Phoenicians use of steles and local environment in conjunction with their astronomy fits the pattern of other uses of Indigenous orality and memory.

Link this example to other examples delineated by Lynne Kelly and others I've found in the ancient Near East.

How does this example potentially fit into the broader framework provided by Lynne Kelly? Are there differences?

Her thesis fits into a few particular cultural time periods, but what sorts of evidence should we expect to see culturally, socially, and economically when the initial conditions she set forth evolve beyond their original context? What should we expect to see in these cases and how to they relate to examples I've been finding in the ancient Near East?

Refinement is a social process. Sadly it can also be accelerated, often negatively, by unintended socio-economic forces.

The dominance and ills created by surveillance capitalism within social media is one such result driven by capitalism.

I'm reminded of a reference recently to Republicans being upset that poor people of color would "waste" their money on frivolities like manicures and fake fingernails instead of on food or other necessities. How might this tie into the argument made in this book?

Ah, so that's how it works. Instead the going to a tax giveaway for aviation, the money goes into RnD and training.

Das Konzept des Marktversagens geht davon aus, dass Märkte ohne politisch/institutionelle Regulierunge funktionieren könnten.

https://thehustle.co/would-you-take-free-land-in-rural-america/

If house flipping is viewed as a driver of inequality in crowded housing markets in larger cities, what spurs it on? What do the economics look like and how can the trend be combatted?

What effect does economic speculation have?

When pushing through ideas like the Homestead Act of 1862, one needs to additionally consider the long arc of history and plan for secondary level changes in decades or centuries hence. It may have been an economic boom for 50 years or so (and shouldn't giving away all that land account for something like that?) but what happens when that economic engine dies from lack of planning?

Could the land and space be given back to indigenous peoples again? Could it be given to immigrant populations which might have different economic drivers for their lives and concerns?

This sounds great, but what are the "costs" on the other side? How does one balance out the economics of this sort of housing situation versus amenities supplied by a community in terms of culture, health, health care, interaction, etc.? Is there a maximum on a curve to be found here? Certainly in some places one is going to overpay for this basket of goods (perhaps San Francisco?) where in others one may underpay. Does it have anything to do with the lifecycle of cities and their governments? If so, how much?

All this demonstrates is the amorality of capitalism. Ham is richer, but also an immoral propagandist for a demented worldview.

good discussion here of the spectrum of the meanings of the word communism.

https://www.noemamag.com/the-other-invisible-hand/?utm_source=indieweb&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=indieweb

Raw capitalism mimics the logic of cancer within our body politic.

Folks who have been reading David Wengrow and David Graeber's The Dawn of Everything are sure to appreciate the sentiment here which pulls in the ideas of biology and evolution to expand on their account and makes it a much more big history sort of thesis.

We definitely need aphorisms like this embedded into our political and economic spheres.

Which conditions? How broad are they?

This statement in the framing of biology is quite similar to the framing in anthropology and archaeology that David Graeber and David Wengrow provide in The Dawn of Everything.

Perhaps we should be saying (especially from a political perspective): Cooperation is King!

This is true in so many domains and not just biology.

At what scale might such cooperative efforts fail?

Look at the scale of the bitcoin bros using crypto and bitcoin as a completely selfish endeavor. Has this reached a scale for social failure? (Separate from the end date at which the bitcoin/crypto system completely fails and collapses?)

Human ultrasociality and the invisible hand: foundational developments in evolutionary science alter a foundational concept in economics

December 2014

Journal of Bioeconomics 17(1)

DOI: 10.1007/s10818-014-9192-x

by David Sloan Wilson and John Malcolm Gowdy

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/269637211_Human_ultrasociality_and_the_invisible_hand_foundational_developments_in_evolutionary_science_alter_a_foundational_concept_in_economics

<small><cite class='h-cite via'>ᔥ <span class='p-author h-card'>Jag Bhalla</span> in The Other Invisible Hand - NOEMA (<time class='dt-published'>01/05/2022 12:12:29</time>)</cite></small>

Cross reference: https://hyp.is/g3DHAm5jEey8o3NhnLbsew/www.noemamag.com/the-other-invisible-hand

https://www.ft.com/content/83a14261-598d-4601-87fc-5dde528b33d0

https://getpocket.com/collections/a-guide-to-the-great-resignation

1. On ‘dream economies’ among the Iroquois see Graeber 2001: 145–9. David Graeber. 2001. Toward an Anthropological Theory of Value: The False Coin of Our Own Dreams. New York: Palgrave.

