Money is just a transfer.  I give to you for something in return.  Sometimes money is a transfer of wealth as when a gift is given.  When money transfers to some in one group and not to others, we have what is known as wealth redistribution.  To put it in terms of who foots the bill, when one group pays for something that benefits another group that has not paid for it, we have the driver of all social policy, wealth redistribution.  Every facet of our world is embedded with it from the largest social institutions on down.  The ease of transfers has grown right along with this redistribution as the internet now allows one party to transfer to another without the parties having to be face to face.  Even more unique to transfer and the internet are Cash Mobs which is kind of like buying local and allows a selection of a local establishment where everyone rushes off to support it by buying up gobs of things on the day of so chosen mobdom.  With transfer so easy, perhaps that is why many of us just expect wealth redistribution to be the order of the day.  With the internet, a liberal take on this redistribution definition blurs somewhat similar to TV advertising.  When you surf the web, a website places a cookie on your computer.  That cookie then uses that information to tailor a banner ad specifically around the content or related content gleaned from the original website content.  In a sense, if that target ad triggers a purchase by you than your group of website visitors is subsidizing the other content that all of us view on the web.

My son recently received a few financial aid offers from the colleges he applied to.  Most of the schools started out by showing their Cost of Attendance at the beginning of the letter.  These days you get used to seeing fifty big ones staring back at you.  While you sit with a glazed look in your eye wondering whether this whole college thing is worth it, you continue to read on.  Well, you find out that this Cost of Attendance is what is commonly known as a sticker price, meaning you see grants, loans, awards, scholarships, and work study whittle away at the total cost.  Sometimes though there is not much whittling going on.  One of my son’s prospective schools had something that no other school had on its list of subtractions.  Next to the usual grant given by all the schools was another line.  It was an achievement award, otherwise known as a merit scholarship.  The translation of this line should have read: “we really do want you.”  It was this schools way of competing with the next school by nudging us into a decision offering us more aid money.  Many kids will even end up taking a school up on this merit offer even while that school is not their first college choice.  After all, over four years that little award can amount to fifty, sixty, seventy grand, and so on.  Why does the price of college keep going up so much each year?  Well, here is one of your answers.  For every kid that is offered one of these merit scholarships, the school counts on others to pay closer to the full tuition.  In other words, everyone else pays those awards as the gross cost keeps going up in order to compensate.  The reason gross cost goes up is so they can offer awards to some students while others pay closer to the full fee, in other words, wealth redistribution.

Congress, the president, and the lobbyists that they feed off of make wealth distribution part and parcel of the government’s role to tax and spend.  This obviously creates tax rules providing advantages to such things as homeowners, airlines, and corn subsidies for ethanol.  By using fiat money, meaning the government just issues the stuff and not the gold standard where there is actually something hard backing money, the government can print more money than it has.  This means that wealth redistribution can be redirected in many more and complex ways.  It means that current workers not only pay for retirees on social security but Chinese bond holders do too as government bonds keep getting issued and more debt accrues.  This becomes a source for inflation.  Then the Fed comes in and tries to manage inflation.  This is supposedly done for the economy as a whole but it still creates winners and losers.  For a theoretical example, for all those homeowners that are underwater on their mortgages, allowing high inflation would put their home values higher too while the mortgages remained where they were.  This would get these homeowners off the hook.  Of course, those who have assets while living on a fixed income would be happy too since the interest on their assets pays more, while consumers would be taking it on the chin as they pay more for goods and services.  By the Fed’s keeping interest rates low, the wealth distribution is favoring creditors over debtors.  The Fed’s whole job is basically wealth redistribution.  In the banking crises, the Federal government had to do their “too big to fail” dance to prop up some institutions and not others.  This was wealth redistribution on steroids and was supposedly done for the good of the economy as a whole.

Now that the recession has taken its toll on tax revenues, it has exposed just how much debt and borrowing governments have been doing all these years.  Both Europe as well as each U.S. taxpayer knows fully well that this level of borrowing is unsustainable.  This type of wealth redistribution pays the current generation and their retirees while doing so at the expense of our children.  The debate now rages over whether to make draconian austerity measures to pay down the debt versus still borrowing to stimulate growth.

In my last blog, The Big Buck Theory (April 12, 2012), we discussed that the financial universe expands as big firms naturally keep getting bigger through economies of scale and swallowing up smaller firms with pin factory accuracy.  On the other side, the universe contracts as the invisible hand keeps dragging us back to stability.  At the same time, financial evolution expands the universe as new technology and growth are the new financial engines that keep everything growing.

The problem with wealth redistribution is that money concentrates around power and power buys influence.  This type of “maldistribution” just feeds on itself until it consumes anything and everything with it.  What gets lost in this formula is not only fairness but that the engine of all things financial are the small entities, some that break off from larger ones, which then starts from scratch and drives innovation and development which leads to new jobs, work, and wealth.  In any form of wealth redistribution, we must maintain incentives and avoid a situation where the big just keep getting bigger but are not allowing these smaller entities to provide the conditions to grow, innovate, develop, and flourish.  Without cultivation of this type of development, economies stagnate as new jobs are not created.

When you are fighting for your share of the redistribution or can’t make any sense of fairness or sustainability out of healthcare costs, social security solvency, budgets, taxes, lobbying efforts, energy profits, wealth inequality, interest rates, and those who game the system, you are most likely in “talking to the hand” territory.  Besides the proverbial hand, you are in Invisible Hand territory as well.  Remember the Invisible Hand is supposed to work in a way that those pursuing their self-interest will end up helping society as a whole.  However, the evolution of finance that keeps bringing us bigger pin factories and Invisible Hand wealth redistribution is not an endless cash cow.  There is really only one sacred cow and that is development and innovation coming from the bottom up.  This is what we all should be promoting and defending and encouraging.  It is this side of things that gets left out of these social debates on wealth redistribution. For any society to thrive, you need a culture of risk takers.  If you squelch that part of financial evolution then there will be no wealth left to redistribute.

Let’s go back to the beginning…the very beginning.  All matter was gold until the great explosion sent gold pieces hurling into deep space.  When the stars and planets formed though they were not just made of gold and land but combined with labor and capital.  And so the Economic universe was created or at least a model of that universe was created which is what economists do, they create models.  Somehow though, it seemed as though the cosmos was expanding and contracting at the same time.  How could this be?  Was this just a matter of perception?  Was it just a case of glass half empty versus glass half full?

Why are some persons, some parents, some businesses, some governments, and some countries successful while others languish or flounder?  Let’s be clear and define success as efficient production and not get hung up by getting into things like who makes the most money and those who use force to get their way and so on.   It can be argued that there are those with money or power that have unfulfilling lives which could be considered a criteria of success.  The score evens out on things like this eventually anyhow.  Ideally, successful parents produce children that will make for caring individuals that make for better citizens, better workers, better parents, and hopefully a better planet.   Ideally, successful businesses produce products and services that will be cheaper, make life easier and safer, and also hopefully make for a better planet.  If we attend a high school reunion, you have probably played a guessing game beforehand at who would turn out to be successful.  There were sharp go-getters and so forth that you felt were destined for good things back in the day.  We are probably shocked though when we fast forward to today to find that while fortune has smiled on some of those early movers and shakers, most have seen their gains come in the form of pounds and the closest thing to money they will get to in the future is to having a safe dropped on them.  On the other hand, there were the nobody’s who became wildly successful and yet seemed to have nothing going for them back in school days.  Success seems like some stardust fell from our economic universe as there seems neither rhyme nor reason as to who makes it and who doesn’t and what traits make for success.

