August 20, 2009 - Broadway Cafe - Kansas City Missouri

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Robert Samuelson in “The Great Inflation and Its Aftermath” defines “economic growth” as the percentage increase in hours worked plus the percentage increase in productivity. I looked up productivity – the concept sounds simple enough, it is about producing more goods and services with less and less labor but it can’t be measured directly as hours worked is. No two economists seemed to agree on what productivity is composed of or how to derive it – no simple formula in a machine – put a few numbers in out a number pops an answer. Most economists leave it out of their calculations of growth altogether (unless you call those intersecting curves they like to produce a calculation) and call growth simply the increase in GDP. So ‘economic growth’ I gather is the doing of more and more with less and less but in reality is a measure of an increase in economic activity itself (any economic activity). It may just be that most of the growth in our economy in the last fifty years has nothing to do with productivity but has been the conversion of non-economic activity into economic activity (for example look at meal preparation – instead of buying basic food stuffs, we purchase prepared items – what we used to call TV diners – and then we stop preparing meals in the home all together and start eating take out – that is economic growth because we have moved the activity of food preparation into the market place).

Hence, my proposal for economic growth – convert “no child left behind” into an economic activity. This has two major benefits – it creates a new economic activity and increase the hours worked (by turning school children into workers). The scheme is very basic – pay students for test preparation by the hour and make their test scores their productive activity – hours worked increases, a new activity is colonized. We don’t have to pay them very much for this to work – sort of like the tooth ferry (wow! Another activity to convert – recovery is just around the corner). And yet another economic activity – a market could be established for trading test scores so that districts with high scores could sell credits to districts with low scores (don’t we already do that with pollution credits – another new economic activity – turning global warming itself into an economic activity – better living through pollution). Our totalizing economy shall leave not activity behind.

Jove fixed it certain, that whatever day / Makes man a slave, takes half his worth away – Homer

As stresses mount, the attempts to relieve it become more bizarre – as traditional behavior becomes less rewarding, anxieties increase

Capitalism expands wealth primarily though creative destruction – the process by which the cash flow form obsolescent, low-return capital is invested in high-return, cutting-edge technologies – Alan Greenspan

Technology is another code word that doesn’t mean what we think it does (at least to us non-economists). For the economist and the anthropologist it is merely a new or different way of doing something – so a new technology may be using bicycles to commute to work rather than driving automobiles. In this sense we can say that technology can solve all problems – if due to global warming we return to hunting big game with stone spears, that is a new technology in that it is a different process for gathering our food from going to the grocery store. Of course Alan Greenspan assumes that new technologies always introduces a higher-capital return and we commonly assume that new technologies all come out research laboratories.

The more one lives in this wicked world the more one learns – Soseki Natsumi – I Am Cat II, 1979 p107

The tipping point –
        It may have already been exceeded
In which case –
        Any chance of a mid-point correction
        Has passed


The only thing left is to fuck
        Your neighbor’s wife and pass
        Out drunk (but watch out or
        You may get tea-bagged)


And the conservatives are making
         A  concession – I don’t believe it
         Not for one minute


But I’m willing to admit that we need
       To do the right thing and keep
       Our house clean

Meaning he’s willing to buy up

       My credits

So I decided to fuck his wife

       Too and break into his cabinet

       Of fine whiskies and aged brandies

To hell with another market I want

        Immediate gratification

I hate history! Nothing is simple, nothing is consecutive, the record is corrupt. Further, the ‘me’ inside these brackets appears no wiser than the one outside them, though he (the former) is fifteen years older – John Updike – Memoirs of the Ford Administration, 1992 p307

And I have to get up and move about

And wave my arms around

         To make the security lights

         Come back on so I can read

A Theologian – what denomination if I may ask

– Nazarene - I would have guessed Catholic

         Theology after all is supposed to be universal

         All pointing to the one true god

There are not many who think as I do
And it was unfortunately true
        And I had faith in what he said
        That and the fact that he had not mentioned
        God or its manifestation in the holy trinity
                   Once


Ideas and life and experience
       Should hold hands
       Language alone is not enough
       I said waving my arms


He wanted to recover the past
And I wanted to redeem the future
And we were both condemned to the
       Here and now
With no one left capable of proclaiming –
God Bless you My Son! Anymore
Nietzsche had made sure of that
      Or maybe it had been Kant


He got back on his bike and peddled away
I was left flailing my arms about trying to turn
      Night into day

Most of us are constituted in such a way that we also aspire to understand things, that is to say, to reduce them to the limit of our mind – Jean-Claude Carriére – Please, Mr. Einstein, 2006 p83

Anything said of the micro-level, should also be applicable to the macro-level and visa versa for if it is to have any real significance. Conventional microeconomics has a “when to stop” rule, while macroeconomics does not.

Economic bodies that hold real power… do not and inherently cannot exercise that power directly [and] … while Big Brother is now anonymous, his subjects’ servitude is more voluntary than ever – Serge Latouche – The Globe Downshifted (Le Monde dipolmatique, Jan 2006)

A de-colonization of the mind is in order