Coming Saturday, the next installment -- "Story and Stuff"

If money is imaginary (as most people would agree if pushed to the edge of argument) then where does its power come from? And when it loses power, how did that happen?

... stay tuned.

Until then, here is my buddy "Cookie" exploring the sculptured lake shore, one of the last kindly days we are likely to have this year.

--NM

Added Today -- Cumulative Glossary

Until I can assemble a proper glossary, I will keep adding terms and definitions to this: http://tea-analysis.blogspot.com/2008/10/cumulative-glossary.html

Your comments and suggestions are welcome.

Seven Deadly Sins

The Hazard of Induced Acedia in Supply Side Economics
First published on Monday, April 09, 2007 on the Angry Bear economics blog.

=====================

Every journalist, I suppose, has a list of questions they dream of asking some famous person, preferably on live network TV.

My personal daydream at the moment is to stand up and ask President Bush whether he can name the seven deadly sins.

I suppose he would wiggle out of it, look blank, or get a witty comeback courtesy of his walky- talky backpack. But in a daydream like this, it is more the response of the listeners than that of the patsy which matters. In this scenario, the listeners would blink and realize that not only does the emperor have no clothes, but he has no clues. Then a national discussion would arise, driving Justin and Britney off the airwaves. Well, I did say it was a daydream.

This brings us to the one of the seven deadly sins which is called "acedia". Acedia is a Latin word, from Greek akedia, literally meaning "absence of caring".

A great deal of the triumph of corporatism in recent decades has to do with the entrenchment of acedia in western thought, and its wilful spread by authorities who may or may not believe in it. Why deadly?" Because as a result of buying into acedia, ordinary people lose the ability to defend themselves from the pressures of the supply side market.

It shows up in public language, in legal rulings, and in the concerns to which public institutions and pervasive spokespersons grant or do not grant validity. Sun Tzu famously said the best way to win a war is to remove the enemy's will to resist. Acedia is what you have left when that will to resist is removed.

I used to argue with a pleasant, large and kindly co-worker who was a business writer and who had thoroughly bought into the business model. He had heard all my arguments from others, and heard them again from me with, I must say, remarkable patience.

A catalogue of the disasters of pollution, social collapse, slave labour, and the dozens of other worries of typical "left-leaning" citizens, did nothing to ruffle his condescending smile. He really, truly didn't care. He told me often, in response to my diatribes, that he expected to die, and that would be it, and any problems in the living world were his children's problems. The Chinese economic model? "Why should you care what happens to some Chinese guy?" he asked me curiously. Their policies were making the Chinese GDP rise rapidly, and damn the pandas. Everything will die, so what does it matter?

But he didn't not care about everything, only some things. When it came to tax rates, government controls on business, and the interference of human rights and environmental issues with the development of industry, he could wax quite wroth.

The danger of buying into acedia is that when one's own desires and priorities are disparaged, they become quaint and expendable factors, as unimportant as choosing green over brown when buying a shirt — even in areas of compelling human significance.

All economy, all of it, is based on human choice and the allocation of human energy and attention. There are physical limits to the energy and capacity for attention of any individual, so beyond a certain point, extraordinary pressures must be put in place to persuade people to allocate more and more attention and energy toward the desires of industries, which after all exist and survive only because of the participation of human beings..

This is the essence of supply-side economics, and induced acedia makes the process a great deal easier.

Well, I can hear some of our readers asking, "So what if people's choices are subverted and bent to the service of the economy? Isn't a lively economy good for us?"

Maybe. Sometimes. But busier is not necessarily better. As a child learning to swim, I had to be taught that the most efficient swimming caused the least froth. A frothy economy is only good for the very few who can ride the foam.

The GDP is not a measure of genuine wellbeing, but only of froth. Take one hypothetical example: if we cut our sugar industry by 95%, and as a result cut our insulin industry by 98% and the health care industry by 20%, there would be a huge net loss to the GDP and an enormous benefit to our shared prosperity.

When someone sets aside what you really value, and tells you to substitute other values, sometimes they are reliable teachers whose advice will benefit you. Other times, they serve their own desires instead of yours. Alertness to this distinction can serve us well.

***
The seven are: Luxuria (extravagance, later lust), Gula (gluttony), Avaritia (greed), Acedia (sloth), Ira (wrath), Invidia (envy), and Superbia (pride).

Remembrance and anticipation

Another element to add to the TEA model mix has to do with how people look backward to evaluate the past, forward to plan the future, and outward to try to understand it all. I am calling this element “story”.

What does “story” include? Hope and fear, imagination, belief, hypotheses and theories, histories and science -- no matter what we shove in this category, this element is going to be one of the most important in the whole TEA theory.

Human beings know very little from their own experience. At any one moment in time, I know the current temperature and lighting levels, what people and animals are nearby, whether I am hungry or full, in pain or in comfort, and not a lot else.

