What might a positive economics be?

I’m always struck that “economics” is so generally the reason we can’t do what’s needed. Those of us who teach it often refer to it as ‘war by other means’ (said of diplomacy too). We have our own jargon -macro-micro monetary-fiscal abrabloodycadabra.  These days we tend to go straight for models and arithmetic and cut out thinking altogether.

This means if it seems sensible to have more and better equipped cops (and let’s face it, there’s no shortage of labour) to improve our quality of life through more freedom from crime, we can’t have them because they will be a cost – we even end up cutting jobs and equipment budgets.  Sensible ideas like renovating and greening our housing stock can’t be done for the same reason.  It’s better to “employ” people to do nothing on the dole!  I make no apologies for saying this isn’t clever, it’s fucking stupid.  The ultimate “success” of current economics is about consuming stuff that makes us fat, unhealthy and childlike as we breed ourselves into poverty and war and resource annihilation.

A positive economics needs to start with a list of what we want to achieve and the barriers to this.  I’d say the first issue is one of world population control.  This has more or less tripled in my lifetime, just as the more advanced countries have curbed that of their indigenous peoples.  A very thorny issue, yet we’re reaching the point of competition for air and land exhaustion.  Our main means of population control has been the education of women and making kids too expensive.

The next is some form of reasonable equality combined with innovative conservation of capital and the work that produces it.  This means full employment and probably radical changes in employment relationships.focused on dignity.  I guess we could more than get by on a 30hour, three-day week and a 40 week year and raise living standards and quality of life.  This is a radical change and we need to understand our current practices are feudal, medieval and broadly neurotic.  We are now massively productive.  Half of all French workers in 1958 worked on the land and all our economies were once agrarian. We need to harness modern productivity to quality of life, not work as serfs to profit as in the Domesday Book.  Our work ethic is out of date.

The point of economics would be to ensure funding for work that needs doing.  We have ceded this role to banks – nearly all money is now created by them and allocated as credit.  Current disasters have all been to do with their failure to put the money into the right investments and we should return to primitive banking with bankers on wages.  I wouldn’t ring fence the rest, but arrest in large numbers and bury the speculative dross and its restrictive practices as surely as the ‘Amalgamated Union of Holeborers’.

I see plenty of room for markets (even Lenin did) but these need to be free of insider trading, algorithms, derivatives and accounting practices that hide failure to the very point of draining the swamp after we’re up to our arses in alligators.  We need to wrench capitalism back from favoured oligarchs and parasitic ‘speed’.

Deep questions remain in any of this (and much more) -not least what must replace greed and massive accumulation – or for that matter the fear of poverty as a work motivator and how we could still ‘discipline’ work.and provide some form of productive leisure for the social animals we are.

Perennial problems of world peace, despotic creeps, chronic religionists and bandits still prevail and we need ideas on this beyond vapid assertions on the wonder of human nature.  We’ve been living under an American umbrella that has been a holocaust of ‘killing hope’ for others.  The maintenance of this has required the beggar thy neighbour economics to keep military superiority and I for one don’t want to give this up to a bunch of the ‘wrong Mullahs’.

That economics isn’t democratic is obvious in history and our democracies have wilted in corruption.  We clearly don’t want to create a situation in which getting work done is like herding cats.

Yet what is work now?  We know that if you haven’t got any you’re likely to be poor or very rich.  What does work make?  We would rather give it to North Koreans in Mongolia (paying the clown dictator) than our own.  We can’t afford cops, yet we can afford Rooney and the half-assed media circuit of celebrities and news poodles.  We aren’t housing our people and creating a green economy, but can have Xmas cheer in the form of plastic crap from China.

The positive questions really concern whether we can trust ourselves with a more rational system and prevent any ‘darkness at noon’ and iron cage of bureaucracy.  In the meantime we have nurses chatting whilst old patients starve – and a probable 15% unemployment while all sorts of things can’t be done.  We need a leveling and this will come through war unless we can establish a more rational way.

The ideas are around and the analysis could be done.  We are apathetic.  Another key issue to addfress,

 

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Climate Change Facts

http://royalsociety.org/climate-change-summary-of-science/ links to a Royal Society page from which a short PDF on climate change can be obtained.  It’s a good all round guide.

I’ve noticed over the years that it’s much easier to find cranks and interest group hacks than any of the real science.  I’m not a climate scientist, but accept most of what is said on the problem in my understanding of science and argument.  My friend Sam suggests the video found at http://sustainable.gather.com/viewArticle.action?articleId=281474979327535

and I sympathise.  My friends will point out that I obviously can’t change the weather as it’s so lousy at Test matches.

