Econ Crisis 4 - Shadow Banks
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by leearnold 1 month ago
Autoplay series:
NEW! --The Economic Crisis
Autoplay: 1. Macro Cycles 2. Recessions 3. Double Bubble 4. Shadow Banks 5. Crash & Bailout
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Wild Nature Introduction
This sequence of videos was storyboarded in the years 1982-1987. .......... It is an introduction to language, grammar, systems theory, school subjects, and different grade levels. All at once. It was meant to appear in the order that you see here. ............ It is a very deliberate synthesis THAT WAS MEANT TO LOOK LIKE A SERIES OF BRIEF EXCERPTS FROM LONGER SEQUENCES, for the SINGLE PURPOSE OF MARKETING the WHOLE IDEA to a publisher in curricular materials or in educational film. This attempt never succeeded. ............ Here is the history: I had trouble from the beginning. Ecolanguage came to me in 1978, as a full-blown imaginary animation, with a lot of details to be researched and worked-out. That is not a saleable proposition. I had the immediate problem in how to sell it, because written explanations of the Ecolanguage idea were incomprehensible to business investors, and in those days media production was very expensive. In 1978 most people had not even heard of Apples or personal computers, which as yet had very little of the animation power that I required. Therefore originally I thought that the format of Ecolanguage would have to be as secondary curricular 16mm films, integrated with textbooks series, for school classroom film projection--or else some kind of unprecedented 90-minute educational movie about world history, which seemed even then to be more unlikely. So, to try to convince investors who might come down any avenue, I decided to make a short super-8mm film cartoon, by hand-painted cel animation. It had to be short, because hand-painted animation work is a massive personal labor. But intellectually it had a lot of ground to cover. So I wrote the sequence that you see here. ............. The multiple goals of this sequence were, and are: (a) to introduce the language and familiarize the viewer with it, which means introducing the symbols and grammar; (b) to set-up the preliminaries to do ecology and economics, both separately and combined (indeed, combined into a frank concern for the world problematique); (c) to help to set-up the preliminaries for a systems-view of the world to cover life arenas and social arenas; (d) to give some exhibits of my grammatical invention of using symmetry in motion, to represent organization at any level; (e) to do it all as regular school topics, coming as if from pre-existing educational curricula; and (f) to present those as excerpts from different age-comprehension levels, starting at elementary-school level and progressing upward to university level, sometimes from cut to cut. ............. In other words, this sequence is a very deliberate synthesis of several different threads that was meant to look like a series of brief excerpts from pre-existing longer sequences, all for the single purpose of marketing the whole idea to a publisher in curricular materials or in educational film. ............. In the end, all story-structure problems are marketing problems! --Itself a realization that took me some time to figure out, though it was no doubt known to Homer! ........... I completed the first chapter, "Elementary Nature Studies", as a 12-minute super-8 film cartoon, shot in the Berkeley basement of my dear friends the Lowe's in the mid-1980's, and got it transferred to VHS videocassette (very tough for super-8; I found an ex-Hollywood cinematographer in North Oakland who had been compelled for his own reasons to find a machine that transferred it). I showed the Ecolanguage "Elementary Nature Studies" videocassette to a lot of people, but to no avail. By that time, consumer delivery of audio-visual content had progressed to "hypermedia" on CD-ROMs, but these did not have much capability for extended sequences of linear animation, to tell stories. (Much less did they have the capacity to show movies: DVDs didn't hit until the mid-90's, and now they are almost on the way out.) In fact when I contacted them by phone I had to make sure that they were capable of playing a VHS cassette in their offices, before my visits: UCB geography said doing CG on campus was a difficult downer, San Francisco Amiga animation people were scrambling for investors too, the Marin county software biggies were still figuring out their own markets, even Lucasfilm Skywalker Ranch's games division was basically a production studio looking for orders in new-media technology content that were to be financed FROM THE OUTSIDE, and Apple Cupertino pointed-out that it was possible to do it on one of their Macintoshes. Well I couldn't even afford one (and still barely cannot). ........... To make it short, I got tons of lovely comments from investors and met bunches of very interesting people indeed, but no one would take the leap. ........... ............ Now look how things have changed! In the future somebody is going to say to you, "Your movie is 1 minute! Why the hell is it SO LONG?"
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On different topics.
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Standard Economics
Textbook economics, presented as flow-charts. .... A learning aid. .............................. Start any video. The rest will play automatically in order, then recycle. This is called a "playlist". ...... This is a high-school-level overview of Introductory College Economics, showing it as simple hydraulics in a flow-chart language. The first few videos also help to acquaint with the flow-chart grammar, which is basic and standardized. ...... My hope is that classroom teachers are able to use this series to save time on describing the basic ideas, so they can spend more time with students on the implications and the AP test questions. ...... Segments will be added continuously. Missing numbers will be filled in later. The series presently starts at #10 because there will be an introduction from systems ecology. The rest will be a presentation of textbook economics, chapter-and-verse. ...... The language was adapted from ecological systems, and in the future it will be also used to integrate ecology into combined presentations. ...... Many of the basic designs for this series were drawn in the late 1980's, using the textbooks by Lipsey-Steiner-Purvis, Baumol-Blinder, and Paul Samuelson. This series is also using Case-Fair (6th ed.) and Krugman-Wells.
