Things I Do When I Could be Writing @babbagamma - Tumblr Blog

What the Pandemic Shows Us About the Economy

By Nancy Jane Moore Every day I eventually read the pandemic news. It always makes me angry and sometimes scares me, but I have to read it. I have to know what’s going on. Checking that news on the last day in November, I saw this (from an LA Times report) in the Cal Matters newsletter: “Los Angeles County Supervisor Janice Hahn: ‘I am not convinced that shutting down,…

View On WordPress

A Response to Othering the Other

by Dr. Clare Hintz

Thank you for your thoughtful questions and honest comments that my essay sparked… such a delight to engage in this slow discourse that gives us time to complicate and complexify!

You conclude, “Too many times, no one is punching up and no one is punching down—we’re just punching each other on the same level, each side claiming to be victims, when we could be holding each…

View On WordPress

Othering the Other

by Debbie Notkin

This entry is written as a response to “Complexity in an Age of Uncertainty”.

I know I’m not the only person who is deeply upset by the consistency of the voting maps in this month’s election. In every state, we see blue cities and red rural areas. Of the 375 counties with the worst COVID spread so far in November, 92% of them voted to keep Trump in office. In North Dakota,…

View On WordPress

Othering the Other

by Debbie Notkin

This entry is written as a response to “Complexity in an Age of Uncertainty”.

View On WordPress

Boiling Water

by Beth Plutchak

My favorite explanation of complexity is the pot of boiling water. When you put a pot of liquid water on the stove it is in a steady state. All of the collective molecules exist in liquid form, but as soon as you begin applying heat and pressure that state begins to change. At any point in time we can’t predict which molecules will make the transition. They exist at the edge…

View On WordPress

Housekeeping

Please click through to see the whole blog post on the symposium entries. We are having a theme problem where the continue….. line is not showing up as expected on all posts.

View On WordPress

Homo Economicus: Bringing Out the Worst in all of Us

by Homo Economics himself and Debbie Notkin

Homo Economicus: I was asked to write about complexity economics, which is funny, because I am the world-renowned face of simple economics … and yet I am the structure on which this complexity relies. Kate Raworth, in Doughnut Economics, calls me “the most influential portrait … the protagonist in every economics textbook.” She says I influence…

View On WordPress

What We Can Learn from the Artificial Racist

by Steven Schwartz

Traditionally, scientists are taught to vary only one variable at a time, if at all possible—to use that method to tease apart complicated tangles, to find out when variables aren’t independent, or when expected correlations fail.

The problem is that in problems of sufficient complexity, that approach may be impossible—or may produce the wrong result.

There’s an old…

View On WordPress

We Aren't Dragons

We Aren’t Dragons

by Nancy Jane Moore

When we come across a dragon in a story, we assume (often correctly) that it will have amassed a hoard of gold and other precious objects by plundering the surrounding area and killing all who stand in its way. The classic western dragon lives alone and sleeps on a bed of its wealth, not even bothering to display the great pieces that it has accumulated. It does not care…

View On WordPress

Complexity in an Age of Uncertainty

Staying Home with the Others in Rural America

by Dr. Clare Hintz

My neighbor said, “I’m concerned about what’s going to happen after the election.” I agreed, and we talked about homesteading and stocking up our freezers, root cellars, and pantries. Gradually I realized that we were on opposite ends of the political spectrum: she a conservative, and I, a liberal. I was on this woman’s…

View On WordPress

Edge of Chaos Blog Symposium

Symposium Notes

We are at one of those historical pivot points where the future seems particularly dangerous and unpredictable. The past year has seen an increased awareness of the crises of our time: systemic racism, economic inequality, the climate crisis, and of course the pandemic. It’s not clear which is most serious or whether the pandemic brought the other three into focus, but those…

View On WordPress

#symposium

5 things you didn’t know about extroverts

1. Extroverts don’t suck the energy out of other people.

2. Extroverts are energized by interacting with people.

3. Being denied a certain amount of interaction can be damaging to extroverts (anxiety, depression, etc.)

4. Extroverts will respect your boundaries.

5. You can be extroverted AND have social anxiety.

Take care of your extrovert

The Ubiquitous End-of-Year Reading List

Still Thinking

I wish I were one of those people who keeps a list of everything I’ve read during the year, maybe notes as I read, maybe reviews on Good Reads. I don’t do any of those things. I don’t have a neat list to share. Everything I read is related to everything else and related to the things I am working on. I didn’t read much science fiction this year. I did reread Parable of the Sower, by Octavia Butler.

