The cornucopian episteme & money
The link forwarded by NLK in the Iran elections thread was to a recent essay by Alf Hornborg. In that author’s own words, this paper serves as a fine summary of his thinking on the nature-culture-personhood triad, the fetishism of the machine, the progression of accumulation by dispossession, the devastation of the biosphere, and the money-sign.
It takes about half an hour to read if you poke through like me.
His conclusion is not the conclusion of a “realist.” Not by a long shot. He argues that general purpose money-itself contains the power from which emanates many of our most discomfiting and dangerous trends in social evolution — because money is the sign-agent that makes everything interchangeable on the market. We have used the term “solvent” here to describe the same thing. Over at Insurgent American, I just posted something (still being edited) called Midrash on Money, that provides a kind of cristological account of this same phenomenon.
kevin:
Stan, I don’t think that money is inherently anything, which is a point you make, but you seem frequently to come back to describing what money is and what it isn’t with a sense of inherence. For example, “Money is a universal solvent. It makes everything the same. It replaces the complexity and diversity and richness of Creation with cold simplicity. It dissolves qualities into mere quantity.” I’m suggesting that it’s not money itself that does that, but the thought and intent of the individual that, for example, “dissolves qualities into mere quantity.” The dissolution of quality is done before money even comes into play — it’s done in the mind of the individual, “which is it’s own place, and can make a hell of heaven, and a heaven of hell.” And from that action within the mind manifest the outer actions that realize the forms of that mind-set in the external world.
Money is part of a system of economic conventions (agreements) that have become, over time, crystallized and accepted (through thought and faith) as inherent and absolute. Like any fundamentalist doctrine (e.g. Religion) it almost always overshadows reason. But this is because of the habits of thought, not because of any inherent qualities that money possesses. We are caught in a system of our own creation and only through serious suffering can we extricate ourselves from it (because essentially no one who enjoys the privileges that can accrue through that system will give those up for the benefit of others — i.e. “it’s harder to go through the eye of the needle,” etc.).
Money is nothing. It’s our attitudes, our “understandings,” our choices that determine the values upon which we act. Money is just a tool, like a hammer or a paint brush. It’s the awareness, the culture, the fundamentals that precede thought, speech and action that allow one to decide that the rain forest is of no more value than the toilet paper that its trees can be converted into. And it’s our desires that determine how we shape our understandings and our thinking and awareness. Money is just used to realize those desires. The desires ultimately manifest the consequences, not the object that we call “money.” There’s nothing inherently “bad” or negative about money. As usual, it is the individual’s own chosen awareness that is the source of all “evil” in the world.
And, I’m sure that this is really behind everything you write, as well. I’m just highlighting what I think is an important distinction. It is the thinking that things in themselves are good or evil that creates so much suffering in the world. That’s where bigotry has its roots. It’s where theft, murder, sorrow, poverty, exploitation, etc. all get the individual’s OK to exist. Nothing is, of itself, good or evil. It is (or becomes) what we make it to be through our thoughts, which constitute a reality that exists first in our own mind and that we then project upon the world for ourselves. I believe this is the esoteric meaning behind the verse you quoted: “For each tree is known by its own fruit. For of thorns men do not gather figs, nor of a bramble bush gather they grapes.” A tree is a symbol of a sequence of cause and effect, which, spiritually speaking, has its roots within the consciousness of the individual.
24 June 2009, 5:35 pmStan:
Well, money is something. So what is it?
Kevin, you say yourself that “Money is part of a system of economic conventions (agreements) that have become, over time, crystallized and accepted (through thought and faith) as inherent and absolute.”
Not a definition, really. You situate money (it is a part) within an “economic system.” Then you say that “money is nothing.” I admit this confuses me.
What shapes our attitudes? What circumscribes our understandings? You say that our choices determine our values, which I might agree is partially correct; but where do those values come from?
I’ll hazard a guess that Hornborg and I both have erred in not fleshing out the geneology of this thinking. It is Marx; and hardly anyone has studied Marx, or reflected on the implications of his body of critique. Marx-ISTS have done a good job of giving the rest of society an aversion to it (by trying to transform it into a doctrine), and plain anticommunism has done a good job of caricaturing Marx’s thought.
But there are two very important points that come through from Marx to the kind of skeptical anti-modernists who include Hornborg, Georgescu-Roegan, and others: (1) Neither commodities, nor the built environment, nor money can be understood from their simple physical presence; and all present themselves “mysteriously,” as things without a history and therefore innocent of power, and (2) that culture, the individual (personhood), and ecology are inseparable except as analytical categories. The latter can be said of economics, as you use it here. Hornborg is very explicit on that topic. The idea of one realm for ecology, another for culture, another for economics, etc., is a habit of thought (disaggregating reality) that is axiomatic within modernism.
An important point here — using your rainforest for toilet paper example — is that the people who run this kind of show are not primarily interested in making toilet paper. The commodity — toilet paper — has its use-value only with the consumer, who is motivated by… well, need. The people who olwn the means of production (as opposed to the workers who are employed by the company) are not motivated by the desire to help people wipe their behinds in more comfort, but by the prospect of “making” money. For them, the production of toilet paper is an intermediate process in the process of accumulation.
No one said that money is evil (I sure didn’t; and neither did Hornborg). He said that money is unexamined for its role in flows of energy and matter, and how it facilitates those flows. Skeptical anti-modernists (here I go perpetuating another IST) are not seeking normative measures, good and evil or anything else, to make sense of those flows of matter and energy. They have been seeking to explain, using physical criteria, how inequality in exchange relations is created and accelerated (almost beyond our will). Thermodynamics is how they have done that.
What they have shown, can show, and what is irrefutable — using this standard — is that delocalization, urbanization, and global “trade” correspond to depersonalization, disenchantment (with nature), and desacralization — aspects of our culture, and therefore our sense of personhood.
All one has to do is track the flow of any “resource,” like oil, iron ore, et al, and we can see how this stuff travels. Here is an old paper with maps that illustrates a few of these flows.
A hammer is created for a purpose (speaking about “tools”), as is a paint brush, or an M-4 assault rifle. Don’t these all contain some inherent character? Money is a tool, but it’s a lot more. We use it as a tool for exchange, so — like the commodity that Marx unpacked to show the unequal social relation hiding within — we tend to end our interrogation of money with it immediate appearance. In particular, we don’t look at it as a key cultural institution, political, economic, and ecological (there it is, crossing those categories).
Since money does not serve any directly utilitarian purpose (one can’t consume it, unless one is willing to use it instead of that toilet paper we were talking about). So, let’s look at it as a culturally-constructed “sign.” Then, let’s concede that flows of signs facilitate flows of energy and matter (we are exchanging a very complex system of signs right now — linguistic, textual.
What does this sign do? How does it change things? How does this sign alter the possibilities for action in the world? Calling it a “solvent” is hardly a moral critique. It is a chemical analogy; and our critique of money as sign, tool, and institution is assessing behavior and very material consequences.
“Good and evil” out of context make no sense. You say that belief in good and evil is behind much evil, which ends up being a tautological account, circular reasoning. I haven’t the time to respond to the sweeping claims of your last paragraph, except to say that an examination of the history of bigotry alone disproves your claim. Racism as we know it has a veryu specific history; and that history is very, very economic. The motive for the slave trade was to “make money.” All the other stuff — outside accounting formulae — was “externality.” Just like the environment is now, in this partcular epoch of money-lubricated, fossil-hydrocarbon powered, globalized industrial-financial capitalist patriarchy.
An individual does not “choose” one’s awareness. We see, feel, understand the world through a culturally-constructed, historically-contingent system of meanings; and we act in the world according to those meanings but also in the face of their unanticipated consequences. Universalizing money has displayed some very important unintended consequences.
The mechanism of that power is that money promotes an abstract equality between unlike things — rain forests and Coca-Cola, eg. A price, that singular arithmetical account that effaces all other qualities and all differentiations.
Gotta go to work.
25 June 2009, 5:48 amm.c.:
As a psychological tool, money is a fetish used to scare the docile, spooked, follow-the-herd middle class of affluent nations. “If our standard of living falls any further, we won’t be able to afford private schools & colleges for the kids(at the very least a slot in a local charter school; God Forbid!)” Jones next door just bought himself a new set of golf clubs for his birthday…. Throw in the fear of urban ethnic crime to these suburban boobs and you have the political strategies of pols like Rudy Giuliani & Newt Gingrich.
25 June 2009, 12:02 pmNLK:
I think Stan is right to suggest that we need to trace the genealogy of this thinking. Marx’s analysis of money begins with the Aristotelian distinction between use-value and exchange-value. Production for exchange value alone, Marx suggests (especially in the sections on usury and merchant capital), could only thrive at the margins of societies dominated numerically by peasants with at least some access to land, and dominated politically by elites committed to expenditure for ceremonial, monumental or other use-values. One index for the creeping takeover of capitalism is the marginalization of all production not for exchange-value. Consider lawns: as Ted Steinberg shows in his recent, surprisingly non-boring book American Green, until the late 19th century only rich Americans had manicured lawns, on estates modelled after the British gentry. Most detached urban and small-town homes in America either had vegetable gardens, chicken coops and the like, or were left to weeds and dirt. It was only with the rise of mass-produced suburban housing and the modern lawn industry, especially, after WWII, that the exchange value accruing to “lawn aesthetics” (and an associated multi-billion dollar lawn-care industry) totally replaced the old use values of food, wood, outhouses and the like. As Stan has described with respect to his local homeowner association, this capitalist lawn-as-showcase-of-property-values aesthetic is very, very deeply entrenched in the weird world of American suburbia.
Regarding the article, though: Marx’s great insight was to historicize capitalism the same way we might, say, historicize gang slavery or castes or foot-binding, as a transient and not eternal social arrangement. But, by the same token, if we historicize Marx’s work it is easy to see how he naturalized prevailing 19th century assumptions about techno-industrial utopia and the revolutionary destiny of the “advanced-capitalist” proletariat. The history of the 20th century world shows those assumptions to have been profoundly wrong; but what will the 21st century show about our naturalized assumptions about cars, suburbs, “cheap energy”, cheap commodities, and other “normal” features of American life? I think that Hornborg is trying to sidestep the whole teleology of industrial progress which underlies both neo-classical and Marxist economic discourse, and which leads to terms like “developing countries,” or “advanced-capitalist countries.” Those terms, and assumptions about progress, seem to be blinding us to the implications of the everyday things we take most for granted.
25 June 2009, 1:55 pmStan:
Well put.
American suburbanization from a similar point-of-view to that in evidence here is the topic of Matthew Lassiter’s highly undervalued book The Silent Majority. He comes at the topic as an urbanist, como Mike Davis. Very synthetic approach, very local and detailed, and shows how racialized and gendered this process wass, too… and not the kind of de facto discriminations we mostly acknowledge have always been there, but de jure racializations encoded in public policy, especially local policy. Aside from our moral objections to Suburbia (soy residente), the character of the built environment — shows Lassiter — has a powerful determinative effect on culture and politics.
This is the most formidable voting bloc in the US (Suburbia, and it votes as a virtual bloc); and it has an identifiable political character that Lassiter breaks down into iirc Consumer, Taxpayer, Homeowner, and School Parent. It is to these political identities — and the power of their sheer numbers — that pols of both parties orient to, and their differences are contained within those categories, never-ever-ever outside them. This is a much better account of the similarities between parties, especially as you begin to study local politics, where a hell of a lot more is going on than national politics.
Lassiter also puts his finger on what he calls “the suburban white sense of victimhood” as an ideological organizing principle.
Good stuff.
25 June 2009, 3:56 pmSean:
Stan,
The point you make, the distinction between Marx’s critical observations and Marx-ISTS, is something that I have found a real obstacle in trying to find any sort of useful momentum in the USA regarding Marx’s views. The Marx-ISTS seem more interested in a secret-handshake society premised upon a quasi-religious doctrine that varies from Marx-IST group to Marx-IST group. I understood exactly what you meant when you said this –
Marx-ISTS have done a good job of giving the rest of society an aversion to it (by trying to transform it into a doctrine), and plain anticommunism has done a good job of caricaturing Marx’s thought.
25 June 2009, 11:36 pmStan:
Yeah, and I don’t want to come off as still kicking that dead horse… especially since these skeptical antimodernist folk are again proving the continuing fertility of Marx’s ideas. Louis Proyect, who runs Marxmail, pointed out that in an environment where very few people have access — for whatever reasons — to the actual insights and perspectives of Marx, and where the few organize themselves into groups (organized on the principle of “democratic centralism” — a main-blow strategic perspective), a competition is self-organized between these small groups for a very finite pool of recruits. In that situation, sellers have to emphasize to buyers what makes the sellers different. So beliefs held in common are sidelined, while differences are amplified… the essence of the sectarian arms race dynamic. In various publications, this translates into weird language addressed openly to the public but also arcanely to the annointed to maintain these differentiations.
One of my own issues with this paper by Hornborg is a whiff of that sectarian impulse in Hornborg’s stated fear that resilience theorists — and other academics — will somehow demobilize us politically by failure to emphasize the right points. My argument against that is that if the practices of any given group are consistent with the direction we desire for change (in this case, reducing dependency on the money-grid) — like growing gardens, keeping chickens, designing water catchment and the like — what’s the problem? These practical experiences will trump ivory-tower musings every time in consciousness. Because they are work. The underlying premise of much talk about demobilizing politics (I have been guilty of this myself) is often that attachment to main-blow, mass organization strategy, further premised by the belief that transformation occurs primarily through policy-changes.
I’m still not ready to let go of this Dunbar’s number thing; and until I am, I go back to something Audre Lorde wrote about in “The Uses of the Erotic:” we only have so much time and energy, and we use energy whether we are washing dishes, or roofing, or playing with children, or having sex. Our psychic attachment — our sense of deep connectedness which we struggle to maintain in the modern desacralized world — to our world and others, is likewise a commitment of energy. There’s insight there about mass-politics, dog-waggery in large organizations, and especially why committed people burn out. Our radical instrumentalism (the apotheosis of efficacy) — a legacy of the 20th Century — is a recipe for sucking the energy out of people to feed organizations (and their strategies) that become so slow and cumbersome and self-protecting that they undermine tactical agility and stifle initiative. Yet we cling to the pantlegs of that notion that we need The Party or whatever, and the same fear highlights the tempo-task (which has strong associations with male power)… a hint of which I got from Hornborg’s conclusion. His analysis of money, however, is so powerful and important that — for me — it overshadows any minor disagreements I might have.
Back on urbanization-suburbanizaiton-exurbanization, one of the main drivers for this, or opneings, was the so-called Green Revolution (post-WWII, like suburbanization), which freed-up (for a time) vast stretches of former farmland for this kind of “development.” The flows of matter and energy were only do-able with general-purpose money, as was the consolidation of newer, and enormously large, agglomerations ot technomass (which, as H sez, competes with biomass). Using fossil-powered machinery and rivers of chemicals generated its own iatrogenic and dog-waggery dynamics, in which food has progressively been “engineered” to be more compatible with machines and chemicals (how’s that for dog-waggery?!) Machine-farming was responsible for a lot of other flows of people, eg, African American migration from South to North as cotton production was mechanized in the late 40s.
