Probing Economics

An Introductory Note

The text below is composed of fragments from my correspondence with physicist turned economist Niklas Damiris on the nature of money.

All references to Niklas’s perspective on the nature of money found below are references to my impressions of his perspective. I reserve Niklas the right to disavow any and every claim that I make about his perspective but, in so doing, I am also reserving for myself the right to caricature and parody his perspective in order to get my own points across. Indeed, every perspective that I make reference to in this text has been caricatured and parodied to such ends. I do not claim to have accurately represented the perspective of the Graeberite, nor that of the Marxist, nor that of the mainstream economist, and I feel no shame for having playfully mis-represented them. Like all caricaturists and parodists, I only distort in order to make the major features of my subjects recognizable, and I know full well that my distortions leave out the minor features that might moderate the major features in reality.

The Mystifications of Monetary Authorities

Central Banks as Ideological State Apparatuses

In his magnum opus, The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, John Maynard Keynes stressed “the characteristic of human nature that a large proportion of our positive activities depend on spontaneous optimism rather than mathematical expectations.” According to Keynes, “irrationally exuberant” economic behaviors “can only be taken as the result of animal spirits—a spontaneous urge to action rather than inaction, and not as the outcome of a weighted average of quantitative benefits multiplied by quantitative probabilities.”

I hold that today’s ruling monetary authorities are all Keynesians insofar as they believe that they have been tasked with taming unpredictable “animal spirits”, with exorcising daemons that possess human beings and make them behave in irrationally exuberant ways. Human beings liberated from their “animal spirits”, exorcised of their daemons, would become rational actors: they would observe the law of supply and demand and the “invisible hand”, the God of the neoclassical synthesis, would rule on earth as He does in heaven — heaven, of course, being the ideal world described by the formal models of orthodox economics.

That being said, however, the ruling monetary authorities are not hard-line, orthodox economists but kin to the decadent authorities of the Church during the Renaissance: corrupt, greedy, licentious, power hungry. Rather than taming “animal spirits” and exorcizing daemons, the ruling monetary authorities are, more often than not, to be found dispensing “indulgences” to the rich and powerful — bailing out corporations, states, and individuals who are deemed “too big to fail”. The ruling monetary authorities have decreed that, as long the rich and powerful perform “good deeds” in support of the Bank for International Settlements and use their wealth and power to encourage the poor and powerless to submit to the Invisible Hand, the rich and powerful shall be forgiven for their irrational exuberance, for succumbing to the wiles of their “animal spirits”.

Libertarians, hardline monetarists, and the cryptocurrency boosters are those who rail against the central banks and decry the sins of central bankers — they are kin to Martin Luther and the other Reformers, who railed against the Papacy and the sins of Church officials. Libertarians, hardline monetarists, and cryptocurrency boosters would put an end to rampant and unwarranted dispensation of indulgences to the rich and powerful, and they would expose the Central Banks as earthly institutions that wrongly lay claim to the obedience properly due to the Invisible Hand in heaven.

The Marxist De-Mystification

Money and the Formation of Fictitious Capital

Marxists are non-believers: they are dismissive of the Invisible Hand and of “animal spirits”. Instead, the Marxists believe in a natural law, the “law of value”, and in a science that proves this natural law. To quote from the horse’s mouth—here is a famous passage from Karl Marx’s correspondence with Kugelmann:

Every child knows a nation which ceased to work, I will not say for a year, but even for a few weeks, would perish. Every child knows, too, that the masses of products corresponding to the different needs required different and quantitatively determined masses of the total labour of society. That this necessity of the distribution of social labour in definite proportions cannot possibly be done away with by a particular form of social production but can only change the mode of its appearance, is self-evident. No natural laws can be done away with. What can change in historically different circumstances is only the form in which these laws assert themselves. And the form in which this proportional distribution of labour asserts itself, in the state of society where the interconnection of social labor is manifested in the private exchange of the individual products of labour, is precisely the exchange value of these products.
Science consists precisely in demonstrating how the law of value asserts itself. So that if one wanted at the very beginning to "explain" all the phenomena which seemingly contradict that law, one would have to present science before science. It is precisely Ricardo's mistake that in his first chapter on value he takes as given all possible and still to be developed categories in order to prove their conformity with the law of value.

The law of value according to Marx is, of course, that “socially necessary labour time” regulates the exchange value of commodities in trade. The exchange value of a commodity falls when labour-time has been expended in excess of what was socially necessary for its production; the exchange value of a commodity rises when less labor-time has been expended than is socially necessary for its production. Ay, and stress is to be put on the phrase “socially necessary”. Here is a quotation from Marx’s "Value, Price and Profit":

It might seem that if the value of a commodity is determined by the quantity of labor bestowed upon its production, the lazier a man, or the clumsier a man, the more valuable his commodity, because the greater the time of labor required for finishing the commodity. This, however, would be a sad mistake. You will recollect that I used the word social labor, and many points are involved in this qualification of 'Social.' In saying that the value of a commodity is determined by the quantity of labor worked up or crystallized in it, we mean the quantity of labor necessary for its production in a given state of society, under certain social average conditions of production, with a given average intensity, and average skill of the labor employed.

According to the Marxist, the exchange value of a commodity is not the same as its “money price”. A “money price” is, rather, a more or less accurate and more or less precise measurement of a commodity’s exchange value. The ruling monetary authorities mistakenly imagine that money is what money measures: they do not recognize that money is a measure of something other than itself, it is a measure of exchange value. What the ruling monetary authorities call “animal spirits” are what Marxist would call “random errors” and “systematic errors” in the measure of exchange values or errors in the pricing of commodities.

When the ruling monetary authorities grant the rich and powerful indulgences, the Marxist says that the ruling monetary authorities are allowing “systematic errors” to accumulate. Capitalism, according to the Marxist, is an imperfectly calibrated machine which biases the measurement of the exchange value of goods, systemically under-estimating the value added by the worker to a commodity and over-estimating the value added by the capitalist. The indulgences dispensed by the ruling monetary authorities enable this over-estimation of the capitalists’ value and the under-estimation of workers’ value but, because there is a natural law at work here, the scales must inevitably be balanced and the event that balances the scales is what the Marxist calls a “crisis of capitalism”.

What the Marxists cannot account for, however, is the fact that a crisis of capitalism can be deferred through the dispensation of indulgences by ruling authorities. The crudest Marxists are endlessly flummoxed by the maddening manner in which systematic errors are able accumulate. They liken this madness to the cartoon physics of Wile E. Coyote running over a cliff without plummeting into the abyss until he looks down and recognizes that there is no ground under his feet. According to the crudest Marxist’ “science”, the crisis should always come faster and hit harder than it does, but somehow the indulgences dispensed by the ruling monetary authorities manage to slow things down and soften the blows, much to the crude Marxists' chagrin.

