Interplace

Hello Interactors,

Winter break is drawing to a close for my two kids who just wrapped up their first semester at college on the east coast. We’ve had a lot of conversations about what it’s like living in a new city. My daughter is particularly impacted having moved to New York City from a relatively small town near Seattle. But she’s not alone. More and more people are moving to urban areas, but does it necessarily make them happier?

As interactors, you’re special individuals self-selected to be a part of an evolutionary journey. You’re also members of an attentive community so I welcome your participation.

Please leave your comments below or email me directly.

Now let’s go…

BIG CITY, LITTLE PRETTY

Stepping out our front door with my daughter who was just home from New York she proclaimed, “It’s nice just walking out the door and seeing trees. No twenty-story elevator trip, no concrete, no noise, no high rises, no pollution…just easy, calm, and quiet nature. It’s beautiful.”

She loves the city; she hates the city. I asked her what New York could do to make it more pleasing, she recommends more green spaces. More Central Parks. Humans do need nature; some more than others.

I’m reminded of my philosophy professor at UC Santa Barbara for an aesthetics class. It was his first-year teaching and first-time outside of New York. There he was on one of the most beautiful coastline campuses in the world buttressed by green foothill mountains. He was shocked to learn his student’s thought nature was ‘beautiful’. He didn’t get it. Or so he claimed. He kept quoting Woody Allen who complained about not being able to sleep in the country because it was too quiet. Allen once quipped, “I am two with nature.”

Some proclaim “cities; can’t live with them, can’t live without them” while others groan, “Nature; can’t live with it, can’t live without it.” More and more people are choosing to live with cities, not nature. The United Nations estimates 55% of the world’s population live in urban areas. It’s estimated that number will grow to 75% by 2050.

The rate of growth varies by country or region as does the share of the total population. Japan is the most urbanized, United States is number two, followed by Europe. But number four has the fastest urbanization growth rate – China.

But what constitutes an urban area? Don’t ask me. I screwed up my poll last week by providing widely inconsistent ranges of population size. It turns out I’m not the only one confused about quantifying urban areas. Despite the U.N. making claims and predictions about urbanization, there is no agreed upon definition of an urban area. Japan says it’s 50,000 people or more while Sweden says it’s 200. Singapore’s entire population is considered urban while Uruguay leaves it up to the city to decide whether it’s ‘urban’.

Either way, the trend is clear. More people are moving to urban areas than ever before. Even my ill-formed poll of Interactors shows most live in bigger and the biggest metropolitan areas. And I just dropped my daughter off at the airport where she’ll soon be back in the city and away from nature.

Why are so many people choosing to live in large cities? Are they happier? Most of the 36 Interactors responding to my poll report being happy. And most have moved to seek happiness. About half of the 36 responders still live in the country in which they were born (47% or about 17 people), a few live in the same state or similar (17% or about six people), and even fewer live in the same city (11% or about four people). Another 25%, or about nine people, have moved to a different country all together.

People move. It’s a defining characteristic of our species. We move to satisfy our basic human needs. However, there’s also disagreement over what constitutes ‘human needs.’ What explanations do exist are largely defined and propagated from a Western perspective from the study of WEIRD people (Western (mostly White) Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic).

One of the most popular and enduring needs models comes from a simple pyramid drawn by the American psychologist, Abraham Maslow. His ‘hierarchy of needs’ posits that human needs are built on top of one another going from ‘physiological’ needs like breathing, food, and water to ‘safety’ then ‘love and belonging’ to ‘esteem’ and finally ‘self-actualization.’ But is this an oversimplification? Is it just an easy-to-understand graphic that puts the lofty concepts of ‘morality’, ‘creativity’, ‘spontaneity’, ‘problem solving’, and ‘acceptance of facts’ at the top of a mountain of over-achievers? Is the hierarchical path to happiness achieved only by those with ‘confidence’, ‘respect of others’, and high ‘self-esteem’?

Does one really need ‘security’, ‘employment’, and ‘property’ to have a happy life filled with loving ‘friendship’ and ‘family’. Some families moving to cities risk physical and psychological security, induce precarity by change jobs, and pay rent on the most affordable apartment they can find – all to satisfy basic physiological needs. But are they not creative, spontaneous, problem solvers who may indeed be happier than before their move? Must everyone earn ‘achievement’ awards or the ‘respect of others’? Must they exude ‘confidence’ to be happy?

It seems Maslow treated needs as a series of hierarchical problems to conquer. One must climb a particular ladder of self-actualization rung by rung. It’s a convenient pseudo-psychological symbol to American idioms like ‘climbing the corporate ladder’, ‘upper class’, or ‘keeping up with the Jones’s’.

A NEED FOR A BETTER CREED

Like the word ‘urban’, there is not one definition of ‘human need’. But with so many people flocking to cities, the running assumption among most, including researchers, is that people do so to become wealthier, healthier, and happier. But are these still biased toward climbing some kind of economic ladder? Are they held up by surrounding socio-political systems, structures, and norms largely fueled by Western capitalistic ambitions? Yes, certain amounts of wealth accumulation are needed to satisfy basic needs, but are there hidden assumptions that more money buys more happiness? Were the Beatles wrong? Does money really buy love? What is required to satisfy our needs?

Experts generally agree on these four categories of human need: personal, economic, social, and political. We all require certain physical and psychological safety in pursuit of our goals and happiness. How we interact with people and place plays a vital role and is dictated by the social and economic systems influenced by politics. Increasingly, it appears more and more people seek places that most complicate these requirements – cities. So, is widespread urbanization making people safer, healthier, richer, and happier?

It varies, but in the aggregate, more humans are safer, healthier, wealthier, and presumably happier than in the known history of civilization. And as countries become richer, they also become more urbanized. As cities increase in scale, as with biological systems, naturally occurring scaling laws dictate they also become more efficient. When an animal doubles in size, it’s operating efficiency more than doubles – about 15% more. When a city doubles in size, it also gains from scaling efficiencies. Wages, innovation, and infrastructure, for example, all more than double with population size. These efficiencies tend cities toward better sanitation, water quality, cleaner fuels for cooking, and better nutrition – all requirements to fulfill basic human needs.

However, these positive effects are not evenly distributed, and the wealth correlations found in the aggregate may be due to inequalities. Large cities can yield and attract extreme wealth giving the illusion bigger is better and wealthier is healthier. As most everyone witnesses, if not endure, urban areas are also home to extreme poverty, accentuated inequalities, and politicians in search of a cure.

Indeed, those same geometric power laws that can more than double the positive effects of cities can also more than double crime, garbage, illness, and disease. Which has people yearning for quiet, natural spaces inside and outside the city, just like my daughter.

Access to nature seems to be a basic human need hidden from the surface of Maslow’s pyramid. It sits under a category of needs my old philosophy professor may have an issue with – aesthetics. Nature features more prominently on a competing model of basic human needs made by the Chilean economist Manfred Max-Neef.

He was Frustrated by the negative social effects influenced by the U.S. backed conservative economic policies of the so-called “Chicago Boys”. This was a group of Chilean economists trained at the University of Chicago under Milton Friedman on conservative neo-liberal philosophies and policies. They went on to hold prominent positions under the military dictatorships of Chile in the 1970s and 80s. Max-Neef lived with and studied those stricken by failed attempts at fashioning the Chilean economy after American neoliberal forms of capitalism. He observed the negative effects of debt and ecological destruction brought on by privatized economic and social systems modeled after and funded by the United States and top U.S. corporations.

After decades of experience and research living and traveling around South America in the 1960s, 70s, and 80s, he wrote a book in 1989 on Human Scale Development. It centers on the organic and messy human needs diagnosed at street level in contrast to the clean, mechanistic, and abstracted top-down, state and/or corporate led approach. Max-Neef’s findings became foundational to what we might now call ‘urban sustainability’. In 1992, in the publication Real-Life Economics: Understanding Wealth Creation, he published a human needs framework that shuns the strict hierarchical structure of Maslow’s while adhering to those needs scholars largely agree exist among humans.

Max-Neef identifies nine needs: subsistence, protection, affection, understanding, participation, leisure, creation, identity, and freedom. These fall under these four categories that define our existence: being in psychological state, having assets, doing actions, and interacting with and in places with or without other people. Because cities increase chances of social interaction, offer more opportunities for doing actions in exchange for money, the opportunities to have assets increases, leading to a desired state of being.

WINGS OF A BUTTERFLY

Max-Neef observed that while human needs are universal, getting them satisfied is contingent on particularities of a given city and how it functions. For example, a well equipped and staffed police force may satisfy the fundamental human need to feel safe, but it can also limit freedoms, perpetuate unfair power inequities, or dissuade community interactions.

But for Max-Neef, community engagement and participation between the powerful and the powerless was at the heart of satisfying the needs of all humans. He was interested in practical solutions to problems at scales ranging from neighborhoods to cities and regions to countries. Thus he devised his model to be flexible and adaptable to unique situations at the micro and macro level – each dependent on the other.

A group of Dutch urban studies researchers recently published a paper calling for planners and elected officials to consider the Max-Neef model as a guide. They reveal how it’s uniquely suited to better plan and shape or reshape cities toward a more just, equitable, and environmentally sound future. This is due mostly to the synergies between fundamental human needs and the elements of cities that can satisfy them.

But it would be wrong to say these associations and synergies necessarily guarantee the satisfaction of needs. Simply moving to a city, with all it’s social potential for interactions, does not automatically lead to a better life. Max-Neef says,

“The articulation between the personal and social dimensions of development may be achieved through increasing levels of self-reliance. At a personal level, self-reliance stimulates our sense of identity, our creative capacity, our self-confidence and our need for freedom. At the social level, self-reliance strengthens the capacity for subsistence, provides protection against exogenous hazards, enhances endogenous cultural identity and develops the capacity to generate greater spaces of collective freedom. The necessary combination of both the personal and the social in Human Scale Development compels us, then, to encourage self-reliance at the different levels: individual, local, regional and national.”

But he also warns it is not his

“intention to suggest that self-reliance is achieved simply by social and economic interaction in small physical spaces. Such an assumption would do nothing but replicate a mechanistic perception which has already been very harmful in terms of development policies.”

Instead, he calls for

“Complementary relationships between the macro and the micro, and among the various microspaces, [that] may facilitate the mutual empowering of processes of socio-cultural identity, political autonomy and economic self-reliance.”

This requires government systems to flexibly empower individuals and local communities so they may satisfy their basic human needs as they see fit. Instead of a rigid top-down, mechanistic, hierarchical system geared toward economic growth and private wealth accumulation, a more flexible system spanning many nested hierarchies is required that fosters personal growth in the pursuit of human needs. A system that is resilient to the variability of external forces. Like a pandemic.

The pandemic appears to have changed all the historic economic, cultural, and political assumptions surrounding the physical social interaction of people in cities. With more and more people working, socializing, and shopping online what are the implications for the social aspects of human needs? Last summer, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics published the results of their 2021 American Time Use Survey. On days “employed persons” worked, 38 percent did some or all their work at home and 68 percent did some or all their work at their workplace. In 2019, before the pandemic, workers were 24 percent less likely to work at home and 82 percent more likely to work at their workplace.

Workers 25 years old and older with an advanced degree were more likely to work at home than those without. Sixty-seven percent of those with an advanced degree worked at home versus 19 percent with a high school diploma and no college degree. Will those advanced degree earners get their human needs fulfilled working from home? Is online social interaction better or worse at fulfilling basic social needs or are those getting fulfilled outside of work hours? Will those without college degrees find that interacting physically offers more opportunities for doing? Will they find the necessary opportunities to have the necessary assets needed for a desired state of being?

My daughter goes to school in the center of one of the biggest cities in the world and my son in a sparsely populated wooded suburb. As they finish their first year of college, I wonder what they’ll face a few years from now as they seek to fulfill basic human needs on their own. Will cities and governments morph to meet to what appears to be one of the most transformative moments in the history of urbanization? How much adapting and compromising of their desires will be required to satisfy their basic human needs?

One thing is clear, and Max-Neef seems to have gotten this right. While macro-scale political and economic systems may appear to muster control over people, it took a pandemic to reveal the power of individual micro-scale behavior. It seems when most of those individuals with the means to chose how to work, to do, to have, to satisfy their needs differently, they acted. They chose how to interact with society in a new way that indeed forced large-scale macro changes to worldwide economic, social, and political systems.

What would happen if instead of blindly following the course set by centuries of a particular socio-economic construct, of which increased urbanization is a biproduct, we all chose to act differently? What if instead of feeling the need for speed, we all slowed down to succeed? What if in pursuit of a basic need, we shun the allure of greed? Surety is not decreed and only uncertainty is guaranteed. So, let’s be what we want to be, have what we want to have, do what we want to do, and interact with the world. After all, small acts by a few ripple through and through bringing changes to a world anew.

Hello Interactors,

Happy 2023! Today we launch into a season on topics related to human behavior. So much of how we interact with people and place comes down to language. It shapes how we communicate with one another, but how much does language shape our behavior? And if one language dominates, how much does that domination shape our global society?  

As interactors, you’re special individuals self-selected to be a part of an evolutionary journey. You’re also members of an attentive community so I welcome your participation.

Please leave your comments below or email me directly.

Now let’s go…

DO YOU SPEAK ENGLISH?

Last week I caught up with a friend of mine who left Microsoft soon after I did. He was a technology executive and is now pursuing a degree at Cambridge on ethics in artificial intelligence (AI). His coursework is very different from his engineering past and Taiwanese education. Fewer numbers, more words. He is reading multiple philosophy papers a week, sometimes 30 pages long. He must then write his own analytical essays. Predictably, these papers he is reading are written in English – his second language.

It can be challenging enough to read philosophy in a native language. When he encounters a word, he doesn’t understand, he often consults his Chinese dictionary to better understand the concept. But then when he compares that definition to the English dictionary definition, the meaning is sometimes different. The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein once wrote,

“Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language.”

For my bi-lingual friend for whom English is his second language, it seems the language is the battle against intelligence by means of the bewitchment of philosophy.

This is an increasingly common phenomenon around the world as English is the dominant language of higher education. An estimated one in six people on this planet speak some form of English. While seemingly small, it is the largest population to speak a common language in the history of our species. Still, with over 7000 different languages spoken around the world language diversity dominates.

In the United States 80% of households speak English only at home. Those homes are likely to remain monolinguistic. But as immigrant populations in America grow and Indigenous languages resurface the number of bilingual or multilingual households is expected to increase. When the first wave of immigrants came to America in the late 1800s, many children were encouraged to drop their native language in favor of English. My American born Italian father-in-law was discouraged to speak Italian and thus never learned it. Meanwhile, the cost of learning English was too great for his mother, so she was discouraged to learn English. They never shared a richly common language.

Even though the United States has never declared English the official language, it is often assumed. As a result, there exists not only a monolingual bias, but an English bias. Given the last two global trotting colonizing superpowers have English as the dominant language, it follows the English language dominates. As a result, schools, including higher education replete with international bilingual diversity, is also dominated by the English language and all that comes with it. That includes the branches of the field of cognitive science intent on understanding how language affects how the brain works.

