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<p>Gary -</p>
<p>Watching now... but THIS rant was Eric's not mine... mine was
previous and more rambly!</p>
<p>- Steve<br>
</p>
<blockquote type="cite"
cite="mid:CANr4ZePswq1XCYF9bjQErBm-1VDm=+=z_tcBvDfpYGbTZQqkdg@mail.gmail.com">
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<div dir="auto">Great rant/stream of consciousness as usual,
Steve! Has anyone watched this five minute video yet? A bit
utopian, but maybe not... <a
href="https://vimeo.com/411278238" moz-do-not-send="true">https://vimeo.com/411278238</a></div>
</div>
<div><br>
<div class="gmail_quote">
<div dir="ltr" class="gmail_attr">On Sun, May 3, 2020 at 7:23
AM David Eric Smith <<a href="mailto:desmith@santafe.edu"
moz-do-not-send="true">desmith@santafe.edu</a>> wrote:<br>
</div>
<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0px 0px 0px
0.8ex;border-left-width:1px;border-left-style:solid;padding-left:1ex;border-left-color:rgb(204,204,204)">
<div
style="word-wrap:break-word;line-break:after-white-space">I
can’t weave a grand diorama that has the meaning of
everything in it, and anything I try will come out a
mess. So let me try for Less is More.
<div><br>
</div>
<div>I think part of this is habit and commitments.
Somehow the society has to sort out a predictable way to
arrive at who has a right to consume how much of what.
A surprising amount of structure goes into that, and it
has enormous inertia. Part of what we are trying to
“restart” is a set of systems that happen to be doing an
allocation that we don’t have other systems in place to
do as an alternative.</div>
<div><br>
</div>
<div>Take food production. Fine, what people need to eat
is relatively inelastic, and not wildly different from
one human to another, compared to dollar-wealth. But
over the past 80 years, nearly all food calories are
produced by very few decision makers and enormous
capital outlays, levered to the hilt with credit, on
really bad (regular, fast, and inflexible) turnaround
times. (This means Corn, Beans, lesser Wheat, to some
extent commodity meats.). The story is a little more
diversified for the nutritive value of food (fruits,
vegetables, et al.), but different in structure where
near-slave labor takes the place of capital and a
different analysis is needed. For now I will just look
at the simple one.</div>
<div><br>
</div>
<div>We can’t all suddenly move back to the farm and grow
calorie crops. We don’t own land, we don’t have skills,
and besides there is no easy angle to do that in a
system that over-produces already. So the production is
there. But if we don’t have a way to pay the “farmer”
(really a grant/loan/lobby businessman more than an
expert in soil health etc.), why should he give us
anything to eat? You could say “Ah, he only needs
enough to live, and he is only one man, so he could give
the rest away because people need it.” But he isn’t
only one man. He is a vastly debt-leveraged operation,
with enormous capital replacement and maintenance costs,
huge loans for fertilizer/seed/pesticide, and no way to
pay that unless he turns over the crop within certain
price ranges (or lobbies hard to get Dept of Ag to make
up the difference; what happens is a lot of both). So
he has no choices if we don’t have money, and we have no
choices if we have no money. But then what should
anyone pay any of us for if the US operates on 1000
farmers, but there are 378M mouths that want to be fed?
Some system has to work that out. </div>
<div><br>
</div>
<div>During the near-century of technological increases in
output optimization, the rhetoric was that with less
labor used to produce consumables, people’s efforts
would be liberated to do other good things. But to the
extent that those things aren’t “necessary” in the
Maslov sense like food is (following Steve S.), really
all those other people are useless. </div>
<div><br>
</div>
<div>One could try UBI, or have some utopian fantasy about
centrally managed communist economies, but apart from
small-scale experiments on UBI within much larger
conventionally-run countries, and Kibbutz-level
communes, I don’t see evidence of mechanisms to put
behind those visions. So we are left with an unsolved
problem of distribution. Not least, just How do we
coordinate it? But also how do we do so stably enough
that the system is perceived as having some kind of
legitimacy (close enough to “fair”, to being
individually negotiated and thus allowing people to want
different things, all the marginalist Econ stuff).</div>
<div><br>
</div>
<div>Take any other area. Gas-powered transportation.
Well, maybe you don’t “need” it in the sense that you
can conjure a world where you live and work close
together and have support for walk/bike/pubtrans etc.
But where you are now, you and almost everybody else in
the US, has demographically committed to being unable to
do much of anything without plugging into that whole
“unnecessary” system. So some part of the economic
inertia comes just from the thick web of these
commitments that people have made, which leave them
unable to withdraw from dependencies on lots of
complicated services.</div>
<div><br>
</div>
<div>Easiest way to get 100,000V if you started with
100V? Coil some wire to make an inductor, plug it into
the wall, and then cut the wire. Sudden shifts of
anything have a dimension of problem just from the
timescale, in addition to whatever may have been
problems or virtues of the normal state of operation.</div>
<div><br>
</div>
<div><br>
</div>
<div>If one thinks that these kinds of “commitments” or
“inertia” as one principle, and the mechanics problem of
negotiating a widely-applicable and adequately stable
set of permissions for access to a wage as the second,
are two broad “primary” drivers of the restarting, then
there is still a vast depth of smaller-grained design
choices that have accumulated since the Industrial Age,
in supply chains, transportation, management, law, etc.
