P is for Protean Project

I have a project in the works, I don't know if I'll ever get it up. I'm exploring partnering to try and get it going right now.

A little background

I think the good fight is that of economic literacy. Indeed, I suspect I've lived my entire life through a resulting crisis of economic illiteracy. 

When primary school aged Greta Thunberg has a teacher explain the coming climate catastrophe, it sends a child into a nigh-catatonic depression. In her own words, she could not believe that climate change could be real, because if this was known, people would be obliged to act on it.

I have some sympathy with Greta's logic. The distinctly dramatic reaction she had, possibly arose from her inability to look around and intuit how people are socialized, as such she imagined she lived in a world of technocrats or something, not animal spirits and evolved psychology.

To borrow from Rory Sutherland, the two biggest predictors of human behaviour are 1) habit - people keep doing what they've been doing. and 2) sensitivity - people do what everyone else is doing. Greta probably was unusually insensitive, so she didn't take cues from her classmates, the teacher, parents, political leaders etc. that nobody else was taking action on this climate change thing.

Taking us right back to Socrates dictum as written by Plato "The unexamined life is not worth living" and that is where I sympathise with Greta. The nature of my own ongoing existential crisis is not so much that "I don't know what to do with my life" - a problem that any career counsellor could solve with a few brochures, but that "I don't know what you are doing with your life." 

I hope this then is sufficient background to hit you with my introductory question, from the introductory class, the 101 of this project of mine:

"What is the economy for?"

I've nowhere near robustly tested this question, but my initial and admittedly inadequate sample's most common response is to be completely stumped by the question.

Where friends have furnished an answer, which is a rarity, the answer has been idealistic rather than descriptive. I speculate this is because few people on this planet take the perspective of steering the economy, it is more common to be "sensitive" you see someone trying to lift a couch, you join in by picking up the other end. The economy is something you approach, you don't inform it, it informs you through job postings and supermarket prices and auction results and sharemarket indexes and op eds in the paper.

Being stumped by the question, for me, is an answer to Greta's incredulity. People who devise an answer to the question graduate to the Lee Kuan Yew question: "Does it work?" to trouble shoot whether their answer best fits the initial question: "What is the economy for?" (descriptive) or the unasked question "What should the economy be for?"

I'm operating off a presupposition that much human behaviour can be explained by the "unexamined life" whatever the economy is, I suspect it is an emergent phenomena driven largely by human habit. What I observe is that people get jobs because they need them, they move out of home, get married, have children and send their children to school in order to get jobs. That is basically the economy and what the economy is for.

Something that works well in a largely unproductive agriculture based economy that was most of human history. But note, that when 80% of the European population worked in agricultural food production, though high falutin' concepts like "the economy" would be unintelligible, rephrased as "what are we doing here?" I would suspect far more superstitious serfs could answer, sooner than be stumped with something like "we are spreading the true faith to bring about the promised land."

The Promised Land: Getting Rich 

I haven't come across someone to question about the purpose of the economy that would sort of give the Y2K Republican base response of "the economy under capitalism allows people to thrive so they can buy the things they want and need to be happy and so we can all prosper"

People who assume that the purpose of the economy is somewhat identical to a prosperity gospel. 

I can't bring myself to credit, that anyone actually imagines that the economy is working towards some future where everybody lives in a seaside mansion, with a superyacht moored out front in case anyone ever wants to take their own private household voyage to the Caribbean.

Likely, I think people will intuit that the economy is some kind of competition that rewards winners and punishes losers. So like, people who study hard then work hard get mansions and yachts, and people who don't put in the effort deserve either nothing (rightwing) or something (leftwing).

Here I'm beginning to circle a concept of meritocracy, that I suspect more often is actually a "just world fallacy" or "just world hypothesis" approaching in extreme cases an "affirming the consequent" fallacy as baked into the ancient Hindu cast system, where one inferred from the quality of an individuals life the quality of that individual in their past life or something.

And here's where I've had to converge on Epstein Island, but I'm not quite there yet.

The more *I* think about "the economy" the more I think the problem humanity collectively faces is a distribution problem, and this lead to a question like:

How hard does someone have to work, to justify being rich forever?