Work calls.
26 June 2009, 5:11 amr graves:
see here for an interesting analysis of dunbar’s number, which suggests that 150 is an outer limit for groups that lives close to eachother and depend heavily on eachother, and that 60 or 80 is a more common limit for groups in modern life. also some interesting analysis of small group numbers that matches quite well with the anarchist concept of the “affinity group”.
http://www.lifewithalacrity.com/2004/03/the_dunbar_numb.html
26 June 2009, 8:34 amr graves:
and a follow-up series by the same blog author
http://www.lifewithalacrity.com/2008/09/group-threshold.html
26 June 2009, 8:39 amSean:
the belief that transformation occurs primarily through policy-changes.
It seems to me that it’s pretty hard for most American Marx-ISTS to shake off their “liberal” or “progressive” origins. Those origins are where the notion of pitched battles over policy exist and dominate. I like to refer to American mainstream (Dem vs Repub) federal political dynamics as The Eternal Super Bowl of Donkey vs Elephant.
This is the essence of the distractive nature of American federal politics — that it causes people to focus on policy arguments, with reference to “reliable experts” from think tanks. And the supposed “experts” have “reliability” mainly because of their ideological slant, and not because they speak discernible, tangible, demonstrable truths. It’s no wonder Joseph Goebbels’ ideological son, Karl Rove, was such a pivotal figure for the Bush/Cheney Admin’s public face. Cold, calcluated “perception management” is the path chosen by the ideologue. Struggling for real meaningful changes, and imagining the micro-scale individual efforts are valuable — these things are irrelevant in the Eternal Super Bowl. The Eternal Super Bowl is just a war of words, it’s not aiming at social reform.
Have you ever read any of Christopher Lasch’s books? I don’t agree with all of his views or conclusions, but I think he had some good insights on the motive forces of American socio-economic-political perspectives. Over 30 years ago he noted that the two main parties ceased being in true opposition, and became caricatures of themselves. In the meantime things have only grown worse.
The fact that nothing of durable value is produced by most American “business” these days just makes it worse. Economic “growth” via manipulations of money, or of the vectors and vehicles of money, benefits nobody except those who already have economic power. It’s a massive illusion, but apparently as long as most Americans can continue to plop in a comfy chair and watch TV at the end of their work (or unemployment) day, they don’t seem to mind very much.
26 June 2009, 10:52 amm.c.:
By my observations, Britain has a sizeable middle-class but not too often do you see more than one car in the driveway unless it’s a company vehicle. The well-manicured lawn is pretty much an American thing imo, not counting places like Kensington Gardens in London or golf courses. In WWII, an American enlisted GI made roughly what a British officer made, i.e. the War Bride Syndrome. Was it Keynes who said economics is simply people respond to incentives. Almost everything else is commentary.
26 June 2009, 1:33 pmStan:
From RG’s link:
Thanks RG.
In an infantry company (close to Dumbar’s number), no leader ever has more than four direct subordinates who fomr the leadership core. A fire team consists of three or four, one being the team leader… who in turn — with another team leader from the co-team — are the suborndinates of one squad leader. The squad here (we’ll call this one a nine-person squad) consists of an A-Team and a B-Team (led by the aforementioned team leaders). The squad leader, then, only tells two people what to do, and the team leaders then tell their subordinates how to get it done. There are four squads in a platoon, and the platoon leader tells four squad leaders what to do (usually through his exec, a platoon sergeant). The company consists of four platoons, so the company commander only tells three platoon leaders what to do. Missions can be task organized, and can be performed by anything from a team to the whole company, or the company as part of a larger unit (battalion, brigade, division). But the (mandated) affinity groups are always small. Nonetheless, an infantry company (that Dunbar-sized whole) has a strong collective identity, and its members know each other, usually very personally. A death in a company, for example, is a very big deal to that company. That’s far less true at the battalion level, and more true — obviously — the bigger the numbers get.
My question — hypothesis, whatever — is, does this tell us why management begins to happen, with or without intent? The relationships become quickly contractual instead of covenental. Contractual relations require enforcement, as well as introduce abstractions into interpersonal affairs. Management, in turn, evolves into dog-waggery based on managemnt’s desire to perpetuate itself more than serve a community.
26 June 2009, 3:28 pmSean:
@ r graves –
Interesting stuff there from Dunbar.
I’ve often said in discussions with self-identified libertarians that I can’t see a libertarian laissez-faire system working in a group of larger than 100 people. Ayn Rand made it sound really simple but then we only have to remember that her biggest group of gathered libertarians (or egoists, or objectivists, choose your label) was the small gathering in Galt’s Gulch in Atlas Shrugged. Of course if you gather 15 or 20 people who agree on most every one of life’s larger issues regarding government and other forms of mutual responsibility, you can make it work without an extensive system of laws & regulations and the mechanisms of their enforcement. In social group settings, focusing on commonality is the key to long-term success and harmony. Humans are complex enough creatures –even the most incurious and sedentary ones– that if we always focus on what’s different in each of us, disorder will reign and people will be inclined toward an authoritarian solution to keep peace. If we instead focus on commonality, the individual differences are easier to see as the things that make life interesting, and not as things that call for a behavioral clampdown on all things disapproved. When I’ve tried to find internet discussions related to Marx’s critique of capitalism, I’ve been disappointed because (as I said in a post above) the discussions seem to have a strange insular quality to them, a strong divisive tenor. Why people take that as a necessary thing after reading Marx, I don’t know. Maybe I haven’t properly understood Marx? Or maybe they haven’t?
26 June 2009, 5:06 pmStan:
Resilience folks have their say on this one. In the comments section, Hornborg himself repies to critics of his criticism, as follows (beware, arcane!):
My own sugggestion of an unacknowledged attachment to “real” (mass-strategy, main-blow) politics is still bothering me; and in the commentary on the linked post, there is a kind of defensive declaration by resilience folk that “Hey, I’m political, too.” There is some reason that people feel obliged to say that under the circumstances; and I continue to believe that *Strategy* is precisely what needs to be critiqued as a kind of underlying axiom. What I’m not sure of is whether Dr. Hornborg was motivated by it in exaclty the way I suggested… even though the reaction of one commenter is an attempt to display his strategic bona fides. The use of the word “political” instead of “strategy” notwithstanding.
Or I could be completely wrong, since I haven’t had the time to do some background study on specific aspects of AH’s critique, directed at specific advocates of resilience theory. I am perfectly capable of projecting my own preoccupations into places where they don’t belong.
For myself, I admit simultaneously that I respond enthusiastically to the discourse of resilience theory (possibly thirst in a drought) and have a moment of uncomfortable recognition at Hornborg’s critique (here more than in the essay) that social science cannot imitate natural science.
One of several reasons I am such a big fan of Hornborg is his insight into money; and his conclusions on that count are frighteningly credible… even as solutions in the world seem both scarce and improbable. My hope remains a fool’s hope (which is what Illich calls faith).
27 June 2009, 12:14 pmm.c.:
Not Keynes. I think its from Steven Landsburg, a Libertarian Free_Trader. Another U Chicago PhD from wiki. I know its simplistic but to those like myself whom much of economics glazes my eyes over, it offers insight.
27 June 2009, 12:15 pmSean:
Stan –
I like the discussion of natural systems, and the comparison to “medical science.” One of the things that popped into my head as I read the quote in your 12:14pm post was the idea that America’s medical model is all about treatment and not prevention. This is to me a reflection of American culture’s obsession with the quick fix even if the “fix” nature of that quick solution is ephemeral and not durable for the long haul.
For example — Rather than noting the various forms of cancer that industrialized society has created, American medicine focuses on costly “treatment” of the cancers once they arise in people. A smarter solution would be to eliminate the causes!
Whenever “economics” (read: Capitalism) encounters problems it does not wish to address, it turns them into “externalities” and in so doing, eliminates them from the discussion, calls them irrelevant. Gullible people with poor logical reasoning and rhetorical skills don’t even see that this is a ruse being played on them.
27 June 2009, 1:07 pmNLK:
That “midrash on money” essay looks really interesting. I’ll read it when I get a chance (ridiculously busy right now).
27 June 2009, 1:51 pmStan:
Economics is chrematistics masquerading as science. I just read that recently, and it’s a nice summation of economics (once you look up “chrematistics”). I’m not at all sure, though, that economics is a trick; that would imply a subject who plays the trick. Systems are — by definition — supra-personal. They are not conspiracies, but a vast mutating set of recursive feedback loops that has transcended the individual, even individuals as members of groups.
The basis of ethics, to my mind as I write this, is understanding that we can influence a lot of things, but that the consequences of our actions are greater than our influence. The ethical implication is that since we can create consequences beyond our control by exerting influence, we are obliged to limit our influence.
That is not just a critique of the system, but it contains a critique about the way we do politics, too.
This point of view biases me, because I am a Christian. I have commited to peacemaking; and so the collateral damage of big-strategy politics — right, left, up, or down — is a moral issue after baptism. That doesn’t mean that my secular criticism of big-strategy is wrong; it’s just full disclosure. I have a dog in the fight (forgive the violent image). Even if big-strategy proved more efficacious than micro-tactics around strategic imperatives (which sums up my pov), I would still oppose it because it does create so much collateral damage. Nonetheless, I will continue argue — for the time being — that big-strategy is not more efficacious than micro-imp in the end, because it is iatrogenic. The cures all spin out new disease processes… now I’m going for medical metaphors, but I stole that from Illich (iatrogenesis).
In this essay, Hornborg crystallizes what he said in The Power of the Machine, albeit focusing in a bit on that old question, what is to be done? Whatever it is, says Hornborg, it has to do with money. I believe him when he says that. That is precisely what I mean by the term, “strategic imperative.” The strategic imperative is to get off the money grid.
Hornborg and a lot of other people have studied the impending consequences of our influence-without-control; and the prognosis is not merely disturbing, it’s scary as hell to anyone with a puff of imagination. We are in an epoch of inconceivable unintended consequences, in every dimension of human experience; and if money is the problem, we all inuit in a second how utterly overwhelming the problem is because we understand our own abject dependency on this thing that this man just said is a “sign,” a dangerous chemical — a solvent that attacks human connectivity, a change agent that can be as destructive as a flood of assault rifles into a big city slum.
But a strategic imperative does not a Strategy demand. It’s not a weapon, but a compass.
Getting off the money grid while money is still hegemonic is only possible for certain people, or we couldn’t make the claim that money is hegmeonic. I’m certainly not off that grid. I can tell you two things that are essential, though, if anyone is going to get off: (1) new (often old) skills, and (2) land.
Getting off the grid is inherently local, because it is a practical design problem. It is not ONLY a practical design problem; but it is INESCAPABLY a practical design problem. My own belief is that the practical design element of this money problem is the paramount element. This is where ideologues start to get uncomfortable, because they want to homogenize our belief systems as an imagined precondition for experimenting with practical measures.
There will be two categories of re-designers, because the current system is in a state of chaos: (1) voluntary re-designers, and (2) involuntary re-designers. The latter will respond to necessity, the former are those who have some sense of a big change and are attempting to get ahead of it. Food praxists, or the unofficial food underground (UOFU) are part of the preparatory column, the voluntarists. Another billion or two of us will soon be in the involuntary (necessity) column.
This suggests to me that at some juncture in the not-too-distant, the voluntarists will be the available repository of proven skills; and as such, they will exercise a great influence on the involuntarists of the future. That makes them a future vanguard — though not self-consciously so like political parties.
The community gardens of today are preparing to be the schools of the future, like nuclei that will spread in direct response to necessity… and this is what niche maximization looks like (there’s one of those natural science mets). One strategic imperative = get off the money grid … thousands of practical design projects, responding tactically to local conditions (where tactics can be quickly matched to emergence… tactical agility), without direction or oversight from a Grand Strategic Body. Not a weapons system (big-strategy), but a compass (that we all use to navigate over our own terrain, but which always gives us the same point of reference), micro-imp. You can’t attack, occupy, or imprison the north pole.
I’d add an intermediate imperative, too. I said it above. Get land, and get it off the market for good. Communities cannot do for themselves unless they have places to do it. And there is no useless land. Taking land off the market, eg, land trusts et al, is taking land further back from the gravitational pull of the money-grid. This is ultimatley a land reform issue… logical, because the negative impacts of the neoliberalism that scourged Latin America are now creeping back in toward our center. But main-blow strategy — including policy struggle — has not proven effective at changing the prevailing land-property phenomenon. Policies are certainly part of our environment, but they ought never be the centerpiece of any effort at transformation. Local micro-tactics to get the land, one piece at a time, and use it as part of a voluntary local re-design iniatative. Community control of land is a fact on the ground, the most immoveable asset we have in any transformative project.
Play GO, not chess.
Here is the introduction to my largely unused GO set:
Anarchists like to think about abolishing the state, but the capacity for such an abolition never materializes (and never will, I’m betting). But as the state’s power wanes based on deep secular contradictions, individual and group initiatives inevitably take up the slack. There are necessity-arenas in which the state loses its capacity to administer (and “serve” ie schools), and within them, arenas that are no longer under state surveillance or control. “Scientific socialists” haven’t made much headway under their take-state-power agenda, either. In fact, they suffered a parade of terrible unplanned consequences. So some of us are in-betweeners, neither anarchist nor marxian socialists (I’m a Methodist), who construct this kinda sorta-syllogism: (a) We need to get off the money-grid. (b) Money is absolutely necessary to the existence of the nation-state. (c) Our actions to remedy our dependence on the money-grid will necessarily undermine the power of the state ( a lot more than anyone’s catch-all program or expressive individualism).
No need there for a program or a national executive committee. And this is where I am skeptical abut terms like “ideological disarmament.” That notion always seems to be in tandem with that belief in homogenizing ideas as a precondition of change. And that desire to homogenize can lead to thinking that every error, as Lou Proyect said, is a scratch threatneing to turn into gangrene.
The less management the better, I say. Management is the curse of over-large human bands. (Mr. Dunbar, is that you?)
I’m discovering that suburban gardens are susceptible to rabbit plagues. I’m experimenting with a a manifold defense-in-depth. I can already give you a good recipe (that I got from a fellow church member) for a homemade, non-toxic rabbit repellent. It’s worked for four days now. Soon, I’ll be able to share that information with neighbors the way it was shared with me.
*
postscript: On that homogenized thinking riff, I’ll also share another Lou Proyect insight, on sectarianism. Lou is a veteran of some horrific sectarian politics; and he’s a very smart guy. Looking back, he explained, on the movements that called themselves “marxist,” there was a small group of people who described some deep social problems, but they got wrapped up in ideological purity (the scratch to gangrene phobia). As a marginalized voice in consumer society, these small numbers of people organized (around principles and rules), then went recruiting (implicitly and idealistically believing that revolutions can be “made”… my editorial). They were recruiting from a very finite pool of potential members. In that painfully nuanced world of grouplets, they couldn’t sell their program over and against the other groups by emphasizing their common ideas and goals. No, in a competitive marketplace, brands emphasize their differences.