These dreams and vision quests sound suspiciously familiar to Australian indigenous peoples' "dreaming" and could be incredibly similar to much larger and longer songlines in North American cultures.

hundreds of miles of ocean, arm-shells and necklaces in opposite directions. To an outsider, it seems senseless. To the men of the Massim it was the ultimate adventure, and nothing could be more important than to spread one’s name, in this fashion, to places one had never seen.

Not to negate the underlying mechanism discussed here, but there's also a high likelihood that this "trade" was in information attached to these objects being used as mnemonic devices.

Read further into the anthropology of these items, their names and histories.

Is it also possible that these items may have served the purpose of mnemonic devices as a means of transporting (otherwise invisible) information from one area or culture to another?

Can we build evidence for this from the archaeological record?

Relate this to the idea of expanding the traditional "land, labor, capital" theory of economics to include "information" as a basic building block

Link this to

A thousand years ago, the world was flat, economically speaking. —Chapter 1 of Economy, Society, and Public Policy https://hyp.is/-XJOwkOjEeqNeL-phEONOg/www.core-econ.org/espp/book/text/01.html

I don't think we have to go back even this far. If I recall correctly, even 150 years ago the vast majority of the world's population were subsistence farmers. It's only been since the 20th century and the increasing spread of the industrial revolution that the situation has changed:

Even England remained primarily an agrarian country like all tributary societies for the previous 4,000 years, with ca. 50 percent of its population employed in agriculture as late as 1759. —David Christian, Maps of Time (pp 401) quoting from Crafts, British Economic Growth, pp. 13–14. (See also Fig 13.1 Global Industrial Potential from the same, for a graphical indicator.

entretiens de Royaumont

Quite a pithy remark. Even though some may say it's far too reductionist, I would say reductionism remains the truest mirror of our selves. We're nothing but monkeys, except that we don't throw shit at each other, we throw nukes.

She's talking about monopolies here. How can we break the monopolies of big tech?

Here again is an example of the extreme power of granting corporations the ability to be protected as "people".

This is a great video on the reality of open source software. Open source hardware also faces similar funding issues.

As long as open source is fundamentally dependent on the private sector, it will exist within at best a parasitic relationship. To truly develop an autonomous open source model requires a structural change in funding that allows it to stand alone and apart from corporate sponsorship.

This is a classic chicken-and-egg situation. We want people to sponsor us, but many of those people also work for the private sector. Governments and NGOs may sponsor us, but they also depend on private sector for tax and donation revenues.

This requires a much deeper discussion that unpacks the fundamental assumptions that underpin our economic, social and political systems. The structural challenges of funding open source exposes the constraints of our current system.

Unless we examine the fundamental assumptions by which our current civilization operates, we cannot make the structural changes that would enable open source to reach its full potential, which is maximum access to shared intellectual and material resources for the benefit of all.

It's a bit funny and ironic to think that the communal/peaceful Skywoman would use such a Western-centric phrase like "short end of the stick", which as I understand it has an economic underpinning of a receipt by which the debtor and the lender used marked sticks that were broken apart with one somewhat shorter than the other. When put back together the marks on the stick matched each other, but the debtor got the shorter end. (Reference: Behavioral Economics When Psychology and Economics Collide by Scott A. Huettel; what was his source?)

Compare with etymologies expanded upon here:

The Long Story of The Short End of the Stick by Charles Clay Doyle. American Speech, Vol. 69, No. 1 (Spring, 1994), pp. 96-101 (6 pages), Duke University Press. https://doi.org/10.2307/455954

Which doesn't include the economic reference at all.

This is the million dollar question and requires a lot of science to calculate it.

As much as I like the idea of putting your content out for free, I get that people need to make money if this is the business model. Schools and universities are probably under less pressure to do make a profit but still need to cover basic costs.

The Left’s Covid failure. (2021, November 23). UnHerd. https://unherd.com/2021/11/the-lefts-covid-failure/

This is a whole new sort of "attention economy".

