What Game Are We Playing?

October 16th, 2008 Posted in Social Invention, Surplus Value, Crisis Seroquel For Sale Acticin No Prescription Buy Lasuna No Prescription Buy Online Shallaki Buy Motrin Online Levlen For Sale Zimulti No Prescription Buy Vantin No Prescription Buy Online Elimite Buy Topamax Online Prinivil For Sale Lotensin No Prescription Buy Prozac No Prescription Buy Online Hyzaar Buy Karela Online Doxycycline For Sale Serevent No Prescription Buy Erythromycin No Prescription Buy Online Maxaquin Buy Zoloft Ultram Online Vasodilan For Sale Female Viagra No Prescription Buy Lynoral No Prescription Buy Online Erythromycin Buy Evista Online

“I owe you my life,” says the person snatched from the sea to his rescuer.

“Forget it,” answers the coast guard sailor. “All in a day’s work.”

There is a giving, a rendering of a service, without consideration. More generally, a gift establishes an obligation to reciprocate at some future time.

The debt exists as an informal burden to be redeemed as opportunity allows.  There might be no occasion. The giver might return to the anonymous whole, recognized but unidentified (neither name or address). The only chance to give back might be as a pass-along, giving  in turn to still another. An explosion of giving.

We are all familiar with this game-like social order.  The governing values are service, duty, altruism.  An early recognition of this concept is in Marcel Mauss’s sociological essay, “The Gift.”

The commercial sector has the same pattern of giving and receiving except the return is formal and immediate.  No by-and-by here.  There is an exchange, a trade.  Usually a material object or a service is given (sold) for a cash consideration (a payment).

The commercial way is governed by law and the courts. The values upheld are egoism and advantage.  The advantage is built into the seller’s side by the conventional notions of profit and on the creditor’s side with interest on debt.  There is no absolute guarantee of this return–the manufacturer, merchant, and banker can suffer loss, go broke,  bankrupt–in fact they need the advantage to succeed. The system of the game establishes the outcomes as painfully real and serious.  What some see as avarice is merely an desperate attempt to avoid loss.

The governing regime sets and enforces the rules of the game and the acts seeking advantage follow the paths of the law.  The notion that the government does not intervene in the private sector is a fiction.  The government is behind the game itself.

Money is essential for a large industrial and post-industrial society with a complex division of labor.  And as long as our trades are even-up, there is no systematic advantage, and we all participate as producers and consumers the socio-economic way will continue  placidly and uneventfully.  The major disruptions will be from natural events –hurricanes, crop failures, and such.  Think the biblical story of the fat and lean years.

But with advantage at the heart of the rules of the game there is a tendency for money, in some part, to escape from its connection with material goods and services and follow a dynamic of its own.  The fruits of advantage accumulate as a money surplus–that part of our marker system not required for the on-going real economy.  All of us with any savings, no matter how small or big, participate in this surplus and we are all eager to maximize our advantage by seeking out the highest interest return with the lowest chance of loss–the mini-max strategy.  But there is, eventually, more money than investment opportunities.  The system always reaches a falling rate of return.  The bubble reaches its limit.  Those into the surplus are pushed to excessive actions–increase return by keeping labor costs down. Limit the power of trade unions, send factories and production abroad to cheap labor countries.  Encourage undeveloped countries to accept massive loans they can only pay by impoverishing their people. Leverage financial bets astronomically so that failure threatens the whole system. Sell houses at bubble popping time to people who can only afford them in a rising market. And so on.  The logic of the system always leads to the bubble.

The management of the system in the USA falls to the political regime in power assisted by academic experts and by stock brokers and bankers seconded from  Wall Street to Washington DC. Except for the excesses of the political leaders who are dominated by rigid ideologies, this gang has been remarkably successful since the Great Depression. Hot and cold wars which assured massive governmental participation in the economic sector have made their job easier.

The current crisis is unusually dramatic.The system has become global–sort of a modern version of the Tower of Babel. The amount of paper of doubtful value has no measure beyond very large. The falling stock market and the actual statistics for the real economy are discouraging. The expectation that sometime the flaws in the system will lead to a crisis beyond the ability of the service cadre to control. And so the fearful spectra of a replay of the 1930s.

But do not despair.  A friend of mine tells the story of being drafted into the Army in the early 1940s.  They took him to the supply room and gave him clothes. They took him to the mess hall and gave him food. They took him to the barracks and gave him a bed.  They gave him a pass into town and he went to a dance.  All the girls were beautiful.  At the end of his first month in service they gave him his pay–$15.00 clear.  He thought it over and decided, obviously, that he had died and gone to heaven.  Either that or “Happy Days Are Here Again.”

The farmers, bless them, produced the fruit of the earth and sent it to market.  Rents were cheap and many houses empty. Wages were low but with luck one could get a job or go on welfare temporarily or join a New Deal work program, or volunteer for the Spanish Civil War.  To paraphrase Lenny Bruce: a Depression like this can’t be all bad.

Later.