The Graeberite De-Mystification

Money and the Tokenization of Debt

The Graeberites would say that the Marxists’ science doesn’t understand that a money price is something more and other than simply a means of measuring exchange values. According to the Graeberite, money is, first, foremost, and above all else, a tokenized debt.

Many orthodox economic textbooks typically list only three functions of money: medium of exchange, store of value, and unit of account. There is, however, a fourth function that too often goes unmentioned. Money is also a standard of deferred payment, and the Graeberite argues that this fourth function is the primal and primary function of money: money first emerges as a standard of deferred payment and money can only serve the other three functions that it serves for as long as it functions as a standard of deferred payment. What’s more, the Graeberite believes that money as standard of deferred payment is, first, foremost, and above all else a tokenization of social obligations that are born of love and fear, coercion and convention, memory and desire.

The Marxist believes that money is first and foremost a medium of exchange and a unit of account. Money’s capacity to store value and its capacity to serve as a standard of deferred payment are, from the Marxist point of view, fictitious capacities. The Marxist believes (i) that Money cannot be a store of value because only commodities, which materialize socially necessary labor time, can store value, and (ii) that money as standard of deferred payment is “money that is thrown into circulation as capital without any material basis in commodities or productive activity.” The Graeberite counters the Marxist simply by citing historical fact and the anthropological research that shows that deferral of payment is far more than a mere fiction.

What the monetary authorities call our “animal spirits”, the Graeberites call our obligations to one another, to our communities, and to our institutions. Ay, and the Graeberite would argue that to tame animal spirits, to exorcise daemons, and to transform human beings into rational actors is to alienate human beings from one another, from their communities, and from their institutions. The Greaeberite says that the ruling monetary authorities endeavor to prevent the poor and powerless from keeping their obligations to one another, and, given that the keeping of obligations is the basis for social solidarity, the ruling monetary authorities endeavor to make sure that there is no solidarity amongst the poor and powerless. What’s more, the ruling authorities allow the rich and powerful “indulgences” that (i) oblige the poor and powerless to rich and powerful and (ii) let the rich and powerful keep their obligations to each other, fostering solidarity amongst the rich and powerful. Indeed, for the Graeberite, it is solidarity amongst the rich and powerful and a lack of solidarity amongst the poor and powerless that accounts for capitalism’s capacity to endure one crisis after another.

What the Graeberite cannot explain, however, is what David Harvey and Neil Smith term “uneven geographical development” (i) how crises of capitalism differ across space and how spatial differences that facilitate the temporal deferral of capitalist crises, and (ii) how crises of capitalism differ across time and how temporal differences that facilitate the spatial deferral of capitalist crises.

Here is another way of putting it, that gets to the point less abstractly. You see, the Marxists’ natural law, the law of value, can and does account for (i) how exchange values in one geographical region and exchange values in another geographical region can be effectively commensurated by money prices, and (ii) how exchange values this year and exchange values next year can be effectively commensurated by money prices. By contrast, the Graeberite history and anthropology can neither account for (i) how obligations in one geographical region and obligations in another geographical region can be effectively commensurated by money prices, nor (ii) how obligation this year and obligation next year can be commensurated by money prices. The Graeberites inability to account for the commensurability of differing standards of deferred payment across time and space is a particularly acute problem when it comes to understanding a today’s global economy, fueled by derivatives, where currencies float relative to one another.

The Play of Mystification and De-Mystification

Differing Payments, Deferring Payments, and the Dissemination of Financial Instruments

Niklas, here is where you come in: you make the argument that money is neither a measure of exchange values nor a tokenization of debts but, rather, that money is economic information, akin to physical information. Money, as economic information, is that which resolves uncertainties regarding the state of an economic system.

Exchange values and obligations are complementary properties of economic systems which cannot be observed or measured simultaneously, just like momentum and position are complementary properties of physical systems. Resolving uncertainty regarding exchange values means generating uncertainty regarding obligations and, vice versa, resolving uncertainty regarding obligations means generating uncertainty regarding exchange values. We’ve already found that the money price of a commodity is a more or less accurate and more or less precise measurement of a commodity’s value, the socially necessary labor time for the production of a commodity. Now we find that the money price of an obligation, of a debt, is a more or less accurate and more or less precise measurement of the likelihood that an obligation will be satisfied in a timely manner. Ay, but the more certain we are about whether or not an obligation will be satisfied in a timely manner, the less certain we are about the value, the socially necessary labor time, that must be expended in order to satisfy an obligation. Vice versa, the more certain we are about the value, the socially necessary labor time, that must be expended in order to satisfy an obligation, the less certain we are about whether or not an obligation will be satisfied in a timely manner.

This economic uncertainty principle, like the physical uncertainty principle, has effects. For instance, there is an economic tunnel effect which corresponds to the physical tunnel effect. The physical tunnel effect finds “an uncertainly located particle sail[ing] through the barrier around the nucleus on a light breeze of probability, existing—in particle terms—then ceasing to exist, then instantly existing again on the other side.” The economic tunnel effect, which lies at the heart of “options markets”, finds an obligation, whose likelihood of satisfaction in a timely manner is uncertain, popping into and out of existence before and after the production of a good or service, just like the uncertainly located particle in the physical tunnel effect described above.

According to the “Damirian” play described above the “animal spirits” decried by the ruling monetary authorities are not extraneous complicating factors but, rather, intrinsic uncertainties. Ay, and the “indulgences” that the ruling monetary authorities dispense to the rich and powerful are opportunities to make effective use of uncertainties. The poor and powerless who are not allowed such “indulgences” are not allowed opportunities to make effective use of uncertainties.

The Damirian play is a far cry from the perspective of the libertarians, the hardline monetarists, and the cryptocurrency boosters. The problem is not that too many indulgences are being dispensed by the ruling monetary authorities but, rather, the ruling monetary authorities keep the poor and powerless from indulging themselves. The Damirian play begs the question: how might we disseminate the power to dispense indulgences more and more widely? Or, in other words, how might we widely disseminate the know-how and the means to create and seize opportunities to make effective use of uncertainties?