This genre of problem is also one of the most common defenses given by the accused as sort of "boogeyman" meant to silence accusers. How could we better balance the ills against each of the sides in these cases to mitigate the broader harms in both directions?

A new social imaginary of cosmolocality, where we spend most of our time locally, but use information technology as the prime method for nonlocal communication. In other words, replacing transportation with lower footprint communications.

https://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/Cosmo-Localism https://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/Cosmo-Localization https://medium.com/@joseramos_30450/the-cosmo-local-reader-invitation-to-participate-dbcb6248f54b

In the field of production and provisioning systems, cosmolocal production implies designing and sharing designs globally, and downloading the appropriate ones for local clean production, thereby minimizing global supply chains.

Graduated relocalization that begins to replace auto transportation with pedestrian and bike traffic can result in huge decarbonization impacts. This relocalization movement is also an economic reconfiguration, echoing what community economist Michael Shuman refers to as the movement from Wall Street to Main Street - decentralizing centralizing organizations when feasible, and creating more community wealth while decarbonizing unnecessarily long supply chains.

https://michaelhshuman.com/store/

New stories and narratives, in other words, new social imaginaries of viable low carbon life styles can help bring about a shift. By adopting the viable story, it primes individuals to seek technology elements that are designed to fit that new social imaginary.

As mentioned above, community economists Michael Shuman demonstrates how relocalizing can create new patterns of behavior consistent with a desirable future.

The Swiss 2000 Watt society is another example of such a new social imaginary https://www.2000-watt-society.org/what as is Doughnut Economics https://doughnuteconomics.org/

We must engage film-makers, artists, playwrights to create stories of such alternative futures of living within planetary boundaries, doughnut economics and eco-civilizations.

Constructing social imaginaries that are alternatives to the petrocutultural, carbonscape ones is critical to shift the mindset.

Carbon pollution cannot be disentangled from colonialism and social imaginaries must consist of stories that tell alternative futures narratives that address both simultaneously.

Replace petroculture with ecoculture, doughnut economics, living within planetary boundaries and eco-civilization

THIS is it - web 3 is making consumers mutiplicitous - opens marketts WITHIN games, subworlds that can be exploited / marketed to / fashion trends will sweep games, online subcultures (maybe) - people have markeable personas on and off the web, new context for targeted advertising / commerce.

Will cannabalize physical economies?

Accessorize for a zoom meeting - digital suits, etc digital costumes. Something to wear at digital concerts, in games; your Perona will not be birthed into the metaverse clothed, accessorized...

Assets will be portable across platforms.

Compared to what? We have NO IDEA what the standard of living is there, only that inflation is very bad.

Also agreed; measures how much, not how well

A fascinating economic question.

What happens if we extend from one or two countries against each other to multiple countries? What happens when we expand this to the entire world?

As Charles Eliot says in the end:

A precious lesson of the war will be this: Toward every kind of national efficiency discipline is good, and cooperation is good; but for the highest efficiency both should be consented to in liberty.

New stories and narratives, in other world, new social imaginaries of viable low carbon life styles can help bring about a shift. By adopting the viable story, it primes individuals to seek technology elements that are designed to fit that new social imaginary.

The Swiss 2000 Watt society is an example of such a new social imaginary https://www.2000-watt-society.org/what as is Doughnut Economics https://doughnuteconomics.org/

This article fails to recognize the societal benefits of free education. Since the US is all about the individual, this isn't surprising. However, the facts - as evidenced by countries where education is essentially free - is that it increases the societal level of education, which improves so many things, not the least of which is more informed and rational voting.

Each day, there seem to be so many epiphanies. That shift in awareness feels overwhelming. I’m not sure what to do with these realizations, as the next right thing is often uncertain and ambiguous. Charles Eisenstein is drawing me into an exploration of sacred economics.

On Saturday, October 9, after our World Weavers conversation on the topic Matter is Derivative of Consciousness, I was exploring Value Village, a thrift store in Chilliwack, with my wife, Jayne. I came across a book that fits with the theme for our World Weavers conversation on October 23: Shifting from an attention economy to an intention economy.