Your criteria in the guessing game as for why these persons would make it big might range from that they were the smartest, most motivated, most aggressive, most competitive, most talented, most creative, started out with good connections and had lots of money in the first place.  These are all traits that can give you a leg-up but obviously don’t guarantee success alone.  Not everyone who goes to a prestigious college ends up successful.  Those who are born to money can be clueless in how to use it.  Those who are creative may never get noticed.  Those who are competitive have to have something special to compete over, and so on.

Everyone makes a model of their economic universe that is built on their experience with the world along with what they were taught, their values, and the lessons they learned, both hard and easy.  That model may make the world into glass half empty or full but either way, we fit our decisions and choices into the model.  Our model may make us go to grad school, start a business, refuse to work for someone else, try and work our way up the corporate ladder, drop out, work for a non-profit, have a career where we help others, and so on.  Early on in computer technology, software was something that a company paid for by billing it out to those who would customize it for their business.  Bill Gates’ model was to charge a royalty by having someone pay for being able to include their software on a computer.  He changed the way the model worked.  Gates’ model included keeping the source code of this software proprietary to his company while the Linux model, an alternate operating system, is an open source model where everyone could share in improving it.  Even though Gates’ Windows operating system is almost a universal, nowadays it not only loses market share to Apple but even greater of a threat is the Internet.  Just like Microsoft replaced IBM as top dog, it seems inevitable that Google has or some other rival will eventually replace that Microsoft model.

Do you think the world will keep getting better or will we drive ourselves into the ground?  The media loves a doomsday scenario.  Whether it was Population explosion or then Nuclear Explosion, like money, the portrayal is that everything we have worked for can be taken away from us in the blink of an eye.  Now, we still have the nuclear threat but it’s from a rogue state or individual rather than the Cold War.  We have to add to it though the threats of pollution, ozone depletion, dying bees, and being struck by a meteor, etc.  While all of these should not be ignored, the question that comes to mind is can we fix the ones that we are in control of before they get us first by inventing new technologies to rescue us?

The reason the economic universe appears to be expanding and contracting goes back to the King of our Economic Universe, Adam Smith.  Most of us by now have heard of the metaphor of the Invisible Hand.  The idea is that by each person pursuing their own interests, they will actually unknowingly promote the interest of society as a whole which, in turn, brings all things like prices into equilibrium.  Even in situations of monopoly, government regulation, trade unions, or trade secrets where one company will have a significant price advantage, eventually this invisible hand will return prices to a natural state.  One firm tries to raise prices and another will sell at a lower cost.  Since the hand is invisible, it is perfectly suited for picking ones pocket.  Costs go up while returns go down which means the universe is contracting.

On the other “hand,” quite on the other hand, you have Smith’s idea of a pin factory.  If you are the first company to make a product, like pins, than you are the first to make money before anyone else.  After a bit, you start to buy machines to make more pins in less time and costs start to get lower.  Then you find ways to specialize in different types of pins and production becomes more efficient which can then allow you to lower prices making it even more difficult for new competition to take hold.  Now we have a case which is the polar opposite of the hand as we have costs going down while returns go up which means the universe is expanding.  [If you saw Annie Hall, this is why little Alvy won’t do his homework]

So what is your personal model of the world?  Is the universe expanding and things keep getting better or is it just inevitable that a black hole will suck us all up?  You may think this is all psychological or just some way of looking at the world positively or negatively but when it comes to economics, we need to fit a plan into a model of our making if you expect there to be a world for you, or possibly your offspring, to live in.  In a case of the hair of the dog that bit you, our decisions as to where the economy is headed affects and alters where the economy is headed.

There is an answer to the expanding-contracting dilemma.  It equivocates a little but there are certain contexts where each can be right.  If you want to be successful, there is also an answer as to what you will need to do in order to get there.  As you may have guessed, the two answers are tied together.  The answer is about how we use and process knowledge.  For certain companies, they have a certain know-how, a certain quality of worker, a sought after product or service, and/or a certain proprietary knowledge that gives them an advantage.  Unless you are a pinhead, we are speaking of the Pin Factory.  This will keep you on top but for how long?  If you are to stay on top you will have to adapt.  That is what company’s do all the time.  They change their products, their image, and spend money on research and development to gain new footholds.  Eventually, though, they will lose market share and eventually they will most likely be replaced at the top of the heap.  This means the invisible hand is at work.  What happens is that certain types of knowledge start becoming more widespread and universal.  At the same time, as the world changes and new technology comes along, such as the steam engine or internet, these new memes become the new paradigm.  This causes upheaval and new companies are born and old ones fail to adapt and die.  New technologies create new opportunities that didn’t exist before.  This is why there are a million future entrepreneurs today trying to develop the next mobile phone app like the Gold Rush of old.  Things keep changing and things keep improving as new ideas and inventions are developed.  With new knowledge, the universe keeps expanding, evolving, and progress flourishes.  In the long run, the Universe keeps expanding.  New pin factories come into existence.

So what can you do to be successful?  Those individuals, like companies, that thrive will be the ones at the forefront of knowledge and learning and then each must find a way to develop that knowledge.  The key is the difference between information and knowledge.  Information, like the internet, is just all those known bits of things that float around us.  It is someone or something that will take that disassembled information and then reassemble it in such a new way as to create knowledge.  It is a new way of looking at something in a new changing world.  We need to make a new model.  It is no secret that the more you learn; the better you will be, as an employee, a business owner, a person, or a parent.  Not only that, the best chance you have at finding knowledge is to put yourself in such a situation where new information and shared information is fertile and flowing.  Knowledge and growth are social and that is where the economic advantage of our universe lies.  Shared and collective knowledge, what the economists call nonrival, keep producing and building new knowledge which creates technological change which keeps our universe expanding.  If you are in a country, a school, a business, or an environment where seeds are being planted, then growth will occur.  If your soil has been drained of nutrients, you can expect a dessert on a dying planet as the likely consequence.

Exercise:  What is your model of the world and does the world fit that model or do you make your world fit the model?  How does your model affect your choices and decisions?  Is there a way to look at the information around you and create new knowledge with it?

For a good history of economic ideas and the invisible hand versus the pin factory see David Warsh’s Knowledge and the Wealth of Nations: A Story of Economic Discovery, W. W. Norton & Company 2007.

I have no evidence for my conspiracy theory that my children are out to get me.  There seems to be something dastardly in their eye on the oft chance that they look at me, which is rare these days.  What would cause them to avoid eye contact with their own flesh and blood?  I decided to go down to the basement to see if they had set up manacles welded to the wall where they would keep me when I become too feeble to cry out.  Then, I realized, we really don’t have a basement.

For months now, since they are older and about ready to strike out on their own, I noticed that I wax between two extremes in their eyes.  On one hand, I am parenta-non-grata meaning that I am treated like a chipped plate buried underneath the everyday plates that are used first.  The other side of the equation is that I am considered irrelevant.  I often hear the chant of “why would I say such a thing” whereas they think that, in the real world, anyone would know the deliberate inanity that I keep spewing out.  For my side, my objections are more practical.  I complain that the kids of today are multi-texters.  Anything can be done, they insist condescendingly, in conjunction with texting at the same time without any drop off in efficiency.  Of course one could text while stitching up a wound.  It is not illegal they note.

