Category: Civilization, History, and Anthropology

THE CONVERSION OF ANGLO CIVILIZATION FROM PRODUCTIVE AND MORAL TO COMMERCIAL AND FINANCIAL

Think of how hard it is to convert a hunter gatherer people to an agrarian economy. From where you know everyone to where you don’t.

Think of how hard it is to convert an agrarian economy to a mixed-craft merchant economy. You don’t need much trust but you need to at least be able to secure your territory and capital. Where you don’t know who produces what or where it came from. And where organization of production becomes invisible to you.

Think of how hard it is to convert your economy to consumer capitalism because your trust is high enough that you can create long term contracts. Where cooperation is achieved through the pooling of capital in large amounts so that it can be concentrated to produce lots of goods and services cheaply.

Think of how hard it is to convert your economy to a financial economy, where you make money from the process of credit alone. Where you are in fact assisting in organizing the production of goods and services as your primary method of production.

In each of these cases you are making wealth because you’ve produced the commons we call TRUST : reciprocal insurance, and evolved from a laborer, to a craftsman, to an entrepreneur, to a financier. And you’ve moved your entire economy through that same evolution.

But as your people evolve through this hierarchy, you produce institutions that assist you in producing records, in resolving disputes, and in developing habits that make resolution of disputes unnecessary.

What you LOSE is the ability to observe externalities.

Financialization has produced profound externalities that we have no learned how to RECORD, and ACCOUNT for.

The cumulative effect of our financialization, which in itself may not be a bad thing but an heroic thing, is that we do not account for the externalities produced under the various transactions.

Why? well off the gold standard we have no method of measurement. And secondly, the progressives have ‘gambled’ upon the fallacy that technology and growth would persist forever – which it hasn’t, won’t, and can’t.

We departed the empirical society. We became a society of ‘hope’ or ‘wishful thinking’ or ‘fanciful thinking’, instead. The germans remained an empirical people. We became a moral (british) and utopian(american) rather than empirical people.

It’s fixable. But it won’t be pretty. a 30 year bear market is a pretty understandable thing.

(h/t: Benjamin Steigmann)