Niklas, what I give you credit for is not the notion of the "informational" character of money, Hayek already knew this. Rather, I credit you for the uncertainty principle that says that money can either measure the likelihood of an obligation being satisfied in a timely manner with certainty or measure the value expended in satisfying an obligation in a timely manner with certainty, but money can never both at the same time. This uncertainty principle, of course, is not an entirely new notion: it is at the heart of the policy trilemma. Assuming a sovereign monetary policy, we can either have fixed exchange rates or free capital movement. What your characterization of this problem gives me is a way to think about this problem better, not from the perspective of the ruling monetary authorities but from the perspective of the two activist positions that I find myself alternating between, the Graeberite position and the Marxist position. Through your work, the Graeberite and the Marxist position become “complementary” in the sense that the physicist Niels Bohr used the term.

Another important aspect of your thinking, Niklas, is how you point out that orthodox economics, when it talks about money as information, rests upon the Hayekian treatment of the information problem as a problem attributable to the resolving power of money as a measuring instrument. The Hayekian says, "We do not have monetary instruments that can resolve with certainty both the likelihood of an obligation being satisfied in a timely manner and the value expended in the satisfaction of an obligation in a timely manner, but there is absolute certainty about both of these matters to be found out there in the real world; the problem is that creating instruments that would be capable of resolving for both is too costly."

Your uncertainty principle argues something different: there is no absolute certainty to be found out there in the real world, we must “meet the real world halfway” in order to create relative certainty. Our models and our practices create what they resolve for, they do not resolve for so-called "fundamental facts". The so called macroeconomic "fundamentals" (unemployment, supply and demand, growth, etc.) are not what we measure for and respond to with our formal models and material practices but, rather, they are what we are creating with our formal models and material practices.

Beyond the Marxist’s Reality Principle

Customary Uses, Profitable Uses, Experimental Uses

The customary use of a knife may be to assist with eating, with hunting, with carving, or with a ceremonial bloodletting ritual—whatever the case may be, a knife fabricated and apprehended with a customary use in mind is an object fabricated and apprehended as a fetish.

By contrast, the profitable use of a knife is either (i) to be exchanged for another object or (ii) to be employed in the production of another object to-be-exchanged. In either case, a knife fabricated and apprehended with a profitable use in mind is an object fabricated and apprehended as a form of capital: either as commodity-capital when the knife is itself exchanged for money or another object; and as productive capital when the knife is used to produce another object that is to-be-exchanged.

In our (post-)industrial societies customary uses are supplementary to profitable uses: an ever increasing number of objects are fabricated and apprehended not with a specific customary use in mind but, rather, with a profitable use in mind, and, what’s more, purely customary uses—that is, customary uses that are not supplementary to profitable uses—are frowned upon for being “unproductive”.

There is another sort of “unproductive” use, however, a sort that isn’t customary but that is also considered supplemental to profitable use in our (post-)industrial societies. The experimental use of goods or, in other words, the invention or “prototyping” of customary and profitable uses is both unprofitable and non-customary. The experimental use of a knife, for instance, is the unprofitable, non-customary use of a knife in the invention of customary and profitable uses; and a knife fabricated and apprehended with an experimental use in mind is fabricated and apprehended as a probe.

Small societies that revolve around the proximity of their members and the simple manufacture of tools and other objects are societies that pay little mind to the difference between the production of an object and its customary use. This is because the production of an object and its customary use are proximal in space, in time, and/or in the experiences of producers and users. The larger and more complicated a society and its manufacturing processes become, the greater the spatial-temporal-experiential distance between the production of objects and their customary uses, and the more profitable uses come to mediate between the production of objects and the customary uses of objects: an individual who will not have a proximal experience with the customary use of an object will not participate in the object’s production unless participation in the object’s production is profitable to them. If I make a dress for my wife, I need not make any profit from the making of the dress because I get to experience the customary use of the dress alongside my wife when she wears it. The garment workers in the Philippines who make a dress that a sorority girl in California will wear to a fraternity party in at UCLA will want to profit from the labor they put into the dress, as they will not have a proximal experience of the dress’s customary use.

The larger societies become and the more complicated their manufacturing processes become, the greater the spatio-temporal-experiential distance between the production of objects and their customary uses and the more profitable uses mediate between the production of objects and the customary uses of objects—but also, the more experimental use comes to precede profitable use. When I make a dress for my wife, I know her customary activities and I tailor the dress to her customary activities. If I am the dressmaker in a small town, I may not experience all of my customers’ customary uses of my products, but I shall have a fairly good feeling for what those customary uses are and I can tailor my dresses for those customary uses so as to ensure that they meet a demand. If I am manufacturing dresses that will be sold to strangers all around the world, I will need to tailor my product for markets that I must research: I shall need to develop prototypes and test my prototypes within various markets so as to gauge or, better still, stimulate demand for them.

In pre-capitalist societies and in societies that react against capitalism, customary uses are primary and all other uses are supplemental. In our (post-)industrial capitalist societies, by contrast, profitable uses are primary and all other uses are supplemental. In the post-capitalist society that I imagine coming into being, experimental uses would be primary and all other uses would be supplemental.

Beyond the Graeberite’s Reality Principle

Customary Debts, Debt Instruments, Debt Derivatives

Just as there are customary uses of goods, there are customary debts: the debts that characterize the relationship between parent and child, husband and wife, teacher and student, etc. Let us take the first of these customary debts: the debts that characterize the relation between parent and child. In many societies, a parent is customarily obliged to clothe, house, and feed their young child, and a grown child is customarily obliged to care for their aging parents. A parent who fails to clothe, house, and feed their young child is in arrears to their child. A grown child who fails to care for their aging parents is in arrears to their parents. Customary debts, like the debts that bond a child and parent, are non-fungible: if a parent is in arrears to their child, a child cannot sell their parents debt at a discount to a debt collector for a lesser amount of clothing, shelter, and food.

Debt instruments are fungible and, because they are fungible, one can profit from the buying and selling of debt instruments. Whereas a good is commodified (transformed into commodity capital) in order to make profitable use of it, a debt is instrumentalized (transformed into a debt instrument) in order to make profitable use of it. When a customary debt is instrumentalized, used to raise capital, it becomes fungible and it ceases to be a customary debt. The child who instrumentalizes their parent’s debts to them puts an end to their customary relationship with their parent and capitalizes upon their relationship with their parent.

What customary debts are to customary use, and what debt instruments are to profitable use, debt derivatives are to experimental use. Customary debts fetishize social bonds; debt instruments capitalize upon social bonds; debt derivatives probe social bonds. To issue a debt derivative is to speculate upon whether or not a debt will be honored. Whereas, a customary debt assumes that a code of honor guarantees debts, whereas a debt instrument assumes a reputation system (e.g., a credit rating bureau) that serves to commensurate different codes of honor, a debt derivative makes no assumptions about codes of honor and reputation systems but, rather, hedges and speculates, testing the reliability of different codes of honor and reputation systems.