27 June 2009, 3:04 pmMichael D:
good points about the gardening and land.
i wonder if that repellent would work on porcupines, our local food pirates. they scare dogs by just shimmying and rattling their spines.
one year they ate 40k. of potatoes, the night before i was going to harvest them!
the squatting, crouching, bending, kneeling, twisting, stretching and carrying took a lot of getting used to…
it’s a funny feeling being on your knees that much, the skin on them has become sanded down.
it is a fantastically virile feeling, those hours with the warm, moist earth under you, in the missionary position, plugging in the plants, lol.
giving away excess is such a great feeling, knowing you grew it with love, and the earth responded in kind.
it’s easy to see where the ideas for the hypermultiplication orgy the financial services indulge in came from, when you get right back to it, it’s an attempt to clone mother nature’s. one kernel turns to a hundred, in one plant, one growing season, talk about yer derivatives!
the only things that could concretise marx’s insights into social policies would be a deep and wide understanding of history, plus a lot more sceptical common sense.
till then, they whistle, we dance.
once the conscience is frozen solid and buried under the culturally determined permafrost, the default position is the lowest common denominator of human behaviour.
religion tried to whip and shame the conscience into life, a temporary measure at (rare) best that we are outgrowing.
marx tried to alert us to the inevitable outcomes of the premises we were turning into axioms, yet a marxian conscience has always been nullified by propinquity to real power nodes, (or shapeshifted into neoconnery).
back to the drawing board, on bended knee before the fertility gods.
27 June 2009, 6:23 pmSean:
Great post, Stan!
I think I sit fairly close to where you are in the anarchist/socialist blend. Anarchy appeals to me but I realize its success depends on two things I see as impossible: (1) abolition of present governmental structure, which couldn’t likely be done without a lot of violence, which I think always should be a last resort and not a first one; and (2) after such abolition, when true anarchism is prevailing, all of us must agree on a an awful lot of stuff — or else it could end up like the bleak picture painted by Cormac McCarthy in The Road. So Anarchy seems to me more useful in the way Crispin Sartwell discusses it — as a social planning tool, as a tool for governmental authority-checking, as a voice in the discussion on the limits of state power.
Socialism seems to me an inevitable system mainly because its focus on the whole rather than the individual would give rise to acknowledging such things as resource limitation, and the practical limits on “progress” and “growth” in the resource-related and “economy”-related spheres. The real practical struggle for me is the tension between my realization that socialism will have to prevail for a durable human society to be realized, but a hope that people will not go as far as certain socialist-based systems have — that it should not become authoritative, paternalistic, or self-justifying in any way.
How well does fencing work to repel rabbits? Will they always dig beneath it?
27 June 2009, 7:20 pmStan:
Repellent, fencing, live trapping, a four-foot black rat snake caught on my work site and relocated to underneath my shed, and after first frost, an air rifle (to harvest them). They haven’t been digging. Right now there are gazillions of juveniles. One of my problems is that I have the only veggie garden in the immediate area, so I’m ringing the dinner bell for them. For now, all the other measures are beggar thy neighbor (sorry neighbors), make them go elsewhere. In November, we are eating them (not that weird, I’ve been eating rabbit as far back as I can remember).
The repellent is very simple. Boil a pot of water with a tablespoon of cinammon and a tablespoon of cayenne pepper. Strain the water to get out the sediment, so you can put it into a pressure sprayer (sediment clogs the spray-nozzle). Add a dash of dish soap to make the solution stick to things. It hasn’t hurt anything I sprayed, but I rinse veggies (to get off the cayenne).
These furry little folk have eaten fully 90% of everything I planted this year, and the neighbors report having more flowers eaten, too. Mild winter, fewer predators, I don’t know. But they’re reproducing like rabbits… oh yeah, they are rabbits.
27 June 2009, 8:08 pmTeresa Ginardi:
Stan,
27 June 2009, 9:54 pmI can only say thank you for the most intelligent, interesting, downright mind-blowing blog ever. The only other sites I visit our Catherine Austin Fitts solari.com; vdare.com; and Steve Sailer’s blog. I have learned so much since I discovered your site about 2 months ago. But, I’m steeped in ignorance on a lot of what’s being discussed. I print out most of the discussions and read and re-read to get a real handle of what’s being said. Could I ask a favor of you? Would it be possible to give a reading list to bring someone close to understanding some of these issues? I’ve got Benjamin, Hartsock, and Mies for gender from reading one of your posts. I’ve read and listened to Vandana Shiva on eco-feminism, water wars, and seed destruction. But, I’m clueless on economic flows, politics of power, poli-sci stuff, etc. I may not be able to participate in the discussions intelligently, but I’d sure like to understand the topics better.
Again, thanks for this wonderful site and the incredible intellectual posts.
Teresa
Michael D:
hmm, i can see how sheer reproductive procilivity can trump self launching cartilage missil-ettes when it comes to helping one understand the concept of selfless service.
you serve, they eat and reproduce.
thanks for the tip, i’ll try it, i kinda like the idea of preflavoured curry spices on my swiss chard, so maybe i’ll try skipping the soap and just throw it in the skillet as is.
it’d be harder to stay vegan in a situation like that.
here there are hare and the occasional deer, but so far no loss to them.
what i’d really like to invent would be some kind of ground covering that turned them off the idea of entering, like those bars in the ground deter cows from walking on them, but other than counter-revolutionary visions of broken glass strips, or teeny spikes for tiny porcupine tootsies. they are protected as a species here too, to add rack to ruin…
many farmers are giving up on cereals, as the hybrid feral pigs are getting too numerous, (since some hunters had the bright idea of importing a new species from rumania, which make bigger litters, twice a year instead of once), and the costs of tough enough fencing for big fields is economically prohibitive.
this will change, i reckon, as the true value of food is revealed, and as people wake up from the consumer-coma.
28 June 2009, 3:44 amStan:
Teresa, I apologize for what I warned could get arcane. Flows refer to specific things, generalized as matter-energy.
Think of yourself as a fleshy, embodied being. There is an appearance you create to all outside observers; and it is an appearance of impermeable identity, further enhanced by things like clothes and ornamentation, and seemingly confirmed by the predictable behaviors you exhibit that others might call you “personality.”
But what’s really going on is wild and complex and in constant motion… flowing. We are not, in fact, impermeable, but semi-permeable; and that applies all the way down to the cellular level, with constant flows (concentration gradients and charge gradients, eg).
Now think about what goes in and what goes out and what happens in between. Oxygen is extracted from air, transported to tissues, molecules are swapped around, a higher concentration of carbon dioxide is expired; water goes in, travels through tissues and organs and systems, even as a fluid is formed by the kdineys that carrries off filtrates from the blood (whenever we pee), food is transformed into new tissue, nutrients, energy; and scat is passed along back into the “not-me” environment…. and on and on. In fact, we are a structure through which matter-energy flows.
Hornborg and others (Tainter, Odum, et al) have struggled to improve out thermodynamic account of this process, which is an account from physics. There are two basic “laws” of thermodynamics in physics — well-established, durable, and accepted — called the 1st Law and the 2nd Law.
1st Law — “Energy can be changed from one form to another, but it cannot be created or destroyed. The total amount of energy and matter in the Universe remains constant, merely changing from one form to another. The First Law of Thermodynamics (Conservation) states that energy is always conserved, it cannot be created or destroyed. In essence, energy can be converted from one form into another.” That one doesn’t sound too sinister.
2nd Law — “The Second Law of Thermodynamics states that ‘in all energy exchanges, if no energy enters or leaves the system, the potential energy of the state will always be less than that of the initial state.’ This is also commonly referred to as entropy. A watchspring-driven watch will run until the potential energy in the spring is converted, and not again until energy is reapplied to the spring to rewind it. A car that has run out of gas will not run again until you walk 10 miles to a gas station and refuel the car. Once the potential energy locked in carbohydrates is converted into kinetic energy (energy in use or motion), the organism will get no more until energy is input again. In the process of energy transfer, some energy will dissipate as heat. Entropy is a measure of disorder: cells are NOT disordered and so have low entropy. The flow of energy maintains order and life. Entropy wins when organisms cease to take in energy and die.” That one is a little scary.
LINK
Our sense of time going only in one direction is actually quite accurate. We are participants in a process wherein low entropy (order) always flows into high entropy (disorder). Everything ultimately enters this winding down, even if its momentary appearance is one of stability. Life exists between these two states, and each of us is a highly ordered structure that takes low-entropy inputs from the outside and convert them into high-entropy.
When you eat a cucumber, that low-entropy package of order (unused energy) is disassembled for your body to use, and the component parts are simplified and-or re-assembled into something else, as some energy is taken into the body, and some is lost (dissipated) as a source that can move things around… as heat. You can feel that when you touch others and feel their body heat. So, as a structure, we are dissipative. We dissipate energy (and matter, as we move it around and extract what we need from it).
So far, we have only discussed dissipation as a process from within (endo) the body (somatic). Your dog or cat is endo-somatic in its energy use. Humans, however, are also like snakes, and we can get energy from outside (exo) the body (exo-somatic); but humans are far less passive about it. We figured out how to domesticate fire; and from then on we became progressively more exo-somatic in our energy use.
That’s where the problem started, some say. Hornborg points out that we have not only come to be more than a biological dissipative structure; we have built agglomerating masses of technology (machines, he calls them) that — when built, used, and maintained — are themselves highly dissipative. Think of your car or house, and where the flows came from that converged on either. Metals, petroleum products, chemicals, mined materials… all this stuff is in the car and house, and to maintain them, there might also be heating and air conditioning… certainly the car needs a constant input of fossil fuel (gasoline, to be specific).
Leave technomass alone; and you’ll see how quickly it is broken down. Ever looked at a factory ten years after it closes? Or an abandoned house or car?
In our current social system, that’s a problem because technomass (the abstract inclusive category for all those buildings and machines) creates more social power to extract energy-matter from the environment, and the maintenance of technomass by the society that lives in a highly-machined environment becomes necessary for those who live inside it. This is how the US, with 5% of the population ends up using 25% of the world’s fossil energy. But that extraction and dissipation debt owed to technomass continues to climb. Moreover, in capitalist society, there are monetary rewards for those who facilitate the greatest flows of dissipation, whether that’s an oil company or a luxury hotel owner. So the process is both damaging to the envirionment (biospheric destruction by using low-entropy faster than life -especially photosynthetic life – and sunshine can replace it, and worsening inequalities of social power between “cores” of highly-entropic (super-consuming) technomass and “peripheries” which serve as resource pools and-or dumps for waste.
This turns capitalist economics (chrematistics masqeurading as science) on its head. Profit, which is supposed to be a “market” reward for good, actually “creates” profit in corellative proportion to the damage it creates through extraction and disposal. Profit is an accelerant of entropy; and since there are social consequences that can be traced to these kinds of dissipation (importing order and exporting disorder), we cna reasonably refer to social breakdowns in this dimension of understanding and experience as “social entropy.”
This problem becomes spectacularly worse with the introduction of further divisions of labor and increases in scale. A fisherman catches a some fish in his nets, but the scale of the ocean relative to his impact is such that the oceanic biosphere “heals” easily using biologic fecundity (reproductive capscity) as its successful defense. A factory trawler, on the other hand, using huge specialized technomass crews and giant complexes of machinery, fueled by tons and tons of oil, using gigantic dragnets, catches useful with non-useful, throws away the killed or damaged “by-catch” (sea life that isn’t profitable) and tears up reefs and other habitat. Why? Because this is the most profitable way to do it. They are driven by capitalization and competition; and if they don’t employ these destructive methods, someone else will beat them to it.
Hornborg is making the point that money is the sign-language-institution-social_contract that facilitates exchanges on a large scale, ie, globally. Without money, a resident of Cleveland would not be eating cherries grown in Chile. Rather, without money — an instrument that makes unlike things alike through “price” — these destructive flows of energy-matter could not happen.
Hornborg’s complaint about highly “functionalist” accounts of this process is that those accounts do not emphasize the dimension of social conflict when they describe it using only the (objectivist) language of natural science.
*
postscript: I just glanced at Steve Sailer’s stuff, and I have to tell you, Teresa… this is a very creepy (very racist, homophobic, xenophobic, and sexist) guy.
28 June 2009, 6:50 amr graves:
just want to pipe up to defend anarchism a bit– there are many strains, and though the “smash the state” variety has been dominant, there are many influential anarchists who have put forward a vision of social change close to the incremental, pacifist path stan describes above, a “prefigurative” politics in which means are consistent with ends. i think of p.j. proudhon, paul goodman, gary snyder, colin ward (“anarchy in action”), and more recently david graeber.
STAN: I painted with an overly broad brush, and I am sympathetic to anarchism as Chomsky describes it… that the burden of proof is on anyone who claims the right to power over others. My apologies. Reiterating my point, however, those who study extrication from the money grid are objective allies of anarchists, because the modern nation-state must have money to exert its control.
28 June 2009, 9:14 amSean:
re Steve Sailer — yes, and you’ll find similar bizarre, thinly-veiled hatred at VDARE.com as well. I find it amusing that Steve Sailer calls himself an intellectual and critic, when all he does is post prurient judgments levelled in a blindly partisan fashion. He reads as though he just adopts whatever he hears from Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh, Bill O’Reilly, Sean Hannity, Ann Coulter, Michelle Malkin, and the other Republobot Talking Head Spinmeisters. I would not call that intellectual, nor would I call it criticism.
I once had someone recommend VDARE to me. After reading entries there for a couple of hours, I felt like I’d wandered into a KKK meeting.
Teresa, you can find much more useful information in places other than Steve Sailer’s blog or VDARE.
Catherine Austin Fitts, she’s a hit-or-miss analyst to me. A lot of her statements are without foundation, and we’re expected to believe her based on her resume. Frankly, her resume reads to me like that of David Stockman or some other “economist” whose aim is to gull the gullible. Occasionally I stumble across a Fitts essay I find worthwhile, but not too often.
28 June 2009, 11:52 amSam:
Hmmm. They seem to love salt. Why not give them what they want? A salt block or so might keep them happy and away from your plants…
28 June 2009, 3:47 pmm.c.:
Not directly to Dunbar’s Number but close”:
When I lived in NYC I met a German college student who said his uncle was a tank soldier in WWII. One night drinking cheap strong Polish beer, he said in 1940/41 the main French battle tanks were not inferior to German ones. The main difference was French tanks had a gunner, driver, and loader. The gunner was also the commander. German taks had a gunner, driver, loader, plus a commander on the radio & binoculars communicating & planning future moves. The gunner only took over if the commander was unavailable. Business Schools in Game Theory tactics call this a Force Multiplier Advantage.