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Bush Tax Cuts & Social Security
Most people do NOT know: 1) that government debt can be rolled over, ...... for a long time without harm; 2) that government spending doesn't crowd out private investment in a demand-caused recession, such as the one we are having now; 3) that money doesn't have to be backed by gold, so long as the growth of it matches the growth in real goods and services; 4) that considering all taxes together, the effective U.S. tax rate is nearly flat and the rich are not paying larger share; 5) that government spending on the safety-net has more return to quality of life than the latest technological gadget; 6) that the long-term deficit and the short term deficit are different things, with very different causes, and must be discussed separately; G) that healthcare has anomalies in supply and demand that make it unsuitable for a market approach, AND it is the total problem with the LONG-term deficit, AND Obamacare takes baby-steps in the right direction (by trying to reduce healthcare costs carefully, and almost curing the long-term deficits). .......... Recent government policy in the United States shows that the complexity of these issues has given plenty of opportunity for politicians to lie, and to reward their contributors, while hiding the real result behind flurries of phony rhetoric and confusion. Learn as much as you can!
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Symmetry = Group Grammar
Ecolanguage can picture intentionality in a larger conceptual framework. ...............Intentionality forms logics into patterns. Ecolanguage's ability to portray "intentionality", and its use of symmetry to represent the "one-to-many" relationship, leads to a symbolic grammar that can show the TWO different logical levels in any thought: the DISTINCTION itself, and the CONTEXT that the distinction is under. ...... The use of the symmetry also to represent living groups makes an analogy between contexts of thought and social institutions. ...... This leads to a number of philosophical suggestions: ...... {1} The object of an intention (the distinction) is always a ratiocinative split or bipartition. The line of intention is logically different from the line between the poles of the bipartition. The line of intention splits, one line going to each pole, and this triangle formed by context over bipartite distinction defines the concept of "concept" as a triad of empty boxes, connected by lines of two different logical types, continuously shifting during our discourse. A concept is a distinction, in a context. ...... {2} There are two kinds of bipartite distinctions: (i) separated comparison and (ii) the endpoints of a continuous order. They may overlap. ...... {3} There are two kinds of hierarchies: (i) logical specification/control and (ii) composition, in a scale of extension. They may also overlap. ...... {4} There are limits to personal attention. This leads to Bateson's "economics of flexibility", in which proven ideas become hardwired and partly unconscious and habitual at the center of your being, leaving your conscious attention for the flexible trying-out of new ideas at the periphery. ...... {5} #4 has a hierarchical effect: the amplification of your rational view of a PART of the world usually has a simultaneous reduction of your view's aperture. You become more "specialized". ...... {6} Limits to attention are partly overcome in individuals by hardwiring repeated ideas as memory and habit, and by external symbols, rituals and language, which all serve to condense thought for easier manipulation. In institutions, there is a direct analogy to the use of expert committees. ...... {7} Individuals, ideas, innovations, institutions are all formally similar, insofar as they all save spacetime costs of transformation, transaction, or transportation. ...... {8} There are two different kinds of growth: (i) accretive and (ii) cost-reducing, or efficient. ...... {9} Growth and crowding increase the network effects of negative externalities, logarithmically. ...... {10} The distribution of income and wealth is partly a function of the one-to-many relationship as it inheres in four different arenas: geographic centers, sociopolitical structures, mass production manufacturing, and financial asset markets. In history, these have varied in importance. ...... {11} There is an institutional categorization of social problems into central, peripheral, and external. ...... {12} There are two basic kinds of extended systems organization: (i) directed attractors (represented by the snowflake symmetry) and (ii) feed-forward webs (e.g. foodwebs). They are often different perspectives upon the same system. ...... {13} Feed-forward webs, such as wildlife foodwebs or climate models, are deterministically unpredictable but they have certain general effects that include regular gyrations, and abrupt changes when external forcings are applied. ...... {14} There are apparent limits to formal rationality, as typified in certain areas such as n-body indeterminism, Cantor's continuum problem, Heisenberg's uncertainty, Godel's incompleteness, Arrow's impossibility. There are, on the other hand, baffling epistemological affordances such as the principle of least action in physics. In general: in thinking, we come to higher contexts which are not computable. However, it may be possible to construct a typology of paradoxes that would lead to further scientific discovery. ...... {15} The one-to-many relationship is at the same epistemological level as mathematics, but it is NOT mathematics. In other words, there is another formal symbolic understanding that stands alongside mathematics, and in fact contains mathematics as a specialized subdivision "within" it. ...... {16} We develop further the neo-Kantian view that knowledge is an autopoietic construction. Any expression of consistency in the universe will be partly a function of the observing organism. ...... {17} Science and consciousness are the two incommensurate directions of a DUAL epistemology.
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About ecolanguage
Inspired by the language of Howard T. Odum and the philosophy of Gregory Bateson.
"Truth can never be told so as to be understood, and not be believed."
--William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1793)
In memory of my brother Harold