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ill-conceived question

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Prof David West

Re: ill-conceived question

Steve,

birth and control - remove the men from the breeding ground (home) to reduce the number of pregnancies. Father Smith presented the statistical and historical data for this argument.

A near cultural universal is the inverse relation of sex and violence. You want fierce warriors, deny them sex. Rape is just an extension of the violence - no sexual or procreative element.

Sex was used as a reward for soldiers, but not via raping the vanquished. Most have heard of the Japanese "comfort battalions"in WWII, but few are aware of how common that practice was with most armies throughout history.

General Hooker, US Civil War, was famous for his comfort battalion — "Hooker's Legions" — and that is the origin of the common term for a prostitute.

davew

On Sat, May 2, 2020, at 8:00 PM, Steven A Smith wrote:

Dave -
I once taught an honors course, with Father Smith at St. Thomas on the Anthropology and Theology of War. One of the prime forces behind war — since prehistory — had been nothing more than birth control.
Do you meant literally *birth* and *control*, or rather *population* and *reduction*?
The more literal usage works well too. Controlling Births. I think much warfare culminates (or did before modernish times) in the victors killing the men and raping/impregnating and enslaving the women either in-place, inhabiting the conquered lands or taking them back to their homeland. Children alternatively would have been killed or enslaved. Thus the genetic heritage of Genghis Khan...
One step more sophisticated than the rats?
I don't think we have to go there, no matter how much the gun hoarders want their chance at being unequivocally "on top" at least for one round of the grande iterated prisoner's dilemma that is human civilization.
- Steve
Well, in a sense that’s correct. But their method of “birth control” is not one that I am prepared to take as a model. Just imagine the worst sort of dystopian post apocalyptic novel. See the description of the Calhoun experiment on p 224.

Nick

Nicholas Thompson
Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology
Clark University
[hidden email]
https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/

From: Friam [hidden email] On Behalf Of Marcus Daniels
Sent: Saturday, May 2, 2020 12:15 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group [hidden email]
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] ill-conceived question

< You recall that I invoked as a model that experiment in which 24 rats were put in a quarter acre enclosure in Baltimore and fed and watered and protected to see how the population would develop. They never got above two hundred. >

Maybe the rats were right?

Marcus
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Prof David West

Re: ill-conceived question

In reply to this post by Gary Schiltz-4

Major investors lose little — certainly as a percentage of wealth — because they have the super-high speed systems and insider status to ameliorate their loses. As always, it is the smaller investor that cannot trade in milliseconds, but in minutes and hours, that loses the most.

davew

On Sat, May 2, 2020, at 4:12 PM, Gary Schiltz wrote:

Would the rich, with proportionally more in the stock market, be disadvantaged by drops in stock prices? I suppose, on the other hand, they would tend to have enough cash or equivalent to to take advantage of the price drops to buy stocks at reduced prices.

On Sat, May 2, 2020 at 5:02 PM <[hidden email]> wrote:
Hi, Dave,

Given that the super rich have the resiliency to respond to any crisis, I have a hard time imagining anything that would disadvantage them EXCEPT taxing the living daylights out of them. We did pretty well on 90% marginal tax rates.

I agree about the White Quarantine.

Nick

Nicholas Thompson
Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology
Clark University
[hidden email]
https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/

From: Friam <[hidden email]> On Behalf Of Prof David West
Sent: Saturday, May 2, 2020 3:02 PM
To: [hidden email]
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] ill-conceived question

I once taught an honors course, with Father Smith at St. Thomas on the Anthropology and Theology of War. One of the prime forces behind war — since prehistory — had been nothing more than birth control.

davew

On Sat, May 2, 2020, at 12:37 PM, [hidden email] wrote:
Well, in a sense that’s correct. But their method of “birth control” is not one that I am prepared to take as a model. Just imagine the worst sort of dystopian post apocalyptic novel. See the description of the Calhoun experiment on p 224.

Nick

Nicholas Thompson
Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology
Clark University
[hidden email]
https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/

From: Friam <[hidden email]> On Behalf Of Marcus Daniels
Sent: Saturday, May 2, 2020 12:15 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] ill-conceived question

< You recall that I invoked as a model that experiment in which 24 rats were put in a quarter acre enclosure in Baltimore and fed and watered and protected to see how the population would develop. They never got above two hundred. >

Maybe the rats were right?

Marcus
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Prof David West

Re: ill-conceived question

In reply to this post by Steve Smith

Genghis spread his genes via wives and concubines, not rapine. He also installed daughters and wives as regional governors instead of sons. Interesting historical figure.

davew

On Sat, May 2, 2020, at 8:00 PM, Steven A Smith wrote:

Dave -
I once taught an honors course, with Father Smith at St. Thomas on the Anthropology and Theology of War. One of the prime forces behind war — since prehistory — had been nothing more than birth control.
Do you meant literally *birth* and *control*, or rather *population* and *reduction*?
The more literal usage works well too. Controlling Births. I think much warfare culminates (or did before modernish times) in the victors killing the men and raping/impregnating and enslaving the women either in-place, inhabiting the conquered lands or taking them back to their homeland. Children alternatively would have been killed or enslaved. Thus the genetic heritage of Genghis Khan...
One step more sophisticated than the rats?
I don't think we have to go there, no matter how much the gun hoarders want their chance at being unequivocally "on top" at least for one round of the grande iterated prisoner's dilemma that is human civilization.
- Steve
Well, in a sense that’s correct. But their method of “birth control” is not one that I am prepared to take as a model. Just imagine the worst sort of dystopian post apocalyptic novel. See the description of the Calhoun experiment on p 224.

Nick

Nicholas Thompson
Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology
Clark University
[hidden email]
https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/

From: Friam [hidden email] On Behalf Of Marcus Daniels
Sent: Saturday, May 2, 2020 12:15 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group [hidden email]
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] ill-conceived question

< You recall that I invoked as a model that experiment in which 24 rats were put in a quarter acre enclosure in Baltimore and fed and watered and protected to see how the population would develop. They never got above two hundred. >

Maybe the rats were right?

Marcus
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unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
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Steve Smith

Re: ill-conceived question

In reply to this post by thompnickson2

Nick -

I contemplate this question regularly. "What means 'the economy' ?" The way it is bandied about in the public media and among most circles I listen to, it is this big hairball of exchange of goods and services facilitated by "money", both in the form of currency and credit. Yet it is treated as if it is our psychic (spiritual?) as well as physical lifeblood.

This abrupt interruption of *much* of that activity potentially exposes a LOT about how much of a "false economy" we live within.

Among the things that humans really need/want/value, I suspect the "economy" we have grown creates goods and services that are not of any particular use/interest/value to most (if any) of the human population. Hard-line "invisible hand of the market"-eers will insist that if it exists in our economy, that it *must* be of interest/value/use to *many* (or at least some). Invoking the idiom of "follow the money", I agree that we *can* follow a chain of implied value that leads from the most marginal or absurd to the common and mundane.

I defer to Abraham Maslow: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maslow%27s_hierarchy_of_needs for an armature/prioritization of what human needs might *really* be.

During this shutdown, I suspect *many* are discovering (getting hints of) what truly is important to them and if they are being self-observant, what their greatest fears (and hopes?) might be. The trope "Guns, Germs, and Toilet Paper" erupted soon after the shutdown and the abrupt/extreme shortage of disinfectants, personal paper products, and ammunition/guns.

