This was yesterday, in response to a recent post.
There are no prizes for guessing where. But you're welcome to try.
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I was into boilers and enpalthy tables in a big way once. A lot of sensible schemes for running economies look a bit like steam or chemical engineering to me. Tax as pressure relief on MMT-stoked full resource usage. Plenty of good traction in that.
The picture of new democracy requires a grip on real history and the role of promises of change, language and ideas within it. Easy enough to write the future prototype of a regionalized Parliament running on an electronic network. MPs would represent in different ways than we get in current representative democracy. The new model would be closer to legal representation so MPs would need teams to deliver. Something a bit like judicial review (but free to all) and an employee benefit scheme (but for all) and the old law centres. The legal system would have to change and far fewer lawyers would become judges and institutions would be representative in people, not filled in terms of current dud notions on meritocracy. My guess is the ‘blueprint’ is about book length on the future design.
Designing in awareness of the mad Idols (think Bacon) of our public debate is actually tougher than prototyping itself. I’d start in a video game of the Voyage of Mardonius designed to involve players in the racism, sexism, slavery and use of ‘democracies’ by scheming Persian empire-builders to manage their colonies, including borrowing Greek navies to fight Greeks. The basic idea would be immersive involvement with democracy’s ignoble origins. One can ponder pretty much anything from anthropology to how wars come about in such a design – and design free contributions from others into the games.
None of this is as simple as it may look to others. Language is generally bemusing (Wittgenstein) and people generally don’t do empiricism but latch onto evidence in a world-view (Quine) – we still have little clue on working understanding work 50 years old like this, let alone free of Idols of history in which we are told be be proud of our heritages (nearly always bleak dominance stories).
Cases of people asserting they act disinterestedly would need to be written against statistics demonstrating the lifelong political bias of such people (US Supreme Court etc.). Griffiths at the LSE did some of this years ago (70s) – amazing how so many “disinterested” judges had Tory values in their objective hearts. There’s a play-thing version of what I’m on about in science fiction prototyping. Part of the idea would be to involve people in worlds wide-apart dealing with similar issues – like Ancient Greek critique of democratic processes being so like our own pathetic Brexit. An essential idea is to free ourselves from educational and Hollywood propaganda in imaging the future and what the real constraints are in building such from something more practical than politicians’ promises. It’s a tough job and one’s boilers may explode before warp is achieved. The democracy of the future may be so different as to only be intelligible in current language in terms of us never having had the real thing. Current debate between MPs may stand as obscene comedy in the future. Language might change so much if exposed to electronic scrutiny in more or less rel time to audiences freed from propaganda-created world-views. The lies go deeper than what MMT reveals as taught lies of macro-monetary economics. Old chestnut in all this is how do we not brainwash having discovered just how conned we have been. We do have some ideas on this including defeasible and paraconsistent logics. We can reason about inconsistency without explosive triviality.
Wow
Much to think about there
Thanks. Hard to stay on track once language gets like Bakunin in his bath watching his body melt into the water. This said, everything solid doesn’t melt to air. On close examination, there are many states of matter and direct solid to gas transitions are rare except in metaphor. Enthalpy (total heat) is essentially about the thermodynamics of air, there being sensible and latent heat in it. Oddly given our usual use of the term, one uses ‘psychometric’ charts in this very strict science. See what a picture of a train chimney gets me rambling about, rather than the ramble through Welsh countryside better for my health! This is old science and key in it is a redefinition of the basic tool – the thermometer. Economics (we could do with another term) has so many fairy stories embedded from general language (homilies on comparative advantage and various from eastern European grandfathers) – and seems not to grok the circularity in the formation of its theoretical terms. Though I’d like to see some real worrying about this – as we see in Ludwig, Sneed and Scheiber on structuralism in physics – this uses Bourbaki’s species of structures – it is much more important to democratise economics in a formalisation different from that used in the theories of the subject. I don’t know how to put this plainly, but the key is not to think (like Marx at his worst or any of the TINA merchants) of economics as a kind of tough love that justifies rotten treatment of people and the planet for the great idea leading to something like Parfit’s ‘repugnant conclusion’ concerning utilitarianism. Big data – in a sense not to do with State and advertising surveillance – has some promise in letting in the real lives of people in meaningful contribution to measurement, a bit like the wet-bulb in enpalthy. I can’t muster the plain talk and suspect this is to do with something in communication’s base in control and a competition needing new rules, new attitudes towards theory formulation – lives worth living, rather than theory in the first place.
