Ran Prieur Watch

[candide]

Ran writes:

March 5. Another quote from a book I'm reading, Morris Berman's Wandering God:

| What Woodburn discovered in Tanzania was that the Hadza do not experience any severe
| food shortages and that they are unconcerned about the future. Although all Hadza
| consider themselves to be kin, they have few obligations to each other and are not bound
| by commitments. Everyone has direct access to valued assets, and this provides security
| for all. Dependency, let alone hierarchy, is not part of the Hadza way of life. What is perhaps
| the popular image of hunter-gatherer societies -- close, warm, communities that are
| simultaneously very supportive and very conformist/restrictive -- may be off the mark.
| Instead, what we often find is a great deal of autonomy and independence.

I haven't written about this stuff in a while, but my position hasn't changed. Just as you need an empty container to carry water, the foundation of all freedom is the freedom to do nothing. The fact that this has been achieved by hunter-gatherers, and not by modernity, should not discourage us from technological ambitions.

Here's a fun question. How far can we go with an all-volunteer economy? Can we go to space? There would be plenty of volunteers to build the rockets, not so many to mine the ore.

Related, a classic essay, The Economics of Star Trek.

[xmj]

Earlier yesterday I came across Ran Prieur's "How To Drop Out" article. It's an interesting start, I then went on to read his "The System Works" and some of the other essays. With your post about the updated "About" page and the linked "Urban vs Rural Sustainability" article, his points are really starting to land.

Good stuff!

[zbigi]

I've recently came across interesting interview with Theodore Roszak, who did seminal research on counterculture movements of the sixties and seventies (he even coined the term "counterculture"). The interview, where he summarizes his findings, is on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EXJOjJAlEDI

Roszak explains how the idea and term of "dropping out" were also coined in those times. As he presents it, young white people in the sixties (in the US) noticed that they live in an extremely wealthy society that has probably even brighter future ahead of it, and decided that they personally don't need to "play the game" (build a career, work hard etc.) to sustain themselves - the society is so rich they can always fall back on it. Many imagined that they can do whatever they want their whole life, and their basic neccesities will be met by the society (i.e. others). These are the notions behind the origins of the concept of "dropping out".

[candide]

@xmj. I hadn't read "The System Works" before. It makes me wonder what other goodies are in the archives that I haven't read. Great piece from the maestro... Ran writes (in 2002, edited 2012):

The system tells us that joining the system is good: It's good for a failed artist, with a small local audience, to become a successful artist whose works are duplicated for millions of strangers through industrial technology to enrich corporations. It's good for a fringe idea, learned with excitement by free explorers, to become a dominant idea forcibly taught to bored inmates of schools. It's good for an enhanced sense of right and wrong to become a new law, enforced by the threat of violent punishment by police and prisons. It's good, as you get older, to own more expensive stuff requiring more reserved behavior, to adjust your tastes so you're easier to bother and harder to satisfy.

Or, even when this path is not good, it's supposed to be inevitable. A capitalist version of this doctrine is "What doesn't grow dies." But it's not true! There are shops and pubs in Europe that have stayed tiny for centuries while proud corporations have bloated and collapsed. Increasing in scale and detachment and centralization and dominance is not the path of survival, but the path of prolonged suicide, and we don't have to follow it.

@zbigi. I am pretty sure that is correct. For example the book "Steal this Book" (what a name!) is paper-thin on philosophy, or even aesthetics, but just collects assorted scams to get things from safety nets. Which in turn dried them up for the poor.

ETA: Hoffman amounted to the sociopath is the Geek > Mop > Sociopath Cycle that is often mentioned here.

[xmj]

Ran did a second interview with Hermitix recently:
Freedom, Attention and Psychedelics with Ran Prieur
https://anchor.fm/hermitix/episodes/Fre ... ur-e1m9v1g

The first interview was already good stuff, this is quite interesting as well

[candide]

Ran writes:

August 19. Still in repost mode. This is a post from April 1, 2020:

A nice trick for understanding economics is to factor out money. An economy is just a bunch of people doing stuff that keeps the system going. The strength of an economy is the overlap between what's necessary to keep it going, and what people want to do anyway. By this definition, a weak economy has to threaten people with hunger and homelessness to get them to do their jobs, and at the other extreme, Utopia doesn't even have the concept of freeloading.

This has actually been done. The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Hunters and Gatherers mentions tribes where some people do no productive work their whole lives, and nobody cares. Obviously not every tribe has done it, but even if it's just one, that tells us that it's possible.

