Michelle Taylor

Here are some more underinformed thoughts :) Please tell me where I'm being wrong/stupid, previous corrections have been very useful to me in thinking about this stuff!

The purpose of an economy, as far as I can see, is to produce things that people want, without producing too many things people don't want.

There is also a second-order effect here - economies should also produce 'the ability to produce more things people want in the future' and avoid producing 'a reduction in the ability to produce more things people want in the future'.

(I am using a very wide definition of 'things people want' here. People want iphones, food, world peace, novelty, countryside, etc etc. People don't want zunes (or insert your favourite failed gadget here), hunger, suffering, ugly architecture, hopelessness, etc etc.)

We haven't found a better way of measuring 'want' except in money (i.e. we model 'how much people want stuff' as 'how much money people are willing to pay for stuff'). I haven't been able to come up with a better measure either!

The present economy, up until the current blip at least, seems to be pretty good at producing things people want - at least for people in this country / 'the Western world'.

It seems to be pretty awful at not producing things people don't want ('minimising negative externalities', I believe, if we want to get techincal) and is starting to show signs of failing at 'ensuring people have the ability to produce more things people want in the future'.

So far, governments have been able to shore up the edges of this (regulation on pollution etc tamping down the negative externalities, public service education and healthcare and infrastructure keeping the productivity rising), but this is also breaking down - partially because the 'produce stuff people want - manufacturing the 'want' too if necessary' part of the system has gone into hyperdrive and become bigger than any governmental co-ordination acna handle.

Some key problems seem to be:

1) Money concentrates and gets inherited; there's not a complete relationship between 'what is good' and 'what people will spend money on'. So far, not enough people can agree on a better way to measure 'what is good'. There are ways to make money a 'better' model (for certain people's definition of 'better') like redistributive taxation and basic income guarantees, but they start to pretty obviously become awkward patches on the system only undertaken at the sufferance of those who could get ahead by breaking the system - and when the way to get ahead is to break the system rather than work within it, the system traditionally doesn't do well (see: various attempted implementations of communism).

2) There might not actually be enough stuff to go round, especially with the damage we've been doing to future productive capacity by ignoring that part of the equation. This makes people even more reluctant to try new models than the general human reluctance to change things - it might turn out that a model that maximises e.g. human happiness does it by markedly reducing the happiness of the people who are currently sitting on the levers of power, and also all of the people they are directly related to / care about personally...

3) We've even been messing 'make stuff people want' up lately.

I blame this partially on 'manufacture the 'want' if necessary' - there has been a lot of advancement in the ability of people to make people want stuff that isn't actually 'good' in any objective sense (if there is even an objective sense for it to be good in! this stuff is tricky) and that means there's a lot of wasted potential that doesn't necessarily immediatley look like waste.

And the other major part is lack of transparancy - especially lack of transparancy of negative externalities. When people buy things, they are pointed very firmly at the good ('this iphone makes my life better and makes me feel like I am living in the future') and away from the bad ('this iphone is manufactured in terrible conditions and uses a lot of irreplacable resources that we aren't doing enough to find alternatives for - it contains a lot of Suffering and Making My Future Suck').

The negative externalities build up and build up until they start making it harder to produce 'good' stuff - stuff people want - and that's why we're suddenly noticing them now...

The gold standard keeps being advocated to me by all corners of the internet. I still think it is useless for a modern economy, and this is why:

Money Supply needs to be controlled to determine the level of risk that should be taken in investments - too much money in the system and bad investments are constantly made (leading to wasted actual resources, like abandoned factories); too little money in the system and good investments are not made (leading to unemployment).

In a gold standard or other commodity standard, money supply is entirely linked to how much of that commodity people are producing and how much gets lost/destroyed/decayed/used up.

The gold standard relies on constant supplies of gold being found and dug up out of the ground.

This works very well when there is a small constant supply of new gold strikes and mining productivity improvements such that more gold constantly enters the market - you get a small but positive inflation value, which encourages people to invest but not too much and makes them happy that their numbers are going up and 'progress' is being made.

(Even when it's working fairly well, you still get occasional abberations like a Gold Rush, where the money supply goes too high as a big supply is found, but not too many of them to cope with and they tend to be local.)

It does not work at all well when the supply of the commodity / gold begins to run out, and suddenly vastly un-environmental behaviour like tearing up rainforests to mine the gold under them is heavily incentivised to keep the good times rolling...

And eventually even that doesn't work, and you are left with a deflationary currency, as gold supplies go out of the system (through being milled into tiny pieces and lost, or hidden by savers who know it will just grow and grow in value).

