Money is a funny idea. As natural as it seems today, our ancestors rebelled against it for centuries (ask Mutual Aid). Money is an incredibly useful tool, but it has huge social and institutional effects, where the minutest choices in the arbitrary rules surrounding it can have huge differences.

We choose to use a single idea of money as exchange for both items and actions (but not jobs or college admissions), land (but not air), advertising space (but not ideas), institutions (but not people), power (but not freedom), and security (but not safety). Money isn’t supposed to be used to buy and sell sex, votes, or ideologies, but it is. We allow money to be given away or held indefinitely, irrespective of the individualness or ephemeralness of its original granting. And we allow those who most directly generate the profitable products and services to get the least money.

But I’m not arguing against money or property today– they’re ideas that work awfully well. Capitalism provides for something like liberty, opportunity, and a high standard of living in a way no other system has come close to. I want to argue against one particularly funky practice: the use of money to make more money– that is, usury.

Usury is an ill-defined term. Lending is complicated business, and different degrees of justice are served by different limits on interest. The extremes delineations are at zero interest and free-market interest. With proper safety-nets, charging nothing extra seems perfectly just, if not more than just. Similarly, it seems fairly unchallengeable that charging more than what you could get on the free-market is clearly usurious. But there are finer gradations between.

Just up from zero interest is the charge to cover basic assessment and handling of a loan. I’ll call this epsilon interest, because I think it’s comparatively small (but it doesn’t make much difference if it’s bigger), and I include it in the other levels. Then there’s risk-insurance interest, set at a level to protect its lender from a disinterested party’s estimation of the risk of the endeavor. Sure, it’s theoretical, but it’s useful. Either above or below that level is the current “risk-free interest level”, which is whatever return the lender can get investing in risk-free endeavors (corporate finance people scale everything in terms of this interest rate). Finally, there’s the combination of risk-insurance, risk-free, and epsilon interest. In theory, the market drives toward that line of justice and interest, but not very well, as evidenced by the recent explosion of payday loans.

Good arguments could be made for crying usury at any level. I’ll argue that the limit of unjust interest is at the greater of the risk-free interest or and the risk-insurance interest. Call this the tipping interest.

I claim that the use of money to make its possessor more money is inherently unjust. Money is liquid incentive or liquid power *over other people* (directly or indirectly). If we want to ask if someone has gotten wealth justly, we have to ask, “By what do they *deserve* this wealth?” In a capitalist economy, you can justly exchange your property or use your time, mind, and body to get money, and the perceived worth in your items and actions is reflected in the money you get. You deserve the money for the worth you’ve provided.

The argument goes that, similarly, lending money is a kind of providing worth for which you should be compensated. But how can the worth of lending the money be greater than the money itself? Lending money is not the same as providing a service. Moreover, money transfer is not made just by all parties agreeing to the same contract. At best, that fact adds no injustice, but the question of deserving still needs to be answered.

At the tipping interest, investors are assured a risk-free level of interest, or the opportunity for more profit on risky endeavors. Why, then, would they loan to anything but the most institutional and conservative projects? The answer is, for *any* other reason, except for the money. The tipping interest ensures that the incentive for investment isn’t greater wealth, thereby removing the relentless drive on capitalist systems to sacrifice everything for profit. If only for the smallest reason, investment in a system with the tipping-interest cap is based on values– the non-monetary gains from the investment.

Allowing money to make money is at best unnecessary. It accelerates economic growth, which drives “poverty and hunger, environmental destruction, resource depletion, urban deterioration, unemployment” (ask Jay Forrester). It entrenches and extremities the economic divisions in society. It builds money-centered thinking into every aspect of life.

