Innovation – No. Degeneration – Yes.

Just how much innovation is really possible in a simple transaction under which one man borrows money and another one lends it? All financial transactions ultimately reduce to a simple formula: I provide you money—and you pay me the money back, plus-some. The plus-some is my reward for letting you have the money. What more is there to it? Investing is also just another form of lending.

Curious Cockfight

Battles or uproars in the Media tend to remind me—because they’re so visible—that all of us inhabit artificial worlds, worlds produced by habit and assumptions. The dark aspect of this is that we think ourselves immune, but we’re just as benighted as everyone else.

The example, this time, comes from CNN. There Lou Dobbs has apparently decided to continue his bombastic fulminations from another but as yet unannounced media platform. Evidently he was nudged in this direction by CNN itself which, inside its own bubble, believes that it is a balanced purveyor of news.

Second Life to the Rescue

The other day—the trigger was a New York Times story about real money spent on virtual good (11/7/09)—Brigitte and I had a lots of fun and laughter talking about Second Life, a subscription based virtual reality program that, by happenstance, was not mentioned in the Times article. The Wikipedia article on this game is awesome. It runs to 25 pages in which the tone is dead seriousness throughout, and the article ends with (count them) 140 footnotes.

What’s So Special About Afghanistan?

Before I get to that question, just a few facts. The weapons used in the 911 terrorist attacks were three airplanes routinely used by airlines. Nineteen people hijacked those planes. Next, three of the terrorists, all three trained as pilots, crashed the planes. Two went into buildings, the third augured into the ground–thanks to heroic resistance by its passengers. The conspiracy behind this attack certainly needed planning, funding and coordination.

Morality v. Law

The words morality and ethics both derive from the concept of “customary good behavior.” One word comes from the Greek, the other from the Latin. In our times we prefer to use ethics, e.g., in phrases like “business ethics.” The reason for this is that the Latin word is too closely associated with religion, a vast cultural domain we also now look down upon; and, indeed, when people speak of immorality, they usually mean sexual behavior. The “customary” also ranks low with us because customs and traditions often sanction ways of behavior which we now find unacceptable—especially in the way women have been deprived of equal status in the past. I acknowledge the deficits of custom. Any and all collective products of the human mind are prone to failure, customary law as much as anything else.

Contract, Custom, and Corruption

It is best to remember that contracts and laws draw their power from enforcement. Our contract-based society absolutely requires (1) a functioning state, (2) a law-enforcement arm, and (3) a judicial apparatus. But what happens in societies where one, two, or even all three of these necessary underpinnings of contact-law are missing?

Well, agreements are still struck, but in reaching them both parties must be much more careful. Each will be required to enforce the contract—because no state authority is handy to do the job. To aid in this effort, other relationships are very useful, not least family ties, tribal ties, and sufficient other economic or power relationships so that, if the other party fails to deliver, meaningful pressures can be brought to bear, and if these also fail, pain can be imposed on the reneging party.

Incentives versus Integrity

I changed jobs during my career in order to get higher pay, but I have never really “worked for money” nor ever “worked harder” because of so-called incentives. For these reasons I view the current debate about incentives and bonuses as a sign of decadence, unworthy of us as a people. That’s the gist, but let me enlarge.

A Benign View of the Internet

One of the useful aspects of our adaptations to this dimension is that bad news always dominate our consciousness whereas the good we take for granted. Thus we don’t exult minute to minute because our heart is beating, but if a period of arrhythmia sets in, look out! We can think of nothing else until we’re back in rhythm again. The negative compels because it’s natures way of calling out for action—even when, alas, there is nothing we can actually do.

Algorithms Optimize While Trust Erodes

In effect this is a minor thing, but it tells a story.

We have three e-mail accounts with some entity that calls itself att.yahoo, meaning that, along the way, AT&T must have acquired some piece of Yahoo, or gone into one of those mysterious partnerships. Trying to keep current with these matters requires absurd levels of concentration, like tracking the paths of fleas on a mangy dog. In any case, what once was Yahoo is now att.yahoo, or maybe the other way around, but the fact remains that of the three accounts we use, one we never use. The two we use are a kind of his and hers, Brigitte gets her mail on one, I get mine on the other. The third, the unused one, however, is part of the set up on both of our machines.

The Daily Isn’t

My theme is not the daily paper but it is the Detroit News and Free Press that occasioned the thought I want to record. Subscribers to one or both of these papers have been served up a pretty botched meal this past year. The paper is still being printed daily, but subscribers only get the physical copies delivered Thursday, Saturday, and Sunday. So much for the People’s Right to Know. The papers come when it pleases the advertisers for us to receive printed ads at our door. The Market knows best, etc., etc. [Expletive deleted] the market.