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Continued from here.
Matt Ridely develops his concept of the technium - the sum of our technologies - in a way that perfectly dovetails with my idea of man surviving by dreaming up new needs and making relentless efforts to turn these dreams into reality. I have consistently argued that technical progress and economic growth are anchored in human nature; none of both can be stopped without doing inordinate harm to man, as a being intent on expressing its nature and as an animal with a recurrent need of creative provisioning.
The term creative is important, because it is true specifically of the human, and only of him, that all attempts at solutions are creative or at least potentially creative, unless automated by training (an experienced driver shifting gears) or by instinct (avoiding excessive heat). We perceive the world in terms of problems whose solutions involve non-recurrent innovative elements almost all of the time. We are taking this specifically human quality for granted, so much so that we are hardly aware of the fact that we customise practically every minute effort at problem solving. Customisation of problem solving by humans is effected by framing the problem in terms of newly defined needs which are tailored to a specific situation. Other animals work with a fairly rigid set of standard responses largely programmed into their instincts, but with only some rather narrow bandwidth of intelligent variation. Horses do not refurbish their stables. By contrast, picture this: you are cleaning up after having cooked a meal, a friend calls you up asking you to visit her concerning an urgent matter. You respond to this situation by creating a whole series of new needs and fulfilling them, like changing the procedure of cleaning up the kitchen to shorten the chore while still finishing it tolerably well, and you amend other parts of your tasks for the day which require you coming up with a number of new ideas, each of which representing new needs, needs that had not existed before, but are created by you to better adapt to a new situation. These challenges and solutions may be trivial, but they require the ability to constantly create and satisfy new needs.
The term creative is important, because it is true specifically of the human, and only of him, that all attempts at solutions are creative or at least potentially creative, unless automated by training (an experienced driver shifting gears) or by instinct (avoiding excessive heat). We perceive the world in terms of problems whose solutions involve non-recurrent innovative elements almost all of the time. We are taking this specifically human quality for granted, so much so that we are hardly aware of the fact that we customise practically every minute effort at problem solving. Customisation of problem solving by humans is effected by framing the problem in terms of newly defined needs which are tailored to a specific situation. Other animals work with a fairly rigid set of standard responses largely programmed into their instincts, but with only some rather narrow bandwidth of intelligent variation. Horses do not refurbish their stables. By contrast, picture this: you are cleaning up after having cooked a meal, a friend calls you up asking you to visit her concerning an urgent matter. You respond to this situation by creating a whole series of new needs and fulfilling them, like changing the procedure of cleaning up the kitchen to shorten the chore while still finishing it tolerably well, and you amend other parts of your tasks for the day which require you coming up with a number of new ideas, each of which representing new needs, needs that had not existed before, but are created by you to better adapt to a new situation. These challenges and solutions may be trivial, but they require the ability to constantly create and satisfy new needs.
But man organises his demands not only by personal strategy for personal needs but also on a macro level by robbery, exploitation, trade and other forms of negotiated agreement. The possibility of high performance in augmenting the technium hinges on the way social forces are organised, and this, in turn, depends on the ordering of human affairs brought about by politics.
Technium and socium (the sum of our social technologies) form a mutually reinforcing cycle - improved socium leads to an accelerated and more efficient augmentation of the technium, which releases more resources to strengthen the socium. In fact, technium and socium represent a multi-layered circle, such that the technium may take the first mover position (change in military technology), while on another layer within the same cycle the socium is simultaneously taking that protagonist position (social change releasing members of social strata to adopt the change in military technology thereby altering the relative strength of classes - large standing armies replacing the feudal model of knighthood).
A recession is a pause in the process of expanding the technium. Tapping into the resources available from the socium can help get us out of recession and reinvigorate the technium. Even without taking sides with Keynesians, it seems rather plausible to regard the shift from the communist to the capitalist social technologies as a way of imparting vigour to the growth of the technium by replacing a less effective socium with a more powerful one.
Read in conjunction, the below excerpts from two of my posts, as well as the quote from Keynes 1925 essay "Am I A Liberal?" support the conclusion that the technium-socium cycle produces Keynesian options that are hard to suppress in the short run, and impossible to deny in the long run.
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P022 The Inexorable Technium from 10/07/2013
In technology you need to take each step before you can take the next. And once you’ve taken each step, the next becomes mandatory, which is why people throughout history have stumbled on the same inventions at the same time. As Kevin Kelly catalogues in his book What Technology Wants, there were six different inventors of the thermometer, three of the hypodermic needle, four of vaccination, four of decimal fractions, five of the electric telegraph, four of photography, three of logarithms, five of the steamboat, six of the electric railroad. According to two historians, no less than 23 people deserve credit for inventing the incandescent bulb around the same time as Edison.Such redundancy underlines the futility of trying to prevent or even steer technological change. Opponents of GM crops and fracking can prevent a nation sharing in the bounty of progress, but almost certainly cannot stop the world doing so. As Kelly argues, the technium (the sum of our technologies) marches onward, selecting its inventors rather than vice versa. It is almost as if it is alive.
Also, in the course of augmenting the technium, we find more time to do more things, which automatically expands the range of options from which to choose:
[F]or true economic growth to happen, something somewhere has to get cheaper. If you have to work for a shorter time to fulfil a need such as mobile telephony, sandwiches or an airline ticket, you have a bit of spare time left over to fulfil another need or want. That gives somebody else a job providing for your new demand. And so on. Sometimes things get cheaper because of different organisation of people and things (Ryanair, Primark); sometimes because of new inventions that cost less to make or run.