28 June 2009, 5:47 pmTeresa:
Sean,
28 June 2009, 8:53 pmThanks for your thoughts on Sailer, vdare, and Fitts. Fitts’ greatest worth right now is promoting local ‘resiliency’ and community building vis-a-vis our current central-bank/warfare model. She mainly links to some decent articles. I’ve not found a lot of essaying by her, simply short comments. She done what she’s done, and been where she’s been: her resume is certainly not that of a light-weight.
Sailer has never, imo, been a repeat of Beck, Limbaugh, etc. His value to me, as with vdare, is the measured thoughtfulness of some articles that have not yet been answered in kind, but only with vitriol and ad hominem attacks. Sailer’s articles supporting Charles Murray, Summers, et. al., on IQ and gender are as provocative as Murray’s Bell Curve or Summers’ original statement re math/engineering profs when he was Harvard President. I disagree with Sailer’s main arguments (more than that, I find some of them downright dangerous), but I find it helpful to hear what my antagonists are saying and planning, and trying to develop appropriate responses.
Teresa:
Stan,
28 June 2009, 10:31 pmNot necessarily arcane, but the vocabulary is unfamiliar to me in a social science sense (excuse the alliteration). So, after re-reading your post several times, I’m getting the data set points down and feeling somewhat more comfortable with the content. I’ve downloaded Hornborg from scribd and will take my time reading this essay. Thanks, again.
Teresa:
Sean,
Further thoughts on Fitts. I guess I’m willing to place credence in someone’s resume: most companies do, most people do. Achievements like graduating from the Wharton School of Economics, Partner in Dillon-Read, Assistant Secretary of Housing (HUD), founder and owner of Hamilton Securities with cutting-edge software mapping economic flows of communities, being taken down by the government and sued by them for over 7 years in my mind are not minor achievements, and really don’t speak to me of a David Stockman.
Her current active court-press for permaculture, local development and investment, and positive approach that we can survive and change our current chaos without hiding the grisly details are her blog’s specialty.
I started reading this blog because of Stan Goff’s resume. His achievements and pursuit of virtuous personal and social action with erudite commentary are the ‘ticket-to-ride’ for me.
I guess resumes, excellence in specialty, and promoting virtuous values are all that I can judge in the exterior forum.
Enough said.
29 June 2009, 12:32 amSean:
Teresa,
I am sorry but I disagree with you on what Fitts’ accomplishments reflect. It appears to me that you admire her resume. I do not. Why? I have spent a good chunk of my adult life among those people of “prestigious” educational and work backgrounds, and I found most of them to be lacking in any form of ethical or moral grounding. Most of them worship money and power beyond all reason. That’s been my experience on what “prestigious” education and work history yields — greed, covered up with fancy polysyllabic wording uttered from the greedy person’s mouth. I’m going to guess that you don’t have any history among those people, and admire them because of cultural totem values in the parts of American culture where you live and interact with others.
Naturally you’re entitled to find VDARE “provocative.” Just to be clear — I find it racist, bigoted, closed-minded, anti-intellectual, fraudulent, and devoid of any purpose save to gull the ignorant and inflame the belligerent. You reference comparisons to Murray’s “Bell Curve” nonsense. That book was pure racism. Anyone who read it without an eye biased in predisposition toward Murray’s bigoted thesis could see it was pure crap designed to achieve a certain policy goal — separate but equal. Murray essentially was arguing indirectly to push time back to the days of separate water fountains, separate counter seats, separation in buses and trains, etc. You might think that’s honest scholarship.
I would only suggest that you need to be more skeptical of the things you read. Much more skeptical.
29 June 2009, 10:46 amHenry:
http://www.itulip.com/forums/showthread.php?p=106493#post106493
Does USA 2009 = Argentina 2001? Part I: Falling economy reaches terminal velocity – Eric Janszen
29 June 2009, 3:51 pmHenry:
http://finance.groups.yahoo.com/group/gang8/message/14178
How banks end up with the economic surplus
29 June 2009, 3:52 pmHenry:
http://informationclearinghouse.info/article22943.htm
Is the Fed Juicing the Stock Market?
By Mike Whitney
29 June 2009, 5:06 pmkevin:
Stan, wow, you make a lot of interesting and scholarly points, which I appreciate, but there was really only one basic point I wanted to make, which I think is fundamental and which, assuming that the purpose of our discussion is to help us each live a better life, I think has to be clarified before moving on. I really think that this underlying issue brings a whole different tone to this discussion, takes it in a different, and I think ultimately more salutary, direction.
I was a little careless in saying “money is nothing,” but gave myself a little latitude there since I thought I’d made the point elsewhere. Let me rephrase: money is nothing in itself. Basically, the point underlying everything in my comment is that we decide for ourselves (individually) what money is and isn’t, then our consequent actions unfold from that and impact the world. The main idea is that money has no power over us, no power to shape our thoughts: we choose our own thoughts, we shape our thoughts (based on our own assumptions, desires, concepts, etc.), and it’s these thoughts that determine our actions. When we say money (or society) shapes our thoughts, we’re being careless and shrugging off our own responsibility in the equation of creation: that is, we’re denying our own involvement, in that truthfully WE shape our thoughts first, then attribute it to money (or some other material condition). We always decide what we believe and what we don’t. It’s an illusion that external objects like money, time, space, earth, determine the course of our thought. It appears that they do, but we always inwardly make a ruling choice in response to the phenomenal.
So, it’s our internal “understandings,” perceptions, beliefs, desires, illusions, that shape how we see things, what they appear to mean to us, how we respond. That internal world is the first place, the only place, where we can address the ills that seem to exist in the outside world. Not the acute illnesses brought on by events (these have their own fixtures for temporary relief), but the chronic, essential problems underlying and existing as first causes for all the ills (social and individual). The problems are rooted in the mental sphere of the individual.
If our internal world lacks solid truth, clarity, love, deep insight, then our perceptions and actions are shaped accordingly. If one accepts the evidence of the world as it presents itself, and the words and beliefs of others as they come down to one, without inquiry, then it is as though one’s inner world is completely shaped by the external. But this is an illusion. The choice was still made by the individual, inside. Maybe because one had no other clear choice, but one still made, or accepted, a particular set of external meanings. (And this is why it’s so important to, as Socrates said, “Know thyself.”)
Yes, it’s very real, it’s all very much something: but that substance that makes a thing have the meaning that we respond to is internal. The mere matter, energy, space and time — these are just commodities of the physical world. We decide inwardly what they mean, and how we will respond to them. The real issue is, upon what substance within ourselves (ego or soul) will we choose to form the meaning with which we imbue life?
29 June 2009, 5:22 pmStan:
Kevin, the issue of whether this is internal or external is a false dichotomy. Our communication right now is between persons (experienced internally), using a shared set of culturally-constructed meanings (transcending and emcompassing our individual being), using material means (physically external — except for all those flows, you understand). There’s no either-or here.
Are you living without money? Can you live without money? Try it, starting tomorrow.
29 June 2009, 6:55 pmStan:
On the Midrash on Money, here’s a snapshot of what Herod Antipas was doing in Galilee. Urbanizing, introducing money for the process, and replacing small-holding poly-croppers with land loss, tenancy and monocropping. Nazareth was a small peasant community of fewer than 200 people, small-holding poly-croppers.
When they lose their livliehood, the peasants have to go find work for money. Four miles from Nazareth, there is a need for construction laborers (tekton) in Herod Antipas’ elaborate urbanization project of Sepphoris. Jesus is called a tekton, and he likely sought survival by working for wages in Sepphoris, for the rich, controlled by foreign occupiers, in ths exact milieu.
This is why he tapped directly into the prophetic tradition in Judaism that emphasized we are tenant’s on God’s land, and that God commands a jubilary (redistributive) economy.
Wanna know where he got his iconoclasm, this Palestinian Jewish peasant? Look no further than the Old Testament.
-Amos 5:21-24
People say that prophetic Christians are distorting the scriptures to fit our lefty politics. I beg to differ.
29 June 2009, 7:18 pmSean:
I am having a hard time understanding why if Kevin’s point is so simple, he needs so many words to say it.
By arguing that money is whatever we say it is, or has only the value we ascribe to it, Kevin glosses over an important fact — unless one is fully self-sufficient and totally off the grid, one cannot take a cavalier attitude toward money.
I would suggest that Kevin try signing a mortgage loan, and then not repaying, and arguing to the mortgage bank that he has already given them his version of money, so he won’t bother repaying them with their version of money. I doubt that would get him farther than debtor’s prison!
If I misunderstand Kevin, then I have to blame his convoluted explanations for this allegedly simple construct he’s offering. Anything that’s very simple should be susceptible to simple definition and explanation. If it is not so susceptible, the obvious answer is that it’s not as simple as alleged.
29 June 2009, 11:25 pmKevin:
Money is not first cause. Is that simple enough?
30 June 2009, 5:10 pmSean:
First cause of what? Now it just seems like sophistry. What am I missing here?
1 July 2009, 10:04 amMichael Anderson:
Related to this…James Lovelock’s take on global warming. Pessimism and optimism—if we can survive. Relates directly to money…
http://www.alternet.org/environment/141081/the_dark_side_of_climate_change%3A_it%27s_already_too_late%2C_cap_and_trade_is_a_scam%2C_and_only_the_few_will_survive/
7 July 2009, 12:41 pmMichael Anderson:
I should state that in reference to the above article, I agree with Lovelock’s assessment of environmental POLICY, and how it relates to Hornborg’s article’s premise.
I’m not too sure about the Gaia theory, yet, but it does make a certain amount of sense. Among friends we sometimes say the Earth has developed a high fever and is trying to kill the invasive pathogenic organism, namely humans.
9 July 2009, 2:35 pmStan:
Whether one employs the personalizing hermeneutic of Gaia to the situation, or Hornborg’s eco-semiotics and cultural anthropology, we risk a demobilizing post-panic scenario… c’est la vie. Shit happens. Embrace the horror, whatever. Unacceptable.
Back to our Italian friend’s formula: pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will.
Henry’s x-posts on the continuing economic spiraldown are most interesting on this account because they remain “inside,” so to speak, an un-deconstructed money… un-revealed, for my fellow apocalypticists.
Hornborg is operating in a tradition that was smothered inside marxism once it acquired a foothold on state power, beginning with Lenin, that suggests money can’t be fully understood and appreciated until it is contextualized within an account of economics that comprehends energy… that activities of cultural exchange are, in fact, flows of energy and matter, not merely metaphorically, but quite materially. Hornborg’s critique of “resilience theory” is that it cleaves to a totally dispassionate physicalist vocabulary… eliminates personhood from these recursive feeedback loops. Lenin’s attack on Bogdanov — as far removed in its conclusions as it is from resilience theory — shares this characteristic with RT… its persistent objectivism (not unlike Kevin’s assertions). Marx himself, though never thoroughly familiar with the implications of the 2nd Law (He and Engels mentioned it in a couple of letters late in life, then dismissed it as politically relevevant iirc), did break new revelatory ground — as Hornborg notes again and again — in the description of commodity fetishism (an unfortunate term, now that is conjures vaguely sexual allusions). The new ground was that this was a semiotic critique. It would be others later one who carried this critique deeper… Bogdanov, for one, but ultimately folks like Georgescu-Roegen on energy and economics.
Hornborg wants to finish unpacking money this way; and I agree with him, vigorously. Saying that money does not operate like a “first cause” doesn’t shed much light; in fact, the whole point of this topic, in the words of Hornborg (from The Power of the Machine):
“First causes” belong to a far more linear hermeneutic, and a distinctly modern one that accurately reflects the unexamined premises of… well, modernism. Stating the fact that the important descriptions that Henry forwards on the economy do not yet contain this money critique is not dissing the folks like Whitney and Hudson et al; but it raises some important questions.
Here’s Illich circa 1973:
One of the media circulating between persons and culture that is absolutely necessary to sustain this malignant flow is money. We urgenly need to understand how, and to share that understanding as widely as possible. First things first.
13 July 2009, 9:23 am(Boer) Tom:
As to feedback: 1. Do you have some special meaning for ‘recursive feedback loops’, or was that meant as a redundant description?
As to quantity of e(n,x)ergy: 1. Specific ‘organisms’ (e.g. machines in the standard understanding, corporations, NATO and SEATO states, USA) evolve to degrade this energy for their own usage, and mutually beneficial (in a narrow biological sense) organisms take up some of the original-form (e.g. refined petrol) energy that remains, for their own functioning / continued existence; access (for us) is through money, which is obtained through service to the acquisition machinery/organisms. Money then is blood, with the ‘oxygen content’ (metaphor) reduced by inflation. State/policing maintains the complexity/order (again as a biological metaphor) – courts regulate business in a manner that allows fairly large structures to remain intact. 2. Also, it is not so much ‘high quanta’ of energy per se, as much as high concentrations – the energy content of the earth has not changed terribly.
As other (social) organisms develop to consume extra exergy that was formerly to a greater degree available to lower-class North-Americans and Europeans (e.g. East-Asian and African corporate structures, middle-classes and vehicles, which directly tap into the ‘open-market’ metaphorical blood-stream), and the supply dries up (peak everything), a form of moneyed cannibalism arises among those that have least access – petty thefts, that are recycled through pawn shops (for access to the blood-stream money, to obtain essentials and non-essentials – drugs in both senses are often an upper-classes pleasure denied the lower classes), which then also reduces the money costs of the (stolen) goods for the poor in an area in general (and taking a cut). (Some of my tools were recently stolen…) Of course, this East-Asian and African tapping into the exergy market and arisal of corporate structures is ideologically known as ‘raising millions out of poverty’.
The feedbacks are mysterious until one investigates them, and most people have no experience with differential and difference equations (I’m not talking about differentiation as such, for those wondering – see below) – how does one explain short-changing to someone who cannot add and subtract, short of creating simple suspicion? These equations are necessary to explain the feedback loops, and getting people to numerically solve them to illustrate a problem seems an obvious form of revelatory practice.
A differential equation: The number of bacteria in a jar of medium (food) grow in proportion to the unconsumed food and the number of bacteria, but consume K units of food for every bacteria. Mathematically:
X is number of bacteria, Y is remaining food, X(0) is the initial bacterial population, Y(0) is the initial amount of food, and t is time (after starting).
The rate of bacterial growth (i.e. derivative),
dX(t)/dt = C x X(t) x Y(t),
but Y(t) = Y(0) – K x X(t),
or dX(t)/dt = C x X(t) x [Y(0) - K x X(t)]
For those familiar only with differentiation, note that the derivative with respect to t is not specified in terms of t. If anyone wants, I could set up a miniature blog with a spreadsheet to demonstrate a numerical solution (openoffice is free and has spreadsheet program). (It is kind of interesting to me that many engineers, who work with such equations all day, are very resistant to the possibility of an end to the party.) Other differential equations may involve multiple derivatives, e.g.:
d^2X(t)/dt^2 – 3 x dX(t)/dt + X(t)^2 = 6
Much of chaos theory and the like arises out of differential and difference equations – anyone with a computer can be taught to solve them numerically, hence allowing for the origin of the chaos to become obvious. (Heck, a calculator, pencil and sheet of paper could do it, but spreadsheets are nicer.)
