Nature vs. Agriculture

 

The difference between root systems of natural prairie grass and farmed cereal crops graphically explains how we created the dustbowl... pic.twitter.com/DIiLV1qtzZ

— Lu Hersey (@LuWrites) March 23, 2021

Meanwhile, here is an account of how many petroleum inputs just growing leafy greens takes. (Michael Pollan says 10 calories of petroleum to produce one caleorie of food...so not even our agriculture is solar.)

One nexus of bizarre thinking: American Education

In the clusterf*ck that is American education, the bizarre truth is that privatizing (union-busting charter schools), monetizing (bonuses for good teachers) and looking for "value added" (testing to see who is the good teacher) are all things that make perfect sense to an MBA.

Actual science does not validate any of those tactics as producing better educational outcomes. Yet our plutocrats persist, even funding propaganda films like "Waiting for Superman" that tout such strategies as effective. The film points to the Finnish schools as a model to emulate.

And Finnish schools are very good indeed. Oddly enough WFS omits mention that the Finnish teachers are tenured, well-paid and unionized.

What does actually correlate with better educational outcomes? Answer: Childhood poverty. In Finland 2% of children are poor. In the U.S. it's 23%.

One other bizarre corollary is that Federal funding for higher education has declined 55% since 1972. State funding has declined even more dramatically. This leads to high tuition and student debt. It also means professors thinking of flunking students have to think twice because having fewer students, even if they're unqualified, means their funding is in jeopardy.

To top it off, the founders of our MBA programs, like Frederick Winslow Taylor, were con men. Taylor himself admitted he altered his "experimental" results as much as 220% so they would fit his theories.

I could not make this stuff up.

Prevent and reverse heart disease

 

Dog Agility Athleticism

 

Supernormal Stimulus/Buggy software

"Software"--not just the hardware of our physical body--is essential for human perception and action. One example: people born with congenital cataracts were blind because of a physical impediment--an opaque lens in their eyeball (hardware). When medical science invented the cataract operation, surgeons thought they would become sighted once the operation removed that lens. Yet...when they had no more physical, hardware problems, these people still couldn't see. They literally could not distinguish between a circle and a square on a plain background. 

When the doctors advised them to use their gaze as they had been using their touch, to "feel" an object visually, they were finally able to make the distinction. They needed to know how to move their eyes ("software") before they were sighted. Most sighted adults do this so speedily and automatically they aren't aware it's happening...but it is.

In the brain, the visual cortex receives only 10% of its input from the optical nerve, the remaining 90% are connected to language and memory. Normally sighted people construct their vision of the world based on lots of stored patterns learned in early childhood. The "cured" congenital cataract sufferers almost all found the effort to locate and remember patterns of gazing too much trouble, and largely returned to the life they were used to, as blind people.

The story of the congenital cataract sufferers also demonstrates that prejudging--prejudice--is one of the foundations of human perception, and a big time saver. Trying to find someone without prejudice is difficult, if not impossible. That could explain the psychological experiments that confirm 90% of the population has some unconscious racial bias.

The problem with human software, indeed with all software, is that it tends to have bugs, making it susceptible to deception. For vision, our susceptibility to optical illusions is one such bug. 

Even inanimate, computer software has some bugs that occur so frequently that they have names--"race condition" for an infinite processing loop like dividing by zero, a "memory leak" for software that consumes more and more memory until the computer crashes. These are bad programming mistakes, and good programmers catch and handle such errors before they crash the computer. Evolution is still working on a few of these for the living.

There's even bad software in the animal kingdom. Stuart McMillen's Supernormal Stimulus comic reminds us that there's literally no limit to a peahen's appetite for large peacock tails.

 

Research proved peahens would prefer the exaggerated dummies to real peacocks as long as the tail was bigger. 

In addition to optical illusions, humans can also encounter limitations to other software. For example, humans can drink refined sugar all day long without ever receiving the chemical or neurological messages that let us know we have consumed enough calories.

Traditionally, humans have called such infinite appetites "sin," and the seven deadly sins (pride, wrath, greed, gluttony, envy, sloth and lust) are certainly behaviors that have the potential distort sensible needs. We're vulnerable, in varying degrees, to types of addiction that do not always serve us.

Political issue advocates and marketers often take advantage of supernormal appetites for things like safety, health, and fairness. Who can have too much safety, or health, or fairness?

Yet too much safety insulates us from a true experience of the world as it is, a surplus of health is impossible to achieve with aging bodies, and a surplus of fairness would imply the world itself could be fair. There might be exceptional cases that satisfy such appetites, but just because someone wins does not mean buying a lottery ticket is a viable retirement strategy.