Returning to the core point: For anyone without the currency/credit to trade for the goods/services they DO need, this shutdown is already a huge problem. For those (like most if not all on this list) *with* a decent reserve of currency/credit OR the kind of job or enterprise which has it's own inertia or true value in this context (e.g. Inertial: random professionals; True Value: Health Care Workers, Critical Retail Workers, Internet Engineers...) there is not an immediate problem with cash-flow, and may in fact never be a problem.

Mangling Maslow: we all need air to breathe, (fairly clean) water to drink, enough shelter from the elements to keep avoid hyper (or hypo) thermia, and enough nutrients (and calories) to keep the metabolism and growth/repair going.

It seems that (so far) the basic infrastructure (power, water, natural gas, coal, transportation, communications) is all staying solid... that they are either robust enough to not be hurt by the disruptions or those who maintain them have the motivation to keep them going in spite of the challenges to doing so (much of the maintenance repair of such infrastructure is inherently socially distanced?). We may whine/worry about our interwebs but even those seem to be holding up. The power grid is probably mildly stressed by shifting most of the use from commercial to residential, and possibly is diminished (office buildings under-heated/lit)?

I hear that the food depots around the country (first world?) are in a multiple of demand of their normal level. I don't know if the newly impoverished are taking precedence over the previous or if they are just joining their ranks, or if these services are coming close to matching the demand. I don't know if people are going hungry(ier) than they were before... perhaps the flexibility built into our social fabric (nuclear and extended families, friends, neighbors, social services) has absorbed most of the shock. Perhaps the congressional (in the US) stimulus funding is trickling through to enough of the people to take the ragged edge off for a week or a month. Perhaps the PPP loans are allowing *some* of the small (and not so small) businesses to keep people on payroll. Perhaps *some* of the unemployment funds in reserve are getting to those who have formally lost their jobs (temporary or long term).

Meanwhile there is produce in the fields, milk in the cow (and storage), and meat on the hoof that is not being processed and shipped to the restaurants that are closed or not being processed because the people who do that work are out sick, or afraid of coming to work where they likely will get sick (lack of PPE, social distance, trust in co-worker's health), or afraid of coming to work because they are NOT properly documented through our foreign worker/immigration system or coming to work sick (and therefore risking other's exposure) *because* they are outside the legal system. This is a breakdown of our *heavily industrialized* food supply system, which probably hasn't hit our transportation/distribution systems (yet). Wholesale warehouse workers and OTR drivers are probably *fairly* able to avoid exposure/infection in their normal work.

It seems (deferring again to Maslow) that if we have the (collective) *will* to keep our food-production/distribution systems going, the basic infrastructure going, the MAIN (only?) thing we *really* have to worry about is keeping our *attitudes* and *priorities* under control. We *might* even be able to put those previously without shelter in shelter (unused motels, second homes, recreational vehicles?) and those without enough food with healthy food (the underfed in our country was a tiny percentage and not from lack of food, but from lack of will to get it to those who need it), and the heat/coolth, and the clean (mostly) water that comes along with the shelter.

Maybe I'm a "pinko/commie/flag" for suggesting it, but this economic upset/reset is the perfect opportunity to renormalize what kind of people/circumstances/behaviour we believe should not be allowed (or deserve?) access to those bottom few levels of Maslow. It can be (has been?) argued that these people need to be incentivized to *participate* in our model of productive society (economy) and that sacrificing their (mental and physical) health and even their lives to the "greater good" of a (manic?) consumerist-capitalist economy is just "collateral damage" (for those old enough to remember the Vietnam War, this term is probably a trigger).

I'm not trying to suggest that I know how to "get there from here" or even what *there* would *really* look like, but I think this global shut/slow-down has circumstantially moved us a LOT closer to an "economy" that includes making sure that *everyone* has reasonable access to the basics of Maslow's "physiological needs".

My pessimistic homunculus (nod to Glen's term) thinks this doesn't have a chance of happening and that in fact, just the opposite will happen. A larger portion of our population will (already has?) abruptly become financially unable to participate in obtaining their physiological needs "the usual way" (day-job, savings, credit, clever entrepreneurship), and those who *are* able to meet their needs "the usual way" will conspire to allow (encourage?) that.

My optimistic homunculus wants to believe otherwise. It wants to believe that *many* of us will recognize that "but by the grace of Gawdess" we could have fallen through the cracks of this pandemic and through a sense of responsibility (or even shame or guilt - Gawdelpus Forbid!) and maybe we can make sure nobody has to fall through those cracks (tactical challenges abound, but strategically I think this is trivial, even obvious?).

This demonstrates MY profound lack of understanding of how economies work. It is quite possible that pinning down the idea that *everyone* can/should/might do their very *best* to make sure *everyone else* has their Maslow->Physiological/Safety needs met and letting the rest find it's own level might not be possible. it certainly doesn't make sense to *many*, especially those who have locked down their own access to the full hierarchy (many times over?) and think they need (yet much) more.

Right now the biggest threat within the agri-industrial complex seems to be the meat supply. Pork, Beef, and Chicken. Eggs and Dairy may go along with that. Remember a few months ago I think we were listening to roughly *half* the population screaming bloody murder that GreenDealers like AOC might be planning to take away their bacon and mcNuggets and Steaks. It seems like maybe the very fragility of the system that provides the bulk of those products is going to take that away from them, whether POTUS45 throws down his War Powers trump-card on the factory-farms or not.

ramble,

- Steve

PS. Just saw that in Belgium, the public is asked to double their french (freedom?) fry consumption to keep umpty-jillion metric tonnes of potatoes from going to waste. Hmmmmm? "Let them eat Fries!"

Colleagues,

I have asked this question before and nobody has responded (for clear and good reasons, no doubt) but I thought I would ask it again. What exactly is this economy we are bent on reviving? What exactly is the difference in human activity between our present state and a revived economy. We can go to bars and concerts and football games? Is that the economy we are reviving? It seems to me that the difference between a “healty” economy and our present status consists possibly in nothing more than a lot of people frantically rushing about doing things they don’t really need to do?

You recall that I invoked as a model that experiment in which 24 rats were put in a quarter acre enclosure in Baltimore and fed and watered and protected to see how the population would develop. They never got above two hundred. Infant mortality, etc., was appalling. Carnage. In the same space, a competent lab breeding organization could have kept a population of tens of thousands.

Don’t yell at me. What fundamental proposition about economics do I not understand?

Nick

Nicholas Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology

Clark University

[hidden email]

https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/
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Steve Smith

Re: ill-conceived question

In reply to this post by Prof David West

On 5/2/20 8:36 PM, Prof David West wrote:

Major investors lose little — certainly as a percentage of wealth — because they have the super-high speed systems and insider status to ameliorate their loses. As always, it is the smaller investor that cannot trade in milliseconds, but in minutes and hours, that loses the most.

"ameliorate" hell... those who operate at those levels profit even better from big drops... they can leverage *any* and *all* volatility, especially that which is counter-intuitive to the average investor. Sure they may get up an hour or two earlier and stay up an hour or two later to parlay around the globe (Hong Kong, Tokyo, London, etc.) but they are rewarded *handsomely* for that extra vigilance.

davew

On Sat, May 2, 2020, at 4:12 PM, Gary Schiltz wrote:

Would the rich, with proportionally more in the stock market, be disadvantaged by drops in stock prices? I suppose, on the other hand, they would tend to have enough cash or equivalent to to take advantage of the price drops to buy stocks at reduced prices.

