Hello Again with a Deep Explanation of The Blog: JP
Economics 101 !
Or :
An Investment Manual for Ordinary People Who Want to Take
Control of Their Situation and Live Life to Its Fullest in a Family Satisfying
and Personally Rewarding Manner or Not if They Do Not Wish To.
So think of this is as a how-to reference and survival guide
for homo-economicus. That’s us human
beings who are, most of us anyway, ordinary folks eking out a living in an
extra-ordinary world.
Actually, some people think we are hardly economic creatures
at all, that being economic is just an invention. It is a bit like believing that Jesus Christ
died for our sins, just because the Pope said so. Economists want us to believe that we are
naturally economic, full of wants and desires and driven to exchange stuff like
there is no tomorrow. If we did not all
believe that, or at least most of us, economists would not have jobs.
I mean, we are homo-economicus about as much as we are
homo-getyourwinkyweticus, or homo-compassionicus, or homo-articus, or
homo-biologicalicus, or homo-sinnericus etc. We are a lot of things, really. Being naturally economic creatures is just
the fad of the day.
But arguing about whether or not we are economic critters or
not is not the point of this story book.
For the sake of discussion, I am simply exploring the economic point of
view. I put aside any argument and just assume that for now we all understand
that most of us are stuck in an economic world and that, for all practical
purposes for the time being, we live around money and jobs and banks and trade.
So be it for now… homo-economicus will be the theme.
An here are some of my premises.
Here is my faith statement:
we can all choose to lead a life
of investment.
My choice statement:
we can be more than mere
consumers.
This is my easy to understand statement:
a life of investment means that
what you buy brings you something more than you
think you would expect in the future.
Complicated consumer situation:
a consumer choice brings you
something now, then with a flick of a switch it is gone, and to get anything
out of it you have to either go buy it again or, likely, it is gone and you
have to buy an alternative that with the flick of a switch itself is gone, and
there you are back at the beginning again.
It’s a kind of golden goose story. You buy the goose, you get eggs for a while. You also have some capital, you can negotiate
capital. If you buy just the egg, you
get the egg. You eat the egg. You put it
on the shelf. You turn it into a cultural celebration. Maybe you re-sell the
egg. Everybody’s got an egg. They would like to sell you one, too. Hard to re-sell an egg. Easy to consume it. If it doesn’t crack first.
On top of the egg and golden goose story, there is another
story. Happening to all of us every
breath we take.
This is a common, extra-ordinary story, shared by all of us:
Seven billion people and counting.
Fossil fuel dependency and peak
oil this or peak whatever resource that.
Unprecedented life expectancy of
80 years + and dropping infant mortality rates.
Internet, of course.
Technologies sprouting like weeds
and displacing jobs left right and centre.
Let's throw in global warming for
good measure.
Other apocalyptic concerns
abound.
All in the time space of just a
few hundred years.
We all know what the population curve looks like. It looks like this:
That’s an awful lot of change in a darn short period of
time. In effect, we have no history, no
traditions, no time tested literature that teach us how to live with the concurrent,
extra-ordinary denominators I describe just above.
But each of us remains ordinary. We get hungry. We go to work or look for work. We fall in or out of love. Some of us get rich. We worry about our friends. We get lonely. Many of us will wonder if life has
meaning. Have kids or maybe not. On the best of ordinary days we have to think
about how much money we have, figure out how to fix our car, maybe unplug the
long hair stuck in the shower drain. We
sip on and enjoy a good cup of coffee.
How do you survive all this ordinariness in such an
extra-ordinary world? In the past, the
old folks who begat who begat who got written up in a bible. In the past, it took at least three or four
centuries for an empire to begin destroying a eco-zone or two. Suffering from an ethnic purging, scape-goating,
or plain old lost the war? Back then in the good old days, with some luck, you
could migrate to somewhere else.
Consuming stuff, though, was not too easy. All that labour, even with slaves if you were
lucky, things still came along slowly.
With ever so few pennies on hand, best to be careful where they go. In fact, it was so hard to buy anything that
most stuff was plain made by hand. Itchy
hand knit woollen underwear. Doors. Purchasing would have felt intrinsically like
an investment.
Now with fossil fuels, we are racing toward an apocalyptic
ending of the entire planet in just a couple of hundred years. By dumping an
incredible volume of caloric energy into machines, we make stuff like there is
no tomorrow. Cars, little plastic squeezable
pigs, business cards, you name it. All
this stuff filling our spaces while there is nowhere to go, clutter, though
some think they might go to Mars.
Here on earth, somebody else already lives pretty much
wherever you might go (and owns the land complete with legal papers to prove
it). What with social media, by the time
you blink with a great idea, somebody else has already posted your thought. It went viral and made them millions. With the left over profits they put their
name on a charity saving hungry kids in Tegucigalpa. Bummer.
Could have been me and my gadget.
The made a million types, really, are just a few. Mostly, we survive by being ordinary. Like me and just about everybody I know. You learn some practical skills. You philosophize from time to time to make
sense of the madness and hyper pace of change.
You share yourself with your family and friends. Sometimes you even go public, maybe have the
courage to press for a better world. Even
if it was just once that you held a protest sign, made a speech in high school,
or called into a radio station to comment on the day's news. Rockin’ the boat, so to speak, that feels
like the riskiest we every might get.
When the real risk to ourselves is the everyday unconscious
consuming of stuff that has no goose-like qualities. We do it pretty much every day. Flick on a light switch or drop into the café
for a coffee. We buy and consume. And have to go buy again. That’s living on the edge. Hardly assuming, maybe not thinking it at
all, well, tomorrow is just going to come along and be the same as it was today
and yesterday. That light switch will
flick on and the coffee around the corner will be there.
Maybe, except that change, surprise, and all the unknown
unknowns are normal. Trusting that life
is going to stay the same is like believing the weather report is accurate more
than 24 hours out. Change is dealt with
by having assets and geese in many baskets.
Why do so many of us just buy the eggs?
Because you can’t buy the chicken?
Because you are not allowed to buy the chicken?
Because you don’t know how to buy a chicken?
I think mostly the last, we don’t know how to buy the
chicken.
And like a lot of chickens that have the ‘chicken stuff’
bred right out of them, we have had investment bred out of us. Well, not taught to us, which is, in the
social gene code way of seeing the world, the same thing as breeding. So it is not that there are no chickens to
buy, it’s just that we cannot much see the world anymore with investment eyeballs
and brains.
We can’t see the gooses for the eggs.
Which is why I am writing this investment manual for
ordinary people, to spark up the investment capacity in all of us, hidden
inside our social gene code. Maybe even
our hard wired gene code.
This investment manual for homo-economicus is a foot forward
towards change. Something that mostly
anyone can put their hands on and put to use.
Call it household management. Be
radical: let’s say that it is treatise in favour of home economics versus global
finance. A survival guide for the 21st
century.
Enjoy!
JP Melville
28 December 2016
