Wave theory of Society

The limiting factor of language.

When talking about societies and civilization, it's hard not to be constrained by language. Inevitably, we have to talk in terms of conceptual units, like kings, merchants and slaves, or in generalized classes, such as the bourgeois, the elites, the working class, etc...

But words are not realities, and trying to describe societies using the words generated by those societies seems like a losing proposition. 

Kings and Emperors.

What is a King and what does it mean for a country to have one?

America has always made a big deal about not having a King, or a formal aristocracy. But it still has an elite, and it still has an executive form of government. How much difference is there between a King and a President? Or a hereditary aristocracy and a corporate elite?

If the President orders everyone to kill their firstborn son, would they do it? Of course not. But neither could a King really order such a thing, except in stories.

Even in medieval societies, The King didn't really issue orders. He embodied the will of the elites. He was a rubber stamp on policies that would have emerged with or without him. And that will is limited by the power of the elites over the lower levels of society. The institution of elites, King and Commoners is just a psychological convenience to describe a complex system of power.

The actions of the King seem to take on an executive aspect, because he is ordering society to do the kinds of things it wants to do anyway.

In the same way that we imagine our brains as a little anthropomorphized pilot in a meat vehicle, the view of individualized agency is only an illusion. If we're hungry, we can avoid eating for a little while, but eventually our bodies will force us to obey our biological imperatives. It is possible to overcome the limits of agency offered by our animal existence, but it requires integration into something bigger than ourselves; a meta organism in the form of our societies and the social norms that help us to live as more than beasts.

If we give up thinking of humans as discrete, self contained organisms with absolute agency and personal responsibility, we need other ways of thinking about humanity.

Points on a line.

Instead of thinking in discrete concrete elements, how about thinking of vectors?

Imagine society laid out as points on a line. There's really no division between one point and the next. We're not thinking in terms of integers here. The number of divisions between 0.0 and 1.0 is infinite.

The King is not separate from his nobles, and they are not separate from the commoners. Each aspect of the whole could not exist without the others. Like a brain in a jar, its functions would not work when removed from the organism. A King locked in prison, wearing an iron mask, is no longer King. A slave, stranded on a desert Island is no longer a slave to anyone but themselves.

Of course the line doesn't always look like x=y. Some societies have steeper or shallower curves. Some have complex curves.

Either sharp curves that eliminate the middle, or those that extend it.

From curve to wave.

Once you see this idea, it's natural to extend the idea to think of societies in terms of wave forms.

You can imagine different kinds of societies, with different amplitudes (representing levels of inequality, from top to bottom) or different frequencies (representing individual units; cities, countries, neighborhoods, empires...)

The Y axis represents material and social benefits of high status (or lack there of). The X axis represents distribution across different social meta-groups. One peak/dip combination might be one community. Again, these societies aren't distinct. There's no border or end between one and the next. They are part of a larger wave form.

There could be high energy societies and low energy societies.

The higher the highs, the lower the lows; You can't have rich people without poor people. You can't have a god emperor without slaves

You can't have billionaires without inherited wealth and inherited debt servitude.

And there can be more complex curves described by a wave.

 We could also look at absolute position of the Wave. Moving it up 2 units on the y axis would mean even the slaves suffer no negative impact from their relative inequality... But I suspect that only the relative advantage of amplitude really allows that relative advantage.

Mass production allows economies of scale. But it also allows monopolies and extreme wealth disparity. It might be hard to measure absolute wealth and relative wealth.

Implications.

We can make a broad division between high energy societies and low energy ones.

A society of tribes of hunter gatherers is a low energy wave, with little amplitude of difference and high frequency of meta-entities.

Today's global economy is a high energy society, with massive inequality and large sub-units.

There are advantages and disadvantages to each, and what kind of society evolves is subject to the same kind of pressures that affect biological evolutionary selection.

If we look at history, we can see times when higher energy societies started to emerge. They had benefits for the members; more efficient production, larger possible settlements, more free time for the elites, more social control that eliminated low level conflicts... 

...but they had down sides too.