On Sat, May 2, 2020 at 5:02 PM <[hidden email]> wrote:

Hi, Dave,

Given that the super rich have the resiliency to respond to any crisis, I have a hard time imagining anything that would disadvantage them EXCEPT taxing the living daylights out of them. We did pretty well on 90% marginal tax rates.

I agree about the White Quarantine.

Nick

Nicholas Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology

Clark University

[hidden email]

https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/

From: Friam <[hidden email]> On Behalf Of Prof David West

Sent: Saturday, May 2, 2020 3:02 PM

To: [hidden email]

Subject: Re: [FRIAM] ill-conceived question

I once taught an honors course, with Father Smith at St. Thomas on the Anthropology and Theology of War. One of the prime forces behind war — since prehistory — had been nothing more than birth control.

davew

On Sat, May 2, 2020, at 12:37 PM, [hidden email] wrote:

Well, in a sense that’s correct. But their method of “birth control” is not one that I am prepared to take as a model. Just imagine the worst sort of dystopian post apocalyptic novel. See the description of the Calhoun experiment on p 224.

Nick

Nicholas Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology

Clark University

[hidden email]

https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/

From: Friam <[hidden email]> On Behalf Of Marcus Daniels

Sent: Saturday, May 2, 2020 12:15 PM

To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>

Subject: Re: [FRIAM] ill-conceived question

< You recall that I invoked as a model that experiment in which 24 rats were put in a quarter acre enclosure in Baltimore and fed and watered and protected to see how the population would develop. They never got above two hundred. >

Maybe the rats were right?

Marcus

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Steve Smith

Re: ill-conceived question

In reply to this post by Prof David West

On 5/2/20 8:39 PM, Prof David West wrote:

Genghis spread his genes via wives and concubines, not rapine. He also installed daughters and wives as regional governors instead of sons. Interesting historical figure.

So Genghis stayed back home and procreated while he sent the boys out into the field? And nobody got anyone pregnant while on the road? Or just Hooker's Legionaires?

Hmmm.... curious.

davew

On Sat, May 2, 2020, at 8:00 PM, Steven A Smith wrote:
Dave -

I once taught an honors course, with Father Smith at St. Thomas on the Anthropology and Theology of War. One of the prime forces behind war — since prehistory — had been nothing more than birth control.

Do you meant literally *birth* and *control*, or rather *population* and *reduction*?

The more literal usage works well too. Controlling Births. I think much warfare culminates (or did before modernish times) in the victors killing the men and raping/impregnating and enslaving the women either in-place, inhabiting the conquered lands or taking them back to their homeland. Children alternatively would have been killed or enslaved. Thus the genetic heritage of Genghis Khan...

One step more sophisticated than the rats?

I don't think we have to go there, no matter how much the gun hoarders want their chance at being unequivocally "on top" at least for one round of the grande iterated prisoner's dilemma that is human civilization.

- Steve
Well, in a sense that’s correct. But their method of “birth control” is not one that I am prepared to take as a model. Just imagine the worst sort of dystopian post apocalyptic novel. See the description of the Calhoun experiment on p 224.

Nick

Nicholas Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology

Clark University

[hidden email]

https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/

From: Friam [hidden email] On Behalf Of Marcus Daniels

Sent: Saturday, May 2, 2020 12:15 PM

To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group [hidden email]

Subject: Re: [FRIAM] ill-conceived question

< You recall that I invoked as a model that experiment in which 24 rats were put in a quarter acre enclosure in Baltimore and fed and watered and protected to see how the population would develop. They never got above two hundred. >

Maybe the rats were right?

Marcus

.-. .- -. -.. --- -- -..-. -.. --- - ... -..-. .- -. -.. -..-. -.. .- ... .... . ...

FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv

Zoom Fridays 9:30a-12p Mtn GMT-6 bit.ly/virtualfriam

unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com

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Marcus G. Daniels

Re: ill-conceived question

In reply to this post by Steve Smith

Steve writes:

< Hard-line "invisible hand of the market"-eers will insist that if it exists in our economy, that it *must* be of interest/value/use to *many* (or at least some). Invoking the idiom of "follow the money", I agree that we *can* follow a chain of implied value that leads from the most marginal or absurd to the common and mundane. >

I had a similar thought when I saw this video. One can’t simultaneously be sympathetic to this initiative and believe in the invisible hand of the market. I haven’t found good recent documentation, but I’ve heard that on the order of 30% of internet bandwidth has been used for pornography.

Marcus

thompnickson2

Re: ill-conceived question

In reply to this post by Steve Smith

David,

Basic fact of demography. Killing men is not a particularly effective means of population control.

You want war to serve in that capacity, you have to get women in the military.

Nick

Nicholas Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology

Clark University

[hidden email]

https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/

From: Friam <[hidden email]> On Behalf Of Steven A Smith
Sent: Saturday, May 2, 2020 8:00 PM
To: [hidden email]
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] ill-conceived question

Dave -

I once taught an honors course, with Father Smith at St. Thomas on the Anthropology and Theology of War. One of the prime forces behind war — since prehistory — had been nothing more than birth control.

Do you meant literally *birth* and *control*, or rather *population* and *reduction*?

The more literal usage works well too. Controlling Births. I think much warfare culminates (or did before modernish times) in the victors killing the men and raping/impregnating and enslaving the women either in-place, inhabiting the conquered lands or taking them back to their homeland. Children alternatively would have been killed or enslaved. Thus the genetic heritage of Genghis Khan...

One step more sophisticated than the rats?

I don't think we have to go there, no matter how much the gun hoarders want their chance at being unequivocally "on top" at least for one round of the grande iterated prisoner's dilemma that is human civilization.

- Steve

Well, in a sense that’s correct. But their method of “birth control” is not one that I am prepared to take as a model. Just imagine the worst sort of dystopian post apocalyptic novel. See the description of the Calhoun experiment on p 224.

Nick

Nicholas Thompson
Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology
Clark University
[hidden email]
https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/

From: Friam [hidden email] On Behalf Of Marcus Daniels
Sent: Saturday, May 2, 2020 12:15 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group [hidden email]
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] ill-conceived question

< You recall that I invoked as a model that experiment in which 24 rats were put in a quarter acre enclosure in Baltimore and fed and watered and protected to see how the population would develop. They never got above two hundred. >

Maybe the rats were right?

Marcus
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Sarbajit Roy (testing)

Re: ill-conceived question

In reply to this post by Frank Wimberly-2

Its a variation on Parkinson's Law (work expands to fill the time) ... "Economies expand to keep their populations sedated"

On Sat, May 2, 2020 at 10:17 PM Frank Wimberly <[hidden email]> wrote:

Nick,

I suspect that if people only did what they 'need to do' the economy would collapse.

On Sat, May 2, 2020 at 10:34 AM <[hidden email]> wrote:
Colleagues,

I have asked this question before and nobody has responded (for clear and good reasons, no doubt) but I thought I would ask it again. What exactly is this economy we are bent on reviving? What exactly is the difference in human activity between our present state and a revived economy. We can go to bars and concerts and football games? Is that the economy we are reviving? It seems to me that the difference between a “healty” economy and our present status consists possibly in nothing more than a lot of people frantically rushing about doing things they don’t really need to do?

You recall that I invoked as a model that experiment in which 24 rats were put in a quarter acre enclosure in Baltimore and fed and watered and protected to see how the population would develop. They never got above two hundred. Infant mortality, etc., was appalling. Carnage. In the same space, a competent lab breeding organization could have kept a population of tens of thousands.

Don’t yell at me. What fundamental proposition about economics do I not understand?