The best defense is an offense.   I decide to get this out in the open.  Helicopter parents, obese children, parents as friends to their children, BMW crashing high school kids, redshirting*, soccer moms, family values in the crapper;  these are all part of what ails us today.  It’s not the economy, oil prices, or suicide bombers but awful parenting and more awful kids that are killing us.  What this household needs, any household really needs, is to be run by the only thing that works anymore in this world.  This house is now going to be run like a business.  We need profits, competitiveness, creativity, productivity gains, and efficiency.  The solution to the problem is:  we need the free market.

The first response from both my daughter and son is the irrelevant track:  “Daddy, you’re too old to be having a mid-life crisis.”  Nothing could be more straightforward, I explain, than running this home like we would run a business, which would keep favoritism and corruption off the table.  “This will be better for both of you in the long-run and it will bring us closer together as a family.”  My son whines that ” this isn’t fair.”  “That’s right” I say, “it’s laissez-faire,” as I enjoy my witty come-back.  “Don’t you read about the free-market in school?”  In what seems to be ignorance or bad humor, my son questions that if markets were free, how would the grocery stores make any money?   Only a half-socialist society, he figures, would have soup kitchens and day-old bread stores that just give it away.  How can he be so smart and so stupid at the same time?  This is what happens when you allow a child to start watching The Simpsons three times a day starting at age eight.

Since irrelevance would be next on the agenda, I had to create a motivation for taking this seriously.  “You kids have had it too easy for too long.  You two have run up the deficit where I don’t see how we’ll ever get back into the black.  If you want to continue to go to college or grad school, you have to be worth the investment.  I want a detailed business plan for how you plan on using my capital investment in you two loss leaders.  The first order of business is that we’re going to military time.  We will reconvene here at 0-800 for each of you to present your plan; otherwise I am not going to continue putting good money after bad. You may think you have been living here on a cruise ship but if I don’t see that plan, this will be your Titanic.”

I am really not that tough but drastic situations call for drastic actions.  I may live to regret this or I may not live at all if my conspiracy theory turns into actual deed.  I hope the ambulance will get here in time when they try to murder me while I’m watching CSI on the couch.  If I hear it faintly in the distance, I am sure I will be able to hold on until the EMT’s get here.  I always imagine an ambulance to sound like those old European war movies.  Wouldn’t it be weird if that was the last thing I heard on this Earth?  Oh, if I survive though, how these kids will be mine after that.  Just one look at me and they will know to wait on me hand and foot for the rest of my days.  If the guilt doesn’t get them, the threat of incarceration will.  Yet, if they do succeed, I hope these kids realize how much regret they’ll feel for doing me in.  I am still haunted to this day about the time I almost took out my friend’s eye with a Frisbee.  That was just because he wasn’t’ looking and I was fooling around (my Jewish mother called it Komandaving) but this is premeditation.  It’s unforgiveable and that’s not just because Freud says so.  Like suicide, there has to be a special place in Purgatory for those who kill their father.

The next day, I was soon to realize that I had awoken a sleeping giant baby.  It was game on.  My daughter came first.  She fired an opening salvo as if to say that she was giving me one last chance to back off otherwise I would be out of my league.  This was chess.  She could see many moves ahead and I was not at my best with the “she thinks that I think that we think” stuff.  “Before you get up all ‘The Donald’ on us Dad, is this like your last scheme where we were going to run the house on vegetable turds?”  Well, laugh all she wanted to.  Waste-to-Energy is a legitimate and growing field.  They probably laughed at Friar What’s-His-Name and now half of the West Coast is fermenting wines.

Just then, in walks a young man dressed in a perfectly fitted expensive suit with each hair on his head in perfect order.  “Who the hell are you?” I demanded.  The Suit Boy confidently stared me in the eye and told me that he represented my son and his interests, whatever that meant.  “I wondered if I could take you to lunch and we could discuss this so that everyone could come to an understanding of what might work in our situation.”  I was at a loss for words and stammered out “Our situation?… He’s hired a lobbyist?”  “Well, that is not the term I prefer but you said you wanted this to work as the business world does, and this is exactly how it is done.” It was obvious that Suit Boy was trying to act elegant beyond-his-years.  I had nothing.  I needed to reload.  “I will get to you in a minute,” I sniped and turned to my daughter and asked what she had come up with?  She handed me some tacky computer replicated stock certificate where she had superimposed her face over an existing company logo.  It seems she was now a corporation.  No doubt she thought this would shield her from any liability.  I asked wryly what her company did but she only answered the question indirectly.  “They’re common stock shares, Daddy.  You said you want to know that your investment in me will pay off.  Well, I took that same concept and I have sold shares in myself.  It’s a great opportunity to buy in now, while prices are low.  Someday, when I have found my calling, these shares could be worth a pretty penny.  All of my friends loved the idea.”  I wouldn’t let her get me off focus.  “This is not what a business plan looks like.  Where is the product, the marketing, the distribution methods?  You’ve put the cart before the horse; you can’t just issue stock first and then create value later on. “She rolled her eyes and peevishly said “you either want to buy some shares or not, Dad.  It is your right to say ‘no’ although what would it show my friends if I can’t get support from my own Father.”

These evasions and diversions were designed to throw the whole concept back in my face.  I can see through this ruse, like when you open a pot store, you can claim you care about healthcare but we know that you just want to get high.  Meanwhile, Suit Boy was becoming impatient.  “Your son wanted me to pass along this message.  Your son says that the bane to a free market is too many rules and regulations.  He feels that you need to stop trying to set limits on his driving and leisure time.  He says it makes him more creative and a more valuable commodity when he has had time to unwind.”  Here it was.  He was using the problem in order to leverage an advantage; using the free market to get his way.  Playing the libertarian card though, that was just plain dirty.  “You tell my son that his whole life has been in ‘unwind.’  When does he get to wind, anyway?”  Never mind.  “Don’t tell him that, tell him I want him here now or else…”

A few minutes later, my son arrived with a phony look on his face of patience and understanding.   He waved for Suit Boy to leave the room.  “All these years you’ve run our house like a Plutocracy, father, and I think it is a little venal to ask for a kickback now, if that is what this is all about?”  Who talks like this and has he been texting this whole time?  “I know that you say one thing but underneath you mean another,” he continued.  “Now that you are getting older, you are worried that you will be ignored and just tossed out.  But, you know, Death is inevitable but it doesn’t have to be a self-fulfilling prophecy.“ Again, I don’t know what that means but I won’t be spoken to like a college essay.

“How about if I take you to the Clippers game and we can talk about anything you want,” my son reasoned.  I shot back that “First of all, they are my season tickets so who is taking whom here?  Next, you better believe we will talk about what I want, you are not getting out of this one.”  I had planned to take the kids to this game for quite some time so who was he kidding?  I remember when I was the Lakers of my household since I was the only game in town.  Now, with my kids being the hard charging Clippers of this domestic hardwood tale, I have to cling to whatever it is that I have left.

“Sorry, Daddy,” my daughter chimed in.  “I can’t go to the game.  You wanted us to think business, didn’t you?  With The Clippers in and out of first place, that ticket is worth four times what you paid for it and since you want me to make money now, I decided to sell it to some Ethiopian boy name Haroosh or Harim or some such.  Just be aware though, he wants to learn about the game of basketball so he may be asking you a question or two.  Besides, I am having a shareholders meeting tonight which means that I would have had to pass on the game anyhow.  No pun intended.  As a matter of fact, first I have to interview the cute boy who helped me come up with the stock certificate about being on my board of directors.  Buh-bye.”