13 July 2009, 1:14 pm(Boer) Tom:
Another comment: The cannibalism is not limited to poor people, but also shows up among poor(er) corporations – with the neoliberal programs initiated in South Africa in the late 70s, fraud among South African corporations (e.g. one corporation ‘merges’ with another, and two months later, the management from what used to be one company empties the combined concern’s accounts and runs) has greatly increased. (The neoliberal programs impoverished many whites, possibly a majority, even as whites as a group continued to get richer.)
Could you merge this with my previous comment? Thanks.
13 July 2009, 1:26 pmm.c.:
On the realistic ground level of money in politics, the last time the Dems had 60 votes in the Senate was 1979 with Carter in the WH. If meaningful health care reform & an alternative energy/environmental climate change policy(the 2 things I care most about, not nes. in that order) happens it will(?) be in this term{before the 2010 elections}. Otherwise it might be another 30 years. The U.S. pulling all troops out of Afghanistan by Obama…. who we kidding.
13 July 2009, 2:46 pmHenry:
http://www.frontlinethoughts.com/pdf/mwo071009.pdf
“Buddy, Can You Spare 5 Trillion?”
The outrageous mysteries of superfast stock trading, Japan, and more, from John Mauldin.
13 July 2009, 9:09 pmHenry:
This will knock you to the ground:
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=6703413885850200097
14 July 2009, 2:44 amSean:
I think that discussions of the “magical 60 votes” theme are a wasteful distraction. They’re like watching a football game and instead of looking at the actual play on the field, one reviews statistics and tries to predict the outcome based on statistical analysis.
This sort of pseudo-analysis should have died with Robert McNamara. Statistical analysis is the biggest distraction, and yet so many Americans fall for it as if it is some sort of technological wonder, a development for the ages. The only people it serves as a “development” of any type are liars, shills, spin-meisters, pundits, deflectors, public relations people, spokespeople, lawyers, and “life coaches.”
The games being played at the top Federal Government level have no care at all for the whims of congressional statistical analysis. Such analysis is completely irrelevant. It’s designed to get people to think that we just need a 100% Democrat Congress. Thus it’s designed to perpetuate partisan bickering, and to propagate hatred for Republicans. It has no bearing on how to fix American problems, because it assumes Democrats will fix them but are being stymied by Republicans. This is such a laughably lying and fraudulent assumption it’s almost not worth taking seriously. But apparently, some people have taken it seriously.
And I wonder why that is.
14 July 2009, 12:51 pm(Boer) Tom:
I guess I was obscure up there, so I’ll clarify the relationship between feedback loops and differential equations:
Feedback loops allow a quantity, e.g. the amount of GHGs in the atmosphere, to impact the speed at which the quantity changes, e.g. the rate at which GHGs are added to the atmosphere, so as a crude example of a tipping point, a feedback could
1. allow GHGs to remain constant (except for human additions) when CO2 is less than 300ppm, but
2. add 1ppm per year CO2 (in addition to human contributions) for 150 years once the CO2 concentration jumps above 300ppm,
i.e. the current reality has a say in how the current reality will change. This is a crude example, but illustrates the the differential (equation) nature of most feedback systems.
15 July 2009, 12:20 am(Boer) Tom:
Another thing (& sorry for the multiple posts): The sign nature of money allows it to set up networks of exchange (people simply exchange less without money, and favors become more common), which are grounded in the physical and cultural needs of the participants (humans, corporations and their components). Entities with more knowledge (and other power) exchange (or seize, when they’re exposed or sense an opportunity), often to pay debts. Debts, especially with compound interest, are their own feedback mechanism: Unless one repays the principle, the pressure remains (error signal in feedback terminology), and states and mercenaries (debt collection agencies included) are more than willing to give the pressure physical reality (although socialization also plays its part in the psychological pressure). The sign signals willingness to exchange. Your general-purpose money signals willingness to exchange some thing (in general) for some other thing (in general); a price is a communication device (the US-definition Libertarians are right on this score).
But money has its own (social) reality, and by focusing on US Dollars, we can easily lose track of what we are exchanging – an ideal situation for ideologies to develop where those not involved in extraction (and even those involved piecemeal) can simply see their money increase, and assume that it must be so (cornucopia). Perhaps we need to unmask the ‘general’ nature of money by adding non-general prices: X trees, Y litres of water, Z MegaWatt-hours etc were denied future generations in the manufacture of this product, and X’ trees per year, y’ litres of water per year and Z’ MegaWatt-hours per year are denied future generations to maintain the infrastructure to make this product usable – W $ are also included in your taxes…
(Generalized, common) Exchange is itself blinding and fetishist – what (labour, exergy, trees, water, etc) was involved in the manufacture of something that was (presumably) exchanged multiple times (including, presumably, by the manufactures/suppliers of the raw resources)? Generalized exchange networks can easily obscure unequal exchanges and seizures; we cannot measure (except through great effort, and then only in select cases) the inputs to that which we obtain through exchange.
15 July 2009, 1:17 am(Boer) Tom:
The moneyed exchanges aren’t entirely as divorced from extraction/seizure as the above would tend to indicate: By buying, we send a signal that there is a demand (market?) for the seized goods, which leads to a dance-like social interaction of price-shifting and increasing/decreasing rate of buying, which negotiates the price, on the basis of which (with other considerations) the seizers may determine how much more to seize in some time frame – supply and demand, as the classical economists put it. Is science infused with ideology not science? I ask specifically regarding economics.
Notice that while we participate in feedback networks of price-determining for seized and under-paid for materials (or materials that were obtained through unequal exchange), the nature of the feedback processes and their arisal are such that we can avoid seeing it – the dance is professional, i.e. no untoward questions are asked, which would indicate an unworthiness to participate in the dance.
15 July 2009, 1:39 pmm.c.:
Sean, its about odds(pols are gamblers) and outcomes(minimizing negative & maximizing positive). 60 doesn’t mean shi_ if congress & Obama don’t pass anything. The Children’s Health Care Bill(SCHIP) passed earlier this year DOES matter to kids whose parents can’t afford to take them to see a doctor. We can BS all we want but politics does have consequences in the Real World. It’s just not RELIGION like some think or want.
15 July 2009, 3:02 pm(Boer) Tom:
I see that De Landa insists that the mono/oligopolistic natures of many markets make supply and demand irrelevant. This works up to a point – one can throw away a certain amount of produce – but bills need to be paid, and larger corporations will fail, and/or run to states for financial assistance if demand remains low. Oligopolies reduce the significance of demand, but do not eradicate its influence entirely. Supply is also still an issue: The violence perpetrated against suppliers can only go so far before the suppliers can no longer function as suppliers, and other costs arise to keep a supply of potential suppliers. So even in a genocidal/extermininst oligopolistic framework, the supply/demand processes still operate (to greater or lesser degrees, and with other feedbacks). It seems that a bigger issue than supply, demand, and price, is whether a stable ‘ecology’ of food-suppliers can arise – when one member of an oligopolistic set of food distributors fails, the load on the others might be such that they cannot meet the caloric needs of people in a region.
De Landa in the same article also mentions that by taking very quick note of demand fluctuations, networks of small producers can compete with corporations… I.e. we can win (against the current economic system – thermodynamics, well…)
15 July 2009, 11:58 pmSean:
m.c., I just do not understand your perspective. It seems you believe you have a good handle on what is “politics” but from where I sit, you are talking about irrelevant details. Maybe that’s because I’ve seen more of the real workings of Federal political machination than you have, from a more inside perspective? I don’t know. All I know is, statistical analysis of Congressional majorities and the related nonsense back in November about “super-majorities” among delegates — that’s all distraction, it’s not about what really happens, not even close. That stuff is the theatre, the bread-and-circus that’s used to distract people from how things really work.
If you’re saying the same thing but are just being sarcastic, my apologies for missing the sarcasm. Sarcasm is mighty hard to detect even in person (unless you know the sarcastic one very well) and it’s nearly impossible to detect on the internet.
16 July 2009, 11:43 am(Boer) Tom:
The whole ‘supply curve meets demand curve’ is nonsense – the two processes are merely feedbacks (among several) that happen to usually be antagonistic, i.e. the price tends to be increased by increased demand (or decreased in certain oligopolistic and other select situations), i.e. usually a negative feedback (decreased price tends to increase sales in most situations, competition among similar producers tends to reckoning that a higher price can be obtained, hence tending again toward a higher price); increased demand increases the price-adjusting power of a given supply quantity (where increasing supply has the opposite sign effect). Another negative feedback is overproduction, though that tends to systemic periodic behaviors – negative feedback by itself does not guarantee stability – see e.g. the Routh-Horowitz stability criterion, Root-locus and bode plots for linear(ized) stability. (The Bode plot of the feedback network must have |H(f)| < 1 (where H is the linear frequency transfer function) for all f such that the angle of H(f) is 180 degrees… (What I’m trying to do is show that linear theory is not entirely powerless to describe complex processes…) I’m not very versed in chaos theory, I guess that the overproduction would be due to the attractor of profit-making toward overproduction…
16 July 2009, 12:35 pmSean:
to (Boer) Tom –
1) Supply and demand never works outside a small vendor with a small buying clientele. Attempts to extrapolate its utility to larger scale operations are just smokescreen rationalizations and/or excuses and/or false justifications.
2) Present “markets” in America are a result of manufactured “demand” and the manufacturing is done by advertisements which use psychological warfare against the consumer, to make him feel unmanly without Product A, to make her feel ugly without Product B, to make them feel low-class without Product C. Preying on insecurity is a time-honored practice in all sorts of organized human social endeavors. It’s the basis for most religions, it’s the basis for totalitarianism, it’s the basis for authoritarians gaining blind public support. It’s how most ideas are sold. And that’s what is sold in the American “market”place — ideas. Product A is sold to make men feel more macho. Product B is sold to make women less insecure about their place in the overall portfolio of beauty. Product C is sold as a way to give an external display of “higher class” status. The actual utility of these products is pretty well irrelevant. Their primary utility is status display.
3) Any statistical analysis which fails to account for these points is another distraction. I can understand how it’s entertaining to those who love to feel intellectually advanced because of their use of insider lingo and variable-filled “equations” which “prove” certain theories, but at the bottom all matters of spending money are related to human insecurities. The only real question is whether the insecurity is due to an actual need, or a felt need.
16 July 2009, 2:00 pmStan:
Alienated individual. Disembedded individual. Disenchanted individual.
Alienated (from processes of production, captive to an impersonal system) individual. Disembedded (from the sacred as experienced in sense of place and intimate intersubjectivities) individual. Disenchanted (with nature, opening the door to nature’s objectification and exploitation) individual.
Money is the oxygen for this process.
At the end of p. 250, Hornborg suggests a formula for demonstrating the appropriation of space (as half of his thesis that machines appropriate time and space), by converting calculations of embodied labor (in the marxian sense) into embodied land (ecological footprint with regard to land-use required to sustain that same worker). Some of these braod figures are surely available if anyone wants to map some of this.
17 July 2009, 4:54 amm.c.:
If Earth does reach the Tipping Point/Runaway Greenhouse Effect, the temperature won’t quite reach that of Venus but close enough(Venus is .73 the distance Closer to the Sun; Earth= 1 A.U.)
When the Sun does reach its Red Giant Stage in a few million years, not much live organisms will be around to see it. Unlike a lightbulb we can’t flip a switch & turn the Sun off to cool down.
17 July 2009, 12:33 pmm.c.:
A few Billion, not Million years(~5) before Red Giant Stage. Either way I won’t be here to see it.
17 July 2009, 1:48 pm(Boer) Tom:
To Sean:
I’ll respond to the psychological explanation first. I’m trained as an engineer: We set up differential equations to model systems, and our own and others’ designs. Any such model is incomplete, that is, wrong, but often can show the fundamental aspects of how a given behavior/phenomenon arises. (And it gives a very nice explanation of how trying to maintain oil production at a plateau tends to cause a much sharper falloff in production once one fails to maintain that production.) The entirety of physics from Newton onwards (including quantum physics) is dependent on differential equations; where you don’t see an explicit differential equation, a differential equation has been solved algebraically with certain assumptions, e.g. constant acceleration. That also goes for chaotic systems, so no escape there. (And differential equations are actually conceptually and in many cases practically – specifically numerical solutions – very simple.) Even the surface area of a circle in a plane (pi radius squared) is found this way. (Learn calculus!!)
I certainly agree that most of our needs arise from insecurity manufactured through propaganda, i.e. marketing: Recall that I spoke of cultural needs; your culture is consumerism, and it is spreading and replacing (to varying degrees) other cultures. Sorry for not being explicit.
As to your first point: Consider what happens when a given price of a given commodity at a given chain store is much higher than at other chain stores: If the price is much higher than is needed to maintain solvency and a netto profit (land costs, wages, electricity, heating), then another chain store may create propaganda (a multipage flier), advertising their prices. Some people will buy the higher-price item, and some people, the ‘deal-hunters’ (especially those who grew up in the Depression – I had elderly relatives like that) who will go and buy the apparently cheaper product (who wouldn’t have otherwise), often incurring greater expenses in fuel as they go. (Rationality does not necessarily drive the demand behavior; propaganda does fine.) If the demand is weak, some things tend to go bad with time (even fuel – try filling up with two-year-old petrol) – fashions change (more propaganda effects), and the bigger chain-stores will try to cut relative losses (i.e. maintain as much of the present profit margin as possible) by reducing the price. That is, the effect of demand fluctuation is different between competitive and oligopolistic markets. Also, if the product is sold at a pace sufficient to avoid spoilage, the price won’t change. One must coupon-clip to change the price paid, and that is set up to be embarrassing – propaganda and insecurity again – but it has enough of an effect to give demand fluctuations (some) power.
But you didn’t understand my critique of economics: The whole treatment of economics assumes that for a given demand and a given supply, there is some correct price. Even in a competitive market, much of the above applies (with less force than in an oligopolistic market). There are floor costs, below which, one operates at a loss, and the economy cannot ‘equilibrate’ – 1. if people don’t have money to buy, things don’t get bought, and 2. feedback systems that include delays (linear theory again, sorry, but I was trained to use it, and it is a very good tool) tend to be very unstable, and more-so as the delay grows. Much of the instability has an oscillatory aspect. An aside – with delays in feedbacks, the predictive power of linear theory drops quite a bit – the math becomes unwieldy and the linearizing assumptions become invalidated…
17 July 2009, 2:29 pm(Boer) Tom:
To Stan:
17 July 2009, 3:00 pmThere is an assumption in his work which is no longer current: The American labourers would have a caloric intake very close to (perhaps a bit higher than) the British labourer. Food intake in the manufacturing world is much lower than here; to what extent is North America importing its food? The unequal exchange is bigger than this: How do we convert exergy flows into land exchange? Do we consider nutrient-rich mangoes exported from Mexico to USA and Canada to be equal per hectare of production land to US rice, corn or wheat, even after removing the land-equivalent exergy contribution of Venezuela and Saudi?