Nick

Nicholas Thompson
Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology
Clark University
[hidden email]
https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/

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--
Frank Wimberly
140 Calle Ojo Feliz
Santa Fe, NM 87505
505 670-9918
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David Eric Smith

Re: ill-conceived question

In reply to this post by thompnickson2

I can’t weave a grand diorama that has the meaning of everything in it, and anything I try will come out a mess. So let me try for Less is More.

I think part of this is habit and commitments. Somehow the society has to sort out a predictable way to arrive at who has a right to consume how much of what. A surprising amount of structure goes into that, and it has enormous inertia. Part of what we are trying to “restart” is a set of systems that happen to be doing an allocation that we don’t have other systems in place to do as an alternative.

Take food production. Fine, what people need to eat is relatively inelastic, and not wildly different from one human to another, compared to dollar-wealth. But over the past 80 years, nearly all food calories are produced by very few decision makers and enormous capital outlays, levered to the hilt with credit, on really bad (regular, fast, and inflexible) turnaround times. (This means Corn, Beans, lesser Wheat, to some extent commodity meats.). The story is a little more diversified for the nutritive value of food (fruits, vegetables, et al.), but different in structure where near-slave labor takes the place of capital and a different analysis is needed. For now I will just look at the simple one.

We can’t all suddenly move back to the farm and grow calorie crops. We don’t own land, we don’t have skills, and besides there is no easy angle to do that in a system that over-produces already. So the production is there. But if we don’t have a way to pay the “farmer” (really a grant/loan/lobby businessman more than an expert in soil health etc.), why should he give us anything to eat? You could say “Ah, he only needs enough to live, and he is only one man, so he could give the rest away because people need it.” But he isn’t only one man. He is a vastly debt-leveraged operation, with enormous capital replacement and maintenance costs, huge loans for fertilizer/seed/pesticide, and no way to pay that unless he turns over the crop within certain price ranges (or lobbies hard to get Dept of Ag to make up the difference; what happens is a lot of both). So he has no choices if we don’t have money, and we have no choices if we have no money. But then what should anyone pay any of us for if the US operates on 1000 farmers, but there are 378M mouths that want to be fed? Some system has to work that out.

During the near-century of technological increases in output optimization, the rhetoric was that with less labor used to produce consumables, people’s efforts would be liberated to do other good things. But to the extent that those things aren’t “necessary” in the Maslov sense like food is (following Steve S.), really all those other people are useless.

One could try UBI, or have some utopian fantasy about centrally managed communist economies, but apart from small-scale experiments on UBI within much larger conventionally-run countries, and Kibbutz-level communes, I don’t see evidence of mechanisms to put behind those visions. So we are left with an unsolved problem of distribution. Not least, just How do we coordinate it? But also how do we do so stably enough that the system is perceived as having some kind of legitimacy (close enough to “fair”, to being individually negotiated and thus allowing people to want different things, all the marginalist Econ stuff).

Take any other area. Gas-powered transportation. Well, maybe you don’t “need” it in the sense that you can conjure a world where you live and work close together and have support for walk/bike/pubtrans etc. But where you are now, you and almost everybody else in the US, has demographically committed to being unable to do much of anything without plugging into that whole “unnecessary” system. So some part of the economic inertia comes just from the thick web of these commitments that people have made, which leave them unable to withdraw from dependencies on lots of complicated services.

Easiest way to get 100,000V if you started with 100V? Coil some wire to make an inductor, plug it into the wall, and then cut the wire. Sudden shifts of anything have a dimension of problem just from the timescale, in addition to whatever may have been problems or virtues of the normal state of operation.

If one thinks that these kinds of “commitments” or “inertia” as one principle, and the mechanics problem of negotiating a widely-applicable and adequately stable set of permissions for access to a wage as the second, are two broad “primary” drivers of the restarting, then there is still a vast depth of smaller-grained design choices that have accumulated since the Industrial Age, in supply chains, transportation, management, law, etc. It’s a hard web to change fast without a lot of chaos that drowns a lot of people.

However bad it was during the last depression, city people still could go back to the farms, because there there was food, and they could somehow chip in in exchange for eating, to get around the coordination failure. Now, with all the permission massively centralized, no people in the interior, and everything going through bank credit, even that demographic shift no longer exists as an option.

There is a whole separate story about the fact that the predator and parasite class are still there, and they aren’t going to leave of their own accord, but I think that is more a story of motive and how the mechanics gets steered and evolves, whereas what I put above is just about what mechanics exists. I think the mechanics will dominate in the immediate-short term.

Very inadequate.

Eric

On May 3, 2020, at 1:33 AM, <[hidden email]> <[hidden email]> wrote:

Colleagues,

I have asked this question before and nobody has responded (for clear and good reasons, no doubt) but I thought I would ask it again. What exactly is this economy we are bent on reviving? What exactly is the difference in human activity between our present state and a revived economy. We can go to bars and concerts and football games? Is that the economy we are reviving? It seems to me that the difference between a “healty” economy and our present status consists possibly in nothing more than a lot of people frantically rushing about doing things they don’t really need to do?

You recall that I invoked as a model that experiment in which 24 rats were put in a quarter acre enclosure in Baltimore and fed and watered and protected to see how the population would develop. They never got above two hundred. Infant mortality, etc., was appalling. Carnage. In the same space, a competent lab breeding organization could have kept a population of tens of thousands.

Don’t yell at me. What fundamental proposition about economics do I not understand?

Nick

Nicholas Thompson
Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology
Clark University
[hidden email]
https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/

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Gary Schiltz-4

Re: ill-conceived question

Great rant/stream of consciousness as usual, Steve! Has anyone watched this five minute video yet? A bit utopian, but maybe not... https://vimeo.com/411278238

On Sun, May 3, 2020 at 7:23 AM David Eric Smith <[hidden email]> wrote:

I can’t weave a grand diorama that has the meaning of everything in it, and anything I try will come out a mess. So let me try for Less is More.

I think part of this is habit and commitments. Somehow the society has to sort out a predictable way to arrive at who has a right to consume how much of what. A surprising amount of structure goes into that, and it has enormous inertia. Part of what we are trying to “restart” is a set of systems that happen to be doing an allocation that we don’t have other systems in place to do as an alternative.

Take food production. Fine, what people need to eat is relatively inelastic, and not wildly different from one human to another, compared to dollar-wealth. But over the past 80 years, nearly all food calories are produced by very few decision makers and enormous capital outlays, levered to the hilt with credit, on really bad (regular, fast, and inflexible) turnaround times. (This means Corn, Beans, lesser Wheat, to some extent commodity meats.). The story is a little more diversified for the nutritive value of food (fruits, vegetables, et al.), but different in structure where near-slave labor takes the place of capital and a different analysis is needed. For now I will just look at the simple one.

We can’t all suddenly move back to the farm and grow calorie crops. We don’t own land, we don’t have skills, and besides there is no easy angle to do that in a system that over-produces already. So the production is there. But if we don’t have a way to pay the “farmer” (really a grant/loan/lobby businessman more than an expert in soil health etc.), why should he give us anything to eat? You could say “Ah, he only needs enough to live, and he is only one man, so he could give the rest away because people need it.” But he isn’t only one man. He is a vastly debt-leveraged operation, with enormous capital replacement and maintenance costs, huge loans for fertilizer/seed/pesticide, and no way to pay that unless he turns over the crop within certain price ranges (or lobbies hard to get Dept of Ag to make up the difference; what happens is a lot of both). So he has no choices if we don’t have money, and we have no choices if we have no money. But then what should anyone pay any of us for if the US operates on 1000 farmers, but there are 378M mouths that want to be fed? Some system has to work that out.

