Toward a human economics ... cont

First 5 additions to yesterdays critique of economics...

1) Economics does not measure that which is naturally given. Thus sunshine, oxygen, rainfall, growth, sunsets, natural beauty etc. All these have fundamental value yet it is not measured very well in economics. People may pay to enter a national park or a zoo to wonder at natural beauty and form but "nature" gets no payment so who does this money belong to? Nature does not charge us for its services. Thus we do not pay for the pleasure of having an "eye" for example. This type of fundamental value is not currently measured, only the relative value of exchange. Thus I might exchange my eye for a new kidney altho the value of each is unique and personal.

This I see links directly with the discussion on measuring before. One cannot measure absolutes only hold one things against another and compare quantitatively. Obviously money as a measure of value will only ever compare things.

2) The analysis of the mechanisms was money flow were not made clear enough. The physical mechanism of money transfer and the availability of money themselves have important impacts on the value of things. As I will expand below money is not a simple ballot system to find which is most valuable.

3) The issue of built in obsolescence has slipped from these pages. The absurd feature of commersialism that it is better to produce cheaper products that break than to produce more expensive ones that last a lifetime. It is absurd because it creates unnecessary work for no gain, and it is absurd because it results in far greater cycling of raw materials and environmental degredation than is necessary for the same products.

4) The divison of private and company time. When for example we phone customer services to gain a refund on an error we have to work for free while the company funds the customer services out of the company profits. Thus the cost of products is higher to compensate and we effectively end up paying for our own customer services. We pay twice. This is another example of a type of work that is not measured by the prevailing economics.

5) Just to recap there is the fantastic feature of economics that not only must we work to create the products that we need, but we must buy the things we don't need to create jobs. This puts the cart far before the horse and creates work and environmental degredation where none is needed.

The Prevailing System.
Continuing the argument from the last blog the benefits of the current system can be seen.

On the principal that each person has equal rights and needs we distribute equal voting tokens to each person (say £100/person/week). They then purchase in the normal way and the money accumulated by each company represents their relative value in the market place. This way exchange value can be determined and non productive companies will be closed. The government collects these tokens and redistributes them. Thus circumenting an unequal salary system.

This is extremely naive and reveals the logic of the rest of the system.

Suppose that an individual like myself does not spend very much. In other words I start to accumulate voting tokens. Gradually the number of tokens in the system will reduce. People will be given progressively less than the opening £100 and correspondingly will be prepard to spend less and prices will fall. As my stash increases my spending power will grow doubly and if I form a cartel we can end up in a position where we can buy anything completely skewing the system. This is worse than what happens now.

If the government claimed all tokens back at the end of each cycle and regarded the unspent ones as a vote for "nothing" this would encourage people to buy things anyway. This is exactly aspect 5 above to be avoided!

If on the other hand the government recycled the tokens but continued to acknowledge your continual ownership then we have the fractional banking system which is also to be avoided and massive inflation as the limited money supply gets reused many times.

Work?
This is just the markets. The next problem is work. If we all got identical tokens by right of living then wouldn't we shop instead of work? Where is the incentive to make things?

The original reason to make thinge was that we did not have them and to get them we must make them. This is reflected in the current system that we must work before we receive the products of that work. Except that our work is exchanged for money and we exchange our money for goods.

This represents the simple personal situation perfectly. But in reality it is never like this. 10 people hunt a deer, 10 people build a house, 10 people farm crops. One person by himself does not get very far. So actually it is 10 people who earn the wages and 10 people who spend them. So what relation does each person have to the community? Under what circumstances do we say that someone is taking more out than they put in? Add to this the problem that occurs when technology increases the productivity of the group, or even makes certain jobs and skills redundant. The group can exchange its products on the market for money but how does the group then decide how to exchange that money.

The current solution is to reduce it to the individual situation. We each market ourselves. If one group offers us a higher share than another then we can change groups. But other non economic factors like enjoying the people of one group more than another may affect our decision.

In the current system "group" refers to legally registered company which is based upon a financial loan and an owner of that capital. Of course a "group" pays back the investment so in theory the group owns the group. But this is not the Capitalism model. There are rewards for risk and also property rights involved. Certainly an entrepreneur takes a risk that employees do not take. But in reality groups are abitrary and it is worth considering the group of all human beings. This group works together and produces products for itself. It is the highest level of human super organism. Strange that few people think at this level which is every bit as real as a registered company. Above this lies the greater groups of ecology, but these do not exchange their goods and "labour" on an exchange and are not measured.