It was my father-in-law’s strict dad that insisted he speak English only. His attitude was ‘you’re an American, so you’re speaking English.’ It was common for immigrant parents during these times to attempt to erase their past in hopes of appearing more ‘American’. But this attitude may have been buoyed by a long-held belief there exists a cognitive cost of switching between two or more languages. A belief that was surely substantiated by the high cost of learning a second language proficiently. It seems advantageous to just pick one and stick with it. And for many of those early immigrant children in America, that choice would have been English.

But I’m reminded of another friend who grew up in Malaysia learning English and Malay while speaking her native cultural language and English at home. Malaysia’s population is a blend of Malay, Chinese, and Indian descendants, and the informal language, Manglish, blends words from English, Chinese, and Tamil. She is so comfortable jumping between these languages that when she and her sister talk, they sometimes use words from multiple languages in a single sentence. For her, there is no cognitive cost in switching. In fact, she may even benefit from using many languages at once.

YES, UH-HA, I AGREE

Some research in cognitive science points to a ‘bilingual advantage’. Multi-lingual speakers showed a greater “ability to plan, focus, and execute a wide array of tasks’ compared to single language speakers and the effect was pronounced among older adults. As a result, replicated studies show performance varies greatly depending on the task, age, language experience, and frequency of switching languages. Still, as cognitive research increases in parts of the world where bilingualism is more common, more is sure to be learned.

The bulk of knowledge in cognitive science comes from studying WEIRD people. They are predominantly White, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic. The ‘E’ could just as well stand for ‘English-speaking’. The discipline is dominated by English-speaking researchers, studying a sliver of the English-speaking population, writing papers in English, and in countries that that are culturally Anglocentric. This flaw has been recognized for nearly a decade. But increasingly more research uses diverse sample populations, in more diverse locations, and is conducted by less Anglocentric researchers who use English as a second language.

In 2022, a group of scholars published a paper investigating how over-reliance on English may hinder cognitive science. It included a chart that illustrates a sampling of differences emerging from these more diverse studies. It shows how aspects of the written and spoken English language differ culturally, linguistically, and cognitively from certain other languages. For example, English speakers tend to frequently rely on words of gratitude to maintain healthy social relations. One study revealed English speakers were four times more likely to say ‘thank you’ than other languages. A language in Ecuador, Cha’palaa, doesn’t even have a word for ‘thank you’. Even ‘please’ is avoided without conflict. Thirsty? ‘Give me water’ is sufficient and considered polite.

Conversely, languages other than English tend to use words more frequently that promote and sustain social cohesion. One of the more extreme versions of this is Japanese where attention to social behavior is more closely monitored by all members of society. During conversation, the person whose ‘turn’ it is to speak is listening and looking for short affirmative confirmation, like ‘yes’, ‘uh-huh’, or head nods without losing their ‘turn’. Meanwhile the listener is listening and watching for breaks in phrasing to offer forms of affirmative confirmation. Linguists call this ‘back-channeling’ and can be found in cultures rich in social cohesion. Perhaps the English language and the American egocentric culture isn’t helping to heal our societal divisions.

The ordering of words in Japanese versus English has cognitive implications too. All languages have a linguistic ‘head’ that determines certain properties of a phrase. The Japanese language puts the head at the end of a phrase while English puts it at the beginning. This has implications for differences in working memory between Japanese and English speakers. When recalling a sequence of figures, like numbers, objects, plants, or animals, Japanese speakers have higher precision on the last item in the list and English speakers the first.

Cognitive differences in ordering arrangements can extend beyond listed figures to spatial reasoning. For example, English speakers use their own relational viewpoint as a frame of reference when describing spatial locations, like ‘left’ or ‘right’. In contrast, certain native languages in Australia and Namibia use cardinal directions like ‘west’ or ‘east’. These differences in linguistic encoding are shown to influence learning of spatial configurations, search and find tasks, and tracking moving objects. Again, the apparent egocentrism of English speakers is seemingly creeping into even how we see ourselves in the world.  

ADVERSITY TO DIVERSITY

The ’left-right’ bias shows up not only in space, but also time. English speakers typically think of a timeline as going from left to right. This ‘left-to-right’ bias can be attributed to many factors, including the ordering of words in a sentence or a math equation. Solving a math problem or writing a sentence in English involves ‘starting’ on the left and over time ‘ending’ up on the right. Those taught to read and write or do math in English or similar languages thus have a linguistic coding in the brain that associates the past with the ‘left’ and the future with the ‘right’.

But those who have not been exposed to these encodings have no such associations. And given there are 7000 languages spoken in the world, that accounts for a lot of humans. As more humans gain access to the internet, more and more of these languages and cultures will be exposed to the 1.2 billion internet users speaking English. The fastest growing languages online are Chinese (0.9 billion), Spanish (0.4 billion), and Arabic (0.2 billion). More people in America speak Spanish than all of Spain.

Given this growing linguistic diversity, these researchers conclude cognitive science is not doing nearly enough “to live up to its original mission of developing an interdisciplinary exploration of ‘the mind’”. They say English language dominance may be the field’s “original sin” and call for a commitment “to research that seeks to systematically explore, generalize, and falsify our models of human cognition by exploring non-English-speaking peoples and societies.”

As we enter a new year, English speaking students, like my continuing adult education friend, will be returning to classes and campuses dominated by the English language. Others will be drawing that timeline planning the next quarter. Many spent this holiday season exchanging in culturally supported niceties perpetuated by language. Santa only delivered the presents if the child had been saying ‘please’ and ‘thank you’ all year. We will spend the next year looking to do the same as we all struggle to keep those new year’s resolutions.

The words ‘spent’ and ‘spend’ bring up another peculiarity of English – tenses. It turns out those living in countries using languages that don’t have an obligatory future tense like English may be better at keeping their resolutions. They tend to smoke less, practice safer sex, and are less obese. And, hey, tax time is also just around the corner in the United States. It turns out those not obliged to use future tense in their language also save more.

But these researchers admit these studies deserve scrutiny. There is much debate about how culture and history shape language and how language shapes culture and history. Teasing out language from cognition and culture will continue to confound scholars, researchers, and practitioners. However, advances in neuroscience and brain imaging together with increased diversity of research subjects, locations, and researchers are sure to yield more practicable results. These tools didn’t exist at the onset of the study of language.

In 1863, the linguist Wilhelm von Humboldt, and brother of the more famous naturalist Alexander von Humboldt, wrote three volumes on comparative linguistics after studying the Kawi language of Java. He noted then there “resides in every language a characteristic worldview.” One day we may be able to discern just what elements of worldview cognition are common to all human brains – and the brains of other animals – regardless of language and culture.

Until then, this is all that is left to write for today. In English. While my sentences have flowed from left to right, the beginning is at the top and the end is here at the bottom. I wish to ‘thank you’ for reading or listening and invite you to ‘please’ click ‘like’ or leave a nice comment. If you feel so obliged. It’s been my ‘turn’ to speak, now it’s yours.

Hello Interactors,

[This is a repost from last Christmas eve. It’s a great story worthy of another share!]

For all you Christmas celebrators out there, happy Christmas Eve. Since many will be gathering ‘round a Christmas tree, I thought I’d tell the story of its origin. And like so much of American history, it has ties to immigrants and slavery; but in this case — anti-slavery.

As interactors, you’re special individuals self-selected to be a part of an evolutionary journey. You’re also members of an attentive community so I welcome your participation.

Please leave your comments below or email me directly.

Now let’s go…

A TREE SO YEE MAY BE FREE

“If the morning drives are extended beyond the city, there is much to delight the eye. The trees are eased in ice; and when the sun shines out suddenly, the whole scene looks like one diffused rainbow,—dressed in a brilliancy which can hardly be conceived of in England. On days less bright, the blue harbour spreads in strong contrast with the sheeted snow which extends to its very brink.”

These are the words of Harriet Martineau. She was a English writer, journalist, and social theorist who pioneered observational methods that came to influence the field of sociology. One of her more popular books came at the end of her travels through the United States in the 1830s titled, Retrospect of Western Travel. The passage above describes what she saw as she left the Boston city limits in the snow the winter of 1835.

You may have images of her bundled up in a one horse open sleigh, over the hills she went, dashing all the way. But according to Martineau, you can let go of any such romantic inclinations. Here’s her take on sleighing.

“As for the sleighing, I heard much more than I experienced of its charms. No doubt early association has something to do with the American fondness for this mode of locomotion; and much of the affection which is borne to music, dancing, supping, and all kinds of frolic, is transferred to the vehicle in which the frolicking parties are transported. It must be so, I think, or no one would be found to prefer a carriage on runners to a carriage on wheels,—except on an untrodden expanse of snow. On a perfectly level and crisp surface I can fancy the smooth rapid motion to be exceedingly pleasant; but such surfaces are rare in the neighbourhood of populous cities. The uncertain, rough motion in streets hillocky with snow, or on roads consisting for the season of a ridge of snow with holes in it, is disagreeable, and provocative of headache. I am no rule for others as to liking the bells; but to me their incessant jangle was a great annoyance.”

And if that’s not enough to convince you, she offers up a quote from unknown source that puts a finer touch on the realities of sleighing.

“Do you want to know what sleighing is like? You can soon try. Set your chair on a spring board out in the porch on Christmas-day: put your feet in a pail full of powdered ice: have somebody to jingle a bell in one ear, and somebody else to blow into the other with the bellows,—and you will have an exact idea of sleighing.”

Martineau was on her way to a Christmas evening celebration at the home of a former Harvard German language professor, Charles Follen. Although, due to scheduling conflicts the event was actually on New Years Eve and not Christmas Eve. The cozy holiday scene that Martineau proceeds to unfold came to be the most, though not the first, read articulation of what came to be the center piece of American Christmas celebration – the Christmas tree.

Follen was a German immigrant so perhaps it’s not that surprising that a Christmas tree would feature prominently in her story. It’s been a long held belief that German immigrants brought their time-honored Christmas tree tradition with them. Though, as we’ll soon see, the evolution of the Christmas tree tradition in America paralleled that of Germany.

Martineau’s account of that evening, while factual, leaves out important historical details as to why she was celebrating Christmas with Follen and his family that night. These were two radical Unitarian abolitionists who bonded over their insistence that slavery be eradicated totally and immediately. Northerner’s, and New England Unitarians, were split on the matter of abolition. Follen’s convictions are what got him fired from Harvard a year prior.

As for Martineau, she was a well known and respected journalist but not yet a public activist. But after attending a women’s abolitionist meeting that November, she was convinced she needed to act. She was asked at that meeting to write publicly avowing her beliefs. Being one of the only women writers of her time to sustain herself through writing and still requiring access to America’s mainstream elite for her book, she faced an ethical dilemma.

Later she wrote, “I foresaw that almost every house in Boston, except those of the abolitionists, would be shut against me; that my relation to the country would be completely changed, as I should suddenly be transformed from being a guest and an observer to being considered a missionary or a spy.…”

News leaked of her position on slavery and Boston newspapers ridiculed her. Their headlines spread across the country and she was forced to alter her itinerary. The event she was attending at Follen’s home wasn’t just a Christmas celebration, but an anti-slavery strategy session. That spring, she (in the company of Charles Follen) took to the road not as journalist, but as an activist.

CHRISTKINDLE AND BELSNICKEL

Historians and folklorists have determined that the first Christmas tree in America was most likely in the home of a German immigrant in Pennsylvania. But it’s unlikely to have occurred anytime before 1810. The first known sketch of a family celebrating Christmas, featuring a small tree atop a table, was not printed until recent decades but dates to either 1812 or 1819.

Recall from my November posts on the origins of Thanksgiving, this was also the time when St. Nicholas was also entering the picture in New York. The Christmas tree tradition was also just emerging in Germany at this very same time. The Christmas tree, like Santa Claus himself, wasn’t a long held German tradition but a story told by a select group of elites who latched on to a small, isolated, and obscure holiday event that was occurring in what was then Strasbourg, Germany but is now part of France.

It was established sometime in the 17th century as a quasi-religious way of judging children on the basis of them being naughty or nice. If you were nice you got a visit that night from Christkindle (i.e. the Christchild) and if you were naughty you got a visit from Hanstrapp; Strasbourg’s equivalent of what became known as Belsnickle (roughly translated: St. Nicholas in Fur).

This character has echo’s of behavior seen by Wassailers during Thanksgiving celebrations where men, often of lower class, would dress up and go door to door, often times even welcoming themselves in. Perhaps this offers a clue into how Santa became a home invader. Though, should Belsnickle determine a child in the home had been naughty, he gifted the parents with a stick with instructions to whip the poor child.

The Christmas tree tradition expanded beyond Strasbourg around 1750. Its spread may have been accelerated by a young up and coming writer, naturalist, and scientist, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe in 1771. Recall from my October post, that by the dawn of the 18th century Goethe had established himself as the go-to guy by the German government for writing, organizing, and evangelizing his opinions and observations on everything from gardening, to parks management, to economics.

He had spent some time in Strasbourg and “discovered in this city a new sense of “German” identity that transformed his larger cultural vision.” His 1774 novel, The Sufferings of Young Werther, is a story of a love triangle that ends tragically. And in the lead up to this tragedy, Goethe writes how young Werther “spoke of the pleasure the children would feel and remembered how in times long past he had himself been transported to paradise by the surprise opening of a door and the appearance of the decorated tree with its candles, sweets, and apples.”

It wasn’t until 1810 that the Christmas Tree tradition made it’s way to Berlin. It was introduced in Munich in 1830 by the Queen of Bavaria. Goethe had inspired a string of writers publishing stories of Christmas trees that were disseminated throughout Europe and the United States. And it was all happening at the same time of the first recorded evidence of a Christmas tree in America – 1820.

And then, in 1836, came the first printed image of a Christmas tree in America. It was titled “Christmas Eve” and was featured in a story called The Stranger’s Gift. It was written, as you might expect, by a German immigrant. But not just any German immigrant. It was written by Herman Bokum, the professor who replaced Follen after Harvard let him go for his public opposition to slavery just one year earlier.

YOUR BOUGHS CAN TEACH A LESSON

After Follen lost his job at Harvard he was hired by a family to home school their two children. Follen strictly followed a progressive teaching method derived from a Swiss educational reformer named Johann Pestalozzi. Pestalozzi had a child-centered and directed educational philosophy. He believed every child is born with inherently good qualities and it’s the teachers role to find them and cultivate them. It’s unclear whether Follen’s enemies convinced the family to reconsider, the family themselves had a change of heart, or Follen, ever dogmatic in his principles, refused to budge on his teaching approach, but two weeks before Christmas of 1835 he was terminated.

