Re: MONETARY: Politics and Economics

[Keith Wilde <kwilde@ca.inter.net>]

Thanks to Dan for correcting my conjectures and clarifying his position. 

Specifically, I said "your postings seem designed to minimize argument over
technical details in the interest of building a political faction for
reforms that depend on a significant augmentation of general understanding
about monetary and financial topics."

To which Dan responds"
>
>Keith, my reason to not spend much time on specific details,
>is because I don't think these can be predefined that far ahead
>in a complex adaptive system.

And furthermore:  "Official social credit explicity forbids the formation
of political parties.  Even then, if I wanted to be a professional
politician, I
>would certainly not join a party that had serious monetary reform
>as a plank."

So my principal conjecture is wrong; Dan is not primarily interested in
building a political faction for monetary reform generally. (I had formed
this inference from what I judged to be an effort to minimize disagreements
and get on with a campaign platform that is sufficiently loose that it
embraces a large number of particular interests or objectives.)

 Other parts of your response, Dan, suggest that you are more accurately
conceived as an engineer. To wit:  

"> There are certain mathematical and thermodyanamic laws that must be
obeyed >(in a complex adaptive system) on the one hand, and there are
certain, >difficult, ethical considerations to be obeyed on the other.
>
>However, the details that would come next, in my opinion, would
>be how to choose a team, design a model/prototype feedback
>system, develop transducers to mimic the interaction
>of the prototype with the larger economy, determine options
>on how to adjust and finetune the entire information processor,
>and so on. From that, the details of a viable new system will
>start to emerge, and even then be subject to constant adjustment
>of course.  The details of various sytems, from social credit,
>to binary econmics will all be valuable stores from which to
>try out concepts for various problems or optimizations."

I get the impression from the words above that you have in mind a primarily
physical model, based possibly on energy sources and flows, but building in
some mechanisms to illustrate the conversion of physical relationships and
magnitudes into monetary signals. With this model of "reality" you would
then be able to plug in various policy alternatives and generate their
implications. 
Am I getting warmer?

Your next comment, involving big failures like Long Term Capital and
Blumenthal's complaint about the inability of economists to explain reality
even after the fact, suggests a reinforcement of the conjecture that you
believe it possible to build a better model of complex reality, one that
incorporates more kinds of information than are built into conventional
economic models or theories of economic behavior.

Then comes a surprise, for rather than incorporating the instinctive
behaviors of dominance and submission which had prompted my initial
interest in reacting to your earlier post, you would treat it somewhere else. 

QUOTE>I do think that discussing the psychological implications regarding
>the current money system would be more usefully carried on in
>a forum separate from one concentrating on technical matters;UNQUOTE

This suggests to me that your concept of an economy is primarily a physical
one, leaving human motivations essentially on the side. 

On a different note, I said "It is quite feasible, therefore, to turn this
list into a forum for believers only. The immediate difficulty presented by
that prospect, however, is "believers in what?"

Your response is to ask myself how I feel when told that "Jeffery Sachs
sponsors Paul Hewlett (or Hewson--neither is known to me)to propagate that
there is a systematic transfer of wealth from desparately poor people, to
the rich."

I am not sure whether you want my response to the relationship between
Sachs and Hewson, or to the message that there is (conspiratorial?) system
for transferring wealth from the poor to the rich. Since I don't know
anything about the former, I will just say that I find the following
statment in Paul Krugman's NYTimes  column today quite believable: 

"...[T]he Bush administration is an extremely elitist clique trying to
maintain a populist facade. Its domestic policies are designed to benefit a
very small number of people - basically those who earn at least $300,000 a
year, and really don't care about either the environment or their less
fortunate compatriots."

 I infer further confirmation that building a political faction is NOT your
purpose from the following reaction to my comment about the success of the
American right wing:

>Not as far as know. Most monetary reformers see right and
>left philosophies of the day as two arms of the same entity.

If I have interpreted your question about gut feeling correctly, then I
wonder why or how you link it to the spiritual? I associate gut feel with
emotion.

>I think we have to also bring the spiritual into this (as per my gut feeling
>question above). 

I look forward to further corrective and clarification.


Keith Wilde
Executive Secretary
Symposium on Biodiversity and Health

An Initiative of Tropical Conservancy (Charitable Scientific Organization)
Ottawa, Canada
URL: http://www.tc-biodiversity.org

To reach me personally:
kwilde@ca.inter.net
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