While I brainstorm here to consider the bee. Famously contrasted to the archetect by Marx. But both do provide an exchangeable product. Honey is exchangeable for money as are building plans. The difference though is that the archetect expects to be paid for his "labour" while the "bee" gets given a one off payment of a hive and is expected to do the rest itself. The bee keeper by contrast might be expected to be paid per hour for his labour in collecting honey. Arguments have been created to show that the bee does not work because work requires conscious intention.

I don't think the markets care whether it was conscious intention that made something or a bee or a machine. The product is exchanged as what it is. The money raised by that is then distributed within the group who created the product. If the product is not very valuable but requires huge amounts of manhours (like for example counting the grains of sand on a beach) no one will accept that wage and that product won't be made. If on the other hand a pin factory can buy a machine which requires 1 operator to produce £1000 worth of pins a day then it becomes viable. The idea of our "time" being paid is a myth. We simply get a share of what has been made.

Just arguing this out loud I see the link between time by money is not only a myth but is also highly dangerous. When products are produced per hour rather than per product then the whole nature of work is changed. Workers agreeing to a wage per hour leads industrialists to require products per hour and neither us nor the product determines the work.

Per hour of course is also an inhumane constract.

A share of the exchanged value seems to be the logical way to distribute wages.

I've no more time here but the brief further argument was that to get people to work we might need to either qualify them for shopping tokens only if they work or make work compulsory which is exactly what we have.

Crudely then the reasons for the current system are laid out and the requirements for the new system also.

Measuring Human Values

This is the requirement of the new economics and the failure of the current.

Why doesn't traditional economics measure what is important to humans? i.e. why doesn't money measure the human value of things?

What is on the economic radar?
In theory it should.
(1) We buy what we humanly want or need.
(2) We make that which we can sell, which therefore has a human value
(3) We are compensated with the power to enact (1).

The value of goods should be set by how much money is available to each person and their relative human need for those goods. The amount of money available to each person should be set by the relative human value of their time (i.e. what they make of human value in that time).

One must also add money velocity. So an economy where work is done fast and goods consumed fast recycles the money faster and we therefore have more value passing through our hands per year and appear richer. (Current credit situation arising because the velocity not the amount of money has slowed.)

What is missing on the economic radar?
However consider the situation where someone is disabled in some way. They can contribute less of human value but require more. The work done to assist them while of enormous value to them cannot be compensated with money and so is not measured. Likewise child care does not currently appear on the radar altho it is conceivable that parents could take out loans that their children have to pay back.

Consider the situation of mutual exchanges. A loving couple providing each other with TLC. While of enormous value to each other pricing becomes very difficult. Could we ever say to our partner I will charge £100 per night for my time, and our partner charge more and it be a stable relationship. It also means that the relationship becomes universal in nature and we are open to bids from other individuals - a girl at work offering us a cheaper rate for example.

Consider in the same vein a child taking parents who charge them less.

The notion of human identity - where we wish to be with "this particular person" in a mutual and closed exchange - which is the foundation of love and care; the core human values - cannot therefore be traded on an open exchange where all things are compared like with like.

This refelcts on the first case of invalid care. We care for them not as parts of a relative market but as absolute elements "in their own right".

This idea of humans as "ends in themselves" is often recognised as a key component of human life, human values and a core foundation of human and civilised life.

Money then proves completely incapable of reflecting value the value of individual things. It can only measure the value of "types of thing" which can be freely traded on an open market.

Money therefore measures the value of a type but not the value of a token.

Thus we can say that "an apple" is worth 40p because across all markets this is the average amount. There will be regional differences but actual individual values cannot be reflected. Some people like apples, some don't. Our personal values and our personal relationship with apples exists entirely separately from the price.

The impact on Society
As money becomes the standard of interactions in a society we end up with a society of people who view the price of thinsg as the market price of things (traditional called the exchange value) but who become less capable of having a personal relationship with things. Thus we end up buying that which has high market value, or which is on discount rather than simply buying that which we need (and can afford). We also learn not to value non financial interactions and the value of other people as "ends in themselves" seeing them purely as relative agents in a market place. Of course we become viewed as such and we end up with no trust and personal security as our life is freely exchanged with any other.