I had to lay down the law.  “Hold on.  You two are either assets or liabilities.  Do you want to be plusses or minuses, huh?”  “Son of Sum” my son proudly labeled himself.  Again, I couldn’t tell if that was ignorance or bad humor.  “You know you will always be my one and only father,” beguiled my daughter “and I will never allow your shares in me to become diluted but some day you will have to share me with the rest of the world.”  Even though it was pure manipulation, I love when she speaks that way.

Here it was, in a nutshell.  That was my original point, I was wondering how they would make it on their own in the real world and they had turned it into my being able to make it without them.  How do they do it, I wondered?   Free markets, relaxed regulations, libertarianism…they were using conservative principles to undermine my authority.  It’s one thing to want me dead but I draw the line when you want my money.  This had to stop.

So I outsourced my parenting to a firm in Plano Texas that also offered golf lessons with the time freed up by my not doing my fatherly duties.  Unbeknownst to me, my kids had decided to privatize their role as offspring presumably to free them up to send out resumes in search of more relevant parents.  They went with a firm out of North Carolina called The Surro-gate Break-In which is so hush-hush, hence the Watergate reference, and where the parents are so uninvolved that they are not even aware they have been replaced.

In the end, it turned out that the surrogate parents were only good at taking bribes, or baksheesh as they liked to call it, and were even more incompetent than I was at being Paternal CEO.  As for my kids, because blood is thicker than bottled water, I decided to give up the outsourcing idea since my daughter subsequently has found a good job.  Her stock price has been rising ever since.  I am not only proud of her but I am especially proud of buying those thousand shares when they were dirt cheap.   As for my son, at first I thought I was going to have to let him go but then he discovered that Haroosh, if that is his real name, was over seven feet tall.  My son suggested that we adopt the handsome Ethiopian and teach him basketball for real.  He further suggested that he would stay on as Haroosh’s sports agent, which my son turns out to be really good at.  Who knew?

Note:  Suit Boy moved to Washington and now works on K Street where he earns over a million a year.  It was too late to adopt him.

* delaying entrance into Kindergarten in order to gain advantage by allowing the child to grow mentally, physically, and being more emotionally mature.

Happy Anniversary, Honey.

On June 7, 2011, I posted a blog about alternative currency movements that are springing up.  The Boodleworld site also has a resources section that covers alternatives to money.  It seems that the financial meltdown has spurned a number of new innovative forms of money.  The problem with barter systems, which is why the fungible nature of money is so important, is that you must find someone who has two things that are mutually attractive to each barterer.   The wheat bread maker and the sandwich shop that caters to those with wheat allergies is a complete non-starter, pun intended.  The dairy farmer and the lactose-intolerant hay producer will not be entering into a serious negotiation if the method of trading is an exchange of products only.

Develop a local currency, however, and the hay producer can give his bucks to the seed producer who can then go back to the dairy farmer.  In order to support local institutions, local businesses may offer local bucks that support each other in the same fashion that a punch card works for the free cup of coffee or bagel on the last punch.  The drawback though is that these types of currencies require separate paper from the traditional greenback.  In each of these scenarios, the local community is given a shot in the arm.

With technology and the internet, however, comes new ways to keep tally.  Outside of San Francisco, in Bernal, California, a debit card was designed using a local credit union that tallies up usage at local establishments.  The credits earned for purchases can then be applied to future local member purchases or donated to local non-profits.

In a more mutual-credit system than barter-like system, Time Bank members use the exchange of services to tally up time given and received.  You may offer up gardening expertise in a swap with one Time Bank member and spend that banked money for website design or dog walking from another member.  One hour given will earn one time dollar which can be redeemed back for one hour.

This is from a news report back in 2009:  You Tube ABC Report on Time Banks.  These organizations again are local and each promotes the following Boodleworld-like values:

• Each person is an asset that has something to contribute
• Reciprocity greases the wheels
• Social Networks provide the power
• Everyone is to be offered Respect
• Work is valued as much for its positive effects toward making a better world in similar ways as contributing to strong families and a healthy planet do as well.

Time Banks are not limited to the United States and have organizations in dozens of countries and continents.  This is a link for the U.S. non-profit Time Bank organization.  Here are some local Los Angeles Time Bank examples:  Echo Park, Arroyo (Pasadena/Altadena), and Our Time Bank (Culver/Palms).

Most expectations are that money, like politics, eventually descends into corruption.  Money, like most things though, is what you make of it.  Here is an example of the nourishing and vibrant side of money.  What ends up happening in most of these connections is the unexpected consequences that come from meetings awash in mutuality.  We are not just paying something forward but earning it that way as well.

If you want to find out more about sharing in our lives, check out Shareable.net.  If you are interested in starting a Time Bank in your area where there is none currently, go the the California Federation of Time Banks Website and learn how to set one up yourself.  In fact, since there is nothing of the sorts in my immediate area, I will try and set one up and see what happens.  Look for future blogs about my experience around this.  If you read this complete blog, you have one hours credit in my book.

Note:  A special thank you to Janine Christiano, the founder of the Arroyo Time Bank, for some of the links suggested here and to Alyssa Kahn for the suggestion on doing a blog on Time Banks.

In the movie “The Artist,” George Valentin gets caught up with the advent of movie sound and left behind as an actor.  Like the typewriter repair person, he is rendered useless by technological change.  In a tribute to the old Hollywood silent days it is against all odds that a movie like this would be made since the new Hollywood is mainly sequels and over-the-top action with a sprinkle of a few indie films that are made without the use of studios or the off-brand version of the bigger studio.  Many movies never get made or if they do then they never get seen.  Like the technological change that make a rare few things go viral and everything else collect virtual dust, there is a lot of pressure for movies to make it big since there is so much money needed to get it made.  Similar to politics, in this type of structure it is tough for the cream to rise to the top especially when the milk is non-fat in the first place.

While movies may be seen as a single vision of an auteur they are really collaborative exercises.  The Artist director Michel Hazanavicius had to have help from Harvey Weinstein who, I’m sure, had to spend a lot of social capital as well in order to get the movie made.  This is not to mention who comes up with story ideas, actors that push to be on board or help get the movie made, a slew of producers and executive producers, and all the crew that is behind whether it gets made or not.

When a movie or a person is successful, we see it though as an individual working against all odds to break through.  It is one of the great American narratives of the myth of the “rugged individual.”  As for money, capitalism has this rugged individual in spades as we conjure up Carnegie and Rockefeller and now look to Gates and Buffett.  Another narrative, in the late 19^th century, the world even went so far as to go by the theory of Social Darwinism where the inferior were replaced by the competition of the fittest business, politician, and other social forces.

The narratives of most any country are balanced off by liberty, equality, and fraternity.  We can think of these as the “I,” “We,” and “It” of how things are portrayed.  Even in dictatorships there will usually be strong fraternal groups, religions, and guilds that ban together.   The U.S. is heavily into the “I” side of the trio.  “We the People” is the de jure ideal while “I the People” is the de facto practice.  Many Asian cultures identify with putting group ahead of personal interest although this seems to be moving toward the “I” a little more each day.