Almost everything that we say we know or believe about the world is either something experienced in the past, or taught to us secondhand through education, other people's experiences as recounted by them or conveyed to us by the media, or the larger structures of understanding which we have been taught, and which might be called "storyline".

It is not possible to underestimate how important it is to remember this. Maps are needful, but the map is not the land.

There is an old Sufi story about a wealthy man who goes on a journey away from home.

As he is returning, a couple of days from home, he rests along the road. Another fellow, poor but clever, also arrives that evening. The wealthy man asks the poor man, "How are things in my home town?"

The poor man knows nothing about this wealthy man or his home town, but hoping for a share of the wealthy man's picnic supper which sits before him in lavish variety, the poor man tells him that all is well, the city is in peace and prosperity.

"Good," says the wealthy man, and goes on with his supper.

Angry at this miserliness, the poor man decides to continue on towards town in the cool of the night. He meets up again with the same wealthy man the following evening at the next resting place. It becomes obvious that the wealthy man doesn't remember him in the least, because again he asks, "Do you know how things are in my hometown?" The poor man shakes his head in sorrow and says, "I am so sorry to tell you the bad news. Things would be just fine if your barn hadn't caught fire and burned."

"My barn?" cried the wealthy man in shock.

"But the barn is nothing, really," said the poor man. "It was when the fire spread to your house that the real trouble began."

"My house!" cried the wealthy man.

"But of course to a wealthy man like you, a house is nothing at all. You could have it rebuilt in no time, I am sure. The real sadness is that your wife and children were in the house asleep, and they have all perished too."

And having said that, the poor man went to his sleeping place, leaving the wealthy man to rush off toward town without bothering to gather his things together. The wealthy men wept all night as he traveled, but the poor man feasted and then slept soundly.

In this story, the rich man got off easy. When he got home, barn and home and family were all just fine. But what the poor man told him illustrated the hazard of forgetting which is the map and which is the land.

We need story to understand the world, but as a tool, not as a truth. It is not for nothing that when a con artist is setting up his cheat, he calls it “telling the tale”.

Each human being has their own allotment of tau, and uses it as best they can. Sometimes they enrich themselves, like the poor man in the story, by using story to influence people’s use of time, effort and attention to their own benefit. Other times they can use story to bind people together into a mutually beneficial organization of great strength. To avoid the one and encourage the other ought to be the work of every concerned citizen. Too often, it isn’t even seen at all.

Pantomime horses and other economic models

It used to be said that man is the animal that laughs, or the tool making animal, or the political animal. Mark Twain said “Man is the only animal that blushes -- or needs to.” But I'm convinced that man is the animal that makes believe.

[Image - famed publicist Jim Moran with an early beer-loving horsie that traveled from bar to California bar in the 20s]

When I was a small child, just like you did I am sure, I would pretend to be a horse running around the living room, or a groundhog living in my tunnel of quilts and pillows, or a bird sitting on the edge of a branch. I think it is probably impossible to stop children from pretending to be all these things. I am certain that it would be a bad idea.

Human beings succeed not because of their physical strength or any special skill -- they are pretty helpless animals, when you come right down to it, with little in the way of armor or claws or teeth.

Human beings succeed, I believe, because of their amazing skill at imitation.

§ Part of this is imitating each other, and thus learning skills and passed down through generations by way of stories and textbooks.

§ Part of it is imitating other creatures – horsies, birds, fish, trees. Is there a child who doesn’t know what you mean when you say, “Can you be a tree now?”

§ Finally, part of this is imitating things they have never seen, or which may not even exist.

Is it useful to be such imitative fools, constantly trying on the skins of other creatures? It is essential. No human being is a match for a wildebeest, but a group of humans can gain functional equivalence to a pride of lions – stalking and driving the herd, and taking the animal down with claws at a distance (spears) and claws up close (knives). They don't look like lions, but they are functional equivalents.

Hercules wore the skin of the Nemean Lion, and it symbolized his strength, but I bet it slowed him down. Functional equivalence is achieved by copying the functional aspects of the model, not the outward appearance. Humans imitate best when they imitate the behaviour patterns of other species, and make their physical attributes into tools that do what the lion’s claws and teeth, or the cow’s complex stomachs, or the mole’s strong forelegs and digging claws achieve.

Over time, I will discuss some of these imitations as economic models – among them the Cactus model, the Scorpion model, the Meerkat model or the Hyena model. But today I will begin by discussing the Pantomime Horse.

The Halloween favorite is a costume that requires two people imitating a single animal.

Wikipedia tells us

“One actor plays the front end, including the horse's head and its front legs, in a more-or-less upright posture and with a reasonable field of view afforded by eyeholes in the horse's head. The other actor, playing the rear end of the animal, must bend at the waist so that his torso is horizontal like that of a horse, and put his arms around the waist of the first actor. He can see little, although there are normally eyeholes in the bottom part of the horse's torso to enable him to see where he is putting his feet and to enable him to breathe. Pantomime cows also usually have comically prominent udders.”