I haven't tested this question, I'm not even sure of the wording. But what I'm getting at is the idea of a Jeff Bezos or a Bill Gates, without even getting to the descendants of characters like Rockefeller, Hilton, Johnson etc. the subjects of documentary "born rich."

The conversations I want to have, and that I want people to have, is to tease out that we probably can't imagine any work a hardworking farmer can do where we'd say that one farmer can work a few years in their early 20s so productively, that they can then retire for life. We'd probably instinctively know that any farmer we want around as a society has to keep producing food, because we are going to keep needing food, so long as they own the farmland. 

Furthermore, we probably intuit that people can't submit themselves to be shaken down by farmers extorting every cent they earn in order to buy enough food to survive. 

As such there is no apple so delicious, so crisp, so nutritious, that a farmer could have one good harvest and then sit back for 50 years collecting royalties.

But, maybe it's okay for Bill Gates to set up a company and program a word processor that becomes a global standard for digital documents. It might take him 10 years to come up with Microsoft Office, but it can scale to billions of customers, just by programming one computer application. Something so useful, that we are happy for him to get a dollar from each customer - he gets a billion dollars and never has to work again.

Maybe I'm okay with that.

But then we have only one side of a 2x2 grid filled out, people who can never work so hard/create value that they can be rich for life/forever, and people who can work hard enough/create enough value that they can be rich forever, but we are missing people who don't work hard at all/never create any value and don't get rich, and people who don't work hard at all/never create any value and do get rich forever.

Probably even more categories - because you can produce a social good, produce nothing, or produce a social harm. So we get drug dealers who harm society and make no money, and drug dealers who harm society and get incredibly rich. We have management consultants who harm society (probabilistically speaking) create no value, and get incredibly rich. We have public servants that create incredible social good, make no money at all.

That I'm confident, is more descriptive of the economy we have, than any conception of a meritocracy, but the question as framed is more idealistic than descriptive.

As a general principle, I'm with Keynes on fundamental uncertainty, the prize of life long riches just needs must be taken off the table as unfeasible. Over a certain limit, people should just be handed a very nice illustrated edition of Boethius' Consolation of Philosophy.

But I think some people think the point of the economy is some kind of "he who dies with the most toys wins" game. And I suspect this attitude can be located in all socioeconomic stratas, giving us cosplaying farmers with their mobile tank pick up trucks purchased on finance, and superyacht owners complaining about the red tape of having to get a bridge removed from a canal in Rotterdam so the superyacht can be moved from the boatbuilders to a seaside mooring for delivery of its helicopter.

The prize being, to get as rich as possible to the end of squeezing others out, ie. treating them like dirt. The tragedy of people adopting the "Monopoly Mindset" where the aim of the game is for one player to bankrupt everyone else at which point, humanity needs to reflect - the game ends.

But a piece of real estate has cropped up in the past 5 months, a little island in the Caribbean, that suggests a follow up question to the one in bold above:

How hard does someone have to work, to justify sex with underage girls?

In the fifth season of FX TV series Fargo, Jennifer Jason Leigh plays a billionaire owner of the largest debt collection service in the US. At one point she exclaims something like "what's the point of being a billionaire if you can't get someone killed?"

My feeling is, such a mentality is probably naively intuitive. I suspect that many people for example, in a survey would assume that their countries head of state was "above the law" and that it generally takes education to get people to accept a notion like "nobody is above the law."

I suspect, many people for example, accept traditional gender roles on the basis of an assumption that 'dad' doesn't have to cook dinner (part of the 'second shift' women work after work in two-income households) because he has been working all day. Some traditional model based on the economic unit being a household and not an individual, the 'dad' finances the whole operation of the household unit and so is exempted from cooking, cleaning, laundry etc. 

Sticking for a moment with this 'traditional' household economic unit, a man could become so rich in the 1920s or the 1930s that his wife could retire to a purely administrative role, bringing in women of colour and even men to work in this daddy-financed economic household unit that was sufficiently flush to employ cooks, laundry ladies, cleaners, groundskeepers, maintenance men, nannies and/or governesses. The subject of books by Dickens and the Brontes.