Sacred Economics

By Charles Eisenstein

Sacred money, then, will be a medium of giving, a means to imbue the global economy with the spirit of the gift that governed tribal and village cultures, and still does today wherever people do things for each other outside the money economy.

Sacred Economics describes this future and also maps out a practical way to get there. Long ago I grew tired of reading books that criticized some aspect of our society without offering a positive alternative. Then I grew tired of books that offered a positive alternative that seemed impossible to reach: “We must reduce carbon emissions by 90 percent.” Then I grew tired of books that offered a plausible means of reaching it but did not describe what I personally, could do to create it. Sacred Economics operates on all four levels: it offers a fundamental analysis of what has gone wrong with money; it describes a more beautiful world based on a different kind of money and economy; it explains the collective actions necessary to create that world and the means by which these actions come about; and it explores the personal dimensions of the world-transformation, the change in identity and being that I call “living in the gift.”

(Page XIX)

Interestingly, this is still all-too-often how business owners, entrepreneurs, and corporations view their own workers.

The big difference between the paranoiac's conspiracy theories and the real ones is that in the fake ones the conspirators are "in it together" and form a like-minded group. In reality, the billionaires would be very happy to through each other under the bus if they could.

So it's not so much that there are real conspiracies as there are a known set of methods and tools - known to everyone, everywhere - that allow this gross power imbalance to be created. These methods and tools are known to all but can only be used by the rich because they are themselves very costly.

This is awfully inflamatory. Why exactly is this company a bottom-feeder? How does it work at others' expense? It's utilizing an underutilized resource and providing some income to landlords that they otherwise wouldn't have.

That I can see there's nothing bad or predatory about what they're doing. If they didn't have physical space, they would (and probably are) sell directly online or pay larger rents in other spaces.

Thousands of pumpkin patches and Christmas tree lots follow the same pattern for ages.

economics

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_MM5_VlMKG8

Bitcoin, currencies, and fragility by Nassim Nicholas Taleb

The most stable currencies are those that are most heavily traded between each other and for actual goods and services.

Some of Bitcoins' problem may be that it is so narrowly traded that it is far too volatile to encourage others to use it.

Leder, J., Lauer, T., Schütz, A., & Gürerk, Ö. (2021). Background Uncertainty Can Increase Risk Aversion in Decision Making. PsyArXiv. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/6s4vf

<small><cite class='h-cite via'>ᔥ <span class='p-author h-card'>Cory Doctorow </span> in Pluralistic: 29 Sep 2021 – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow (<time class='dt-published'>09/30/2021 10:07:35</time>)</cite></small>

https://pluralistic.net/2021/09/29/jubilance/

The technology in advanced cars like the Tesla can be used for repossessing them. Is this an intended or unintended consequence?

Cory Doctorow estimates that mass surveillance technology has enabled an efficiency of two orders of magnitude between the East German Stasi (1:60) and the American NSA (1:10,000) which provides a huge productivity gain for guard labor to enable massive wealth inequality.

The original meaning of free market was a "market free from rents," in which unproductive credtors are not allowed to place a private tax on productive manufacturers. (ie, it's harder to be a leech on the productive sector.)

Must the cost of defense exceed the productive sector or simply come near enough it by a percentage?

Thomas Piketty indicates that inequality self-corrects when market economies collapse, an inevitable function of the inability to guard against lenders' fortunes when the inequality becomes too great.

Thomas Piketty's r > g shows that meritocracy is a lie in that the richest people aren't the ones that do the best or most productive work, but simply those who start of rich.

Michael Hudson's thesis, apparently with nods to Babylonian history of the jubilee, is that without a way to escape the burden of debt, all productive labor becomes captured by servicing debt and causes economies to grind to a halt.

With this description, I want to read Michael Hudson's work.

Great summary of Piketty's book.

Is the fact that these exist a function of how quiet and unknown these can be within a small subset of select society? Because the're not more common or commonly known, the average person isn't aware (not helped by the complexity of the details) on a daily basis and thus they can continue on helped by politicians in power who can be lobbied (or otherwise captured).

