A Comment on Ayn Rand

(A repost with some amendments)

 Ayn Rand and her followers worship money. But her notions on money are such a muddled mix of insight and delusion that it's hard to know where to begin a rational critique. From the Ayn Rand lexicon (http://aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/money.html):

     Money is the tool of men who have reached a high level of productivity and a long-range control over their lives. Money is not merely a tool of exchange: much more importantly, it is a tool of saving, which permits delayed consumption and buys time for future production. To fulfill this requirement, money has to be some material commodity which is imperishable, rare, homogeneous, easily stored, not subject to wide fluctuations of value, and always in demand among those you trade with. This leads you to the decision to use gold as money. Gold money is a tangible value in itself and a token of wealth actually produced. When you accept a gold coin in payment for your goods, you actually deliver the goods to the buyer; the transaction is as safe as simple barter. When you store your savings in the form of gold coins, they represent the goods which you have actually produced and which have gone to buy time for other producers, who will keep the productive process going, so that you’ll be able to trade your coins for goods any time you wish.

    As soon as she leaves the standard definitions of money (means of exchange, store of value/savings), her key points drift into nonsense. One of these misleading notions is that gold has “tangible value”. Gold has no intrinsic value; its value as money is only and exactly what people believe it is. The Conquistadores could not understand how the value of gold among the Inca and other South American peoples could be so low. They looted the gold, took it home to Spain, and promptly caused ruinous inflation. It was only when Spain used its gold for external trading that it could be used as capital. So much for the intrinsic value of gold.

     The notion that money somehow buys time for future production misses the point. "Delayed consumption" is possible only when there is a surplus of goods or productive capacity. Money cannot create a surplus, nor is it needed to ensure that any surplus will be used. Humans have invented many ways of saving surpluses without money. What’s needed to create a surplus is a technology that multiplies the effect of human work, such as agriculture. What’s needed to delay its consumption is a system of values and customs that will ensure the surplus (such as grain) will be stored for later use and trade. Neither of these require money.

     Fact is, even today much trade is done without money. The basic rule of all trade is "mutual obligation". The members of families and social circles trade goods and services because sharing is one of the obligations of these social groups. They keep pretty close track of their trades, too. Exact matches aren’t required, but everyone is expected to share their goods and provide services as best they can.

     And like practically everybody, Rand misquotes St. Paul’s comment on money. Later in the article, she says, So you think that money is the root of all evil? . . .  Have you ever asked what is the root of money?

     St. Paul actually wrote, The love of money is the root of all evil. Look it up!

    Money is a way of making trade with strangers possible, and thereby creating mutual dependence. A very useful invention. Eg, just try to calculate how many people have been involved in producing a 98 cent ball point pen and making it available to you. It’s made of several kinds of plastics and metals, which had to be mined, refined, processed, and shaped. The pen had to be packaged, warehoused, transported, and shelved. Even in a small town where you know most people, you aren’t necessarily a close friend of the shop owners and staff, but they serve you all the same.

     A stranger is someone to whom you owe nothing, and vice versa. This makes interaction between strangers dangerous. Hence, all societies have had to invent ways of making at least temporary mutual obligation possible. Think of "guest right", for example. You not only have the right to stay among your hosts, they have an obligation to protect you. A pretty good deal; you’d better have some good stuff to trade with them.

     So why do all those strangers work to produce and deliver a cheap pen to you? Because money makes it not only possible to trade with people you will never see, it makes it easy to do so.

     Nowadays, money trades are used to measure economic activity. They’re totalled in the Gross Domestic Product, or GDP, a number of such incomplete, gappy data that it causes pernicious delusions. The worst of these is the belief that an ever-rising GDP means we’re getting richer. Yet every time there’s major storm destruction, there’s a spike in GDP in the following months and years as the damage is repaired. I don’t think having to repair storm damage is making us richer. Besides, even in our highly monetised economy, about 1/3rd of economic activity does not involve money. In pre-money times, that was 100%.

