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Musings Report 2022-12 3-19-22 A Modest Proposal
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For those who are new to the Musings reports: they're a glimpse into my notebook, the unfiltered swamp where I organize future themes, sort through the dozens of stories and links submitted by readers, refine my own research and start connecting dots which appear later in the blog or in my books. As always, I hope the Musings spark new appraisals and insights. Thank you for supporting the site and for inviting me into your circle of correspondents.
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A Modest Proposal
Jonathan Swift's 1729 satiric essay, A Modest Proposal for Preventing the Children of Poor People from Being a Burthen to their Parents, or the Country, and for Making Them Beneficial to the Publick, "proposes that the country ameliorate poverty in Ireland by butchering the children of the Irish poor and selling them as food to wealthy English landlords. Swift’s proposal is a savage comment on England’s legal and economic exploitation of Ireland. The essay is a masterpiece of satire, with a blend of rational deliberation and unthinkable conclusion, and its title has come to symbolize any proposition to solve a problem with an effective but outrageous cure."
(Since I'm predominantly Irish-Scots, the modest proposal would have removed much of my gene pool.)
In a previous Musings, I published "Five Things You Notice When You Quit the News," the third item being "Most current-events-related conversations are just people talking out of their asses."
I would have phrased it somewhat more politely but you get the point: the overwhelming majority of pundits and commentators have no skin in the game of whether their analyses or predictions pan out or not.
The nature of our click-bait-driven media circus greatly incentivizes making outrageous predictions as a means of attracting eyeballs and thus revenues, especially to platforms that pay their content creators solely on the basis of the number of views their post or podcast receives.
Financial pundits are especially shameless about issuing bold predictions with few fears that being wrong will have any consequences, due to the public's short memories and the caveats brought to light once the pundit is revealed as completely off-base.
Meanwhile, nobody knows anything for sure, as the global dynamics unfolding are too complex, interwoven, fragile (long dependency chains abound), prone to non-linear breakdowns and too novel to support conventional analyses or predictions.
It's been 80 years since we experienced a Fourth Turning (debt super-cycle, etc.) and arguably hundreds of years (say, 400) since we have experienced long-term shortages of Essential Stuff.
Despite these tremendous uncertainties, we are inundated with conflicting predictions issued with great confidence: recession is baked in, there will be no recession in 2022 or 2023, oil is going to $200, oil is going to $50, and so on: they can't all be correct because they're all over the map.
Since no one issuing confident analyses and predictions has any skin in the game, there is no cost to being wrong, and no cost to cluttering content with wild guesses and half-baked analysis.
My Modest Proposal is that any prediction requires the pundit / commentator to post a bond equal to 25% of their entire net wealth which is forfeited if their prediction proves incorrect.
To eliminate the penniless pundits from having a free hand, commentators with little in the way of assets must post a guarantee of $5,000 of labor to be worked off at the minimum wage.
All predictions must carry a date stamp by which the prediction will be judged correct or incorrect by a panel of peers.
If the dire click-bait headline predicted mass starvation and said starvation did not come to pass in the allotted time, the prognosticator forfeits 25% of their wealth.
Pundits predicting Dow 50,000 whose wild guess turns out to be wrong lose 25% of their fortune.
Penniless click-baiters will think twice about making perilous predictions once they toil for 400+ hours to pay off their forfeited bond.
Once everyone in the public sphere has skin in the game, we'll see far fewer click-bait predictions and far fewer financial pundits shamelessly talking their book.
Public content will be nigher quality with fewer pundits making predictions out of their... ahem, orifices.
Having proposed this, I'm going to be much more careful in issuing my own predictions: Dow, um, whatever....
Satire aside, systems fall apart when participants no longer have consequential skin in the game.
Highlights of the Blog
Podcasts:
Charles Hugh Smith on The Great Reset Agenda (Part I, 42 min)
Charles Hugh Smith on The Great Awakening Vision (Part II, 36 min)
Posts:
How Healthcare Became Sickcare 3/18/22
Risk Accumulates Where No One Is Looking For It 3/16/22
Serf-Expression 3/15/22
Best Thing That Happened To Me This Week
Bees buzzing in the Murashige avocado tree, now 4 1/2 years old, a sure sign of plentiful flowers, which raise our hopes for a first avocado harvest later in 2022.
From Left Field
NOTE TO NEW READERS: This list is not comprised of articles I agree with or that I judge to be correct or of the highest quality. It is representative of the content I find interesting as reflections of the current zeitgeist. The list is intended to be perused with an open, critical, occasionally amused mind.
Crypto Tycoon Goes to War With Hawaii Locals Over Beach -- I suspect we'll be seeing a lot more of this resistance to high-handed multi-millionaires...
Starvation Diet -- fertilizer shortages will matter....
THE CLIMATE-CHANGE TRIP TO ABILENE
How much does it cost to buy a scientist? Less than you would imagine, and it is perfectly legal
Would you take free land in rural America? -- lots of driving, need a 40+ MPG vehicle....
The coming food shortages are going to be FAR WORSE than we are being told -- click-bait headline but makes some good points...
Oil Frackers Brace for End of the U.S. Shale Boom
Jeff Bezos and the secretive world of superyachts
War in the time of Neanderthals: How our species battled for supremacy for over 100,000 years
The Underwater Geology of the Hawaii Islands is Just Amazing
Assessing Global Long-Term EROI of Gas: A Net-Energy Perspective on the Energy Transition--detailed, worth a read....
Just one of those things, I suppose.-- a meaningful trinket accidentally damaged....
"Happiness is a small house, with a big kitchen." Alfred Hitchcock (yatzer.com, via GFB)
Thanks for reading--
charles |
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