It is in this context that Harriett Martineau attended the Christmas celebration in Follen’s newly built home on the corner of Follen Avenue outside of Boston. Martineau did not mention Follen by name in her retelling of their Christmas tree celebration, only Follen’s son who everyone called “Little Charley.” She writes,

“I was present at the introduction into the new country of the spectacle of the German Christmas-tree. My little friend Charley, and three companions, had been long preparing for this pretty show…I rather think it was, generally speaking, a secret out of the house; but I knew what to expect…The tree was the top of a young fir, planted in a tub, which was ornamented with moss. Smart, dolls, and other whimsies, glittered in the evergreen; and there was not a twig; which had not something sparkling upon it… Charley looked a good deal like himself, only now and then twisting himself about in an unaccountable fit of giggling. I mounted the steps behind the tree to see the effect of opening the doors. It was delightful. The children poured in; but in a moment, every voice was hushed. Their faces were upturned to the blaze, all eyes wide open, all lips parted, all steps arrested. Nobody spoke; only Charley leaped for joy.”

It was two years before Martineau’s book was published. She continued her friendship with Follen until his tragic death in 1841. He was killed when a steamship he was traveling on exploded. His photograph hung on the wall of her home until she died in 1876.

And in the intervening years of her book being published, a writer friend of theirs, Catharine Maria Sedgwick, wrote a fictional story called “New Years Day” that included a brief mention of a Christmas tree celebration akin to what actually took place at the Follens. It was published that same year, 1835, making it the first piece of American literature to mentioned a Christmas tree.

It’s unfortunate America’s Christmas tree origin story doesn’t start with the telling of Charles Follen and Harriett Martineau and their New Years Eve anti-slavery strategy meeting around the Christmas tree. Not only is their relationship full of intrigue, but the idea of the Christmas tree immortalized as an historic symbol of freedom from slavery seems an appropriate American Christmas tale. Perhaps the story of Follen and Martineau is what we should be reading to children every Christmas eve and not just T’was the Night Before Christmas.

Both the story of the Christmas tree as a time-honored German cultural tradition and America’s favorite Christmas time fable, T’was the Night Before Christmas, were largely fabricated and perpetuated by a select group of elites on both sides of the Atlantic.

Clement Clark Moore, the author of T’was the Night Before Christmas, — and his reactionary New York Episcopalian Knickerbocker friends — were interested in imbuing their Christmas tales with aristocratic authority. In contrast, Bollen and his Unitarian Christmas tree literary acquaintances used the Christmas tree to add momentum to the swelling progressive reformist movement of the 1830s.

Stephen Nissenbaum, in his book The Battle for Christmas, explains the similarities between the unfolding of these two events, American traditions, and these two men,

“There were important similarities between the antislavery sensibility and the new attitude toward children. Abolitionists and educational reformers shared a joint empathy for people who were powerless to resist the wrath of those who wielded authority over them—slaves and children, respectively. (Both types of reformers had a particular abhorrence of the use of the lash as a form of punishment.)”

He continues,

“In fact, what Charles Follen did in 1835 is similar in that sense to what Clement Clarke Moore had done more than a decade earlier, although his reasons—Moore was a reactionary, Follen a radical—were profoundly different. But both men had reason to feel alienated from their respective communities, and both responded by turning inward, to their own children, and using Christmas as the occasion for doing so.”

And in both cases, literature, and access to it, played a starring role. Nissenbaum, writes,

“As it turns out, the most important channels through which the ritual was spread were literary ones. Information about the Christmas tree was diffused by means of commercial literature, not via immigrant folk culture—from the top down, not from the bottom up. It was by reading about Christmas trees, not by witnessing them, that many thousands of Americans learned about the custom. Before they ever saw such a thing, they already knew what Christmas trees were all about—not only what they looked like, but also how and why they were to be used.”

It seems another mythical folk tradition is still propagated from the top down more than experienced from bottom up. Recalling Harriet Martineau’s American observation that “As for the sleighing, I heard much more than I experienced of its charms.”

Hello Interactors,

As winter solstice nears in the northern hemisphere, this week brings a close to my explorations of economics. Next up is human behavior. I decided to stitch together this season’s economics posts into a single composite narrative. Upon reflection, I see a path my posts tend to take though it’s never premeditated. At least to my knowledge! In keeping with the theme of this post, it seems the uncertain path my essays take is a form of emergence.

As interactors, you’re special individuals self-selected to be a part of an evolutionary journey. You’re also members of an attentive community so I welcome your participation.

Please leave your comments below or email me directly.

Now let’s go…

THE TREE OF MORAL SYMPATHY

‘Tis the season to be jolly, and with it comes this decision to volley. Real tree or fake tree? Or no tree at all. Such is the dilemma many find themselves in, at least in those places dominated by Christian tradition or influenced by Christian culture. The ‘real or fake’ Christmas tree analysis is how I was first introduced to ideas related to a circular economy.

It came through a class called “Sustainable Transportation from a Systems Perspective” as part of my master’s degree program. We were introduced to a 2009 study titled, “Comparative Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) of Artificial vs Natural Christmas Tree”. It came from a sustainable development consultancy in Montreal. Life Cycle Analysis looks at the environmental impact of the full lifecycle of a product or service from ‘cradle to grave.’

While the United Nations’ International Standardization Organization has determined a standard for how to conduct an LCA (ISO 14040), the interpretation of results can often include creative interpretations and conclusions.

This is particularly true if the LCA is conducted by a corporation or industry that may benefit from favorable LCA results. And you probably won’t be surprised to learn most LCAs are conducted or funded by private companies. LCA’s started popping up in the 1960s, but now they’re commonplace as companies jostle to present themselves as being environmentally sustainable and socially just through responsible and ethical governance – ESG. But measurements, evaluations, and analysis to determine an ESG score, like LCA’s, are also open to interpretation and manipulation. Consequently, ESG has lost its luster.

Sadly, the concept of a ‘circular economy’ is following a similar path. Circular economies take limited raw materials used to make goods and loops them back into the economy instead of throwing them away. The idea is to reduce, reuse, and recycle the inputs of an LCA and then repair the outputs to extend their lifecycle. But the term and practice of ‘circular economy’, like ESG, has also become diffuse and trendy.

A group of Industrial Ecologists, people who track the physical resource flows of industrial and consumer systems at different spatial scales, wrote in 2021,

“In seeking to maintain a growth-based economy, critics argue, the circular economy ‘tinkers with the current modus operandi’ of “consumerism, extractivism and (liberal) capitalism, while bearing the unrealistic expectation that the individual consumer will be able to mobilize largescale change. The circular economy is considered to encourage a reboot for capitalism that requires no radical change to institutions, infrastructures, and markets.”

Calls for radical change concerning capitalism are strewn throughout history. The naturalist and scientist Alexander von Humboldt warned in 1800 of human induced climate change. He observed widespread systemic negative ecological impacts originated with infectious colonialism fueled by European and American profit seeking capitalists and imperialists. Between the abduction and trade of human slaves from Africa and local Indigenous populations to the overworking of soils to grow monocultural crops, Humboldt would not have been handing out top ESG scores to those very institutions who funded his explorations around the world.

Humboldt remained critical of colonialism and the brand of capitalism that came with it until the day he died. Ten years after Humboldt died another future critic of capitalistic colonialism was born, Mahatma Gandhi. By the time he was 76, in 1945, he called on his economist friend, Joseph Kumarappa, better known as J. C. Kumarappa, to further his ideas on Gandhian economics – a kind of circular economy.

Like Humboldt and other naturalists, Kumarappa observed the cyclical patterns in nature and sought economic practices that echoed them. He advocated for maintaining an economy of continuity and circularity with nature. Using the bee as a metaphor, he wrote,

“The bees etc. while gathering the nectar and pollen from these plants for their own good, fertilize the flowers and the grains, that are formed in consequence, again become the source of life of the next generation of plants.”

Kumarappa studied at Columbia University under the progressive economist Edwin Seligman – a critic of exploitive forms of capitalism himself. Seligman encouraged Kumarappa to further his own ideas and critiques of traditional capitalistic economic orthodoxy. And he did. He wrote, “The Western plans are material centred. That is to say, they want to exploit all resources.”

Kumarappa and Gandhi also observed Western plans are to exploit all human resources for labor as well. In this regard, Kumarappa found inspiration in elements of Marxism. Marxism also provided a sociological explanation for why some Indians, Kumarappa included, rose to higher social class more than others. Though I suspect the passivist Gandhi probably would not approve of Marxist calls for civil disobedience. Marx himself was hardly socially obedient.

SHUN THE VICES OF PRODUCTIONSWEISE

When Karl Marx was a freshman at a university in Bonn, Germany he was thrown in jail for drunken disorderly behavior. He joined a poetry club that was a front for a group of young radical’s intent on overthrowing the local government. There was also class conflict. Marx, the son of a modestly wealthy Jewish father, was considered a ‘plebian’ by the so-called ‘true Prussians and aristocrats.’ It got personal and led to a dual resulting in a bullet glancing the forehead of Karl Marx.

Marx went on to study law and philosophy in Berlin and was a prolific writer. After leaving college, Marx became a journalist exposing elements of power structures present in the Christian led Prussian government. He believed their oppression suppressed the individual’s right to reason, engage, and speak with freedom of thought. His writing was radical enough to get him kicked out of the country.

He fled to Paris but was soon kicked out of France as well. He settled in England writing as a European correspondent for the New York Daily Tribune. He immersed himself in the work of the Scottish moral philosopher Adam Smith in the reading room of the British Museum. He also witnessed the negative working conditions and poverty in burgeoning London factories that he attributed to Adam Smith’s single publication on economics, The Wealth of Nations.

Marx’s primary critique was summed up in a single German word: Produktionsweise. This can be translated as "the distinctive way of producing" or what is commonly called the capitalist mode of production. Marx believed this system of capitalism distinctly exists for the production and accumulation of private capital through private wealth. Private wealth accumulation allows for the purchase of land, buildings, natural resources, or machines, to produce and sell goods and services. This creates a wealth asymmetry between those who accumulate the wealth and capital and those laborers needed to produce the goods. This asymmetry yields profits that contribute to more private wealth accumulation which allows for the purchase of more capital. The rich get richer, while the poor get poorer.

But a closer reading on the moral philosophies of Adam Smith suggests Marx may have exaggerated the emphasis Smith had on the negative effects of industrial age economics. Reading the work of Adam Smith, and of his teacher and mentor Francis Hutcheson, reveals a good amount of the importance of sympathy for others who have suffered injustice. Smith writes, “All men, even the most stupid and unthinking, abhor fraud, perfidy, and injustice, and delight to see them punished.” He goes on to articulate the importance of justice for a society, and its economy, to be healthy and wealthy while recognizing few in power act to remedy injustices. He says,

“But few men have reflected upon the necessity of justice to the existence of society, how obvious soever that necessity may appear to be.”

Smith envisioned, as he wrote in Wealth of Nations, that “No society can surely be flourishing and happy of which by far the greater part of the numbers are poor and miserable.” A great deal of emphasis has been placed on two words that appear in a single instance in Smith’s popular book – “invisible hand”. But they first appeared in his earlier book The Theory of Moral Sentiments where he describes a selfish landowner’s moral decision to share a portion of his crop yield with the farmers who produced it. He writes,

“They are led by an invisible hand to make nearly the same distribution of the necessaries of life…”

Economics soon took a turn from Smith’s more prosaic philosophical economic interpretations. Instead of Smithonian ruminations on the moral justice of the state, liberty of free markets constrained by government, and the benevolent necessity of a cooperative societal collective, attention turned to the quantitative measuring of economic growth amidst a growing global British political economy. In 1862 W. S. Jevons published an essay titled "Brief Account of a General Mathematical Theory of Political Economy" and declare in an 1872 essay on principles of economics that its study "must be mathematical simply because it deals with quantities". Soon economics reduced complex human behavior, like the subjectivity of the value of a good or service, to a simple variable in an algebraic expression.

THE ONLY THING CERTAIN IS UNCERTAINTY

The atomization, classification, mechanization, and quantification of complex naturally occurring phenomena had long been popular with European Enlightenment thinkers. Isaac Newton believed in preformation – the idea that a Christian god had preformed every past, current, and future living being and packaged them up in miniature form into the male sperm. Every organ, limb, and joint were like components of a watch packed neatly in a microscopic vessel waiting to be released through the mystical act of intercourse.

He, Rene Descartes, and others believed everything in the universe could be explained mathematically. The quest for certainty came both from these influential thinkers, but also religious authority. This came at a time of social revolutions, debates, and contestations over human rights, freedoms of religion, and ‘we the people.’ Mechanists married the certainty of mathematics with the certainty of their Christian god to explain the world. If nature and society lacked the linear precession of clocks, compasses, and mathematical calculations, they feared such uncertainty would unravel societal order and unleash chaos.

This video shows Richard Feynman lecturing on the importance of solving complex problems though a ‘Babylonian’ approach. This is in contrast with pure mathematics, as derived by Descartes and Euclid, that yields universally consistent solutions within the context of an abstracted world.

This love affair with mathematical algebraic abstraction and certitude seduced economists of the last three centuries. But one prominent British economist in the 1930s questioned this classical approach, John Maynard Keynes. Keynes was no stranger to mathematics; he was awarded a scholarship to study it at Cambridge. But he believed it was being dogmatized, misused, and misconstrued to bolster the legitimacy of economics by wrapping it in perceived certainty, logic, and accuracy. In his 1936 groundbreaking book The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, he offers this criticism of traditional economics:

“our criticism of the accepted classical theory of economics has consisted not so much in finding logical flaws in its analysis as in pointing out that its tacit assumptions are seldom or never satisfied, with the result that it cannot solve the economic problems of the actual world.”

Instead he called for “at least a partial attempt to incorporate the fact of uncertainty into an economic theory.”

He must have been on to something. Every capitalistic government in the world suffering from the 1930s depression instituted his policies until the 1950s. After World War II dominant economic theory shifted to the United States and the work of Milton Friedman and away from the recently deceased Keynes. Friedman erased the progress Keynes had made by embracing uncertainty in his economic models and returned to classical economic theory that deceptively models certainty. These theories assume humans act rationally and possesses perfect information that inform predictable decisions. These ‘new’ or neo-classical economists reduced the complexity and uncertainty of life to satisfy their calculations.

Economics cannot be explained with simple algebraic formulas. Complex economies call for an understanding of complexity. Enter complexity economics. Complexity economics is the application of complexity science to economics. Instead of assuming reductionist states of equilibria not found in the real world, complexity economics treats economics as a complex system of interdependent interactions. Out of these nested relationships emerge spontaneous uncertain outcomes that then loop back into the system in unpredictable ways.

One of the pioneers in complexity economics, Brian Arthur, writes, “Complexity economics thus sees the economy as in motion, perpetually “computing” itself – perpetually construction itself anew.” This approach is reminiscent of John Maynard Keynes, but also of Alexander von Humboldt and other naturalists of the Enlightenment. It seems the history of the study and embrace of complex natural systems and spontaneous emergence of uncertain actions from an ‘invisible hand’ also perpetually constructs itself anew. Perhaps the looping nature of complexity in economics over time should be the central focus of what we now call ‘circular’ economy.