The real debate is that we have no politics or public dialogue, despite the Internet.  It’s my belief it’s this that stops us being different from other animals.  Like them we remain merely ‘thrown’ in evolution, thinking Hamlet or Goethe more than stilted devil rituals.  I don’t really know what to say on the content of ‘global warming’ – and this is the point.  I live knowing we are apathetic other than to illusory pleasures in our freezing moral climate.

To deny climate change is to call many people who put their ideas up to public demonstration liars.  I have found liars to like secrecy and spin control of what we would want to see for argument.  Like bankers who claim to be supermen, but look like smug gets, or politicians relying on the liars of ‘National Security’ – they couldn’t tell the truth, could they, for reasons of National Security.

To understand ‘climate change’, we probably need to start in and around Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring – this was not quite accurate in-itself, but sets some tone for understanding just how influenced by interests science is.  If you don’t fall into the pit of believing no one can be trusted, and rather that scepticism works by shutting on and off, I believe you can start to see which arguments hold water and what is just blocking.

I believe all I read in the Royal Society PDF.  It is dangerous art to the current economic tyranny, to which it defers entirely on the matter of what to do.

One wonders what such factual art could change if I taught it.  After all, I teach people (men) more likely to take out a loan 5% higher than a bit of shopping could get them if the offer is accompanied by a pretty female face.  People who will not have an operation if told there is a 15% failure rate and will if told the success rate is 85% – or have children with first cousins on slightly better margins.

I suspect we miss the whole point.  Facts bounce off world-views, usually parochial, or are sucked in stripped of anything that would shift the view.  The dog eaten by the witch, produced in court becomes the evidence she ate it as a witch because it is alive.  Belief in witches prevails, or smaller interests of revenge on a woman, assimilation of her property.

I sense the real issue is control.  We are rightly scared of this.  This history of it in all of us, despite its hagiographers, is one of horror and fear – from the ‘great leaders’ (shits to a man) to peer pressures of fashion, friendship and the wrong-shaped body and cosmetic advertising.  There is no trust in any anarchist slogan of all truth lying in the main destruction, as we fear the rabble who decide as I touch on above.  We, the rabble, fear ourselves most of all.  This is the govern-mentality of ejukation, a taught freedom to conform to evade responsibility in fellowship on bended knee to a point East or to a fashion point.

There is no notion of what their life could be in the facts on climate science, for anyone.  I should have no interest.  My time is done enough to retire to ‘comfortable’ insignificance without the curse of interesting times.  Maybe I feel, like a soldier on reserve turn knowing the front will come back as his energy returns, that death is only a return to the field?  Maybe I just don’t like being a useless old man.  The facts on climate change are much easier to understand.  One can say the same on the human nature and deceit that have got us in the mess and will make it worse.  We need to organise ourselves under a control we can control.  This is not allowed.  I would die a heretic rather than submit to this prime directive.  I always preferred Data to the humans!

Prison notebook on leadership (1)

Classic leadership requires authority.  We can see this in animals, from cockroaches, through pack animals and on to birds and primates.  Leadership is not a human invention, it’s in evolution way ahead of us, unless you godswank.  We can find consensual systems at animal level too – often brutally enforced.  Leadership and consensus can be entirely squalid, and once the shits are in power they are harder to remove than baked on turd with a toothbrush.

I place faith in the idea that we are moving from authority and enforced consensus towards knowledge and evidence based ways forward that are conscious rather than merely instinctual or subject to the ‘survival of the fittest over time’ type of learning.  We know it’s too late to start draining the swamp once we’re up to our arses in alligators, but we have shifted the leadership stain from time to time in human history.  True we live in a septic tank and the really big chunks rise to the top, but we at least have the notion that our leaders can be given a dose of election Domestos from time to time.  The problem is they have both rigged the system and developed immunity.

Current human leadership is drenched in our animal past.  But me no howevers on this one buttfucker!  I’ve met chimpanzees and dogs with more humanity than many of our leaders and our followership of them.  The latest South Park says more than a thousand ships launched to rescue the honour of a man lost through infatuation with a painted whore to a rival.  The one where Cartman ‘fucks’ his mother (google ‘watch ncis online’ and find SP by clicking on ‘other websites’ on the left – ignore downloads and close any ads and you’ll get this week’s).  Imagine Cartman as more or less any politician or jobsworth DPP (etc.) and you’ll get more grip on strategy than from any executive development programme I’ve taught on.