peristaltor

kmo delivered another great podcast the other day, interviewing economist Frank Rotering. Prof. Rotering has an interesting take on human progress and the limits the planet itself places on our expansion, part of which resonates well with what I accept.

For example, I whole heartedly agree that our biological imperative drives our expansion, the desire to eat the richest food (to give us strength and build our energy reserves as fat) and live in the best areas conducive to sating our desires to, well, eat and reproduce a lot. The number of simple behavioral studies that reveal this simple unconscious drive abound, each confirming that despite what we say, we are greedy little piggies that crave tasty (meaning energy-rich) foods and sex with the most reproductively viable candidates. Remember, folks, Darwin's "survival of the fittest" referred to reproductive winners, the organisms that most successfully got as many biological copies of themselves made before they croaked.

Where Frank went off the rails in the talk with kmo, though, was where he started talking about . . . capitalism. Wait, haven't I gone over this already?!?

But then the Professor did something very few who throw the C word about willy-nilly actually do: He explained what he meant. I'm not saying he got it right in my eyes, but I will say he at least had the courtesy to quote Marx's writings directly and explain the nitty-gritty details that might elude the less familiar. Someone who has obviously read Marx so carefully is rare to find even amongst Marxists. That was refreshing.

This explanation, though, confirmed something that has been nagging at me for quite some time: That Marx himself missed the most salient element of capitalism's expansionist tendencies, specifically by ( by conflating the necessity to expand with the ability to expand. )

Jim Kunstler whipped out another gem in which he wrote:

For decades we measured the health of our economy (and therefore of our society) by the number of "housing starts" recorded month-to-month. For decades, this translated into the number of suburban tract houses being built in the asteroid belts of our towns and cities. When housing starts were up, the simple-minded declared that things were good; when down, bad. What this view failed to consider was that all these suburban houses added up to a living arrangement with no future. That's what we were so busy actually doing. Which is why I refer to this monumentally unwise investment as the greatest misallocation of resources in the history of the world.

(Emphasis from the author.)

Why is he so glum about our economic expansion? ( For lots of really good reasons. )


Addendum, August 10, 2009: Calculated Risk shares a paper describing a move from expanded building from city cores to a "new era of infill and redevelopment." Which will have to happen if "this monumentally unwise investment" called suburbia is ever to be corrected.

I'm sorry, but I'm still on this telly, telly, everywhere tear. It's something that is pretty much turning into an obsession.

In case you missed it, yesterday, I moaned about a television in waiting rooms that I legally couldn't leave or turn away from either the sound or the image. I was spared the trauma by a helpful receptionist, but had I been forced to be there later in the day things could have gotten water-torture ugly.

Why this antipathy? I'm seeing more and more evidence that these ever-present flicker screens ( are causing perhaps grievous harm to our collective ability to think. )

kmo has done it again. Yet another of his C-Realm Podcast guests has given me actual food for thought, valuable nutritional content. By contrast, what mostly passes through our mainstream media emerges as undigestable waste.

For The Growth Imperative episode, the guest was Thomas Homer-Dixon, author of The Upside of Down: Catastrophe, Creativity, and The Renewal of Civilization. ( Another long discussion follows. )

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Addendum, February 17: On second thought, it seemed strange to only give 2/3rds of the interview. ( Here's the final section. )

Six months ago, I posted links to a couple of podcasts that helped me understand the current economic situation. Before I heard ellenbrown explain the situation in kmo's C-Realm, I had no idea how currency was created in the United States, let alone how in ten years the global pool of money doubled in size. Since then, I've been following just about all I can hear from the folks at Planet Money and The Economist. I'm struck not by the extent of their coverage -- it's for the most part excellent -- but by how little even the reporters tasked with explaining the situation dive straight to the heart of the matter, reporting instead on the peripheral effects these sudden changes have wrought.

I am here going to attempt to explain what I understand to be the at the root of the economy's woes not to spread the Rant of Peristaltor, but to articulate in writing what I feel to be important and thus to see whether or not, after this articulation, these thoughts stand on their own. No, I am not an economist by training or profession, so take my words with that in mind. No, I do not claim to be more of an expert than trained economists, only to be someone who sees an important link constantly missed and therefore misunderstood. I will fully and humbly accept any criticism on this post that can be backed by an understandable explanation and sound cited references.

( So here we go down the Peristaltic Rabbit Hole. )


Addendum, January 11, 2009: Ellen Brown today simplified my long-winded analogizing by simply explaining how banks create the money.

kmo had a couple of great podcasts on his C-Realm Podcast over the last couple of weeks. The first I'd like to mention featured John Michael Greer, an archdruid who speaks very well about economics and their peaks and valleys. From his September 24th entry:

Yet it also has to be remembered that not too long ago, economic depressions were simply a fact of life. In the 19th century, before government regulation restrained the excesses of the business cycle, major economic depressions happened every twenty or thirty years on average; most people could expect to live through two or three of them. The New Deal reforms of the 1930s, which restricted the vagaries of the business cycle, made depressions a thing of the past; still, those reforms were tossed aside in the deregulatory frenzy of the 1980s and 1990s, and unless they get put back in place, we will all likely have to get used to depressions again.

