the politician, who is bought off with bananas, and
whose job it is to protect the Alpha-males (in the banks),
as they take everybody else's bananas.
The good thing is that this Alpha shit usually burns itself
out. You need broader support for steady growth,
or else somebody else is gonna invade your wood,
while you were getting lazy and inefficient.
So, when society retrenches, there must be a sign of
change, of blood perhaps?
Rich criminals should also go to jail.
Economist (wait, he's good) Robert Frank has a lot to say
about how anthropological movements can stymie
the bankers, and neo-libs,
and shows that not much else will do the job. You wanna
get invaded while 99% are starving and the effete 1%
are running things, with everybody all lazy, for their own
reasons? Recipe for disaster.
SORRY: I just inadvertently described the UK, there.
Totally moribund,
rotten apple with a thin peel of banking corruption.
Transcript from a BBC Radio 4 program:
Radio
4 Analysis -ROBERT Frank- Darwin economy
somebody: “Amos Tversky, who died in the mid-90s - one of the founders, he was a social psychologist - he liked to say, “My colleagues, they study artificial intelligence. Me, I study natural stupidity.” (laughter)”
somebody: “Amos Tversky, who died in the mid-90s - one of the founders, he was a social psychologist - he liked to say, “My colleagues, they study artificial intelligence. Me, I study natural stupidity.” (laughter)”
[INFLATION TRICKLES DOWN- Costick 67]
“FRANK: (laughs) I think we’ve seen an increase in income inequality on this side of the Atlantic that’s followed in the wake of the one we’ve seen in the US. In the US it’s gone much further than it’s gone here; and in the UK it will proceed further, I predict, mainly because of market forces. Market forces now amplify the reach of the most talented performers in each domain and makes their actual value in competitive terms greater than it used to be. And that in turn has spawned an enormously inefficient pattern of expenditure escalation. So if you think about the rich, they spend more on coming of age parties for their kids, they build bigger mansions. Not because they’re bad people, but because they have more money. That’s what everybody does when they get more money: they build bigger and buy better. When the rich build bigger, the middle class doesn’t seem annoyed by that - they like the pictures of the mansions, they will tune into the TV shows about the life stories of the rich and famous to see them - but there’s a group just below the rich that’s very heavily influenced by what the rich build. They travel in the same social circles. Maybe now the near rich need a ballroom in their house too because now we have our daughter’s wedding at home, not in a hotel or club. They build bigger. Then the near near rich build bigger and it cascades all the way down. What that means is that the median earner in order to send his kids to a median quality school must spend a whole lot more than before just to achieve that basic goal even though the median real wage is no bigger than it was thirty years ago. And that’s a huge burden for the people in the middle. American weddings now on average cost $28,000 a piece. In 1980, in inflation adjusted terms, $11,000. Does anybody imagine that the people who were getting married in 1980 were happier because their weddings … were less happy because their weddings cost so much less? There was a standard for weddings. They met it, they were happy or not when they got married in both of those years. The extra expenditures were mutually offsetting. They just raised the bar that defined how big a party you had to have to suitably mark that special occasion.”
“FRANK: I’m still struggling with that
question. This to me is the big issue in the sociology of knowledge in the areas
I’ve worked in. The standard economic models - I assume the ones that are
taught here at LSE as well - completely ignore the role of context in shaping
demand. So the utility a consumer gets from his house, it depends only on the
absolute qualities of the house. That’s so transparently not a correct way to
think about that issue. I lived for two years in Nepal, the poorest country on
the Earth. I was a Peace Corps volunteer many years ago there. I lived in a
two-room house. It had no plumbing, it had no electricity, the roof leaked when
it rained hard. None of you would want your friends to know where you lived
here in the UK if you lived in a house like that, but at no moment did I ever
feel ashamed of living in that house. I was proud to entertain guests in it. It
was a nice house compared to the houses that my fellow high school teachers
lived in in that context.”
[WHY
SHOULD WE BE MORAL, WHEN IT’S SUICIDAL?- Costick 67]
“And the argument I pressed on that issue was that the moral emotions have telltale traces that they leave upon the face and the voice, and if there’s something about me that enables you to tell I’m a trustworthy person, yes there’ll be a cost to me, I won’t cheat you even though I could without any probability of being caught, but because you can forecast accurately that I won’t do that, I’m a very valuable employee for you to hire in situations that require trust. So yeah there’s a lot of interesting work I think being done along those lines and it’s again all about the conflict between individual interest and group interest. Cheating is in the individual’s interest in many cases. It’s not in the interest of the group that everyone cheat.”