In a complex high-tech society, the challenge is distribution, getting stuff to people who aren't making stuff. Communism tried it through central management, which didn't work, and capitalism is trying it through money, which is now also failing. I think the failure of capitalism is a slip between two functions of money: 1) a mechanism of exchange, and 2) a source of the meaning of life.

The problem is, money is zero-sum. If you hang meaning on it, then meaning is zero-sum, and it gets sucked up by people at the top. The poor become NPC's in the quests of the rich.

That system is now breaking down. Human motivation is the most powerful force on the planet, and as the economy collapses, there is more and more human motivation languishing, waiting to be tapped.

[ertyu]

Interesting how in one paragraph he says the poor having become npcs in the quests of the rich is a failure mode, and in the very next paragraph he assumes that if the formal economy doesn't put people to work, human motivation is "languishing" and sitting around passively until someone else comes to put it to work

[candide]

He's not saying someone else needs to put it to work, instead that he wishes people had more autonomy, and if they had it, they could in time come up with good stuff that others would benefit from and could build off of in non-coercive ways. A big theme of his is the misalignment of what the system requires to keep going and what people want to do. Feel free to disagree with his point, but I don't think what he is saying is a contradiction here.

[jacob]

I don't think the economy can really be understood by factoring out money. The system is fundamentally double-ledgered. On the one side, you have what people actually do. On the other side, transactions are somehow recorded. In communism, the transactions are given in the form of top-down edicts from a central location. In capitalism, the transactions are given in the form of exchange of money done decentralized (locally) by those with money. Money is essentially but the deferred option to transact.

Other systems could be devised, including favors, moral edicts, ... a lot of those work much better in small communities---and tend to break apart once people don't know each other personally anymore. People aren't exactly threatened by the financial system with hunger&homelessness... rather they are "threatened" by the fact that people who don't know them will not automagically provide them with their own stuff (food or shelter). Insofar nobody cares about productive work in a society, it's only because the amount of productive work required in such a society is so small that nobody needs to have other people produce for them, e.g. sleep in a cave, pick abundant apples from the trees, ...

One might say that our modern economy is weak but only because expectations are sky-high relative to the amount of effort it actually takes to meet these expectations. If people on average only expected to spend the equivalent of $5000/person/year, our modern economy would be very strong indeed.

[Jin+Guice]

@jacob: Interesting take, because I've always thought one lens to view economics through is an attempt to factor out money to look at the flow of underlying goods and services. I think you and I are actually not defining "factor out money" the same. I'm not sure how Ran is defining it.

To me the great problem is actually a layered misdirection of belief. On the one hand, due to the combination of the efficiency of capitalism and the massive amounts of energy available through the use of fossil fuels, never before has it been easier to get people you don't know to make and give you the things you need (especially if you reside in the top 10% of the global wealth bracket... wealth inequality being another effect of capitalism).

On the other hand, we have this great misdirection, where even globally rich people perceive that it is difficult to meet their basic needs through the market economy. In my perception, there is some truth to this in the rich world, mainly based on our dedication to building expensive housing as well as continually doubling down on market solutions for all problems.

If society prevents me from building my own house and growing my own food by not widely teaching the skills necessary to do these things and making zoning laws so that acquiring the means to these things are difficult, does it not in some sense owe me another reasonably easy means to getting these things, if it claims to care about my basic humanity?

A quirk of the wealthy world remains that we developed the means to satisfy our physiological needs relatively easily, yet still insist that we haven't. I think this has developed because the two main beliefs about getting your needs met are "XYZ need is a basic human right that should be guaranteed to everyone by everyone else" and "XYZ is not a basic human right and should only be available to those who contributed a greater amount to everyone than someone else." This builds anxiety as we no longer feel justified to strive to fulfill our own needs, s.t. our own limitations and abilities, but assuming that we can actually meet all of our needs in this way. Instead we focus on other people meeting our needs out of either moral or (monetarily driven) contractual obligation, missing the fact that we have, at least in this time and place, enriched ourselves to the point where satisfying our physiological needs is trivial.

So while I agree with:

One might say that our modern economy is weak but only because expectations are sky-high relative to the amount of effort it actually takes to meet these expectations. If people on average only expected to spend the equivalent of $5000/person/year, our modern economy would be very strong indeed.

One might also say that our modern economy is weak but only because the options present are sky-high relative to the underlying need they seek to actually fulfill. If the modern economy only expected participants to spend the equivalent of $5000/person/year, our modern economy would be very strong indeed.