Still, the attraction of certainty never escapes us. Nature always seeks efficiencies, and we humans are part of nature. Perhaps this explains why many people are attracted to fake Christmas trees. These take the essence of a complex natural organism and reduce it to atomized parts that can be predictably assembled on a yearly cycle. A neo-classical Christmas tree. But as it happens, at least according to that 2009 LCA, like neo-classical economics, the fake tree has the bigger negative environmental footprint. Not by a lot, and certainly not compared to a daily driving habit, but it seems when it comes to getting a Christmas tree, we’re best to embrace the uncertainties and imperfections that come with finding that ‘perfect’ tree. Our family chooses to be like the naturalists and marvel at the complexity of the branches of a real tree and embrace its imperfections and uncertainties. Perhaps it’s time our economic models do the same.

Hello Interactors,

The social sciences sometimes unfairly get a bad wrap for being a ‘soft science’. But are they? In pursuit of a better understanding the role uncertainty plays in economic analysis, I stumbled across some research that ties John Maynard Keynes’s embrace of uncertainty with a resolute defense of the ‘soft sciences’ by one of the heroes of the ‘hard sciences.’ And you thought physics was hard.

As interactors, you’re special individuals self-selected to be a part of an evolutionary journey. You’re also members of an attentive community so I welcome your participation.

Please leave your comments below or email me directly.

Now let’s go…

CYBERSAIL

“The hard sciences are successful because they deal with the soft problems; the soft sciences are struggling because they deal with the hard problems.”

This quote is by the groundbreaking Austrian American polymath, Heinz von Foerster from his essays on information processing and cognition. He went on to state:

“If a system is too complex to be understood it is broken up into smaller pieces. If they, in turn, are still too complex, they are broken up into even smaller pieces, and so on, until the pieces are so small that at least one piece can be understood.”

This strategy, he’s observed, has proven successful in the “hard sciences” like mathematics, physics, and computer science but poses challenges to those in the “soft sciences” like economics, sociology, psychology, linguistics, anthropology, and others.

He continues,

“If [social scientists] reduce the complexity of the system of their interest, i.e., society, psyche, culture, language, etc., by breaking it up into smaller parts for further inspection they would soon no longer be able to claim that they are dealing with the original system of their choice.

This is so, because these scientists are dealing with essentially nonlinear systems whose salient features are represented by the interactions between whatever one may call their “parts” whose properties in isolation add little, if anything, to the understanding of the workings of these systems when each is taken as a whole.

Consequently, if he wishes to remain in the field of his choice, the scientist who works in the soft sciences is faced with a formidable problem: he cannot afford to lose sight of the full complexity of his system, on the other hand it becomes more and more urgent that his problems be solved.”

Von Foerster studied physics in Austria and Poland and moved to the United States in 1949. He started his career in 1951 as a professor of electrical engineering at the University of Illinois. In 1958 he received grant funding from various federal government agencies to start a Biological Computer Laboratory.

Von Foerster understood the cognitive process humans use to break down large complex problems into smaller discrete linear steps. With the advent of computers, they then typed those instructions into punch cards and fed them into the computer to process. A linear process of which humans and computers can both do. He and his lab then devised a way for a computer to do something humans cannot – conduct multiple calculations at the same time by breaking them into smaller and smaller pieces “until the pieces are so small that at least one piece can be understood.”  With that they invented the world’s first parallel processor.

While von Foerster helped to bring about a machine that could do what a human could not, they also discovered what a human can do that a machine cannot. Indeed, a parallel computer can break down and execute calculations across a network of instructions, but it can’t take in additional input from its environment and decide to adjust course depending on the nature of the results. It operates in a closed system with the information it has been given and with limited input.  

I like the metaphor of sailing to better understand this. When I’m at the tiller of a sailboat steering with a course in mind, I must continually monitor the environment (i.e. wind speed, direction, tides, currents, ripples, waves), the sails (angles, pressures, sail shape, obstructions), the crew (safety, comfort, skill, attitude, joy, fear, anxiety) and the course and speed of the boat (too fast, too slow, tack, jibe, steer). I am using all my senses which continually input information as conditions change. My brain is making calculations and judgements resulting in decisions that in turn impact the conditions. For example, a sudden turn and the sails will fail, the water under the boat will be redirected, air and water pressure gradients will shift, and a crew member may fall or go overboard. All these shifts in conditions in turn impact my subsequent calculations and decisions instant by instant. It’s a persistent feedback loop of information created by human interactions with the boat, the crew, and with nature.  

A computer cannot yet steer as a human would in such conditions. They lack the necessary level of sensory input from changing environmental conditions as well as judgement and control over the information these senses provide. The study of the information derived from these complex phenomena derives its name from the Greek word for “navigator”: κυβερνήτης (kubernḗtēs), or as it has come to be called – Cybernetics. How we got from ‘kuber’ to ‘cyber’ I’m not sure, but I have a hunch that is about to be revealed.

KEYNESIAN BRAIN CHAIN

One of the founders of Cybernetics in the 1940s, Norbert Weiner, defined it as “the entire field of control and communication theory, whether in the machine or in the animal.” Other founders said it is the study of “circular causal and feedback mechanisms in biological and social systems." Another member of the founding group, the influential cultural anthropologist Margaret Mead, said it’s "a form of cross-disciplinary thought which made it possible for members of many disciplines to communicate with each other easily in a language which all could understand."

Von Foerster’s seminars in Cybernetics grew to be very popular at the University of Illinois in the 1960s and 70s. But these early adopters were not the first to use this term to describe complex social information exchanges creating causal feedback loops. In 1834 the French mathematician, inventor of the telegraph, and namesake of the electrical current measurement Amp, André-Marie Ampère, used the term cybernétique to describe the “the art of governing or the science of government.” Perhaps that’s how we got from ‘kuber’ to ‘cyber’.

Either way, whether it’s political science, economics, or other social sciences of so-called “soft sciences” these early cross-discipline thinkers felt the urge to find ways to solve hard problems. Problems so complex they become impossible to deal with or track ­– they become intractable. One economics professor emeritus out of the University of Versailles Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines, Robert Delorme, encountered these intractable problems in his work. He has since sought ways to establish a framework to deal with such problems that draws on the work of von Foerster. But also, on someone we mentioned last week, the famous British economist John Maynard Keynes.

Delorme was studying institutional patterns in public spending between Great Britain and France over long time periods. This yielded a great deal of quantitative data, but also qualitative data including behavioral differences between how governments and markets interacted with each other and within each country. Delorme also studied traffic fatality data between the two countries and hit the same challenge. While there were mounds of quantitative data, the qualitative data was quite specific to the country, their driving cultures, the individual accident circumstances, and the driver’s individual behavior. In trying to break these complex problems down into smaller and smaller pieces, he hit the dilemma von Forester spoke of. The closer he got understanding the massive mound of data in front of him, the further from his initial research economic question he got.

To better model the uncertainty that culminated from behaviors and interactions in the system Delorme turned to the tools of complexity economics. He considered real-world simulation tools like complex adaptive systems (CAS), agent-based computational economics (ACE), agent-based models (ABM), and agent-based simulation (ABS). But he realized this tool-first approach reminded him of the orthodox, or ‘classical’ style of economic inquiry Keynes was critical of. While he recognized these tools were necessary and helpful, they were insufficient at explaining the complexity that arises out of the events in “the real world”.

Delorme quotes Keynes from his 1936 book, The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money where he recognizes Keynes’s own need to break complex problems into smaller and smaller pieces while still staying true to the actual problem. Keynes acknowledged, “the extreme complexity of the actual course of events…” He then reveals the need to break the problem down into “less intractable material upon which to work…” to offer understanding “to actual phenomena of the economic system (…) in which we live…”

According to Delorme, Keynes, his economic philosophy, approach, and writings have been criticized over the years for lacking any kind of formalization of the methodologies he used to arrive at his conclusions and theories. So, Delorme did the work to comb through his writing to uncover an array of consistent patterns and methodological approaches which he’s patched back together and formalized.

He found that Keynes, like a helmsman of a boat, adapted and adjusted his approach depending on the complexity of the subject matter provided by the economic environment. When faced with intractable problems, he applied a set of principles and priorities Delorme found useful in his own intractable problems. The priority, he found, was to take a ‘problem first’ approach by confronting the reality of the world rather than assuming the perfect conditions of a mythical rational world common in traditional economics.

Again, using sailing as a metaphor, imagine the compass showing you’re heading north toward your desired destination, but the wind is to your face and slowing you down. It’s time to decide and act in response to the environmental conditions. Disregard the tool for now, angle the boat east or west, fill the sails, and zig zag your way toward your northerly goal while intermittently returning to the tool, the compass.

What Delorme found next was Keynes’s embrace of uncertainty. Instead of finding comfort in atomizing and categorizing to better assess risk, Keynes found comfort in acknowledging the intricacies of the organic interdependence that comes with interactions within and among irrational people and uncertain systems and environments. He rejected the ‘either-or’ of dualism and embraced the ‘both-and’ open-endedness of uncertainty. In other words, when there is a sudden shift in wind direction, the helmsperson can’t either ram the tiller to one side or adjust the sails. They must both move the tiller and adjust sails.

REPLICATE TO INVESTIGATE

To better deal with complex phenomena, and to further form his framework for how to deal with them, Delorme also found inspiration in the work of one of my inspirations, Herb Simon.

What Delorme borrowed from Simon was a way “in which the subject must gather information of various kinds and process it in different ways in order to arrive at a reasonable course of action, a solution to the problem.” This process, as characterized by the cybernetic loop, takes an input by gathering information and assesses and decides on a reasonable course of action. This solution in turn causes a reaction in the system creating an output that is then sensed and returned into the loop as input. This notion of a looping system made of simple rules to generate variations of itself is reminiscent of the work by a third inspiration for Delorme, John von Neumann.

Von Neumann was a Hungarian American polymath who made significant contributions to mathematics, physics, economics, and computer science. He developed the mathematical models behind game theory, invented the merge-sort algorithm in computer science, and was the first known person to create self-replicating cellular automata. And for all you grid paper doodlers out there, he first did it first on grid paper with a pencil. Now these simple processes are done on the computer.

By assigning very simple ‘black and white’ rules to cells in a grid (for example, make a cell white or black based on whether neighboring cells are black or white) one can produce surprisingly complex animate and self-replicating behavior. One popular example is Gosper’s gliding gun. It features two simple cellular arrows that traverse back and forth left to right across the screen on a shared path. When they collide, they produce animated smaller and simpler cellular offspring, an automaton, that rotate as they animate themselves diagonally to the lower right corner of the page or screen.

Delorme noticed von Neumann used this self-replication phenomena to describe a fundamental property of complex systems. If the complexity of automata is under a certain threshold of complexity, the automaton it produces will be less complex or degenerative – as is the case with Gosper’s arrow. However, if the threshold of complexity is exceeded it can over produce. Or, in the words of von Neumann, “if properly arranged, can become explosive.”

What Delorme’s research suggests, I think, is that to address complex intractable economic problems one must devise a looping recursive system of inquiry that self-replicates output intended to affect the next decision by the researcher. This makes the researcher both an observer and a participant in the search for solutions. The trick is to maintain a certain threshold of complexity such that the output doesn’t, again, become overwhelming or explosive.

In other words, instead of pointing tools at a mound of data in attempts to describe a static snapshot of what is in the world, create a circular participatory system that recursively produces something that affects how one might adjust what it produces in near real time.

As Delorme writes, “Complexity is not inherent to reality but to our knowledge of reality, it is derivative rather than inherent.” He then quotes science philosopher Lee McIntyre, who offers, “complexity exists ‘not merely as a feature of the world, but as a feature of our attempts to understand the world.”

I’m not sure what this kind of system looks like practically speaking, but I think the software tool developed by the economist Steve Keen, Minsky, is a start. Keen created this dynamic simulation software to model approaches to macroeconomics after he predicted the 2008 financial crisis. He hopes to entice people away from the static, equilibrium-fixated style of economics taught and practiced today.

The amount of data available to dynamically assess economic outcomes involving complex human behavior, human-made systems, and the natural world continues to push thresholds of complexity. We are creators, observers, and interactors of information in our own self-perpetuating recursive constructions of reality. But as von Forester suggested, even as we break down complex problems into parts, we can’t lose sight of the whole.

That reminds me of a quote from another ‘von’ the linguist and philosopher Wilhelm von Humboldt – the younger brother of the famous naturalist Alexander von Humboldt. In 1788 he wrote,

"Nothing stands isolated in nature, for everything is combined, everything forms a whole, but with a thousand different and manifold sides. The researcher must first decompose and look at each part singly and for itself and then consider it as a part of a whole. But here, as often happens, he cannot stop. He has to combine them together again, re-create the whole as it earlier appeared before his eyes."

Hello Interactors,

Last week we explored the role naturalists brought to a more open, flexible, and pragmatic approach to the Enlightenment. Today we expand on how our dominant economic ideology remains beholden to dogmatic, sterile, and abstract mathematical models the naturalists were trying to shake. One of the more popular figures in popularizing and perpetuating this pernicious economic perspective was Britain’s Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher.

As interactors, you’re special individuals self-selected to be a part of an evolutionary journey. You’re also members of an attentive community so I welcome your participation.

Please leave your comments below or email me directly.

Now let’s go…

Thank you for reading Interplace. This post is public so feel free to share it.

THE TINA SCHEMA

As British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher was gaining traction with her hardline policies many of her conservative colleagues thought she was too harsh. In response she began calling them ‘wets’ which in Britain meant ‘inept, ineffectual, and effete’. She was famously proud of her resolute, often binary, moral convictions. In response to the economic disarray Britain was facing as she came to power, she said these words in a speech at a conservative women’s conference in 1980,

“There's no easy popularity in what we are proposing but it is fundamentally sound. Yet I believe people accept there's no real alternative…What's the alternative? To go on as we were before? All that leads to is higher spending. And that means more taxes, more borrowing, higher interest rates more inflation, more unemployment."

The phrase “there is no alternative” became a refrain for Thatcher. It was used so often it prompted one the ‘wets’, Norman St John-Stevas, to abbreviate it forming a retaliatory derogatory name for Thatcher – TINA. He, and other ‘wets’, took to calling her ‘Tina’. He later wrote in a book that Thatcher saw "everything in black and white [but] the universe I inhabit is made up of many shades of grey".

I suspect Thatcher was confident in her resoluteness because the neoclassical economists she relied on, both in the UK and the US, were themselves certain there was no alternative. Their confidence was, and still is, buoyed by the certainty that can come with the mathematics behind their economic models. But that certainty can be an illusion that can lead to delusion.

Education researcher, Don Ambrose, says it can start early in math education and over time this “dogmatic thinking can trap professionals, policymakers, and others into perceiving only the sterile certainty of the surface of mathematics while remaining oblivious to its messy, creative inner workings.”

He continues,

“While mathematics provides us with a considerable amount of analytic precision it still is at least somewhat susceptible to the vagaries of the human mind and open to impressive creativity.”  

He quotes the prominent economist Thomas Piketty who in his 2014 book, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, saying,

“For far too long economists have sought to define themselves in terms of their supposedly scientific methods. In fact, those methods rely on an immoderate use of mathematical models, which are frequently no more than an excuse for occupying the terrain and masking the vacuity of the content.”

