the intentional marketplace

Wednesday, December 11, 2013

Midweek Market Monetarist Links and Summaries - 12/11/13

Sunday, December 8, 2013

Dreams of Main Street, Going Forward

...Again this is not exactly a practical post - for who knows what Main Street U.S.A. might look like in the decades ahead. One only hopes that it doesn't continue to resemble the institutional limitations that have taken away much of its relevance. This polarization of economic opportunity has created either environments with numerous options, or else environments where little job potential or excitement can be had, except in specific work domains. Some areas also have job creation (particularly energy related) which doesn't translate well into diverse opportunities for community in larger context.

In such places, the energy that was Main Street mostly belongs to the past, such as where I presently live. Here, buildings remain which seriously should have been torn down years ago, alongside a few recent developments. The new ones were doubtless constructed with high hopes, but had no takers for their intended purpose. New construction can make for really expensive warehousing on Main Street! If you build it...

Of course some locales will always be more conducive for productive conditions than others and geography helps. However - historically speaking - I feel that location potential in the U.S. remains very open. In some ways, much of our geography and demographics are like an untested blank slate. Many a town still has good highway access that has been maintained for decades. And yet, too many roads have mostly been left to the eighteen wheelers that keep passing through. Plenty of these places would like to have both products and services in more accessible contexts. How could locals make that happen for themselves?

If nothing else, approach it like a game. While I'm not a "gamer", there are certainly game aspects to economic life that have always been fun - which is something that a lot of people miss. If people were given the chance to make greater production, services and other product formations happen, what might they come up with? Sure, small towns can't support many product formulations in continuous patterns, but why not have contests for different product settings once a month or however long residents are willing to support them? It sure beats great food places closing down, for instance, because people can't eat out often enough for the restaurant to pay the monthly rent. Then, people find themselves forced to drive to the next larger town when they do want to eat out.

Why do so many communities have a lack of imagination, when it comes to keeping their Main Street "happening"? Don't just let buildings sit empty. There's got to be ways to put something exciting in a store front (and in the entire building for that matter) that gets people's attention. All the local pride in the world doesn't translate effectively when Main Street looks like failed dreams and cynicism.

All of this, even though it is local aspects of economic life, ties into a conversation that has been ongoing for a couple of years, and a link to a 2012 post (HT Farnam Street) helped me put these thoughts into perspective. First, I'll state what seems obvious but perhaps is not. Roads of all kinds can transcend poverty mindsets and limitations. That is, to the degree that anyone can continue to travel them and the roads actually lead to substantial destinations. They were the defining infrastructure of the 20th century, which allowed millions to experience life in ways that had previously been impossible.

Anyone who can't travel today's roads in their present forms, is not really able to take part in economic life unless they have infrastructure alternatives. By no means does everyone need the same alternatives: they just need ways to take part in activities with others, because not having this is the ultimate form of poverty. Life becomes needlessly painful, when people forget to devise reasonable alternatives for different income capacities.

Likewise, the roads of the Internet will need for vehicles of logic to find connecting points and destinations along their pathways. Until this happens, the highways and byways of the Internet remain as a set of lungs which can't quite bring oxygen to the body itself, in services and knowledge use terms. In the twentieth century, friendships were made because of the roads we were able to travel with the help of the automobile. Today, friends are often made because of the roads people have created through Internet pathways. What then is different about these two infrastructures?

They represent different aspects of the Maslow pyramid. Numerous aspects of physical infrastructure are forgotten innovational elements lower incomes still need, at the base of the pyramid. That is, innovation is not just something that needs to happen for higher income levels. When anyone speaks of physical needs largely being met in the developed world, they miss the fact that not everyone is using basic infrastructures in the same ways at all. The developing world presently has an advantage over the developed world in this regard, because some nations recognize the need for innovative infrastructure all along the income continuum.

Before private industry can be as effective as before, infrastructural innovation needs to happen for lower income first, so that they can continue to participate in the offerings of private industry. People need real economic pathways and destinations where they are, and how they are capable of living their lives. But the supply side has not been alone in its lack of recognition for growth potential. Those who work in services have not understood the potential for reorganization and greater inclusion which the digital realm now makes possible. Services are the tremendous untapped growth potential of the present, and much of this resides at the upper end of the Maslow pyramid.

