Why has innovation slowed down? It has everything to do with the rise of plutocracy beyond the reasonable, and the promotion of the Dark Side of human psychology, Hades, to the detriment of the Light Side, the Enlightenment of mind, science, and technology..
This is why I like mild inflation: it makes technological implementation more profitable, hence the whole research system behind it, more attractive.
It is also why the prize system for technological innovation is so good: many aviation pioneers went to their death to get prizes, pushing, to do so, weird new machines, with fantastically creative engineering.
Another factor in innovation, sorry to say, is the military, in the technological superiority tradition of the Athenians, Romans and Franks (instead of the brute force of the masses).
The first cars, in the eighteenth century, were actually enormous (steam powered) all terrain vehicles mandated by a French military program. So were the first planes to take off with an engine. So were the first metal monoplanes. All French military programs, and so was initially nuclear energy (Paris 1938, later morphed into the \"Manhattan project\", 1942). Radar (and thus microwave) was also a military program (in many countries simultaneously during WWII).
So what is going on now? Why is innovation dying? Because the USA went from a nation of bold engineers (1941) to a nation of despicable plutocrats (2011). And it has been contagious, at least throughout the West.
Whereas the emerging countries, such as the BRIC, made the correct analysis that the West's superiority was due to science, technology, and many of them, such as now many Arab countries, or India, or Brazil, and China or Russia, in part, from the superiority of the mind, hence communications.)
This is not exactly the first time this sort of devolution, the one affecting the West now, this sort of take over of the Dark Side, happens: it has happened again and again in history. It happened to Athens, it happened to Rome, and there were periodical bouts of it during the European Middle Ages. each time plutocracy took over.
In the case of Athens, the Athenian hyper rich colluded with the thoroughly fascist imperialist Macedonian plutocrats, to crush democracy, and thus science and philosophy.
I use here the concept of \"Pluto\" in its most general meaning, covering the entire Dark Side, not just wealth. But wealth is the greatest facilitator, as it can exploit the exponential growth interest provides with.
The plutocrats themselves are not stupid; they reign through stupidity. Their enemy is intelligence, hence new forms of thinking, hence what feeds them, new philosophy, new ethics, new science, new technology.
If a youth is smart, right now, she will do as Obama does, and extends the hand to plutocrats. And the plutocrats will fill that hand. Thus the smart go to the wolves. And the smartest, like Demosthenes, the philosopher who condemned Macedonia, they may as well swallow poison, before the state police grabs them, as Demosthenes did.
And what is taking poison with them is the highest and best of what makes the human spirit, and stagnation ensues. At best. At worst, great mayhem, as under the Nazis.
http://patriceayme.wordpress.com/
Sunday, January 30, 2011
Monday, January 10, 2011
How Economics & Morality Relate
AS CIVILIZATION BLOSSOMS SO DO FASCISM AND PLUTOCRACY.
Economics is house management. Morality is what endures. Yes, that's the origin of the word! Better: it has got to be the origin of the concept: what is right is what endures. If it were not right, it would not endure, indeed. Thus morality contains the concept of sustainability.
Best house management would have to be the one that endures. Indeed, if the economy does not endure, it collapses, thus so does the food production system, and part of the population will not survive.
Hence the best economy is moral, in other words. And redistribution of riches sufficient to prevent accumulation of riches caused by mathematics rather than merit is necessary.
Those who do not believe in redistribution in riches are more primitive that the Neolithics who produced sustainable societies on the scale of centuries. The Neolithics understood the exponential intuitively, and realized that riches brought ever more riches to the very top of society, the more they grew, and that had nothing to do with the merit of the individuals, families, groups or classes thus advantaged.
Piling up riches at the top made society, overall, poorer. Poorer in riches, poorer in culture, intelligence, mind stuff.
The great ages of Athens and Rome, and the Franks, were preceded by revolutions, forced income redistribution, and the destruction of plutocracies. Crete had no extravagant plutocracy (just significant oligarchies). The assassinations (Athens), rebellion (Rome), full war (Franks) turned society upside down, like the plow allows the rich soil down below to come to light.
It was violent, but the best society sprang forth, and made more advanced philosophy the law of the land. All sorts of goodness came out, from superlative economics and military, to excellent poetry, science, and further philosophy and law.