A deflationary currency means that it's always worth keeping hold of the money you have - so nobody invests in anything, nobody buys anything, and the economy grinds to a halt.

Edit: I got the last paragraph entirely wrong, sorry! I have now fixed it so it says what I meant, which is the exact opposite of what I said before!

The Inflation / Money Sink Thing:

Crash Course (http://www.chrismartenson.com/crashcourse) is very interesting, but seems to have a massive anti-inflation, pro-savings, pro-commodity-backed-money standard thing. (I thought economists worth their salt were meant to be laughing at the gold standard, not idolising it?)

Then there's a rather old text on Stamp Scrip http://userpage.fu-berlin.de/~roehrigw/fisher/ which neatly demonstrates that a money sink is good to kick-start an economy.

Edit: This theory is now a bit out of date since ilanin poked a big hole in the side of my uncritical 'buying stuff / investment is always good, right?' axiom. The people-backed money one below is still mostly current to my thinking, apart from 'how to control inflation here', though.

My thoughts are:

* Money is primarily a medium of exchange. If you want a commodity-backed store of value then buy some assets - that way your risks due to the commodity properties are more transparent and you have to take on the burden of storage etc etc.
* As a medium of exchange, money is no use in the bank. Savings encourage people to work less. People working less is bad :) that's what kills most socialist systems, after all.
* If you're going to destroy the desirability of long-term saving you also have to guarantee at least one of a minimum standard of living or a constant supply of money to each person. Fortunately there are many systems that can do this in various ways; see below for one...
* Pensions / retirement are an interesting special case - you do want people to be able to save money to have whatever advanced standard of living their productivity has sustained throughout retirement as well (and let people save in order to compete for scarce end-of-life medical interventions, quite possibly - it's a great motivator). But there are ways to deal with this too. You can exempt money that's being locked away in saving accounts that only let you take money out at 70 or so or for direct life-saving medical expenditure from your money sink, for instance.

You also need a wealth tax for this whole thing to work, because otherwise the rich mostly ignore your monetary system and trade in commodities, which they have the wherewithal to do - which does erode the 'save in commodities' thing a bit, but hopefully not too much.

To go with this, I am very interested in the idea of 'people-backed money'.

Instead of controlling the money supply by buying government bonds / interests in insurance and pension schemes / interests in businesses, you control the money supply by giving every individual a certain sum of money every (week/month/year) directly into their account. You can vary the sum of money to control inflation - but you also control inflation by some kind of stamp scrip like method, basically an explicit tax on holding money, so that people are motivated to spend their money instead.

You might say 'everyone would fly to foreign exchange, which they could hold onto' - but you can tax that too, or you can say 'well, yes, some economies are going to be forex-standard whatever you do, it's not a bad idea for a developing economy, but someone has to be the root economy and they need something like gold-backed or debt-backed or people-backed money.'

You don't get the weird thing of debt-backed money where you can massively benefit financial institutions and corps by printing money especially for them, because the money you're printing has to be distributed across the whole population. You don't get the constant-growth-requiring interest treadmill of debt-backed money, because the only 'paying it back' that happens is the anti-inflationary taxation, not an obligation to keep paying it back with interest.

You probably still do fractional reserve banking and end up in the situation where you have more debt than money, but because the liquidity of the system is so insanely high the government can easily fix a round of defaults on debt which threaten to fuck the system up by injecting money which spreads evenly across the economy and bolsters the reserves of all the banks directly (as it goes into the accounts of people some of whom won't withdraw it right away).

I know that this is undoubtedly a stupid idea for many reasons because I haven't seen anyone who isn't crazy advocating anything even similar - so can people enlighten me? :)

I like the Occupy movement, and the 15M movement across Europe which pre-dated it. If you don't know what I'm talking about you can find some more information at http://takethesquare.net and the website of the London occupation http://occupylsx.org, or the global map at http://occupytogether.org - or the article that 'started' the Occupy movement in particular and underlies many of its principles and methods at http://www.adbusters.org/magazine/91/capitalism-crisis.html - which also explains what that big Capitalism Is Crisis banner you might have seen on the news is about and why it isn't just an 'anti-capitalist' statement. I have been spending quite a bit of my energy attempting to support it, although mostly by the virtue of Arguing With People On The Internet which I'm not sure is the most useful thing ever.

If any of you have any questions about it, or politics and economics in general, or how to get involved, I have been doing a lot of talking and thinking about this stuff lately and am very happy to provide information about or enter into debate about it :-).