So, for example, today it costs less than half a second of work on the average wage to earn enough to switch on a bedside lamp for an hour. In 1950 your grandparents had to work for eight seconds on the average wage to earn that much light. (And in 1880, 15 minutes.) Thanks to improvements in electricity generation, light technology and productivity — which is reflected in rising wages — you have seven and a half seconds that your grandparents did not have in which to fulfil a different need and provide a living to a different supplier.
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UPDATE and CORRECTION: the below posts P023 and P024 are wrongly dated - they are from 2014 rather than 2013.
In the meantime, in
P023 The Day the Music Died - The Keynesian Propensity from 11/22/2013 [correct: 2014]
I have opened up in my mind still a bit wider to actually dare see a shade of good in Keynesian ideas, tentatively recognising
... a form of widespread Keynesianism, whereby the idea of a subsidy is enmeshed with other concerns, which in themselves may or may not be objectionable. In other words, there is a human propensity to act like a Keynesian, which to some extent, I think, we cannot or even should not discard entirely.In fact, it may be impossible to arrive at an objective assessment as to whether an intervention is an intervention and, if it is, whether it is to the benefit or the detriment of this or that group or the public at large. Theoretical disagreements sum to a state of indeterminacy from which we return to the hard facts of reality only by way of politics, that is by allowing us to do certain things and prohibiting other alternatives - hopefully in mutually acceptable forms of negotiation and power sharing.
[...]
No doubt, there are groups, persons, and politicians of the shamelessly self-serving type, there are the fatuous, and the fatuously self-serving kind; but when the public good is an open issue with many different answers to it, I suppose, sound principles and arguments alone are not good enough to bar excesses or preclude less than meticulous compromises and mixed solutions. Ultimately, it would seem that in a large number of cases there is no hindrance to bad politics that is more effective than better politics.
I just wonder, how hard it is for politicians, especially on the municipal and state level not to avail themselves of public resources. Also, to spend or not to spend public resources, is it always a matter of clear-cut discernment?- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
This is not supposed to be an argument in favour of Keynesianism; but where public resources are substantial, as they are under modern capitalism, public life tends to get interwoven in countless ways with the Keynesian thread, and people grow accustomed to the gifts of the visible hand. Until the day the music dies.
In
P024 Preferring Smith from 11/29/2013 [correct: 2014],
I note, as I see and expand it today:
Life becomes more agreeable and convenient as the technium-socium cycle keeps revolving forward and as we are gradually enabled to admit more and more Keynesian options, i.e. extend the meaning of the public's emancipation to include the way in which economic resources are applied to satisfy desiderata of considerable public acclaim, rather than remaining impassively wedded to a certain modus operandi of the economic processes (laissez faire) that is defended by condemning the very pooling of resources that we take for granted in countless other circumstances.
But what Smith saw in market transactions was not selfishness—as many people, both friends and foes of Smith, claim—but respect: it was peers meeting one another and making offers to one another, each of them respecting the other enough to recognize the other’s authority to say “no, thank you” and go elsewhere. What a profound and deep respect it shows others not to impose one’s own will, values, or purposes on them, not to require permission from or beg the mercy of “superiors,” and instead to recognize each person’s moral authority to say “no.”The political economy Smith endorsed could, therefore, not only be demonstrated empirically to lead to material prosperity and the alleviation of human misery, but it also instantiated and exemplified the morally beautiful equality of individual human freedom.
And I add:
Otteson invokes a graphic distinction between Planners and Searchers among those assuming responsibility or following ambition in hoping to change the quality and nature of society.
Planners try to impose universal orders; Searchers instead try to find specific problems where they can make marginal, ground-level differences. [...] Searchers get good work done, marginally and gradually improving the world one step at a time
I believe, the efforts of politicians and political engagement in all kinds of other functions (campaign supporter etc.) are necessary and commendable, if they contribute to the work of the Searchers rather than that of the Planners, to use the terminology of the article mentioned above. In fact, we can not come by the advantages of the Searchers' work unless people start getting seriously involved in politics.But is it accurate that searchers must never act as planners? Is all planned universal order imposed and detrimental?
Let us see what John Maynard Keynes has to say:
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Excerpted from Keynes, J. M. (1972), Am I A Liberal? (1925) In: The Collected Writings of John Maynard Keynes, Volume IX, Essays in Persuasion, MacMillan, CUP.
In the essay from which I extract the below quote, Keynes gives an outline of where he stands among the three dominant political parties, the Conservatives, Labour Party ("which I shall designate the party of catastrophe") and the Liberal Party.
Remember, I defined Keynesian options and delineated them against the laissez faire approach
as extending
the meaning of the public's emancipation to include the way in which economic resources are applied to satisfy desiderata of considerable public acclaim, rather than remaining impassively wedded to a certain modus operandi of the economic processes (laissez faire) that is defended by condemning the very pooling of resources that we take for granted in countless other circumstances.
Here is how Keynes himself writes about "Keynesian options":
But when we come to consider the problem of party positively - by reference to what attracts rather than to what repels - the aspect is dismal in every party alike, whether we put our hopes in measures or men. And the reason is the same in each case.The historic party questions of the nineteenth century are as dead as last week's mutton; and whilst the questions of the future are looming up, they have not yet become party questions, and they cut across the old party lines.Civil and religious liberty, the franchise, the Irish question, Dominion of self-government, the power of the House of Lords, steeply graduated taxation of incomes and of fortunes, the lavish use of the public revenues for 'social reform', that is to say, social insurance for sickness, unemployment and old age, education, housing and public health - all these causes for which the Liberal Party fought are successfully achieved or are obsolete or are the common ground of all parties alike.
Clearly, in pursuing the aims that Keynes writes about the Liberal Party has expended her initial substance pouring it into concerns by which it helped turn the world into a social democratic regime. From this moment onward liberal principles could no longer make any sense other than as the basis of social democracy. See also my Das Paradoxon der Freiheit.
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Continued here.
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