He says it can create a ‘scientific illusion’ that ignores the messy realities that, again, Adam Smith viewed as essential to a healthy economy; a shared cultural understanding, a socially just labor market, and a trustworthy government.

But even some mathematicians agree mathematics can lead one astray. The mathematician William Byers, who researches dynamical systems and the philosophy of mathematics, writes,

“What we usually call mathematics—results, proofs, and structure—is the unambiguous face of the subject…[But] looking at mathematics as a human activity, as mind-dependent, forces one to confront the ambiguous dimension of math.”

These are the very ‘shades of grey’ the ‘wet’ set Tory’s unsuccessfully settled with Margaret ‘Tina’ Thatcher. And the man Thatcher liked to blame for the economic mess she inherited was someone who would have agreed with the uncertainty these ‘wets’ were pointing to – Britain’s most famous 20th century economist, John Maynard Keynes.

Keynes made a name for himself in the 1930s devising economic policies that proved to ease the effects of the depression that had wracked the world. His ideas were counter to neoclassical ideas, and those later championed by Thatcher. He believed, like Adam Smith, that markets should include some governmental intervention to minimize the adverse effects of recessions and depressions.

Every capitalistic government in the world had instituted his policies until the 1950s, soon after he passed away. From that point until now, the neoclassical ideology of America’s most famous 20th century economist, Milton Friedman, reigns supreme. A philosophy that promotes free-wheeling, free-trade, and free markets that are free of government restraint, and are backed by rigid and sterile mathematical and statistical models.

Keynes was no stranger to mathematics; he was awarded a scholarship to study it at Cambridge. But he did believe that it was being dogmatized, misused, and misconstrued to bolster the legitimacy of economics by wrapping it in perceived certainty, logic, and accuracy. So much so, it led people to believe there is no alternative.

In Keynes’s 1936 groundbreaking book The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, he asserts this as his criticism of neoclassical economics.

“our criticism of the accepted classical theory of economics has consisted not so much in finding logical flaws in its analysis as in pointing out that its tacit assumptions are seldom or never satisfied, with the result that it cannot solve the economic problems of the actual world.

THE NEWTONIAN BABYLONIAN

Keynes’s General Theory was to generalize existing neoclassical theories and methods. In other words, marry the ‘shades of grey’ of the real world with existing mathematical methods and analysis. He was particularly focused, as much economic work is, on being able to predict economic outcomes in the future. A future that is uncertain. And with that, Keynes called for “at least a partial attempt to incorporate the fact of uncertainty into an economic theory.”

He believed this required an approach that embraced the uncertainties of the real world as clues or observed evidence that could then be scrutinized with analysis, reason, and mathematics. One person he believed personified this approach was a man he idled, Isaac Newton. His thoughts were captured in a lecture he wrote to celebrate the life of Isaac Newton in 1946 but was unable to deliver. He died three months before the event.

He wrote,

“Newton was not the first of the age of reason. He was the last of the magicians, the last of the Babylonians and Sumerians…Why do I call him a magician? Because he looked on the whole universe and all that is in it as a riddle, as a secret which could be read by applying pure thought to certain evidence, certain mystic clues which God had laid about the world to allow a sort of philosopher's treasure hunt...”

Some scholars have latched onto Keynes use of the word ‘Babylonians’. This term is associated with an ongoing controversy in academia about two logical approaches to the social sciences. Finance, economics, and philosophy professor, Mark Stoh, characterizes it like this:

“There are two basic approaches. The first, the Cartesian-Euclidian approach, is ‘the familiar axiomatic one in which the fundamental principles of a science are taken as axioms, from which the rest are derived as theorems.’ Because it comes closest of all the social sciences to attaining this axiomatic ideal, economics has occasionally been considered to be the queen of the social sciences. The second approach is the Babylonian. According to it, there is no single logical chain from axioms to theorems; but there are several parallel, intertwined, and mutually reinforcing sets of chains, such that no particular axiom is logically basic.”

In this context, Keynes views on uncertainty fall more in line with the Babylonians. Further, Keynes characterizes Newton as using methods of inquiry that date back to the ancient times of the Babylonians. Because the mathematics and economics of Babylonian times were captured in stone and since translated, we know a great deal about how they solved mundane and complex problems. Many scholars believe they used pragmatic problem solving that embraced uncertainty and holistic approaches of various mathematical constructs.

Another famous great mind of the 20th century concurs, the renowned physicist Richard Feynman. In a 1965 lecture he talks about the distinction between what he called ‘Babylonian’ and ‘Greek’ approaches to mathematical problem solving. He asserts students learning math in these times were taught different techniques for calculating various mathematical problems. They were then given practical problems whereby they had to determine which techniques were to be linked in a chain to solve a particular problem.

Feynman describes it as a constellation of techniques that could be linked together in a variety of ways to arrive at an answer. For example, the equivalent of the Pythagorean theorem could be linked to calculating the volume of a cube. It was a holistic approach to pragmatic problem solving given the context of the situation at hand, even if the situation were to change.

What Descartes came along and did was reduce the common elements of these constellations to form a set of ordered axioms. Mathematics was then taught from the bottom up as ordered steps, each layer of the constellation building on itself to form theorems. Mathematical problem solving was then taught as ordered and deterministic with no regard for how one might leap from one technique to another should the conditions of the problem set change.

Feynman says,

“the method of starting from [the bottom] axioms is not efficient in obtaining the theorems…Working something out in geometry is not very efficient if you always have to start at the axioms, but if you had to remember a few things in [the constellation] of geometry you can always get somewhere else [in the constellation] which is much more efficient than if you do it the other way.”

Feynman believed solving problems in physics requires a Babylonian approach due to the changing nature of the natural physical world. This is in contrast with pure mathematics, as derived by Descartes and Euclid, that yields universally consistent solutions within the context of an abstracted world.

OPEN TO ALTERNATIVE SYSTEMS

In the context of economics, British economist Sheila Dow offers that in a constellation of economic mathematical tools “One chain of reasoning might rely on statistical analysis, while another might rely on historical research, for example.” Dow is a Post-Keynesian economist who expands on the work of Stoh and Feynman in her paper on the “Babylonian Mode of Thought”.

Dow expresses ‘Mode of thought’ as “the way in which arguments (or theories) are constructed and presented, how we attempt to convince others of the validity or truth of our arguments.” Her interpretation of Keynes reflection on Newton was that he “relied on intuition in order to arrive at explanations for natural phenomena, on the one hand, with the rational proofs he constructed after the fact, on the other.”

This was his ‘mode of thought’, she argues, that enabled him to make the discoveries he did. And like Feynman, she implores others to learn and apply this more ‘Babylonian’ approach to solving complex problems. That is, a pragmatic and wholistic approach through the practical application of an array of mathematical methods which are traversed over time as situations, contexts, and variables change.

Dow equates the Babylonian approach with an open system – a system of infinite unknown variables that change in relation and response to each other, and the environment in which they exist, over time. This is contrast to a closed system where all the variables, their interactions, and relationships are known and isolated in the environment in which they exist. Closed systems are divided into dual atomic parts, the internal, or endogenous, and the external, or exogenous.

Dow believes,

“Babylonian thought is neither dualistic nor atomistic. The categories used to account for social life in an evolving environment are not seen as readily falling into duals. Indeed vagueness of categories is seen to have the benefit of adaptability within a changing environment where institutions, understanding and behaviour undergo change. In a system of thought with a variety of incommensurate strands of argument, variables may be exogenous to one strand but endogenous to another.

Knowledge is in general held with uncertainty (by economic agents and by economists), so the analysis points to degrees of uncertainty. Further, some strands of argument may refer to individuals, and others to the group level, since causal forces may act in either direction. Indeed individuals are not seen as independent, and their behaviour may change as the environment changes.”

She continues,

“Similarly, Babylonian thought provides a rationale for pluralism. It justifies both methodological pluralism (methodologists analysing a range of methodologies) and pluralism of method (economists using a range of methods).”

Dow then warns that many who subscribe to conventional economic approaches, or Cartesian modes of thought, sometimes claim that ‘pluralism’ is just an excuse for sloppiness leading to an ‘anything goes’ approach and attitude. But she argues, as Feynman illustrates, that

“Babylonian mode of thought requires some criteria by which to choose segmentations of the subject matter for analysis, the chains of reasoning to pursue, and the methods employed to pursue them.”

In this regard, not only is there is a high degree of mastery of various methods required, but that their application is highly structured. This leads her to claim Babylonian modes of thought are not ‘pure pluralism’, but ‘structured pluralism.’ She adds, as did Feynman, this may require not only traversing within the domain of mathematics, economics, or in the case of Feynman, physics, but also into other domains of science and humanities.

Sorry ‘Tina’, in the pursuit of answers in complex, uncertain, and changing environments it seems alternatives are not only desirable, but necessary. Those alternatives, however, have yet to be pursued despite record income inequality. After Thatcher came John Major who, despite being responsible for a raft of immoral behavior known as ‘Tory sleaze’, was part of Britain’s longest running economic prosperity.

He was replaced in 1997 by the opposition Labour Party candidate Tony Blair. Three years into his term Thatcher was asked what she thought her greatest accomplishment was. She replied, “Tony Blair and New Labour" because he, like U.S. Democratic President Bill Clinton, adopted most of her policies. She said she "forced [her] opponents to change their minds."

The irony of the Iron Lady, and all those who cling to the belief there is no economic policy alternative, is that the illusion of certainty represented by neoclassical and Cartesian closed systems has created more social and environmental uncertainty than ever. We live in organic, ever changing open system in uncertain times, in an uncertain world. If ever there’s a time for an alternative, it seems it would be now. It’s time we change our ‘mode of thought’ and convince others that the pragmatic and wholistic Babylonian approach is a viable alternative. Let’s turn ‘TINA’ into ‘TAMA’ – There are many alternatives.  

Hello Interactors,

Today is part one of a two-part exploration. I was curious as to why conventional economics continues to rely so heavily on deterministic mathematical models that assume perfect conditions even though they know such inert situations don’t exist in nature. It may tie back to the Enlightenment and the popular beliefs of Newton and Descartes who merged Christian beliefs with mathematic certainty – despite viable alternative theories they helped squelch.  

As interactors, you’re special individuals self-selected to be a part of an evolutionary journey. You’re also members of an attentive community so I welcome your participation.

Please leave your comments below or email me directly.

Now let’s go…

THE SPERMISTS

Isaac Newton and René Descartes were spermists. They believed they entered this world through preformation. This theory states every future organism is wrapped up in a seed or sperm as a preformed miniature version of itself. This was the dominant belief among Europe’s most respected Enlightenment thinkers. They believed not only did a Christian god create all the plants and animals, including humans, but all the future ones too. Intercourse, they surmised, is a magical act that initiates the growth of microscopic animacules which then grow until they are fully formed. It’s easy to brush this off as a point in time lack of knowledge and excuse these brilliant minds. We might say, “They just didn’t know any better.” But it turns out there were other brilliant minds at the time who thought they were crazy.

But powerful people are not easily persuaded. They, along with the church, continued to push the idea that preformation is as elementary to evolution as mathematical axioms are to theorems. A mathematical certainty that one day seduced many scientists, and later economists, into similar deterministic expressions.

One of the early preformation influencers was the Dutch philosopher, mathematician, and theologian, Bernard Nieuwentyt (1654-1718). Three years before his death, he published a soon to be popular book, The Religious Philosopher: Or, The Right Use of Contemplating the Works of the Creator. In it he writes,

“This however is sure enough…that all living Creatures whatever proceed from a Stamin or Principle, in which the Limbs and Members of the Body are folded and wound as it were in a Ball of Thread; which by the Operation of adventitious Matter and Humours are filled up and unfolded, till the Structure of all the Parts have the Magnitude of a full grown Body.”

His book was translated into English in 1724 and its influence spread. In 1802, the English clergyman and philosopher, William Paley (1743-1805), expanded on the ‘Ball of Thread’ analogy with his infamous watchmaker analogy. Using examples of mechanistic functions of the human body like joints and muscles, he expanded the popular notion that this is the work of a supreme designer – their Christian god. He writes,

“Contemplating an animal body in its collective capacity, we cannot forget to notice, what a number of instruments are brought together, and often within how small a compass. It is a cluster of contrivances.”

But Paley wasn’t alone, nor was he the first. Both Descartes and Newton had already remarked as much. Newton once wrote, “like a watchmaker, God was forced to intervene in the universe and tinker with the mechanism from time to time to ensure that it continued operating in good working order."

The confidence of spermists was buoyed when spermatozoa was discovered by the Dutch microscopist Antoine van Leeuwenhoek in 1677. But the seed of the idea dates all the way back to Pythagoras. He believed male semen is fluid that collects and stores different elements from the body like the bone and brain. He said, “semen is a drop of the brain.” The woman provided a host and nourishment so the male semen could unfold inside her body.

Another Greek philosopher, Empedocles, refuted the Pythagorean claim 100 years later noting offspring often inherit characteristics of the mother. He proposed there was a blending of male and female root reproductive elements in plants and animals that has the potential to produce blended varieties as their offspring. Empedocles was on to something, but his theory was overshadowed by a more popular theory and powerful name, Aristotle.

THE OVISTS

Aristotle believed both men and women provided different forms of reproductive purified blood in the form of semen and menstrual fluids. Because semen appeared more pure than menstrual fluids, he surmised it must have the advantage. Therefore, the male provided the instructions, design, or blueprint for formation and the woman provided the material. The ‘blood’ metaphor is alive today despite our knowledge of genetics. J.K Rowling did her part in her Harry Potter series to perpetuate and popularize the blood metaphor with ‘pure-bloods’ and ‘half-bloods’ or the derogatory ‘mud-bloods’.

Aristotle’s ideas were brought to life in the 17th and 18th century by the spermists nemesis, the ovists. Ovists were rallying behind the discoveries of William Harvey (1578-1657) and Antonie van Leeuwenhoek (1632-1723) of female eggs in female bodies, the union of the sperm and egg, and the formation of an embryo which in turn unleashed the production of various parts of the body. Harvey called this cellular formation of individual parts in plants and animals epigenesis. An idea Aristotle also suggested.

But one Dutch spermist, Jan Swammerdam (1637-1680), used this to further the preformation theory, but with a twist. Evidence of the union of egg and sperm, he suggested, must mean the future organism is embedded inside the head of the sperm in miniature form waiting to become whole with the help of the egg. A century later, this prompted a Swiss scientist, Charles Bonnet (1720-1793), to offer a counter ovist preformation theory. He suggested a Christian god planted future generations not inside the sperm, but inside the egg – like nested eggs within eggs.

Meanwhile, a group of naturalist scientists opposed these Cartesian and Pythagorean, mechanistic preformation theories. The French naturalist, mathematician, and philosopher, Pierre Louise Maupertuis (1698-1759), further rejected theological explanations and believed both the male and female possess particles that come together to form unique characteristics in their offspring. He is credited with being the first to observe evolutionary hereditarian changes in organisms over time suggesting some characteristics are dominant while others are recessive.