The social dynamic that characterizes the shift from the prevalence of customary use to the prevalence of profitable use in the (post)industrial world is the same social dynamic that characterizes the shift from the prevalence of customary debts to the prevalence debt instruments. Customary debts prevail in small societies where debtor and creditor are spatially-temporally-experientially proximal to one another. Debt instruments gain prevalence over customary debts as societies grow larger and larger debtors and creditors become more and more spatially-temporally-experientially distant from one another. Ay, and, what’s more, debt derivatives gain increasing prevalence relative to customary debts and to debt instruments as societies grow larger and larger debtors and creditors become more and more spatially-temporally-experientially distant from one another.

In pre-capitalist societies and in societies that react against capitalism, customary debts are primary and all other debts are supplemental. In our (post-)industrial capitalist societies, by contrast, debt instruments are primary and all other debts are supplemental. In the post-capitalist society that I imagine coming into being, debt derivatives would be primary and all other debts would be supplemental.

The Return to Damiris

Spending, Fast and Slow

The Damirian maneuver enables me to argue that customary uses and customary debts are neither prior to profitable uses and debt instruments, nor are they prior to experimental uses and debt derivatives. Indeed, the opposite is the case. If you will allow me a metaphor from the ontogenesis of insects: experimental uses and debt derivatives are the larval phases of use and debt; profitable uses and debt instruments are the pupal phases of use and debt; and customary uses and customary debts are the imago phases of use and debt.

In small scale pre-capitalist societies, the larval and pupal or phases are accelerated to such a degree that they are barely noticeable: the imago or phase of use accounts for the greater part of economic life, while the larval and pupal or phases are of little account.

As societies grow and their manufacturing processes become more complex, first (i) the pupal or phase is prolonged and gains prominence, then (ii) the larval phase is prolonged and gains prominence, and, all the while, (iii) the imago phase is shortened and loses prominence. Capitalist societies are societies in which the pupal phase accounts for the greater part of economic life, while the larval and imago phases are of lesser account. In the post-capitalist society of my dreams, the larval phase would account for the greater part of economic life, while the pupal and imago phases would be of lesser account. Capitalist societies, seeking to ward off the spectres of pre-capitalist and post-capitalist societies, aim to prolong pupal phases of use and debt relative to both the imago phases and larval phases of use and debt.

The larval phases of use and debt, i.e., experimental use and debt derivatives, are the phases of use and debt at which the quantum characteristics of economic life become most salient. Which is to say, in other words, that economic uncertainty principle becomes more salient when larval phases of use and debt are prolonged relative to pupal and imago phases of use and debt.

I regard the life cycle of the dragonfly to be a great metaphor for post-capitalist society that I am imagining, one in which the pupal and imago phases of use and debt are brief and the larval phases of use and debt are prolonged. This is because, the dragonfly doesn’t even have a proper pupal phase but, rather, proceeds directly from a prolonged larval phase to abbreviated imago phase. Indeed, in the post-capitalist society of my imagination, I would have uses and debts eschew a mediating pupal/profitable phase and proceed im-mediately from a prolonged larval/experimental phase to an abbreviated imago/customary phase, with the pupal/profitable phase being an im-mediating transition between the larval/experimental and the imago/customary phases.

Price Signals

Discreta, Continua, and Spectra

A discrete approach to pricing is a digital approach, or “black or white” approach. For example, we take a discrete approach to pricing when we say “This is a good price and that is a bad price.”

A continuous approach to pricing is an analog approach, an approach that signals so many different “shades of grey”; or, in other words, the continuous approach is a matter of relative degrees and not a matter of absolute oppositions. For example, we take a continuous approach to pricing when we say, “I can get a better price in this market than I can get in that market” or, alternatively, “I can get a better price at this time than I can at that time.”

A spectral approach to pricing is an approach that makes noise. For example, we take a spectral approach to pricing when we say, “The price is whatever it is wherever and whenever it is: it is neither good nor bad, neither better than nor worse than.”

Niklas, as you have aptly demonstrated, on the level of everyday exchanges and accounts we are dealing with discreta: we either did buy or we didn’t buy; we either did sell or we didn’t sell; it is either a credit to our account or a debit from our account. However, as you well know, exchange is only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to economic activity, especially in capitalist societies. As capitalist societies have become hegemonic and production processes have become increasingly complex, a greater and greater part of economic activity has become continuous: comparing and contrasting differing prices and deferred orders relative to each other. Indeed, capitalism is primarily a matter of arbitrage and the gaming the order flow: reacting to and capitalizing on discrepancies that arise from differing market prices and from deferred market orders. We must, however, go deeper: I think that you would agree with me that the continuous, as I have defined it above, is only that part of the iceberg of economic activity just beneath the surface, the part of the iceberg beneath the surface that we can still see from the above surface. The spectral, as I have defined it, is the larger part of the iceberg of economic activity that we cannot see at all from the surface, the part lies hidden in the obscure depths. The spectral approach is not a matter of “reacting to and capitalizing on discrepancies” but, rather, the spectral approach is a matter of acting to create discrepancies, to create differing market prices and deferred market orders, and then probing these discrepancies.

Niklas, you will have noted that my usage of the metaphor of the iceberg above is isomorphic to Freud’s usage of the iceberg metaphor: Freud placed consciousness at the tip of the iceberg where I have placed the discrete; Freud placed the preconscious just beneath the surface where I have placed the continuous; and Freud placed the unconscious in the obscure depths where I have placed the spectral. My argument is that the problem that I am dealing with in this text, regarding the errors that economists must cope with when apprehending economic activity beyond everyday accounting and exchange, is isomorphic to the Freudo-Lacanian problem of the errors that psychotherapists must cope with when apprehending psychic activity beyond consciousness.

So, in my terms, what are the errors that economists must cope with when apprehending economic activity beyond accounting and exchange?

First, there is the quantization error that arises from continuous-to-discrete conversion (i.e., converting prices analog signals to prices as digital signals): when we proceed from (i) comparing and contrasting differing market prices and deferred market orders and move on to (ii) accounting and exchange, to buying or not buying, to selling or not selling, to crediting accounts and debiting accounts.
Second, there is the random error that arises from spectral-to-continuous conversion (i.e., converting prices as noise spectra to prices as analog signals): when we proceed from (i) creating differing market prices and deferred market orders and move on (ii) to comparing and contrasting differing market prices and deferred market orders.

