Chill

I have of late been letting an obnoxious git get under my skin. It's a fellow I work with, and professionally he is a fine fellow, but on a personal level he is argumentative and a bit snide. From what I can gather this is what passes for normal everyday behaviour in his family, so go figure? It certainly explains his 40 year old virgin status (not for lack of desire on his part).

The annoying part is that I have noticed that interracting with him lately has made me more confrontational and irritable in general, whereas I would normally simply mutter "gobshite" and go about my business when encountering someone who is talking out their arse, I have felt compelled to do something about it. No more, I will ignore this chap's barbed comments and attempts to justify the greatness of Fianna Fail, and make my way through life letting it all slide, especially once I change jobs in Jan. In fact I think the fact that I will be escaping from him soon is what let me slip upon engaging in this nonsense in the first place. No, from now on having the craic is priority number one, so the ignoring of boring gits is of paramount importance!

Cutlery-ism

People are fundamentally a selfish bag of irrationality

So, not a people person today.

I include myself in that statement, but what get's me is the ones that smugly refuse to face the fact of their irrational choices and insist on asserting that they, and they alone are right on rowing against the tide.

Eh?

Well, look, someone has a bad experience with, say, spoons, at about the same time that they encounter a great fork. They then go through life spouting platitudes about forks being inherently better than the evil and terrible spoon, when in actual fact both have equal utility depending on the situation.

Well, maybe for that individual the evil of the spoon is an unyielding fact.

Perhaps. But a refusal to accept that reality exists outside of their narrow sphere of existence is not only severe denial but the height of ignorance. In any case, reality is little more than a collective hunch, therefore if the majority of the human race considers the spoon to be a perfectly acceptable object then tough fucking shit on them. There is no objective measurement or value, it simply is, the value, or lack thereof is determined entirely by the collective consciousness.

So if the spoon hater manages to convince enough people that they are in fact evil it will cause a change in reality?

Pretty much. It would also result in the oppression of spoons, so the irrational rantings of one individual suddenly bring about a change that has a severely negative impact on spoons even though the majority of spoons are fine upstanding people, err, cutlery.

Doesn't that mean that reality is essentially unstable?

Have you looked around you lately? 18 months ago everyone was rich, now we are all in the shit. If that's not unstable I don't know what is.

Shields to maximum!

Entrenched views are the sign of a closed mind. A mind that will battle new perspectives rather than risk appraising them. This doesn't have to take the form of a hard retaliation, any student of martial arts will tell you of the value of deflection and misdirection over rigid resistance, what looks like acceptance is all to often simply a new technique in rejecting a distasteful concept.

Entrenched ideas are not the preserve of the establishment. Just as much closed-mindedness exists among the minority perspectives, possibly as a reflection of the status quo, but nonetheless, stagnant, reflexive and full of the same levels of empty rhetoric. They might want change, but they want their change because their change is unquestionably right. Unquestionably.

I probably suffer from it myself, though I value adaptability and fluidity as characteristics, and I try to avoid the hypocrisy of "they are narrow minded, they cannot  or wont understand my position". Note, I said "try". I like the approach of the 3 year old: "Why".

One word. Picks at the threads.Picks and picks and picks, until it is unraveled and the core of nonsense exposed. The fundamentally irrational choice at the heart of the issue emerges from the rich tapestry of rationalisations and platitudes wrapped lovingly thereabout. Give it a try, but for God's sake don't try it on yourself, you might get upset.

Doctrine

I have no major issue with religion, some do, I don't. I might have an issue with some people involved in religion mind you. Anyway, the thing about religion is most of them started out as social engineering. Some person had some ideas about how we should interact and, because at the time "well it's a really good idea" didn't hold much weight they invoked the authority of a higher, well, authority.

Most of the suggestions were, in general, nice. Granted there was sometimes an element of 'them and us', as you might expect in times of tribalism, but on the 'us' side of the equation people were encouraged to look after one another, support each other and generally set aside self interest.

Now the secular doctrine is quite the opposite. Thanks to the mathematician Nash (you know, the chap in 'A beautiful mind' who had paranoid schizophrenia) people in markets and society have been modeled according to game theory where self interest reigns supreme. No longer are we encouraged to give a damn about one another, instead the system is constructed to profit from our self interest. We are essentially given permission to be selfish little shits for the greater glory. 

To be clear, I'm not advocating a return to the dominance of the church, but the model we are using currently doesn't seem to work, it was after all one of the key elements of the freshwater economists models which have recently proven themselves to be soooooo inadequate. Perhaps the principle of encouraging people to be nice might not be such a futile course? 

Hmm?

Maybe?

Dig a hole....

Fucking NAMA

Well there is a chance it might work?

It will work

If you think that then what's your problem.

What it's really intended for

Huh?

It's not about getting credit flowing. Even if it does make money back for the taxpayer the damage will be done 

But if it makes money there is no damage surely?