The German physiologist Caspar Friedrich Wolff (1733-1794) expanded on this work and revived Harvey’s theory of epigenesis. By observing chick embryos, he discovered a supernatural action occurs once the sperm is implanted in the egg. This sparks what he called a vital action “vis essentialis” that culminates over the period of gestation creating a fully formed body. This is the origins of what we now call embryology.

Those in the mechanistic and theological Cartesian camp weren’t having it. They, like the church, rejected talk of indescribable, supernatural, and immaterial ‘vital actions.’ It was not only heretical, but suggested science was going backwards to embrace medieval miracles of the occult. Either way, if there were forces at work on matter, the preformation mechanists believed it too would have been preordained by a Christian god. The co-inventor of differential calculus, German polymath and theologian, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646-1716), reasoned like this,

“But if in truth an intelligible explanation is to be sought in the nature of the thing it will come from what is clearly apprehended in the thing…for the success of the whole system is due to divine preformation.”

THE NATURALISTS

Toward the middle of the 18th century the French naturalist and mathematician, Comte de Buffon (1707-1788), began publishing his work on natural history, Histoire Naturelle – an opus that amassed 36 volumes that continued to be amended even after his death. By looking at the history and evolution of the natural world, Buffon was the first to articulate patterns of ecological succession – the successive structural change of species over time. He rejected Christian Creationism and theories of the preordained mechanistic unfolding of nature and provided vivid and expertly rendered illustrations to the contrary.

He took elements of Aristotle’s blood theories, qualitative approaches to inquiry, and aspects of both spermists and ovists to merge them with empirical evidence and compelling writing to make convincing arguments for unexplainable actions vital to the creation and evolution of the natural world.

As the late professor of history and Director of Seventeenth and Eighteenth Century Studies at UCLA, Peter Hanns Reill, wrote, Buffon “emphasized the primacy of living over inanimate matter, asserted the existence of inner, active forces as central agents in nature, envisioned a world of new creation and leaps in nature, and proclaimed the ineffable quality of individuality and the manifold variety of nature.”

Through “comparison”, “resemblance”, “affinity”, and “analogical reasoning” he “revitalized and historicized nature without denying the existence of a comprehensible order.” This provided a path for science to embrace qualitative reasoning without foregoing the rigor, language, and quantitative aspects of mathematics embraced by mechanists like Newton and Descartes.

It wasn’t only ecological communities that could be explained this way. Society and politics could too. This admission further worried mechanists and theologians. They feared any acknowledgement that mysterious random events, be it at a particle or societal level, that could lead to a ‘vital action’ creating unforeseen mutations accuses the Christian god of not understanding his own creations. It would reject both ‘divine preformation’ and ‘God’s will’.

This came at a time of social revolutions, debates, and contestations over human rights, freedoms of religion, and ‘we the people.’ Mechanists married the certainty of mathematics with the certainty of their Christian god to explain the world. If nature and society lacked the linear precession of clocks, compasses, and mathematical calculations, they feared such uncertainty would unravel societal order and unleash chaos.

Naturalists continued to point to ‘internal’ vital forces that created perceptible ‘external’ microscopic and macroscopic evolutions that countered the dominant inert, deterministic, and mechanical philosophies and beliefs. But the seduction of certainty remains with us to this day, even when we know it not to be true.

The Scottish philosopher and historian, Adam Ferguson (1723-1816), suggested as much writing,

“Our notion of order in civil society is frequently false: it is taken from the analogy of subjects inanimate and dead; we consider commotion and action as contrary to its nature; we think it consistent only with obedience, secrecy, and the silent passing of affairs through the hands of a few.”

Ferguson goes on to use a brick wall as an analogy. He continues,

“The good order of stones in a wall, is their being properly fixed in places for which they are hewn; were they to stir the building must fall: but the order of men in society, is their being placed where they are properly qualified to act. The first is a fabric made of dead and inanimate parts, the second is made of living and active members. When we seek in society for the order of mere inaction and tranquility, we forget the nature of our subject, and find the order of slaves, not of free men.”  

Buffon’s new modes of inquiry transformed fields formally beholden to mechanistic dogma like medicine, physiology, and chemistry. But it seems economics remain seduced by the determinism of linear, mechanistic, mathematical approaches despite it being a branch of the social sciences. While it may have dropped religion, it has yet to fully embrace the “notion of order in civil society is frequently false.” It’s time conventional economics acknowledge there are mysterious ‘vital forces’ internal to nature and society resulting in external perturbations that propagate indeterminant permutations.  

Tune in next week as I explore what that might look like.

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Hello Interactors,

Last week’s post on Karl Marx introduced issues he had with the Scottish philosopher and so-called father of economics, Adam Smith. I found myself digging into Smith’s life and work before his contributions to economics. Which, as history shows, was barely recognized until 1942. His name is now more popular than ever.

As interactors, you’re special individuals self-selected to be a part of an evolutionary journey. You’re also members of an attentive community so I welcome your participation.

Please leave your comments below or email me directly.

Now let’s go…

MAKING SENSE OF THE SENSES

Visiting his grandfather in Strathenry, the four-year boy wandered to the banks of the River Leven. He was a weak boy, shy, and prone to talking to himself. He’d lost his father three months before he was born and was being raised by his mother, whom he adored, alone.

When the boy did not return to his grandfather’s home, he and his mother went looking. Surely in a panic assuming the worst, they soon encountered a man who had just witnessed something suspicious. He had come across a group of nomadic people heading toward a nearby town that included a woman struggling to hold onto a screaming child.

A search crew was dispatched immediately. And there, in the town of Leslie, nearly a mile from Strathenry, the woman was spotted with the boy. As the crew approached the woman, she dropped the screaming child who ran to his saviors. The crew then returned the boy to his mother. He never left her side again. He did, however, like keeping to himself until the day he died. And he never stopped talking to himself either. It’s hard to know if he was traumatized by that event, but it didn’t stop him from becoming one of Scotland’s most famous academics. Had that group of nomads managed to kidnap that young boy, the founding father of economics would not have been Adam Smith.

Smith was born in 1723, entered school in at age six, and began learning Latin as early as 1733, age ten. He was sent to one of the best secondary schools in Scotland, the Burgh School in Kirkcaldy. Kirkcaldy was a port town with a population of 1500 people. Though Smith was shy and kept to himself, he was nonetheless engaged and observant. He kept track of the town’s activities and was familiar with some of its local characters. The town was home to shippers and traders and thus full of tall tales from journey men and smugglers.

It also had multiple nail manufacturers that young Adam liked to visit. It was there and then he was first exposed to division of labor and how the value of labor was compensated. Nailers, he observed, were paid in nails which they would then exchange for other goods at local stores. Perhaps these observations, and his high marks in mathematics and classics, were the first seeds to grow as he entered the University of Glasgow in 1737 at the ripe age of 14.

Smith continued his studies in mathematics and Latin but added Greek and Moral Philosophy. This was the glimmering beginnings of the enlightenment and he himself was about to be enlightened. His math professor was Robert Simson, an eccentric man made famous through Europe as the “Restorer of Grecian Geometry”, as his tombstone reads. The Simson line in geometry is named after him and he also noted a curious relationship among Fibonacci numbers. As the values increase, the ratio of adjacent numbers approaches the golden ratio of 1.6180... But his most influential professor was Thomas Hutcheson, his Moral Philosophy instructor – a discipline Smith went on to become famous for himself.

But when Smith was in school, Hutcheson was the popular one in Britain. He was one of Britain’s premiere moralists and key figure in a long line of Scottish Enlightenment thinkers, including his professor, Thomas Locke. He was also the first professor in Glasgow to lecture in the native tongue of his students and not in Latin. This alone made him an easy target among conservative faculty, but it was what he was teaching that really rattled them.

Hutcheson believed, contrary to the established and prevailing belief, human action does not descend from the will of God, but from one’s own mind. And even then, we have little to no control over our own actions but are instead influenced by our complex interactions with people and place.

He believed we form images and beliefs in our mind by sensing the environment around us through our five physical senses. We then formulate ideas which lead to feelings either pleasure or pain. This, in turn, leads to the creation of other senses internal to our mind – though still interrelated and interdependent on our five external senses. He believed there are many mental senses generated, but three emerged as particularly notable – especially as we learn more of Adam Smith’s own philosophies.

The first is a public sense for the happiness of others and the pleasure it brings, but also the sadness that comes with observing misery in others. The second is the moral sense upon reflection of our own good or evil, and perceived good or evil in others, and the feelings of pleasure or pain that ensue. And the third is a sense of honor that comes from the admiration from others who observe the good in us for the positive actions we may have taken – the very actions of which are necessary for sensing the pleasure that comes when seeing others are happy.

Hutcheson observed these emotions are not willed. We cannot will ourselves into happiness, but we can will ourselves to take actions that create public conditions that enable feelings of pleasure to arise. These pleasurable feelings arise, as a moral sense, out of complex interactions among others, to instill a public sense of pleasure, which upon reflection of our own behavior instills pleasure in us as a sense of honor. Good behavior toward ourselves and toward others makes us and others feel good. We are all then rewarded with a sense of honor which in turn motivates more good behavior.

A SENTIMENTAL MOOD FROM A PRUDE DUDE

Hutcheson’s ideas shock the religious establishment who believed goodness can only come through getting in the good graces with God through worship. One 19th-century biographer noted Hutcheson was “bitterly attacked by the older generation outside the walls of the College as a ‘new light’ fraught with dangers to all accepted beliefs, and at the same time worshipped like an idol by the younger generation inside the walls, who were thankful for the light he brought them, and had no quarrel with it for being new.”

His views were also in opposition to another influential philosophical figure during these times, Thomas Hobbes, who believed our will to act was rooted not in altruism, but in selfishness and egoism. Though Hutcheson admitted there is virtue in tempered self-love, taken to an extreme could erode not only one’s moral sense, but also public sense and a reciprocal sense of honor. Clearly, Hobbesian beliefs made their way into colonial America and are present in cultural norms and beliefs today, especially in the neoliberal tradition that helped pull Smith, and the single occurrence of the words ‘invisible hand’, from obscurity.

But many of Hutcheson’s teachings also made their way to colonial America. His book, Inquiry into the Original of Our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue, was used as a textbook at Harvard in the 1730s. It included familiar U.S. declaration of independence constructs, like “unalienable rights are essential Limitations in all Governments” (his italics) and the public has a right to resist oppressive governments. The professor of Moral Philosophy at the College of Philadelphia, Francis Alison, was a student of Hutcheson and three signers of the U.S. Declaration of Independence were Alison’s students, Thomas McKean, George Read, and James Smith.

But Hutcheson’s most famous student became Adam Smith. And his fame and impact are attributed to the teachings and reading of Francis Hutcheson. Smith’s primary contribution to philosophy extended Hutcheson’s ideas of ‘senses’ in his book, Theory of Moral Sentiments, that was written in 1759, seventeen years before his more popular economic treatise, Wealth of Nations. Smith believed that when we see another suffer, it makes an ‘impression of our own senses’ by relating to a similar situation in which we’ve been in. He writes, “we enter as it were into his body, and become in some measure the same person”.

These feelings of sympathy are expanded on in later revisions of his theories to address injustice. If one witnesses an act of injustice, one feels sympathy with the victim but not with the perpetrator. This is grounds for punishment against the perpetrator. Smith writes, “All men, even the most stupid and unthinking, abhor fraud, perfidy, and injustice, and delight to see them punished.” He continues that as true as this may be, there’s a tendency not to attribute this to a necessary condition of a society. He adds, “But few men have reflected upon the necessity of justice to the existence of society, how obvious soever that necessity may appear to be.”

This sentiment was directed toward politicians (or statesmen) and industrialists (or projectors, people who build projects) in a document that predates Wealth of Nations but contains its central themes. Smith writes, “Man is generally considered by statesmen and projectors as the materials of a sort of political mechanics. Projectors disturb nature in the course of her operations on human affairs, and it requires no more than to leave her alone and give her fair play in the pursuit of her ends that she may establish her own designs…Little else is required to carry a state to the highest degrees of affluence from the lowest barbarism but peace, easy taxes, and a tolerable administration of justice; all the rest being brought about by the natural course of things.”

Smith no doubt was a free market and free trade advocate, but also preached modesty, temperance, and justice. And he routinely ran to the defense of those with lesser means or who were victims of injustice. For example, when wealthy consumers of foreign garments sought Smith’s support in abolishing a ban on imported yarn, he surprised many by supporting the embargo. And it wasn’t the flax farmers or domestic yarn corporations he was protecting, but the women living and spinning yarn in their homes scattered across the country.

And in the Wealth of Nations, he defends the right for poor people in cities to earn enough to by clothes and shoes fit enough to blend in with society. He writes, “But in the present times, through the greater part of Europe, a creditable day-labourer would be ashamed to appear in public without a linen shirt…in the same manner, has rendered leather shoes a necessity of life in England. The poorest creditable person of either sex would be ashamed to appear in public without them.”

Smith also suggested sumptuary laws, taxes on consumable high-end goods, to limit luxurious or immodest behavior. He writes, “The high price of such commodities does not necessarily diminish the ability of the inferior ranks of people to bring up families. Upon the sober and industrious poor, taxes upon such commodities act as sumptuary laws, and dispose them either to moderate, or to refrain altogether from the use of superfluities which they can no longer easily afford.”

For an economy and a society to function well, Smith believed, one must put themselves in the shoes of others and act in accordance to bring about the three internal senses Hutcheson spoke of: a public sense for the happiness of others, a moral sense to reflect on the good feelings that come with doing good things, and a sense of honor that comes when others admire you for your good intentions and actions.

WAS THE SENTIMENTALIST AN ENVIRONMENTALIST?

Smith’s insight into markets, especially in the dawning of the industrial age, was that technology helped to reduce the price of goods making them affordable to more and more people. This increased the flow of money to manufacturers to buy more capital goods, like machines and energy, thus reducing the need for, and time needed to, produce handcrafted goods. This created a win-win situation for the society at large so long as people cooperated and were sympathetic to each other’s needs through trust in each other, business, and the government.

This was not something Smith believed should be left to a free-wheeling, laissez-fare market economy free of interventions. Smith believed three conditions were necessary for an effective economy and with each he paired a moral value:

* State-Justice: “Commerce and manufacturers” he wrote, “can seldom flourish long in any state which does not enjoy a regular administration of justice…” This is achieved, he believed, through the administration of laws that inspire security through enforceable regulation and redistribution of tax derived revenues. For Smith, trust in government is a requisite for a healthy economy.

* Market-Liberty: “Trade opens a new market…” The “causes seem to be: the liberty of trade…notwithstanding some restraints…”, he said. The freedom to create, market, and compete on value or price, comes with prudence and protection from monopolies. He wrote, “It is thus that the single advantage which the monopoly procures to a single order of men is in many different ways hurtful to the general interest of the country.”