I propose that a spectral-to-discrete conversion would avoid both of the errors described above. In my scheme of things, (i) prices as noise spectra apprehend what I have called laval/experimental phases of use and debt, (ii) prices as continua apprehend what I have called pupal/profitable phases of use and debt, and (iii) prices discreta apprehend what I have called imago/customary phases of use and debt. Thus, the question for me is as follows:

How could I proceed from larval/experimental uses and debts (which regard prices as spectra to imago/customary uses and debts (which regard prices as discreta) im-mediately, casting pupal/profitable uses and debts (which regard prices as continua) in an im-mediating role as opposed to mediating role?

Muindi’s Play of Economics and Ecology

From Capitalism to Naturalism

I fear that you might mistake me for a curious sort of neoliberal but, I assure you that is not the case. Above all else, what I am calling for is a deceleration and prolongation of the larval/experimental phases of use and debt relative to the other phases: I would have the development of uses and debts to proceed im-mediately from a prolonged larval/experimental phase to an abbreviated imago/customary phase, casting the pupal/profitable phase as a momentary im-mediating phase between the two, as opposed to a prolonged mediating phase.

Capitalism is all about the deceleration and prolongation of the pupal/profitable phases of use and debt. Capitalism works by (i) getting uses and debts from the larval/experimental phase to the pupal/profitable phase as quickly as possible and then (ii) holding uses and debts in the pupal/profitable phase for as long as possible and deferring the imago/customary phase for as long as possible. This is, of course, why capitalism loves rapid prototyping and high-frequency/low-latency (HF/LL) derivatives trading: rapid prototyping accelerates the larval/experimental phase with respect to uses, HF/LL derivatives trading accelerates the larval/experimental phase with respect to debts. The experimentalist differs radically from the capitalist on this point: to decelerate and prolong the larval/experimental phases of use and debt is to be a slow prototyper and low-frequency/high-latency (LF/HL) derivatives trader.

Gilles Deleuze, in his “Postscript on the Society of Control”, showed that, with the decline of social discipline following the World Wars of the first half of the 20th century, late 20th century and early 21st century capitalism sought to make social production and social obligations profitable through controlled experimentation. Thanks to the entangled forces of decolonization and globalization, spatio-temporal-experiential distances between producers and consumers, debtors and creditors became so great that, despite the proliferation of technologies of “time-space compression”, the larval/experimental phases of use and debt could no longer be hurried. But if the capitalist, for-profit system was to be kept afloat, the larval/experimental phases of use and debt could not be allowed to take priority over the pupal/profitable phases: the larval/experimental phases of use and debt had to be controlled.

One cannot deny the fact that capitalism has championed experimentation over the last half-century, but I would argue that capitalism has championed controlled experimentation over and against natural experimentation. This is not to say that capitalism have eschewed natural experiments altogether but, rather, that capitalism have treated natural experiments as “dangerous supplements” when used as substitutes for controlled experiments. An astute reader of Derrida will, of course, recognize that I am invoking Derrida’s deconstruction of Rousseau here: for there is a natural experiment serving as the supplement of (at) the origin of any and every controlled experiment. Capitalism, in regarding natural experiments as “dangerous supplements” to controlled experiments, sought out and privileged those natural experiments that verged most on controlled experiments, so-called “quasi-experiments” or “quasi-natural experiments”, and sought to marginalize those natural experiments that diverged most from controlled experiments, what I call “arche-experiments” or “arche-natural experiments”. Indeed, the post-1968 capitalist societies that Deleuze and Foucault called “societies of control” were societies “designed” so as to facilitate “controlled experiments” and “quasi-natural experiments” that would rapidly yield pupal/profitable uses and debts.

To decelerate and prolong the larval/experimental phases of use and debt is to eschew “controlled experiments” and “quasi-natural experiments”, inasmuch as one can, and, instead, to pursue “arche-natural experiments”. Speaking practically, the experimentalist-naturalist will seek out and privilege those quasi-natural experiments that verge most on arche-natural experiments and will seek to marginalize those quasi-natural experiments that diverge most from arche-natural experiments.

The Death of the Asset

“Derivatives are Constitutive”

The Asset is dead. The Asset remains dead. And we have killed it. How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent? [...] What are asset markets now, if they are not the tombs and monuments of the Asset?

Ay, just as God is dead but the will to submit lives on, the Asset is dead but the will to possess lives on. The ruling monetary authorities and those who put their faith in them believe that derivatives derive value from the performance of underlying assets. Ay, and it follows that the economic behaviour of the ruling monetary authorities and their followers is pathologically defensive and wish-fulfilling behavior, a reaction against the disturbing fact that underlying assets are nowhere to be found. This is, of course, very sort of pathologically defensive and wish-fulfilling behavior that is characteristic of Freud’s neurotic patients.

Freud’s great discovery was that the reactive mind tends to disavow itself of any disturbance and it does so in two ways. In the words of Alan Bass, a remarkable interpreter of Freud, “One [way] is to replace something disagreeable with something pleasant – this is wish fulfillment. The other [way] is to eliminate the disturbance by attempting to render it nonexistent – this is defense.” Wish fulfillment is exemplified by the battered spouse that says, “He hit me / And it felt like a kiss.” Defense is exemplified by the battered spouse that says, “I know, I know: it looks like he hit me, but the situation isn’t what it looks like. He didn’t really hit me.” Wish fulfillment acknowledges the disturbing fact, “He hit me”, but disavows the disturbing feeling that the fact provokes by fantasizing away the disturbing feeling, “And it felt like a kiss.” Defense, by contrast, disavows the disturbing fact entirely, “He didn’t really hit me, I ran into his fist when he shook it at me.” Wish fulfillment and defense are the twin processes of disavowal that enable a person (e.g., a battered spouse) to avoid dealing with a disturbing fact (e.g., the disturbing fact of being battered).

Ruling monetary authorities thinking and acting defensively are thinking and acting as if there are actually underlying assets to be found at present when there are none. Ruling monetary authorities thinking and acting wishingly acknowledge that, yes, there are no underlying assets to be found at present, and yet we can at present derive value from assets to be found in the past and from assets to be found in the future. Church leaders engaged in wish-fulfillment play the same game as the ruling monetary authorities: they acknowledge the dire state of things at present but they encourage us to act at present with respect for God the creator in the beginning, and for His Last Judgment to come.

As clever students of Freud (and Lacan), we must not hastily discount wish-fulfillments and regard them as pure fantasies. Rather, we must “traverse” the fantasy. To quote Richard Boothby, another remarkable reader of Freud:

Traversing the fantasy' thus does not mean that the subject somehow abandons its involvement with fanciful caprices and accommodates itself to a pragmatic 'reality,' but precisely the opposite: the subject is submitted to that effect of the symbolic lack that reveals the limit of everyday reality. To traverse the fantasy in the Lacanian sense is to be more profoundly claimed by the fantasy than ever, in the sense of being brought into an ever more intimate relation with that real core of the fantasy that transcends imagining.