Since the election we all have been living on the Edge of Chaos. It’s felt like as my Mom used to say, a real kick in the teeth. I needed to know what we were in for, also how it all comes out in the end. Spoilers—the way through and the way out is to build community and control the narrative.

I didn’t even complete a lot of non-fiction books this year. I’m currently working on a project using complexity theory to explain the failure of progressivism. Are you interested in what I’m reading for that? It’s mostly politics, economics, and social justice. I read mostly online. Twitter has never worked for me, I’m on Tumblr for the Michael Kitchen fandom, and LiveJournal is as good as gone. So, like many of my cohorts I spend a lot of time on Facebook. I follow writers who link to their own longform pieces elsewhere as well as provide analysis and links to interesting articles. Ooh, that’s a list.

Here is who I read on FB: Kat Tanaka Okopnik, the author of the ongoing Dictionary of Social Justice; Ijeomo Oluo, “Come for the feminist rants—stay for the selfies and kid quotes. Inclusive feminism here.”; Son of Baldwin who links to and provides analyses of issues of racial and gender injustice; Jim C. Wright for rural left politics and a touch of sardonic humor; David Gerrold even though I was never a Star Trek fan, for his takes on politics and fandom, and Mary Anne Mohanraj because she is so eclectic and the food. All these people are probably active on Twitter if that’s your jam. I don’t know.

I have a lot to stay on top of. I’ve added magazines to the mix this year. I now subscribe to the dead tree version of the often problematic The Atlantic. I’d like to see fewer articles that humanize Nazis for the white voter, though (I see you, too—New Yorker), and more articles that humanize people of color, because apparently white people need that. Now if we were willing to say ‘hey I have more in common than I thought with those people in the black community’, for example we might get somewhere.

I’ve subscribed to the digital version of The Washington Post. I’ve gone back and forth on The New Yorker, but still am able to read what I want within the free articles per month. I’ve added Bill Moyers Journal to my feedreader.

People often ask me which economists I follow (seriously, they really do) and these are my go to sites at the moment: left, mainstream economists include Jared Bernstein, Dean Baker, Econbrowser—for Menzie Chin, Economists View—for Mark Thoma, the little bit lefter Robert Reich, and the left libertarian Yves Smith.

I’m also following a few that are specifically concerned with complexity economics.

In a November 17th interview with Ursula K. LeGuin in The Los Angeles Review of Books, she is asked “You once clarified your political stance by saying, ‘I am not a progressive. I think the idea of progress an invidious and generally harmful mistake. I am interested in change, which is an entirely different matter.’ Why is the idea of progress harmful? Surely in the great sweep of time, there has been progress on social issues because people have an idea or even an ideal of it.

[Le Guin] I didn’t say progress was harmful, I said the idea of progress was generally harmful [emphasis mine]… I was thinking of the idea of history as ascending infallibly to the better—which, it seems to me, is how the 19th and 20th centuries tended to use the word “progress.” We leave behind us the Dark Ages of ignorance, the primitive ages without steam engines, without airplanes/nuclear power/computers/whatever is next. Progress discards the old, leads ever to the new, the better, the faster, the bigger, et cetera. You see my problem with it? It just isn’t true.”

This is as good an example as any of the Hegelian Mistake (thesis plus antithesis leads us to synthesis and leads us to a progressively better place.) Complexity Theory is based on how change happens in the biological sciences, which is never straight forward, and never never predictable. An example of change states is boiling water. Water is changing from liquid to solid. We cannot predict which individual molecules will make the change. We only know that if we don’t keep applying heat or pressure change as a whole will never be completed. Complexity scientists call this state the Edge of Chaos. I think it is more than a metaphor for where we are in the world today. I think it is the truth of it.

The economists working on this can be found at Evonomics-The Next Evolution of Economics and The Institute for New Economic Thinking. But, books, was I supposed to be talking about books? A good place for the lay reader to start in understanding complexity economics is Eric D. Bonhoeker’s, The Origin of Wealth. I first read this ten years ago, but I return to it often. From the book: “Historically, science had taken a top-down reductionist approach, breaking the universe into ever smaller pieces…in search of ultimate laws… while this approach had been extraordinarily successful, many of the hardest problems in nature are “complex systems” that have collective or emergent characteristics.”

