{"id":402,"date":"2009-04-12T13:36:42","date_gmt":"2009-04-12T21:36:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/?p=402"},"modified":"2009-04-13T04:36:57","modified_gmt":"2009-04-13T12:36:57","slug":"quantum-economics","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/?p=402","title":{"rendered":"Quantum Economics"},"content":{"rendered":"

The past couple of weeks have not been pleasant ones.\u00a0 I have been doing statistics (on the biogeography of waterfowl), and I have been reading about statistics (on the global economic meltdown).\u00a0 I have been delving broadly, if not deeply:\u00a0 postmortems in The Atlantic<\/a><\/em> and Wired<\/a><\/em>; an articulate if foamy rant in Rolling Stone<\/a><\/em>; and perhaps most incisively, the “Margaritaville<\/a>” episode of South Park in which Stan (as Jesus Christ) takes unto himself ther weight of South Park’s sins using only his faith and a Platinum Amex with no spending limit.\u00a0 (Quite honestly, that ep would have contained more insight than all those other articles combined, even without<\/em> the chicken-sacrifice scene.)\u00a0 I have spoken with an investment banker (lucratively retired) who tells me I am right, and argued with a stock broker (nonpracticing) who tells me I am wrong because money is actually the strong nuclear force.\u00a0 I have assimilated the wisdom of a dozen conventions as to the cause of the ongoing financial flameout, and on the matter of its solution.<\/p>\n

The root of the trouble, when you strip away all the jargon about Gaussian copulas and Credit Default Swaps, is debt.\u00a0 The solution is to make it easier for people to get loans.<\/p>\n

Am I the only person to find this a wee bit off-kilter?<\/p>\n

I am but a simple man.\u00a0 My schooling is not in the “real world” of the stock market but in the ivory-tower arcana of biology, ecosystem trophodynamics, and, you know, those parts of the planet that provide food and oxygen and waste filtration.\u00a0 So my perspective is admittedly na\u00efve, but I’m pretty sure that if anyone presented research at a biology conference predicated on the assumption that “Animal X first gets fat, and then goes out foraging for its food”\u2014 well, let’s just say that particular researcher wouldn’t be top of the list for future NSERC funding.\u00a0 And I’m only slightly less confident that this also applies to chemistry, classical physics\u2014 hell, is there any<\/em> natural system in which deficit financing works, in which energy can be spent before it’s acquired?<\/p>\n

I think you’d have to go all the way down to the subatomic realm for that.\u00a0 Virtual-particle pairs.\u00a0 Hawking radiation.\u00a0 But I don’t see a whole lot of practical relevance to the current situation, unless Humanity’s economic models and their practitioners were to be thrown at the event horizon of a black hole (which, granted, may not be a bad idea\u2026).<\/p>\n

And yet everyone, from Obama on down, seem to agree that the way to claw our way back out of our own singularity is to extend credit.\u00a0 We have to fix the finance industry so that Joe Six-pack can get that loan to pay down his mortgage, so that Josephine Julep can send her kid to college.\u00a0 The way to get out of debt, apparently, is to make it easier for us all to get into debt.<\/p>\n

Here’s a wild thought.\u00a0 Has anyone considered that we might want to follow the example of, you know,\u00a0 every other physical system in the universe down to the fucking Planck Length, and burn only the resources that we already have<\/em>? Has anyone considered living within our means?<\/p>\n

Yeah, roll your eyes, Wall-Street boy.\u00a0 I’m being childish and na\u00efve\u2014\u00a0 because of course, so many of life’s essentials are so expensive that nobody would be able to buy anything if it all had to come out of cash-in-hand.\u00a0 How many of us could afford to pay off a house up front?\u00a0 How many could pay four years’ tuition in advance?<\/p>\n

To which I’d respond, that’s circular:\u00a0 that’s using the conditions resulting from a credit-based economy to justify the existence of a credit-based economy.\u00a0 (I might also say, what God died and gave you the inalienable right to a split-level house in the burbs anyway?)<\/p>\n

Okay, so what would I replace the current cart-before-horse economy with?\u00a0 I have one idea, once again inspired by ecological systems:\u00a0 I call it “forest fire economics”, and it will have a cameo role in State of Grace<\/em> (assuming State of Grace<\/em> ever gets off the ground).\u00a0 It’s probably unworkable\u2014 as I say, I’m no expert on the Real World \u2014 but hey, that doesn’t make it any worse than the system we’ve got now.<\/p>\n

More seriously, though, I wonder if we’re even capable of coming up with a real alternative\u2014 not because alternatives don’t exist, but because we’ve wired ourselves into a mindset that constrains our very thoughts within the current framework, that compromises our cognitive ability to contemplate truly radical alternatives.\u00a0 Just this morning a bunch of us were arguing about resources in hand versus those on credit.\u00a0 I invoked a bushel of grain as an example of something solid and useful and real, something that had intrinsic value outside the realm of economic theory.\u00a0 The first question in response was “But what would its market value<\/em> be?”<\/p>\n

If we can’t even think outside this box, how are we ever going to build<\/em> anything out there?<\/p>\n

Still.\u00a0 As I (and many others) have said, I don’t really know what I’m talking about.\u00a0 Anybody want\u00a0 to talk me off this ledge?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The past couple of weeks have not been pleasant ones.\u00a0 I have been doing statistics (on the biogeography of waterfowl), and I have been reading about statistics (on the global economic meltdown).\u00a0 I have been delving broadly, if not deeply:\u00a0 postmortems in The Atlantic and Wired; an articulate if foamy rant in Rolling Stone; and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[34,15,16],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-402","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-economics","category-just-putting-it-out-there","category-rant"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/402","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=402"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/402\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":406,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/402\/revisions\/406"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=402"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=402"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=402"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}