Stan:
Appropriation of time and space. Money. Movement.
Illich, from Energy and Equity:
FULL BOOK
17 July 2009, 6:25 pm(Boer) Tom:
Two alternative suggestions to compare movement and oil exergy to surface land-base, and the problems of each:
1. Take the average per year agriculturally potentially useful sun-energy per unit surface area (averaged over time and surface of the holding nation-state) to get an annual energy per unit land for conversion. This gives no account of land capacity, in terms of soil health and nutrient content. Also involves much calculation.
2. Take the global per year agriculturally potentially useful sun-energy per unit surface area as basis for comparison. This would overemphasize the far-northern (industrialized) contributions, but avoids problems with variation in soil health and nutrient content.
With either, one could compare the deficits of different states, and calculate how much they would save by stopping their waste of soil nutrients and driving around senselessly. One could account for the oil exergy as available land-surface-time product (e.g. hectare-years). It also nicely illustrates how strategies (waste and artificial fertilizers vs recycling of soil nutrients, e.g.) compare. Any improvements or suggestions?
17 July 2009, 7:48 pmSean:
to Boer (Tom) –
Thanks for that clarification, it helped me understand where you were headed with your prior posts. Most likely you and I are saying very nearly the same thing, but from different perspectives. I’m certainly not an engineer, I tried engineering as my first field in college and the mathematics drove me batty! I finished with a biology degree and later went to law school. So my training is in both the compartmental type (biology as hard science) and the expansive, open-ended type (law) and my nature as a human is to be eternally curious and constantly skeptical. Critical thought is more than a habit for me, it’s an inescapable function of being awake. When I train my thinking on “market” dynamics in America, I come away with the ideas I mentioned in my 16 July 2pm post. Those are the treetop conclusions I draw. Beneath those treetops are countless branches, a big trunk, and an extensive root system. I can go into the details of the sub-canopy system, but it’s just more micro-analysis on the same theme. The micro-analysis doesn’t alter the major conclusions, not one whit.
If one examines critically the assessments and analyses offered by “economists” plying their trade in America, one comes away finding “economists” to be the ultimate naked emperors. Stan and I have had exchanges on this. Stan has a term for what economics is, I can’t recall the term, it’s a rarely-used word that I would imagine finds little use outside academia, but it is right on point with how I see economics, so I tend to agree with Stan’s conclusion.
In an advanced, complex industrial society there won’t ever be free markets and unfettered commerce that yields perfect competition and the products thereof. I would defy anyone who argues otherwise to lay out his/her precepts and points, and I feel confident that I can show him or her where he or she goes wrong. I’ve done enough litigation of issues confronting multi-million and multi-billion dollar enterprises that I understand the practical way our system of American Capitalism actually works, and I can say with confidence that the system we have in America is nearly directly opposite what the “news” media pundits call it, and surely directly opposite what both the Democratic and Republican Parties would suggest.
In fact, we are at a point in American culture where it is nearly perfectly accurate to assume the exact opposite is the truth when you listen to a politician at the national (Federal) level, or a major “news” network spokesperson’s script-reading, or a trusted “analyst’s” assessment given to that “news” media person. We have a fully realized fascism now in America and it is not at all far from what Nazi Germany had under Hitler.
But most Americans think we still have fireworks, Yankee Doodle, “Freedom” and Apple Pie.
17 July 2009, 8:36 pmSean:
PS to Boer (Tom) —
I did study calculus, and I am aware of the utility of differential equations as tools. But that’s all they are — tools. They are not the reality. They are the tools and language that certain people use to try to describe reality.
As to physics, it is twinning the general drift of upper echelon academics. What I mean is, it is engaged in bizarre theorizing (i.e. Lisa Randall’s “Warped Passages”) when it’s not busy serving the military-industrial-congressional complex. It would be refreshing if physics returned to explaining the natural world, but I’m afraid there’s no money in that endeavor.
I could sit down and conjure equations used to “describe” facets of American Capitalism, but they would all constitute smokescreens, obscuring reality.
“Economics” is about personal money-spending decisions, nothing more. It is sociology, with a money view. It should not even warrant a Bachelor’s degree, let alone Master’s or Doctoral degrees. The fact that one can earn a degree in “economics” reflects the fraudulence afoot in American academics presently. The fact that people argue with me on this view shows how much fraud is afoot in general American society.
What actually is studied in “economics” is the method of creating obfuscatory rationalizations for an inhumane fiscal network and commercial system. And this is so even if differential equations are used for that purpose.
My experience as a lawyer is primarily in the insurance world, but also in the general world of top corporate commercial dealings. I am aware that, for example, differential equations and other methods of calculus are used routinely by insurance company actuaries to create justifications for policy premium pricing. Actuaries will beam with pride when they describe how they save money for insurance carriers and make policies more affordable to buyers. They don’t even see that they’re pawns in a chess game not of their own making. Actuarial “science” is as much a naked emperor as economics.
17 July 2009, 8:52 pm(Boer) Tom:
To Sean:
I guess I see political activism as a process of informing people and challenging them in a way that tends to cause moral (co)development. (I’ll bring in differential equations in a moment…) As an example: Most of the people I know are technological optimists; tell them about peak oil, and they’ll say something to the effect of “I’m sure the geoscientists/oil engineers will be able to maintain production, until a replacement is found.” In this one case, I can (and do) point out that USA, despite the efforts of these engineers, oil production peaked in the early 1970s – take the differential point of view, and one sees that these efforts only hastened the decline of production (let production be proportional to both experience and what remains, and increase the proportionality constant, and the decay will be quicker). Acceptance of a fact, and the realization of a morally necessary behavioral adjustment occur. Same thing e.g. with people who ascribe FGM to Islam. I could multiply the examples.
As for sciences, including physics: The useful physics research has been performed, right? Would you agree that more research into small-initial-effect biological-physical (e.g. low-level radiation exposure) and the like is more deserving? If so, how do you propose to go about it? Aside from the fact that most people don’t know much about physics, and the fact that one needs a background in physics (amongst other sciences) to perform the necessary research, we aren’t going to get any funding (at least not in universities). If we want the research to be done, maybe we should popularize physics (and informed people tend to be more skeptical of nonsense). Knowing how to set up a spreadsheet for an ordinary differential equation is a skill set (mind you, knowing how to set up a spreadsheet at all is a skill set). It is a tool that I think will tend to inspire curiosity, critical thought (recognizing patterns, anyone?) and a sense of knowledge that can lead to effective action. Without a knowledge (born of practice) of differential equations, environmental arguments may well sound silly. Have you ever solved an exponential (y’=ay type) differential equation boundary problem numerically and compared the result with the exponential result? Try it, and see how small you have to make the step size for the final result (make x_final = 10 x_initial) to converge within 5%. If people can have experience with these problems, we can avoid many frauds.
Of course, experimental methods would also have to be popularized, but how many office workers have the necessary skill sets? Mechanics, sure, but not white-collar workers in general… Which is probably why so many engineers can be technological optimists…
With special regards to economics: The term that Stan has used (chrematistics) means the study of wealth. Presumably that would include the study of how it is acquired. Is the purpose of his posts here not to make a historically valid, general description of how that occurs (through money and its effects on human persons and societies, violence etc)? Is that not economics, or chrematistics? If chrematistics must be unscientific and/or ideological, why is he attempting it? Hence my objection above. I have precious little respect for the discipline (economics).
18 July 2009, 1:33 pm(Boer) Tom:
Sorry, another post, to Sean:
The differential equations are only as obfuscatory as you make them. One can use them to illustrate Marx’s view of overproduction (although that should go hand-in-hand with a workshop to illustrate the interpersonal dynamics, so as to see what terms in the differential equations are valid). If you run away from science, you hand it over to the ideologues who will use it (fraudulently) against you. Only when you engage their arguments can you show their fraudulence. That’s why I read a lot of liberal, conservative, (US definition) Libertarian, anti-Muslim, anti-Black etc stuff – if you want to convince people otherwise, you have to understand and be familiar with their arguments.
As an example (close to Stan’s heart, as I recall): Take the notion that Blacks cannot swim. Certainly swimming is not part of the cultural repertoire of most Black African ethnic groups. Of course, the racialist argument is not quite that well defined for most racialists (some South African white racialists claim that Black Africans have greater bone densities which somehow prevent them from swimming – don’t tell them about the coastal Delta-state Nigerian ethnic groups). I have some Nigerian (non-Delta-state) friends, some of whom were quite scared of water, but wanted to learn to swim – they did fine – consequently I can shut such racialists up without any swearing or anger in my voice – I ask the racialist if he’d like to meet said friends. Facts trump dubious theory, but theory is necessary to interpret facts, right? PS – such racialists then go on puffing, but then shut up.
To Stan: I’ll try that mapping in the next month or so – caught up in work right now – unless someone beats me to it…
18 July 2009, 1:56 pmHenry:
http://www.spectator.co.uk/print/the-magazine/features/3755623/meet-the-man-who-has-exposed-the-great-climate-change-con-trick.thtml
18 July 2009, 4:39 pmSean:
Tom,
I’m still pretty sure we agree on most points, after reading those latest two posts. I think I’m failing to make clear that I’m just talking skeptically about the utility of science. I’m not saying we should hand it over. I’m saying a few things, actually — (1) technocracy is an artificial ideal; (2) using calculus as a tool to describe human money-spending behavior is a massive distraction and an attempt to head toward technocracy; and (3) that portion of the whole field of economics that I’ve been able to encounter has been limited to either justifying capitalism, or justifying marxism, and since I am not much of a marxist and surely not a capitalist, I don’t see the utility of economics. The marxist economists are busy using theory to “prove” Marx was correct. The capitalists are using formulae and theory to say capitalism is man’s highest plane of existence. As far as I’m concerned, they’re just another version of the charade we know as Democrat vs Republican. They’re not going to basics, they’re splitting hairs on points of virtual irrelevance.
I think that for every supposedly important equation used in “economics,” I can tell you a better way to assess the problem or probe the question. and it won’t involve formulas!
I’m pretty sure I’m holding my ground here because of the recent uptick in attention paid to Robert McNamara on his death. In my view he was the ultimate vector of technocracy and politics by technical distraction, in my lifetime at least. But not far behind would be David Stockman, Alan Greenspan, and the the whole “trickle-down” and “Laffer curve” gang of the Reagan-Bush-Bush eras.
18 July 2009, 6:36 pmSean:
@ Henry –
Interesting link, it reminds me of why technocracy is not a valid ideal. Perhaps the linked “professor” can explain how he ignores chemistry on the way to his vaunted theory’s accuracy. It’s quite simple, much simpler than the “professor” suggests.
You cannot puke volatile, reactive chemicals into the air and expect them to not react.
Once they react, their reactions cause subsequent reactions.
The sum of the reactions yields what we have now — warming on a global scale.
This is not to say that there aren’t a bunch of scammers who will use global climate change as a con theme. But those cons don’t have anything to do with the real atmospheric chemistry that the linked “professor” refuses to note.
And tell me please — how a geologist knows a doggone thing about atmospheric chemistry. Geologists are rock jocks. They skim through hard science on the way to their game of classification via nomenclature.
19 July 2009, 9:30 am(Boer) Tom:
To Sean:
19 July 2009, 4:05 pmI’m not a technocrat! I.e. I am arguing that we should illustrate science, including the scientific content of economics. How do technocrats maintain power, other than by the illusion of control and predictability? What I understand (correct me) is that you wish to tell people simply that such control cannot be had, i.e. people should take your word for it. I wish to get people to understand (proximally) mathematically why such control cannot be had, i.e. from their own experience and ability to apply the necessary math. I’m not a Marxist either; I do see his tendency toward overproduction as correct, and I’m quite interested in what has been said about his philosophical contributions here. How does one show that trickle-down is a fraud? We can show that nothing is trickling down – something is empirically trickling up – but that could as well inspire conspiracy theories about how this or that (typically ethnic) group achieves it. In short, by using calculus to disprove controllability and predictability, how does one head to technocracy (which assumes controllability and predictability)?
(Boer) Tom:
To Sean (again):
I want to try a different approach, especially as you’ve raised the question of holding ground (I’ve probably been too aggressive): If one assumes that your position is in some fundamental respect correct, that implies that we can do very few short-term estimates based on current tactics of the ruling class (few formulas), and we have no way to falsify/check your position. Also, we have to decide up front that supply and demand fluctuations are either irrelevant, or of some fixed relevance based on some eternal and complete categorization (competitive vs oligopolistic market). If we can create models to estimate e.g. the short term effects of current tactics, perhaps even to the point where the next instability starts to emerge, we can gain peoples’ trust and curiosity by making a (scientific) prediction (of game-changing tactics, instability etc), and seize some initiative from our ruling-class and other opponents by setting up relevant (in the short term) social institutions (another skill-set). (We also need to develop subcultures that have as part of their cultural repertoire the ability to disband an organization/institution without undue emotional attachment, careerism etc, e.g. by splitting institutions that grow beyond some size (personnel, geographic scope) and/or simply realize that the situation has changed, and communicate that in a way that can be verified, e.g. by having people competent to do the necessary estimations, to signal intent to disband the institution.) Again, though, our opponents are institutions, and through activism of moral and intellectual development, we can deny them personnel, though that also requires that we develop morally and intellectually.
Consider that most North Americans are functionally illiterate, cannot recognize new patterns in certain disallowed fields (e.g. politics, nature), and are hostile. Can your verbal (or otherwise non-algebraic) explanations tackle any of these aspects of the problem? I suspect (I may be wrong) that by giving people a tool by which they can see non-obvious consequences of current structures (explicitly pointed out), with the tool’s failures (e.g. prediction over greater time-shifts) pointed out, that they can explore on their own, and develop a self-confidence that erodes hostility, a curiosity to seek new patterns and their consequences, and a thirst to learn more that would get them to read, learn and experiment. Would you be willing in your disagreement to try it as an experiment?
If so, a challenge then: First, give your non-numerical explanation of the effect of demand fluctuations on price and institutional viability in an oligopolistic market. Second, try setting up a model of an oligopolistic market, to show the effects of demand fluctuation on institutional viability and price. BTW what are the effects of an institution (e.g. chain store or franchise) failing? Third, come back and tell which gave more insight and confidence.
19 July 2009, 7:29 pmSean:
Awwww, Tom, you’re not being fair!
1) Non-numerical explanation of the effect of demand fluctuations on price and institutional viability in an oligopolistic market?
Please state the question in English, Tom. Not economics rubric. English. What are you trying to divine here? What is a “demand fluctuation” and how have you defined it? What is “institutional viability”? What is an “oligopolistic market”? If you’re going to issue challenges, you ought to do them fairly! Tell me what you’re trying to ascertain, I’ll tell you how to find it. I may, however, challenge the assumptions you make with the query you pose, and that’s why I want you to say it in English. You’re doing a Lakoff here, you’re trying to “frame” things. I want you going to the essence of what it is you want to examine. I don’t want reliance on jargon, nor do I want to use concepts that exist solely in “economics.”