I think we are already living in the time of it being difficult to explain to young people (25 and under) that we used to talk about "millionaires" and "multimillionaires" until relatively recently.

If once upon a time, a person could earn so much that their household unit could employ staff to run that household, it stands that by earning even more, somebody could expand their household into a whole town, or even city.

Stuff that never really historically eventuated, not just having a live in cook or cleaner, but a live in butcher and tailor. This is more the thing of royal households that were one and the same with the state, than what rich people did with their money.

The Weinstein Effect

You start up a company, and you host your first board meeting where you vote to accept your corporate governance documents. Everyone is in agreement that sexual harassment and assault are not to be tolerated and any transgression results in instant termination.

Three years later, you are thrilled that this company is successful. Your pay has tripled, you are picking and choosing work, people are dying to work with you. You feel you have a license to print money, and so you've bought your dream home, taking out a mortgage that would make your dear old grandma's eye water. You aren't worried though, you are flying to Cannes film festival and then heading home via Monaco.

98% of your business is won by one star employee. You can't believe your luck in hitching your wagon to this industry behemoth.

Then, a young female client books an appointment to see you with your personal assistant. You take the meeting and she breaks down crying informing you that this behemoth raped her at a recent work event.

Oh shit.

According to the governance document to which you all agreed, there's no ambiguity. This warrants an instant termination. This is a shame, because that employee 'Harvey' brought in 98% of the revenue. Basically your company will have to dissolve over this, which is also a shame because you are up to your eyeballs in debt that could have been paid off had the company simply continued.

And this I think was what should have been addressed in the fallout of the Harvey Weinstein scandal - all the fucking enablers, really, co-conspirators that absolutely failed their duty of care in order to preserve their paycheques. 

My understanding is that the Weinstein company essentially was sold off, acquired otherwise dissolved, but barring Weinstein the harshest consequences for his enablers was the loss of their jobs. 

Not understanding the biz, I tend to think of Hervey as equivalent to a "rainmaker" a top earning salesman, way out of whack though hence the 98%, rather than say 20% on a sales team of 10. 

Late last year I caught up with an old work colleague who said something of interest to me - he had been raised a kind of Marxist, so when our old employer had been acquired and in a more banal way transitioned from being a firm with a purpose for existing, to an asset on a larger companies balance sheet, I saw the writing on the wall and planned my exit, whereas his instinct was to resist.

In some part, the difference in our approaches - mine more fatilistic, his more idealistic, is likely the product of "real talks" I had been given. 

Real talks are depressing. Archetypically, they are necessitated and involve "remember all those stories you were raised on about heroism and happy endings? Well in the real world bullies are in charge, and actually we don't pursue happiness but least misery via keeping our heads down."

This may sound harsh, but if you want advice that is to let bullies bully, I assure you you can find it. I'm reasonabally confident, that this is often the nature of professional advice.

I don't know what went on with Harvey Weinstein's workplace, everything I saw indicated that he was pretty fucken flagrant with his transgressions, and some other staffers even did some clean up.

What I don't picture is a black mass where particularly evil people in black robes and copious amounts of goat blood chanting as young girls were subjected to Harvey in an attempt to bring the Antichrist into the world.

Something far more banal is what I would bet on, and it is the "oh shit my paycheck is financed by a #&$^%ist" and you lose some people, and others just go into a state of living denial where you feel sick to your stomach for all but the 20 minutes  after your pay is deposited into your account every pay period and you tell yourself one day you'll escape via your golden parachute and the rest is all about just pushing those feelings of humanity down in your stomach.

However, this is a defensive posture that simply explains the enablement. 

I've cited Fargo, lets go full TV aficionado and bring up HBOs final season of The Wire greatest television ever made, where McNulty invents a fictitious serial killer praying on the homeless and by the time his fraud is discovered, the Mayor has become governor off of it, the Police chief has become commissioner etc. such that unwittingly they all stand to become embarrassed if the truth outs.

"What's the point of being rich if I can't have sex with 15 year olds?"

I disagree with Socrates, or Plato, insofar as the unexamined life can go beyond worthlessness to actively harmful. 