I have never been either end of a panto horse, but in addition to the ignominy of being the hinder end, it sounds like an awful lot of work, with an aching back as a reward for trotting along blindly and hoping the breathing hole is big enough.

A much more elegant version of this is the Chinese Lion Dance, which makes the impossible moves of two strong people look like the play of great cats, friends full of humour and ease.



As fun as this all is, look at the same thing done with functional equivalence – without the lion skin.

If human beings achieve great things by imitation, this doesn’t mean equality for both ends of the horse or lion. Someone brings up the rear, and that person doesn’t steer, can’t see anything, carries all the burdens, lifts the front end of the lion when the faux beast dances, and sometimes cannot breath. And to top all this off, it gets the comic insult of being the horses ass or, if female, having “comically prominent udders.” Taking turns would be the fair thing to do, I wonder how often it happens?

Cumulative Glossary

Cumulative Glossary -- TEA Analysis

For lack of anywhere else to put a glossary I will put it here until I can format it more traditionally. [--NM November 18, 2008]

A

B

C

Corporation – an institutional story whose purpose is usually multiple

• to act as a framework to coordinate cooperative action (a subset of
  
• to collect and defend wealth
• to shed responsibility

D

E

F

G

H

I

J

K

L

M

N

O

P

Q

R

Rind -- an inert barrier erected to contain and preserve something of value. Rind exacts costs, sometimes quite large, but is often worth it.

S

Story -- a structured assembly of symbols which influence human behaviour, thought and belief.

T

tau (t)-- units of human potential. This system is still under construction, but currently one average human being possesses (24 hours x 10 effort x 10 attention) = 2400 tau

TEA analysis -- a method of measurement of human potential, consisting of Time, Energy (or Effort) and Attention. Units of TEA are called tau

U

V

W

X

Y

Z

©2008 Noni Mausa, Thuja Words and Images

Tear it down, boys [Updated]

There's an old joke that goes like this: A carpenter, heading up the crew of builders, comes to his foreman with a puzzled look, and asks him, "Charlie, remind me again. When we build this house do we start from the bottom and build up, or from the top and build downwards?"

"Why you idiot," growls the foreman, "From the bottom up, of course!"

The crew chief goes back to his men and says, "Sorry guys. We gotta tear it down and start over."

==========

In the last post, I asked you to try a simple thought experiment: in a small nation of 100,000 people, an angel comes at night and offers the lowest paid 99% a one-year, all expenses paid vacation in heaven. They happily accept, and when the sun comes up, only the richest 1,000 people remain in the country.

Question: what sort of economy now exists?

Let's also assume that the angel (or djinn, or Trickster, or deus ex whatchamacallit) has also calmed the 1000 so they don't worry about the situation, but just carry on as best they can.

Dancing in empty streets

As I see it, there will be two sorts of results -- what I call transient and steady state. Transient effects are found at the beginning of a new situation, are often extreme, and extinguish quickly. Steady state describes a normal, ongoing situation which will vary rhythmically in intensity and emphasis, but varies around a set level and tends to return to that level.

Our wealthy 1000 will probably spend the first few days finding each other, enjoying the comparative wealth and ease, maybe partying and driving around enjoying the empty streets. They may even develop a premature set of norms, temporary patterns which cannot be sustained, but are adhered to pretty strongly once they're established. These are short transients, supported by novelty.

But soon they will realize that they're in trouble. They have no commerce, for instance. No police, no plumbers, no workers except for themselves. In a way this is fine because they're still living off the wealth the other 99% have left behind, but things will soon begin to need maintenance. We can assume the 1000 are bright and capable, but 1000 people are just not enough to keep roads, bridges, power plants, sewers, elevators and all the vast machinery of a city operational, even if all 1000 had all the skills and strength needed.

So the 1000 will come together and discuss what to do, and I imagine they will decide to regroup to an area where they are up to the job of maintaining the infrastructure -- at least for the next few months.

Who pours the coffee?

So they move to a smaller area, and begin to get tired of camping out.

It's been fun, but sooner or later you want to stop camping and go back to normal. Since these people are usually more wealthy than anyone else they know , "normal" includes hiring people and having people to do things.

I predict that as soon as the short transient begins to wear down, there will be some abrupt changes in who does what, and why. Not for money, that's for sure.

Any thoughts?

Noni

UPDATE:

It seems to me that "the tip of any pyramid is another pyramid". The Tip in itself is (or can be) another social pyramid complete with rich and poor and workers and loafers -- but on its own the Tip cannot live as it did when it was still part of the larger pyramid.

The logical deduction is that, whatever else the Tip might be, it cannot be the source of value -- or at least , not enough value to support the rest of the pyramid.

Coming up: "Pantomime horses and other economic models".