Personal values are not this simple however. In addition to the averaging effect of markets are group values which I have dicussed at length. Thus people divorced from their own ability to evaluate things can accept group pressures to conform and I always cite the Nazis as a famous case of membership swaying people to do things they would not otherwise have done.

Just adding to this recent news from Guantanamo. An ex guard described the situation there as allowing some people to become the very worst that they could be and some people had been waiting for such an opportunity as this to express their badness. Or words like that. It seems that some people have a tendency to be brutal and groups can sanction release of this behaviour. However I firmly believe that this brutal behaviour is itself a feature of other group behaviour and in line with religious belief we are all gods at heart.

So here lies the problems now the solutions of economics to follow.

Gr8 nature participation site

http://www.bbc.co.uk/breathingplaces/doonething/simple/surveys.shtml

Recession & Environment

As the recession pulls back on the bull of economic growth a wonderful thing is happening! Just listening to BBC Radio 4 last night in more than one place people are talking about a reassessment of the value of our economy! Maybe I don't need to write my book, maybe the change is coming all by itself.

"People are rediscovering that the best things in life are free" says a National Trust warden - days out with the family, landscapes all are free. In another place the discourse on sustainable economy appears to have risen in the consciousness. The extinction of the fossil fuel based economy is on the horizon. In the long term because no new fossil fuel is being produced and we are using it at a staggering rate. In the short term because of carbon based taxes. Now is the time to redeploy capital toward the economy of the future. This attitude is just part of the larger awareness that just as we have lived beyond our means financially so we are living beyond our means ecologically and the "environment crunch" is going to be far more catas-trophic than anything we see now.

Laterally a separate discussion was had by the editor of the magazine Wired on the arrival of a true free economy based upon the almost zero cost of digital data replication. While I don't rate this as a productive direction itself, it shows that the ingrained economic thinking of the industrial revolution is being eroded and the possibility of reconceiving our personal interactions in terms other than a limited model of exchange value is having its genesis.

One sad relapse to the old thinking is the attempt by the government to stimulate jobs by further fuelling the old archeic industries. First it was the banks, then Heathrow and now they are talking of refinancing the car industry. There are very good reasons why the car will fail, and very good reasons why the car should fail. I discuss the many sides on my web page, but to me the most damaging is the rise of the supermarket. When people drive to the shops they can travel further and carry more. It destroys local shops and communities as all products are brought under one roof. It leads to less frequent shopping, more food storage, more packaging and more centralised food distribution. That encourages road usage and diminishes the impact of local agriculture. It centralises capital and gives increased powers to supermarkets who then use this to drive prices down and thus exploit farmers, livestock and the countryside. Food quality reduces, animal welfare reduces, environment reduces, jobs reduce and health reduces while pollution rises. It is a terrible scar on current society. And this is just one side!

As also discussed on my web page things are most efficient when they are shared. Most obviously space is shared. If we cut the world up into individual plots of land we would have to live our whole lives on only 3.5 football pitches - and on the land would have to be the roads, crops, livestock, mining, industry, sewage, waste disposal and everything we use! A remarkable fact! It is only possible because we centralise and share these resources.

Given the advantages of economy of scale and division of labour how odd it is that while supermarkets exploit the power of centralisation we have a transport system going in the opposite way! Instead of giving the money to the car industry why not take this wonderful opportunity to let the dinosaur die and instead fund public transport. The problem is that a public transport system could be created that offered people greater freedom than the car but for less money and with less jobs. The reason is basic economics.

However we have this growing problem that efficiency works against the fundamental tenet of ancient thinking that we must work for what we receive. This is plainly absurd yet the dogma is so entrenched that it seems few people have questioned it. I won't discuss the details but consider returns on capital investment - the backbone of the current division between rich and poor. What work does an investor do? Yet they get handsome returns.

If we make the economy efficient then we will make people unemployed. Yet we are beginning to accept that we must increase energy efficiency to protect the environment and ultimately create a sustainable economy (unless we rapidly work out how to exploit other planets). So with these two competing problems it is only a matter of time before we have to find a way of distribution wealth separately from labour! For now give the car money to the future of transport namely the public transport system.

Middle East n Violence

It is one of the most misunderstood facts of life that "violence begets violence".

There are many aspects to this truth one that I'm sure hasn't escaped many. A people who notoriously experienced one of the most systematic ethnic cleansing ever seen and who know intimately the horror of war seem completely unrestrained in their own dishing out of righteous authority. Oh how they will complain and the Arabs punish them if the tables ever turn again! For now it is the Arabs who complain and the Jews who have the power and upper hand.