The neglect of actual services potential is every bit as striking, as the forgotten element of infrastructural choice for those who will elect not to drive in the future. In both circumstance, those who see only economic stagnation in the future, are not considering the substantial degree of infrastructure that people still need in multiple aspects of their lives. That same lack of imagination on Main Street, is echoed in the streets of Washington.

Main Streets of the 20th century were about our production potential in terms of product we could see, touch, and bring home in our cars. To say that Main Streets of the 21st century can be more about services, does not mean those services would look as they do now. For one thing, too many of our services were artificially separated from one another, so that time was wasted just running up and down the road to the places that had been designated for them. What's more, we made many of those services seem a lot more harsh and rigid than they ever should have been. Indeed, we still hold up those twentieth century standards and cringe when it seems the U.S. has fallen behind every one else. Why did the U.S. shuffle to the back of the statistical line, when it could have innovated again? Perhaps we know the answer.

Thursday, December 5, 2013

Is This Really A Resume? Time Use Possibilities

Admittedly this post has been a long time coming. There is a fanciful aspect to the idea of exchanging skills sets with others, which goes well beyond the usual constraints of institutional expectations. Some matchups would result in services product remembered for years to come. However, umm, we are talking about locally recorded activities here, by those who participate in the transactions! Much of what we purchase through the course of our lives also contains personal elements beyond actual production processes. However, technology can bring far more product into our lives, than the fixed scarcities we have available for lateral services time. Fortunately, we experience these realms quite differently, and their unique aspects are not hard to recognize.

When we designate a specific economic domain which captures and monitors skills sets instead of product separate from ourselves, everything changes. That is, our time use reverts back to front and center, and the social element no longer detracts from but instead becomes an active counterpart to production process. Just as money options are limited for random scarcities and their product formations, our time is a fixed scarcity in its own right. Therefore, even though our skill set resumes (on offer for the time of others) can certainly be playful, they still need to be full of meaning and purpose.

Think how daunting a resume may be, for anyone who has been out of work for a while. The life lessons we have learned may seem to no longer matter, or have any context outside ourselves. We even hear that the workplace has moved "beyond" our skills sets, so to speak. How true is that? Only think about recent discussions re the high costs of stitches in hospitals (U.S.) for instance...is this really something that the rest of us couldn't figure out how to do, should the need arise? What about the multiple activities we continue to observe others performing in workplaces, which we hear are "no longer needed"? What is really going on here? If our resumes were actually intended for one another, instead of just institutions as service intermediaries, how might we approach them differently?

We have long since forgotten how to negotiate service product at the level of the individual, but there are good reasons why. For one thing, many kinds of services product which become important to us in recent decades, actually began in institutions. Even so, some important functions - research in particular - existed long before it became formalized within institutional walls. What's more, some important research functions are not readily provided by our institutions, to the degree that governments once thought would actually be possible. To be sure, community support structures for skills sets will start at rather basic levels. Just the same, many community settings could eventually become important places for ongoing research, which is no longer possible in many institutional settings.

What we are doing here is separating - yet at the same time linking together - two different kinds of economic trajectories, so that both of them make more sense in their own right. Not only would doing so be more efficient economically, but these areas would no longer struggle to cancel each out in ideological terms. We often want affordable (physical) products made as efficiently as possible through limited amounts of labor . But we also want the element of human time with one another, in a recognizable services form.

Resumes in this post are about the service products we hope to create over time, in that horizontal or lateral time trajectory. And the process of matching skills sets with one another - in many instances - will be quite unlike the skills sets we present to companies or institutions. For one thing, services would finally be freed up for multiple interpretations and variations, much as tradable goods were freed in the 20th century. Any community that reinterprets services markets would also seek to utilize high density skills use. Depending on the size of the area and skills pool potential, there would be some overlapping in the population. That is, many individuals would seek out skills adaptations with some of the same participants over time.

Local community resumes would mean shifting "baskets" of skills sets one could tap into, in any given time frame: depending on ongoing community projects, the needs of others, and one's own special challenges and aspirations. This form of resume would not just be the single page expression of recent work experience. Nor would our acceptance by others depend on highly specific skills roles. Fortunately, participants could remain connected to community life based on running accounts of ongoing economic activities, instead of being locked out by harsh and somewhat arbitrary judgments of today's credit checks, for instance.