While American culture is left to a Hollywood blend of the “I” worlds of video, celebrity, and youth and beauty there still coexists strong individual narratives left from bygone eras.  One of the strongest myths that still affect our view of money is the Western Frontiersmen.  He is a self-made, no bullshit hero who sets out for a new world before anyone else had the guts to do it.  This is do-it-yourself “my way or the highway” rhetoric.  In an “I” world, everyone is left to play the “blame it on the other guy” game. To be fair, we all need the entrepreneur who will put together untested risks and square peg industriousness.  The problem though is with narrative itself.  With storytelling comes a way of seeing the world.  Everyone on the narrative Kool-Aid though seems to live in an echo chamber where they are only able to see the world their way.  Isn’t Fox News or MSNBC just like watching the propaganda of an authoritarian or totalitarian regime? An entrepreneur is essential but alchemy is not science.  Narratives keep us from the types of discoveries that we need.  Narratives are about emotions and spin and keep us from deeper issues, principles, values, and morals.  Narratives are about image.  The Western myth is about not being weak.  You don’t nurture a child, you discipline them.  It is anti-social.  The world is good against evil, natural versus unnatural, and practical or impractical.  Yet money as well as politics is social.

Barack Obama seems to want to make the coming election about fairness while, of course, his opponents want it to be an economic referendum.  I guess he has been reading my blog and has finally come about to the importance of fairness.  Perhaps the election will be a choice between the “I’ and “We” in the successful entrepreneur Mitt Romney against the former political organizer Obama.  Whatever the choice, it is now ingrained that politics is theater and we elect a George Valentin or now Clint Eastwood type with their story and personality dragged behind more than what lies beneath.  Americans are strongly pulled toward not having government get in the way of the individual but they are also pulled at the same time to fairness.  Technological change creates new winners and losers as well as tax subsidies, social strata, mass decision making, and being in the right place at the right time.  American’s realize that a government playing favorites to the few is not about equality of opportunity though.  Success is just as much about the moves that others are making than it is about the decisions one makes alone.  Interestingly, there are very few narratives about fairness of the commons and the greater good that resonate over history.  As is our custom, we even tend to think of individuals when it comes to the greater good such as Gandhi or Dr. King.  The only narratives that gained interest in the U.S. in those regards were the Great Depression’s New Deal and Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society.  The Great Society’s lofty ideals though were plowed asunder by the Vietnam War and arguments over the role of the Welfare State.   Today, the label “liberal” is like Lord Voldemort meaning “He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named.”  More to the point, the question asked by voters of a presidential incumbent “am I better off than four years ago” needs to be rephrased as “are we better off than four years ago.”

Perhaps the technological change that George Valentin succumbed to was about his pride to resist change when things do not progress.  Perhaps, though, he saw that change in this case was built more on image than substance.  In the silent movie, you could actively read between the lines and imagine what the characters were saying or thinking.  You had those expressive faces to unleash fanciful scenarios for what lied underneath.  Sound would just passively steer and direct you.  Perhaps each new technological change removes us more and more from being artists and exploring with depth the intricacies and nuances that are being drubbed out by multi-tasking modernity.  A movement, like Occupy, turns energy into mass while narrative, on the other hand, keeps existing mass from turning to principles.  The old frontiersmen kept moving west while domesticating anything that he needed to until he came to the end of the line, Hollywood.  We are all image junkies now and some cowboy just shot the artist only to let him bleed out on the commons.

As each person ages, we must decide at what point do we apply the label “old” to ourselves.  Like becoming rich, there is not one point when you are poor and when you add one more dollar, you move to Beverly Hills or The Hamptons.  Similarly, there is not a Tuesday when you are still young but when you wake up on Wednesday, you have a date with Betty White.  I use this guideline to determine the age test:  when you are young and you do something stupid and forgetful, you think that is something someone with Alzheimer’s or dementia would do.  When you are old, you think, do I actually have Alzheimer’s or dementia and have I asked myself this before?

In the wild, animals that live in troops often times will group themselves around dominant males.  At some point, the male gets old and is removed by a younger and now more dominant male.  In human cultures, there have been societies set up around a big man or matriarch who everyone owes tribute to as a tradeoff for keeping their world in order.

As for the “to what extent will you do things for money” exercise above, money is embedded in our lives and souls.  We may think that we make a decision for “love OR money” but really our choices are based on “love AND money.”  You would think that the pressures of money problems could lead a husband and wife to split up.  Sociologists point out that during a recession, however, divorce goes down as many persons postpone going out on their own since it will be too costly or hard to make it when times are tough.  When times are good though, couples split-up more when they are thinking that now they’ll have a good shot at being independent.  Sadly, what does go up in bad economic times is domestic violence.

Our economy is based on trillions of these “love and money” decisions and other kinds of decisions that are being made every second of the day.  It is not necessarily a problem when a decision is made for money as the prime consideration.  The problem is that these societal choices are now being transformed by the fact that with improvement in medical science, we are all living so much longer.  While there are plenty of stories in the news about some elderly person having their life savings grifted away by some suave con-artist, there could be just as many stories that could be told where an older, wiser, and more powerful person takes candy from the proverbial baby.  The Occupy folks like to speak in terms of the “One and Ninety-Nine Percents” but we should also be speaking in terms of “Young and Old.” If you have money in what amounts to our economic troop, you can keep the dominant male from pushing you out of the tree.  I have also heard that there are no social security paychecks in the wild.

Economic decisions are based on confidence which affects supply and demand.  In other words, if you like a Company A’s prospects and believe they will do well in the future than you buy the stock and if you like Company Z’s product for the price that you pay for it more than the same product from another company, than you buy that product.  These decisions are the glue that keeps the economy together.  Due to the changes in health and life expectancy though, we have the effect of what is leading to a crisis of demographics intertwined with how our confidence is being shaken by these changes in medical science.  Of course, each person has never known how long they are going to live.  The problem is that with so many years of potential longevity, each person has to have the confidence that they will have enough to not outlive their money.  In addition, years of spending rather than saving have left baby boomers in the fix of needing to make up for lost time unless they are counting on a large inheritance.

This increased longevity has affected the larger economy as well.  Each person and company that gets pension benefits has to account for investment return projections and life expectancy.  The longer we live; each pension has to put away more money to account for longer lives unless they play the game of assuming larger investment returns.  In other words, if you assume you will make more money on investments than you will need less money to invest but, as most of us know, this is a dangerous course to take.  This life expectancy issue plays out in the same way in the public sector as well as the private pensions in the form of Social Security and Medicare benefits that the government must pay out.   There has to be enough younger workers paying into the system to pay for current benefits.  Also, for general revenue, if the government doesn’t have the tax revenues to pay for this behemoth than it issues more debt or bonds which causes a larger budget deficit.  This deficit reverberates all down the line as interest gets charged on the building interest and interest rates and inflation can be hit as well and so on.

Faced with this life expectancy problem of not knowing how long you will live and how much you will need, many older workers are choosing to work longer, not to retire at all, or are working just to keep their minds sharp.  This leaves younger workers behind the eight-ball as employer’s may keep more experienced workers on and fail to hire those new to the job market.   Older workers working longer take jobs away from younger workers.  Ironically, some Baby Boomers stay employed in order to keep supporting their children and helping them because they are unemployed or with skyrocketing college costs.

This does not even account for Health care costs which keep rising since with better science comes more costly medical procedures as well as older individuals having more medical needs from the increased life expectancy.  This also makes employers reluctant to hire due to rising healthcare costs.

A ways back, my wife and I took a midweek trip to Cambria on the Central Coast of California.  When we had dinner at the inn that we were staying at, I noticed that every person in the place was in the senior age group.  It’s not like we were vacationing in Miami.  There were a variety of ages on the streets of the town.  While part of it could be explained by our being there during the week, how did all of these persons afford to stay here on a fixed income while those in the earning years were conspicuously absent?  When the young are employed they are out there spending money which keeps the economy vibrant.  In certain ways and areas, a young person needs fewer resources to get them by than an older person does such as going to the doctor less or being sick from work less.  On the other hand, elder folks do help the economy by having money saved in assets that become invested but that tradeoff is not offset since the elderly spend less than younger workers do as well as the costs to everyone else to pay for the rising health costs.