* Community-Benevolence: It is here Smith relies on his philosophy of ‘moral sentiments” and a shared commitment to each other across a community. To do so, he, albeit naively, admits, “many reputable rules and maxims for the conduct of human life, must have been laid down and approved of by common consent…” The Dutch economic pluralist, Irene van Severan, reminds us that social economists may refer to this as ‘group cohesiveness’ or ‘social cohesion’, institutional economists might call it ‘the management of common pool resources’, and some feminists economists might simply call it ‘caring’.

There is much debate on whether Smith would attribute the same care and moral sentiments to other animals and the natural environment. I suspect he would have. I would imagine over exploitation or seemingly extravagant indulgences to benefit a few, or even many, would have been met with questions of reciprocity, modesty, benevolence, and prudence. He would have walked in the shoes of those hurt by economic, environmental, or social exploits and demanded justice be served.

At the same time, Smith encouraged industry, consumerism, and growth, albeit restrained, yet all three are the engines of our environmental demise. Could it be Smith’s social cohesion is an unachievable ideal beyond groups of a certain size? Perhaps free trade among industrious people has its limits beyond a certain scale or application of technology. Then again, he may look at the innovation curves of renewable energy, signs of an invigorated green economy, and declare the liberty of market competition is again leading to a better future for all. It also wouldn’t be lost on him that it was the state funded subsidies that helped feed that momentum. At the same time, he likely would have been screaming for a carbon and luxury goods tax long ago.

I think there are lessons to be drawn from Smith, and his mentor Hutcheson, that could be used to frame a green, moral, or circular economy, just as the neoliberals from the 1940s to now drew from Smith for the economic systems we currently have.

I do wonder if that kidnapping incident as a four-year-old indeed scared him into a need to feel secure. He never married and lived with his mom, in the same house he grew up in, until the day she and he died. I can imagine he must have ‘walked in the shoes’ of those poor nomadic people as an adult and surely felt moral sentiments – maybe even empathy. He might have even imagined himself walking alongside them had he been captured. He may have, in his own words, “entered as it were into his body, and become in some measure the same person”.

Did that incident motivate him to pursue the path he did, to ensure his own fate, and to devise philosophies and theories that allowed for the least suffering of the most people? He envisioned, as he wrote in Wealth of Nations, that “No society can surely be flourishing and happy of which by far the greater part of the numbers are poor and miserable.” That vision may be naïve, and perhaps not be achievable, but the path toward it is a worthy moral sentiment.

Hello Interactors,

I stumbled across a book that picks ten influential economists and teases out elements from each that contribute to ideas circling the circular economy. It turns out bits and pieces of what many consider a ‘new’ idea have existed among notable economists, left and right, for centuries.

The first is a name known to most worldwide, even if they only get their history from Fox News. But had a gun been aimed more accurately, his name nor his global influence would have been a part of history at all.

As interactors, you’re special individuals self-selected to be a part of an evolutionary journey. You’re also members of an attentive community so I welcome your participation.

Please leave your comments below or email me directly.

Now let’s go…

THE DUEL AT SCHOOL

Class boundaries come into focus in college towns as diverse clusters of first-year students descend, mingle, and sort. Such was the case for one young man in Germany. It’s not that he was poor, but to the über he was. Having been born to Jewish parents, he was used to being bullied. Though he thought violence was an absurd remedy for injustice – after all, he went to college to study philosophy and belonged to a poetry club – but he also believed that sometimes one must stand their ground by whatever means.

And so there he stood, 18 years old, with his back to his adversary, about to engage in a duel. As he breathed in, I imagine he could feel the cold pull from the barrel of the pistol pointed to the sky inches from his chin. With each step his pulse must have quickened. He must have felt the gun handle twist in his sweaty palms as he gingerly rested his tremoring finger on the trigger. He knew at any second, he must turn quickly. He must not flinch. And he must not die.

In his final steps I imagine his world must have slowed down. And then, in a blur, he whirled around and fired at his challenger. The blast must have lit his face, punctuated by the sound of a whirring bullet. He felt the skin just above his eyebrow burn. I can see him lifting his shaking hand to his forehead expecting blood. But it was just an abrasion. The bullet had grazed his skull. That bullet was millimeters from ending Marxism before it even started. Had it landed, Karl Marx would have been dead at 18.

My sense is that when most people read the word Marxism, they think Communism. He’s best known for two massive publications, The Communist Manifesto, and Das Kapital – or often simplified and anglified to just Capital. But he eventually distanced himself from the direction Communism and even Marxism had taken. As we shall see, he was a professional journalist for most of his adult life and thus a staunch free press and free speech advocate – two freedoms communist authoritarianism eradicated.

The word, ‘Marxism’, today is often used by some to discredit progressive pro-social political and economic ideas given its connotations to communism. A holdover from American Cold War McCarthyism. It turns the disparaging came long before the 1940s and 50s. It was used the same way in France and other parts of Europe in the late 1800s. So much so that Marx’s collaborator on The Communist Manifesto, Fredrich Engels, once wrote,

“What is called ‘Marxism’ in France is certainly a very special article, to the point that Marx once said to Lafargue [Marx’s son-in-law]: "What is certain is that I am not a Marxist."

Marx’s economic work is less well-known and Das Kapital remains the most accurate and lucid critique of the negative effects of capitalism. Marx was first and foremost a philosopher and his arguments take aim at the moral and ethical implications of capitalistic systems. Which is why circular economic advocates often turn to Marx for their own philosophical underpinnings.

Coincidently, the man credited with capitalism, and whom Marx often took aim, Adam Smith, was also a philosopher. In fact, he mostly wrote about liberal philosophy and relatively little about economics. I wonder if today these two philosophers, who many see representing the left and the right of political economics, would be unsuspecting allies or dueling advisories?

Karl Marx’s first year at university in Bonn, Germany was like many freshmen. He partied a lot. But Bonn was also home to radical politics at the time. Students were heavily surveilled by the police due to semi-organized radical attempts by student organizations to overthrow the local government. It turns out the poetry club he had joined was not about poetry, it was a front for a resurgent radical political movement. Though, having already spent a night in jail for drunken disorderly behavior, Marx may have mostly been interested in the social side of the club.

Paralleling political turmoil was class conflict between the so-called ‘true Prussians and aristocrats’ and ‘plebeians’ like Marx. The near fatal event came about when an aristocrat challenged Marx to a duel. Marx indeed thought dueling was absurd, but evidently, he, like many men in those days, thought it a worthy way to ‘man up’. His dad certainly didn’t think so and accelerated the plan to transfer his son to the University of Berlin to study law.

HEGELIAN REBELLION

While in Berlin, Marx also continued to study philosophy and wrote both fiction and nonfiction on the side. One of his most influential professors was Eduard Gans. Gans had been brought to the university by none other than the influential German philosopher, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. Hegel had died just four years before Marx arrived in Berlin, and Marx, like many, was fascinated by his work.

After Hegel’s death, Hegelians (as his disciples were called) became divided between Right Hegelians and Left Hegelians. The right interpreted Christian elements in his philosophy seeking to associate his ideas and popularity with the Christian-led Prussian political establishment. The left embraced aspects of reason and freedom of thought they believed Christianity and the Prussian government limited. Gans’ lectures tended more toward the left and so did Marx who joined a radical group of Young Hegelians seeking revolution.

After graduating, Marx left for Cologne, Germany in 1842 to become a journalist for the Rhineland News. He expanded on Hegel’s ideas around the role of government in providing social benefits for all and not just the privileged class. He openly criticized right leaning European governments and his radical socialist views garnered the attention of government sensors. Marx said,

“Our newspaper has to be presented to the police to be sniffed at, and if the police nose smells anything un-Christian or un-Prussian, the newspaper is not allowed to appear."

He also became interested in political economics and became frustrated with other Young Hegelians who continued to focus the movement on religion.

His critical writing eventually got him kicked out of Germany, so he fled to Paris. There too his writing got him in trouble. The Prussian King warned the French interior minister of Marx’s intentions and was expelled from France. On to Belgium he went where he, again, was kicked out. Marx eventually took exile in London in 1850 where he familiarized himself with the writing of Europe’s leading economists, including Britain’s most famous, Adam Smith.

His research passion project brought in no money. Risking extreme poverty for him and his family, he took a job as European correspondent writing for the New-York Daily Tribune in 1850. After ten years, he quit when the paper refused to publicly denounce slavery at the start of the civil war. During that decade, he continued to research in the reading room of the British Museum amassing 800 pages of notes which became the source material for his first successful 1859 book, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy. At the time, he was also witnessing firsthand the deplorable conditions London factory laborers endured at the dawn of the industrial age and the destruction of nature with it.

Marx’s primary critique was summed up in a single German word: Produktionsweise which can be translated as "the distinctive way of producing" or what is commonly called the capitalist mode of production. Marx believed the system of capitalism distinctly exists for the production and accumulation of private capital through private wealth, hinging on two mutual dependent components:

* Wealth accumulation by private parties to build or buy capital, like land, buildings, natural resources, or machines, to produce and sell goods and services

* A wealth asymmetry between those who accumulate the wealth and capital (employers) and the those needed to produce the good or service (laborers) in a way that yields the profits needed to accumulate the wealth (i.e. cheap or free labor)

Capital accumulation existed in markets long before Karl Marx and Adam Smith, but the accumulation was limited, including by nature. For example, let’s say I start a garden next year growing zucchini. Zucchini grown in the Northwest United States can become overwhelmingly productive. I would likely yield more zucchini than my family could consume. I could decide to exchange the remaining zucchini for money at a local farmer’s market. In economic terms, I grew a commodity (C) and would be exchanging them for money (M) thereby turning C into M.

Let’s imagine while at the market I am drawn to another commodity that I’m not willing to make myself, honey. I can now use my money (M) to buy a commodity (C1) grown by someone else. The beekeeper could easily take the money I gave them (M1) and exchange it for a good they’re unwilling to grow or make themselves (C2). This chain of exchange could continue throughout the entire market.

This linear exchange of money through markets was common leading up to the industrial age. Money was the value exchanged but the generation of money only happened at the rate of natural production or extraction of natural commodities or by industrious human hands. Wealth accumulation could indeed occur by saving it or exchanging it for something that may rise in value faster than, say, zucchini, like property or gold.

THOSE DUTCH DO MUCH

With the dawn of the industrial age, Marx observed capitalists showed up to the market with large sums of accumulated wealth at the outset. Wealth often came through inheritance, but also rent of property (sometimes stolen, as occurred during colonization) or profits from an existing or past enterprise. This money (M) is then used to invest in the means necessary to produce, or trade, a good or service (C). The capitalist themselves need not want or need their good or service, they may not be interested in it at all. Their primary concern, according to Marx, is to covert their initial investment (M) into more money (M+) through profit made on the sale of the good. They then take their accumulated money (M+) and use it to invest in the production of, or trade with, another good or service (C+).

Due to the efficiencies gained through the advent, invention, and innovation of energy and machines the rate of production greatly increased in the industrial age. And with it profits. This inspired entrepreneurs to take risks into new ventures thereby diversifying the market while creating additional engines of wealth and capital accumulation. Herein lies the Marxist claim on the primary motivation of capitalism – turn capital into more capital through one or many forms of profiteering.

Again, this concept predates Marx or Smith. In the 1600s the Dutch created a market expressly for the exchange of money for a piece, (also known as a stock or share) in a company. It was another way to accumulate wealth for the purpose of building capital. The first to utilize this market in 1602 was the Dutch India Company leading Marx to comment, “Holland was the head capitalistic nation of the seventeenth century.”

Marx predicted the eventual outcome of unbridled wealth accumulation would be monopolistic behavior. Those who accumulate wealth also generate the power to buy out competitors leading to not only consolidation of wealth, but power. And not just economic power, political power too. We all know too well how wealth and power can sway election results and lobbying strength.

Those sucked into capitalism need not necessarily be greedy. It’s the nature of the pursuit of business in a capitalist system to compete on price. This was particularly apparent in what Marx observed. One way capitalists lowered the price of a good was to flood the market with it. The only way to do that is to increase production. But to earn necessary profits to accumulate necessary capital on a lower priced good meant lowering the amount of money spent on capital (i.e. real estate, raw goods, or machines) and/or labor (i.e. employee wages). This led to increasing wealth disparities and further strengthened the asymmetry Marx claimed was necessary in the capitalist mode of production. It’s not necessary to be greedy to win, but you can’t win without competing on price. And too often it’s the workers who pay the price. This was Marx’s biggest beef with capitalism.

Wealth disparities are now the greatest in history and the number of natural resources needed to create low-cost goods in the competitive global race to bottom barrel prices are nearing earthly limits. Meanwhile, as more people are pulled out of poverty and urban areas grow exponentially, more natural resources are demanded. Including for the necessary energy to make, move, and manage the mess we consumers create. We seem compelled to continually capitulate to creeping capitalism.

It leads many to wonder, do we need capitalism? Marx concludes in Das Kapital that capitalism cannot exist forever within earth’s natural resource limitations. But he may be surprised to find that it has lasted as long as it has. To reject capitalism, or assume, as Marx did, that capitalism is a natural evolution on a path toward some form of communal economically balanced society, does not necessitate rejecting markets. Nor does it necessarily imply going ‘back’ to pre-capitalist times, like 16th century Holland.

But it doesn’t mean we shouldn’t look to the Dutch. They may be onto something yet again. A Dutch company called Bundles has partnered with the German appliance manufacturer Miele to create an in-home laundry service. Instead of, or in addition to, Miele racing to making more and more washing machines, selling to more and more people, at lower and lower prices, they lease the washer and dryer to Bundles who then installs and maintains the appliances in homes for a monthly fee. The consumer pays for a quality machine serviced by a reputable agent, Bundles and Miele get to split the revenue, and Miele is incented to make high quality and long-lasting appliances to earn higher profits. They’ve since expanded this idea to coffee and espresso machines. It’s an attempt at a more circular economy by reducing consumption, energy, and resource extraction, all while utilizing existing markets in a form of capitalism. It’s a start.

But perhaps not enough of a change for Marx. Or maybe so. In 1872, eleven years before his death and twenty-two years before Miele was founded, he gave a speech in Amsterdam. He acknowledged, “there are countries -- such as America, England, and if I were more familiar with your institutions, I would perhaps also add Holland -- where the workers can attain their goal by peaceful means.” As in his youth, it appears he found violence to be an unworthy course of action for injustice. But also consistent with that eventful day in Bonn, 1836, as he was challenged to a duel, he also has his limits. His speech continued, “This being the case, we must also recognize the fact that in most countries on the Continent the lever of our revolution must be force; it is force to which we must some day appeal in order to erect the rule of labor.”

REFERENCES:

Karl Marx: Man and Fighter (RLE Marxism). Boris Nicolaievsky, Otto Maenchen-Helfen. 2015. Published originally in 1936.

Alternative Ideas from 10 (Almost) Forgotten Economists. Irene van Staveren. 2021.

Letter to E. Bernstein. Friedrich Engels. 1882. [“Ce qu’il y a de certain, c’est que moi je ne suis pas marxist” (Friedrich Engels, “Lettre à E.  Bernstein,” 2 novembre 1882. MIA: F. Engels - Letter to E. Bernstein (marxists.org).]

