Stop Me Before I Vote Again

Lovely find!

we already didn't need scotsmen in cottages counting their coin in 1830 let alone 1930 or 2030

shame on u fb

what is a credit system
and a means to regulate the price level for
if not to abolish the scrooge reflex ??

savings
personal savings
even institutional savings
are now a mass superstition
not a religion
we live among dark age avatars
gthose who bow before
this celestial calf of secular worship
are as benighted as fred flintstone

the intellectual under pinnings of this sunday supplement piece come from discussions with
frank ramsey
who wrote this lesser known version of the same future world

Ramsey F.P. (1928), "A Mathematical Theory of Saving," Economic Journal, Vol. 38, No 152, pp. 543 559

its quite lovely
in a facetiously "mock hard " benthamite way

slashing at time discounters he uses the
horror assumption of maximal "social savings"
a the welfare of cat n generations rrom now
is precisely equal to the welfare of a cat today

we only have a rate of "interest "
to ration the uses of this maximal
social savings

change the word savings to accumulation
and you have the progenitor
of a vast global ... five year plan

down with 50 million
ranch house 'accumulators"
with their wretched potted plant size portfolios

all power to gosplan II

on to MMSA
the massive maximal social accumulator

haha, i read http://cluborlov.blogspot.com/2010/09/poverty-of-imagination-in-age-of.html immediately before

".. our current crisis is more likely to give way to an era of progress rather than one of stagnation"
optimism indeed !!

global or local ???

now as in the next ten ....
years
or the next ten decades

give or take a few reaganian eddies

i love a patient feller

t'is true

as much as we seem to ignore it
Clio ain't producing this
10 millenia grand guignol
just for us boomers to cream off
the climax eh ??

hapa

i like you too much to declare war on
natural peaksters
and their relentless cries of

" sorry u face mate in three moves pal
we all do ... "

so long as they refrain from chortling excessively
and never fail to piously
recognize the natural resources
that is both finite and natural
which contemporary capitalism
squanders most wantonly
are
the brief times that become
men's souls
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/14/business/global/14euro.html?_r=1

"we already didn't need scotsmen in cottages counting their coin in 1830 let alone 1930 or 2030"

You can extend that back to 2000 BC, though. Theoretically you could set up a good social credit/payment system at any time in history, so we've never really needed saving.

"global or local ???

now as in the next ten ....
years
or the next ten decades"

Definitely not the next 10 years. Maybe sometime in the 50 years after that.

I found a link to that paper:

Ramsey F.P. (1928), "A Mathematical Theory of Saving," Economic Journal
http://folk.uio.no/gasheim/zRam1928.pdf

the narrative feeds right into the bond set's hands tho. it'd be a just war.

fb

"You can extend that back to 2000 BC, though. Theoretically you could set up a good social credit/payment system at any time in history, so we've never really needed saving."

you answer in silly mode

i mean we had the material basis in england
in 1835 okay maybe 1845
railroads and telegraph
okay so 1848
at any rate by the time of the CPM
england had progressed to a system
that could convert to a pure credit driven production system
like the soviets put in place in the 30's of the following century one hindred year later

Why do you think that railroads and the telegraph were necessary?

I was imagining that some form of government, written language and math would be enough.

I see I have misspelled my handle. Kinda nice though, in an opish way.

Could one of the resident economists do a sermon on thrift, contrasting it with saving, which my mind confuses it with? (Couldn't summon up correct syntax for this question. Sorry.)

government, written language and math

enough for usury
an "ante diluvian form of capital"
like merchants profit

but obviously you're sugggesting something the inca might have devised

credit is a meta system term in that sense
i perhaps needed to suggest i was restricting myself to commodity systems of social production

then again i'm sure you knew that on some level

i picked that bone because many folks
u not included
don't know the marxian thesis
that the bourgeois world historical contributions are over
and have been since mid 19th century

here's keynes implying we have need of these old systems for at least at the time another hundred years

sorry if i was a bit to brusk
it was un intentional...the first time
the second time it was apishness
a vice i indulge like some do
the communion wafer

A little violation of intellectual property here:

The witch that came (the withered hag)
To wash the steps with pail and rag,
Was once the beauty Abishag,

The picture pride of Hollywood.
Too many fall from great and good
For you to doubt the likelihood.

Die early and avoid the fate.
Or if predestined to die late,
Make up your mind to die in state.

Make the whole stock exchange your own!
If need be occupy a throne,
Where nobody can call you crone.

Some have relied on what they knew;
Others on simply being true.
What worked for them might work for you.

No memory of having starred
Atones for later disregard,
Or keeps the end from being hard.

Better to go down dignified
With boughten friendship at your side
Than none at all. Provide, provide!

Boink,

Those two terms are generally used interchangeably, but I think you can draw a distinction, where thrift is maximizing consumption per unit of income, while saving is not using up all of your income.

People might be thrifty in order to save, but can also be thrifty without saving, or save without being thrifty

Thrift: A poor person who needs two t-shirts, but can only afford one, who searches out a 2-for-1 deal in the bargain bin, spending all of their income.

Thrift & Saving: Middle class person who buys 1-ply toilet paper instead of 2-ply, and contributes the money saved to their 401K

Saving: A rich person who wastes money on fancy cars and brioni ties, but only ever spends 60% of their income and saves the rest.

"but obviously you're sugggesting something the inca might have devised"

I was thinking of the Chinese, given that they were less gold-obsessed that most other civilizations and actually used some pretty innovative paper money systems.

" the bourgeois world historical contributions are over
and have been since mid 19th century

here's keynes implying we have need of these old systems for at least at the time another hundred years"

The way I see it is that saving and investment is only necessary for lack of an alternative system of accumulation. I don't really buy the idea that bourgeois capitalist accumulation was necessary at any point. It's just one sub-optimal solution to the problem of coordinating activity in such a way that capital and productivity grow and compound steadily.

I think that we are just now getting to the point where we can be pretty sure that we have a workable alternative that will succeed where the USSR and PRC failed.

Thrift & Saving: Middle class person who buys 1-ply toilet paper instead of 2-ply, and contributes the money saved to their 401K...

Upon reaching retirement age (80), MCP doinks head and realizes 401K is toilet paper, no-ply.

"It's just one sub-optimal solution to the problem of coordinating activity in such a way that capital and productivity grow and compound steadily."
and you think that meme stream is itself not a product of human history
or are you saying
that meme does not require
contributions that came only thru
the world historical stages
of the bourgois epoch ???

maybe you're pulling up
the crude and crazy cat improvised on the fly
ladder that got you so high up in the tree
as to see beyond the stand of trees in front of you

"I think that we are just now getting to the point where we can be pretty sure that we have a workable alternative that will succeed where the USSR and PRC failed"
now your talkin'

i agree completely
notice i said material conditions not the concentrated comprehension of
the possibilities for further action
contained in those material conditions

the 5 year plan was a bold thrust
across the frontier
it implied

"we don't need no stinkin' scrooges ...
"now !!! not in a hundred years ...now !!!"

this to me is the difference between
lenin and martov
you take your choice

the soviet or the weimar republic ??
both ended rather badly
like all of Clio's blue plate specials

in the end time
its always reform or revolution
but of course that's only in..the end time

and yet read the reds of 15-16 did they have any inkling of what was about to happen

of course they got two shocks

the hideous rally round the flag moment of summer fourteen
before thoise moments after
the winter of seventeen when .....it was an end time
a time for a fall of seventeen

"and you think that meme stream is itself not a product of human history
or are you saying
that meme does not require
contributions that came only thru
the world historical stages
of the bourgois epoch ???"

Well, in general, isn't every idea a product of human history? I tend to view the path of history and emergence of new ideas as a little more arbitrary and a little less logical than the way you seem to view it. In general I find that these world historical dialectics seem a bit like just-so stories.

"i agree completely
notice i said material conditions not the concentrated comprehension of
the possibilities for further action
contained in those material conditions"

That's the bit where I disagree, I think. It doesn't seem to me to be a matter of the material conditions being right. It seems like something that could have been implemented a long time ago as it doesn't really require advanced technology or a lot of fixed capital, etc..

"I tend to view the path of history and emergence of new ideas as a little more arbitrary and a little less logical than the way you seem to view it."

for logical substitute some thing like

chained to the necessity
of a sequence of stages

ergotic ???

well the potential
of the human brain and hand might well have taken far longer or maybe somewhat shorter
time to get to the commodity/credit economy

we have three independent experiments

australia and the new world
seems the new world with its more recent separation from the old world
was close on to evolving
full blown state centered society
---if not "there"---

yet seems to have run on a slower clock
and with nicely different florishings

but australia ...yikes !!!!

but no exit ??

i doubt it
imagine the rest of humanity wiped out in say 1750

maybe the time till reconquest of the old world out of australia
might have pushed of the commodity/credit economy for a million years
i have no notion of when the land bridge
would be resurfacing even without anthrogenic warming
it migof 100 million years i dunno

but not never and then the necessary stage would begin the emerge out of each other

"In general I find that these world historical dialectics seem a bit like just-so stories. "

they are but only because we can't
as yet even in stripped down form
model human social evolution

but despite genesis being
6th century bc redaction
of a just so story
it got
the finite history of the universe right

even if in abbreviated form
6 thousand 15 billion... ah what's that

among the zillionns of universes

prolly both scales
are placed by the devil
in the same
total time zip code

"among the zillionns of universes"

Heavy. Just two 'everythings' defeats my limited understanding.

I wonder about these "necessary stages." Am I betraying the Old Man? I hope not, because I venerate him.

Is it disrespectful, though, to say that while he brilliantly opened our eyes to what did actually happen in history, nobody but nobody is in a position to say what might have been? Or might or will be?

Years ago I had a serious beef with the subjunctive mood: The only thing that's possible, I used to grump, is what has in fact happened. (Of course that list will have to be revised tomorrow.) I'm not such a bigot any more, and I subjunctivize recreationally. Still, it's hard to know what basis there might be for deciding that any given event is either inevitable or impossible.

a series of necessary stages
may only be in terms of each other
doesn't preclude other equally valid
sets of necessary stages

much like various proofs
of say the pythagorean theorem

and yet the analytic notion implied by the necessary stage lingo
is clearly off base

one means necessary here in the hegelian sense

"head for the Sabellian hills ..hoss "