N = 2

What's common between American Beauty, Logan and Deadpool 2? You know that the lead is going to die in the end but the build up to it is gonna keep you hooked.

Close your eyes and travel to a fictional world — a superstable bipolar world. There are about a hundred countries in there, of which 2 are by far much bigger than others in wealth. Let us call them CSR and CSA. CSR is a ~perfectly communist state while CSA is perfectly capitalist. The currency in circulation in both the states is Publes and Tollars respectively.

All the other ~200 countries in the world are in between the 2 and none of them have their own currency. All the other countries have happily accepted to use both their currencies for internal and external barter as well. Now recollect the meaning of currency we discussed in the last post. Done!

You are now free to price your goods and services (GnS) anyway you want. Your pricing will be a rather quantitative representation of your ideological preference. Do you prefer a semi-functional feature phone whose workers live in as leisure and care as you do, or would you rather have an iPhone 69S+ whose workers live in a terrible environment, humiliating regime, but are safe from death by fall, thanks to the high grade activated carbon infused spandex suicide nets. You’ve deployed the most elite galaxy of craftsmen to deliver premium quality products, charge it all in Tollars. You’re mass producing 1-day validity shoes to cover as many feets as you can, you might prefer your earnings don’t militate your communist efforts, thus you express your patriotism more towards Publes than Tollars. Finally each of us — the corporate, the institution, organisation, individuals — gets to express their stand in this spectrum of politics. Their individuality.

But..

 Walter White Won't Win.

These countries need to be extreme. Why?

For the system to work, these countries will have to be extreme in their stand. Very. Extreme. Why? A bit of linear algebra will make this predicament easier to understand. Nevertheless, a brief explanation is as follows:

Consider the sick diagram below:

E     (CSA)G----D-------------C----------------F(CSR)     A         B


It represents the communist-capitalist political spectrum with 7 sample points (people): A,B,C,D,E,F, and G. Let's say each of them have 100 units of GnS to sell. D will probably price them as 80 Tollars(CSA) and 20 Publes(CSR). People will know he is a 'right-winger' and he'll be happy with this identity. Similarly C will have a 52:48 portfolio, G and F will have 100:0 and 0:100 price tags respectively. They are all satisfied with how specifically they can establish their political identity.

Now look at A,B and E. E is even more 'right-wing' than the most right wing country in the world. Heaven help him, but you can not ask individuals not to take 'that extreme' a stand. Capitalism has given us so much of what we have today. Similarly A is probably ready to make it illegal for a person to earn a penny more than their neighbour, while B might shoot him/her on sight for a similar offence. All three of them hate the world, condemn its understanding of the spectrum, abhor its restrains. B probably despises A as a 'half-measured' commie. Nevertheless, their 100 units of GnS are best priced as 0:100 (100:0 for E). I.e., (A,B,F) or (E,G) are grouped as people with exactly the same socio-economic stand.

In all fairness, it's not all bad to not cover the very extremes. The ends will always be attractors, or stable fixed points, i.e. they'll have a pruning-cum-attracting effect on the edges of the world order. By not sympathizing with the extremists, they do limit their numbers and opinions. It's a good thing, but it will rip you off of their perks. Without some extreme right wing measures, you would never have next day delivery FREE with prime privilege, to state one. And they deploy EXTREME 'right-wing' measures to get you this. (A,B) may sound too communist to survive but they are the ones who maintain the world from slipping into the whirlpool of greed self-interest. These extremes are the ones giving a definition to the spectrum - a portent to its loss of balance, but also indicators of the width of the forsaken margin.

But can democracies enforce such extremum stands?

This part might hurt - they can't be democracies for this very reason. The demography is weighted around the center. Even those who lean towards either side, those with rigid opinions don't want to be painted as extremes. They usually have genuine understanding and ensued concerns of the aggravation of their stand. Thus if given a 'vote', everybody will pull down such monuments of extremism. So are they ... ? YES. They are autocracies. Monstrous autocracies. More powerful than anything in the world. No referendums. Think about the people living in such hypothetical countries.

Sounds terrifying? Devious? Tell you what, the devil has a pet 3-headed-hound you may have overlooked - Countries making money or in other words, NO autonomous central bank. That's equivalent to the entire Insidious and Conjuring franchise for an economist. Even disregarding the plight of the people and strictly thinking in financial terms, there's a lot that can and will go wrong with it.