Community size also matters: the smaller the town or local setting, the more dense and layered skills sets would become amongst participants. This is just another way of expressing what people once provided for one another quite naturally, and so in a sense there would be a return to full circle. However the societal gains could be extensive this time around, in that relatively informal methods could be combined with knowledge use gains especially from the 20th and early 21st centuries. A couple of post links today echoed the themes of cooperation and changes in emphasis for market focus, which would be inherent in local skills use strategies.

A rather basic structure of local coordination can lead to many diverse results over time, something which any local record of skills use participation would also reflect. Those who spend a significant amount of time in one place would often start to reflect that area's take on knowledge use in general. There would be local records wherever we were, in which not only our resume options and activity/dialogue logs exist, but also the logs kept by individuals who we utilize our time with. One of the first things found on such resumes might be current aspirations for skills challenges, for instance.

Such aspirations can be digitally updated whenever the local calendar gets set for a new season. Rather than single employers or employees, peers would seek out what might be thought of multiple "mini-employers", in the sense that a business owner sometimes refers to his customers. We don't have to be great at whatever it is, if someone just wants to match time to discuss, validate ideas or otherwise mull over the present mutual challenges. A little time spent in dialogue prior to commitments, would be enough for both parties to discover whether it would be worth their while to match time use. The next post will touch on another aspect of this discussion - is this all even legal? Keeping things voluntary, and informal, definitely helps.

Wednesday, December 4, 2013

From the Ground Up - Building Skills Arbitrage

It looks like a lot of economists are going to lose a battle of logic this time: the one over minimum wage hikes, that is (for instance Kevin Erdmann presents a compelling argument re historical labor shocks). Unfortunately it's not hard to decipher why voices of reason continue to fade, yet again. After all, the supply side of the economy has scarcely budged in terms of what it offers for all incomes, or allows people to actually participate in. Aggregate supply and aggregate demand are indeed entangled. And even though they may not show up in unemployment statistics, wage hikes still mean that many individuals end up abandoning job markets too soon. Communities need to try harder, to bring job markets to those who still very much need them.

Even though aggregate demand was partially supported after the onset of the Great Recession, the fact that supply side efforts were needed as well, was never really addressed. Consequently, a national dialogue for greater economic stability (in terms the public can get behind), has scarcely begun. Politicians and pundits alike continue to flounder about, while strategies for long term growth remain on the back burner. Consequently, it's up to the public to find their own means for growth strategies, and also to do so from the ground up. Building a base for skills arbitrage is a good way to start.

Some of what is attributed to structural problems, is really about the need to evolve past the limitations of present day institutional goals. Importantly, the factor of skills mismatch is constantly attributed to a lack of education. For the most part this argument completely misses the point - especially in a world where education has been extensive in relative terms. This so called "secular decline" is mostly due to the fact that countless limitations exist, both in product and production access definitions. They stand in the way of skill sets which people could already utilize from the educations they have already taken part in, through the course of their lifetimes.

Chances are, your underemployed neighbor is not really a "victim" of offshoring, for instance. Instead, she remains held hostage to the notion that her challenges and aspirations are not legal, appropriate or otherwise possible to extend to others on her own terms. Unfortunately, too many available skills sets have been usurped by the institutions along our Main Streets and other commercial designations. Some of those with the lucky commercial spots would still rather cave to the occasional wage hike, rather then let people back in to the marketplace by more rational means.

Of course there's the side benefit that wage hikes "clean" up neighborhoods nicely (snark intended) and send yet more unfortunates packing for parts unknown, One can only hope that the forgotten do not remain so, indefinitely. In that spirit, it's time to get specific about some alternatives to the seismic shift in economic equilibrium that continues apace. Where might communities begin the process of building skills arbitrage coordination, so that local residents can take part in services to assist one another? And - in the process - gain hope for a better future?