Fairness, or deserving is particularly thorny as a supernormal stimulus. We assume good behavior preceded good outcomes, and people who are ill, or out of favor probably deserved that because they were bad people. Our modern understanding of illness tells us sick people are not necessarily bad people, yet despite that understanding the U.S.' carceral state still punishes drug addicts rather than treating them medically. The "war on drugs" treats addicts as enemies.

This predisposition to believe people deserve their circumstances is why cutting welfare has any appeal. Why those poor people are cheats! They would just squander the money if they got it! This conclusion is parroted by those who profit from others' distress, despite studies that disclose income guaranteed poor people gets spent on necessities, not wild parties.

Darwin's observed evolution can make progress, but slowly, and through the death of those who do not adapt to life as it is in their niche.  This is unfortunate for those of us who would like to change our minds rather than die, but all too often people would rather die than change their minds.

From Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right's Steath Plan for America by Nancy Maclean + Debt or Democracy

Recommended reading: Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right's Steath Plan for America by Nancy Maclean

The celebration of wealthy people's rights at the expense of the poor dates from pre-Civil War days, when John Calhoun was the legislative advocate for slavery. Even Andy Jackson called him a traitor and advocated Calhoun be hanged. Some excerpts from the book:

"By 1850, two of every three of the relatively few Americans whose wealth surpassed $100,000 lived below the Mason-Dixon Line. New York at that time had fewer millionaires per capita than Mississippi. South Carolina was the richest state in the Union. The source of southern wealth was staple crops--particularly cotton--produced by enslaved men, women and children for world markets. So matchless were the profits that more money was invested in slaves than in industry and railroads.

...And no one thought harder about how to safeguard those investments than John Calhoun..."

"...one of the first scholars subsidized by [Charles] Koch, the Austrian economist Murray Rothbard, spoke openly of the cause's debt to Calhoun, crediting his class analysis of taxation as foundational to the libertarian cause. 'Calhoun's insight,' Rothbard explained, was 'that it was the intervention of the State that in itself created the classes and the conflict,' not the labor relations of the economy, as previous thinkers believed. ....Most crucially, Calhoun and Rothbard inverted how most people would construe who had power over whom. A man whose wealth came from slavery was a victim of government tax collectors, and poorer voters were the exploiters to watch out for. "

..."Calhoun once summarized his case, 'Slavery is an institution ordained by Providence, honored by time, sanctioned by the Gospel, and especially favorable to personal and national liberty....For all their invocations of the Bible and the era's pseudoscience of race, Calhoun and his peers knew the cold reality that they were practicing a type of captalism that would not pass democratic scrutiny much longer if majority opinion was allowed to prevail in Washington. [So Calhoun relentlessly cast wealthy Southerners as victims]....To Calhoun, by contrast, freedom above all concerned the free use and enjoyment of one's productive property without any impingement by others. If he deemed it necessary to punish one of his workers with '30 lashes well laid on'....[s]uch practices fell under the heading of the property rights that Calhoun was trying to make absolute in a society that, in point of fact, had always regulated property rights in all kinds of ways..."

The 1950's incarnation of Calhoun was a University of Virginia economist named Jim Buchanan, whose work Koch subsidized. His economic theories are exactly what the libertarian right is trying to implement now. These are coherent, and come from a theorist, so, just as the Soviets had Marx, Kochs have Buchanan.

Because what they're promoting is so unlikely to pass democratic scrutiny, they are secretive and indirect--again, by design. Rather than "how to enslave a population in debt peonage," they call their ideology "Choice Economics." Even Milton Friedman's work recommended coercion and secrecy--e.g. in Chile, where they shut down all the economics schools but the one which agreed with the Chicago school's recommendations...as Pinochet assassinated his opposition. Oddly enough, the plutocrats are sensitive to any state interference with their property rights, but are fine if the state interferes with the population's objections.

This also relates to the money economics I've been reading about in Mary Mello's Debt or Democracy. A few excerpts:

p.8 "As governments lost control of their money systems and became trapped by them, the public lost faith in political democracy...Worse, the public were responsible for a monetary system they could not control; they faced austerity to support the integrity of the monetary and fiscal regime."

p.11 As a result of the current monetary arrangement "People without work must be punished or vilified, even if there are no suitable jobs, or they have personal difficulties. Commercial activities must continue even in the face of environmental threats. Social, communal, familial and public activities are not valued in themselves because they are not traded for profit....If environmental sustainability and social justice are to be achieved, public money must be reclaimed to support social and public provision of goods and services in the same way it has been used to save the financial system."

p.19 With the rise of neoliberalism and market fundamentalism... "The concept of the public itself as an economic actor, let alone the idea of a public role in money creation was totally rejected. As a result, the idea of public investment, public service and the creation of public wealth was marginalised in both theory and practice in most contemporary economies. Instead, the privatised domination of money issue and circulation emerged virtually unchallenged. It became the heart of TINA--there is no alternative. If all wealth is created by the private sector, there is no role for the public except as an impediment to growth and prosperity. A profligate public sector is seen as putting a heavy burden on the 'wealth creators' and the 'taxpayer,' who are considered to be the only source of money and wealth in the economy.