The only advantages currently to the young are left to specific fields such as computer technology which is a newer and constantly changing sector that older workers have a harder time keeping up with along with the very medical field that serves the elderly.  However, if you are young and not in those fields, you may either have a hard time finding work at all or have to accept a job paying a lot less.  Technically, if boomers would retire there should be less unemployment as there are fewer workers left to fill the needed jobs.

Our society has told the older workers that they worked to pay for the elderly of their day and now it’s their turn.  However, the social security system was also designed to encourage elderly workers to leave the workforce so that there would be jobs for the young.   Again, the young are better spenders which churn the economy.  Most think of their Social Security Benefits as a right they have earned.  After all, they are called “entitlement programs.”  It is not that these older workers haven’t worked hard and not that they don’t have every right to deserve the fruits of their labors.   It is as though there is some cultural switch that was on “give” and now must go to “take.”  However, most understand that the system was designed when life expectancy was much shorter.  To most of us though, this translates to a discussion of whether the Social Security system will be solvent for the young down the road.  Our cultural story leads us to believe that our money is ours and we have earned it.  While there are individuals who make decisions that do help or hinder their chances at not outliving their money, our cultural story needs to understand that we all exist as a whole.  Money does not work by an “us against them” modus operandi.  I need you and you need me for it to work.  The narrative is more like an ecosystem.  The young folks are the wolves.  The old may seem like sweet little passive sheep but the problem is that we need a natural balance for the two to survive.  This is about responsibility that we all look out for each other.  This is not just some ideal but a way for all of us to thrive, both young and old.  If the wolves kill off too many sheep, there won’t be enough food left for them to subsist.  If there are too many sheep, they eat all the plants and grasses to the point of extinction for all concerned.  Wolves force the sheep to move from place to place and killing off some of the weak actually strengthen the population.  Unfortunately even more, the elderly are like the farmers who want the wolves killed off to protect their other livestock.  The farmers fail to see their part in this financial infanticide along with the importance of the natural balance.  Increasing life expectancies, pension benefits and entitlement programs are like the sheep eating everything in sight.  If we keep going, even the wolves will starve.

The values of “I am okay as long as I have mine” are like a fool’s gold.  On the surface, it looks like it is the real thing but the only way to sell it would be to sell something worthless to someone else for your own gain.  The natural balance is to promote a confidence and a fairness that keeps our decisions in a framework to produce a vibrant economy for both young and old and we need the old to stop being a wolf in sheep’s clothing.

I am not a nostalgic person.  I lived in a different world once, an actual world that was not a dream.  While I do not long to go back to that world, there were parts of it that I have come to deeply appreciate.  In our world today, I do not appreciate that we are filled with junk science, pop psychology, and media infatuations.  Most of all it is a We-They World that just doesn’t seem to work.  It seems as most of us think that we must protect our own interests from big governments or those who would make a quick-buck no matter whom they hurt.  That point is not lost on me but I remember a time though when we felt confident that things would keep improving.  The world seemed much less We-They probably because of the cultural remains of World War II which had brought the country together with drives to save our resources and a solidarity that could hopefully protect us from evil forces.  It was a time of modernism where the big narrative was a machine.  This metaphor means that some parts of a machine do more work than others but ultimately machines must work together to work their overall purpose.

When I was growing up in the early sixties, it seemed a time of promise and wonder.  Our classroom would gather and watch Mercury astronauts rocket-launched into space.  The space race with the Soviets made us feel that we must put our total efforts and means into not falling behind in math and science.  The Kennedy administration tried to tap into the intellectuals of the world by filling the cabinet and government with all types of academics and bow-tied eggheads.  It wasn’t just those at the top though as everyone seemed to value those autodidacts who could read, invent, and create new things.  Sadly, we no longer value self-learning, we value self-improvement.

There even seemed to be a folk music resurgence in the early sixties.  Little did I know that this Kumbaya was partially calm before the storm as well as a period of equality of opportunity much more than it was a time of equality of condition.  The calm before the storm would be in the form of The Vietnam War that would just a few years later be the wedge that would shatter this whole spirit.  At the same time, things were far from perfect in those days.  The equality on the surface was not one that was shared by those that were different such as most non-whites, homosexuals, or gender inequality especially in the workplace.

Television really had not completely sunk its teeth into culture and not only was science and math respected but reading was very common.  While some may have started their two to three hour a day couch-potato ways, those same individuals were also likely to be Book-of-The-Month Club members.  When I go to a coffee-house and see a person sitting by themselves in this day and age, I am very unlikely to see someone holding a book (or even a tablet or E-Reader) but am far more likely to see someone on a smart phone or just staring off into the distance and not in an introspective way.

I and most of my friends, even while being wet-behind the ears, loved to laugh at this Middlebrow Culture in those days.  There were Jacqueline Susann books and Reader’s Digest shortened versions of “real” literary works.   Even our homes were filled with decorations based on laughable designs that would later be Kitsch but we just saw them as some horrid not-even-close attempt to be highbrow.

Now I look back at it with a different take.  In the classification of if I knew then what I know now, when it comes to mass culture, we weren’t even a Category One Hurricane yet.  The masses still read things like newspapers and books.  Science co-existed with religion.  Education was not just about test scores.  We hadn’t quite sold our soul yet for youth and beauty.  News wasn’t infotainment.  There were celebrities but celebrity was not a culture in itself.  While the products and marketing to the middlebrow may have been a bit “schlocky” it still exposed many to a wider and less provincial world.  Comparing our worlds, when it came to money and knowledge, there was still a value given to reason then but this has been mainly lost in today’s current sense and material culture.  Even more to the relative point is that we actually thought the times were too fast even then.  I could hear a new revised Back to the Future kid rolling their eyes while spewing “Booorrriiing” if they had to experience those times now.   The word for the misapplication of common sense with emotion is “junk.”

Not only have we descended into junk psychology, junk science, and junk thought but we have junk money.  This form of illogic takes a couple of reasonable theories and mixes in some pseudo-cause-and-effect and then presto, we have a conspiracy.  We see this a lot in what amounts to those who bad-mouth the corrupting effects of money on everything which the world contains or that the free market will provide a panacea for every societal ill.  We also see this in the tax-the-rich debate from both sides on what effects taxes will have on our economy.  In one scenario more jobs will come about and in the other the rich just get richer.  How did we end up with today’s individualism on steroids when in the early sixties we were individualism lite?  Does a lack of reason contribute to everyone being able to believe anything and just end up where we are always sure that we are right and the other guy is not?

In the We-They World, we even fight over whether equality means equality of opportunity or equality of condition.  Rather than an appreciation for reason, we worry that too much thinking can lead us to be out of touch or even a feeling of being superior.   Rather than religion and science co-existing, we divide the world into “are you with us or against us” worldviews.  Moderation seems downtrodden by fundamentalists or “my way or the highway” extremists.  Everything is emotion.

Money is action and motivations as countless numbers of decisions interact each second.  Money too though has given way to emotion and lost its course of reason.  In all worlds though, money is connection.  Where are all the characters of my dream world?  Have they been swallowed up, like middle culture, by the mass youth and beauty world?  Have our deep relationships been shorted out by electronic communications?  Have we lost the ability to converse and to listen before action?  If we use a common relationship terminology to describe our association to money in the Junk-Money world, our involvement would be one of casual sex.  In the Other World, money would be our soul mate.  Money and culture have so much potential.  It could be a world worth working toward and worth living in since everyone knows that money can come true.