     There is one value to the GDP: it can tell you how much of your spending eventually ends up in various pockets. Eg, in Canada, we spend about 10% of our GDP on healthcare. Every time we spend a dollar, a dime wends it way to the healthcare providers. Some of it gets there via taxes, some via insurance payouts, some via personal spending. So we could describe our GDP in terms of these three types of spending, but then we wouldn’t know what exactly the taxes, insurance payouts, and personal spending bought. What the GDP means all depends on how you analyse it. And that means that people with different axes to grind will analyse it differently.

     Basic rule about money: Money and wealth flow in opposite directions. This should be obvious, but most people tend to think that more money means more wealth. Money is only potential wealth, a point Rand doesn’t get quite right either, although her notion of money as buying time for future production comes close. But anyone who’s lived through extreme inflation, or has absorbed the stories of the people who did, knows that money isn’t wealth.

     I think everybody needs a good introductory survey course in anthropology, to learn about all the ways humans have organised the production and distribution of goods and services. It might cure one of the notion that our current economic arrangements are somehow natural or god-given. For over 95% of our existence as a culture-creating species, we humans have had no money. Yet humans managed to produce the goods and provide the services they needed. It’s true that money, because it accelerated trade, and more importantly enabled trade with strangers, accelerated the creation of wealth. But trade, and its beneficial effects on wealth creation and cultural exchange, existed long before money.

     2013-03-11 / 2014-05-23 / 2015-11-07 / 2018-07-03 / 2019-10-15

A Grammar checker.

I’ve just tried Grammatik, a grammar checker built into WordPerfect. To say it’s bad is an understatement. The only actual error it flagged was a typo. All the other errors showed that Grammatik could not parse sentences correctly, and so mistook verbs for nouns and nouns for verbs; demanded modifiers where none were needed; confused proper names with common nouns; didn’t recognise objects; and on and on and on.

One example: “A voice from on high spoke:...” Grammatik said it should read “A voice from a high spoke...”

I don’t know if the other wordprocessors have equally bad grammar checkers. I suspect so. Avoid them, they will thoroughly mislead you.

BTW, Grammatik flagged eight errors in this short screed.

Oliver Sacks: The River of Consciousness

     Oliver Sacks. The River of  Consciousness (2017) Posthumous collection of essays assembled from notes and edited from drafts. As the title suggests, Sacks is thinking about consciousness, the hard problem of philosophy and neurology. In one essay he wonders if consciousness is a discontinuous sequence of moments.
    Vision seems to be discontinuous he says, citing experiments measuring the response times to changes in the visual field. I think it's obvious that vision is discontinuous: the light-sensitiva molecules in the retinal cells decay when struck by light, and must be rebuilt in order to decay again. This process takes about 1/10th of a second. Then the nerve signals generated must be processed so that the human can see. This can take longer than a 1/10th of a second, since objects must be recognised, etc. The fastest conscious reaction times to an expected visual stimulus is about 1/6th of a second in children and teenagers, and double or triple that in adults. Responses to unexpected visual stimuli take much longer. Thus the visual contents of consciousness are constructed from perceptions that take a sizeable time to assemble. the same applies to the other senses. The unbroken stream of consciousness is an illusion. It can be a dangerous one, since what feels like an instantaneous reaction takes at least half a second. At highway speeds a car travels about 14 metres in 1/2 a second.
     Sacks also has interesting observations of the subjective passage of time. His patients vary enormously in the rate at which they process sensory information, and that processing relates to the feeling of time passing. He tells of taking photographs several  minutes apart of one of his post-encephalitic patients, then binding the prints into a flip-book, and seeing the patient slowly lift his arm. Conversely, some of his patients entered a high-speed phase, and reported that they found the world around them moving unbearably slowly.
     The book feels unfinished. Most of the essays consist of extended notes. Sacks didn’t have time to rewrite for continuity, style and clarity, and this sometimes shows in a banal or cliche phrase. However, for any fan this is an essential book. For the general reader it serves as a very good introduction to some of the conundrums of consciousness and mind. ***½
     Correction 2018-11-10: At highway speeds of about 100km/h, a car travels about 14 metres in 1/2 a second.

