[Mac_crypto] The Geodesic Economy: "World Peace Through Free Trade"

[R. A. Hettinga]

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I wonder what people, especially from New York City, think about the
new proposals for Lower Manhattan and World Trade Center site that
came out this week.

<http://www.lowermanhattan.info/rebuild/new_design_plans/>


There's something about some of those gloriously large buildings (10
million square feet, lots of them, must have been a requirement),
especially the jaw-dropping bizarre ones, like one of the "sky-city"
proposals that looks like a colony of mid-ocean tube-worms,

<http://www.lowermanhattan.info/rebuild/new_design_plans/firm_f/slides
/slide17.asp>

<http://www.lowermanhattan.info/rebuild/new_design_plans/firm_f/slides
/slide12.asp>

<http://www.lowermanhattan.info/rebuild/new_design_plans/firm_f/slides
/slide26.asp>

<http://www.lowermanhattan.info/rebuild/new_design_plans/firm_f/slides
/slide11.asp>

<http://www.lowermanhattan.info/rebuild/new_design_plans/firm_f/slides
/slide10.asp>

, or the monster skyscraper built of huge vertical acute triangles,

<http://www.lowermanhattan.info/rebuild/new_design_plans/firm_a/slides
/slide9.asp>

<http://www.lowermanhattan.info/rebuild/new_design_plans/firm_a/slides
/slide30.asp?>

<http://www.lowermanhattan.info/rebuild/new_design_plans/firm_a/slides
/slide32.asp>

<http://www.lowermanhattan.info/rebuild/new_design_plans/firm_a/slides
/slide33.asp>

<http://www.lowermanhattan.info/rebuild/new_design_plans/firm_a/slides
/slide35.asp>

<http://www.lowermanhattan.info/rebuild/new_design_plans/firm_a/slides
/slide37.asp>

or even the semiotic daisy-chain of a 1776-foot needle in the sky,
stuffed full of trees, arranged, no less, in biomic order,

<http://www.lowermanhattan.info/rebuild/new_design_plans/firm_d/slides
/slide8.asp>

<http://www.lowermanhattan.info/rebuild/new_design_plans/firm_d/slides
/slide30.asp>,

 that is just plain cool to think about.


Heroic, even.

A hearty economic "sod off" to all kinds of mumbo-jumbo-spouting
theocratic luddites -- at home and abroad -- who continue to excuse
their barbarity, in word and deed, in the name of some ostensibly
sane idea, say trans- or even anti-nationalism, or, more likely, the
usual superstition, like religious extremism, or, closer to home, and
found even in most of these designs, the mystification of nature.


Or, for that matter, the mystification of the idea of human equality,
an obscenely facile lie that has justified the murder and slavery of
more people in the past three centuries than all the people who have
existed on earth prior to that time. Cromwell, Robespierre, Napoleon,
(yes, Lincoln,) Bismarck, Stalin, (yes, Hitler,) Mao, Pol Pot, they
were all egalitarians of one stripe or another, at the very least as
it pertained to their own race, class, creed, or political origin.
Saddam Hussein's Pan-Arabist Baath Party says it's egalitarian among
Arabs, and, obviously, Al Queda says that all (true) Muslims are
equal, and, like all egalitarians no matter who they are, the rest of
the human race are just animals of one kind or another. Death by the
excluded middle, as it were, the most fundamental, and evil, fallacy
of egalitarians everywhere. By very egalitarian definition, there
*is* no difference between people except a binary one. Every "human"
has an infinite price, and every "non-human" is worthless. It almost
makes you long for the days of the Danelaw, were at least everyone,
free or slave, was worth a real, tangible amount, instantly
calculable in a market. Fortunately, modern economics does that today
without slavery. Everyone worth anything knows what their net worth
is.

Of course, some of the other stuff, like Skidmore's apparently
super-secure (probably because they're so low a plane can't hit it
without hitting something else first) "low-rise" version of a
Florentine courtyard

<http://www.lowermanhattan.info/rebuild/new_design_plans/firm_c/slides
/slide17.asp>,

has one looking around for the required late-feudal murder-hole and
killing field, which, one hopes coincidentally, turns out to be a
reflecting pool covering the site of the original "bathtub" in which
the twin towers stood.

Even the "Hollywood-Squares" grid-buildings

<http://www.lowermanhattan.info/rebuild/new_design_plans/firm_g/slides
/slide30.asp>

<http://www.lowermanhattan.info/rebuild/new_design_plans/firm_g/slides
/slide31.asp>

<http://www.lowermanhattan.info/rebuild/new_design_plans/firm_g/slides
/slide40.asp>

<http://www.lowermanhattan.info/rebuild/new_design_plans/firm_g/slides
/slide39.asp>,

remind me too much of South-Side Chicago Public Housing, or Boston
City Hall, and all that other statist "brutalism" nonsense, which
means, along with the others designed in the spirit of
"sustainability" and "community development" and other touchy-feely
psycho-babble pseudo-science,

<http://www.lowermanhattan.info/rebuild/new_design_plans/firm_b/slides
/slide20.asp>

that the various "authorities" and "departments", not to mention
"coalitions" and "public interest research groups", will probably
ejaculate in their collective Pradas with approval, agglomerating the
worst of all such ideas into the mother of all compromises, voting
for that faster than last year's Ikea lamp went to the curb --
instead of doing something actually requiring, well, balls, frankly.
An event that really would happen if *person* had genuinely *owned*
the site instead of the state collectivizing it in the name of
"renewal", and other statist slunk, in the 1960's.


In that spirit, I wonder whether any New York-area members of the
cypherpunks list, or their fellow travellers :-), have looked at this
stuff and have an opinion on it. Or, like most New Yorkers, do they
have better things to think about, all this stuff being for the out
of town yokels anyway...

I think about John Young, the award-winning, but not old enough to be
venerable, :-), Manhattan architect and crypto-archivist, someone who
does this sort of stuff for a living, and what his opinion is of some
of the proposals, from the standpoint of security, or structure, or
aesthetics, or whatever.  On September 11th, John talked so well on
cypherpunks about how the World Trade Center towers probably
collapsed, an analysis that held up quite well in light of subsequent
investigation. Shortly after, John actually walked a digital camera
into ground zero and shot a whole panorama of the place before the
police hustled him off, so we could get a clandestine look at what
had happened while the ruins were still actually smoking. I figure
John probably *knows* some of these guys in the lower Manhattan
competition, certainly all of them by reputation at the very least,
so I'm suddenly curious what he thinks about the above exercise.

I also expect that Duncan Frissell, another cypherpunk, an attorney
and self-described member of the ""Right Wing Nut Investment
Community", knows a quite a lot about what's going on down there in
lower Manhattan, since I think I remember that he, like John,
personally watched the towers fall, and he's fairly familiar with
some of the players on the buy side of whatever transaction
eventually takes place. More important, it's almost certain that
Duncan knows exactly how to creatively de-socialize all the
politically correct and environmental-socialist dreck that the
current process is obviously ripe with. Maybe even kick around ideas
to privately finance something that huge without any state
interference someday. (I know I think *I* do, but people have heard
that thing from me more than once already.)


Of course, in the best of all possible worlds -- and to the absolute
appalled outrage of almost every red-blooded small-d democratic
American who watched it happen that day -- the Port "Authority"
should have just sold the site off to the highest bidder and let him
build whatever he wanted.

Hell, in the best of all possible worlds, the twin towers would never
have been "public" buildings at all, having been built with
expropriated property, and "financed" with expropriated money to
begin with. With "public" financing -- that is, stolen money --
currently to be used to finance their replacements, on what will
almost certainly be *more* confiscated land than is in play right
now, to "memorialize" the site some more, somehow. In the proposals,
I keep seeing various "light corridors" through lower Manhattan to
create a giant Stonehenge out of the sun-positions at the date and
time the first plane hit and the last tower fell for instance, or
piers and strip-parks representing the shadows of the buildings out
onto the river that day, or whatever. They ain't gonna get that stuff
without taking it from somebody, folks.

There really always has been something implicitly hilarious about the
accidental self-parody of original World Trade Center itself. The low
comedy of using confiscated property and various bits of graft and
political vigorish to "promote" world trade, down to the funding of a
committee-commissioned abstract bronze sculpture "representing" the
concept of "World Peace Through Free Trade" placed -- for lack of a
polite non-scatological word, and with a nod to Tom Wolfe -- in the
plaza between the two buildings. As an aside, I suppose it's probably
just decades of inoculation or something -- I can even tolerate
Stravinsky, even Schoenberg, now -- but, at this point, the sculpture
looks pretty benign to me, dents and all, and, frankly, so too do
even the most outre of the proposed designs, reminiscent of the
architecture of a badly-resuscitated Gene Roddenberry television
pilot than anything conceived on earth. If, Tom Stoppard's words,
modern art is art in the absence of skill, most of the proposed
designs, especially the far-out ones, aren't modern art.


Which, finally, brings us to the question of whether an actual market
*would* ever build anything that massive, or, dare I say, grandiose.
As much of a fan of the massive and grandiose as I am to begin with,
and of free markets in particular, I'm personally hoping that sooner
or later the sanctity of private property will re-emerge and prevail
someday on the island of its modern birth. Odysseus home from a
successful war against confiscatory statism abroad, there to make
things right again.

There was a very telling comment, in a recent New York Times exegesis
of the designs, about how one of the more "extreme" designs belonged
on Hong Kong, or, one would suppose in light of recent events there,
a pre-"Policeman Inside" Hong Kong, anyway. New Yorkers should think
about that statement, and, if they have any real sense, recoil in
horror at what has happened to the city air that they breathed so
freely once, and not too long ago as history remembers things.


Personally, as someone who lives in the Greater BosWash area, myself,
I'm also thinking these days how much cities themselves don't
actually suck.

Most of the "rules" here in the Northeastern Megalopolis are usually
honored in the breach. More important, living "downhill and downwind"
in a soft-target ant-hill, like NYC, or the San Francisco Bay Area,
or the Los Angeles Basin, or London, or Hong Kong, or Singapore, or
Bangalore, or Shanghai, or Mexico City or Calcutta, still seems be
where most human progress actually happens. Actual material and
economic progress, I mean, in the Jared Diamond "Guns, Germs and
Steel" sense, not the chimera of "social" progress, a second or third
order effect at best, the figurines on the wedding cake. The words
"social progress", in the mouths of politicians and the nomenklatura
invariably means the opposite of what they say it means; the old
Clintonian spirit of attacking someone by accusing them of what you
do.


This demonstrable, physical, progress in cities is happening even as
the net itself surfacts information, services and manufacturing to
all corners of the globe, through suburbia and exurbia, through the
farm, through even recently depopulated frontier areas, through
wilderness itself. Through superstition and ignorance. Through the
dramatic collapse of distance with trans-continental and -oceanic
fiber, satellites. And, as the life of Southwest, and the death of
United Airlines show, through increasingly point-to-point non-stop
air travel, using almost exponentially smaller and faster jet
aircraft, even in local travel networks, mirroring the geodesic
networks we're creating out of our own "hub-and-spoke" telephonic,
and thus social, networks themselves.

Yet, paradoxically, with all of this translocative abundance, people
are moving *back* into cities, to live right among the industrial and
office buildings. Most of the "Sky City" plans for the World Trade
site have huge residential areas, in absolute defiance of the attacks
on the previous office-only buildings. This is not new, even. The
residential areas of Hancock Tower in Chicago has long been famous
for this kind of city in a city idea, for instance, and the idea has
caught on in many other places over the decades since its
construction. Our increasingly geodesic society almost requires the
intermingling of work and residence, from our domiciles out through
our neighborhoods to the entire fabric of our cities, and to the
countryside itself, where, of course, it never really stopped being
that way.

Cities which are getting cleaner and more safe because people are
starting to respect *property* now. That includes the *private*
supervision and protection of property, and the personal
responsibility that that entails. Not because of the expropriation
someone else's property by one force monopoly or another, ostensibly
on your behalf, in the name of non-obtainable social "equality", or
non-countable social "cost", or community "development" some other
illogical and usually socialist fantasy. Or, oddly enough, even
because of "law and order", because of the impossibility of routine
enforcement all but the most rudimentary property and violence
offenses in a city as complicated as New York is. Ask any sublettor
in a rent-controlled building sometime, or habitue of an after-hours
nightclub. Or the otherwise law-abiding owner of an unlicensed
concealed-carry weapon. Or, frankly, any user of any controlled
substance you would care to name, and some you don't even want to
even think about.

In that vein, then, it seems to me that most millennial survivalist
alarmism, particularly about cities, with discussions of "anthills",
and "useless eaters", and so on, is just back-to-the-farm
rural-romantic nonsense. You only live once, in other words. Make it
count, and, even if there is an occasional, and temporary, local hard
reset, life's just a bitch sometimes, and then you die. So, fight
back, or die, but quit whining, and get on with it. In the meantime,
like Jared Diamond says, we have cities because they're more
efficient at all kinds of things, including, as we've noticed in the
last year, fighting back.

Finally, as they say down on the farm, city air still breathes free.
In spite of an infinity of attempted, or, more properly, pretended,
encroachments over the years, inflicted from inside, and outside, of
the city limits, usually by people H.L. Mencken called, with relish,
"Bluenoses and Busybodies".

And *that's* because, cities -- especially New York, especially
Manhattan, especially *lower* Manhattan if they can manage to
deceremonialize a whole lot of currently "public" property, or at
least keep from ceremonializing any more of someone else's property
- -- cities are where the markets are.

Cities are where people trade things, where they trade things with
all kinds of people. People they don't like. People who may be worse,
or better, in the trader's own opinion, than the trader himself.


Trade is as old as humanity itself, in fact, it may be the very
definition of what it is to be human, originating millions of years
ago, when African proto-humans brought cheap raw materials to a
central place and exchanged them dearly, or at least the going rate,
for finished hand-axes made by someone else.

And, I would claim, in probable apostasy to both people who hate
markets, because they'll think I'm right for the wrong reasons, and
to people who love markets, because I'm wrong for the right reasons,
that trade is the most *un*egalitarian thing we do.

Think about it. People trade because *both* parties have something
the other wants but doesn't have, things that *both* parties value
more in their own possession than in someone else's. The paradox that
both parties are *better* after a trade than before, that, at the
execution, clearing, and settlement of the trade, each principal must
*behave* as if the other was an equal, is immaterial to the inherent
inequality of the situation -- in the minds of *both* of the
participants prior to the trade, which is exactly where the paradox
comes from. It's not surprising that after a trade both parties think
themselves better off than the other is, and certainly better off
than they personally were before the trade. That process is called
price discovery, and if it doesn't occur, the trade doesn't happen
either. Again, prices are not calculated. They are not figured out.
They have to be *discovered* in a market, or they don't exist. That
is, oddly enough, something egalitarians of all stripes, and
socialists, national or otherwise, never figure out. The ones who
think of markets as zero sum games, where there winners win at the
expense of the losers, are the ones who are least likely of anyone to
ever figure it out at all.


To get a better handle on this thought, or at least turn it further
on its head, consider hunting, that great collectivist activity,
where even if done individually, the spoils of which are shared back
at camp. Or, even better, think about war, the idea of hunting, as
someone said, applied to other humans. Even modern warfare, with its
ranks, hierarchy, and orders. Even the ostensible opposite of modern
war (though various currently-engaged Special Forces teams would take
issue with you), single combat with chosen champions, is more
egalitarian in its own way than the act of trade can ever be.

With its culture of comradery, of sharing the horrors of war and the
literally calculated (and not discovered), "fair" sharing of the
spoils and glory of battle, of selflessly dying for one's comrades,
war is the ultimate in egalitarianism.

Not coincidentally, and as political economist Mancur Olsen likes to
point out, a prince, and by extension a soldier or policeman, is a
bandit who doesn't move. Even in a democracy, as Mencken noted, "an
election is an advance auction of stolen goods".

Like the Spartans yearly declaring war on their Helot slaves, a
modern nation state literally declares war on its population at
budget time. The resulting spoils of war are "shared", distributed by
calculation, instead of discovered by pricing. Soldiers die in
battle, become heroes, if you will, not for their salaries (a word
derived from the payment of salt of a roman legionaire), but usually
to save their comrades from the same fate. Thus altruistic valor is,
at heart, an egalitarian concept, and why it's frequently given to
justify the existence of force monopoly itself. Certainly large
totalitarian states, by definition, assume that *everyone* is a
combatant, everyone sacrifices, even when, as we've noticed, everyone
is also declared having war declared on them by the state. Somewhere
Ayn Rand, with her idea that innocent people cannot be criminals, and
so the state passes enough laws that *everyone* is a criminal, is
laughing, and loudly.

Curiously, the maximum amount of revenue that a sovereign can extort
before his victims either rebel, or, more usually, stop working and
produce less tax revenue, is about 50% of gross income. Sound
familiar?

You'd think we'd figure that out by now, and I guess most of us on
these lists have, or we wouldn't be working so hard, here, and
elsewhere, to figure out an alternative using internet cryptography,
financial and otherwise.


And of course, I *do* think that we're approaching a world where we
will *buy* force in non-monopolistic markets, and it will be cheaper,
and safer, to do so. We will actually make *trades* for force to
protect ourselves. We already do that now with private security, and
the apparent resurgence in the national security state that we are
currently experiencing as a result of what happened at the World
Trade Center is only an indicator of the demand for force, and
certainly not that a monopoly can adequately meet that demand in the
long run.

So, no, I'm actually talking about *everything* requiring force, sold
in a market someday, cheaper, better (more violent, more precise, and
so on) than we do now with monopolistic force. Or, of course, we
won't execute the trade, right? We have what we have now because it's
cheaper than what we used to have, to reduce the idea of economic
progress down to its most atomic statement.

The fact that we *vote* for force, of course, is, to paraphrase
Churchill, a very poor approximation of a market, but it's the only
one we've got, and frankly, as we've seen, modern nation-states, even
democratic ones, expropriate far more income in their yearly
declarations of war on their "Helots" than the Spartans, or even
feudal lords, ever could. Part of that has to do with the lower
carrying capacity of an agricultural economy, and the -- you guessed
it -- density of wealth, progress, in other words, found in
industrial cities versus that spread out in a fiefdom. You hear in
heraldic stories about how a king moved his court from castle to
castle throughout the year. Why? Because he would literally eat his
peasants -- and his barons -- out of house and home and have to move
on. That 50% again, and there's a certain American glee in the idea
of royalty as a plague of locusts.


That density of industrial ex-/sub-/urban wealth is part of the
solution to our problem, however. In fact, I would probably claim
that we're going to continue to get so productive that we're going to
price human-mediated services, like the violent control of space and
geography, through the floor, just like we priced excavated minerals,
agriculture produce, and now, manufactured goods, through the floor.
Like the old joke about "bad" Harley riders, farmers are now only
about 2% of the population. And mechanics, including "industrial
workers" to use the Marxist neologism, are steadily falling out of
the double-digits in that direction. Even programmers, a much more
remunerated species of mechanic :-), will have to eventually decline
in number someday. They must, if we're to get all the software a
geodesic economy needs to function. We're already starting to price
American programmers out of the market and sending work to Bangalore
and other places. Professional Cassandra Ed Yourdon, who, like
Keynesian economists of old, has predicted 10 of the last 2
technological disasters including the recent Y2K kerfluffle, made
good money for a while saying, in magazines and books of the same
name, that the American Programmer was doomed. Just like the American
"Industrial Worker", and the American "Farm Worker" before him.

Here's hoping that the American "Violence Worker", and others like
him the world over, will lose the industrial Marxist handle, become a
sole proprietor or limited partner, and encounter the same free
markets some day that caused the diminution of his predecessors in
agriculture and industry. If declining casualty rates are a form of
productivity growth -- we can certainly claim significantly increased
energy output with the advent of thermonuclear war-- it looks like
smarter weaponry is moving us in that direction on the supply side.

If we can figure out how to disaggregate the demand accordingly,
using the internet for price discovery and financial cryptography for
reduced payment and transaction cost, allowing a "swarm" of
individuals to have the same economic effect as transfer-priced
corporations now have, aggregating themselves for large payments like
we do in the capital markets, and disaggregating again to make small
payments to small private force-entities for our own personal
security as we need it, we may, in the grand spirit of progress
elsewhere, end up with more security cheaper, and dispense with
force-monopoly altogether.

I expect that if we can do that, we'll probably also do away with the
kinds of neo-superstitious political nonsense plaguing the homeland
of modern economics and finance.

Odysseus will have returned to Manhattan, and the suitors will stop
harassing his wife.

World peace through free trade, indeed.

Cheers,
RAH

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-- 
-----------------
R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah@ibuc.com>
The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/>
44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA
"... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity,
[predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to
experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'