High levels of guard labor and social control are required to sustain a high energy wave. Inequality creates exploitation and lack of trust. A feeling of anger at the system and scapegoats, folk devils, that represent it. The low level conflicts that are suppressed can feed high level conflicts, resulting in wars and revolutions.

Often in the historical record, you can see times when the wave collapsed and people just walked away from these societies. For the individual members, the down sides exceeded the benefits. it wasn't possible to preserve the wave through guard labor alone, and the empire fell apart.

But wave collapse isn't painless. A high energy society can sustain much higher levels of consumption and populations than a lower energy society. If our global economy collapsed overnight, and we were plunged back to pre-industrial levels of organization, a lot of people would die.

Entering into a higher level society requires a devil's bargain. Each time we moved to a higher level, we made it possible to live with higher population densities and higher levels of consumption. But we also made it nearly impossible to go back to the "earlier" model without suffering a painful transition.

And?

If we look at society this way, what ideas does that offer us in terms of making things better? Obviously we don't really want to live with the down-sides of massive inequality and a constant shifting to higher and higher levels of consumption... it's just not a stable or sustainable pattern. Collapse is inevitable.

So could we reduce amplitude (inequality) while changing frequency? Smaller social units? Or larger ones? Could a slow return to pre-industrial civilization be managed without violent collapse?

Could we really engineer asymmetrical distribution? Could we have rich people without having poor people?

Previous large scale attempts at this kind of society make it seem unlikely. Removing poverty tends to also remove the mechanism that allows massive wealth. Trying to cheat the numbers through manipulation of the symbolic aspects of the system leads to long term problems, as the system always has to return to equilibrium over time. We can't make everyone rich by printing more money and giving it to everyone. If everyone is rich, no-one is. Behind the numbers represented by currency, there's still the real numbers of resources and labor allocation.

If that's not possible, then there are those that advocate a return to a pre-industrial low energy society. But bearing in mind the requirement to massively reduce consumption and population, that has its own problems. Can we really reduce consumption without reducing population? Can we create a low energy society where we don't spend 16 hours a day farming just to survive? And wouldn't there still be some relative poverty to compound the problem of absolute poverty?

What about Robots? There is the idea that we've already reached the point where not every section of the line needs to be populated by humans;

This model relies on the idea that all the robots are communally owned. Otherwise the benefits of robot labor go to the elites and we end up with a situation where the robots live better than most humans in terms of rights and resource consumption.

Maybe we don't have much of a "choice". Few organisms get to decide what form they evolve into. It's likely that our evolution to the next state change will be forced upon us. It will be interesting to see what it looks like; If we survive the violence of the wave collapse. 

End.

In any case, I've found that abandoning the idea of humans as unique, precious individuals, either sinful or virtuous, at least has the benefit of helping to avoid simplistic silver-bullet, utopian theories of politics. The world isn't like it is because somewhere a bad guy is doing bad things. It's not going to be improved by finding that guy and defeating him.
Look at America; the King is dethroned, but the problems that he embodied remain.

There are possible different ways of living. But they come with pros and cons compared to the society that we currently live in. And there's always the problem that any wave is self sustaining. Everyone along the continuous line of the wave is working to preserve the status quo. Either voluntarily or involuntarily. It's not just a case of a faceless elite forcing everyone to follow orders. The King can't order people to do anything that they, collectively, aren't already prepared to do anyway. The benefits of power percolate upwards, so that anyone who isn't at the bottom of the graph feels some positive results from their place on the line.

Once that stops being true, the wave collapses to a lower energy state. It becomes chaotic before finding a new equilibrium.

Most of us live above zero on the lines above. We'd probably be worse off individually under a lower energy system. But there would almost certainly be collective benefits, especially in terms of the environment that we can't avoid in the long term.

New subway line for Daegu line (4&5)

I heard some news about Daegu's proposed new subway lines the other day, but I couldn't find any recent news in English. So here's some info about the proposals taken from a Korean wiki.


The blue line is a proposed circle around the city. It has been talked about for some time, but with no definite plan. It might be called line 4.