During the near-century of technological increases in output optimization, the rhetoric was that with less labor used to produce consumables, people’s efforts would be liberated to do other good things. But to the extent that those things aren’t “necessary” in the Maslov sense like food is (following Steve S.), really all those other people are useless.

One could try UBI, or have some utopian fantasy about centrally managed communist economies, but apart from small-scale experiments on UBI within much larger conventionally-run countries, and Kibbutz-level communes, I don’t see evidence of mechanisms to put behind those visions. So we are left with an unsolved problem of distribution. Not least, just How do we coordinate it? But also how do we do so stably enough that the system is perceived as having some kind of legitimacy (close enough to “fair”, to being individually negotiated and thus allowing people to want different things, all the marginalist Econ stuff).

Take any other area. Gas-powered transportation. Well, maybe you don’t “need” it in the sense that you can conjure a world where you live and work close together and have support for walk/bike/pubtrans etc. But where you are now, you and almost everybody else in the US, has demographically committed to being unable to do much of anything without plugging into that whole “unnecessary” system. So some part of the economic inertia comes just from the thick web of these commitments that people have made, which leave them unable to withdraw from dependencies on lots of complicated services.

Easiest way to get 100,000V if you started with 100V? Coil some wire to make an inductor, plug it into the wall, and then cut the wire. Sudden shifts of anything have a dimension of problem just from the timescale, in addition to whatever may have been problems or virtues of the normal state of operation.

If one thinks that these kinds of “commitments” or “inertia” as one principle, and the mechanics problem of negotiating a widely-applicable and adequately stable set of permissions for access to a wage as the second, are two broad “primary” drivers of the restarting, then there is still a vast depth of smaller-grained design choices that have accumulated since the Industrial Age, in supply chains, transportation, management, law, etc. It’s a hard web to change fast without a lot of chaos that drowns a lot of people.

However bad it was during the last depression, city people still could go back to the farms, because there there was food, and they could somehow chip in in exchange for eating, to get around the coordination failure. Now, with all the permission massively centralized, no people in the interior, and everything going through bank credit, even that demographic shift no longer exists as an option.

There is a whole separate story about the fact that the predator and parasite class are still there, and they aren’t going to leave of their own accord, but I think that is more a story of motive and how the mechanics gets steered and evolves, whereas what I put above is just about what mechanics exists. I think the mechanics will dominate in the immediate-short term.

Very inadequate.

Eric

On May 3, 2020, at 1:33 AM, <[hidden email]> <[hidden email]> wrote:

Colleagues,

I have asked this question before and nobody has responded (for clear and good reasons, no doubt) but I thought I would ask it again. What exactly is this economy we are bent on reviving? What exactly is the difference in human activity between our present state and a revived economy. We can go to bars and concerts and football games? Is that the economy we are reviving? It seems to me that the difference between a “healty” economy and our present status consists possibly in nothing more than a lot of people frantically rushing about doing things they don’t really need to do?

You recall that I invoked as a model that experiment in which 24 rats were put in a quarter acre enclosure in Baltimore and fed and watered and protected to see how the population would develop. They never got above two hundred. Infant mortality, etc., was appalling. Carnage. In the same space, a competent lab breeding organization could have kept a population of tens of thousands.

Don’t yell at me. What fundamental proposition about economics do I not understand?

Nick

Nicholas Thompson
Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology
Clark University
[hidden email]
https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/

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Prof David West

Re: ill-conceived question

In reply to this post by Steve Smith

Genghis did not "stay home" to procreate. He traveled with his armies, conquered other tribes / peoples; then married the daughters of the leaders of those he conquered. Marriage and children provided the political glue that held his empire together — including appointing his daughters as governors instead of sons.

My only assertion was that the Khan's genes spread via marriage - not wholesale rape.

Of course, the politically correct sensibility of today would characterize any marital relations under the umbrella of arranged / political marriage is by definition rape.

davew

On Sat, May 2, 2020, at 9:57 PM, Steven A Smith wrote:

On 5/2/20 8:39 PM, Prof David West wrote:
Genghis spread his genes via wives and concubines, not rapine. He also installed daughters and wives as regional governors instead of sons. Interesting historical figure.
So Genghis stayed back home and procreated while he sent the boys out into the field? And nobody got anyone pregnant while on the road? Or just Hooker's Legionaires?
Hmmm.... curious.
davew

On Sat, May 2, 2020, at 8:00 PM, Steven A Smith wrote:
Dave -
I once taught an honors course, with Father Smith at St. Thomas on the Anthropology and Theology of War. One of the prime forces behind war — since prehistory — had been nothing more than birth control.
Do you meant literally *birth* and *control*, or rather *population* and *reduction*?
The more literal usage works well too. Controlling Births. I think much warfare culminates (or did before modernish times) in the victors killing the men and raping/impregnating and enslaving the women either in-place, inhabiting the conquered lands or taking them back to their homeland. Children alternatively would have been killed or enslaved. Thus the genetic heritage of Genghis Khan...
One step more sophisticated than the rats?
I don't think we have to go there, no matter how much the gun hoarders want their chance at being unequivocally "on top" at least for one round of the grande iterated prisoner's dilemma that is human civilization.
- Steve
Well, in a sense that’s correct. But their method of “birth control” is not one that I am prepared to take as a model. Just imagine the worst sort of dystopian post apocalyptic novel. See the description of the Calhoun experiment on p 224.

Nick

Nicholas Thompson
Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology
Clark University
[hidden email]
https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/

From: Friam [hidden email] On Behalf Of Marcus Daniels
Sent: Saturday, May 2, 2020 12:15 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group [hidden email]
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] ill-conceived question

< You recall that I invoked as a model that experiment in which 24 rats were put in a quarter acre enclosure in Baltimore and fed and watered and protected to see how the population would develop. They never got above two hundred. >

Maybe the rats were right?

Marcus
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Prof David West

Re: ill-conceived question

In reply to this post by thompnickson2

Nick,

No one made any claim about effectiveness. Just an observation that if you do year-by-year plot of birthrate in a given population you will see an annual increase leading to the onset of a war, an obvious decrease during the war, and a surge immediately after the war ends. The surge more than compensates for the drop during the war years, so effectiveness is out the window.

I think — haven't checked recently — that there was a gradual increase in birth rate between WWI and the onset of WWII, a 2-4 percent decrease during the war years, and a huge baby boom immediately after. Father Smith had similar statistical measures for dozens of other conflicts.

Population pressure / "birth control" are but one of a multitude of factors that lead to war. All kinds of arguments can be made about the "validity" of Father Smith's statistics — few pre-modern peoples kept comprehensive public health records, ...

davew

On Sat, May 2, 2020, at 11:21 PM, [hidden email] wrote:

David,

Basic fact of demography. Killing men is not a particularly effective means of population control.

You want war to serve in that capacity, you have to get women in the military.