Ay, so, what is the “real core” of the ruling monetary authorities’ wish-fulfilling fantasies, the “effect of the symbolic lack that reveals the limit of everyday reality”? It is, of course, the uncertainty principle that says that money at any given time can either measure and symbolize the likelihood of an obligation being satisfied in a timely manner with certainty, or it can measure and symbolize the value expended in satisfying an obligation in a timely manner with certainty, but it can never do both at the same time. Ay, it is no wonder that we find temporizing at the heart of the wish-fulfilling fantasies of the ruling monetary authorities, fantasies about deriving value in the present from assets to be found in the past and from assets to be found in the future.

The mistake that characterizes the fantasies of the ruling monetary authorities is treating derivatives as if they derive value from assets to be found in the past and from assets to be found in the future. Derivatives are not derivative, they are constitutive. A derivative constitutes the becoming of an asset, as opposed to the being of an asset. Or, in other words, a derivative simultaneously constitutes an asset to be found in the past and an asset to be found in the future in and through its acknowledgment that an asset will never be present(-at-hand).

Every derivatives contract involves a becoming rather than a being, either an obligation becoming more or less valuable or the satisfaction of an obligation in a timely manner becoming more or less likely. To quote Gilles Deleuze from the opening pages of The Logic of Sense:

[Becoming] does not tolerate the separation or the distinction of before and after, or of past and future. It pertains to the essence of becoming to move and to pull in both directions at once. [...] It always eludes the present, causing future and past, more and less, too much and not enough to coincide [...]

Capitalists engaged in derivatives contracting and trading, especially those engaged in high-frequency/low-latency derivatives trading, aim to (mis)take becomings for beings, to make assets appear to be present-at-hand. The capitalist derivatives trader is less interested in speculating and hedging with regard to an obligations becoming more or less valuable or more or less likely to be satisfied in a timely manner but, instead, is more interested in arbitrage and gaming the order flow, in reacting to and capitalizing on discrepancies that arise from differing market prices for derivatives and from deferred market orders for derivatives. Ay, and it is the appearance of such discrepancies that is (mis)taken for the presence(-at-hand) of assets.

Whereas the capitalist reacts to market discrepancies in order to capitalize on market discrepancies, the experimentalist acts to create market discrepancies in order to probe market discrepancies. As we have noted, however, the late-capitalist is always an experimentalist-capitalist, acting first in order to react later. As opposed to the experimentalist-capitalist, it is the experimentalist-naturalist who acts first in order to act again later, that I aim to affirm over and against the experimentalist-capitalist.

Time Devices and Time Protocols

Time-Sharing, Time-Keeping, and Time-Dilating

Time-sharing protocols entangle different economic actors and, thus, enable different economic actors to share untimely events. Take, for instance, the first debt derivative we have on record, the 48th law of the Code of Hammurabi, a time-sharing protocol that enables the indebted farmer and their creditor to share the untimely event of crop failure:

If any one owe a debt for a loan, and a storm prostrates the grain, or the harvest fail, or the grain does not grow for lack of water; in that year he need not give his creditor any grain, he washes his debt-tablet in water and pays no rent for the year.”
[The] 48th law [...] translated into a more modern language would stipulate the following: A farmer who has a mortgage on his property is required to make annual interest payments in the form of grain, however, in the event of a crop failure, this farmer has the right not to pay anything and the creditor has no alternative but to forgive the interest due. Experts in the field of derivatives would classify such a contract as a put option. [...] If the harvest is plentiful and the farmer has enough grain to pay his mortgage interest, the put option would expire worthless. If his harvest fell short, however, he [c]ould exercise his right to walk away from making the payment.

In other words, the 48th law of the Code of Hammurabi entangles the indebted farmer and their creditor such that the measurement of the indebted farmers harvest is correlated with the measurement of the creditors receipts on interest payments. What is to be understood here is that time-sharing protocols constitute social contingencies: the measurement of the creditors receipts on interest payments are contingent upon the measurement of the indebted farmers harvest.

By contrast, take an indebted farmer without recourse to a debt derivative, one who is bound by a debt instrument, a time-keeping protocol, to pay off a loan in monthly installments over the course of 20 years, and who must pay their monthly installment to their creditor or suffer consequences: late fees, higher interest rates. The binding of a debtor to creditor by a debt instrument is markedly different from a debt derivatives entangling of a creditor and debtor. When an indebted farmer is bound to a creditor by a debt instrument, the measurement of the creditors receipts on payments and the measurement of the indebted farmers harvest are no longer mutually contingent. Indeed, the binding achieved by a debt instrument is the dis-entangling of that which has been entangled by a debt derivative.

Note that, as a result of the binding achieved by the debt instrument, the measurement of the creditors receipts on payments can be said to keep time insofar as the indebted farmer must keep up with their monthly installments or suffer late fees and higher interest rates, no matter the weather, no matter whether the crops grow or fail. Indeed, it could be said that the measurement of the indebted farmers harvest varies over time-as-kept-by the periodic measurement of the creditors receipts on payments. What is to be understood here is that time-keeping protocols constitute social necessities: again, the indebted farmer must either keep up with their monthly installments or suffer the consequences, no matter the weather.

Whereas time-sharing constitutes social contingencies and time-keeping constitutes social necessities, time-dilating constitutes social niceties. Let us say that we have two indebted farmers bound pay off a loan off monthly installments to the same creditor. The first farmer is of no relation to the creditor but the second is the creditors second cousin. Both of these indebted farmers have had bad harvests and cannot pay their monthly installment. The creditor charges a late fee to the first farmer, who is of no relation, for failing to pay. By contrast, because the creditor is familiar with the second farmer and his circumstances, the creditor overlooks the lapse in payment and doesn’t charge the second farmer a late fee. As a result, time-as-kept-by the periodic measurement of the first farmer’s account with the creditor will differ from time-as-kept-by the periodic measurement of the second farmer’s account with the creditor. Time moves faster for the first farmer and slower for the second farmer because the custom obliges the creditor to forgive the second farmer.

Another example, both a peasant and a priest are indebted to the same money lender. The weather is bad and every peasants harvest fails. As a result, the priest receives a meager tithe from the peasantry. Both the peasant and the priest fail to make their monthly payment to the money lender. The creditor charges a late fee to the first farmer, who is a lowly creature, for failing to pay. By contrast, because the creditor knows that it is bad taste to play the usurer when dealing with a priest, the creditor overlooks the lapse in payment and doesn’t charge the priest a late fee. In this example, time moves faster for the peasant and slower for the priest because custom obliges the creditor to forgive the priest.