I am, however, worried it may have a bad case of the That Stuff Is Easy syndrome, though. The only thing that the current movement as it stands is truly good for is spreading the word - waking people up - explaining how the current system is corrupt, how certain financial institutions are cheating, as well as the general issues of global inequality (which less people are likely to get behind, as solving that will reduce living standards for those like us who are on the top of the pile globally!).

The movement thinks it can develop alternatives - it can come up with solutions - and maybe it can, by getting people talking, by getting them together. But the alternatives will take time. There are simpler stop-gap solutions that can be put in place - more restrictions on the use of money in political campaigning, maybe even debt forgiveness / jubilee or some similar 'reset switch' on the world economy - but the massive changes to the world that many people are advocating can't be done well in one step in a handful of weeks or months.

It's all very well, very inspiring and comforting, to share our grand visions of the future and utopian ideals, to dream of what might come - but there are serious individual problems with the current order that a much broader swathe of people can get behind solving, and I fear that they will get lost in the very attractive noise about more radical alternatives which haven't had enough time to be developed or trialled and are likely to come to nothing - or worse than nothing - if forced or rushed.

I love the idea of universal rights to basic sustenance without forced labour, direct democracy, a world where nobody starves or freezes on the streets again, and I can see why people want to seize the opportunity of change given by this current crisis, but the more of that kind of thing we attempt to embrace the further off necessary change gets and the more people we alienate and the more likely it is that instead we get one of the nightmare scenarios instead - collapse to the level of small communities due to violent revolution, or a society which is worn out too much to care about the plight of all the people discarded at the bottom...

I kind of feel that I ought to do some kind of write up of Level 5 (http://lvl5.org/), which I was at last weekend.

My usual approach is proving quite difficult here, though; the context and setup are important as well as the in-character elements, and I'm struggling to find the right song or prompt for telling the story of the event.

( Crazy Artlarp inside! )

newvani made me ponies!
( because you can never have too many eidolonponies )

I think these Johari Window things that have popped back up all over the place would be much more interesting if they let you choose an arbitary number of words.

All they do in their current form is irritate me immensely as they all end up with this enormous list in 'Blind Spot' which isn't necessarily actually a blind spot, it might just be that someone else chooses one of the other words in the very close together families of words (like 'caring', 'loving' and 'giving').

(I may be slightly more easily irrationally irritated at the moment as I have been getting about five hours sleep a night this week...)

There was an ODC. I actually enjoyed myself quite a lot. Despite the faceplanting in the forest and the busted toe resulting, which confined me to the Plot Tent for much of the proceedings. Now my brain is insufficiently functional to perform useful actions so I am having an Enforced Rest Day, so here is a meme. If any of you want me to ask you five questions, or have questions for me, please do comment below :).

From theviciouspixie

1) Which creature comforts would you really struggle to do without?

All of them? I am incredibly rubbish at discomfort and just fall completely to pieces when not kept in the style to which I have become accustomed. Being at the wrong temperature, in uncomfortable clothes, or without comfortable sleeping accommodation (with walls! and a roof! buildings are very important to me) basically utterly cripple me and reduce me to a shuffling, whining shadow of myself.

I'm not sure how far 'creature comforts' extend; I would find it relatively easy (if sad, as eating good food is a reliable source of happiness) to make do with a simple or even unappetizing diet (as long as it didn't actually make me ill), I am not bothered by cramped living conditions (I will quite happily sleep on a mattress on a floor in a room of snoring people, for instance), I am not that fussy about sharing my life with piles of garbage and their attendant insects / smell, I am not particularly attached to physical possessions (although I do need access to some means of Writing Stuff Down from time to time to avoid insanity; I don't necessarily even need to keep the results though).

2) Which country (real or otherwise) would you most like to visit and what would you do whilst you were there?

I'm not really convinced I'm cut out for visiting countries. I generally prefer to remain relatively stationary and let other worlds come to me. As above, extremes of temperature knock me right out, which rules out quite a lot of travelling.

Interestingly I love the actual _act_ of travelling - car journeys, train journeys, bus journeys, airplane journeys, boat journeys, even journeys on foot. It's like the forced separation from the everyday world gives me a rare opportunity to truly relax; to watch the scenery go by, to read a book, to listen to music, to just do nothing of consequence without feeling bad about all the things I'm not doing because I am already Doing Something (going from A to B) and anything else is a bonus. (Also, transport technology still inspires and fascinates me and reminds me that I am Living In The Future.)