Nick

Nicholas Thompson
Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology
Clark University
[hidden email]
https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/

From: Friam <[hidden email]> On Behalf Of Steven A Smith
Sent: Saturday, May 2, 2020 8:00 PM
To: [hidden email]
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] ill-conceived question

Dave -
I once taught an honors course, with Father Smith at St. Thomas on the Anthropology and Theology of War. One of the prime forces behind war — since prehistory — had been nothing more than birth control.
Do you meant literally *birth* and *control*, or rather *population* and *reduction*?
The more literal usage works well too. Controlling Births. I think much warfare culminates (or did before modernish times) in the victors killing the men and raping/impregnating and enslaving the women either in-place, inhabiting the conquered lands or taking them back to their homeland. Children alternatively would have been killed or enslaved. Thus the genetic heritage of Genghis Khan...
One step more sophisticated than the rats?
I don't think we have to go there, no matter how much the gun hoarders want their chance at being unequivocally "on top" at least for one round of the grande iterated prisoner's dilemma that is human civilization.
- Steve
Well, in a sense that’s correct. But their method of “birth control” is not one that I am prepared to take as a model. Just imagine the worst sort of dystopian post apocalyptic novel. See the description of the Calhoun experiment on p 224.

Nick

Nicholas Thompson
Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology
Clark University
[hidden email]
https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/

From: Friam [hidden email] On Behalf Of Marcus Daniels
Sent: Saturday, May 2, 2020 12:15 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group [hidden email]
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] ill-conceived question

< You recall that I invoked as a model that experiment in which 24 rats were put in a quarter acre enclosure in Baltimore and fed and watered and protected to see how the population would develop. They never got above two hundred. >

Maybe the rats were right?

Marcus
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Prof David West

Re: ill-conceived question

In reply to this post by Marcus G. Daniels

Early this year, Pornhub claimed to have close to 2 petabytes of video. Other sources suggested it was barely over 1 petabyte. Pornhub is the largest, but only one of several thousand sites serving this kind of video.

davew

On Sat, May 2, 2020, at 10:06 PM, Marcus Daniels wrote:

Steve writes:

< Hard-line "invisible hand of the market"-eers will insist that if it exists in our economy, that it *must* be of interest/value/use to *many* (or at least some). Invoking the idiom of "follow the money", I agree that we *can* follow a chain of implied value that leads from the most marginal or absurd to the common and mundane. >

I had a similar thought when I saw this video. One can’t simultaneously be sympathetic to this initiative and believe in the invisible hand of the market. I haven’t found good recent documentation, but I’ve heard that on the order of 30% of internet bandwidth has been used for pornography.

Marcus
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Prof David West

Re: ill-conceived question

In reply to this post by Prof David West

Father Smith was a "liberation theologian," pacifist, and activist as well as a Catholic priest. On the population-war issue we had some fun conversations about whether or not contraception should be used as war/violence preventative measure.

He and I traveled to Cuba in the 90s and tried very very hard to get arrested upon our return (to protest the US embargo), but the immigration and customs personnel at the Minneapolis airport refused to cooperate. Although it was legal (barely) for US citizens to go to Cuba, it was illegal to spend money there. I brought back, and declared, several hundred dollars in Cuban cigars, rum, and art goods. Both immigration and customs personnel looked at the form and my luggage, visibly sighed and waived us through instead of arresting us.

Fun times.

davew

On Sun, May 3, 2020, at 7:43 AM, Prof David West wrote:

Nick,

No one made any claim about effectiveness. Just an observation that if you do year-by-year plot of birthrate in a given population you will see an annual increase leading to the onset of a war, an obvious decrease during the war, and a surge immediately after the war ends. The surge more than compensates for the drop during the war years, so effectiveness is out the window.

I think — haven't checked recently — that there was a gradual increase in birth rate between WWI and the onset of WWII, a 2-4 percent decrease during the war years, and a huge baby boom immediately after. Father Smith had similar statistical measures for dozens of other conflicts.

Population pressure / "birth control" are but one of a multitude of factors that lead to war. All kinds of arguments can be made about the "validity" of Father Smith's statistics — few pre-modern peoples kept comprehensive public health records, ...

davew

On Sat, May 2, 2020, at 11:21 PM, [hidden email] wrote:
David,

Basic fact of demography. Killing men is not a particularly effective means of population control.

You want war to serve in that capacity, you have to get women in the military.

Nick

Nicholas Thompson
Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology
Clark University
[hidden email]
https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/

From: Friam <[hidden email]> On Behalf Of Steven A Smith
Sent: Saturday, May 2, 2020 8:00 PM
To: [hidden email]
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] ill-conceived question

Dave -
I once taught an honors course, with Father Smith at St. Thomas on the Anthropology and Theology of War. One of the prime forces behind war — since prehistory — had been nothing more than birth control.
Do you meant literally *birth* and *control*, or rather *population* and *reduction*?
The more literal usage works well too. Controlling Births. I think much warfare culminates (or did before modernish times) in the victors killing the men and raping/impregnating and enslaving the women either in-place, inhabiting the conquered lands or taking them back to their homeland. Children alternatively would have been killed or enslaved. Thus the genetic heritage of Genghis Khan...
One step more sophisticated than the rats?
I don't think we have to go there, no matter how much the gun hoarders want their chance at being unequivocally "on top" at least for one round of the grande iterated prisoner's dilemma that is human civilization.
- Steve
Well, in a sense that’s correct. But their method of “birth control” is not one that I am prepared to take as a model. Just imagine the worst sort of dystopian post apocalyptic novel. See the description of the Calhoun experiment on p 224.

Nick

Nicholas Thompson
Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology
Clark University
[hidden email]
https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/

From: Friam [hidden email] On Behalf Of Marcus Daniels
Sent: Saturday, May 2, 2020 12:15 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group [hidden email]
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] ill-conceived question

< You recall that I invoked as a model that experiment in which 24 rats were put in a quarter acre enclosure in Baltimore and fed and watered and protected to see how the population would develop. They never got above two hundred. >

Maybe the rats were right?

Marcus
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thompnickson2

Re: ill-conceived question

In reply to this post by David Eric Smith

Hi, Eric,

Thanks. I am going to study on this. Not only does it show that less is more but also that mess has lure.

Nick

Nicholas Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology

Clark University

[hidden email]

https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/

From: Friam <[hidden email]> On Behalf Of David Eric Smith
Sent: Sunday, May 3, 2020 6:23 AM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] ill-conceived question

I can’t weave a grand diorama that has the meaning of everything in it, and anything I try will come out a mess. So let me try for Less is More.

Very inadequate.

Eric

On May 3, 2020, at 1:33 AM, <[hidden email]> <[hidden email]> wrote:

Colleagues,

I have asked this question before and nobody has responded (for clear and good reasons, no doubt) but I thought I would ask it again. What exactly is this economy we are bent on reviving? What exactly is the difference in human activity between our present state and a revived economy. We can go to bars and concerts and football games? Is that the economy we are reviving? It seems to me that the difference between a “healty” economy and our present status consists possibly in nothing more than a lot of people frantically rushing about doing things they don’t really need to do?

You recall that I invoked as a model that experiment in which 24 rats were put in a quarter acre enclosure in Baltimore and fed and watered and protected to see how the population would develop. They never got above two hundred. Infant mortality, etc., was appalling. Carnage. In the same space, a competent lab breeding organization could have kept a population of tens of thousands.

Don’t yell at me. What fundamental proposition about economics do I not understand?

Nick

Nicholas Thompson
Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology
Clark University
[hidden email]
https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/

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Merle Lefkoff-2

Re: ill-conceived question

In reply to this post by Frank Wimberly-2

No, Frank, the PRESENT economy might collapse, not the economy. The word "economy" comes from the Greek for "house" and "manage". Nothing about the present economy suggest household management.