If you want ot be a writer: Stephen King On Writing

     Stephen King. On Writing (2000). Subtitled “A Memoir of the Craft”. I’m not a fan of Stephen King, not because he’s a bad writer, but because horror fantasy doesn’t move me. I read some of his short stories way back when, and thought they were well done.
     King writes both about the nuts’n’bolts (grammar and style, narrative pace, character, etc) and his own experience as a writer. The book is worth reading for both. If you need some guidance to improve your writing and work habits, read this book. If you need some inspiration and emotional support because you’re not sure you can hack the writing life, read this book. You will improve your mastery of the craft, and you may discover your writing groove. Or you may discover that you’re not a writer after all. Either way, the book is worth reading.
     More take-aways: Writing is a compulsion, it’s what you have to do to maintain your sense of self.
     Reading a lot is essential to your development as a writer.
     A story is out there, like a fossil to be discovered. Writing it is uncovering the fossil.
     Interesting for any Stephen King fan, and for anyone who's curious about the writing life. ****

What did your lfe mean? The Five People You Meet in Heaven (Mitch Albom)

     Mitch Albom. The Five People You Meet in Heaven (2003) Albom made his name with Tuesdays With Morrie, which was made into a successful movie. I’ve seen the movie, it teeters just this side of sentimentality.
     This book (also made into a movie) teeters over, which is a pity, since it’s a lovely idea: Eddie, the hero, dies while saving a little girl when a gondola on an amusement park ride falls. The story tells of how in the afterlife he meets five people who affected his life in ways he didn’t fully understand or didn’t know. He needs to discover how his life made sense and had a purpose before he can live in his own corner of heaven.
     Eddie had a harsh upbringing, went to war, came home a changed man, and didn’t have the children he and his wife wanted. He ends up working in maintenance in the Ruby Pier Amusement Park, a job his father held, and which he thinks marks him as a failure. The five people he meets show him otherwise.
     Albom writes well, if occasionally too consciously ironic, and with sometimes too much authorial commentary. If the book causes the reader to reflect on how minor and major incidents shaped his own life, it will have succeeded. As a story about a likeable man who finally understands his own value, it’s well-done. Read it. ***

Graham Greene's last book: The Last Word

     Graham Greene. The Last Word and Other Stories (1990) In the title story, an old man with a fractured memory and a broken body lives alone in a one-room flat. We gather that some major social and political change has occurred. Eventually, the old man is summoned to see the General, whose predecessor brought about the revolution. The General is curious to see this relic from the bygone age, the last Pope. He offers the old man food and wine before killing him. The old man thanks him for sending him home, and accepts the wine. His last words as he drinks from it are Corpus domini nostri.... The General does not understand the words, but as he squeezes the trigger, there flashes through his mind the anxious thought that perhaps what the old man believed might be true.
     Typically Greene in its mix of thriller, politics, and religion. The other stories offer much the same mix, demonstrating that Green understood the psychology of power and politics as few other writers have done. Worth reading, if somewhat depressing in its unrelieved pessimism about the secularisation of modern life. Greene died about a year after publication. ** to ****

Vintage SF: Blood & Burning by Budrys

     Algis J. Budrys. Blood & Burning (1978) Budrys’s imagination is as off the wall as Philip K. Dick’s, and as dark, too. Three samples:  In Be Merry, the Klarri have crash-landed their lifeboats on Earth. Humans and Klarri mutually infect each other. One small enclave in New Jersey has found a grim method of healing themselves using Klarr blood.
     In All for Love, an impossibly huge spaceship has landed on Earth, apparently in distress. It casually destroys human civilisation, treating humans as pests. The hero manages to make his way to one of the support legs and damage it. The story focuses on the human cost of attempting an impossible task.
     In A Scraping of the Bones, extreme overcrowding leads to murder for extra space in the hive-like apartment blocks.
     Well imagined, well-written, with a tad too much of the formulaic to be a match for P. K. Dick, but still recommended, if you can find copy. ***