Did we learn from market failures? Nope. p.38 "Market fundamentalist neoclassical views continued to dominate economic theory despite major crises in 1992, 1987-8, 1998, 2000 and particularly the crisis of 2007-8. ... One reason that Europe's policymakers have pursued neoliberal policies is that many of the staff of the European Central Bank (ECB) and European finance ministries have been trained in Chicago school neoliberal economics....Neoclassical economic modelling allowed its theories to be untainted by the inconvenience of real people in their real lives."

p.122 "From 1916 to 2012 the US population grew threefold, inflation went up by 22 times, GDP grew 155 times, but total debt expanded by 907 times."

Since the 1980s "The 1 per cent did not even carry out the basic capitalist task of generating employment through investment in productive industry...Instead their wealth was derived from unearned income: dividends, capital gains, interest and rent. The rich syphoned off their wealth through tax havens, while dominating both politics and economic life....Bankers and businesses were rescued, but not the people or the planet."

$1.9 trillion, in context

2021 Stimulus America Recovery and Re-investment Act - context

$1.9 trillion.

Cost of 2017 Corporate Tax cut.

$ 1.9 trillion over 10 years.
 

Cost of development of F 35 fighter jet

$ 1.7 trillion, 

Cost of the 2008-9 Wall Street Bailout (from the Federal Reserve's audit)

$16 - $29 trillion (Mostly loans that have since been repaid, but about $4 trillion remains on the Fed's balance sheet)

Bitcoin + Social Security

Someone emailed me to ask about bitcoin, a commodity-backed currency. Instead of being backed by gold, the commodity is the energy needed to calculate the complex, encrypted mathematics that is the "coin." Think of something like a three-dimensional sudoku 1,000 digits on a side--easy to validate, a nightmare and energy hog to calculate. I’ve written about this before on my blog, too.

When it backs “currency,” energy has virtually none of the advantages of a regular commodity--you can't recover and re-use the energy as you could something like gold--and it has all of the disadvantages of commodity-backed currency. That’s not to say it couldn’t be valuable--after all, tulip bulbs were all the rage in Holland at one time. But just because someone wins the lottery doesn’t make buying a ticket good retirement planning.

Because commodities are limited, they have a tendency to encourage deflation, which favors creditors, and that explains the political pressure from the creditors to return to commodity backed money. Because deflation inevitably makes an elite creditor class and an impoverished 99%, political economist Mark Blyth says we can either have commodity backed currency or democracy, not both--never mind that it’s nuts to tie the success of one’s economy to the production of gold mines, or three-dimensional sudoku.

Update: There’s even a movement to monetize encrypted art: The new acronym from the CryptoArt market is NFT (Non-Fungible Tokens). Next: tulip bulbs! 🌷… and Nakedcapitalism.com has a bitcoin smackdown...and several other linked bitcoin articles (here, here [note how this one explicitly calls out how bitcoin lacks a “trusted third party”--i.e. a state. Eliminating the state is the unstated agenda of bitcoin promoters], and here -- says Bill Gates “The cryptocurrency "uses more electricity per transaction than any other method known to mankind”...so it’s bad for the planet.)

I have discussed how sovereign, fiat money creators are fiscally unconstrained--where would people get the dollars to pay taxes if the monopoly provider of dollars (government) didn’t spend them first? Such money creators can spend without waiting for tax revenue.

I also thought readers came to understand that while taxes make money valuable, they do not provision federal programs. Here’s Alan Greenspan correcting Paul Ryan who believes the government is like a household, telling him there’s nothing to prevent the government from creating the money. The constraint is on real resources, not dollars. If the real resources are not fully employed, creating money might employ them.

After discussing this, and suggesting eliminating FICA (Social Security) tax as a possible conclusion, I was surprised someone remarked that unless Social Security recipients paid taxes before they got their benefits, they would not (correctly?) appreciate the program itself. 

Never mind that between Reagan and Bush 41 FICA tax increased eightfold while the top marginal income brackets had their income tax reduced by roughly half. Never mind that Social Security has reduced elder poverty by an estimated 65%. We must be “Fiscally Responsible™”!