On Sat, May 2, 2020 at 10:47 AM Frank Wimberly <[hidden email]> wrote:

Nick,

I suspect that if people only did what they 'need to do' the economy would collapse.

On Sat, May 2, 2020 at 10:34 AM <[hidden email]> wrote:
Colleagues,

I have asked this question before and nobody has responded (for clear and good reasons, no doubt) but I thought I would ask it again. What exactly is this economy we are bent on reviving? What exactly is the difference in human activity between our present state and a revived economy. We can go to bars and concerts and football games? Is that the economy we are reviving? It seems to me that the difference between a “healty” economy and our present status consists possibly in nothing more than a lot of people frantically rushing about doing things they don’t really need to do?

You recall that I invoked as a model that experiment in which 24 rats were put in a quarter acre enclosure in Baltimore and fed and watered and protected to see how the population would develop. They never got above two hundred. Infant mortality, etc., was appalling. Carnage. In the same space, a competent lab breeding organization could have kept a population of tens of thousands.

Don’t yell at me. What fundamental proposition about economics do I not understand?

Nick

Nicholas Thompson
Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology
Clark University
[hidden email]
https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/

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--
Frank Wimberly
140 Calle Ojo Feliz
Santa Fe, NM 87505
505 670-9918
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Merle Lefkoff, Ph.D.
President, Center for Emergent Diplomacy
emergentdiplomacy.org

Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA

[hidden email]
mobile: (303) 859-5609
skype: merle.lelfkoff2

twitter: @Merle_Lefkoff

Steve Smith

Re: ill-conceived question

In reply to this post by Gary Schiltz-4

Gary -

Watching now... but THIS rant was Eric's not mine... mine was previous and more rambly!

- Steve

Great rant/stream of consciousness as usual, Steve! Has anyone watched this five minute video yet? A bit utopian, but maybe not... https://vimeo.com/411278238

On Sun, May 3, 2020 at 7:23 AM David Eric Smith <[hidden email]> wrote:

I can’t weave a grand diorama that has the meaning of everything in it, and anything I try will come out a mess. So let me try for Less is More.

I think part of this is habit and commitments. Somehow the society has to sort out a predictable way to arrive at who has a right to consume how much of what. A surprising amount of structure goes into that, and it has enormous inertia. Part of what we are trying to “restart” is a set of systems that happen to be doing an allocation that we don’t have other systems in place to do as an alternative.

Take food production. Fine, what people need to eat is relatively inelastic, and not wildly different from one human to another, compared to dollar-wealth. But over the past 80 years, nearly all food calories are produced by very few decision makers and enormous capital outlays, levered to the hilt with credit, on really bad (regular, fast, and inflexible) turnaround times. (This means Corn, Beans, lesser Wheat, to some extent commodity meats.). The story is a little more diversified for the nutritive value of food (fruits, vegetables, et al.), but different in structure where near-slave labor takes the place of capital and a different analysis is needed. For now I will just look at the simple one.

We can’t all suddenly move back to the farm and grow calorie crops. We don’t own land, we don’t have skills, and besides there is no easy angle to do that in a system that over-produces already. So the production is there. But if we don’t have a way to pay the “farmer” (really a grant/loan/lobby businessman more than an expert in soil health etc.), why should he give us anything to eat? You could say “Ah, he only needs enough to live, and he is only one man, so he could give the rest away because people need it.” But he isn’t only one man. He is a vastly debt-leveraged operation, with enormous capital replacement and maintenance costs, huge loans for fertilizer/seed/pesticide, and no way to pay that unless he turns over the crop within certain price ranges (or lobbies hard to get Dept of Ag to make up the difference; what happens is a lot of both). So he has no choices if we don’t have money, and we have no choices if we have no money. But then what should anyone pay any of us for if the US operates on 1000 farmers, but there are 378M mouths that want to be fed? Some system has to work that out.

During the near-century of technological increases in output optimization, the rhetoric was that with less labor used to produce consumables, people’s efforts would be liberated to do other good things. But to the extent that those things aren’t “necessary” in the Maslov sense like food is (following Steve S.), really all those other people are useless.

One could try UBI, or have some utopian fantasy about centrally managed communist economies, but apart from small-scale experiments on UBI within much larger conventionally-run countries, and Kibbutz-level communes, I don’t see evidence of mechanisms to put behind those visions. So we are left with an unsolved problem of distribution. Not least, just How do we coordinate it? But also how do we do so stably enough that the system is perceived as having some kind of legitimacy (close enough to “fair”, to being individually negotiated and thus allowing people to want different things, all the marginalist Econ stuff).

Take any other area. Gas-powered transportation. Well, maybe you don’t “need” it in the sense that you can conjure a world where you live and work close together and have support for walk/bike/pubtrans etc. But where you are now, you and almost everybody else in the US, has demographically committed to being unable to do much of anything without plugging into that whole “unnecessary” system. So some part of the economic inertia comes just from the thick web of these commitments that people have made, which leave them unable to withdraw from dependencies on lots of complicated services.

Easiest way to get 100,000V if you started with 100V? Coil some wire to make an inductor, plug it into the wall, and then cut the wire. Sudden shifts of anything have a dimension of problem just from the timescale, in addition to whatever may have been problems or virtues of the normal state of operation.

If one thinks that these kinds of “commitments” or “inertia” as one principle, and the mechanics problem of negotiating a widely-applicable and adequately stable set of permissions for access to a wage as the second, are two broad “primary” drivers of the restarting, then there is still a vast depth of smaller-grained design choices that have accumulated since the Industrial Age, in supply chains, transportation, management, law, etc. It’s a hard web to change fast without a lot of chaos that drowns a lot of people.

However bad it was during the last depression, city people still could go back to the farms, because there there was food, and they could somehow chip in in exchange for eating, to get around the coordination failure. Now, with all the permission massively centralized, no people in the interior, and everything going through bank credit, even that demographic shift no longer exists as an option.

There is a whole separate story about the fact that the predator and parasite class are still there, and they aren’t going to leave of their own accord, but I think that is more a story of motive and how the mechanics gets steered and evolves, whereas what I put above is just about what mechanics exists. I think the mechanics will dominate in the immediate-short term.

Very inadequate.

Eric

On May 3, 2020, at 1:33 AM, <[hidden email]> <[hidden email]> wrote:

Colleagues,

I have asked this question before and nobody has responded (for clear and good reasons, no doubt) but I thought I would ask it again. What exactly is this economy we are bent on reviving? What exactly is the difference in human activity between our present state and a revived economy. We can go to bars and concerts and football games? Is that the economy we are reviving? It seems to me that the difference between a “healty” economy and our present status consists possibly in nothing more than a lot of people frantically rushing about doing things they don’t really need to do?

You recall that I invoked as a model that experiment in which 24 rats were put in a quarter acre enclosure in Baltimore and fed and watered and protected to see how the population would develop. They never got above two hundred. Infant mortality, etc., was appalling. Carnage. In the same space, a competent lab breeding organization could have kept a population of tens of thousands.

Don’t yell at me. What fundamental proposition about economics do I not understand?

Nick

Nicholas Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology

Clark University

[hidden email]

https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/

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Merle Lefkoff-2

Re: ill-conceived question

In reply to this post by thompnickson2

Nick, the only mainstream news program I watch is Fareed Zakaria on Sunday morning. Below is part of this morning's report. Not surprisingly (for those of us who have had the privilege recently of spending time in Sweden), the answer to how it's working, is just about like the countries that are locked down, with one exception. More deaths (mostly among the elderly who primarily live together in retirement).

