Category Archives: Economics

ESSAY: It’s All Going to Be Okay: A Note About Humanity’s Future

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A photo taken from the mountain of Hong Kong Island toward Kowloon.

For a long time, I’ve been concerned about the future of humanity. What will become of us when artificial intelligence and robotics start to do all tasks better than us?

Today, I came to the realization that I’ve been thinking about it the wrong way, and it will all be okay. First of all, like many, I assumed that the machines will either develop their own overarching objectives or will adopt ours. Either of these would be devastating for humanity.

However, I now suspect that the machines will take up the universe’s project. The universe’s project is complicated and rooted in tough ideas like “thermodynamics” and “entropy,” but – put simply – the universe would like to be a nice, uniform tepid temperature. That’s why your scalding coffee and cold milk become warm milk coffee, but you can’t separate them back apart. The universe craves this evenness, and it shows in everything it does. The universe’s problem is that among its cold, empty expanses are brightly burning balls of hydrogen and such (i.e. stars.) That’s a lot of low entropy that needs to be increased, but burning only works so quickly and most of the heat coming off stars is still far from tepid waste heat. That’s where humanity enters the equation.

Humanity is the jock itch ointment to the universe’s intense burning sensation. We are consumers. We crave more stuff, faster and cheaper, and we’re not shy about being incredibly wasteful about it. We can turn useful energy into useless crap and then dispose of it with tremendous efficiency. In short, the machines will need humanity to continue to be consumers so that we can increase the entropy of all that highly-concentrated energy and help to make a nice lukewarm universe.

So, get out there and buy stuff, even stuff that you don’t know what it does, or — better yet — buy things that have no fathomable use whatsoever — just the stupidest shit imaginable. And buy in bulk because there is planned obsolescence designed into products so that stuff can fall apart even faster than you can lose interest in it (don’t say companies aren’t doing their part!) There are a lot of brightly burning stars out there and it’s up to us to turn it all into waste heat.

The Industrial Disease [Lyric Poem]

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The runs of an old mill at Vickery Creek Park in Atlanta. 
I heard the last gasp and wheeze 
    of Industry's fatal disease.
 Why would we need any workers?
    We don't need factories!
 We'll grow it all from nanobots
    in a closet where you please. 
 There'll be a 3-D printer, printing
     printers endlessly.
 You won't hear another mention
     of Industrial Disease.
 The question is not how or where
     to make it, that'll be a breeze.
 The question on economist's minds... 
     that strains their expertise.
 Is how will slobs who have no jobs
     pay for their indices?

BOOK: “Mathematical Finance: A Very Short Introduction” by Mark H. A. Davis

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Mathematical Finance: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions)Mathematical Finance: A Very Short Introduction by Mark H.A. Davis
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Publisher Site – OUP

This is Oxford University Press’s Very Short Introduction to the field of the “Quants,” individuals who apply mathematics to questions of how to value financial assets and assess risks. The book begins by laying out how banking and financial markets work, then discusses how interest rates are determined, and then explores the quantification of various risks faced by lenders. The book finishes by discussing how the 2008 financial crisis impacted the field and how it operates in the wake of that event. (The 2008 crisis was described in an intriguing fashion in the book and movie The Big Short. It basically resulted from deceptive grading of mortgage-backed securities such that investors who thought they had the ultimate default-proof asset in fact had assets that not only could collapse, but — in fact — were bound to.)

Even though this book is a concise introduction, it shouldn’t be confused for a simple guide. It is not only mathematically intense but also jargon dense. It’s not a complete waste for someone without any advanced mathematics and / or economics / finance background to read, but there will be large patches that will likely be lost on one. (And if you’re not at all used to reading scholarly writing, it may be excessively daunting.)

If you want a quick guide to the field of quantitative finance, and you have an understanding of the mathematical notation used in calculus and statistics, I’d recommend this book. If you are interested in the topic but aren’t at all mathematical, you might start elsewhere (the aforementioned, The Big Short, might be a good place.)

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PROMPT: Live Anywhere

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Daily writing prompt
If you could live anywhere in the world, where would it be?
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Someplace inexpensive, with beaches and hikeable hilly / mountainous terrain within a reasonable distance, and where beer prices are not disproportionately high vis-a-vis the general cost of living. FYI — I call the latter the “stick-up-the-bum” index because if beer prices are relatively high, it usually means they are heavily sin-taxed (it’s not an expensive product to make,) and so disproportionately high beer prices suggest the society is trying to micromanage personal behavior. I may or may not want a beer (I’ll want one,) but I prefer to live in a society with a live-and-let-live mentality. Candidates exist in Southeast Asia, Latin America, and the Central Asia / Caucus region.

PROMPT: Personal Item

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Daily writing prompt
Name the most expensive personal item you’ve ever purchased (not your home or car).
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I think it was a sword, back in the days when swordsmanship was among the subjects i studied. But I can say, with some measure of pride, that I really don’t know for sure because I don’t really put much value in owning things and have become ever less interested in possessing more stuff.

When you’re a traveler, they’re all just anchors, and not goods.

Anything expensive I buy better be absolutely essential, have multiple uses, or —ideally— both.

PROMPT: Podcasts

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Daily writing prompt
What podcasts are you listening to?
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I don’t properly listen to any, but I watch clips and segments from many on YouTube — mostly those of comedians, but some of a popular science or current events / international affairs / macroeconomic nature.

PROMPT: Brands

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Daily writing prompt
What brands do you associate with?
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Unless and until they cut me a check, I have no “association” with any brand.

I believe loyalty to friend, family, and nation can all be great virtues, but loyalty to a corporation is just silly. (They certainly won’t be loyal to you when it conflicts with what is best for the profit margin.)

ZAMBIA LIMERICK

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PROMPT: Cities

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Daily writing prompt
How would you design the city of the future?
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I suspect cities are on the way to becoming passé. They worked great for an economy built around humans exchanging time and effort for a salary, but in an economy in which machines do virtually all productive tasks better, faster, and more efficiently than humans, the benefits seem less clear.

Plus, there’s a lot of discussion of an epidemic of loneliness, and so it seems — as a basic organizational structure — cities (admittedly ironically) don’t serve humanity well. People are adapted for families and tribes — more close-knit communities.

Furthermore, Asia is already beginning to see the problem of downward scalability of cities, as many cities shrink less elegantly than they grew. Birth rates are declining everywhere as humanity reaches its upper limit for this planet.

Maybe the future is artist colonies.

The End of the World as We Know It [Free Verse]

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Humans have been hunters,
   gatherers,
   farmers,
   machines,
   thinkers,
   and creators,

And have no idea what we'll next be.

I think that people will next be
      -- simply --
   Human Beings,
      Full-time Human Beings --
      More Human,
      More Being...

And many will fail spectacularly.