This year I decided I wanted to find out more about the Santa Fe Institute where much of this theory was first developed. And yes, I do follow the Santa Fe Institute on FB, as well as The Edge of Chaos, the lab at the University of Alabama in Birmingham tasked with solving “wicked problems”. So, this year I read Complexity: The Emerging Science at the Edge of Order and Chaos, by M. Mitchell Waldrop. This book, as well as deepening my understanding of complexity theory has lots of history about the founding of the Santa Fe Institute, where the work of complexity science continues. Unfortunately, much of the research on economics has been squandered on making better stock market predictions.

Thinking about complexity economics has lead me to thinking about the failures of neoliberalism and late stage capitalism. Paul Mason, an economics reporter for The Guardian, wrote Postcapitalism A Guide to Our Future. This book provides a comprehensive breakdown of the failures of neoliberalism, why Marxism won’t fix them, and what needs to happen and in some cases is happening. Basically, as finance and intellectual property appropriate the place in the economy that was formerly held by manufacturing GDP and income can no longer be in sync. Jobs and wages will never again create the standard of living that baby boomers thought inevitable.

This lead me to Next: The Future Just Happened, by Michael Lewis. Like all of Lewis’s books this one is an easy, gossipy read. It leans a little too heavily to the AI are taking over our jobs argument, however if you can read past that and read it in conjunction with Mason’s book, you have the beginnings of an argument of how we need to be thinking about economics. I’ve started The Zero Marginal Cost Society, by Jeremy Rifkin which goes further into an analysis of the internet of things, the collaborative commons, and the eclipse of Capitalism.

Together these books lean a little too heavily on the experiences of those who are already privileged in white supremacist capitalist patriarchy, and can be read as economic solutions for millennial technocrats. I urge you not to do so. The problem isn’t that the outlook in these books is wrong, its that its limited. The piece that’s missing is the experience of marginalized people in moving through society and in creating communities.

People on the margins are, have been, speaking up about how to survive in America. This year I got around to reading Bad Feminist, by Roxanne Gay. I’ve long said that the reason feminism seems irrelevant to young people is because we lost. We lost. We owe young people an apology. We need to get out of their way.

I also read The WisCon Chronicles Vol. 11 Trials by Whiteness, edited by Jaymee Goh. The WisCon Chronicles have historically provided a forum outside of the mainstream press and academia to provide analytic insights born of people’s lived experiences. This is the missing piece, my friends. How do we get from here to there? We listen to, we support, we follow those who have never been included.

Sound on.

Sound on.

sunlightontheground-deactivated

have those people who are like “poor men under patriarchy!! never allowed to express their emotions!!! :(” ever been in the presence of a man who is frustrated or angry about something because in my experience they express their emotions far too much and scream or break things or kill people

bananapeppers

Most of my clients are not unusually repressed. In fact, many of them express their feelings more than some nonabusive men. Rather than trapping everything inside, they actually tend to do the opposite: They have an exaggerated idea of how important their feelings are, and they talk about their feelings—and act them out—all the time, until their partners and children are exhausted from hearing about it all. An abuser’s emotions are as likely to be too big as too small. They can fill up the whole house. When he feels bad, he thinks that life should stop for everyone else in the family until someone fixes his discomfort. His partner’s life crises, the children’s sicknesses, meals, birthdays—nothing else matters as much as his feelings.

It is not his feelings the abuser is too distant from; it is his partner’s feelings and his children’s feelings. Those are the emotions that he knows so little about and that he needs to “get in touch with.” My job as an abuse counselor often involves steering the discussion away from how my clients feel and toward how they think (including their attitudes toward their partners’ feelings). My clients keep trying to drive the ball back into the court that is familiar and comfortable to them, where their inner world is the only thing that matters.

For decades, many therapists have been attempting to help abusive men change by guiding them in identifying and expressing feelings. Alas, this well-meaning but misguided approach actually feeds the abuser’s selfish focus on himself, which is an important force driving his abusiveness.

Lundy Bancroft. 2002. Why Does He Do That? Inside the Minds of Angry and Controlling Men. New York: Berkley Books. pp. 30–31.

I would have preferred Sophie Okonedo with Michael Kitchen as the companion.

#alibi #drwho

Trending Blogs

Recently Viewed Blogs

Things I Do When I Could be Writing