There are a number of ways to approach services curriculums and calendars at local levels. The most obvious is that of supplementing strapped public school systems, as well as the curriculums of some private schools. It would not take a very extensive coordination process at all, for many communities to quickly move past the offerings that most schools are able to provide with their given budgets. Add to that some of the ongoing issues which individuals don't have ready answers for, and you have a place to think about beginning a community calendar. Plus, social elements need not be factored out, as they are often more important than they may seem.

To be sure, early versions of coordination for local economic agendas may appear crude, but then any beginning system or product seems that way at first: so was the computer. However it would be quite freeing for participants to be allowed numerous tries in terms of services offerings - something not always possible in more formal environments . After all, when institutions place products into the marketplace, they may be committed to that product in a long term sense, even if it isn't really needed as before. But what choice do they have? A lot of pain can be involved in letting go of products, for many reasons. What's more, the loss of the product may mean the loss of the institution as well.

Communities and individuals which would create multiple dynamic product offerings at any given moment, don't carry that same degree of survival risk, for they would effectively be supporting one another in mutual skills risk pools. Not every skills investment will necessarily "pay off", of course. When do they ever? Just the same, pooling diverse skills and knowledge sets under single coordinated umbrellas can provide considerable economic stability.

A number of years would probably be necessary, for any community to start making real connections between new educational efforts and ongoing local needs and aspirations. Indeed, communities would need to find their own unique imprints, before they might became relocation options for others who are seeking better ways to connect with others economically. By putting knowledge and skills use first, individual risks re time use, resources and most of all, money spent for skills infrastructural needs, will have greater societal impact and community wide support than is presently the case.

Some elements of calendaring would exist for short term situations - some as simple as a series of question and answer sessions, to longer term assistance in life skill sets. Local calendars would also make room for both emergencies and spontaneous needs (and proposals) which arise. Alongside traditional educational areas would be the education connected to local production projects - all of which are integrated so as to create safety nets for coordinated investments.

The institutions we now have, were once capable of providing us invaluable service capacities and job descriptions which in many cases didn't even exist, prior to the 20th century. While some forms of knowledge use aren't necessary going forward, many other patterns of work suggest directions for knowledge use which otherwise never would have been possible. The future is not so much about abandoning our institutions, as it is simply allowing them to evolve into more useful elements of our lives.

Midweek Market Monetarist Links and Summaries - 12/4/13

Tuesday, December 3, 2013

Core Wealth (An Improvisation)

Prior to the main work on this post, my local walking path offered up its usual thought tidbits! While some posts here at least make an attempt at "reading from sheet music" (after all, "sight reading" was the way I used to approach life), clearly these thoughts would be free form, instead. So today is an improvisation in the key of C major, shall we say.

Core wealth is our unrestrained ability to make an impact on the world: not only through our perceptions of it, but also through individual and collective challenges which inspire us. In the process our environments are transformed through our insights, our modifications, adaptations, imaginings and desires. The components we create from resources, the products that result from the components, the ways we experience product, the environment which holds the product and in turn the ways we experience the environments which hold the product of our minds...

And in a fully functioning economy, this process occurs along the entire continuum of income and resource availability, not just on specific points on the continuum itself. For when such limitation occurs, the very wealth of all creation is still expected to also support the life that it may insist is not also free, to create and participate. We end up with near slavery conditions when this is forgotten.

The most basic wealth we know, is about applying the knowledge and skill of the world, to our own immediate concerns and interactions with others. Do we continue to have common templates which we in fact can gather similar associations from? If not, who has templates that could readily work with our own income and resource capacity, let alone unique challenge? Is knowledge something that our institutions actually allow us to improve our own sets of circumstances, or do our institutions jealously guard it, so that our only access to knowledge is in the event that one of them hires us?

We are in a unique position of core wealth potential, if the window does not close before it is recognized. Indeed, the riches of more than a century of dedicated educational efforts across the world, have resulted in thick layers which are just waiting to be tapped into. The possibility of wealth capture today, is no less than the moment when society first took to agriculture, or when guilds focused skills use and capacity, hundreds of years earlier. There are only two things holding us back: Local community needs to take over the old roles of guilds and cartels so as to coordinate knowledge use and resource transformation amongst all. Plus we need to return to time, as the field where each can till the soil of knowledge use.