Will capping interest levels decrease opportunities for ventures that need capital, or otherwise harm the good things about capitalism? I doubt it. Investors will still have an incentive to invest their money– just not extra incentive. If this cap means that less money is in circulation, it will only increase the effective worth of those who don’t have much of it. It will decrease the worth of owning capital, but the greatness of capitalism is in the freedom, opportunity, and fluidity it provides, not its ability to support an upper-class. The tipping-interest cap equalizes society by decreasing the self-fulfilling power of the powerful and cuts capitalism’s bottom-line-is-the-only-line exploitive feedback loop.

I feel like I’ve been on fast-forward all day, and I’ve got way too much energy, too many todo items, too exciting of plans to make to go to sleep. Today, running around with a bottomless list of tasks is a blessing.

I need a new gig. I love being independent and working only under my own whip, and I love turing tricks for multiple clients, and I love the clients that I’ve found. But I can’t take pride or joy in contracting except as a means to an end, and that isn’t enough.

It’s been on my mind from a few people’s questions, and from getting hit up for help this weekend on a class I taught at Olin, and hearing about everything that’s been going on there. I gave up full-time teaching, which I loved, for contracting so I would have time for my own projects. And it’s worked, but not enough.

For years, I’ve wanted to start a learning center, or community center, or commune, or youth hostel (the idea keeps morphing) so much it hurts, but I can’t support myself on it and I can’t make significantly more progress unless I can dedicate myself to it. I do have a new money-making stepping stone idea toward it (I think I can make a kind of Neal Stevenson-style Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer), but I’ll say more on that if it pans out.

I am close to having a project– a travelers community site– advanced enough that I’m pretty sure it could support someone full-time just traveling and working on it and promoting it… but I’m back to never wanting to leave our Cambridgian fairyland. Not permanently, that is. Anyone want to be a professional vagabond?

Disclaimer: I hold a regular Salon discussion group, with wide-ranging conversations on politics, philosophy, society, and life. The thoughts in this post came from a recent Salon, but are not meant to be an accurate reflection of the dialogue.

One topic we discussed was the possibility that the use of money to make money– that is, usury– may be the origin of many of capitalism’s problems. I have many thoughts on that one, so I’m going to leave it for it’s own post. [Don’t let me forget to write that one.]

We started by talking about Bush and his [then] newest foolishness: the rejection of the recommendations of the Iraq Study Group. When his public approval and political capital are at history-setting lows, and the situation in Iraq getting ever more disastrous, it seems inconceivable that he would hang on like a tick to his hard-line “victory against the infidels” stance. Unless he actually believes the drivel he spews.

At a protest two years ago, a speaker read from the autobiography of a cold war general whose name I forget. He spoke of the times he almost removed his stars so he could speak freely about his doubts of the reasonableness of the American actions he was helping to engineer– but ultimately he didn’t because everyone else seemed so solid in their beliefs. Much later, he found out that everyone had similar doubts, and kept them private just like him.

Jeff described a similar situation, but where parroting gave way to belief. People at his company spent so long excusing and using an effective advertising untruth that they forgot it wasn’t accurate. If people propound a belief enough, they can forget that they never believed it. Just like in Don’t Think of an Elephant, facts and beliefs have only the most tenuous connection. Beliefs are to facts what form is to content– except that the human mind works far more with beliefs than with facts.

We carry around a model of the world in our heads, the composite of all our beliefs, which performs two basic functions. Every causal relationship we understand about the world is a consequence of this model, and as such it is the basis of all our decisions. Causality cannot come from observed facts alone, and must rely on a baseless belief (ask Lacan, “decisions are mad”). Second, it manages our perceptions. The senses take in a colossal amount of data, but it is only the details called out as interesting by our model that arrive at the consciousness. As such, the facts we absorb are inseparable from the belief system we hold.

In this sense, belief, model, paradigm, and Weltanschauung are essentially the same, and it follows that the majority of our intelligent knowledge and mental capabilities are functions of our models of the world. The same is true of our stupidities– see Libertarianism Makes You Stupid, or NLP’s claims about the structure of neuroses.