“And the argument I pressed on that issue was that the moral emotions have telltale traces that they leave upon the face and the voice, and if there’s something about me that enables you to tell I’m a trustworthy person, yes there’ll be a cost to me, I won’t cheat you even though I could without any probability of being caught, but because you can forecast accurately that I won’t do that, I’m a very valuable employee for you to hire in situations that require trust. So yeah there’s a lot of interesting work I think being done along those lines and it’s again all about the conflict between individual interest and group interest. Cheating is in the individual’s interest in many cases. It’s not in the interest of the group that everyone cheat.”
[SYSTEMS
COLLIDE- Costick 67]
“Maurice GLASMAN: Yeah, I’m from London Metropolitan University. I’m interested in the competition between systems within the Darwinian system and I wonder to what extent you think that the social market economy in Germany, which has the vocational training that’s binding on all companies, that has the worker representation on boards - I mean you could describe it in terms of liberty, competition and the common good - is something distinctive from Anglo American capitalism, and how it could be that the social market economy could triumph over the Anglo American model, particularly at a time when it seems to me that the conclusion that many people (including in the Financial Times) are drawing is that Germans should just spend their savings?”
“Maurice GLASMAN: Yeah, I’m from London Metropolitan University. I’m interested in the competition between systems within the Darwinian system and I wonder to what extent you think that the social market economy in Germany, which has the vocational training that’s binding on all companies, that has the worker representation on boards - I mean you could describe it in terms of liberty, competition and the common good - is something distinctive from Anglo American capitalism, and how it could be that the social market economy could triumph over the Anglo American model, particularly at a time when it seems to me that the conclusion that many people (including in the Financial Times) are drawing is that Germans should just spend their savings?”
[TAXING
the RICH- Costick 67]
“FRANK: Here is the point I would make in response to the claim that all taxation is theft. The alternative is what, voluntary taxation? If we had a country with voluntary taxation, here’s what I predict would happen. I predict there wouldn’t be much tax revenue before long. There wouldn’t be much of a government you could fund with the little tax revenue that you’d have. You couldn’t maintain an army. You would be invaded in due course by a country that had an army financed with mandatory taxes that it levied on its citizens and then you would pay mandatory taxes to that government. (laughter)
“FRANK: Here is the point I would make in response to the claim that all taxation is theft. The alternative is what, voluntary taxation? If we had a country with voluntary taxation, here’s what I predict would happen. I predict there wouldn’t be much tax revenue before long. There wouldn’t be much of a government you could fund with the little tax revenue that you’d have. You couldn’t maintain an army. You would be invaded in due course by a country that had an army financed with mandatory taxes that it levied on its citizens and then you would pay mandatory taxes to that government. (laughter)
Paul MASON: I think, Professor
Frank, you might be describing Greece there. (laughter)
FRANK:
Nobody likes taxes, but adults know you have to pay taxes. That’s the price of
a civilised society.”
[Rework
society- Costick 67]
“So, yeah, I think let different national systems experiment with this whole issue of what’s in the collective interest and maybe some will find useful ways of realising the collectively best pathway.”
“So, yeah, I think let different national systems experiment with this whole issue of what’s in the collective interest and maybe some will find useful ways of realising the collectively best pathway.”
Paul ORMEROD: (over) If
we raised taxes to defend ourselves, like the English did you know at the time
of the civil war. You know we’ve got a long tradition of this historically.
----enda few words on "civilisation" from Thomas Jefferson in one of his
books that described the census and topography of Virginia,
but also theorised about the difference in government
between the Indian "savages" and the European savages.
Jefferson, Thomas 1861/1964 "Notes on the state of
Virginia"
London: Harper Torchbooks
pg90 "Very possibly there may have been anciently three
different stocks, each of which multiplying in a long course of time, had
separated into so many little societies. This practice results from the
circumstance of their having never submitted themselves to any laws, any
coercive power, any shadow of government. Their only controls are their
manners, and that moral sense of right and wrong, which, like the sense of
tasting and feeling in every man, makes
a part of his nature. An offence against these is punished by contempt, by
exclusion from society, or , where the case is serious, as that of murder, by
the individuals whom it concerns. Imperfect as this species of coercion may
seem, crimes are very rare among them, insomuch that were it made a question,
whether no law, as among the savage Americans, or too much law, as among the
civilized Europeans, submits man to the greatest evil, one who has seen both
conditions of existence would pronounce it to be the last; and that the sheep
are happier of themselves, than under care of the wolves. It will be said, that
great societies cannot exist without government.
The savages, therefore, break
them into small ones."[COULD BE A STUPID CONCLUSION, OR ADVICE FOR US NOW, AND THE LEVEL OF GOVERNMENT THAT MIGHT WORK for us now- LOCAL- Costick67]