La Liberte speech. Karl Marx. The International Working Men's Association.1872.

Hello Interactors,

I took a break traveling to the Midwest and East Coast of the United States visiting family and friends the last few weeks, but am back now. Today I continue my inquiry into the ‘circular economy’ by exploring its history. While it is often portrayed as a recent phenomenon, the origins date back to 1945. And since then, it’s traversed a vast landscape of economic and political ideas and philosophies that are as seemingly polarizing as today’s politics and economies!

As interactors, you’re special individuals self-selected to be a part of an evolutionary journey. You’re also members of an attentive community so I welcome your participation.

Please leave your comments below or email me directly.

Now let’s go…

THE ECONOMY OF PERMANANCE

The guest room was void of furniture and the pungent stench of the squatting toilets punctured the hot humid air. Joseph’s appointment wasn’t until 2:00PM, so he waited outside along the cool banks of the Sabarmati. This significantly religious Indian river would have been free of garbage and toxins in 1929.

When it was time for his meeting, he climbed the riverbank. His steps were aided by a long walking stick. As he crested to flat ground he looked up and saw an old man under a tree spinning in circles. He stood there leaning on his stick watching the man twirl for what felt like five minutes or more. Suddenly he stopped and looked at Joseph with a toothless grin and said, “You must be Joseph.” It was then Joseph realized his 2:00 meeting was to be outside. For standing before him was the man he was to meet – Mahatma Gandhi. Gandhi sat on the ground, legs crossed, as his white robe draped over his knees. Joseph felt compelled to join him. As he sat, he felt the dirt skid under his pressed trousers as he loosened his starched white shirt and black tie. 

Joseph Kumarappa, better known as J. C. Kumarappa, was there at Gandhi’s request. Gandhi had read a paper he had written on the role public finance played in poverty-stricken India and wanted him to write a column in Gandhi’s weekly magazine called Young India. By the time of this meeting, Gandhi’s revolutionary movement left him fearful he’d be imprisoned at any moment. He wanted his magazine to continue carrying his message with Kumarappa as a contributing writer.

After years of publishing successful articles, Gandhi asked Kumarappa to turn his work into a small pamphlet for further dissemination. He agreed and asked Gandhi to write the forward. Soon there after, Gandhi was imprisoned. As was Kumarappa.

Gandhi wrote the forward on a train to Bombay in August of 1945. It began, “Dr. Kumarappa's on ‘The Economy of Permanence’ is a jail production.” He continued that it is through “Plain Living and High Thinking” that “we shall arrive at the economy of permanence in the place of that of the fleeting nature we see around us at present.”

J. C. Kumarappa was one of Gandhi’s closest collaborators and chief economist. Kumarappa observed,

“There are certain things found in Nature which apparently have no life and do not grow or increase, and so get exhausted or consumed by being used. The world possesses a certain stock or reservoir of such materials as coal, petroleum, ores or minerals like iron, copper, gold etc. These being available in fixed quantities, may be said to be 'transient' while the current of overflowing water in a river or the constantly growing timber of a forest may be considered 'permanent' as their stock is inexhaustible in the service of man when only the flow or increase is taken advantage of.”

He advocated for maintaining an economy of continuity and circularity with nature. Using the bee as a metaphor, he wrote,

“The bees etc. while gathering the nectar and pollen from these plants for their own good, fertilize the flowers and the grains, that are formed in consequence, again become the source of life of the next generation of plants.”

While Kumarappa was trained as an economist in the West at Columbia University, he was critical of its exploitive orthodoxy. He said, “The Western plans are material centred. That is to say, they want to exploit all resources.” He was encouraged to pursue his economic philosophies by his professor and progressive economist, Edwin Seligman. Kumarappa’s book, The Economy of Permanence forms the foundation for Gandhian Economics and is one of the first known precursors to what we now call Circular Economy.

SPACE COWBOYS OF THE COMMONS

The critique of over exploitive economies returned in 1966 when the economist and cofounder of Systems Theory, Kenneth Boulding, described it as a “cowboy economy”. He chose the image of a cowboy because,

“the cowboy [is] symbolic of the illimitable plains and also associated with reckless, exploitative, romantic, and violent behavior...” He offered that “systems may be open or closed in respect to a number of classes of inputs and outputs”

and that the ‘cowboy’ mentality assumes earth to be an open system filled with limitless natural resources as inputs for outputs – namely, products for consumption.

Instead, he offered another metaphor gaining in popularity in the late sixties – a “spaceman”. He said, “the ‘spaceman’ economy, in which the earth has become a single spaceship, [is] without unlimited reservoirs of anything, either for extraction or for pollution…therefore, man must find his place in a cyclical ecological system…” His ideas for such a circular economy were summarized in a short, but influential, paper titled, The Economics of the Coming Spaceship Earth.

Two years later, in 1968, ecologist Garrett Hardin wrote a paper for the publication Science that popularized a century old dilemma regarding the economic use of shared natural resources. It is called The Tragedy of the Commons. The tragedy, he theorized, is that any shared natural resource will become over exploited or polluted because people would act out of self-interest versus sharing and caring for the common good.

He wrote,

“Therein is the tragedy. Each man is locked into a system that compels him to increase his herd without limit – in a world that is limited. Ruin is the destination toward which all men rush, each pursuing his own best interest in a society that believes in the freedom of the commons.”

He called for “coercive laws or taxing devices that make it cheaper for the polluter to treat his pollutants than to discharge them untreated.” Hardin’s primary study was population growth as was the British economist William Forster Lloyd who first introduced the theory of the commons in 1833. Hardin wasn’t the only one concerned with population growth and its impact on nature.

The same year Hardin published The Tragedy of the Commons, 1968, a Stanford biologist and his wife, Paul and Anne Ehrlich, published a book on the effects of population growth called The Population Bomb. It warned of a worldwide famine and social upheaval due to human overpopulation on a planet of limited resources. They called for “legislation to stop the wasting of resources” asking governments to “move toward creating a vast waste recovery industry, an industry that might well make ‘trash’ obsolete. Reusable containers might be required by law for virtually all products”, they believed.  

More technological solutions began creeping into precursors to circular economy four years later in a 1972 report called The Limits of Growth. The lead author was Donella Meadows, an environmental scientist, professor, and writer who started as a research fellow under Jay Forrester at MIT. I mentioned Forrester back in May; he is the founder of the field of system dynamics – the study of nonlinear behavior of complex systems over time. The Limits of Growth was the culmination of a computer simulation using the World3 model developed by Forrester.

The researchers used “population, food production, industrialization, pollution, and consumption of nonrenewable natural resources" as five primary variables in computing the effects of exponential population and economic growth in a world of limited resources. It predicted that

"the most probable result will be a rather sudden and uncontrollable decline in both population and industrial capacity."

They surmised, like the Ehrlich’s, that “technological advance would be both necessary and welcome in the equilibrium state” including “new methods of waste collection to decrease pollution and make discarded material available for recycling.”

Throughout the 1970s came more calls for ‘ecological design’, ‘steady-state economics’, and studies of ‘deep ecology’ aimed at staving off a catastrophic ‘overshoot’. In 2020 a group of researchers compiled a literature review of publications from 1945 to 2020 and developed a typology of circular economy discourse that includes a timeline. This early work marked what they called the ‘Preamble Period’ of circular economy research stretching from 1945 to 1980. Much of the research leading up to the 80s focused on ‘techno-fixes’, like recycling and water treatment, to deal with increased waste.

DOUGHNUTS OF REFORM OR BUILD THE WALL?

The 1980s then marked the beginning of what they call the ‘Excitement Period’ which includes the first use of the conjoined words ‘circular’ and ‘economy’ by David Pearce and Kerry Turner in their 1989 book Economics of Natural Resources and the Environment. This period lasted through 2010 with research focused on ‘connecting input and output in strategies for eco-efficiency’. It included inquiries into ‘biomimicry’, ‘closed-loop supply chains’, and ‘industrial metabolism’.  

This period also saw the introduction of the ‘first holistic circularity frameworks.’ This includes the 1992 United Nations Rio Declaration on Environment and Development, research into complex systems to conduct ‘regenerative design’, and ideas around the fusing of ‘ecological integrity’ with ‘business acumen’ through ‘natural capitalism’. The literature review revealed these were all early forays into ‘reformist views on circularity’ that ‘integrated socio-economic approaches to resources, consumption, and waste.’

Those efforts continued from 2010 into the current period these researchers call the ‘validity challenge period’ which include ‘new holistic views on circularity.’ This includes one of my favorites from the British economist Kate Raworth in her 2017 book, Doughnut Economics. She describes a visual framework that envisions a doughnut shaped economy combining elements of planetary and societal boundaries to create a ‘safe and just space for humanity’. Other research uses color as a metaphor. The ‘blue economy’ seeks a regenerative economy that avoids debt cycles that lead to people to living in the ‘red’ through a more practicable approach than offered by the environmentalist’s ‘green’ economy.

The literature review also uncovered more radical ‘transformational views of circularity’ that call for ‘degrowth’, ‘eco-socialism’, and ‘voluntary simplicity’. The Pope’s 2015 ‘Laudato Si’ even gets a nod. Transformational views also included non-western visions from the ‘Global South’ like the Ecuadorian government’s 2008 constitution – the worlds first codified ‘Rights to Nature’. Zimbabwean educator Overson Shumba offers a call for Commons thinking, ecological intelligence and the ethical and moral framework of Ubuntu as “an imperative for sustainable development.” Also included is a 2019 collection of over 100 essays offering “radically different worldviews and practices from around the world that point to an ecologically wise and socially just world” and call for a ‘pluriverse’ – a society “where members of diverse ethnic, racial, religious, or social groups can maintain and develop their own traditional culture or special interest within the confines of a common civilization.”

The researchers who assembled this timeline of influential papers, books, and essays then constructed a two-by-two matrix of themes found in the work. On the horizontal axis are ‘approaches to social, economic, environmental, and political considerations’ that divide into two categories: ‘Holistic’ and ‘Segmented.’ On the vertical axis is ‘technological innovation and ecological collapse’ divided into the categories of ‘Skeptical’ and ‘Optimistic’.

This forms a quadrant with the upper left corner being ‘optimistic’ and ‘holistic’ framing a ‘reformist circular society’. This society assumes a ‘reformed form of capitalism is compatible with sustainability’ with the help of technology that decouples ‘ecology’ from ‘economy’. The goal would be ‘economic prosperity and human well-being within the biophysical boundaries of the earth’. The means would be ‘technological breakthroughs and new business models that improve ecological health, resource security, and material prosperity for all.’

The upper right quadrant is ‘optimistic’ and ‘segmented’ through a ‘technocentric circular economy’. This assumes capitalism is already compatible with sustainability and, like the ‘reformists’, relies on technology innovation to prevent ecological collapse. The goal is ‘sustainable human progress and prosperity without negative environmental externalities.’ This would require ‘economic innovations, new business models, and unprecedented breakthroughs in circular economy technologies.’

The lower left is made up of ‘skeptical’ and ‘holistic’ creating a ‘transformational circular society’. Unlike the last two quadrants, this assumes ‘capitalism is incompatible with sustainability and socio-technical innovation cannot bring absolute eco-economic decoupling to prevent ecological collapse.’ The goal would be ‘a world of conviviality and frugal abundance for all, while fairly distributing the biophysical resources of the earth.’ To get there would require ‘complete reconfiguration of the current socio-political system and a shift away from productivist and anthropocentric worldviews.” Humanity’s ecological footprint would need drastic reduction to ‘ensure that everyone can live meaningfully and in harmony with the earth.’

Lastly, the lower right consists of ‘skeptical’ and ‘segmented’ creating a ‘fortress circular economy’. This assumes ‘there is no alternative to capitalism and socio-technical innovation cannot bring absolute eco-economic decoupling to prevent ecological collapse.’ The goal would be to ‘maintain geostrategic resource security and earth system stability in a global condition where widespread resource scarcity and human overpopulation cannot provide for all.’ This would rely on ‘innovative technologies and business models combined with rationalized resource use, imposed frugality and strict migration and population controls.’

As I suggested in my last piece on challenges to corporate and economic environmental and social governance, and as these researchers have discovered, attempts at moving toward elements of a circular economy run the risk of also being met with a ‘validity challenge’. With this literature review and subsequent typologies of academic discourse over the last 77 years, these researchers hope to provide academics and practitioners with a framework to “better analyse current policies and practices on circularity and sustainability transitions in general.” They do warn, however, that “if corporate and government actors continue to use a Circular Economy framing that doesn't consider systemic socio-ecological implications, the term could easily become discredited as a refurbished form of greenwashing.”

It’s not hard to see how the holistic optimists and skeptics may perpetually be disappointed in progress toward reformation and transformation as the current U.S. fortress of economic authority is reinforced. Meanwhile, the segmented holistic and skeptical capitalistic technocrats will continue to pray to the Gods of innovation, casting environmentalists as hysterical scare mongers perennially ‘crying wolf’ on ecological collapse – even as worldwide social, political, environmental, and economic systems become increasingly erratic, unpredictable, and vulnerable.

I, for one, prefer to draw a square in the middle of their matrix labeled ‘pragmatic adaptive economy’. This would be home to those who accept the future is increasingly unpredictable, where all ideas of certainty should be viewed with skepticism, pessimistic there is some magic technology or top-down government action that will save us, and optimistic that individual humans at the fringes of society will continue to come together seeking solutions to guarantee their permanence.   

Joseph Kumarappa concluded his Economy of Permanance by warning that until society’s are based “on nonviolence and truth there can be no hope of any permanence in our economic, social or political life.” He said, “The present type of organization based on competition and centralized industries lands us periodically into terrific upheavals.” He believed, “These have to be avoided if nations are to progress steadily towards a set goal, which will bring peace amongst nations and prosperity to the citizen.”

Gandhi wrote the forward to this book just a few days after the United States drop an atomic bomb called ‘Little Boy’ on Hiroshima. Showing little remorse, the act was legitimized as a “necessary evil” and marked the beginning of U.S. worldwide military and economic domination. Some argue that the environmental destruction at the hands of the current economic system is also a ‘necessary evil.’ Evidently that is true, because the prospect of a globally agreed upon alternative in this highly segmented and polarized political and social environment seems bleak.

But surely prospects for a bright future were much worse when Kumarappa and Gandhi were summoning their own optimistic words as nuclear fallout from two atomic bombs circled the globe at the end of a second world war. While Kumarappa, a trained economist, indeed envisioned an economic model that sought ‘justice for the common man’ and a society that doesn’t have ‘the glamour of ill-gotten gains’, in the end it wasn’t some top-down governmental scheme on which he hinged success for an ‘economy of permanence’. His final words called for individual introspection. I'm with Kumarappa when he concludes, to “enable us to see the advent of the economy of permanence”, what today might be called a just, fair, and ecologically viable circular economy, “calls for a considerable amount of self-discipline and self-control.”