It’s a hard web to change fast without a lot of chaos
that drowns a lot of people. </div>
<div><br>
</div>
<div>However bad it was during the last depression, city
people still could go back to the farms, because there
there was food, and they could somehow chip in in
exchange for eating, to get around the coordination
failure. Now, with all the permission massively
centralized, no people in the interior, and everything
going through bank credit, even that demographic shift
no longer exists as an option.</div>
<div><br>
</div>
<div>There is a whole separate story about the fact that
the predator and parasite class are still there, and
they aren’t going to leave of their own accord, but I
think that is more a story of motive and how the
mechanics gets steered and evolves, whereas what I put
above is just about what mechanics exists. I think the
mechanics will dominate in the immediate-short term.</div>
<div><br>
</div>
<div>Very inadequate. </div>
</div>
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style="word-wrap:break-word;line-break:after-white-space">
<div><br>
</div>
<div>Eric<br>
<div><br>
<blockquote type="cite">
<div>On May 3, 2020, at 1:33 AM, <<a
href="mailto:thompnickson2@gmail.com"
target="_blank" moz-do-not-send="true">thompnickson2@gmail.com</a>>
<<a href="mailto:thompnickson2@gmail.com"
target="_blank" moz-do-not-send="true">thompnickson2@gmail.com</a>>
wrote:</div>
<br>
<div>
<div
style="font-family:Helvetica;font-size:12px;font-style:normal;font-variant-caps:normal;font-weight:normal;letter-spacing:normal;text-align:start;text-indent:0px;text-transform:none;white-space:normal;word-spacing:0px;text-decoration:none">
<div style="margin:0in 0in
0.0001pt;font-size:11pt;font-family:Calibri,sans-serif">Colleagues,<span
style="font-family:Calibri,sans-serif"> </span></div>
<div style="margin:0in 0in
0.0001pt;font-size:11pt;font-family:Calibri,sans-serif"> </div>
<div style="margin:0in 0in
0.0001pt;font-size:11pt;font-family:Calibri,sans-serif">I
have asked this question before and nobody has
responded (for clear and good reasons, no
doubt) but I thought I would ask it again.
What exactly is this economy we are bent on
reviving? What exactly is the difference in
human activity between our present state and a
revived economy. We can go to bars and
concerts and football games? Is that the
economy we are reviving? It seems to me that
the difference between a “healty” economy and
our present status consists possibly in
nothing more than a lot of people frantically
rushing about doing things they don’t really
need to do? <span
style="font-family:Calibri,sans-serif"> </span></div>
<div style="margin:0in 0in
0.0001pt;font-size:11pt;font-family:Calibri,sans-serif"> </div>
<div style="margin:0in 0in
0.0001pt;font-size:11pt;font-family:Calibri,sans-serif">You
recall that I invoked as a model that
experiment in which 24 rats were put in a
quarter acre enclosure in Baltimore and fed
and watered and protected to see how the
population would develop. They never got
above two hundred. Infant mortality, etc.,
was appalling. Carnage. In the same space, a
competent lab breeding organization could have
kept a population of tens of thousands. <span
style="font-family:Calibri,sans-serif"> </span></div>
<div style="margin:0in 0in
0.0001pt;font-size:11pt;font-family:Calibri,sans-serif"> </div>
<div style="margin:0in 0in
0.0001pt;font-size:11pt;font-family:Calibri,sans-serif">Don’t
yell at me. What fundamental proposition
about economics do I not understand?<span
style="font-family:Calibri,sans-serif"> </span></div>
<div style="margin:0in 0in
0.0001pt;font-size:11pt;font-family:Calibri,sans-serif"> </div>
<div style="margin:0in 0in
0.0001pt;font-size:11pt;font-family:Calibri,sans-serif">Nick<span
style="font-family:Calibri,sans-serif"> </span></div>
<div style="margin:0in 0in
0.0001pt;font-size:11pt;font-family:Calibri,sans-serif"> </div>
<div style="margin:0in 0in
0.0001pt;font-size:11pt;font-family:Calibri,sans-serif">Nicholas
Thompson</div>
<div style="margin:0in 0in
0.0001pt;font-size:11pt;font-family:Calibri,sans-serif">Emeritus
Professor of Ethology and Psychology</div>
<div style="margin:0in 0in
0.0001pt;font-size:11pt;font-family:Calibri,sans-serif">Clark
University</div>
<div style="margin:0in 0in
0.0001pt;font-size:11pt;font-family:Calibri,sans-serif"><a
href="mailto:ThompNickSon2@gmail.com"
target="_blank"
style="font-family:Calibri,sans-serif"
moz-do-not-send="true">ThompNickSon2@gmail.com</a></div>
<div style="margin:0in 0in
0.0001pt;font-size:11pt;font-family:Calibri,sans-serif"><a
href="https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/" target="_blank"
style="font-family:Calibri,sans-serif"
moz-do-not-send="true">https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/</a></div>
<div style="margin:0in 0in
0.0001pt;font-size:11pt;font-family:Calibri,sans-serif"> </div>
<div style="margin:0in 0in
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