You are thinking too linearly. The real purpose of NAMA is to lock in the status quo.

Well they need to be locked up from what I've heard

No, not the band, though I'll remember that comment and hold it against you. No, I mean locking the whole system up tight to prevent any social mobility until such time as the overall financial system recovers sufficiently to be once again exploited by the privileged.

How do you figure that?

Well if land prices collapsed that would create a wealth of opportunity for those who were not caught up in the ridiculous property fervour of the last decade. These people mostly being of a younger generation who had no opportunity to get in there. This would be to the detriment of the existing elite, as they will be tied up tight by their debt and negative equity. Instead NAMA puts a floor on property prices and essentially kills of the market for the next decade or more, but at the same time locking in the gains made by those in the know so they can swill some chapaign and spit on the proles that are paying for their foolishness.

I can't say I buy it. Why is property the only gateway to social mobility?

Well, a couple of reasons. Firstly, they aren't making any more land. Secondly the ingrained, inbred and insane value attributed to property by the collective psyche of this country as a result of centuries of not being able to own any.

There is a slightly perverse relationship to land here alright.

In the past they'd have married it if the priests had let them.

Still stickin' it to us and telling us we like it

Tesco have dropped their prices. 

Somewhat.

The fact is they are still charging us more that they charge our compatriots up North.

Now, here's the thing, if they have dropped from 30% above NI prices to 18% this equates to a drop of 8% in the prices we pay. A quick check of the historical exchange rate shows that on this day last year sterling was trading at 15% higher against the Euro as compared to today, so stuff is (in Euros) 15% cheaper for them, but they are passing only an 8% saving to us while telling us how nice they are being to us.

So, in summary, they are making more money from us and telling us they are doing us a favour. 

Mad Hatter's Tea Party

People like stability, in the short term in any case. Economies, for the most part don't. They want growth, and yes, you can argue that they want stable growth, but the growth tends to come from something disruptive. The technology of steam power was disruptive and led to economic growth, but even that reached a point of equilibrium again, until oil took over, disrupting the equilibrium again, and it will tend towards equilibrium where it becomes sufficiently highly priced that the return on it's use in increasing the efficiency of production is shaved to the bare minimum. These are disruptions caused by technology and resources though. What about disruptions within society?

Thinking about it lately, and watching a few documentaries, I've been wondering if economic theories don't have a life time. I mean after the crash Keynes made a collection of economic recommendations that were aimed at providing governments with the tools to control their economies and maintain a degree of stable growth, but then the stagflation of the '70s kicked in and no-one understood why. The Friedmanites stepped in and claimed that they had the answer and the freshwater free-market doctorine was born, shoved down the throats of many (often with considerable force) and eventually transformed into growth. Well, we can see where that has got us now.

Both approaches (I think) suffer from the assumption that the players in the game remain unchanged by the game, purely for simplicity's sake, the heavily mathematical models of the free marketeers treat all players as rational little robots and assume that deviations from this model will be catered for by statistical effects (as I understand it so far) and what little I know of this, I know even less of Keynes' assumptions, but the reality is inevitably more complex.

Let's take a case where the old rule book gets torn up, and a new one put in place. Now for it to remain in place it must create growth, otherwise you need to put a harsh regime in place to keep it going, and that is not sustainable. If it creates growth then some people must be doing well within the confines of the new rules, while (inevitably) others fail. This leads to a degree of natural selection, and the people and methods used to succeed become common place. These are the people and methods that are best suited to exploiting the current system of rules. Eventually the opportunity for growth peters out unless a technological disruption kicks in to allow increased efficiency. The demand for growth from shareholders will still exist, so even though the method of production has reached a stage where no further efficiency gains can be wrung from it. Markets get saturated though, so the demand may not be there to support a price increase, and while it may be possible to shed some of the workforce to reduce costs, this will also have a negative impact on demand, the only way up is for the price for what is being produced goes up. The government doesn't like inflation and unemployment so they adopt Keynes recommendation of printing more cash, but the successful businesses have flourished in this environment, so this allows them to bump up prices, meanwhile the workforce is also similarly canny, and ups their wage demands. Hence stagflation. Change the rules and it all gets turned topsy turvey for a while, some clever sorts find a new way of succeeding within the new rules (often only just within them) and the game of adaptation begins again, this time ending in the unstable point of financial crisis. These are our choices, crisis or stagflation. The alternative is to never seek equilibrium, but to continuously steer rule changes to keep us away from both outcomes, essentially turning the whole affair into the mad-hatters tea party, where all of the players switch chairs at random intervals, succeeding on one turn, failing on another. Perhaps this is indeed the most equitable solution as all get a fair crack of the whip at success, but can never be successful for long enough to establish enough power to unduly influence the system?

Essentially we need technological disruption or we will lurch from crisis to stagflation and back again until an asteroid obliterates us.