2) A model of an oligopolistic market? Why would I want to do that? To what purpose would I create such a model, other than to answer your challenge? What would such a model do for us? Any model you choose is going to be biased, that’s the primary flaw of models. Why do you need a model to predict “economic” results?
19 July 2009, 8:43 pm(Boer) Tom:
To Sean:
1. Sorry, my background is electronic noise (random variation in currents and the like), and I tend to talk about what I understand, hence my terminology. The challenge was not meant to be some four-hour project, that you could immediately come back with a response – it would probably take a good deal of clarification, discussion of realistic approximations etc. I’ll answer the uses of the model last, and clarify my terminology first.
I guess one could define two types of demand fluctuations: The demand drops or rises (e.g. by some portion, or by some number of countable commodity sold), and 1. stays down, or 2. changes back within some period. What is the effect on the price at the store affected? A problem is that demand is sufficiently poorly defined to have many possible meanings, e.g. is it only the demand for one product (at the current price and marketing/propaganda intensity), or is it for some class of products, e.g. consumer electronics? For each, we could ask how many people would be expected to be laid off as a result of the change in demand. Also, by laying people off, the total demand in the economy is reduced (less income, especially now that people have reached a saturation debt), i.e. more local poverty (and insecurity, leading to lower wages). To bring in your second question – we have oligopolistic markets – a few (large and interconnected) corporations employ us and supply us with real and manufactured needs. Institutional viability could be the probability that the chain-store in question (and its suppliers) remain in business; one could ask how many businesses fail because people decide to pay down debts and grow their own food – if the number is high, we should be pushing equally for debt-destruction (forgiveness has dubious implications) with local self-sufficiency. Can we do an estimate of how much less people will earn, how much real unemployment is expected to go up etc, due to the current situation, redistribution of wealth inside USA etc?
A model would include feedbacks; one can take their effects into account. (That also applies in the short term.) What biases would be involved, other than those that would be expected based on those aspects of the model (e.g. marginal feedbacks) which are excluded for the sake of calculation? And as the model is meant to be semi-empirical (see below), such biases as arise can be accounted for – the purpose of the model is short-term estimation, not some complete account.
At the same time my (our?) goal is not a better market (at the very least not per se). One use is to show how prices vary and people are harmed monetarily (and hence denied calories, other nutrients etc) and immiserated as groups. Another use is to show how these institutions (oligopolistic chain-stores and markets) facilitate (with non-market-specific, e.g. neo-colonial political/technological structures) the extraction of negative entropy from ‘oil producing states’. (I’m a pan-Africanist – many African states are oil-producing states – if an opportunity arises to reduce the pressure of your state’s boot on our necks, we pan-Africanists would like to know about it.) I guess I should point out that most of these models, including my conception of this challenge, is that the model be ‘semi-empirical’, i.e. that one mix in real world data-points (e.g. price of oil, etc). With such a model, one could create an account of e.g. historical and ongoing unequal entropy exchange, unequal land exchange etc. Such a model would tend to predict patterns (e.g. feedbacks), that one could describe empirically, but only rarely could one just guess at them.
20 July 2009, 5:01 pmShaukat:
“First, give your non-numerical explanation of the effect of demand fluctuations on price and institutional viability in an oligopolistic market. Second, try setting up a model of an oligopolistic market, to show the effects of demand fluctuation on institutional viability and price.”
Just to jump in here, such a model has been constructed. Paul Sweezy put forward the idea of a kinked demand curve, which explained the behavior of capitalist firms and consumers in an environment of oligopoly. The model demonstrated that a few firms dominating in any given industry would fix their prices at a certain level in order to cover costs and maintain super profits. Such firms would be less likely to raise their prices in response to the moves of a rival, but much more likely to cut prices if such a move was initiated. In such a case, demand would be elastic if any firm attempted to raise prices, but very inelastic if any given firm decided to cut prices, since other firms would follow suit in order to protect their market shares. All of this depends on the ability of such firms to prevent the entry of any newcomers, due to the high organic composition of capital existing in each industry. This theory has proven to be obsolete, mainly by Brenner’s study on ‘The Economics of Global Turbulence.”
Although I have come late to this debate, I must say that I agree with Sean in that I don’t much see the relevance in constructing such a model given the context of the above discussion.
21 July 2009, 2:27 am(Boer) Tom:
To Shaukat:
I have not yet read those works by Sweezy and Brenner – thanks for the references – I’m very dubious of the (even short term) predictive power of ‘supply curves’ and ‘demand curves’ – in an economy (e.g. due the increasing scarcity of negative entropy) where average returns on investment drop, can we make any approximations as to how the MARR (minimum acceptable rate of return – a corporate policy on scales of profitability that is used to evaluate whether to perform a project) in the economy would change? If the MARR drops in many corporations, in which sectors would international investment in Africa increase, and in which would it decrease, and how would the ensuing bankruptcies (also involving corporate fraud) open up or close opportunities e.g. for say Cameroon to take the initiative and build final-stage refining so as to be able to sell their oil as a completely refined product, or use it locally, rather than selling it for cheap to France? I ask the question specifically about oil, because of the strategies that a number of African states have take regarding food: After the Zimbabwean state’s taking of white-owned farm-lands, several African states have been ‘importing’ white Zimbabwean and South African farmers to set up large-scale (industrial) farms, e.g Nigeria (in the more northern states, as there is not yet a Hausa-Anglo or Hausa-Afrikaner conflict, unlike the Hausa-Igbo conflict that prevents Igbos from setting up such farms – the Hausa are mainly pasturalists) and Congo-Kinshasa. If we do not get to a point where ‘our’ states have a measure of control over ‘our’ oil/negative entropy, there is a smaller window for us (Africans, in the continental sense) to transition to a less intensive food-production model; there are military-commercial barriers to us taking that control – if we can have a short-term but serious model (I don’t think anyone here is interested – I’m only justifying the project – I and others intend to work on it) as to how the various corporate structures are operating, it can serve as guide to selecting opportune times for and estimating difficulties of various initiatives.
To bring it full circle and back to the discussion above, where do you think your sense of cornucopia comes from? Money? Sure, but right now, the only cornucopia in Zimbabwe is money – people don’t see a cornucopia of food and/or negative entropy. In Congo-Kinshasa right now, there is not even a cornucopia of money – according to Mike Davis (planet of slums), post-Mobutu military looting so devastated the economy that people stopped using money at all – businesses barter for commodities and services – but they export (thank you, Canada, for your pro-Kagame genocidal terrorism that has cost 5 million lives in eastern Congo-Kinshasa, and for lying about events in Rwanda…) raw materials for advanced electronics (tantalum, used for tantalum capacitors – open up your computer or cell-phone and look for black rectangles on the printed circuit boards, with c? printed next to them (? being a number) and a plus printed on one side) without getting paid – royalist Tutsi thugs (there are two royalist Tutsi clans; most Tutsis belong to the same clans as Hutus, but the royalist clans of e.g. would-be successor king Paul Kagame (dictator of Rwanda), are exclusively Tutsi) amongst others set up illegal mines across the border in Congo-Kinshasa, and use slave labor to extract the ore (Coltan), and dump the (alpha-emitter containing) mining waste in rivers. Here’s a question: How much farmable land surface is rendered useless each year in Congo-Kinshasa by your exchange (buying) of advanced electronics? And how does that knowledge help you in stopping that reality (of farm irradiation and heavy-metal pollution, not your specific contribution)? I find the whole reaction to my suggestion very reactionary.
To bring it to Marx – sure, we can describe unequal exchange, but the purpose of philosophy is to change it (the reality of unequal exchange). Having a model which captures (most of) the relevant corporate dynamics is useful for picking times for initiatives. (Some initiatives must start right away, and do not depend on the internal status of corporations.)
21 July 2009, 11:28 amSean:
Tom,
The analysis is SO much simpler than you are making it. SO much simpler. I am not engaging you on your terms because your assumptions include the assumption that the present “complexity” of American Capitalism is something that requires only tinkering around the edges to make it more humane. I’m saying that such tinkering is technocratic bungling and basically, a distraction from what needs to be analyzed and discussed.
Read my earlier posts in this thread, and you’ll see where I’m coming from.
The technical details you’d like to focus on… they remind me of people who are “sports fans,” who argue statistics regarding “their team” and why “their team” will beat Team XYZ in the upcoming game.
The only proof of who beats whom in a game is the game itself. Not a model of the game, not a statistical prediction of the game.
The game itself.
I suggest you return to analyzing the game itself, Tom!
21 July 2009, 1:40 pmHenry:
http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=14461
Towards a Global Currency?
Towards the integration of the Dollar and the Euro?
By Michel Chossudovsky
Global Research, July 20, 2009
21 July 2009, 2:00 pm(Boer) Tom:
To Sean:
I make no such assumption. Reread my post to you, and read my post to Shaukat. Winning a certain breathing space is quite different from only wishing to tinker. By understanding and challenging one aspect of a complex reality, one gains a confidence to challenge and understand other aspects of said reality. It is a little silly and abstract to fantasize about some main blow to destroy an empire when such an empire is much stronger than you are – it also suggests that you are a metropolitan citizen, suffering some liberal guilt – why don’t the empire’s victims shrug us off faster? I hope you realize that you and your family will suffer much more each time we reduce the pressure of your state’s boot on our necks – it is a question of negative entropy, of food etc. The oil question (in Africa more so to European empires and East Asia) is a fundamental vulnerability. By gaining that control, an African (or other subaltern) state weakens the imperial arrangements, and imperial states try to reduce the scale of the loss by offering better trading arrangements, and making the somewhat more developed subaltern state a policing force for the empire, e.g. Nixon-Mao, US-Nigeria, US-Ethiopia, US/Britain-Apartheid South Africa (post-Anglo-Boer war), US/ANC South Africa. Heck, post-Meiji restoration USA-Japan and post-WWII USA-Japan had such aspects. Perhaps that, rather than the reasons you supply, is a better reason not to involve you; however, as your state weakens, you will become its target more often, and you might need such a model, if at that point you still have an oligopolistic market situation. Finally, the model may sound complex (4 or 5 feedbacks complex?) but it is aimed at providing likely outcomes – we cannot predict with guaranteed accuracy – such a model would only be valid for a short time, after which it would have to be adjusted for new realities. It is no guarantee of victory, any more than a compass is a guarantee of successful navigation (much less victory); sure one could use moss on trees to navigate, but that gives less accuracy, much as a fluctuation in magnetic field would mess up compass navigation. Also, going back and rereading your posts, I don’t have to include every little detail – the actuaries you describe have some marginal effect – if I want to include the effects of insurance, it is quite simple to take the current price and let it vary randomly, e.g. white noise source, if the price is relatively consistent, or 1/f noise source (‘fractal-like process’) if the variation is correlated with its past, and do repeated runs (Monte-Carlo methods)…
To give you an idea of the scope of the empire, consider that many if not most west-African universities have excellent curricula (prior to Abacha, many Brits would go to Nigeria to study) – even as power-supply is intermittent, and in e.g. Nigeria, the arisal (perhaps of imperial designs, perhaps due to local collapse and the psychological damage of the Abacha years) of student unions that during strikes go and destroy computers and other equipment – engineering students will design great structures or other projects in great detail, without computers, often under candle-light (electricity problems), but will assuredly never build them: Western mining and other companies don’t usually higher local engineering students to do design (real world problems are generally abstracted away in the university education, and one needs someone with field experience to meaningfully teach about such problems) – they do physically taxing field-work, and western states are not hesitant about bumping people off (e.g. by fomenting a coup) who try to change the reality. Take all these realities, and you mean to tell me that we should simply use non-mathematical conceptual descriptions to guide our actions? Rules of thumb often fail. At the same time, capacity building is always ready to start – composting-as- sanitation, urban (shanty-town) agriculture etc. don’t need any new model, just willing volunteers among its beneficiaries.
22 July 2009, 12:10 pmJames M:
“Daniel Suelo … joined the Peace Corps and was posted to an Ecuadoran village high in the Andes. He was charged with monitoring the health of tribespeople in the area, teaching first aid and nutrition, and handing out medicine where needed; his proudest achievement was delivering three babies. The tribe had been getting richer for a decade, and during the two years he was there he watched as the villagers began to adopt the economics of modernity. They sold the food from their fields—quinoa, potatoes, corn, lentils—for cash, which they used to purchase things they didn’t need, as Suelo describes it. They bought soda and white flour and refined sugar and noodles and big bags of MSG to flavor the starchy meals. They bought TVs. The more they spent, says Suelo, the more their health declined. He could measure the deterioration on his charts. ‘It looked,” he says, “like money was impoverishing them.’”
FULL ARTICLE
22 July 2009, 3:08 pmKevin:
Stan, in answer to your challenge to “try living without money,” check this out:
http://sites.google.com/site/livingwithoutmoney/
22 July 2009, 6:30 pmHenry:
http://solari.com/blog/?p=3532
Swine Flu: What I Believe
I believe one of the goals of the swine flu vaccine is depopulation. Perhaps it is the goal of a swine flu epidemic as well, whether bio-warfare or hype around a flu season.
————————–
http://solari.com/blog/?p=3385
Sir James Goldsmith on Corporate Agriculture
23 July 2009, 8:51 amSean:
Tom,
I’m not misunderstanding you. We agree on problems — what problems exist, I mean. Where we part company is that you take a detail-oriented approach and I say the details you want to analyze are naught but distractions, mainly because fixing the problems doesn’t arrive through technical analysis.
Think about this, Tom. Many, many “think tanks” exist in the USA and what they do is technical analysis of the type you suggest is needed. What has resulted from these “think tanks” doing all that analysis?
Nothing but a Super Bowl of Technocracy. Nothing but distractions.
Nothing but two Sports Fans arguing statistics, instead of waiting to see how the game is played out.
There’s a sort of gambler’s enticement to trying to predict things with technical analysis, I understand that. But I’m not that kind of gambler. I gamble only on what I can control, not what is outside my realm of influence. Outside my sphere, I look at cold hard facts, and I discern which ones are relevant.
I’m afraid to say that the focus you suggest is one on irrelevancies. By going further into details as a way to offer your reasons for arguing as you do, you seem to me only to be digging yourself into a deeper hole — deeper than you’re going to be able to climb out of, deeper than any of us wants to be. The only people I know who want to focus on problems as you are suggesting are policy wonks.
I’ve worked with and among policy wonks. And that’s where I got my analogy to Sports Fans arguing statistics.
Look, I enjoy argument-as-sport more than anyone I know. I relish the chance to debate things, especially things that seem pivotal to man’s current set of problems. So if there were some way to engage you on your terms, I’d do it because I enjoy the sport of argument. But I am afraid that your terms are irrelevant to me, and so there’s no enjoyment in arguing them.
The people who must be “convinced” are not the technocrats or policy wonks. So I don’t understand why you argue so strenuously for a technocratic approach. I can only surmise that you misunderstand how power is wielded in American society.
23 July 2009, 2:08 pm(Boer) Tom:
To Sean:
24 July 2009, 9:35 amI find your position nebulous: Each time I think I understand it, I find something in your writing that contradicts my understanding. Are you ascribing to me a position that your corporations would be involved, for example, in the building of the necessary infrastructure? Also, the notion that ‘think-tanks,’ especially staffed by people from the very corporations that are undermining us, and working for a state that is undermining us, would be trying to find some means to help us is silly – their national and class interests would make such a project a treachery to said national (imperial) and class interests; I could as well ask the IMF for advice on national financial independence. Likewise, I could give a detailed ‘technical analysis’ of why one should change one’s brake fluid every 100,000km had I the relevant background (assuming the ownership of a car which would be valid in the medium term for many North Americans).
m.c.:
So we have a very good example of how an incident with a famous Harvard Prof. + one question by a Chicago Sun-Times reporter to the President at a press conference about health care has sucked all the oxygen out of What Should be the Most Important Domestic Policy Issue of the last 50 years. Instead, we get a circus. WOW! Keep Your Eyes on the Ball.
24 July 2009, 1:07 pmSean:
Tom,
The most recent post makes sense to me. The prior ones, especially the one where you wanted me to create a model about certain things that hadn’t been described — that’s where you lost me in a fog of meaningless details that seem to be about distraction.
As a former corporate lawyer I know well the utility of distraction. In acquisitions, if there’s ugliness about the company to be acquired, it’s best to distract the buyer from those ugly details else the acquisition may be scotched. One way to distract is to focus on minutiae that don’t indicate ugliness, and to dwell on the minutiae as if they are the pivotal points of the transaction.
Karl Rove was a master of this technique, which he used in combination with the method of accusing your adversary or detractor of the bad thing you are about to do yourself. More distraction, with the eventual result of dilution — when the bad thing you do eventually arises, the observing public already is acclimated to it — and imagines it was already done first by your adversary or detractor, which lessens the effect of you doing it.
These types of minutiae-oriented distractions… they seem to me the full raison d’etre of economics.
24 July 2009, 9:02 pmrootlesscosmo:
Been away a while but when could I resist a thread (or sub-thread) on sectarianism?
Looking back, he explained, on the movements that called themselves “marxist,” there was a small group of people who described some deep social problems, but they got wrapped up in ideological purity (the scratch to gangrene phobia). As a marginalized voice in consumer society, these small numbers of people organized (around principles and rules), then went recruiting (implicitly and idealistically believing that revolutions can be “made”… my editorial). They were recruiting from a very finite pool of potential members. In that painfully nuanced world of grouplets, they couldn’t sell their program over and against the other groups by emphasizing their common ideas and goals. No, in a competitive marketplace, brands emphasize their differences.
I think this is a good account of how and why sectarian groups compete for (a dwindling pool of) recruits. There’s still the question of how ideas become doctrines that sects spend their time trying to refurbish. NLK observed (way upthread) that “The history of the 20th century world shows [some important assumptions made by Marx] to have been profoundly wrong.” Yet (for a whole raft of reasons, too numerous and complicated even to summarize here) Marx-ISM became a doctrine. And doctrines, unlike methodologies, are by definition never wrong (though from time to time they need to be “enriched” or “adapted” and similar waffle-language.) One result is that once having given allegiance to a doctrine, the believer needs increasingly to ignore or deny or misrepresent evidence lest the solidity of the doctrine suffer irreparable damage. And this isn’t just the negligible doings of the sectarian “Left” in the US, with its rigid adherence to one or another version of the true faith; something of this kind happened in the Soviet economy, where parallel structures had to be created “under the table” so enterprises could conduct business without openly declaring that the plan targets and plan prices and plan input-output charts were purely fictitious.
24 July 2009, 10:21 pm(Boer) Tom:
Another comment about feedbacks: One can show mathematically, that if one responds to new information at all, but more slowly than the delay that is inherent in the information coming to one from the point where one acted to give rise to the reality captured in the new information, one tends to reduce the instability in most processes, if one acts to work against the trend in the new information. That is the conceptual core of feedback theory. Where economics gets silly is when some dependent vs independent variable graph is supposed to represent the effect of a feedback in any generality at all. In Rootlesscosmo’s comment, those input-output charts are an excellent example: Had they used more short-term, scale-appropriate monitoring/feedback with a more problem-solving mentality, they’d have been able to control production in a manner that would be more functional, and that could give some reality to said graphs. Feedback is linear theory’s answer to unpredictability. Of course, other pathologies of the Soviet economy is that technologies that were discovered in the course of military research were rarely incorporated into the civilian economy – plumbers had a hard time because they had to have very clean, matched threads, as they didn’t have teflon tape to prevent water to escape around pipe threads, while the military research had resulted in the relevant knowledge long before the collapse, for example. Had they taken the necessary data for scale-relevant feedback, the society would have been much more pleasant, but my suspicion is that party loyalty with its silly emphasis on irrelevant and dubious knowledge, e.g. the attendees/members and agenda of this or that plenum of the communist party in this and this year, rather than a practical application of known and understood science to civilian problems, inhibited such a development. The capitalist economies had the advantage of not having the economists running the fundamental sectors of the economy, what with their silly graphs, but rather used (intrusively) observing managers, who would give rather stern (and in its own right, often dysfunctional and socially unfair) feedback – problematic feedback is often better than no feedback (although self-directed economic activity allows self-discipline to develop, so that one becomes in part one’s own feedback network). To bring it back to differential equations, if you are above target, slow down, and if you are below target, speed up – speed of production being a derivative term. How the speed is determined with respect to the difference between target and reality, is another question, typically of design – telling a worker to work faster or getting more workers to do a particular job when the bottleneck/problem lies elsewhere might reduce the scope of the problem, but cause other problems due to misallocation and dysfunctions of speed.
I should add that in nature, the feedbacks are aimed not so much at some target, as much as arising from the interactions of populations: As a predator over-consumes its prey, its own population must diminish – a steady state may or may not arise (i.e. gross variations may occur over time in the respective populations). Likewise, when a nutrient (exergy) is available in over-abundance, those life-forms best adapted to consume it, do, using up other resources that they share with other species (hence reducing the latter’s population over time, and possibly to extinction) and undergo a growth that is initially roughly exponential, and a chain reaction results, as life-forms that depend on the excretions of the first are also presented with over-abundances of select (and usually scarce) nutrients. Of course, as other nutrients are used up due to the limiting nutrients becoming more available, the initially favoured species start to face other lacks of nutrients, and their populations must also (partially) collapse. Hence the degradation of nature when a limiting nutrient suddenly becomes available in a scale that proves too large for the (local) ecosystem. I’m currently setting up such a set of differential equations, and hope to set up a blog with an explanation so that people can set up the spreadsheet themselves, as well as a sample spreadsheet, to solve the differential equations stepwise through time. (The heck with work.)
On the question of linear theory, specifically linear differential equations, consider a function that grows in proportion (i.e. linearly in the short time limit) to its own size: That is the calculus definition of the exponential function – linear differential equations usually give rise to non-linear behavior. Example: The economy grew (or declined) by 5%.
On the question of cornucopia and money (and in response to Shaukat’s unanswered challenge to me): Allow for a moment (put aside any ideological objections, intuitions to the contrary and specific counter-examples – the last may prove broadly irrelevant) that markets (both oligopolistic and competitive) are distribution/allocation mechanisms, which broadly (with time) tend to decrease prices (e.g. in proportion to pay) as supplies (nutrients, commodities or any other relevant view) become scarce with respect to evident demand. In an impoverished society, one might typically have no sense of cornucopia, and understand the matter quite well when a rich society comes in to steal resources openly (or if one has a sense of the scope of what is in the extraction ledgers) , or have a sense of cornucopia if neither apply, and one has family abroad in a rich country, in which case the rulers of the poort country are understood to be to blame. In a rich country, with food and other commodities on the shelves of the stores, there is an immediate cornucopia! Broad tendencies, such as the condition of the fisheries, don’t show up until they do (in the form of empty shelves, in which case the cornucopia is exposed, or in the form of higher prices, in which case occasionally valid charges of price-gouging and exploitation are made). Rulers have long encouraged trade to cement their status as providers (e.g. Darius – or was it one of the other early Persian rulers?, Genghis Khan – he reduced taxes on traders!), but flows of exergy determine the wealth or poverty of a society – unequal trade in existing and/or used exergy (e.g. refined goods) is necessary, and that requires violence to sustain – people eventually figure out that they’re being had. If the ruler stops supplying, the ruler has gone bad, and a new one is necessary – the rulers prove their worth by supplying, which they do by extracting from other societies. The genius of the North American ideological system is that ‘the market’ ex nihilo rather than the traders/extractors in cooperation with the state achieve that – they increase supply (to those who have the necessary quantity of money). What the (neo)classical economists don’t want to acknowledge is that 1. exergy is strongly limited, and 2. that the local cornucopia is dependent on unequal exchange of exergy (and that which arises from its destruction) – poor societies cannot develop over time on a scale that rich societies do, precisely because the limiting nutrient is exergy-dependent (and slave-labor dependent in relevant stages of development, e.g. western vs eastern Europe, North-America vs west Africa, South Africa vs Malaysia and Indonesia in the colonial era, India vs east-African (Bantu) slaves (supplied by Arab and Ethiopian slave traders) prior to colonial rule as well as the caste system, etc).
To Sean: I guess I haven’t been too clear here of what I have in mind either: I’m thinking along the lines of keeping above corporations out of our oil – trapping or hunting them, or trimming them down, which ever metaphor you prefer. To do so effectively, I need to understand to some extent their internal workings, and estimate their internal state, which has some impact on how much trouble they can give while trimming/hunting them. Early humans hunted Mammoths, right?
25 July 2009, 2:23 pm(Boer) Tom:
Oops: Please correct the above: prices increase as supplies drop with respect to demand, not decrease!
25 July 2009, 5:08 pmStan:
DeLanda, in A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History, reassigned the term “market” to self-organizing activity, and noted that what we now call “market forces” are, inn fact, mostly “anti-market forces,” impositions based on social power that divide and conquer (disembed) markets (self-organized trading activity). And as Polanyi et al suggest, these activities were not strictly trade/econoimics, but were woven into the “embedded” fabric of shared history, kinship, and other cultural phenomena.
I’d also point out that nature provides us with many examples of cooperation and symbiosis and creative non-antagonal niche-maximization, not just head-to-head competition (our own bias growing out of our cultural-historical — and cosmological — interpretation of Darwinism, “red in tooth and claw”).
“Anti-market” may be a useful term for meme-skirmishing, dressed up as it is in seemingly familiar garb, yet embodying something far more subversive. Monopolies, agribusiness, and interstate highways are all anti-market institutions. So is the state!
26 July 2009, 6:52 am(Boer) Tom:
To Stan:
26 July 2009, 4:30 pmRegarding non-antagonal niche-maximization: I don’t think it substantially alters the reasoning regarding excessive dumping of nutrients. Beyond some point, a lack of some shared nutrient can push symbiotic relationships into antagonistic modes. Also, when some niches are widened, the species occupying those niches, those dependent on them, and those in symbiotic relationship with them, benefit, at some expense to some of the rest of the ecosystem – some parts are in partial conflict with others e.g. on the basis of shared nutrients – and the ecosystem may still simplify as they overconsume more limited nutrients in proportion to the suddenly abundant nutrient, by letting some species become dominant. As for the ideological content, every species is part parasite/predator (even on sunlight, e.g.), and provides for other species, even if only at death. There are very few species that don’t share nutrient sources with others, if any.
Stan:
I would agree that creativity can cut both ways. My point is, I suppose, that perspective matters. Pedator-prey relations (et al) exist alongside symbiosis (et al), and in conjunction with each other. All the time. My preoccupation with symbiosis and niche maximization is more political and tactical than it is scientific curiosity (though it is interesting from that perspective). Martinez-Alier iirc showed how these dominant metaphors (machine, system, etc) become hugely significant in the formation of our cultural practices. We need less energy-sink confrontation and more squatting.
27 July 2009, 10:38 amHenry:
http://www.theoildrum.com/node/5615#more
How Much Natural Gas Do We Have to Replace Gasoline?
30 July 2009, 10:49 pmPosted by Robert Rapier on July 30, 2009
Henry:
Good post here:
Scott McGuire [Scott McGuire is an organic farming and permaculture master based in Ashland, Oregon]
For most of my grown life I’ve been a plant person; farmer, gardener, tree-planter, landscaper… and for quite a while now have been beating the sustainable-living drum as a “food-supply activist”. For the past few years, in addition to growing a backyard demonstration garden (www.greentownaction.tv/sustainable-garden), I’ve been teaching classes on plant-craft, as well as going to meetings and organizing activities like the Neighborhood Garden Project, matching folks wanting to expand their gardens with others without any space for one. The Transition Towns movement is well underway in our small Oregon town, which is quickly becoming a haven for retirees and other equity immigrants from California.
But I’m burnt out on all the blah-blah. Sometime last spring I stopped going to these kinds of meetings due to the lack of focus and distracting blather that never seems to get grounded in any compounding action (oh, and it was also time to sow seeds, so seeya). One symptom of denial around the immensity of the changes required/pending, is the invisible goo that fills a room causing everyone to think and move as if they were underwater, or in a dream where you can’t run away fast enough or find where you left your backpack… It’s absolutely surreal, the effective slow-motionizing of cognitive dissonance.
The rest of this post is here:
http://mikeruppert.blogspot.com/
30 July 2009, 10:55 pmMichael Anderson:
From Joe Baegent:
http://www.alternet.org/module/printversion/141668
Some good observations (as usual, in his gonzo tone) on money, consciousness, and a bit on Henry’s post, here. Gotta be in this world, like Stan sez, and TAKE action—-doesn’t have to be the equivalent of moving the Earth’s axis, but DO it…
4 August 2009, 11:22 pmm.c.:
A little more on Health Care. When Pres. Johnson got Congress to Pass Medicare & Medicaid in 1965, very few Republican members of Congress voted for it. Bob Dole, Don Rumsfeld and other prominent pols voted against it. Gov. Reagan was opposed to it though he couldn’t vote. Obama needs to get a Public Option through even if No Repubs vote for it, even if they call it a Co-Op or something else. Later, the public will recognize the Bill for its positive results.
7 August 2009, 12:18 pm~50 House Dems hold seats whose districts were carried by John McCain in the ’08 election. There are the members who need to be on board.
m.c.:
I think Gerald Ford also voted against the 1965 Social Security Act. Reagan was not yet Governor in 1965 but I believe he campaigned against it.
7 August 2009, 12:46 pmS.L.:
Here is something that I think is a nice candidate for the quotes box.
“Money is a sign of poverty.”
-Iain M. Banks, 1987
Interestingly this is a quote I found on a lecture about the “RepRap”
fabrication technology. More about it here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TZfcETkbGWk&feature=related
Technology with some interesting social, economic, and ecological
18 September 2009, 5:35 pmconsequences. The tie in with breeding, symbiosis, and making manufacturing like
agriculture is food for thought.