<small><cite class='h-cite via'>ᔥ <span class='p-author h-card'>Cory Doctorow</span> in Pluralistic: 29 Sep 2021 – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow (<time class='dt-published'>09/30/2021 09:17:09</time>)</cite></small>

The latest installment of Propublica's essential IRS Papers reporting shows how the richest Americans abuse a bizarre loophole to avoid ANY tax on indescribably vast estates:

https://www.propublica.org/article/more-than-half-of-americas-100-richest-people-exploit-special-trusts-to-avoid-estate-taxes

While we've generally moved beyond chattel slavery, I'm struck by the phrase frenzy for limitless profit that comes from capitalistic agriculture. Though we don't have slavery, is American culture all-too captured by the idea of frenzied capitalism to the tune that the average American (the 99%) is a serf in their own country? Are we still blinded by our need for (over-)consumption?

Are we recommitting the sins of the past perhaps in milder forms because of a blindness to an earlier original sin of capitalism?

Do we need to better vitiate against raw capitalism with more regulation to provide a healthier mixed economy?

The irregularity of the work day of the common people in the 17th and 18th centuries ran counter to the desires of both moralists and mercantilists.

What might this tension tell us about both power structures both then and today?

While specialization since that time has increased the value of goods we produce, does it help in the value of our lives and happiness?

We attend to time in large measure as a need to be able to synchronize our work.

Early example of a watching being a store of value and credit.

William Pitt (the younger) assessed a tax on clocks and watches from July 1797 to March 1798 and it didn't go well. One would suspect it was the case that those who purchased them were the richer upper-classes (as argued above in the piece) who had the power and wealth to vitiate against such taxation.

Presumably if the masses were the target, the tax may have stayed.

This sort of power seems to ensconce racist policies.

Recall that we measure what we find important. This fashion of timekeeping was a tool for wielding power over others to acquire wealth.

I wonder at the history of counterfeit goods. At what point in a market does it typically begin to happen? Is there some level of profit margin which kicks in due to lack of competition? What are the effects of brand within the space of fashion?

Eternal struggle of competition here. The workers (and the poet) admonish that one compares themselves against their neighbors (competitors) than simply themselves.

The fix for this is for the leadership/bosses to participate themselves to see if the yield isn't as good as it might otherwise be. So much could be fixed if the "boss" is involved in the actual work or physically on site at least some of the time to experience what is going on. Participation counts.

Time is now currency: it is not passed but spent.

Some of this essay shows the change in conceptualization of time and its use. Identifying it as currency certainly happened over time.

What else might we equate with time besides money? Happiness instead? Measure it in leisure instead of solely by capitalism?

Among the Nandi an occupational definition of time evolved covering not only each hour but half hours of the day.

This reminds me of hearing attorneys journaling their day down to 7 1/2 minute increments for billing their clients.

But based on science and with computers, we're now able to discriminate things down to the time it takes atoms to vibrate and we can date and timestamp things in our worklives to the nth degree. Even this post will have a timestamp on it down to the thousandth of a second.

Improved interoception may be a usefu skill for functioning in the world.

How might one improve this ability? Can it be trained?

I posted this article in the class Slack for a couple of reasons. First, this particular argument reminds me of Benjamin, which we're currently reading, and how she shows that the problem of underexposure wasn't taken seriously until it interfered with capital. But, second, I also used it to point out that despite that, it's important to remember that we sometimes have to make arguments for specific audiences--i.e., that it isn't necessarily that Daley only cares about workplace productivity, or even that she prioritizes it, but that she's writing for an audience that does prioritize workplace productivity over basic humanity. So, the rhetorical situation may call for making such an argument rather than appealing to humanity, morality, or equity.

What happens to this graph when we overlay pure capitalism instead of a mixed economy? What if this spectrum was put on a different axis altogether? What does the current climate of the United states look like when graphed out on it. Which parts have diminished over the past 50 years with the decrease in regulation?

Some of these areas benefit heavily by government intervention and regulation.

We need the ability to better protect both common and public goods.

definitions:

• rivalry: does use by one person physically preclude use by others?
• excludability: do laws prohibit access to these goods?

Real world role of POLIS

In-game role of POLIS

POLIS - the governance token

ATLAS - the in-game currency

Star Atlas' Economics.

Economic gain is the ever present underlying motive for wars.