Why such goodness? Democracy blossoms minds in parallel. It is not just the "Open Society" Pericles and his philosophical advisers vaunted, it is the open minds of multitude of minds exchanging thoughts and feeling in an immense eco system of consciousness.
Plutocracy, and its associated fascism is all about a few taking all the decisions. Fascism is not new: it is the number one trick of primate defense. Baboons are expert fascist, when threats appear: they group up behind their most powerful leaders, female with the young hidden inside the group. Then the group does what the most powerful, most decisive males, the Golos, decide to do, and follow them as one: E PLURIBUS UNUM.
A chimpanzee variant of fascism occurs when chimps form a file, behind their leader, stop talking, and stealthily invade another group territory, in the hope of surprising an individual, and killing it. So fascism is so old, at least 40 million years, since there are the likes of baboons, and they thrive, that it has got to have become an instinct.
Plutocracy however is new, it's not in our biological inheritance, but an emerging property: it needed capital to exist. Long ago, capital was a harem, and a territory. But then the genus Homo appeared, and tools became capital too. When the Neolithic started, and the first cities appeared, capital became potentially gigantic: it could be a city, and extend over a country.
Some individuals, families, groups and finally classes were able to exploit the fascist instinct and the exponential, to create the new phenomenon of plutocracy.
The Neolithic was a total success: man took control of the planet. Capital and populations exploded by a factor of 10,000 for population, and much greater for capital.
Both fascism and the exponential exponentiate themselves to ever more tremendous heights as they grow (the growth of exponential is proportional to itself, just as capital and population do before disaster strikes). Thus they have become the nemeses of civilization, the more civilization grows.
Fascism exerts its seduction always. A case in point is what happens in democratic revolutions. They are born out of the desire by the People to redistribute riches. However, as adversity arises, fascism has to come to their defense.
An example is a Corsican artillery captain. Under the vengeful leadership of the British leader Pitt, anxious that France would not become more of a competitor to London after having a successful revolution, as Britain had a century earlier, the plan was conceived to invade France from Provence. Toulon and its two bays were conquered by an army and navy of British, Spanish and French royalists. The commanding republican generals were incompetent. Napoleon schemed to have them replace, then implemented his own plan, and attacked. He was seriously wounded by a bayonet , but the victory was total, and the British fleet, now exposed to French artillery, sailed away the next day. Napoleon was made into a general directly. He would soon lead French armies to great victories (other French generals did too, because, at that point France was republic fighting an obvious coalition of fascists, it was Greece versus Persia, all over again).
Napoleon was a military genius, thus everybody deduced, and especially himself, that he was a genius in all ways: the monkeys, when threatened, love to group up behind a smart, bold warrior. And when not threatened, it is easier to have just one guy doing all the thinking. In the end, Napoleon turned into a bloody tyrant who was still talking to his soldiers as if they were all "comrades" (a trick from Alexander and his "companions").
In the end, intellectual and political fascism led directly to Napoleon's disastrous campaign of 1812, the attempted submission of Russia. Napoleon a giant multinational European army of 700,000 in 5 months, because he was alone to take all the decisions, and thus took a lot of stupid ones. By then he did not have peers to put him back to sanity. That does not mean that plutocracy and fascism can always be corrected for the best. The Mayas collapsed, all by themselves, and stayed 98% collapsed by the time the Spanish showed up, six centuries later.
Right now, as relatively fewer and fewer Americans, go to state of the art schools, American society is ever becoming, relatively speaking, less of a state of the art society. Plutocracy does not mind; they always have India and China to invest in. But beware the history of Germany!
http://patriceayme.wordpress.com/
Economics is house management. Morality is what endures. Yes, that's the origin of the word! Better: it has got to be the origin of the concept: what is right is what endures. If it were not right, it would not endure, indeed. Thus morality contains the concept of sustainability.
Best house management would have to be the one that endures. Indeed, if the economy does not endure, it collapses, thus so does the food production system, and part of the population will not survive.
Hence the best economy is moral, in other words. And redistribution of riches sufficient to prevent accumulation of riches caused by mathematics rather than merit is necessary.
Those who do not believe in redistribution in riches are more primitive that the Neolithics who produced sustainable societies on the scale of centuries. The Neolithics understood the exponential intuitively, and realized that riches brought ever more riches to the very top of society, the more they grew, and that had nothing to do with the merit of the individuals, families, groups or classes thus advantaged.