This is the insanity which lies at the heart of all us low people. I have been arguing with my mother today in exactly the same way as the Jews and Arabs argue. Everyone thinks they are right (otherwise there wouldn't be sides to any argument). And we all know we don't like to have violence dealt against us, but we act with complete impunity when we have the power.

How can there ever be an end to war and violence when people are actually like this!

The surmounting of sexual desire!

This has been as long a journey as any I've been on : the battle with sexual desire. Why battle with it? Basically because it is not our own, it is an imposter in our freedom! I realised as a kid looking within myself that sadism etc are possbilities which proves that it is not our friend - it is not the type of thing we wish to hold close! It also disturbs us from our seat in search of satisfaction. False relationships are created to satisfy it: the deep down knowing that you only know this girl because of how she makes you feel. The force is very powerful and very painful if not satisfied. It turns our lives upside down, it creates false lives and false wishes simply so it can be served. We become its slaves. Sex is the easy part: Love is its divine tormentor which demands not of our body but of our soul and seeks to crucify us on a life of slavish obedience.

Harsh words for one of life's greatest pleasures: but that weakness of us is the very reason to fear it! So I have battled it with more of less vigour and suffered whenever I gave in!

Of late however the battle has been going my way. I forget how long ago but since getting away from the hampster wheel of work and slowing things down I've developed a resistence to sexual desire. It is still incendiary but I've been losing to wish to love (or the respectful keep off approach to love). I no longer wish to "fall" and "abandon" myself to ecstacy.

Maybe this arises from a firm understanding of the true nature of ecstacy. It is much better achieved through meditation. Sexual ecstacy is very profound but it is powerful and forceful and arises from strong attachments. In an uncertain world - as I've discovered - best not to rest ones hopes on mortal entities. Meditation achieves much more profound states with less strings attached - save only discipline, time and ones own living. Temptation for the flesh and the soul is still huge but finally I seem to have let go of the morring rope and it is drifting slowly off.

It is more like having finally swallowed something that previously had been to large to eat. The whole image of "woman" in my head was too sensational and provocative to enable calmly getting to know. The thought that vulvas, legs, hips, breasts, ovaries(interesting object to view sexually) were all somehow connected with the sexual beauty that is often held in the face and in the image that clothes, hair and other styles create. It is a toxic and potent mix that is simply too vast to comprehend in one go.

It involves smashing the glass illusions which encase the sleeping princesses of beauty. I was considering today this approach:

Why is it that we won't accept just any woman as our life long partner? It is because we are looking for something in particular. If we examine that something in particular it is probably very trivial indeed. It might be that we enjoy sex together. It might be that we get on well, or we are able to have a laugh together. It might be that have a certain look that turns us on. It might be something like hair, eye, skin. It could be a taste in music, food, sports etc. Or most probably a combination of such things.

But really all people are good in one way or another else some just wouldn't ever get a partner. If we were marooned on a desert island with one other person (of appropriate sex) it is no longer the right person that really worries us but rather that they are not the wrong person. Anything else is manageable.

What it boils down to is simply a choice. We chose a partner not unlike a car or a house. In a big city the choice is big and we spend longer looking. In a small village we make a quick decision. On a desert island we take what we can get.

That choice is not much to do with the business of sex. Rights bits and pieces then we got sex no problem. Its about the mental fabric. They call it chemistry and indeed it is exactly that. But the impact isn't biological but mental. On a desert island I really don't think people would be much fussed by the chemistry! Ok so our kids "benefit" from chosing a partner with different gene pool from our own - but it isn't important.

So amongst the deducable points from this are these. (1) The idea of the "right one" is an absurd myth simply made all the worse by the millions of potential mates we meet day to day. Maybe we would be blissfully happy with 1 in 500 or maybe even 1 in 100 random mates depending upon how easy going and tolerant we are. The mystery of the perfect connection is myth. (2) That most if not all of our preferences are just fetish and create a superficial veil of illusion that is paper thin and unsubstantial. Directly sexual cues are maybe not so trivial but you only need to see the diversity of orientations to see that even this is maybe trivial. Certainly in homosexuality the arguments for one taste over another are paper thin. In heterosexuality it is arguable that reproduction and offspring fitness are cues in mate selection so confering some importants - and just thinking here evolutionary biology must be considered by radical homosexuals to be hegemonically socially constructed - given that the prevailing sexuality has been hetero whose agenda is suited by it?