Notice the tying in of things kept together in an economic context. How does this relate to the commonplacing of ideas (or even the gathering of flowers with florilegia)?

I like the differentiation that Jared has made here on his homepage with categories for "fast" and "slow".

It's reminiscent of the system 1 (fast) and system2 (slow) ideas behind Kahneman and Tversky's work in behavioral economics. (See Thinking, Fast and Slow)

It's also interesting in light of this tweet which came up recently:

I very much miss the back and forth with blog posts responding to blog posts, a slow moving argument where we had time to think.

— Rachel Andrew (@rachelandrew) August 22, 2017

Because the Tweet was shared out of context several years later, someone (accidentally?) replied to it as if it were contemporaneous. When called out for not watching the date of the post, their reply was "you do slow web your way…" #

This gets one thinking. Perhaps it would help more people's contextual thinking if more sites specifically labeled their posts as fast and slow (or gave a 1-10 rating?). Sometimes the length of a response is an indicator of the thought put into it, thought not always as there's also the oft-quoted aphorism: "If I Had More Time, I Would Have Written a Shorter Letter".

The ease of use of the UI on Twitter seems to broadly make it a platform for "fast" posting which can often cause ruffled feathers, sour feelings, anger, and poor communication.

What if there were posting UIs (or micropub clients) that would hold onto your responses for a few hours, days, or even a week and then remind you about them after that time had past to see if they were still worth posting? This is a feature based on Abraham Lincoln's idea of a "hot letter" or angry letter, which he advised people to write often, but never send.

Where is the social media service for hot posts that save all your vituperation, but don't show them to anyone? Or which maybe posts them anonymously?

The opposite of some of this are the partially baked or even fully thought out posts that one hears about anecdotally, but which the authors say they felt weren't finish and thus didn't publish them. Wouldn't it be better to hit publish on these than those nasty quick replies? How can we create UI for this?

I saw a sitcom a few years ago where a girl admonished her friend (an oblivious boy) for liking really old Instagram posts of a girl he was interested in. She said that deep-liking old photos was an obvious and overt sign of flirting.

If this is the case then there's obviously a social standard of sorts for this, so why not hold your tongue in the meanwhile, and come up with something more thought out to send your digital love to someone instead of providing a (knee-)jerk reaction?

Of course now I can't help but think of the annotations I've been making in my copy of Lucretius' On the Nature of Things. Do you suppose that Lucretius knows I'm in love?

Nice overview of work in the space for fixing monopoly in social media space the at the moment. I hadn't heard about Fukuyama or Daphne Keller's versions before.

I'm not sure I think Dorsey's is actually a thing. I suspect it is actually vaporware from the word go.

IndieWeb has been working slowly at the problem as well.

This is definitely a problem and a bigger one since the 2008 recession.

Economic recovery for the masses took ages while the economic recovery for the wealthier was nearly instantanous.

What is the relationship to the recession with the rise of the Tea Party?

Will the pandemic recession do better since there seems to be more focus on the lower classes than the upper? The upper classes (and certainly the billionaires) apparently did incredibly well.

This seems a solid microcosm of the idea of of privatizing profits and socializing the losses.

It also fits at the corporate level where a CEO who makes a horrible decision can wreck a company, but the low level blue collar worker or even low level white collar worker who steals hand tools or office supplies faces much larger consequences.

It's much harder to and more complicated to hold power to account, but we're obviously failing miserably at it in American society. How might we incrementally improve this situation. We desperately need it.

Humanitarianism and international engagement are definitely important, but their value is often made invisible to "Real America" or "middle America".

How can this value be made more apparent? How could we account for it to make it easier to see?

The issue is compounded when large corporations receive massive bailouts as it's an additional cost weighing down the system. Would humanitarianism and international engagement be easier to uphold if we left off corporate costs? Do most of the value of humanitarianism and international engagement redound to corporations as an additional value primarily to them rather than everyday people? Is their perceived problem that they're another method of privatizing profits to major corporations and elites and socializing the losses to the average person?

This is a strong statement.

Are there other levers? What might they be?

If it is the only lever, has the split in America made things too difficult to allow patriotism to come back? Especially in a more global marketplace where countries now are more inter-reliant?