Obviously one of the lessons here is technology cannot be a substitute for listening skills.  Also, most of these kids have never bothered to learn the streets of their own city nor even which direction they are going toward.  Technology should either be an improvement over the way a person would perform an operation or should be able to take the burden away from a person by performing that operation.  It can be said that there is no great loss if someone cannot know east from west or how to read the hands of a clock.  On the other hand, learning certain skills can spill over into other areas of mastery.  Supposedly, Google already has a car that uses technology and sensors to drive a car.  If I had a car like this, this would have been an easy solution to the problem connecting with my son’s friends.  All we would have had to do would be to have the two machines communicate and find a safe meeting place when the two cars came together.  When this is perfected, this car or truck will be a case of technology improving on a person’s skills.  This is not only because the machine can perform better at the task but also because  a machine, unlike us, will not be distracted, fall asleep at the wheel, drive while intoxicated, and especially as it relates to my son’s friends, drive while texting (in fairness, I do not know for a fact that they do so).

If you are concerned with the levels of unemployment now, imagine how the economy will be affected when machines can drive our cars and trucks and the jobs lost by those who drive for a living such as shipping company drivers like Fed-Ex or UPS, bus drivers, taxi drivers, chauffeurs, truck drivers and so on.  Perhaps you can have no problem imagining the economy replacing those millions of jobs with other new jobs but think too that this may not be the only new technology to replace jobs.  If you multiply this by other advances in technology that is happening each year, more and more of our jobs will need to be replaced.  Yes, technology does create jobs too in the sense that there are persons needed to supervise, run, and maintain the machines.  Also, these jobs can be very high paying as well.  However, part of the problem with the economy now is not just unemployment but an income disparity between rich and poor. Since fewer higher paying jobs will only create more wealth, this would only exacerbate that disparity of income.

There is a book called Race Against the Machine (RATM): How the Digital Revolution is Accelerating Innovation, Driving Productivity, and Irreversibly Transforming Employment and the Economy by Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee which talks about the effects technology is having on employment.  Technology was originally projected to have saved persons vast amounts of time.  This, of course, never came to fruition as most of us still work many hours, although probably with more leisure time than ever before, but more to the point, is the amount of time used on our machines in the forms of internet time, phone time, and so on.  In other words, the tasks at work and home replaced by machines were just taken over by new tasks needed to be done.  Whenever long-term predictions are made, they are usually way off base.  Think about the massive food shortages and population explosions predicted by the book Future Shock.  However, cases where technology is replacing ten jobs with one still happen all the time.  This is why manufacturing jobs have disappeared from many countries including but not limited to the U.S.

I heard a radio program the other day that had one of the authors of RATM discussing these projected changes due to technological advancements  (http://www.kcrw.com/news/programs/tp/tp111026should_we_blame_tech?searchterm=race+against+the+machine).  One of the guests commented that if improvements keep continuing at their current pace, robots could do the jobs of anything humans can do now and not just manufacturing, but such things as lawyers and teachers.  The radio guest said that what needs to be “cracked” is the vision problem of computers and machines.  With this solved, even retail jobs, such as food servers and other service economy workers, would be fair game and likely to be eliminated.

If this were to come to pass, again with the futurist caveat of projection, we would not just be at high unemployment we would be at a tipping point of needing human beings to offer their skills and talents in order to produce something where they, in turn, are paid money in order to feed themselves and so on.  This translates to that there would be no “drive” to drive our economy.  We would have to give up the concept of earning money.  The guest put it that either everyone would be broke or we would need a new system where everyone would be on permanent vacation.

How much reward do we all achieve by doing things, improving skills, and completing a job well done?  If you remove this from the economic equation, what are we left with?  Would we all just play and pretend to do work like gardening or would life function like a hobby?  While there are plenty of jobs that lean toward math and science and internet technology, many students are avoiding these fields in the U.S.  If that is where the money is, that means that our decisions are not being made in self-interest.   What would happen to our decision making if you took away the need to earn a living?  Could we shift into some other realm of meaning and relevancy?  Would our personal assistant machine tell us that we shouldn’t worry about those things and, if we would like, they can give us a pill that will make us feel better?

So in the future, money may be no more.  If money doesn’t exist, I am sure there will always be a few rebels who will try and drive themselves to the human interaction center.  I am convinced there will always be an underground economy though.  In fact, I heard the robots are hiring.

Exercise:  What would money be replaced by?

Hypothetically, do you have a vision of a system that can stimulate human connection, allow for individuals to attain some type of skills or mastery, and maintain how to fit into the planets resources while allowing for decisions and choices that wouldn’t take us to the dark side?

This was a sign from the Occupation movement in Los Angeles.  The top of the sign reads “15 years ago we had” (Photo by Harlin Kahn)

When the Arab Spring populist movement came about, it was not only about changing the type of government but also about jobs.  This translates to a demand for a better quality of life.  The Occupation movement which started as Occupy Wall Street in New York focuses on income inequality, the problems with the financial industry, but is also about the same demand for a better quality of life and jobs.  In each case, the government is seen as not providing reform, change, or better economic conditions.  Congress is now mainly seen as doing nothing since compromise is seen as betrayal and weakness.  The problem with U.S. government seems to come from two sides with singular minds that cannot seem to work together but just blame each other for the policies that make things worse.

So the electorate gets upset and views the next election as a referendum to “throw da bums out.”  Then the sides become even more divided and even more gridlock happens which then upsets the electorate even more.  Part of the problem is that that the newly elected still keep their singular minds and refuse to work with the other side so that we get back to nothing changing except the tenor of blame.

Now comes the Occupation Movement.  They have a referendum in the sense that they know what they think is unfair and a lot of it is focused on banks and the superrich.  Instead of a single mind, they know what they don’t want and what they don’t like.  This is a form of “no” mind in that they know what they are against but are open to changing it in any way they can.  What is refreshing though is that, as a populist movement, they are rough around the edges, have no true leaders, and do not have a singular mind.  By singular mind, I mean they have no specific solution or agenda but just want things to change especially when it comes to having the opportunity for gainful employment.

So we have the politicians on one side with a single mind who, because of the single mindset, won’t budge on what the solution should be since it could only come from reworking how they view the world.  On the other side, we have this populist movement who knows who to blame and what the problem is but really has no specific solution.  At this point, the Occupation Movement is either going to build more steam or fizzle out.  If it is the former, it is possible it will start to focus on some type of solution or principles for its demands but that will happen only if things evolve.

The nice things about social movements are that as more people join in there is even more potential for new people to join in or a jump on the bandwagon effect.  No one really knows if steam will build and the movement will become powerful or influential or what the specifics will be as to what course should be taken in order to go about getting change.  It is entirely possible that since the movement is about the other 99 percent of the income equation, the potential could be that even the average bloke can get involved.

In all of this singular mind, “no” mind, and blame game though, one thing keeps real change at bay.  The common denominator is that we have become a “we-they” world.  The singular mind politicians pit red against blue.  The no-mind populists pit rich against not rich and corporations, especially banks, against the middle.  If a politician speaks to trying to get things done by compromise, the other side ignores compromise and cares only about getting things done their way and being reelected.  No doubt, the amount of money in politics keeps feeding the We-They beast.  By We-They, I do not mean rich against poor but more about being so worried that your principles are so rooted in correctness that any deviation from those principles will bring about a dark world.