So - somewhere temperate, which gives good scenery, where I would wander around and stare at things, and maybe eat nice food if I can be sure of adequate translation. The thing is, few places fit this bill better than Scotland, which has the added advantage of my grandmother-in-law, so there is little call for me to go anywhere else; but this doesn't seem to be in the spirit of the question which is usually answered about _new_ places I _haven't_ been before.

I do have this idea for a prehistoric-setting LARP that won't go away though; obviously I wouldn't want to visit that world literally (see above under 'not liking uncomfortable clothing or sleeping accommodations, liking buildings') but I would like to create it for visitation metaphorically one day...

3) Which three little-known bands do you love and why do you think more people should know about them?

I am so immensely out of touch with music that I have no idea whether bands that I love are little-known or not; I get into all of my music through either my father, having heard it a long time ago, or recommendations from other LARPers or people from my church.

So I'm going to list three that I like quite a lot and appear to be small niche bands, but I may well be terribly embarrassed to discover that one of them is incredibly popular and not little-known at all!

The first on this list is obviously Jars of Clay, who are consistently my favourite specifically-Christian band. I am sure I have gone on at great length about them before; they have a wide and interesting musical repertoire (swerving between folk, indie and rock, often within the same album and sometimes within the same song) and their lyrics are deep, thoughtful, certainly not all cheerleading / worship / happy-clappy or avoiding acknowledgement of doubt and the darker sides of life and hard questions, which can sometimes afflict music of this niche.

I try to sneakily play and recommend them to all of my friends at all opportunities, because I genuinely think listening to them is likely to make your life better, even if you don't share the faith I share with them and which they often sing about.

The second odd corner of my music collection I'd like to introduce you to is Escape Key. Be careful with this one as there is another band called Escape Key who are entirely different :-). Escape Key only have one album that I am aware of, called Shadowbeast. They are something I would describe as 'excellent LARP music' - simple but beautiful guitar-and-singer tunes often with strong choruses and generally fantasy-themed. More people should know about them because I would love to hear more reproductions or slight filks of this stuff around campfires!

Along similar but slightly more 'robust' lines is the music of Leslie Fish, who isn't technically a band but a filk-singer. Some of her stuff is her own or written specifically for her, some of it is the kind of thing that would be marked 'trad.' in a hymnbook because it has passed through so many hands, and everything in between. She does have a bit of an unfortunate libertarian / evangelising-atheist streak, but her settings of various Kipling pieces are among some of my favourite songs.

Again, I think more people should have these so that they can be used for communal singing at LARPs and other gatherings of my tribe - often being filk originally and all done in that style, they are excellent pick-up songs, and I generally just can't get enough casual communal singing in my life, even if I'm not great at it :-).

4) What is your strongest memory associated with a smell?

I've never really understood the 'memories associated with smells' thing. The memories I have associated with smells are all very specific memories _of_ smells or tastes - so a smell will remind me of a kind of food or a particularly smelly place I was in once, but it is unlikely to extend to an entire scene / run of memories around that area or item like I hear reported from other people.

My memory tends to work on visuals instead; seeing a bluebell, or a tree viewed from underneath, or one of my fading scars, will trigger a cascade of memories much as smell is reported to do for other people. Sometimes it works on audible cues too, but mostly just songs which are linked to incidents in my head because my brain often plays a continual soundtrack out of my music collection or because I wrote the incidents down using the song as a framework.

So, alas, my strongest memory associated with a smell at the moment is the truly hideous stench that pervaded the blue cargo container loo at the last Maelstrom event :-).

5) If machines could talk, what do you think they would say?

Machines talk all the time. They hum; they buzz; they rumble. Some of them I can even understand a little at times, the whine of an unhappy computer, the struggling bumping noise of the car engine almost out of fuel, the continual communion with the engine hum of my car telling me when to change its gears or ease up on the poor thing.

If they could talk in words, I imagine they would communicate much the same information, just as if an animal could talk in words - in fact I don't really draw much distinction between animals and machines, if anything often I feel a lot more empathy and sympathy with the latter than the former.

So they would express their simple needs, their general status, their unhappiness at mistreatment or their contentment in proper use...

Tomorrow (well, today, technically, I guess) I will be picked up by a taxi at around 8am and whisked off to LHR to head off to Tech Ed Atlanta.

I am slightly worried that there are significant numbers of hours in an airplane that I didn't have the foresight to get a window seat on, and which doesn't have mains, in which I have nothing useful to do. I've got a couple of books but I can't get that many into my laptop bag and I think they'll only last me four hours each at most.