These ideas of patriotism apply generally to me. Perhaps some of it is the result of extreme nationalism at the end of the 1800s which broadly caused the two World Wars of the 1900s.The new rise of populism also doesn't make nationalism a valuable thing.

Also tied into this change is the rise of globalism and the global marketplace which devalued some of the "made in America" sort of nationalism of the 1970s and 1980s.

How much of my thesis about the massive shifts of consumption and production related to globalism fits into this sort of nationalism? When might the playing field equilibrate? Equilibration is going to rely on not having a World War III which may only serve to break things further apart?

Similar to Abraham Lincoln forcing America to stick together to make it what it was, what will future leaders have to do/sacrifice to hold the world together until the economics of the first, second, and third worlds equilibrate?

This rings true to me. How can we reverse this tide?

A solid question.

Perhaps less mysterious when gauged against the extreme financialization of our economy since the 1970's.

Are these people primarily propping up our classist structures to the lack of all else?

What could be done to re-regulate things back into some semblance of balance?

How much of the financialization is strip mining the lower classes or even middle classes of their earnings and retirements in progressively more vicious economic downturns that get bailed out by the populace?

Would allowing companies that are "too large to fail" help right the system and push more wealth back down to the lower classes?

Class stratification helps to create not only racist policies but policies that enforce the economic stratification and prevent upward (or downward) mobility.

I believe downward mobility is much simpler for Black Americans (find reference to OTM podcast about Obama to back this up).

How can we create social valves (similar to those in the circulatory system of our legs) that help to push people up and maintain them at certain levels without disadvantaging those who are still at the bottom and who may neither want to move up nor have the ability?

This statement generally rings true to me. The collapse of cultural and local institutions (Lions Club, Elks Club, etc.) hasn't helped to bring different classes together.

Some of this has been fueled by social media as well.

Smart America can also afford more expensive tickets, so even mixing classes at baseball games is less frequent on an economic scale as well.

This is a solid example of the sort of rose colored glasses too many had for technology in the early 2000s.

Was this instance just before the tech bubble collapsed too?

What was the state of surveillance capitalism at this point?

The deregulation part has hurt us immensely. Cross reference this with the thesis found in American Amnesia by Jacob S. Hacker and Paul Pierson.

Which parts of the Democratic party went along with this? Evidence? More of the deregulation parts seemed to be identified with the Republican party.

Interesting to note the time period of this peak, which broadly coincides with Brown vs. Board of Education and desegregation in the 1970s. Did the fluorescence of these others begin as a means of better segregating students either racially or economically?

<small><cite class='h-cite via'>ᔥ <span class='p-author h-card'>Greg Rosalsky</span> in Products Are Shrinking. Beware Of 'Shrinkflation,' Inflation's Devious Cousin : Planet Money : NPR (<time class='dt-published'>07/22/2021 09:06:12</time>)</cite></small>

https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2021/07/06/1012409112/beware-of-shrinkflation-inflations-devious-cousin

So in addition to sketchy economic and psy-ops practices, they're also engaging in greenwashing as well.

The idea of shrinkflation and the fact that it works indicates that the majority of consumers are not rational actors that classical economics would indicate or they would be much more aware of these changes in pricing.

Another example of this sort are the domed bottoms of jars/bottles which remove product while keeping the same packaging, which further hides the bait-and-switch operation.

Hillary Clinton: 472 counties = 64% US GDP

Donald Trump: 2584 counties = 36% US GDP

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examples of upper-class supremacy

This seems an interesting sociological issue. What is the root cause? Is it the economic sense of "keeping up with the Jonses"? Is it a zero-sum game? really?

A major archiving issue in the digital era is that libraries are no longer the long term storage repositories they have otherwise been for the past two thousand years.

What effects will this have on the future? Particularly once the financial interests of the owning companies no longer exists?

This sounds like a positive move, but will require a lot of government regulation/oversight.

Placing caps on runaway capitalism and meritocracy could be required to keep us from killing ourselves.

Think about this and the ultimate consequences. Polarized verses compressed meritocracy sounds intriguing, but could also be the wrong framing or working at the wrong issue.

Quote from Daniel Markovitz

This does raise the point of whether or not some of the things elites are doing is actually good or productive for society. Many are only working at privatizing profits and socializing losses which can be phenomenally caustic to society as well.