In the present, local communities and individuals are held back. Our institutions still insist on the right to create the products that both need, with no input from those who need to adapt the product for sustainable local use. It's as though each gardener of knowledge use has became a sharecropper because of institutional holdings. These knowledge use sharecroppers may or may not have enough resources left from the institutional harvest, to even contribute to the infrastructural needs of the institutions themselves. And yet increasingly, all of the institutions are demanding more from both community and individual, even though the actual core of wealth had previously been claimed by institutions already. Each of us needs ground (representative lateral knowledge use time) that we can till from, if we are able to contribute and not be a drag on the rest.

But before individual and community can reclaim this core wealth, they need to recognize wealth for what it actually consists of. Once money becomes capable of representing core wealth, each individual will once again have the chance to find meaning, in their journey through possessions and responsibility. When this process is finally allowed to happen, central bankers will not be so likely to obscure the primary purpose of money as they are today. So far, those who speak of money as representative of true spending capacity, have hardly been heard.

Presently, it is entirely too easy for central bankers to be distracted by financial tools, credit use and the growth trajectories of vital resources. However, without adequate representation on the part of the human mind, all the financial tools and resources of the world only bite the dust, time and again. When skills use capacity falls out of the equation, many people start to believe that money is the source of societal ills. However, money is not the problem: the problem is one of individuals who desire to bend money representation toward their own ends. Money has incredible capacity to assist people in their desire for freedom, if and when it is given the chance to do so.

What do people perceive as possible? Or, what do we perceive ourselves as capable of creating both individually and collectively? Are those visions capable of including the fruits of our imagination, or is this vital element something that has been reserved for minds other than our own? Even though we may be able to reach for and achieve the vision that someone else had, we only add on what appears as wealth. After all, it cannot have the same meaning to us, if we are not somehow connected to the transformative process.

Here are just some of the benefits of time arbitrage in lateral use terms, as a key part of core wealth. For one, people would have the ability to provide experiential settings for one another which could add considerable dimension to their lives. A part of this could exist as a kind of quality preservation which might not otherwise be possible in exogenous (global) production settings. However, these settings would exist alongside the benefits of exogenous wealth that allows people to choose the most important "slow economy" experiences, given fixed time scarcity. Another added element would be freed up time for numerous negotiation processes: processes which many governmental institutions no longer have time or resources to provide, that are still vitally important.

However, one of the more important elements of core wealth is the capacity for time arbitrage to create full employment along the entire knowledge use spectrum. By no means would full employment exist only in a low skill capacity. And, the time arbitrage which entrepreneurs and others already take for granted amongst one another, could take the place of what has become "missing labor". While this employment would not exist in the same sense as "ordinary" income, one's ability to create product designed to income capacity is what could make the difference. What's more, the green light for personal innovation would allow many to resume economic growth without resorting to the use of credit. What's more, this integrated aspect of production and consumption could allow the process to happen without added inflation effects.

By embracing core wealth, no one would have to worry about economic inclusion, for time arbitrage could be utilized as the missing link between fixed scarcities and random scarcities. Utilizing core wealth would not only allow societies to reintegrate local endogenous efforts with global exogenous activities, it would make every economic place of activity important in its own right.

Update: A link from Daren Acemoglu and James Robinson includes this quote, "...there is curiously very little work on how politics affect endogenous technology, which seems a clearly under-researched area."

Sunday, December 1, 2013

Butterfly Community

Before the normal back to work week starts up, it feels appropriate to "wander" a bit and do some dreaming. Therefore this post also includes "what would be nice for the long run" or a wish list writ large. What might butterfly communities include? Concepts that run along these lines of course include "pay it forward", where for instance, someone may pull up to a fast food window, only to find that the person ahead has already paid their tab. And unlike the careful missions of non profits, these impulses can apply to anyone from any walk of life.

There's also "random acts of kindness": a movement of sorts which started up some years ago. People decided to be kind to others for no good reason at all, with some interesting results. Once I had a book by that name, but I just found this website. And back in high school, some of the choirs sang this song, "Let There Be Peace on Earth" which includes the line about peace, "and let it begin with me". Oftentimes I'm too much a grouch for that, but I've always been a sucker for the holiday season, just the same.