To reword Chomsky’s Plato’s Problem, where do models come from? Artificial life programs have tried to provide a sufficient basis for arbitrarily complex models through competition– with interesting but inconclusive results. Their approach is by random evolutionary changes, where the most effective models result in the most capable organisms. The analogy to human models claims that our heads are competitive environments where memes (the Dawkins kind) battle it out (I had been reading Edge just before the Salon).

Models don’t just live in the mind. They pass from person to person, and have been honed by a million years to do so. Models live in the collective consciousness, and we are constantly passing them around like airborne viruses in the complex and unconscious ways we communicate with each other. As said in the bedroom scene in Waking Life, “When a member of a species is born, it has a billion years of memory to draw on.”

Of course, serviceability isn’t the only reason a particular model will predominate, because the collective consciousness can be variously hospitable to certain ideas. That’s how parroting (and lying) can lead to whole-hearted belief.

Another ramification is that most of the guts of our intelligence are hidden from us. If civilization were to collapse, how much of our knowledge would we be able to draw on? Aside from the knowledge that’s only applicable in a world built to support it, no knowledge is entirely separable from the frameworks that support it. Every container we have for knowledge– our memories, the collective consciousness, the written language, mathematical systems– is deeply structured, and almost none of the knowledge is can stand on its own, outside those containers. Whole areas of mathematical truths that we take to be necessary and obvious where a confounding struggle to the ancient Greeks– and, similarly, some of their simplest truths we can only describe with difficulty.

The biggest piece I’m missing in these notes was our discussion of redistribution of wealth versus ideal libertarianism—the self-determination libertarianism allows and its problem with children. One solution to children in libertarian society is to consider them as extensions of their parents, but the potential for exploiting people that way is almost endless. With the above discussion, I wonder if it makes sense to consider anyone to be truly independent. We rely on each other and society not only for everything we do, but for everything we think.

Jeff had one suggestion which deserves more airtime: currently social security is taken as a percentage out of people’s paychecks, up to a certain amount—but that places the burden most on the wrong people. Why not flip it? We should be taking a percentage out from all paychecks only down to a certain amount, and leave the poorest unburdened.

Happy New Years, all!

d_day‘s party was fantastic! It was a great group of people, and more good food and drink than you can shake a newly emptied champagne bottle at. I got to experience the legendary “rocket”, eat some excellent good brownies, and try my mouth on the ice luge. As the night wore on people mellowed into little clusters of good conversation. I eventually chose my own bed over crashing and New Years brunching, but I hope that went well.

Aaaand, my crew was almost all there, making it Cortney and Cassandra’s first party! Sadly, we didn’t have any a_c_i_d‘s or anastasia1‘s to initiate them, but I think (and I hope!) that they’ll be coming to more parties, so there’ll be more opportunities.

I wrote this for someone, but I’m going to share it for fun– a song for when you’re down:

Raindrops on papers and lightning in windows,
Bright golden boxers and ill innuendos,
Mummified monsters all tied up by queens,
These are a few of my favorite scenes.

When Riff-Raff bites,
When Columbia sings,
When Frank’s feeling up Brad,
I simply remember my favorite scenes
And then I don’t feeeeel sooo baaaaad.

Yoinked from siderea:

In 2007, jrising resolves to…

Overcome my secret fear of lucid dreams.
Backup my hypnotism regularly.
Take metagenie unschooling.
Volunteer to spend time with politics.
Apply for a new parecon.
Ask my boss for a chocolate.

Get your own New Year’s Resolutions:

I’m still trying to figure out how it knew about my secret fear.

And here’s an LJ toy of my own. Below is the graph of the total livejournal activity of my friends over the past year. On the left, each point represents someone’s [public] post, with the height being the number of comments. The right shows a bar for every day: blue is posts, red is comments.

I’m really curious about the bar graph: the post counts vary by day of week but are fairly constant over time, but the comment counts seem to come in long waves (must do longer-timespan analysis!). I built the toy to possibly do some nifty word frequency analysis or subject vs. comment count comparisons– but I’ll do that later. If you want a graph of your own, or have other fun ideas of extensions for this analyzer, just comment below.