Counterintuitive though it may seem, furthermore, a serious depression right now may just be the best thing that could happen to the United States. I don’t say this by way of passing judgment, or in the spirit of schadenfreude that seems to surround so many predictions of social catastrophe. Rather, a good many of the dysfunctions that are dragging America to ruin will be immediately unsustainable in a time of depression, and a certain amount of economic suffering now could spare the American people a far worse experience later on.

I know, I know, those of you contemplating the blood and tears of employment spent just to squirrel away enough money in your later years to enable you not to produce more blood and tears in your later years might find these words revolting treacle. I'm sure everyone with their tootsies poised on Wall Street window sills in late 1929 thought exactly the same thing about other analysts explaining the robust economies that might emerge from the ashes of that crash. A lot of good a correction now does for my planned trip to Hawaii next year.

His bloggy entries, though, make a lot of sense. He makes a further observation in the podcast as well that jives very well with a concept I've been trying to articulate for several years now, an idea best expressed in an analogy between plants taking over a cleared lot and societies. Greer traces the development of agriculture and equated that to a dandelion on a vacant lot; the farms sprout where the soil is fertile, consume the soil nutrients, crash and disperse just like a weed growing in the soil briefly only to scatter as many seeds as possible:

The weeds that grow in a vacant lot; they maximize their resources, they reproduce themselves, produce lots of seeds. They don't cycle. They tend to burn through the available cheap and easy resources, and then they tend to get squeezed out by something else which is slower and more efficient.

And it goes, stage by stage, with increasing efficiency, more cycling, more . . . concern for durability, less concern for maximum production in any immediate period. (The) history of agricultural societies follows that trend.

Exactly. For years I have wanted to make a documentary that followed this line of reasoning, tracing human technology in terms of what the newer gadgets could deliver in efficiency. Yes, it's fun to light an open fire and try to cook a dinner; but over the long run one gets more efficiency enclosing and controlling the fire in a wood stove, then a gas stove, then electric, then induction; and so on. Each successive addition to the technological tool chest increases in complexity and often in support needs, but decreases the necessary operator input time and resource energy needed to support the tech. The weeds to forest analogy fits that old chestnut of mine very nicely.

Anyhoo, I encourage a look into Greer's interview and blog. Good stuff. This last week, kmo once again hosted ellenbrown to talk about why our financial future is crashing around us. She explains the derivatives market, a bizarre system of betting on both success and failure that pretty much works to inflate our economy. . . until it crashes. After all, in conflicting bets only one will prove a winner. The fact that both bets show their outcomes as positive assets? Well. . . that's proving a bit problematic of late, now isn't it? She describes this process in more detail. I won't bother to summarize this stuff. I can barely understand it.

Enjoy the depressing content I heartily recommend!

Remember that scary scenario I recently mentioned, the one about the world's atmosphere changing rapidly for the worse should global greenhouse effects run too rampant? On that note, this article should help the constipated make their desired releases:

In the past few days, the researchers have seen areas of sea foaming with gas bubbling up through "methane chimneys" rising from the sea floor. They believe that the sub-sea layer of permafrost, which has acted like a "lid" to prevent the gas from escaping, has melted away to allow methane to rise from underground deposits formed before the last ice age.

They have warned that this is likely to be linked with the rapid warming that the region has experienced in recent years.

Methane is about 20 times more powerful as a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide and many scientists fear that its release could accelerate global warming in a giant positive feedback where more atmospheric methane causes higher temperatures, leading to further permafrost melting and the release of yet more methane.

(Emphasis mine.)

This is one of those positive feedbacks Dennis Bushnell mentioned.

A few weeks ago, kmo had a great interview on his C-Realm Podcast with Dennis M. Bushnell, chief scientist of the NASA Langley Research Center. Mr. Bushnell is, to say the least, an immensely qualified individual. Just listen to the introduction kmo gives him. (If you don't have time for that, someone was good enough to transcribe the interview here. You can read instead or listen. I'll be using that transcription for my quotation source, with some corrections.) Mr. Bushnell touches on quite a few topics that interest me -- global warming, alternative energy, to name just a couple -- so I found myself listening to it on the iPod thingie more than once.

After the second listen, something started nagging me, a concept with which I found myself quite unfamiliar. Though he speaks well and concisely, Bushnell kept making references to atmospheric conditions I didn't understand. I thought it best to go and read the source Bushnell lists in the interview:

(T)here is a book which, I believe, will be considered a milestone in this whole energy and warming discussion and that is Peter Ward's recent book called Under (a) Green Sky.

I've read a few other Ward books, so this wasn't too much of a hardship. ( What I read scared the living crap out of me. )

After I read Green Sky, I put on the headphones and went for a walk with Dennis Bushnell once again. ( As low as Ward got me, something I missed from Bushnell hit me that much harder. )

X-posted to boiling_frog.

I just finished up with kmo's podcast, Higher States of Collapse, where he muses with readers about states of consciousness. Should shamanistic pharmacologia be described as inducing "higher" states, or simply "altered" or "different?" I found the entire discussion, while very interesting, missed one critical element:

( Can one objectively quantify various mental states? )