If you’ve ever studied accounting and by extension any economics you find that it’s predicated on the basic concept of:
Somethings give while other things consume.
The slight complication being that almost everything does both. In order to give, you need to first consume. The question is, do you give more than you consume, or vice versa?
(Politics is just the study and application of who gets what, after the fact)
Everything else is a detail. And you can lob complex concepts around it like “systems science”, “demand vs supply”, “double accounting bookkeeping”, or “justice”, it matters not.
Our whole civilization is built on it.
This giving of more than taking is called “value creation”.
The problem with this type of theory is that by the basic laws of physics, nothing can give more than it consumes.
One of the principle ways around this conundrum is to consider that some arrangements are more valuable than others. The other, is to not count what nature gives into the equation.
For example, an apple is more valuable than the sun, water, soil, fertilizer and air it is made from, for an ordinary human being. You can eat an apple but you can’t do that with its prior. The apple is just another arrangement of its inputs. Most of the inputs are not counted.
Thus similarly, your mobile phone is a complex arrangement of all its inputs (metal, plastic and other exotic crystals) and more valuable to you in this arrangement. A second phone may be less valuable to you, this is called “marginality”.
The phone is a beautiful example of something that itself has no value. It’s value is precisely because with it, you can leverage further complex arrangements by communicating with other people more efficiently. However, having a second phone doesn’t necessarily increase your powers of communication, not by much anyway. The value relation is not linear with the real world. Neither are are all the inputs and outputs counted. Only convenient numbers are entered into the equation.
Then we have the idea of consumption.
What is it?
In someways it is the opposite of value creation. It’s the destructive force. Disarrangement. Not necessarily a bad thing. The only reason we create anything is to consume it. Once you eat the apple it is gone. Once the phone is used, the next destination is mostly a landfill. (The recycling you do is simply sending it off to someone’s else’s landfill in a country far away.)
To the extent the consumption is turned into the input for another creative pursuit, we can think of it as such. Creative Destruction. Also known as Transformation.
Some pursuits are purely destructive. For example, after said apple is consumed, the energy given can be used to dig a ditch by the sea. It will be taken by the next incoming tide (destruction).
Or the apple could be left to rot. Nature disarranges it for you. It becomes soil and an input back to the Apple tree.
The key concept here is that all these arrangements and disarrangements are important only from a human perspective. The world cares not. Science and Math care not either. They are a Hammer and Sickle. We count only what we want to.
The bees may care but they have no say.
Humans are not all the same either for that matter. The Bushmen of the Kalahari presumably care less for the arrangements important to Stock Traders operating out of New York City.
They, like the bees have less of a say. They also have a different counting system.
What is of value and it’s creation or destruction is a deeply personal thing. It depends very much on you, the individual and your counting system.
We sometimes get fooled that it isn’t, that it is the opposite. That it is objective. One of the chief reasons is because of this technology called “money”. Whatever it is, it has this objective number attached to it. $10 seems objectively to be that. The game we play is that everyone is trying to get it. The theory is that this game produces value because you have to make something of value for people to give you their money in exchange.
However there are problems here.
They say the money doesn’t grow on trees, (unlike our apple) and this is unfortunate because instead, we just print it. (Pseudo-Creation)
Take for example a house, it is an object, in the real world and carry’s a price tag. We give it a value.
But houses actually consume. They consume a lot. They’re only productive in a money sense if the tenants are productive elsewhere and pay rent above the consumption value. The house consumes both in its production and forever more. The house itself protects you from the awesome destructive forces of nature. It is a shelter. Not a bad thing. It’s price is high consumption. It’s not really an asset.
Some people think, “Tax the Rich” is a solution to societies problems but Tax is a destructive force. It only takes, it produces nothing. Personally, I can sympathize with the sentiment. What proponents of this policy are implicitly saying is “The Rich” stole the money in the first place, so we can take it back. This is a rearrangement, called redistribution (or theft, if you actually think about it). The theory being it thus creates value by leveling the playing field or by giving virtuous people the money to build bridges or some other public good. At least that what they tell the fools.
The problem being that such policies usually just penalize the real productive population while the “The Rich” continue as usual. They create and enforce The Law (arrangement). The printing press too. That particular brat in the photo above has grown exceedingly rich, in a very few short years. If you look into history, the first “taxes” were not monetary. Feudal lords collected bushels of wheat, rice or cattle. Extraction as a price for Arrangement. A protection racket in the pure sense. The only difference today is people vote for it gleefully. I’m sure no serf voted for his or her predicament.
Personally, I like to buy books and rearrange my brain. I then rearrange letters on a webpage. Not many see the value in it. (I also buy a lot of guitars and go on big holidays). Others value rocks and metals dug up from some mine in heart of darkness. Shiny things. Who am I to say no, it’s been going on for centuries. Those rocks will remain while my brain is consumed by nature a few decades in passing.
So it really is a matter of perspective.
Consider a forest. Is it worth more as fire wood, lumber or as its function in the ecosystem? Who is to decide on this? The people who live in the forest? You? Me? Or some amorphous voting blob called the public? And does a piece of paper or the guns that back it, give “ownership” of the forest to the people who posses it. Does it really confer a right to do anything you please with it?
The answers are not so clear. There is no equation for this. (Counting doesn’t work). No book or manual. No prescription. No white lab coat or university degree. No robe, gown or turban either.
What about the feelings of the animals and trees that live in it? They have wants and needs too. Or are only human wants and needs important in this context because animals can’t speak or counter it?
Does a forest give or does it consume? Does such an abstraction even make sense?
The Vikid Truth has no answers to all these questions. Not universally, at any case. It seems to him that before all such things can be negotiated, we must first understand for ourselves individually.
We have to determine ourselves, what gives, what consumes and how we wish to count it. It’s very much in each individuals control because value is subjective not objective. Believe you me, what you think counts, see Disney’s Stock price for an example.
One simple answer is not to create or consume at a speed greater than the system that’s supporting you. Using creative destruction and marginality as a guide. But such ideas have been hijacked by the crowd shouting slogans such as “sustainability”, “equity” and “inclusion”. They want to impose their answers on you.
It’s not that they are wrong. It’s that they have been subverted and don’t know it. It was the same a few decades ago on the other side of the equation. In those days it was production at any cost.
One must look at themselves. For my day job, I install large electric cables and fencing around major world cities. This is an arrangement of copper, XLPE polymers, PVC and steel that allows the electrical network to expand and people to protect their properties. People find that valuable as everyone wants electricity while deterring intruders.
It has significant associated consumption. Some immediate and others long term (think of the lifetime of electrical production). Is that a bad thing? We create to consume after all. Life is both creation and consumption, at every nanosecond (at the level of a cell) to the billions of years it has existed.
So am I actually giving or taking? Depends on how you count, so is this even the right question?
I’ve been rambling for a while now, to what point I don’t know. Maybe just to say, it’s worth thinking about deeply and coming up with your own answers for every action. It moves markets and can change the world.
What gives, what consumes and how do you count it?
And is this right lens to look at things?
Much of modern life is built on it.
And that’s,