So if anyone wanted some kind of crazy doodling 'art' done, or any kind of fiction or other text I can produce without references that they wanted me to write, now would be the time to tell me... I'll be checking once at about eight tomorrow morning, and maybe in the airport if I find a computer.

Today I have been ranting a lot about economics, unfortunately in a kind of disconnected way responding to individual points.

Basically, I believe that the best economic system goes as follows:

1) Everything, at least theoretically, goes into a big pot.

2) The first thing that comes out of this big pot is a very basic standard of living for everyone. This is a big area of debate in itself - what constitutes a 'basic standard of living', is it 'a hut and some corn' or 'a house of your own, a private hospital room when required, and a car'? But this should be basically 'the things which people need to have which they can't be trusted to buy for themselves' - food, medical care, shelter.

3) The second thing that comes out of the pot is a 'general allowance' which should be enough to give everyone a 'reasonable' standard of living. This is the bit where one person might spend on a widescreen TV and another might spend on Photoshop and another might spend on running a car - different people have very different priorities for 'basic standard of living' so you can't just impose one standard set of services on everyone.

4) After that, surplus resources get apportioned via some system which is very much like today's capitalist system, although possibly with some special bonuses for providing socially useful things that people don't generally see fit to directly demand (especially things which ensure everyone can recieve their Very Basic Standard Of Living), which would be the equivalent of today's public sector jobs.

The consequences of this is that nobody _has_ to work to live, which probably reduces overall productivity.

But additionally nobody has to do a job they don't like or aren't suited to in order to live, preventing them from being productive in their 'hobby' field which might actually turn out to be very useful and productive and end up being paid for by other people eventually, but they would never have been able to get the practice in to be good enough to get paid for it if they had been forced to mop floors at the local store in order to eat.

Some people just like to be useful; some people like to clean things. We would probably have to do without so many shop assistants, but that's okay because we know how to do automated checkouts now. We would probably have to community-organise or have larger incentives for some public services, like collecting the bins. Surely that is okay too - we should incentivise people who are doing low-status jobs by 'you want to have nice things' rather than 'you want to eat tomorrow'.

Obviously this is all hopelessly naive and not thought through, but I hope you get the jist.

The main objections / obstacles to this system appear to be:

1) Dislike of freeloaders. 'Why should I pay for lazy people', anger about 'benefit scroungers' etc. People don't like to work for people who are 'being lazy' and not 'pulling their weight' to take some of it even if they're only taking away just enough for them to live on. I'm not sure how to fix this - it seems like a moral failing to me (my slightly confused moral system tells me that one should be happy to give stuff away to those less fortunate, regardless of whether they 'deserve' it or not), and also it doesn't make sense from a practical perspective (practically, society is better off with the freeloaders kept happy and well-fed than having them be resentful), but it appears to be a deep instinctive / emotional response (and probably has good reasons that I'm not seeing because I don't share it) and hence I can't see how to cope with it.

2) Ability to use infinite upsides / desire to provide for one's children. Linked to the above is the problem that taking away 'surplus' from people who have 'earned' it has actual tangible effects on their life expectancy and the projected success of their children, and so is 'unfair'. Unfortunately, whilst it is true that some people gain wealth due to being hard-working or virtuous in some similar respect, most people gain wealth because of circumstances, upbringing, and general 'luck' factors - but disproportionate quantities of people view their wealth as 'earned' entirely by themselves in any case, because that is a beneficial rationalisation to an individual making it. It being therefore impossible to determine who has 'earned' their wealth and who hasn't, it is only fair to redistribute fairly evenly (based on marginal value) from everyone, even if this does cause injustice to those who really did work very hard for their wealth.

3) Removal of incentives. The more you tax people, and the less 'deserving' the recipients of the tax money, the more likely people are to go 'well, I won't bother working then'. I acknoweldge that this would be a problem in some cases, but think it is a worthwhile tradeoff for avoiding the suffering of those who can't find employment even with their best efforts, or who get stuck in unpleasant employment but can't leave for fear of losing basic necessities. On the other end of the scale, giving people a reasonable standard of living for free will cause some of them not to work at all - but mostly I contend that this probably means the job wasn't worth doing in the first place, and I'm not sure that many people would rever to a life of complete unproductivity, instead they would get bored and express productivity in new and unexpected ways.

I'm sure there are a lot more but this is probably the extent of the rambling I should do whilst I should be finishing lunch and getting back to working at my own money-earning job (my enthusiasm for working on other projects neatly demonstrating that actually some people work _more_ and _better_ when monetary incentive isn't the incentive on offer...).