OK. I’ll have a wild guess. Based on the minimal chimney detail I’ll go for the Llangollen Railway. Wherever you are I hope you’re all having fun. … ‘Nos da’. 🙂
Good try
Not right
Is it the Welshpool? The top of the funnel is not spartan enough to be the Rheidol. I love the Rheidol – when you go across the Cob and look over the estuary to the mountains and then you have the upper reaches of the line – phew! – spectacular. A lot of Wales for me is what I would call a ‘mini New Zealand’ – a really beautiful place. Your picture looks too big to belong to a locomotive off my favourite Welsh narrow gauge – the Talyllyn.
Speaking of the latter we have some lovely memories of that line with the kids. We also walked along it once from Dolgoch to Tywyn and the bridges over the line have slate topped walls. They are covered in writing by people over years that are fascinating to read – a history of the British Isles written in copperplate and stone – from 19th century walkers to trainee commando’s from WWII leaving their mark on a passing world.
I do remember a lovely afternoon spent on the Welshpool though. It was a very chilled out place. A good place to recharge.
You got it
That is The Countess
While archytas’ comment is somewhat tongue-in-cheek, there is surely truth in there. I believe that one of the reasons many people are attracted to steam engines is that they represent a model of organisation that is functional, elegant and, importantly, comprehensible – fire up the boiler, raise the steam, drive the pistons, gain traction. Steam engines were things of beauty, created by human hands to perform a task that served us all. Would that the workings of the modern life were as intelligible and certain! Insecurity is, sadly, one of the defining characteristics of the world today, and as a result I believe many yearn – albeit perhaps unknowingly – for what the likes of the Mallard represented:
”They ran south
working up the bank
past the upturned faces
of the platelayers.
She starts to take her wing,
she jumps to it like a living thing,
made for speed and in full cry
they gave her the road
and she holds to the line.
Church bells call a beat along the track
she burns with the substance of the land.
Racing through the circling lines
a rocket in blue at two miles a minute,
embers stream along her sides;
from this far away now,
she flies with them
into sky
into history
into legend
she flies…”
https://nationalrailwaymuseum.wordpress.com/2013/05/21/how-mallard-inspired-a-rock-band/
Lovely Jim. We might be a lot better off if we could get back to something Veblen said on engineers doing decision-making rather than financiers. These days this could fire green practices rather than smokestack and steam nostalgia.
Archytas
I don’t know what you are ‘on’, but whatever it is could I have some please?
thanks,
PSR.
Is that part of the song lyric, or a different poem?
Those were my thoughts on a train journey yesterday
I don’t claim it to be poetry
I use words whatever way suits to explore ideas
Oops – I didn’t mean your post, I meant the lyrics quoted in the previous comment by Jim Green. And I’m pleased to say they are indeed part of the song lyric – unusually clear on the recording that the NRM blog links to.
And also an unusually fine and tight piece of poetry, for a rock style that can be self-indulgent and rambling (my husband a I are both Genesis fans, and he goes beyond them to the genre as a whole so I hear some others too…)
Of course if you are the group’s lyricist, then double “chapeau” – but I think you’ve enough to do already and we’re merely at cross purposes here. Thanks for responding.
Karen, it’s part of the lyric to the song ‘East Coast Racer’ by the band Big Big Train. It’s about the famous steam locomotive Mallard, which you can see a picture of here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LNER_Class_A4_4468_Mallard
And now you have the Hyperloop train based on an idea of Isambard Brunel’s:-
http://mikenormaneconomics.blogspot.com/2018/10/hyperloop-explained-b1m.html