David, thanks for your thoughtful response. The film does present a very simplified, and probably elitist and naive view. I will have a look at the film you referenced and reflect my thoughts back here.
On Sun, May 3, 2020 at 4:49 PM David Eric Smith <desm...@santafe.edu> wrote: > Hi Gary, > > I would put up this one as a constructive reply to your link below, not to > counter but to add alongside: > > https://www.filmsforaction.org/watch/the-power-of-community-how-cuba-survived-peak-oil-2006/ > I am pretty sure I have posted this to the list in the past, but it > remains a strong reference for me. > > Six weeks or two months into a shutdown, with pictures of glittering > skyscrapers in NYC with nobody maintaining them, and yoga people sitting on > posh porches overlooking the forest, I get the impression that something is > being overlooked. If I saw the same video made by a Panamanian immigrant > in Brooklyn, living with 6 family members in a small apartment, I would > feel safer abducting from the anecdotal point of view to a generalization. > > I don’t say that to disagree with the intent of the short video you > circulated, which expresses preferences that I also hold. But all the ways > we create damage, from climate to farmland management to ecosystem > destruction happen partly because it is hard to understand long-term > trajectories from the early stages of transients, and we are particularly > bad at recognizing that transients are that. This little bit of inertia, > while people consume stocks that were in inventory already, does not look > to me like a model for an alternative steady state in barely any respects > (though still a few). I don’t doubt that the maker of the video > understands this and would agree, but he probably sees the end of making > the point as justifying the means of omitting these things. > > I like the Cuban case because it starts to get into the weeds of just how > much _work_ is needed, and how many and how diverse are the problems that > require invention to solve, to significantly re-arrange a social system. I > think the documentary makes the case that the move they made was entirely > in the right direction. The thing that makes it feel real to me is that it > was a lot of work for a modest and very incomplete improvement. To make a > good world will require that kind of work-for-change as a way of life to > which we remain committed over generational timescales. It also required > that the center of mass of the society be going in that direction, and not > just a committed fringe swimming against a current that is all going the > wrong way. The latter nut is one that is seeming particularly hard to > crack. > > Many thanks, > > Eric > > > On May 3, 2020, at 10:05 PM, Gary Schiltz <g...@naturesvisualarts.com> > wrote: > > 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 <desm...@santafe.edu> > 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, <thompnicks...@gmail.com> < >> thompnicks...@gmail.com> 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 >> thompnicks...@gmail.com >> https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/ >> >> >> .-. .- -. -.. --- -- -..-. -.. --- - ... -..-. .- -. -.. -..-. -.. .- ... >> .... . ... >> 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 >> archives: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/ >> FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ >> >> >> .-. .- -. -.. --- -- -..-. -.. --- - ... -..-. .- -. -.. -..-. -.. .- ... >> .... . ... >> 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 >> archives: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/ >> FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ >> > .-. .- -. -.. --- -- -..-. -.. --- - ... -..-. .- -. -.. -..-. -.. .- ... > .... . ... > 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 > archives: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/ > FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ > > > .-. .- -. -.. --- -- -..-. -.. --- - ... -..-. .- -. -.. -..-. -.. .- ... > .... . ... > 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 > archives: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/ > FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ >
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