Piling up riches at the top made society, overall, poorer. Poorer in riches, poorer in culture, intelligence, mind stuff.
The great ages of Athens and Rome, and the Franks, were preceded by revolutions, forced income redistribution, and the destruction of plutocracies. Crete had no extravagant plutocracy (just significant oligarchies). The assassinations (Athens), rebellion (Rome), full war (Franks) turned society upside down, like the plow allows the rich soil down below to come to light.
It was violent, but the best society sprang forth, and made more advanced philosophy the law of the land. All sorts of goodness came out, from superlative economics and military, to excellent poetry, science, and further philosophy and law.
Why such goodness? Democracy blossoms minds in parallel. It is not just the "Open Society" Pericles and his philosophical advisers vaunted, it is the open minds of multitude of minds exchanging thoughts and feeling in an immense eco system of consciousness.
Plutocracy, and its associated fascism is all about a few taking all the decisions. Fascism is not new: it is the number one trick of primate defense. Baboons are expert fascist, when threats appear: they group up behind their most powerful leaders, female with the young hidden inside the group. Then the group does what the most powerful, most decisive males, the Golos, decide to do, and follow them as one: E PLURIBUS UNUM.
A chimpanzee variant of fascism occurs when chimps form a file, behind their leader, stop talking, and stealthily invade another group territory, in the hope of surprising an individual, and killing it. So fascism is so old, at least 40 million years, since there are the likes of baboons, and they thrive, that it has got to have become an instinct.
Plutocracy however is new, it's not in our biological inheritance, but an emerging property: it needed capital to exist. Long ago, capital was a harem, and a territory. But then the genus Homo appeared, and tools became capital too. When the Neolithic started, and the first cities appeared, capital became potentially gigantic: it could be a city, and extend over a country.
Some individuals, families, groups and finally classes were able to exploit the fascist instinct and the exponential, to create the new phenomenon of plutocracy.
The Neolithic was a total success: man took control of the planet. Capital and populations exploded by a factor of 10,000 for population, and much greater for capital.
Both fascism and the exponential exponentiate themselves to ever more tremendous heights as they grow (the growth of exponential is proportional to itself, just as capital and population do before disaster strikes). Thus they have become the nemeses of civilization, the more civilization grows.
Fascism exerts its seduction always. A case in point is what happens in democratic revolutions. They are born out of the desire by the People to redistribute riches. However, as adversity arises, fascism has to come to their defense.
An example is a Corsican artillery captain. Under the vengeful leadership of the British leader Pitt, anxious that France would not become more of a competitor to London after having a successful revolution, as Britain had a century earlier, the plan was conceived to invade France from Provence. Toulon and its two bays were conquered by an army and navy of British, Spanish and French royalists. The commanding republican generals were incompetent. Napoleon schemed to have them replace, then implemented his own plan, and attacked. He was seriously wounded by a bayonet , but the victory was total, and the British fleet, now exposed to French artillery, sailed away the next day. Napoleon was made into a general directly. He would soon lead French armies to great victories (other French generals did too, because, at that point France was republic fighting an obvious coalition of fascists, it was Greece versus Persia, all over again).
Napoleon was a military genius, thus everybody deduced, and especially himself, that he was a genius in all ways: the monkeys, when threatened, love to group up behind a smart, bold warrior. And when not threatened, it is easier to have just one guy doing all the thinking. In the end, Napoleon turned into a bloody tyrant who was still talking to his soldiers as if they were all "comrades" (a trick from Alexander and his "companions").
In the end, intellectual and political fascism led directly to Napoleon's disastrous campaign of 1812, the attempted submission of Russia. Napoleon a giant multinational European army of 700,000 in 5 months, because he was alone to take all the decisions, and thus took a lot of stupid ones. By then he did not have peers to put him back to sanity. That does not mean that plutocracy and fascism can always be corrected for the best. The Mayas collapsed, all by themselves, and stayed 98% collapsed by the time the Spanish showed up, six centuries later.
Right now, as relatively fewer and fewer Americans, go to state of the art schools, American society is ever becoming, relatively speaking, less of a state of the art society. Plutocracy does not mind; they always have India and China to invest in. But beware the history of Germany!
http://patriceayme.wordpress.com/
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