Because line three has a low demand and is not very profitable, there have been suggestions that the circular line might be modified or abandoned all together. Daegu is not a fast growing city, and the main reason for a subway line might be to reduce pollution, rather than easy congestion. It also has a problem with the army base in the South. Discussions have suggested that it might go under the base via a tunnel, but nothing is confirmed.

The other line, which could be called line 5 or more likely the Exco line.

"It will be a total length of 12.4km that connects Suseong-gu Sports Stadium Station (Line 3) to Isiapolis . A total of 13 stops are scheduled."

A newspaper article recently suggested that this line could become a possibility in the near future, with a decision being made in the new year. The reason for the development is quoted as being about economic stimulation via investment in infrastructure:

"Nationwide metropolitan governments are jumping into expanding the urban railway. The purpose is to invigorate the local economy through social overhead capital (SOC) projects and to find new growth engines by expanding the urban railway network."

The vehicle design would probably be AGV light rail (like the Busan Gimhae line) or tram (see below), though there are also proposals for extending the monorail. Neither project will likely be designed as a full underground subway, in the style of line 1 or 2.

It's likely that AGV was chosen in order to test the water, being a relatively cheap alternative to underground rail, or the monorail.

"Daegu City is planning to start construction by 2022 and finish construction by 2023 after investing 701.7 billion won in total project cost."

Some sources I read quoted the project starting in 2022 and taking ten years to complete... so it would seem to depend on the choice of vehicle. Line 3 took a couple of years for construction.

There's also a plan, to be evaluated in 2019 and put in to action in 2022, for an industrial railroad link and an extension to the existing green subway line. 

This would be a traditional train line, not a subway or tram. It would run from West Daegu out past The Arc and down to the industrial areas and Daegu Technopolis.

It's not impossible that the EXCO line may be ready within the next few years, but the circle line remains a paper project for now.

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You can read the wiki for yourself using google translate (blue and purple lines).

A note about the sources used:
WoodWiki (나무위키) is not an encyclopedia and may contain unverified, biased, or misleading statements.

The wiki is a compilation of facts and conjecture about the plans in the pipeline. Take it with a pinch of salt.

Here's a news article which matches some of the info from the wiki though.
(BTW Google translate always mistranslates EXCO as X-ray). And here's an article which suggests that the city has decided to adopt trams as the vehicle instead of AGV.

A  tram would run on the roads directly, with an overhead cable or something built in to the street. Construction costs per KM are projected as follows:

Underground rail: 120bn won per KM
Monorail: 60bn won per KM
Tram: 20bn won per KM

So it's easy to see why trams would be an attractive alternative to the other systems.
Also: 

The tram emits less pollutants and is more environmentally friendly and energy efficient. 

 

However, trams have less capacity than subways, and can transport fewer passengers per day. There's a trade off between construction costs and operating capacity, as fewer passengers mean less impact on traffic and less revenue from fares.

Quick fixes for Capitalism: Part 1

Is capitalism broken?

It certainly seems like it. Global trade and economic growth is slowing in real terms and standards of living for many are either stagnant or declining. Despite aggressive tax cuts and imposed austerity, it just doesn't seem possible to reverse the current trend. Even if we consider that wages in the developing world are slightly higher today than they were 30 years ago, it has come at the cost of terrible ecological damage.

Our future?

In fact, if we want any kind of future at all, we may have to consider cutting our levels of consumption in half. Earth Overshoot day now falls in August. This is the day when we can consider our economies to have used 100% of the non-renewable resources of the Earth, or to have degraded the renewable sources such as clean water and fish stocks to the point where they can't recover. We are using 200% of the Earth's capacity already...

50-20/50-80

But as many people might already know, much of that consumption, and the waste that is a bi-product is concentrated in a small part of the economy, and a small number of hyper consumers.
Also, exploitation and degradation of our resources is not uniform.

Wasted resources

While we produce much too much CO2, and throw away too much food uneaten, there is a lot of potential farmland which is underutilized, because the produce can't be profitably distributed, or local people can't afford to eat. And our human resources are terribly underutilized. Billions of people are under-educated and under-employed. They could be doing the work which is currently being done by dirty machines or is not being done at all.

So what's the solution?

Wait a minute! Please don't jump to the obvious conclusion.