As world governments employ different policies to fight Covid-19, Sweden’s relaxed approach stands out: Eschewing lockdowns, the country has left its schools, gyms, cafes, bars and restaurants open throughout the spread of the pandemic. Fareed interviews the man behind that strategy, Anders Tegnell, the Swedish government’s top epidemiologist, about how it’s working and whether his country can offer any lessons to the rest of the world.

On Sat, May 2, 2020 at 10:34 AM <[hidden email]> wrote:

Colleagues,

I have asked this question before and nobody has responded (for clear and good reasons, no doubt) but I thought I would ask it again. What exactly is this economy we are bent on reviving? What exactly is the difference in human activity between our present state and a revived economy. We can go to bars and concerts and football games? Is that the economy we are reviving? It seems to me that the difference between a “healty” economy and our present status consists possibly in nothing more than a lot of people frantically rushing about doing things they don’t really need to do?

You recall that I invoked as a model that experiment in which 24 rats were put in a quarter acre enclosure in Baltimore and fed and watered and protected to see how the population would develop. They never got above two hundred. Infant mortality, etc., was appalling. Carnage. In the same space, a competent lab breeding organization could have kept a population of tens of thousands.

Don’t yell at me. What fundamental proposition about economics do I not understand?

Nick

Nicholas Thompson
Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology
Clark University
[hidden email]
https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/

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Merle Lefkoff, Ph.D.
President, Center for Emergent Diplomacy
emergentdiplomacy.org

Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA

[hidden email]
mobile: (303) 859-5609
skype: merle.lelfkoff2

twitter: @Merle_Lefkoff

Gary Schiltz-4

Re: ill-conceived question

In reply to this post by Steve Smith

Sorry Steve, I quoted the Wrong Wrant :-) Rest assured, though, that it was my intention to complement Your Rant. David, your rant was good as well.

Always the diplomat,

Gary

On Sun, May 3, 2020 at 11:53 AM Steven A Smith <[hidden email]> wrote:

Gary -

Watching now... but THIS rant was Eric's not mine... mine was previous and more rambly!

- Steve
Great rant/stream of consciousness as usual, Steve! Has anyone watched this five minute video yet? A bit utopian, but maybe not... https://vimeo.com/411278238

On Sun, May 3, 2020 at 7:23 AM David Eric Smith <[hidden email]> wrote:

I can’t weave a grand diorama that has the meaning of everything in it, and anything I try will come out a mess. So let me try for Less is More.

I think part of this is habit and commitments. Somehow the society has to sort out a predictable way to arrive at who has a right to consume how much of what. A surprising amount of structure goes into that, and it has enormous inertia. Part of what we are trying to “restart” is a set of systems that happen to be doing an allocation that we don’t have other systems in place to do as an alternative.

Take food production. Fine, what people need to eat is relatively inelastic, and not wildly different from one human to another, compared to dollar-wealth. But over the past 80 years, nearly all food calories are produced by very few decision makers and enormous capital outlays, levered to the hilt with credit, on really bad (regular, fast, and inflexible) turnaround times. (This means Corn, Beans, lesser Wheat, to some extent commodity meats.). The story is a little more diversified for the nutritive value of food (fruits, vegetables, et al.), but different in structure where near-slave labor takes the place of capital and a different analysis is needed. For now I will just look at the simple one.

We can’t all suddenly move back to the farm and grow calorie crops. We don’t own land, we don’t have skills, and besides there is no easy angle to do that in a system that over-produces already. So the production is there. But if we don’t have a way to pay the “farmer” (really a grant/loan/lobby businessman more than an expert in soil health etc.), why should he give us anything to eat? You could say “Ah, he only needs enough to live, and he is only one man, so he could give the rest away because people need it.” But he isn’t only one man. He is a vastly debt-leveraged operation, with enormous capital replacement and maintenance costs, huge loans for fertilizer/seed/pesticide, and no way to pay that unless he turns over the crop within certain price ranges (or lobbies hard to get Dept of Ag to make up the difference; what happens is a lot of both). So he has no choices if we don’t have money, and we have no choices if we have no money. But then what should anyone pay any of us for if the US operates on 1000 farmers, but there are 378M mouths that want to be fed? Some system has to work that out.

During the near-century of technological increases in output optimization, the rhetoric was that with less labor used to produce consumables, people’s efforts would be liberated to do other good things. But to the extent that those things aren’t “necessary” in the Maslov sense like food is (following Steve S.), really all those other people are useless.

One could try UBI, or have some utopian fantasy about centrally managed communist economies, but apart from small-scale experiments on UBI within much larger conventionally-run countries, and Kibbutz-level communes, I don’t see evidence of mechanisms to put behind those visions. So we are left with an unsolved problem of distribution. Not least, just How do we coordinate it? But also how do we do so stably enough that the system is perceived as having some kind of legitimacy (close enough to “fair”, to being individually negotiated and thus allowing people to want different things, all the marginalist Econ stuff).

Take any other area. Gas-powered transportation. Well, maybe you don’t “need” it in the sense that you can conjure a world where you live and work close together and have support for walk/bike/pubtrans etc. But where you are now, you and almost everybody else in the US, has demographically committed to being unable to do much of anything without plugging into that whole “unnecessary” system. So some part of the economic inertia comes just from the thick web of these commitments that people have made, which leave them unable to withdraw from dependencies on lots of complicated services.

Easiest way to get 100,000V if you started with 100V? Coil some wire to make an inductor, plug it into the wall, and then cut the wire. Sudden shifts of anything have a dimension of problem just from the timescale, in addition to whatever may have been problems or virtues of the normal state of operation.

If one thinks that these kinds of “commitments” or “inertia” as one principle, and the mechanics problem of negotiating a widely-applicable and adequately stable set of permissions for access to a wage as the second, are two broad “primary” drivers of the restarting, then there is still a vast depth of smaller-grained design choices that have accumulated since the Industrial Age, in supply chains, transportation, management, law, etc. It’s a hard web to change fast without a lot of chaos that drowns a lot of people.

However bad it was during the last depression, city people still could go back to the farms, because there there was food, and they could somehow chip in in exchange for eating, to get around the coordination failure. Now, with all the permission massively centralized, no people in the interior, and everything going through bank credit, even that demographic shift no longer exists as an option.

There is a whole separate story about the fact that the predator and parasite class are still there, and they aren’t going to leave of their own accord, but I think that is more a story of motive and how the mechanics gets steered and evolves, whereas what I put above is just about what mechanics exists. I think the mechanics will dominate in the immediate-short term.

Very inadequate.

Eric

On May 3, 2020, at 1:33 AM, <[hidden email]> <[hidden email]> wrote:

Colleagues,

I have asked this question before and nobody has responded (for clear and good reasons, no doubt) but I thought I would ask it again. What exactly is this economy we are bent on reviving? What exactly is the difference in human activity between our present state and a revived economy. We can go to bars and concerts and football games? Is that the economy we are reviving? It seems to me that the difference between a “healty” economy and our present status consists possibly in nothing more than a lot of people frantically rushing about doing things they don’t really need to do?

You recall that I invoked as a model that experiment in which 24 rats were put in a quarter acre enclosure in Baltimore and fed and watered and protected to see how the population would develop. They never got above two hundred. Infant mortality, etc., was appalling. Carnage. In the same space, a competent lab breeding organization could have kept a population of tens of thousands.

Don’t yell at me. What fundamental proposition about economics do I not understand?

Nick

Nicholas Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology

Clark University

[hidden email]

https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/

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