What we are left with for sure is just the tenuous, temporary and fraught pleasure available from sexuality. The pleasure itself is fruitless with no beneficial results as it evaporates into the ether. Once the mythology is shattered those who seek complete liberation have the strength to walk away from this most enfatuating feature of life!

Of Numbers, Ratios, Fascism, Value

So the Greeks viewed geometry in terms of ratios of lengths and sides and stuff hence pythagoras's famous equality etc.

Ratios and equations are directly analagous to weighing scales. Sadly but true it was merchants and accountants whose trade necessitated and began the art of numbers and maths.

It occurred to me today that all numbers can be seen as ratios. Nothing new but never seen clearly to me before...

In elementary algebra we are taught to treat terms separately ... i remember as a kid trying to get my head around the rules : "3a + 4b = 7ab" seemed sensible that is 3 apples and 4 pears makes a pile of 7 apples and pears... not so. The point here is that numbers in reality are of "types" of things which means that we are comaring like with like! A pile of 3 apples is in a ratio of 3 to a pile of 1 apple. It is not in a ratio to a pear. The number 1 then arises through my old enemy of self-reference: everything is in a ratio of 1 to itself. But this is not a self-reference problem because the reference is external to the entity: when we say that an apple weighs as much as itself a priori we imagine an apple on both sides of a scale: but the scale is external to the apple. The self-reference problem is an entity which is by its own nature self-referential e.g. a scale which weighs itself. This annoying problem like a tooth ache still awaits solution.

When we measure the number of things we are not making any qualitative statement about the thing itself. 3 apples does not tell us what an apple is. To say that something is 100 miles long doesn't actually tell us how much space it occupies it simply tells us the ratio of this length to the length which we call a mile. We try to make sense of distances like a thousand miles by taking what we humanly know of a mile and do a bit of mental addition. Of course that mental addition is unrealilistic. 1000 miles is alot more than two 500 mile walks!

My criticisms of economy, employment, capitalism, politics have been aimed recently at the psychology of power and the misuse of people by one another. It is dawning on me that there is another illness in the system - a misunderstanding of numbers. I scanned a book a few weeks ago on this very subject and it has left an impression. David Boyle's "Tyranny of Numbers" looks at first scan as off the pulse but actually it explains more of the ills than my own analysis so far.

It is because we feel knowledgeable about things when we see the numbers, because we feel we know whales by a statistic of their size, or we know the sun by a statistic of it's surface heat, or know the concentration camps by a statistic of the body count. But this is accountant thinking. Does an accountant know an apple when we reads the receipt for 10 apples?

This is at the route of the old saying "knowing the price of everything but the value of nothing".

Value is Quality as Robery Pirsig would say (Zen and the Art of Motor Cycle maintenance) while Number of Quantity as we are familiar with.

You cannot know value when you have numbers, and judgements based on number are void of quality - that is disrespectful of the things being counted - that is in the terminology of this blog; fascism. It is not money that is at fault but numbers, and I propose experimentally that it is not Nazis at fault but numbers.

So far only Natural and Rational numbers have been discussed. A student of Pythagoras discovered - and was drowned for the heresay (Pythagoras in the midst of Nazi number madness) - a group of numbers that do not exist in a ratio to the numbers so far discussed. These are the irrational numbers things like e and pi. They can only be generated by infinite sums of the numbers so far discussed. Here my analogy between ratios and numbers collapses and numbers spin off out of worldly orbit.

Numbers are certainly an odd world, quite removed from qualitative value based reality: yet intersecting with this reality in qualitative concepts like ratio. You can use the methodology of ratio to get a number (more commonly called measuring e.g. 10cm is a length in a ratio of 10:1 with a cm i.e. 10 cm end to end) but you can't then measure the methodology. This has been my argument for many decades against science it doesn't have the tools for self analysis. It is the self-reference problem.

However I must add that pi cannot be measured since it does not lie in a ratio to anything: but we can determine an indefinitely accurate ratio which is as good as measurement. Somehow we have escaped the limitations of our human world of indefinite quality to postulate the existence of exact entities which lie in infinity - how Platonic is that! The mind is certainly greater than reality (greater in a qualitative not quantitative way - how could you measure the mind: What is the meaning when a ruler measures itself?).