Capitalism is bad, so if we get rid of capitalism, whatever we get instead must be better.

Maybe not.
The other options sound great in theory, but have always had their own problems when executed in reality. For example, the Aral Sea is often used to illustrate how Capitalism is destroying our environment, but the sea was already greatly reduced by bad farming practices during the Soviet era.

Bad vs Bad.

The centrally managed Soviet economy often didn't attach any more value to environmental assets than the Capitalists do. I suggest that it isn't a matter of who owns the resources, and is responsible for managing them, but how the owners define their value.

Creating balance.

Could Capitalism be reworked to provide a better valuation of our resources, so that we use less of what is really scarce and use more of what is underutilized?

(I hope to address the issue of non-ownership, a commons or trustee economy  separately in future).

Quick fixes.

For now, I will try to suggest some little fixes that could be made to our current system so that it could be better directed towards sustainable development. These are not things that require us to roll out the guillotines, or establish world socialism, but modest changes to how capitalism already works. Today I address asset risk weighting.

Where does new money come from? 

That's a question I don't want to delve too deeply in to here, but suffice to say, new money is created when private banks loan money to the public. This money didn't exist before it was loaned, and when is paid off, it will go back to not existing. The economy grows by debt inflation.

What stops banks from lending infinite money?

Commercial banks have to balance their loans and other assets against the capital that they hold. They can only lend our more money if they have something on the other side of the balance sheet to support it. These loans are risk weighted, which means that some are more risky than others, so the banks can't lend as much of one kind of loan as another. As an example, commercial real estate has 100% risk. So a bank needs $1 of capital to balance every $1 of loans in that sector. Housing loans (mortgages) have $50 risk weighting, so they need $0.50 for every $1 of household mortgages. Credit cards have up to %120 risk weighting, so they are only profitable if they come with very high interest rates to offset their risk.

This has had a predictable effect on our economies. Lending for mortgages far outstrips all other kinds of loans. This is because the amount you can borrow to buy an asset, ends up defining the cost of that asset. If you can sustain the debt burden on a $200,000 house, that's the house you are going to go out and buy. As average mortgage limits increase, property prices rise too.

How can we use this to our advantage?

Many people think that the economy is essentially "free" and unregulated, and that the rise of house prices is a result of the "natural" property market. But there's nothing natural about it. Someone decided the levels of risk weighting to apply to different classes of assets. It happened as part of an international government regulation effort. Mortgages are low risk because they are perceived to be low risk, since they are secured with the house as collateral.
Business loans are high risk because they are not secured with expensive assets.
But the value of those assets ends up being set by the very measure that is supposed to reflect it.

We can set the value of assets by setting the risk weighting of those assets. 

We should take in to account not just the individual risk of the loan, but the systemic risk of an overheated housing market, high cost of living and stagnant business growth. These are the problems which led to the 2008 financial crisis. We should also factor in environmental risk which promises an even bigger danger in the long term.

Things which are bad for the environment should have a very high risk factor to discourage lending in those sectors. Fossil fuel companies should have a hard time getting credit to carry out their business, because their business represents a clear systemic risk. Banks which lend to fossil fuel companies are accelerating the point at which ecological degradation can cause inevitable economic collapse. When climate change causes massive flooding, it often destroys property, making mortgages worthless overnight.

Rewarding future security.

We could go further than this and suggest zero risk factors. A bank which lends money on an energy efficient home is reducing the risk of systemic failure. They are taking steps to make their bank more secure in the long run. The house price will increase faster over time than a house which is not energy efficient because lower interest rates will be offered, allowing borrowers to service a bigger debt.

When we are not looking at assets but cash flows from business revenues, then high risk factors discourage lending and reduce availability of credit. We get the opposite effect. High risk weighting leads to slow business growth.

By giving green businesses access to cheap capital from low risk loans, we can encourage the growth of those companies which are ecologically friendly.

Regulations are bad?

Remember, these are not new regulations. We already have asset risk weighting. Without it, banks would be able to write infinite IOUs or simply cook their books to make it look like they were addressing risk. For any libertarians out there, they should be happy that this kind of guiding hand could be used to avoid more direct interference in the economy by government, such as big bank bailouts after a systemic crash.