It’s the time of year when schools relax their panopticon, the consumerist machine casts its nets, and good little philosophers snuggle into their books and reflect. My year has been full– filled with challenges, good times with good friends, and opportunities for new work, play, and growth– and defies recap. Instead, here are the changes I feel like I’m going through now, though I don’t know how far they’ll go. I’d love it if others took this as a meme (though your list will probably look very different from mine).

I’ve developed a distaste for my habits of philosophical reflection and conscious growth (like this? *sigh*). I tend to approach the world like an ever-blooming flower: I’ll unfurl each petal, stretch it to catch the light, and let it fall to make room for another. But now my obsession with that progress has become a barrier– my destiny is in the world, not in my head. I love reflection, but now less so when it’s self-absorbed or disconnected from the world, or pot-riddled– it’s all fun, but that’s all it is. I love growth, but I believe it can be intentional and ongoing without being planned or considered.

I have a greater appreciation for the overlookable details. A friend of mine learned ski-instruction in India, where the slopes go for miles. He said you could just tilt your head, or shift your attention, and the skis would follow. The greatest thing I learned from traveling is the huge effects on how people interacted with me based on the slightest variations of mood and presentation. We get to choose the rules to this game called life, and the instruction manual is written in life’s unnecessary complexities, details, and accessories, which I’m growing to love. I spent ten years developing an externally simple life; now I’m giving that up for some playful ambiguities.

I’ve refooted my sexual interests and sexual self. It took me a long time to get comfortable sleeping alone again, and I was driven by what I didn’t have. But I’m think I’m now more comfortable personally, sexually, and socially than any time since awakening my sexual interest (four years ago). I’m happy with the relationships I have with my male and female friends, and happy living up being single. While deep relationships are incredible and all, I think for now I’ll dedicate myself to seducing women for the thrills of that game.

This year I also got into experimental jazz, salsa dancing, exercise, and sexual display, but those aren’t worth philosophizing about.

Precarious. But I’m too involved to try fixing it.

• Many friends have left to visit their no-longer-homes; at the moment, my plan is to vacation in Cambridge except for Christmas Eve. I’m staying at the Opium Den to care for Chloe-the-cat starting Sunday. If anyone is around and wants some adventure, get in touch.
• I now have two trashed houses to clean: left-overs from a triple-whammy of the Rocky Party, a Salon, and Claudia staying over. Somehow Claudia can generate more mess than 30 drunk Rockys– and making me feel more used than a hawk president who can’t take a hint. Sometimes.
• I finally saw Reefer Madness the Musical on DVD! The choreography is beautiful!, and the pot-riddled situations and characters so true. I can’t wait to see the MIT production– starting January 26.
• I did my first real winter-gift shopping today (not counting a window-shopping trip a few days ago to re-awaken my consumerism). One more day ought to do it.
• My impulse self-purchase was How to Succeed with Women which looks better than it sounds. I’m quite happy with my female relations now, but it’ll be good for the long-term. I’m trying to decide if I want to create a distinct real-life persona to try out a bunch of social experiments.

I want to teach a seminar in ESG next semester, but all of my ideas require a fair amount of preparation, and I like them all too much to decide between them. So I want to hear your reactions: below are descriptions of the classes I’m trying to decide between. What sounds interesting to you, and are there any variations or related topics that you’d want in the classes?

FYI, non-MIT people are always welcome at my seminars and activities. I may also do parts of these as activities during January, when MIT becomes a seething mass of zany seminars, projects, and gatherings.

The Coming Years: An Exploration of the Future

I just realized: I know of no experience I’ve had that was bad enough that I wouldn’t want to do it again, more, harder– in the right situation. My life is a sham. Do you have an experience that I might find abominable, or might change my life?

I’ll do almost anything once.