Time
We are born with one resource to spend: TIME, and by early adulthood, we must produce more than we expend over a three week period, or we will die. We are able to produce only so many calories in that time. And, alone, barely enough to survive as a gatherer. We are, however, capable of cooperation. We can imitate (the physical), empathize (with emotions), and sympathize (with thought). And cooperation is possible because we can judge intent (thought) reward (emotion) and means of acting (the physical) The returns on cooperation are not additive but multiplicative – on the order a power of five to ten per person added to the division of labor. (Really. It’s that much). As Adam Smith famously argued, ten men make a few pins each but ten men dividing the labor make ten thousand pins. There is no equivalent to cooperation in a division of labor. All our biological abilities: language, reason; our habitual abilities: manners, norms, and traditions; our institutions: money, law, banking, politics, religion, and even war, assist us in cooperating in ever larger numbers. And through that vast system of heartless, mindless, communication, cooperation, we produce and transform infinitely more calories than we could on our own. For this reason, we have only one form of wealth: Time, and we are not wealthier than cavemen. We have only made everything infinitely cheaper in the only currency we have to spend when we are born: time. However, we are all born rational actors, and act morally (do not lie, cheat, steal, or free ride) and immorally (lie, cheat, steal, and free ride) as is in our best self-interest. And the velocity and scale of cooperation is dependent upon truth-telling, adhering to promise and contract, and incentives for both reward and punishment if we fail to speak the truth, the whole truth, nothing but the truth, adhere to promise and contract, and follow only those incentives that impose no costs upon the investments(costs) of others. Mathematics (the logic of constant positional relations – or what we call ‘measurement’), Science (testifying to demonstration of the determinism of the physical world), Economics (demonstrated human behavior) and Tort (demonstrated human conflict) are the only languages of truth that we know of. Humans evolved language to ‘deceive’, negotiate, and speak ‘morally’, not to speak truthfully, scientifically, economically, or legally. And humans evolved to cheat where they have the opportunity – and continue to do so. So the primary difficulty in history is creating language, habits, and institutions, that assist us in truthful, voluntary, reciprocally beneficial, cooperation while suppressing untruthful, involuntary, irreciprocal impositions. In the end, as inhuman as it may seem, we are all just calculating opportunities to work together to pursue the highest return at the lowest cost in the shortest time with the greatest degree of certainty at the lowest risk. We are calculating, and the ‘equals sign’ in that vast set of calculations is when we cooperate. We work together to increase the returns on time. THE FOUNDATIONS OF ECONOMICS (COOPERATION) = TIME The opportunities in a market are limited by the requirement that we do not impose costs by externality upon the investments of others causing the loss of capital in territorial, physical, institutional, cultural, normative, informational, familial, and genetic assets. Markets allow us to create opportunity through proximity – decreasing opportunity costs of time, and thru informational, informal, and formal institutions, and physical infrastructure as a common good – each decreasing opportunity costs of time. These market opportunities are produced as a common good. We can then serve the common good by converting opportunity into exchanges, each of which creates more than it consumes by the service of the coincidence of wants. (time savings). We create opportunities for temporal compression through the division of perception, cognition, knowledge, labor, and advocacy, and seize them through the identification of a coincidence of wants, thereby converting the potential for temporal compression into the existential compression of time. And it is through this temporal compression that we, collectively, in increasing scales, constantly reduce the cost of existence, and defeat the dark forces of time, ignorance, and scarcity. If you understand this you will understand all of human civilization, consists of time-saving – and the reason we have achieved what no other creatures have achieved. We must defeat the dark forces of time, ignorance, distance, and scarcity, and we do so through cooperation, and we cooperate through the incremental suppression of the imposition of costs on one another upon life, body, kin, possessions, and interests, in the form of violence, theft, fraud, falsehood, conspiracy, rents and free-riding. We accomplish this incremental suppression by the demand for a warranty of due diligence for our products(materials), services(actions), and information(speech) and the prosecution, restitution, punishment, ostracization, or execution, of those who circumvent that Warranty of Reciprocity by production, action, or speech. This leaves us with no option but to participate in voluntary markets under which we limit our productions, actions, and speech to that which consists of productive, fully informed (truthful), warrantied, voluntary transfer, free of imposition of cost upon the life, kin, possessions, and interests of others by externality. This explains why time is the principal asset from which all of human existence emerges through the continuous discounting of time costs through an ever-expanding division of labor, with ever-expanding suppressions of parasitism.