Jane, You Ignorant Slut

We all have monsters under our beds, don't we?  One of mine is a furry little critter; furry because it's base, little because it's base, and a critter because it's base.  It's otherwise known as the American economic structure.  Humans generally either seek to maximize pleasure (the Darwinist approach) or minimize pain (the McElhone approach; you likely haven't heard of him, but that's OK).  The maximizing capitalists control how our economy is structured, what goods and services we, as a group, produce.  They decide, through the allocation of capital, what it is that we do.  There is in economics a substudy, known as Input-Output Analysis.  This consists of some fairly hairy linear programming, but also the resulting matrix, which is pretty simple and shows what industries produce what using what resources.  Here's the WikiPedia article.

It's been way too long since I was a practicing economist, so I don't have to hand decadal copies (1950 - 2010, although 2010 isn't likely calculated by anyone yet) to bolster my belief that there's a furry little critter under my bed.  The furry little critter looks like a robust producing economy in 1950, but merely a cotton candy cone in 2010.

How do we measure the decline of a society?  How do we define decline, in the first instance?  My furry little critter's most salient attribute is triviality.  The capitalists have reduced us to producing mostly trivial shit most of which is just virtual shit at that, while we import ever more of the necessaries.  I had considered this for some time, and I explicitly never expected to see foreign refrigerators and washing machines; too expensive to ship.  Yet, Samsung is flogging them to beat the band.  That's just plain wrong.

What has motivated this epistle is, naturally enough, a story in today's Times.  It recounts the birth and youth of Twitter and its founder.  Here, with all the sarcasm it deserves, is the money quote:  "The founders likened Twitter to ice cream: not that useful, but 'a fun thing for family and friends when they are not in the same place,' Mr. Williams says."  So, what the US economy is about is a bunch of twits.  Oh my.

I'd say that it's high time that capitalists be brought to heel.  They've done so much damage.  We make military weapons of mass destruction, financial weapons of mass destruction, and silly software.  No wonder the world laughs at our bitching and moaning that life's not fair.  And Christine O'Donnell is just like us, and wants to be a Senator.  No child left behind?