Do we actually need social mobility?

Social mobility and the goods it can purchase can be a useful social motivation.

However, social mobility for the poorest amoungst us would be good, but how much additional marginal good does society derive from continued social mobility of the middle and upper classes continuing to gain wealth and moving up?

Perhaps there's a myth of social mobility confounding the issue with the myth of meritocracy as well.

Certainly the idea of raw capitalism without caps is at play as well. Could providing better governmental oversight of this be a helpful factor for society? (At least American society at the moment? As international competition may drive other broader problems vis-a-vis other pieces of global domination...)

This all seems logical and certainly plays a part, but I still think it's more complicated. This is a feedback "engine" that has been installed since ~1970 and exacerbated by the 1980s.

There's likely still a leisure class above this compounding the effects.

What if we look at meritocracy from a game theoretic viewpoint?

Certainly there's an issue that there isn't a cap on meritocratic outputs, so if one wants more wealth, then one needs to "simply" work harder. As a result, in a "keeping up with the Jones'" society that (incorrectly) measures happiness in wealth, everyone is driven to work harder and faster for their piece of the pie.

(How might we create a sort of "set point" to limit the unbounded meritocratic cap? Might this create a happier set point/saddle point on the larger universal graph?)

This effect in combination with the general drive to have "power over" people instead of "power with", etc. in combination with racist policies can create some really horrific effects.

What other compounding effects might there be? This is definitely a larger complexity-based issue.

Financialization of the economy may indicate that this isn't the case. What labor is really being done? Isn't more of it built on information and information flows?

These numbers definitely need to be checked.

What level of rich are we talking about with this comparison? The uber-rich or the rich?

The rich need at least some level of education to prevent themselves from being scammed certainly, but how hard do the uber-wealthy really need to work?

This may be the case for high-earners, but where do these people sit with respect to the higher elite or "leisure class"?

Are these hard working high-earners a new class of people that has emerged that aren't the previous elite of the mid-1900s?

What effect does the rise of finacialization (versus manufacturing or service sectors) since the 1970's have on this shift? Did these high-earners arise out of a hole in the market to service the elites on the highest rung up to make their wealth grow faster?

There seems to be a hole in this argument with respect to the prior quote:

Fifty, 60, 70 years ago, you could tell how poor somebody was by how hard they worked. Today, that relationship has been completely reversed. Elites work for a living. They work harder than they used to. They work harder in terms of brute hours than the middle class on average, and they get most of their income by working.

So much here to unpack...

This animated film is a collaboration between economist Kate Raworth, puppet designer Emma Powell and song writer Simon Panrucker.

<small><cite class='h-cite via'>ᔥ <span class='p-author h-card'>juanjosefernandez</span> in 📚-reading (<time class='dt-published'>06/04/2021 16:32:12</time>)</cite></small>

<small><cite class='h-cite via'>ᔥ <span class='p-author h-card'>Maria Farrell</span> in What is Ours is Only Ours to Give — Crooked Timber (<time class='dt-published'>05/18/2021 11:28:17</time>)</cite></small>

<small><cite class='h-cite via'>ᔥ <span class='p-author h-card'>Maria Farrell</span> in What is Ours is Only Ours to Give — Crooked Timber (<time class='dt-published'>05/18/2021 11:28:17</time>)</cite></small>

Apparently lots of reading to catch up on here.

I definitely like the idea of starting with the commons and working backwards, not only with respect to data, but with respect to most natural resources. This should be the primary goal of governments and the goal should be to prevent private individuals and corporations from privatizing profits and socializing the losses.

Think of an individual organism in analogy to a country or even personkind. What do we call a group of cells that grows without check and consumes all the resources? (A cancer). The organism needs each cell and group of cells to work together for the common good. We can't have a group of cis-gender white men aggregating all the power and resources for themselves at the cost of the rest otherwise they're just a cancer on humanity.

A quiet nod here in it's own right. Now I want to dig into Elinor Ostrom's research and work.

The dominant culture being in a position of power and wealth makes it far easier to direct the future to ensure that the dominate culture stays in power and wealth.

How does one "break this wheel" of power?