That remark contradicts what I’ve been saying, and is a tremendous opportunity for clarification...so...thanks, I guess...😉

As I understand it, the point being made is that it’s important that people pay for what they receive, otherwise they’ll feel undeserving, and be confused or perhaps arrogant. Giving them a gift rather than some kind of trade is just not kosher (but not because we’re running out of money, or resources, for that matter). So...it’s bad juju.

I’d suggest the pursuit of deserving or fairness is one kind of supernormal stimulus--things we seek out of proportion to their usefulness. Perhaps the earliest prescription for deserving or fairness is in the Code of Hammurabi (1755–1750 BCE): “An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.” This predates even its appearance in the Hebrew Bible (the Old Testament). Yet…”An eye for an eye only ends up making the whole world blind.” (says Gandhi) … so it’s best to be sensible, rather than being addicted to deserving or fairness.

The need for deserving / fairness appeared early in human civilization. Early Judeo-Christian debates about whether salvation is deserved (“salvation by works”) or a gift (“salvation by grace”) anticipate this argument. Note: orthodox religions typically endorse salvation by grace (grace = “charis” in Greek, as in “charisma,” and is a gift). Salvation by works is heretical.

What has salvation to do with economics? In ancient Israel, the person who buys you out of debt slavery is called “the redeemer”--that’s one name for the messiah bringing salvation. When not totally spiritualized, salvation amounts to our ability to live without having to look over one’s shoulder for pursuing creditors (rhymes with “predators”). It’s not for nothing the Lord’s Prayer includes “forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors.”

I’d also suggest that “deserving” is something Jesus himself--or, by example, Job in the Old Testament--said was not the whole story. The parable of the Prodigal Son rewards the undeserving prodigal, not the deserving, good brother. The parable of the workers in the vineyard, who get paid the same amount whether they work all day, or the last few minutes, is another. So, in effect, Jesus’ teaching discourages expecting complete fairness/deserving too.

What’s the function of such parables? Answer: To interrupt the narrative supporting the supernormal stimulus of deserving or fairness. Can one be too preoccupied with fairness, justice, safety? Obviously.

Some Roman Senators (the Gracchi) attempted to relieve some of the population’s poverty as part of Roman law, which did not include jubilee and bankruptcy, but were assassinated. Meanwhile, the pharisees were trying to write IOUs (notes) in a way that exempted them from Biblically-prescribed jubilees. Jesus was not pleased with them (read Matthew 23 to see).

Finally, for those who still insist that people must pay for their gifts, how shall we pay for the privilege of existence? What did we do to deserve it? Or how should we pay for our health? Or our presence in the U.S. rather than, say, Somali? Our gender identity? Is all this really deserved? And if repayment is required, can we really afford to be ungenerous to Social Security recipients given our many gifts?

From the Intercept: Our country’s productivity gains in recent decades should have translated into a minimum wage today of $24 an hour — and by 2025, it should be almost $30. Hmmm...I wonder why the U.S. has Banana Republic levels of income inequity…?

Update: An interesting reaction to the Biden stimulus. Critical because that stimulus avoids fixing systemic problems. Meanwhile, in the category of systemic failure, like Flint, Michigan, Jackson Mississippi (the capital of the state) reports three weeks without water. No discussions between city and state have occurred, yet.

Another Update (and proof that Heterodox Economics is getting some traction): “Biden’s $1.9-trillion big spend is a big bet on modern economic theory” [Los Angeles Times]. “[N]ow economists — and Biden — are trying something new. They’re working on the premise that it’s neither government deficits nor a failure of thrift that causes economic problems. Rather, it’s government stinginess that leads to unemployment, which in turn deprives people the money they need to cover taxes, which in turn pay for the common good. As Stephanie Kelton, former chief economist on the Senate Budget Committee, argues in her bestseller “The Deficit Myth,” the country’s real deficits are in healthcare, jobs, infrastructure, education and the climate. But rather than address those things by spending, writes Kelton, the government proceeds in terror of not ‘balancing the budget,;’ falsely believing that an unbalanced budget is the source of inflation. ‘We run around like a six-foot-tall guy who wanders around perpetually hunched over in a house with eight-foot ceilings because someone convinced him that if he tries to stand up tall he’ll suffer a massive head trauma,’ she writes.”

Ms. Kelton is an MMT founder.

Update:

When crypto evangelists show proof of concept things that their currency can do that fiat currencies supposedly can’t pic.twitter.com/RYpvr6GaL4

— Sid Verma (@_SidVerma) May 21, 2021

Update #2:

BREAKING: DeFi100 coin exit scams, and runs away with $32 million in investors funds.

Website is now updated with the message “We scammed you guys, and you can’t do shit about it” pic.twitter.com/uyeYUDgbwo

— Mr. Whale (@CryptoWhale) May 22, 2021