If you just cruise along with the logic of "Honey I've had a hell of a day I'm going to watch The Brady Bunch until dinner is ready." to "Honey, sure you can divorce me, but you signed a pre-nup and good luck buying a superyacht with $13 million. Or you can accept that when your husband makes $146 million a year, he's going to sleep with prostitutes." to "Honey, I am one of ten people that are as rich as half of this countries population combined. I'm richer than 60 million people! I'm off to an island where I a frankly disgusting looking old man, can have sex with facsimiles of the girls who wouldn't give me a valentines in 7th grade."

I am loath to bring up an idol of mine, who to my knowledge has not appeared in the Epstein files - Brazilian businessman Ricardo Semler, who wrote a book called "the 7 day weekend" in which he postulated a "Da Vinci Constraint" that in the late 2000's he calculated to $13 million dollars. 

Once you have $13 million dollars, there's pretty much nothing more you can buy with money to make your life any better. Now various factors probably mean that today the constraint would be $26 million or so. If you have $26 million dollars, you can charter a Yacht to sail from Pisa to Monaco and wear a tuxedo to play blackjack ala mr bond in the high rollers room of a casino and stay in a penthouse suite in a hotel. You can have a sherpa drag you up and down everest, and do the other 6 summits, you can probably even in 2026, go to space like Katy Perry who I assume is nowhere near a billionaire, or take a fatal trip to the titanic in an experimental submarine, or build your own safe submarine and go to the bottom of the ocean like James Cameron.

But, what you cannot do, whether you have $26 million USD or $1 billion USD, is have sex with someone under age.

I suspect, sadly, this is an educated position. That it is not intuitive.

The intuition is that money = power, where 'power' is the ability to act or do, and that once you have enough money, it stands to reason that you can do whatever you want.

Comedian Arj Barker had a bit where he asked an audience member if they would blow a hobo for $1, then kept upping the number until the audience member admitted they would blow a hobo. His punchline was that for $10 million dollars he would blow a hundred hobos and when the press came to him all like "Arj Arj! you've just blown a hundred hobos and earned $10 million dollars, what will you spend the money on?" He would respond "A mouth transplant."

The bit presumes that the hobos would be somehow into it, otherwise it is basically exactly the question of buying a ticket for the Lolita Express. 

The Epstein "scene" moreso than the Epstein files reveals an implicit question of "how much should a ticket to the island of 'do-as-you-please' cost?" and many fail this question. The correct answer is an island of 'do-as-you-please' cannot be morally countenanced, but alas too many appear to have fallen back on 'well obviously not just anyone can be allowed to go there..."

The importance of asking questions

I believe in my project, because I am not just asking questions. I feel if I asked someone who is not a billionaire, and is not likely to become a billionaire, how much money they need to make to be above the law; there's a decent chance that they may become conscious of something quite counterintuitive - that money isn't everything.

A thought they may otherwise never have had, that while it would be very nice to be rich, the priveleges come in the form of being able to purchase goods and services legally that maybe not everyone can, but that that never extends to gaining access to a Diddy Freak-off, or Epstein Island.

That the point of a billionaire is not to gain access to having your enemies killed by the most powerful military on earth, and that there isn't much point to being a billionaire at all so you may as well pay your fucking taxes.

Conclusion - The 2nd Outrage

Details contained within the Epstein files are outrageous, people read them or a youtuber gives them the gist and are very justified in a response of outrage.

The second outrage though, is one I feel, when ordinary people feel that outrage oblivious that given the opportunity they would have committed the same outrageous acts.

Not through any act of hypocrisy, but ignorance. They don't see it because they've been living an unexamined life. One where they never really thought about how their employer earns a lot of money while providing no real value. Or how proud they are of a business deal they made, that breaks down to just ripping someone off. They don't see it in all the laws they themselves flaunt, or the bullshit things they claim in their tax return, or lying to the hospital and telling them they are feeling 10/10 pain so they get treated faster.

I'm outraged by the unobserved life, it is one of the many things wrong with me. I concede, where others possibly don't, that habit and sensitivity alone can get you along way and very comfortable in life. 

But the downfall is, that these are hacks, not principles to live by, and as such if you gain access to a scene, a circle your sensitivity can easily lead to a new habit of underage sex tourism in the Caribbean.