How might one create a true synthesis of such ideas, so that we would not wind up with the daily news I see in those Foreign Policy links - most of which are way too depressing to even link to. Local and national television news have long since tried to include positive stories in their broadcasts, but they've got a long way to go before they ever have 30 minutes of positive news. Many people are trying to do their own small part in what the world might become, but a lot of efforts still get drowned out in the cacophony of disillusionment and yes, despair.

Even though it's readily apparent that many societal problems have economic underpinnings, it's just not easy to present economic arguments so as to capture the heartstrings of the public. If policy makers and economists are really having sleepless nights over current economic woes, that is still going over the head of much of the public.

As a result, much of the job of societal encouragement still goes to spiritual leaders, but I'd wager right now that they need a bit of help. In the U.S. lots of self help now comes from the pulpit, for what it's worth. And to the surprise of many, Pope Francis thinks that a certain conservative U.S. mindset is a big economic problem (shall we say), which didn't make Greg Mankiw very happy. Perhaps Pope Francis is not as down on capitalism as Mankiw thinks, at least one would hope.

Even though I regret that Pope Francis reacted the way he did, he should not be the one having sleepless nights over the pressing economic issues of the world. Plenty of us have a lot more time than he does, to be thinking how one might spread the idea, over time, of butterfly communities.

For years I liked "snowflake community" and the uniqueness that each community implied, yet all with a recognizable structure. But something was missing. For one thing, not everyone gets snowflakes. And even the concept of uniqueness wasn't exactly new, because there was a time when many a town and region was indeed quite unique, one from the other. So when I returned to the Wikipedia page for the Butterfly effect, the initial description felt right. Certain initial conditions in a nonlinear system could create large differences in a later state. And that's what the daydreaming of this post is about.

Some things just deserve to be said as simply as possible. For instance, whenever I hear tirades against neoliberalism: for the life of me, I can't make any sense out of what the people who are leveling the charges actually want, other than perhaps just feeling better that they are getting something off their chest. Power to the laborer? Solidarity? How about some community solidarity for a change, and some local economic support for the individuals who feel so alone and cut off from the world.

Take a drive in countless towns in the U.S. They are barren economic wastelands, devastated by the loss of local production, let alone the random city densities of services which leave service deserts in their wake. For many communities, practically the only local "production" to be had is housing, served with a slice of agriculture or some other commodity. These days, the idea of laborer in local work scenarios is mostly an abstract notion where in the reality of small towns everywhere, there is hardly any work to be had. In its absence is a growing drug world that mirrors that of some developing nations. Think about it. There is an unbelievable economic vacuum waiting to be filled in the nation I inhabit. And while someone may in fact be doing something about it, I have not yet heard the stories. Let alone, felt the results.

So it gets left to bums like me with no college degree, to dream about butterfly communities. The odd part is that the world around me has more patience when I "smile" and explain myself, no matter how silly or laughable the explanation seems. I fought the idea for years of always being "nice". I wanted to argue! An old friend used to tell me, when he wanted me to lighten up, "You're prettier when you smile". Society will usually allow everyone a bit of rant space, but it depends on how much sense we already make to others. If others struggle to understand where we are coming from, rants don't accomplish as much.

Don't get me wrong, the word "community" is by no means completely appropriate. One cringes when it gets used for local banking advertisements, and others might say, "when I hear the word community I reach for my gun..." I get that. However, there is not another word that really works well for the needed context. Where the word does presently work well is in the context of like preferences and associations. By extension it could also apply to structure diverse preferences and associations in more cohesive and understandable patterns. In particular, hourly services arbitrage could allow for greater density optimization in small towns, than some cities make possible now, through older patterns of services use.

Importantly, city and town already carry very separate connotations, which has not been helpful in recent centuries in economic terms. Too many people continue to believe that survival means escaping the limited places where they begin. Unfortunately, many places of economic hope are busily putting up no vacancy signs in the present, in relative terms.

Therefore a big part of the battle ahead, is to overcome the separateness which exists between city and town. That's particularly true, in light of what is expected on the part of citizens who choose to remain in their environments. In other words, people have to feel that growth and stability is possible wherever one is, instead of always through escape. People from my generation learned the hard way, that escape did not always mean greener grass at the next landing. Before any of us can fly, we need economic environments which allow us to thrive, before we even take on our wings.