As for those who join the Occupation Movement, it would be easy to try to dismiss this as jealousy for the rich or a mob of young people feeling entitled to being offered high paying jobs but this is not the case.  On the other side, while the banks can be faulted with removing spokes from the economic wheel, our institutions, including government, corporations, banks, and individuals make up our economy.  There are tons of poor choices going on or better ways that progress could come about.  If you buy into the more is better consumer culture or feel it is not you but the other guy that’s doing all the frivolous spending and not seeing that the choices you make contribute to income inequality, than you are part of the problem.  There also has been an expectation of upward mobility in the U.S.  However, most of us do want to give back but don’t see how.  Many just feel frustrated that some advantages are being manufactured which stack the cards in favor of the one-percent and it is not just a matter of how things and success happen to work out.  Our culture has has deteriorated away from the level playing field while everyone seeks out their own rewards while not concerning themselves with how others are being punished.  We do not see the collective advantage of being in this together.  The 99% though do have a point that it is no longer a country where you can be anyone you want to be.  It is not sour grapes though that is making people as mad as hell but it is a sense of fairness gone awry.

While there is much unfairness in the way banks have handled their stewardship in society and changing them might go a ways in helping our situation, it is still too easy to get hung up on scapegoats.  In fact, those voters who just vote to “throw da bums out” need to take ownership that they are part of the problem too.  If everyone started insisting on candidates that blend principles with pragmatism, perhaps we wouldn’t see as much gridlock.  Money is extremely complex.  There is no simple answer as to why income is so unequal.  Sure tax rates are at issue but how money changes hands is changing and some of it is not because of just greed but from structural economic differences as well.  Still, in this global world where so many products are made all over the world, it is hard to pick out between who is working toward the common good and a better world or who is someone lining their own pockets before they get figured out.  It is also hard to get feedback on who the good guys are and who are not.  In any event, we also must bear some responsibility to own the fact that we direct where our money goes just as to whom we vote for.  If we want more jobs or those who understand fairness in the marketplace then we can try to find them, support them, and tell others about their products and services instead of just buying whatever is the cheapest or handiest all the time.  We can also support more products that match our values such as green products or whatever it is that you can get behind.

Kudos to those in the Occupation Movement who bring financial activism to center stage.  Anger is a great thing to start change.  A solution will always have to favor some over others but that doesn’t mean it can’t be fairer to the 99 percent while being directed to the 100 percent as well.

Using fairness as a yardstick is not part and parcel to the We-They world.  Money should be about fairness, connection, and trust as opposed to just self-interest.  With fairness in mind, we are not so apt to promote only our own agenda and see evil as the one to blame on the other side of the political or economic aisle.  Instead of single-minded or “no-minded,” we can become activists that are fair-minded.

What seems to be the problem?  Why is this such a Greek Tragedy?  I live in L.A.  The Greek theater seems to be packing them in.  Greek Yogurt is selling more than ever.  Colleges still pledge Greek Life.  They should be making money by these accounts.  Even the movie with Travolta and Newton-John seems to be selling well on Netflix and even the sequel gets some requests.  No wait.  Sorry, my bad, that’s “Grease.”  Can’t we go back to the old days when a country like Greece was isolated like a Greek Island that had no effect on the rest of the world?  Why do we have to have this Butterfly Effect where any small thing can start an avalanche?  Apparently, Winston Churchill knew even than how small things can escalate in the context of Greece when he commented about the monkey bite that killed 250,000 people.  He was referring to King Alexander of Greece who was trying to protect his dog from a monkey when the monkey bit him.  He later died from the infection leaving his exiled father to come in and start the 250K dead war and spurred Churchill to say that the monkey bite cost 250,000 persons their lives.  In our global financial world, these small occurrences with large effects are even more common, I guess we can call this “monkey business.”

What is our psychological need for certainty or at least a feeling that we can predict the future?  Did science give us all the feeling that we could control the universe since we can predict the movements of planets and tides?  While we have improved our understanding of the probability of things, we all still know we will be caught without an umbrella when we need one if we totally rely on the weather report.  I know that I will be shaken, not stirred, by the next earthquake but is today the day?  Most of these things are just too complex to predict no matter how much we know about them.

So if even real science can’t do the forecast job for complex things, it would be even sillier to expect how economics can be expected to do so.  After all, economics is not physical but social.   Financial markets are not just based on supply and demand but whether we feel like demanding something from their supply.  This is not to mention the self-fulfilling and self-negating prophesy stuff when the media tells us we are all uncertain or that things are hunky-dory and we get scared into inaction.  It’s like the political polls where people don’t go out and vote because they figure what’s the point since the race isn’t close.  Then, with so many people staying home, the other candidate wins.

The world seems to want to reduce itself to one understandable theme in order to produce predictability and certainty.   Isaiah Berlin used a Greek Poem by Archilochus to make the point that foxes know the world of many things while hedgehogs know one big thing.  Now put this into the perspective of economics.  Economics is complexity.  There are too many moving parts for anyone to know where things are going.  New businesses, new technologies, new powerful countries are just a tiny fraction of unpredictability.  Yet everyone wants to see the world through their own one big thing in order to think they understand where things are going to be headed.  If we would try and understand money and business like the fox understands many things, while accepting uncertainty, in a sense, we would ironically have a better shot at predicting where things will go.  Yet, even though many of us know better, we figure that knowledge must equal predictability.

Is there a Grecian Aesop fable we can look to for money guidance?  Well, “The Ant and the Grasshopper” speaks to hard work.  “The Tortoise and the Hare” can be applied to avoiding get rich quick schemes.  “The Fox and the Grapes” can be used to illustrate how easily we can hold two conflicting views about money or success.  The wisdom we should look to is not from or about Greece though, it is about another ancient culture, Babylon, a diverse and robust city as ever there was.  There was an Aesop fable like telling about money but it was told from the perspective of Babylon and not Greece.  In the 1920’s, George Clason published little financial parables of financial planning in “The Richest Man in Babylon.”  “A part of all you earn is yours to keep” was used to illustrate how to make savings like an expense and put something away each time you get paid.   Now, if money and finance is too complex, why would we waste time to plan or listen to what was said when the world was a much smaller place?  If one small change can be magnified which throws all predictions out the window, then why take the time to make choices based on the unknown?  After all, isn’t the pop culture saying “man plans and God laughs.”

When it comes to money, the gravitational pull of uncertainty draws us to make a financial plan.  At the same time, we are repelled by action.  It is as if the future can be uncertain and hopeless at the same time.  Over the years, I have received many calls from someone who feels they need to have a financial plan and yet, I can predict with certainty, that most will do nothing about it.  In “The Richest Man in Babylon” book, the ancient city of Babylon is portrayed as one of the richest cities that ever existed.   One of my favorite lessons in this book is that one end of the spectrum is procrastination.  At the other end is opportunity.  Good luck comes to those persons of action who accept and follow opportunity.  This is at the heart of a financial plan.  It is not about being able to predict the future.  The lesson I tell my clients about a financial plan is:  Don’t plan for control, plan for opportunity.  It is how to best scatter the seeds that when unpredictable things happen that you are in a position to take advantage of them.  Do not shutter from uncertainty but, on the contrary, not only accept it but use it to your benefit.

The next time you want to give in to the prediction of the expert or procrastinate yourself out of an opportunity, think about the folly of prognostication like the accuracy of sports predictions.  Think of Jimmy the Greek.

Note:  For more depth on our need for predictability, foxes and hedgehogs, and the Monkey Bite read Future Babble by Dan Gardner