Leaving Capitalism unguided and unregulated leads to the situation we are currently in. We need to get our hands on the steering wheel and drive to the future that we want. I hope to address other problems with Capitalism in future, and try to suggest small changes that could help to steer us in a better direction.

If Capitalism doesn't fix itself, there are plenty of people ready to polish up the guillotine and provide their own solutions. So it's now or never for saving Capitalism from itself.

Race, Income, Education and Property- In maps

This is the first blog in this series. Just interesting stuff that's too long or detailed or difficult to present on Facebook. I'll try to keep the commentary to a minimum and let the stats speak for themselves. Make your own mind up about what they mean.

After seeing a map that showed racial diversity in the USA and the shocking levels of segregation which still apply to the country, I wanted to see how they matched up with other heat maps, such as income poverty, property prices and college education.

The first one is New York and Philadelphia:

I think you can see some quite clear correlations.
A little explanation of each map:

The map of racial segregation uses colors to show race as reported by the census.

The income map uses blue dots to show incomes above $200,000 and yellow ones to show incomes below $25,000. This is map of extreme poverty and wealth.

The college degree map has been contrast enhanced to better display the extremes where less than 40% of people have college degrees and more than 80% have.

Property prices range from less than $75k to over $1.5m. Rent prices and crime figures are also available, but don't show enough contrast to be very useful (Maps here, scroll around and change the settings to see other demographics). The blue spots showing crime are hardly visible, even with enhanced contrast.

So some more maps. Next up is Richmond:

You can often see where inner city areas feature high levels of poverty and low levels of higher education. The hot spots on these heat maps are where people of color have ended up.

Next is an interesting area, Las Vegas:

Again, the division between rich and poor is obvious. You can also see where low population numbers can heavily influence some heat maps like education because the data is shifted by the small sample size.

Next up, L.A.:

I think Los Angeles shows the most striking correlations of all the maps so far. Maybe it's just because the higher levels of urbanization lead to less of a softening effect. The maps are less blurred.

By the time we get to San Fransisco, and the Bay Area you can see the racial mix is changed. The red dots show Asian families, and here there isn't such a strong relationship between race and poverty. Still, it's the white people with all the money:

Heading back to the east coast, Pittsburgh shows how away from the hot spots of the big cities, up in the rust belt, the effect is still there, but on a smaller scale.

Like many cities in the area, Pittsburgh has seen a 9% drop in population in the last 16 years.

During the same period, Detroit has seen a −29.3% drop in population. Around the great lakes, you can see the same depressing relationship; Racial segregation, concentration of poverty and reduced property value (a big problem when people rely on property as one of their only assets), as well as reduced access to education.

Here there's some overlap though, with poverty that crosses racial divides. The collapse of the North East has hit everyone hard, and even "white privilege" is not much of a defense.

When you look at these maps, and see the correlations, it's shocking. Poverty and race are so entwined, it's hard to separate them.

When I talk to some people on the Right of the political spectrum, they seem sure that race causes poverty. They imagine this is something that racial minorities do to themselves. That's not what I'm seeing here.

It's like someone has taken jigsaw puzzles of two completely different nations and stuck them together randomly in to one. One nation is poor, with low incomes, low access to higher education and low property values. The other is rich, with everything the poor nation lacks. You can see the inhabitants of the two nations by the color of their skin, and sometimes the only thing that separates them is a freeway or a river, or the fence of a gated community.

Some of those cities, you might as well put a wall up right through the middle, and set up passport checks on the border. The division is as stark as that between East and West Germany during the cold war. But as Germany shows, you don't need a wall, because Neo-Liberalism keeps everyone in their place. You can't just go live in a better area, and you can't make your own area better.

Without access to education you can't hope for a high income. And without a high income, you can't move to a better neighborhood, and that limits your access to a good education... People with high incomes won't come and live in the poor areas, and they won't bring their spending money with them. Small businesses are just as segregated as the schools and housing.

Poverty is entrenched along racial divides, and that's never going to change as long as the current system exists