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Currently at Toronto Pearson: 15. High today: 22.
That was yesterday. I told mama raccoon that they could stay for the day but they'd have to find someplace else tomorrow. They weren't back today. Very well-mannered raccoons.
Hey guess what, I am the president of a scholarly society now. Life is such a larf. I keep trying to remember what JD said when I asked him in Fredericton why he keeps saying "crazy world!" It went "life keeps exceeding my x". He doesn't remember what x was anymore either. He also doesn't think it is such a crazy world anymore, but he is wrong. Our point of contention this year, though, following out of our keynote talk, was whether it is possible or desirable for there to be a non-monetary or non-monetizable "register" of value. So, you know, you do something and somebody pays you a thousand dollars and so what you did "registers" as being worth a thousand dollars. The idea motivating the keynote is something like that it's a problem that we don't know (anymore) how to register the value of anything except in units of currency, and so even though maybe we value not strip-mining Alberta more than we value the oil we get from it, only our valuing of the oil registers in a way we can talk about and make arguments about that have political traction. The thing that I got to mulling about this is this: the way these things are talked about, you can put a price on what it would cost to not strip-mine Alberta. So, you can say, it would cost the Canadian economy twelve zillion dollars a year to not strip-mine Alberta. Now, why is that a cost to the Canadian economy? What we've actually done, if we decide not to strip-mine Alberta, is we've effectively created a good worth twelve zillion dollars, or infused a value of twelve zillion dollars into this good, or whatever. Imagine this: you've got some doodad that was passed down from your great-grandmother. It has never occurred to you that it's worth anything, but someday someone tells you that this doodad is actually great and rare and highly sought-after, and it is in fact worth twelve zillion dollars. Now, you have no intention of selling this thing to anyone ever, because it was passed down from your great-grandmother and you love it. So, on one hand, the fact that it's worth twelve zillion dollars seems irrelevant to you, because you're not going to sell it anyway. On the other hand, it is effectively worth at least twelve zillion dollars to you to have this thing--you would not trade this thing for twelve zillion dollars--and, objectively speaking, your net worth includes the twelve zillion dollars that this thing is worth--you are now a multi-zillionnaire, no matter how cash-poor you are. Now, you might want to say, the value of this thing to you is incommensurable with monetary value, because money is not the kind of thing you would trade for it. But money is not a particular kind of thing. Money is anything you want it to be that someone else will sell for however much of it you've got. Suppose you could sell your doodad for twelve zillion dollars and do something with it that was very likely to drastically improve the life chances of a million children. (This is something that I worry about now and then about the fact that I don't care about making much money. I could do good things with a lot of money, not just for myself but on the whole, so maybe I have a moral obligation to make as much money as I can! ... or something. (A few years ago I said something similar about playing the lottery....)) So maybe what we need is a better system of registering the value of things monetarily rather than a non-monetary system.
This is what money does, what it registers: it shows up what you value more than what, what you vote for, what you choose when it comes right down to it. The problem isn't that we don't know how to register how much we value not strip-mining Alberta; the problem is that we just don't value it as much as we value the oil ... or at least the people with the money don't value it as much as they value the oil, which seems like it might give the game away, but I'm not so sure it does. If you don't have the money, then it's easy as hell for you to value the land more than you value the oil, because you can't have the oil anyway, but you can still have the land as long as no one strip-mines it. So, the question is, what would you do if you had the money, and we see very well what people do when they have the money.
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saintalbatross drove us up to Hurricane Ridge from Port Angeles, he noted that his father won't go to national parks anymore because he thinks you shouldn't have to pay to go to national parks. So, OK, it cost us $15 to go to Hurricane Ridge. Going to Hurricane Ridge was worth at least $15 to us. To saintalbatross's father, the principle that you shouldn't have to pay to go to Hurricane Ridge is worth not going to Hurricane Ridge. On the face of it, it seems like the value of the principle is non-monetizable, and of course the point of the principle may be that the value of going to Hurricane Ridge is non-monetizable. But the point of the principle may also be that it's unfair to charge for goods that are somehow of the nature that everyone ought to have equal access to them given an unequal distribution of money. You might not think that's the point of the principle, but once you think about it you might think it is. You want to say that some things should not be for sale, but why do you want to say that? Probably because when those things are exchanged for money the money can then be exchanged for things that are less valuable than those things. So, say, your kidneys should not be for sale--but of course not just your kidneys themselves, the whole business of having major surgery and having to live with one kidney and having to live with yourself having sold a kidney--all that should not be for sale. Why? Because chances are what you'd get back for it would not be worth all that--and chances are that you'd take what you get back for it anyway only because there's an unequal distribution of wealth such that all that human dignity stuff is worth less to you than it should be because you are poor. Rich people don't sell their kidneys. Unequal distributions of resources distort the monetary registration of values.
The one other thing that was mentioned in the discussion after the keynote as a way to register values was law, i.e., prohibitions and regulations. But it seems to me that you can always put a price on prohibiting something or regulating it, so the legal registration of values is at least commensurable with if not reducible to the monetary registration of values. Anyway, there's a parallel distortion with law as with money: unequal distributions of political power distort the legal registration of value. I guess the ultimate question is, or maybe is properly understood to be, is it possible for values to be collectively/institutionally registered in a way that is not distorted in these ways? (I can't see how the answer to that question can not be "no"; the real political problem, at least given democratic assumptions, seems to be to limit the distortion as much as possible.)
Anyway, don't mind me, I'm just sayin' stuff here.