In the first example, with the two farmers, the capitalist observing the creditors act of forgiveness from a distance would say that the creditor gains social capital by forgiving the second farmer. In the second example, the capitalist observing the creditors act of forgiveness from a distance would say that the creditor gains cultural capital by forgiving the priest. While this is certainly the case from the perspective of the capitalist observing from a distance, this is not necessarily the case from the perspective of the creditor intimately involved in forgiving the two late payments. From the perspective of the creditor involved, there may well have been no ulterior profit motive: forgiving the two late payments may simply have been the right thing to do, what custom obliged them to do.

Note that in the examples of the three different timing protocols above, the timing device we investigated was always the same: the farmer’s harvest functioned as a time-sharing device in the first example, then as time-keeping device in the second example, then as time-dilating device in the third example. It is the implementation of a protocol that determines which function a device serves: the harvest functioned as a time-sharing device in and through the implementation of a time-sharing protocol, then as a time-keeping device in and through the implementation of a time-keeping protocol, and then as a time-dilating device in and through the implementation of a time-dilating protocol. I might have placed the prefix “mal” in parentheses before “function” because to use a harvest to implement, say, a time-keeping protocol is only to attempt to get the harvest to function as a time-keeping device. Indeed, in the example that we discussed above, wherein such an attempt was made to treat the harvest as a time-keeping device, the harvest was a mal-functioning time-keeping device and late penalties applied to the farmer’s account were “corrections” of the harvest’s time-keeping “errors”.

The above reveals a defining feature of the capitalist character, the capitalist wants to keep everything timely and gets off on “correcting” for time-keeping “errors”. Whereas the character of the capitalist wants to keep everything timely, the character of the experimentalist-naturalist, by contrast, wants to share whatever is untimely and the character of traditionalist wants to give greater time to somethings and give lesser time to others.

An Open Conspiracy

On Formal and Material Openness

If we could deal with timing protocols apart from timing devices, with debts apart from uses, we would only confront the problem of formal openness. Formal openness is the consequence of species of "incompleteness", a genera that Kurt Gödel is famous for describing, and the consequence of species of “undecidability", a genera that Alan Turing is famous for describing.

If we could deal with timing devices apart from timing protocols, with uses apart from debts, we would only confront the problem of material openness. Material openness is the consequence of species of “uncertainty”, a genera that Werner Heisenberg is famous for describing, and the consequence of species of "complementarity", a genera that Niels Bohr is famous for describing.

We can, of course, deal with timing protocols (debts) and timing devices (uses) apart from one another in the abstract:

We can abstract away formal openness—by some miracle producing complete and consistent measurement protocols—so that only material openness remains to bring about novelty and surprise.
We can abstract away material openness—by some miracle producing infinitely precise devices of measurement and, even more miraculously, proving that uncertainty is nothing more than an “observer effect”—so that only formal openness remains bring about novelty and surprise.

Ay, but it has been proven that, concretely, we can neither put an end formal openness nor to material openness: Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle and Bohr’s principle of complementarity prove that we cannot put an end to material openness; Gödel's incompleteness theorems and Turing’s undecidable problems prove that we cannot put an end to formal openness. It follows, that we are always forced to relate timing devices (uses) and timing protocols (debts) to one another in concrete experience, which is to say, in other words, that we are always encountering formal openness and material openness together, at one and the same time. Formal openness and material openness are always “inspiring” each other and “conspiring” together so as to perpetually bring about novelty and surprise.

That being said, however, it is only during the larval/experimental phase of uses and debts (i.e., it is only when dealing with debt derivatives, probes, and spectra) that we openly acknowledge that formal and material openness mutually inspire and conspire with one another. Otherwise, during the pupal/profitable and imago/customary phases of uses and debts, we acknowledge the primacy of one over the other.

Accounting in Three Voices

Active Accounting, Reflexive Accounting, Passive Accounting

Let us consider accounting as a verb that can be deployed in three grammatical voices:

The active voice (e.g., “to account”)
The reflexive voice (e.g., “to account for oneself”)
The passive voice (e.g., the naïve version of the passive voice: “to be accounted for”; and the sentimental version of the passive voice: “to make oneself be accounted for”)

With these three grammatical voices in mind, I want to make four arguments.

First, I want to argue that material openness appears to be independent, and formal openness appears to be dependent upon material openness, when we are dealing with active accounting.

Second, I want to argue that formal openness appears to be independent, and material openness appears to be dependent upon formal openness, when we are dealing with reflexive accounting.

Third, I want to argue that formal openness and material openness lose any apparent independence and exhibit mutual dependence when we are dealing with passive accounting.

Before I make the three arguments about accounting outlined above, however, I would like to discuss the three grammatical voices in two other contexts: in the context of the psychoanalytic interpretation of dreams and in the context of experiments in quantum mechanics. I would like to do this because I would like to account for economic phenomena in a manner inspired by the psychoanalyst's accounting for dreams and the experimental physicist’s accounting for quantum phenomena.

Lacanian psychoanalysis tells us that accounting for dreams in the active and reflexive voices can never get us to the “actual subjects” of our dreams: we only get to the “actual subjects” of our dreams when we account for them in the passive voice.

If, for instance, I have a dream in which I am eaten by a pack of wolves, I will not get to the “actual subject” of my dream by using the active voice and providing the following account of my dream, “A pack of wolves devoured me in my dream.” This use of the active voice disavows the dream’s internal significance for the dreamer insofar as the dreamer gives up responsibility for what has happened to them in their dream: the dream happens upon the dreamer in the active account of the dream.

Nor will I get to the “actual subject” of my dream by recognizing that the wolf pack is nothing more or other than a projection of myself and, thusly, providing an account of my dream in the reflexive voice, “I devoured myself in my dream.” The self-reflexive voice disavows the dream’s external significance for the dreamer insofar as the dreamer takes responsibility for everything that happens to them in their dream: the dreamer happens upon themself in the reflexive account of the dream.

If I am to get to the “actual subject” of my dream, I must account for my dream in the Lacanian sentimental version of the passive voice: “I made myself become devoured by a pack of wolves in my dream.” The Lacanian sentimental version of the passive voice traverses both the internal significance and the external significance of the dream: the dreamer shares responsibility for what happens to them in the dream with others or, in other words, the dreamer makes themself become happened upon by others in the dream. The wolf pack in my dream is something more and other than just my self-projection: the wolf pack was conceived by my imagination, yes, but something more and other than my imagination was seminal in its conception. Thus, the wolf pack has significance apart from my imagination, the wolf pack signifies, both for myself and for others, something more than and other than just myself.

Like an avowed surrealist, I hold that what applies to the accounting of what we experience in dreams applies just as well to the accounting of whatever we experience in waking life: the “actual subject” of whatever we experience can only be expressed in the passive voice. Using the active voice activates the subjects of experience and pacifies the objects of experience by insisting that subjects differ from their objects without deferring to their objects. By contrast, using the reflexive voice activates both the subjects of experience and the objects of experience but only by identifying subjects with their objects. The Lacanian sentimental version of the passive voice can activate both the subjects of experience and the objects of experience without identifying them in any way: the Lacanian sentimental version of the passive voice insists that subjects both differ from and defer to their objects.

Now, let us take, for instance, the experience of the experimental physicist probing quantum phenomena. Experimental quantum physicists know very well that, in practice, their experimental protocols and devices effect the quantum phenomena that they probe, yes, but experimental physicists also know that their experimental protocols and devices do not simply act to effect the quantum phenomena that they probe and, what’s more, their experimental protocols and devices do not reflexively act upon themselves and probe themselves in action, casting quantum phenomena as illusory epi-phenomena. Contrary to that, experimental physicists know that, in practice, their experimental protocols and devices passively effect the quantum phenomena that they probe: their experimental protocols and devices make themselves become acted upon by the quantum phenomena that they probe. The “actual subjects” of experiments with quantum phenomena, like the “actual subjects” of dreams, can only be accounted for in the passive voice.

Many would argue that the experiences of the dreamer and of the experimental particle physicist are marginal to the extreme: they would argue that the active voice and the reflexive voice account for most, if not all, experiences. Ay, and I would agree that the experience of the dreamer and of the experimental particle physicist are, indeed, marginal to the extreme, but they are so because they are marginalized to the extreme. Experiences of the kind associated with the dreamer and the experimental particle physicist are, in fact, the only kinds of experiences that we actually have, they are unexceptional experiences. What is exceptional is the traversal of such experiences in and through passively voiced accountings: actual experiences are commonly disavowed in and through active and reflexive accountings and prevailed over by virtual experiences.

Now, proceeding to the problem of accounting for "economic subjects", the only way to get to an "actual economic subject" is through a passive accounting of economic phenomena. Only passive accounting practices can account for all three phases of use and debt: the imago/customary phase, the pupal/profitable phase, and the larval/experimental phase. By contrast, reflexive accounting practices can only account for the imago/customary and the pupal profitable phases, and active accounting practices can only account for the imago/customary phases of use and debt.

The capitalist, the proponent of time-keeping devices and protocols, privileges reflexive accounting practices and regards uses and debts as reflexive formalisms. The reflexive accounting practice that the capitalist privileges in our time is, of course, double-entry accounting. As you have deftly pointed out, Niklas, double entry accounting works by identifying every credit with one or more debits, every asset with one or more liabilities, and in this way the subject of double-entry accounting always and only happens upon themself: nothing other than and nothing external to themself. If the subject of double-entry accounting is credited it is because the subject has debited themself, if the subject of double-entry accounting acquires an asset it is because the subject has burdened themself with a liability. Ay, in this way, the subject of double-entry accounting takes responsibility for every credit and every debit, for every asset and every liability, disavowing the significance of externalities. The capitalist world order, as registered by reflexive, double-entry accounting, consists of subjects that are supposed to be self-sufficient.

The traditionalist, the proponent of time-dilating devices and protocols, privileges active accounting practices and regards uses and debts as (re)active matters. The traditionalist finds everywhere (i) greater, masterful subjects that put lesser, slavish objects to use and are credited for doing so and (ii) lesser, slavish objects that are indebted to those greater, masterful subjects who put them to use. The active accounting practices that the traditionalist privileges are, thus, all about marking the actions that distinguish masterful subjects (those that use and are credited for it) from slavish objects (those that are put to use and indebted for it). The traditionalist world order, as registered by active accounting practices, consists of “ladders of being” and “wheels of becoming”. An active account of our relationship registers our relationship as a “ladder of being”, with me at the top and you at the bottom, when it indicates that I put you to use, Niklas, indebting you to me, and then leaves the matter to rest there. An active account of our relationship registers our relationship as a “wheel of becoming” when it indicates that our relationship is matter of reciprocation by turns: I put you to use, indebting you to me, then you put me to use, indebting me to you, then I put you to use, indebting you to me, then you put me to use indebting me to you, then… Gift economies, as described by Marcel Mauss, register their world as a “wheel of becoming.” Feudal economies, using the term “feudal” in its most expansive sense, register their world as a “ladder of being.” Most traditional economies are a mix of feudal and gift economies, with some traditional economies leaning more towards feudal economy and others leaning more towards gift economy.

The experimentalist-naturalist, the proponent of time-sharing devices and protocols, privileges passive accounting and regards uses and debts as passive supplements. The experimentalist-naturalist finds that there are (i) forms of subjectivity that supplement matters of objectivity and (ii) matters of objectivity that supplement forms of subjectivity.

What is to Be Done?

An Economics for the Anthropocene

It is the 21st Century of the Common Era: roughly three hundred millennia since the species H. sapiens emerged from a predecessor within the genus Homo, roughly a hundred millennia since H. sapiens equipped with symbolic language began migrating out of Africa, roughly ten millennia since H. sapiens first domesticated plants and animals, roughly five millennia since H. sapiens developed writing and the first exact predictive sciences, roughly two centuries since H. sapiens began to exploit fossil fuels on an industrial scale, roughly a century since H. sapiens split the atom, and roughly a half century since H. sapiens deciphered the genetic code and first traveled beyond the earth’s atmosphere.

All creatures living on the planet earth during this 21st Century live either with or against a planetary civilization that revolves around the institution of reflexive accounting practices and the prevalence time-keeping protocols. The institution of reflexive accounting practices, the righteous work of the ruling monetary authorities, disavows the significance of externalities, of the external world, and this disavowal is precipitating massive environmental crises. Ay, and, what's more, time-keeping protocols prevail over and against time-sharing protocols, diminishing our ability to collectively respond to untimely events. Insofar as the massive environmental crises we face yield untimely events with greater and greater frequency, this 21st Century is liable to be a fatal one.

How can we experimentalist-naturalists counter the fatal liabilities of our era? How might we institute passive accounting practices, as opposed to reflexive accounting practices, so that we may site our internal worlds in the external world and cite the external world in our internal worlds? How might we enable time-sharing protocols to prevail, as opposed to time-keeping protocols, so as to maximize our ability to collectively respond to untimely events?