Notes to Myself

First.

With respect to my summer reading.

I have always been fascinated by information. Its role in the economy; its nature; and its effect on our institutions. Equally I am usually horrified by the abuse information gets in economic theory. To me asymmetries of information are the reason economies exist. They are the cause of need, of exchange, and, at a more pragmatic level of profit. Thus creating, protecting, and maintain asymmetries of information are the lifeblood of business. Which makes most microeconomics a mockery of reality. Especially any micro that presumes information to be either freely or equably available.

You cannot understand an economy without first understanding information.

But not information in the sense of physics so much as information in the sense of biology. Evolution, the origins of life, the subsequent trajectory of everything since that origin are all the story of information traveling through time. We ourselves, and hence everything we have created including economies, are manifestations of that process.

In which regard I want to note the following quote:

“Genomes do not predict the future but recall the past: they reflect the exigencies of history” – Nick Lane, “What is Life?” p. 23

Of course my thoughts went here:

“Economies do not predict the future but recall the past: they reflect the exigencies of history”

How true. The information that is encoded in today’s economy contains the instructions for tomorrow’s. But the exact instantiation of that code is subject to the vagaries of the environment, of error, of emergent novelty, and of many other forces that make that instantiation unique.

In such a context the traditional subjects of economic theory, even the so-called forces of supply and demand, are secondary causes of what will appear as tomorrow’s economy. The primary cause is the interaction of the code and its environment as modified, but not superseded by, those secondary causes.

To understand the code and its travel through time is to understand an economy. Perhaps economics is only part of that overall understanding.

Second:

With respect to an upcoming speech. Two comments I have made – to friends – recently:

“The challenges of the future are how to make growth compatible with environmental safety, how to return to an equable (fair) society, how to reduce class privilege, how to balance social change with our historical legacy, and how to re-capture a sense of security.”

“Meanwhile, one point I want to make clear: I think economic security is essential if society is to navigate through social upheaval safely. Your example of the 1960’s is a good one. Economic security broke down in the 1970’s [mainly due to resource cost inflation, i.e. oil] and produced an extraordinarily conservative reaction manifested by Reagan and then Clinton both abandoning the platform of the New Deal. We are stuck in the economic mire as a result – a proper Keynesian reaction to 2008 would have moved us markedly forward from where we are now.

In other words the intellectual reaction to the 1970’s was an error now so well entrenched throughout our elite thought – and hence policy making – that we cannot break free and recapture security until the elite itself is overturned. And, with respect to your favorite social phenomenon, our cultural elite is also culpable: it is either cynically out to exploit society for personal enrichment, stuck re-cycling out of date leftist critiques, or deeply engrossed in important but yet marginal issues – issues that leave the majority out.

If, for instance, you want a colonial, holocaust, or slave-owning history to be truly written into a nation’s textbooks and its self-knowledge, then you cannot lambast today’s generation as if they caused the problem. They manifestly did not. They weren’t present. Blame, revenge, the call for reparations and so on merely create resentment amongst the very group you want to educate. They create a barrier not an entry way. Look at the deterioration of race relations in the US. It is appalling. Our textbooks refuse to include the real history. Our children grow up ignorant. The loss of economic opportunity aggravates base feelings. So the combination of ignorance and insecurity ends up making matters worse.

A healthy economy, one where opportunity is both real and abundant, where education is available and rewarded, where privilege is reduced to a minimum, where prosperity is fairly shared by all involved in creating it, and where the weak, young, sick, elderly and poor are not subjected to puritanical abuse and thus abandoned, supports a society capable of adapting to its history and of writing a better future.

The great social and economic thinkers of the past were reflecting on the passage of society from its agricultural base to a newer and what seemed disorienting industrial base. Those ideas need to be adapted or replaced as we move from an industrial base into what appears to be an experiential or service oriented base.

It is exciting to try to contribute to that process.”

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