A bee or not a bee, that is the question:
That was yesterday. I told mama raccoon that they could stay for the day but they'd have to find someplace else tomorrow. They weren't back today. Very well-mannered raccoons.
Hey guess what, I am the president of a scholarly society now. Life is such a larf. I keep trying to remember what JD said when I asked him in Fredericton why he keeps saying "crazy world!" It went "life keeps exceeding my x". He doesn't remember what x was anymore either. He also doesn't think it is such a crazy world anymore, but he is wrong. Our point of contention this year, though, following out of our keynote talk, was whether it is possible or desirable for there to be a non-monetary or non-monetizable "register" of value. So, you know, you do something and somebody pays you a thousand dollars and so what you did "registers" as being worth a thousand dollars. The idea motivating the keynote is something like that it's a problem that we don't know (anymore) how to register the value of anything except in units of currency, and so even though maybe we value not strip-mining Alberta more than we value the oil we get from it, only our valuing of the oil registers in a way we can talk about and make arguments about that have political traction. The thing that I got to mulling about this is this: the way these things are talked about, you can put a price on what it would cost to not strip-mine Alberta. So, you can say, it would cost the Canadian economy twelve zillion dollars a year to not strip-mine Alberta. Now, why is that a cost to the Canadian economy? What we've actually done, if we decide not to strip-mine Alberta, is we've effectively created a good worth twelve zillion dollars, or infused a value of twelve zillion dollars into this good, or whatever. Imagine this: you've got some doodad that was passed down from your great-grandmother. It has never occurred to you that it's worth anything, but someday someone tells you that this doodad is actually great and rare and highly sought-after, and it is in fact worth twelve zillion dollars. Now, you have no intention of selling this thing to anyone ever, because it was passed down from your great-grandmother and you love it. So, on one hand, the fact that it's worth twelve zillion dollars seems irrelevant to you, because you're not going to sell it anyway. On the other hand, it is effectively worth at least twelve zillion dollars to you to have this thing--you would not trade this thing for twelve zillion dollars--and, objectively speaking, your net worth includes the twelve zillion dollars that this thing is worth--you are now a multi-zillionnaire, no matter how cash-poor you are. Now, you might want to say, the value of this thing to you is incommensurable with monetary value, because money is not the kind of thing you would trade for it. But money is not a particular kind of thing. Money is anything you want it to be that someone else will sell for however much of it you've got. Suppose you could sell your doodad for twelve zillion dollars and do something with it that was very likely to drastically improve the life chances of a million children. (This is something that I worry about now and then about the fact that I don't care about making much money. I could do good things with a lot of money, not just for myself but on the whole, so maybe I have a moral obligation to make as much money as I can! ... or something. (A few years ago I said something similar about playing the lottery....)) So maybe what we need is a better system of registering the value of things monetarily rather than a non-monetary system.
This is what money does, what it registers: it shows up what you value more than what, what you vote for, what you choose when it comes right down to it. The problem isn't that we don't know how to register how much we value not strip-mining Alberta; the problem is that we just don't value it as much as we value the oil ... or at least the people with the money don't value it as much as they value the oil, which seems like it might give the game away, but I'm not so sure it does. If you don't have the money, then it's easy as hell for you to value the land more than you value the oil, because you can't have the oil anyway, but you can still have the land as long as no one strip-mines it. So, the question is, what would you do if you had the money, and we see very well what people do when they have the money.
When
saintalbatross drove us up to Hurricane Ridge from Port Angeles, he noted that his father won't go to national parks anymore because he thinks you shouldn't have to pay to go to national parks. So, OK, it cost us $15 to go to Hurricane Ridge. Going to Hurricane Ridge was worth at least $15 to us. To saintalbatross's father, the principle that you shouldn't have to pay to go to Hurricane Ridge is worth not going to Hurricane Ridge. On the face of it, it seems like the value of the principle is non-monetizable, and of course the point of the principle may be that the value of going to Hurricane Ridge is non-monetizable. But the point of the principle may also be that it's unfair to charge for goods that are somehow of the nature that everyone ought to have equal access to them given an unequal distribution of money. You might not think that's the point of the principle, but once you think about it you might think it is. You want to say that some things should not be for sale, but why do you want to say that? Probably because when those things are exchanged for money the money can then be exchanged for things that are less valuable than those things. So, say, your kidneys should not be for sale--but of course not just your kidneys themselves, the whole business of having major surgery and having to live with one kidney and having to live with yourself having sold a kidney--all that should not be for sale. Why? Because chances are what you'd get back for it would not be worth all that--and chances are that you'd take what you get back for it anyway only because there's an unequal distribution of wealth such that all that human dignity stuff is worth less to you than it should be because you are poor. Rich people don't sell their kidneys. Unequal distributions of resources distort the monetary registration of values.The one other thing that was mentioned in the discussion after the keynote as a way to register values was law, i.e., prohibitions and regulations. But it seems to me that you can always put a price on prohibiting something or regulating it, so the legal registration of values is at least commensurable with if not reducible to the monetary registration of values. Anyway, there's a parallel distortion with law as with money: unequal distributions of political power distort the legal registration of value. I guess the ultimate question is, or maybe is properly understood to be, is it possible for values to be collectively/institutionally registered in a way that is not distorted in these ways? (I can't see how the answer to that question can not be "no"; the real political problem, at least given democratic assumptions, seems to be to limit the distortion as much as possible.)
Anyway, don't mind me, I'm just sayin' stuff here.
A bee or not a bee, that is the question:
