05. Ape Economy
CHAPTER V
Parallel systems
Is your credit still counted as an asset in accounting?
As in "credit card"?
Well, humans are animal beings, slightly evolved from apes.
So let's have a look at their economy, shall we?
Apes - and other forms of life, not only mammals who are capable of discriminating between two different individuals - have developed rudimentary forms of what humans call economy. They trade. This for that.
Spiders, for instance, don't: He who offers a gift gets eaten anyway, if the gift isn't big enough. That would be appeasement. Satisfy the hunger of who you are dealing with something or someone else, and you will be saved. Maybe.
Yes, you have just traded in something or someone else for something else. That's economy. For you. So - is human economy all about, or superimposed with, non-thermodynamic inhibitions of judgment and morality and the like, and are we therefore superior to lions and apes and zebras and grass?
Perhaps.
But let's look at the psychology of non-human, non-lethal trading first:
Apes trade favors. And they trade for favors. Now, this requires memory - try trading favors with a rattlesnake, a crocodile; or a human with late stage Alzheimer's Disease, if you do not see what I mean.
You can trade with a bee, but not with a fly.
To be able to trade, both must be able - and willing! - to remember what happened more than three seconds ago - the time lapse for the present.
In other words, trade - or trade-based economy - runs on debt.
Money is just a written reminder - and expression - for debt. You owe the other a favor - in return for what has happened before, in your favor, in the way of resources, of relief, of energy or entropy. Any form of money in a modern economy is an expression of a) your credit - what you owe to others - and b) your credit - what ist owed to you.
You can access something with a soiled bit of paper or plastic only because this is owed to you. Transfer of Money is the transfer of debt.
This debt will be invoked and enforced by guilt, shame, pain, and threats
of the same, just to make sure it is not easily "forgotten" - for those
that "forget" and default on their debt are the ones that make a gain -
bar those whose creditors "forget" their debt, in one way or another,
as in a crash.
There seems to be another issue when two partners trade, especially two countries, of getting rid of the money (or debt) left over in this transaction, AKA "trade deficit" - note the language. Of course, one countries' deficit is the other's surplus - but the point is the money involved.
Perhaps we should see "money" not only as an expression of debt between trade partners, but as an expression of a real physical deficit caused by their manufacture and trade; if you run the game in simulation, you always end up buying potatoes and oil with money symbolizing less than what you get for it.
Perhaps, therefore, any money involved in transactions should be destroyed once it returns to the issuer; otherwise it - and therefore debt - builds up and clogs the system until it collapses about once in a generation - unless, as strong players are able to do, this debt is pawned off to foreign countries which then take the fall, or - in some cases - the assets of the country, or that country itself, is sold off to the creditor. Has anyone ever played "Monopoly" seriously without the losers issuing piles of IOUs in the end?
So does every economy in the world - it's called inflation.
[What you can try: Play your own 'Monopoly', but with no starter cash, AKA helicopter money. Just issue IOUs. Simulate a world with few survivors: One person can be a worker living in a ditch, another has a factory for, say, refrigerators, devoid of workers, but no refrigerator himself as yet. Choose! Everybody chooses to be the boss - and I'm fine with that, for of course I demand to be paid... just a piece of paper stating what I'm owed... you'd be surprised! Now add a third person as farmer, and you'll be surprised even more. Rules: No cheating, no magic whatsoever, no foreign money or uncle from Mars, no central banking. Just that what you issue yourself.]
Now, money being an expression of debt, one person's wealth is another person's debt. Monetary wealth and debt always cancel one another out to exactly zero - which is why you will witness massive protests at the attempts to reduce debt and deficit - reduce debt by any amount, and you will inevitably reduce wealth by that same amount somewhere else; and they will not like it.
Remember the source and sink you need to run a physical economy, which has to be provided for by gravity? Well, there you have the expression of it.
Debt being the source, by the way.
Of course, monetary wealth and debt are unevenly distributed, and never the twain shall meet. As the wealth builds up, when the economy is running well, more debt is being accumulated, one on one; and all the while production and trade are producing real physical deficits - oil is burnt and has to be replenished.
The more work you invest, the more debt you accumulate - and sometimes, when you destroy the result of your work, as in a recession or war, you return to square one. Industrial nations have far more debt than agricultural ones.
In more expressed detail:
The economy of debt
Work depletes resources thermodynamically, producing physical loss as well as monetary wealth and debt. This is less esoteric than you think - you can make a chair out of a tree, but you cannot make a tree out of a chair, plus it takes energy and augments entropy to make the chair - and that chair will have to be sold for more debt (money) than what is owed for the tree, ripping a hole in the economy, which has to be stuffed with an even greater hole, because the act of stuffing costs extra; so you always end up paying off the deliverer of resources with debt.
At the very beginning of this economic chain - from resources to end product, from tree to chair - everything has to be for free - as in this case, sunlight; but it the loss has to be paid, for the system to even get started. Note: the primary resources cannot be produced, they have to be created by self-augmenting gravity systems over time - as a source, not a re-source.
Now, does that sound as if it will work for ever - or rather like a self-augmenting deficit system, which needs to empty - or kick - the bucket every so many years?
In any given monetary system - did this come into being or be enhanced by the invention of the steam engine, by the way?
- all money is not based on credit. It is credit. Every dollar bill, every bank account in the green is a generalized IOU. You get something for your money because it is owed to you - if it is legal tender. Otherwise it's just pretty decoration paper.
- the relation of wealth or assets to debt is exactly 1:1, always.
- if you reduce debt, you reduce wealth or assets by exactly the same amount, 1:1.
- if you cancel all debt, you cancel all wealth to instantly 0, busting the system.
- if there is too much debt on one side, there is too much wealth on the other.
- wealth and debt are unevenly distributed.
Of course, those who give credit have their own interest in mind - it is not only an easy way to make money, it is also the only way to make money.
And those who create money out of nothing, by this very act create debt out of thin air... whilst taking care to attribute this debt to others than themselves. Of course.
This little detail - by the way - has been known for around 4-5 thousand years.
For on the one hand, interest on capital is money that either has to be taken away from somewhere or someone else - zero sum - or hast to itself be created out of ever new credit, thus steadily increasing the money supply.
On the other, money cannot be created by work - it does not magically appear, anywhere, while you are chopping wood or writing code. You have to sell your product or service - which again means that earned income is itself money that either has to be taken away from somewhere or someone else - zero sum - or itself be created out of ever new credit, thus steadily increasing the money supply. Duh.
Schematically:
Step 1: Create money by printing it (on paper, in books or digitally) to be lent to corporations, startups or the like, who begin offering products and services (corporate credit)
Step 2: Create money by printing it (on paper, in books or digitally) to be lent to consumers to buy these products and services (consumer credit)
Step 3: Destruction of Capital (crash, insolvency), as the consumers, being the end of the creadit chain, usually have no-one to pass their credit on to.
The real interesting bit here is the conversion of corporate credit to consumer credit - it is passed on together with the products and services; the providers pay themselves for their own service with credit; for the customers, working for their living, cannot pay for their own overhead by buying their own products with their pay, which is, per product, necessarily only a part of the cost of that product.
In a word: People who work for a living cannot pay for their own services in money - the cost of their own product naturally exceeds their pay and has to be financed with credit or IOUs which they can never repay for this very reason. Collectively.
Neat, huh?
We take home:
Human - and non-human - trade-based economy runs on debt. Not Wealth.
- A sacrifice is an overall net gain of zero, and along with the inevitable thermodynamic loss of any action, a negative gain.
- A fair trade is an overall net gain of zero, and along with the inevitable thermodynamic loss of any action, a negative gain.
See? Think in reverse. Always.
Production runs on thermodynamics, trade runs on thermodynamics.
Human economy, all economy - the production and trade of goods - runs on debt, and the overall negative result is an absolute loss of resources.
This is not a moral observation, it is a mathematical and physical one.
How can a system, that produces nothing but negatives, survive for just one second in time?
There is only one answer:
It is being subsidized from outside of itself.
There needs to be a second system, which is independent of the first.
Biomass economy
Positive and negative messes - just a little light-hearted banter.
Some stuff about ants, with no voucher for truth given:
Why ants?
The species whose biomass supposedly matches that of humans are ants - the world wide mass of earthworms far surpass both - it also seem to be the one species the most human domestic poisoning is performed upon.
Are they competitors? For what?
Though seldom aggressive, ants are perceived - and indeed are - invasive, and there is the old adage that no humans should build their home where ants - or cats! - like to be. Negative 'earth rays', you see.
And anyone who has ever felt the unease which emanates from an anthill, or has observed where cats like to settle, knows this to be true … whereas, where dogs or sheep lie down, there's where you build your home and make your bed - of course, dog and sheep permitting. Positive 'earth rays'.
So, what is this?
Well, in their own invasive and unreflecting way, the ants are trying to tell you something - namely, that you should not be there at all, or that you are mis-performing in some other way. Hence, there are some homesteads which never get a visit from the little scavengers of misfortune, sickness and death - those are which are where they should be - namely, where the ants are not.