Let us not do it.

Don't let these money minting economic poles be countries governing people. Let them be Extreme-Exhaustive-Autonomous-Autocratic bodies. Money minting central banks, if you may, built on fundamentally different economic principles and priorities. We'll call them ET (extra-terrestrial) poles. They are benign. Don't care for the governments or the leaders. All they care about are their extreme economic principles (which they alone are at liberty to amend) and a healthy flow of their currency in the common markets.

It might be difficult for the reader to picture such banks (especially the one on the extreme left, the communist bank). I'll admit I myself don't have very coherent ideas about its working principles. Just try and hypothesize it for the time being.
Vaguely speaking, it's principled against the abominable 'trickle-down-economics' and prioritizes 'last man delivery'.

Are we done? Don't we now have pitch black and pitch white to make any shade of gray we want? Yessssssssn't. Any self-proclaimed game theorist, will tell you how both these inks are gonna fade to very close shades of gray. Imagine both the banks headed by a shrewd, calculative and smart panel of Gus Frings (from Breaking Bad) Observe:

Gus Fring from Breaking Bad.

There's autonomy, i.e., full liberty to make choices, form principles - take a stand; and there's contention, you wanna be better than your competitor. Have people support you, use more of your currency. Without loss of generality, we'll assume that initially, the entire global population lies between these 2 ET poles.

Remember how our sample points E,A, and B were just helpless and had to fully support the end closer to them? So what would happen if one of these poles hopped a couple steps towards the center? The now-abandoned terminus will not hopelessly support their end 'as usual', but will instead go all in for it (just like (A,B,E)). Moreover, their fraction of investment from the remaining faction will increase as well, since the pole is closer to their ideology now. So there's every incentive and 0 loss in moving towards the center. Sure they will lose the political connect with the people at extremes - the people they initially stood for - but they will helplessly support them all the more.

(If you somehow couldn't follow the intuition, read about 'dominated strategies' and 'iterative domination' in game theory. It's not very difficult)

RESULT: Both of them realize not just that standing on the edge is stupid, but also that standing anywhere but the middle is stupid too. So do they zap towards the center and annihilate? Not exactly.

They are greedy banks. They are contenders. Coming close they'll start repelling each other, highlight their differences. See the white of each other's eyes, aggressively exhort the middle faction to side with them, but will maintain a significant distance from one another. The long stretched pole will shrink to a nutsack. Those in the middle will enjoy the 'mix-n-match' while those barely on the other end of the 2 'poles' will sit in despondence, never being able to express themselves as different than their neighbour.

I wanted them far far apart at the ends. I gave them infinite power to maintain it. They were supposed to be world's apart, not spitting at each other's face in the center of the world.  

There. It's dead.

But there was a small ray of hope there, wasn't it? They never came too close. It's like the simultaneous action of 2 different force fields. 2 massive stars with small but same charge on both of them - attracted by gravity, repelled by Electromagnetism. If we twiddle with the charge-to-mass ratio, we can set them as far or close as we want.

In a way, pegging them apart, simply means force of repulsion >>> force of attraction. What could that mean in sociology? WAR. More practically, cold war, but super hot (couldn't help it). The idea will work, Deadpool will live again, some of you might be okay with it, but the world would be very divided. Not just like the cold war times. We have only 2 poles who equally exhaust global financial autonomy. There will be a grim perpetual state of war. Repulsion. Contention.

Or will it?

I accentuated the 'repulsion' only to qualify a system wherein the poles are far away. DO NOT FORGET that the novel idea here is coexistence and NOT contention. The typical population spread has a normal distribution (Unimodal/one-humped/center-heavy, whatever floats your boat) remember? Most of your population lies in between and even those who don't have the absolute liberty to trade in whichever currency they please; in whatever amount they chose.  Most people won't even be very hardwired on their point of preference (more on this later, maybe). Such representation will highlight the difference between individuals but will more generally unify them with individuals of similar preference. As for the compulsory repulsion, we'll see what that brings us.

--------------*-------------------*----------------

 

Were you wondering all this while, "Does this guy not know about the 2D political spectrum? That beyond capitalist and communist, there's another dimension - the liberal and authoritarian?" I do. And if you've been reading the posts in the chronology they appear in the blog, you should not.
Then why did I cunningly avoid its discussion?

Next Post>>>