Indeed, where humans finally fail and leave, the ants take over, and try to clean up the mess that should not be there in the first place. They do their best, as in the 1990s experiment in Arizona called 'Biosphere 2'.
After humans had to abandon this failed experiment to recluse themselves from the source and sink of the world around them, whereupon - and I quote - "the would-be Eden became a nightmare, its atmosphere gone sour, its sea acidic, its crops failing, and many of its species dying off", ants are now busily working to get this abomination off the face of this planet.
All hail to them. Hail Ants!
Think off the rails, and you think askew.
Interactive economy
The eagle and the rabbit
One more thing before we concentrate on humans again.
There is such thing as interactive or interspecies economy, as shown by the bison who fed the wolves. And it too, is driven by hunger - not surplus.
Any possible surplus within the system is short-lived:
If there is grass, there will be rabbits. If there are rabbits, there will be eagles.
Either the grass will be overgrazed with too many rabbits, resulting in hunger, or there will be too many eagles, reducing the prey on the grass, thereby subjecting themselves to starvation - and the abundant grass will bring forth the next oversupply of rabbits. And so on.
Ergo: Oversupply causes starvation - but so does undersupply: No matter what, the ecosystem - and it shall be left open if this 'eco' means ecology or economy or both - will go into deficit.
Why? Because it is fed from the outside, and that feed is limited to some 3,000,000 exajoules per year - give or take a joule. And the actual feed which can be extracted from this by the biosphere is quite miniscule … 3,000 exajoules per year or .1% - just in the first stage of the food chain.
Would that be around 1000 Watts of solar Energy per m², of which then 1 W / m² would be converted partly into food? Would that reflect the dimensions?
So we are talking maybe 10 Wh / m² per day?
Wilderness and farms
If this food is not eaten raw, more conversions will have to follow, only to be multiplied to further fractions thereof; but even if - you will then, as a hunter & gatherer, have to move from berry bush to berry bush, and chase deer, and if you return too soon, before the berry bush, or deer family, has had time to build up edible biomass for you again … see rabbits, above.
If you stay where you are, you will simply use up more energy than your surroundings provide - a human needs at least 1000 Wh per day just to stay alive, making it 100 m² of wild berry bush per human per day to graze upon, and then move on - or 36000 m² per year. I am no good with numbers, so I hope this get it right … how big is the minimal ecological farm land needed for one person? They say 1 US acre - or 4000 m², or about 1/10 of that. Well, crop plants are indeed about 10 times more efficient than wild ones.
But above all, modern farming converts mineral oil to vegetable oil. Farm produce is today subsidized by fossil and other fuels - to over 50% - making it a consumer, rather than a producer, of energy carriers. A consumer of energy - or rather energy potential - it always was, always is, and always will be.
As everything is.
Perhaps the only surplus ever achieved was when carbon energy carriers were buried underground - no, not even that. The second law of thermodynamics rules supreme … that fossil fuel, garnered over maybe hundreds of millions of years, just gave humans more energy potential to exploit and destroy within a few centuries - in roughly .0001% of the time, am I right there? Aren't we burning gas, oil and coal worth around 100,000 years - every year?
We are gathering time - that's all.
Good luck with the alternative.
The elders of time understood that humans feed off creation, and they were even able to describe it - without really knowing how and why.
Knowledge, even intelligence can get in your way as much as it can help. Dumb creatures can know more about creation than smart ones - as they are more helpless towards it. They therefore understand more easily - on a low level, of course. For those that don't, die out. The others survive.
Once again: If you have been led down your path of thinking by a goal, put your thinking in reverse and back out of it - back to the point where you made the decision to follow this path rather than the other one.
Think: What if that presumption were right and the other was wrong?
And what if that presumption was wrong and the other was right?
Go down both paths as far as you need to know. But never forget - you always took a decision which presumes against one possibility.
That was you.
You could be wrong. What if?
Don't chicken out!
- - - -
[Save page as: Text] or
[Web Page, complete]
Contents
01. Thinking in Reverse _ Minds.html
02. The Opening of the Sluices _ Minds.html
03. Everyone thinks the Same - and that is Wrong _ Minds.html
04. Human Economy - in Greater Context _ Minds.html
05. Ape Economy _ Minds.html
06. The Mechanics of Creation _ Minds.html
07. The Grand Conclusion _ Minds.html
08. Addendum Papyrae: Epilogue _ Minds.html
Go to: