I’m continuing this week with Capital in the 21st Century.

Last week was reading Parts One and Two of the argument. Part One defined the methodology and gave some results about how Piketty measures Income (mainly national income, derived from income-tax government sources) and Wealth or Capital (mainly derived from intelligent-observer estimates over a long period at least in the cases of England and France). Piketty devotes a fair amount of air time to discussing the merits of his sources.

Part Two deals with the changes in the capital/income ratio over time, showing among other things, that the 20th century was not kind of capital anywhere in Europe, including some estimates of where the destruction of capital came from (SPOILER: not mainly from physical destruction).

This week we are looking at Part Three which deals with the nature and structure of inequality in both labor income and capital ownership. And, with any luck, we’ll get to Part Four dealing with Piketty’s prescriptions for regulating capital going forward.

I’m returning now to each of the seven antinomies in 7 Hard Problems, starting with #1: “Individual Wealth vs. Commonwealth”.

The aim is to flesh out the elements that were glossed over in the original vomitout, so I’m going to start in with income inequality, and then work my way over to class struggle.

Accordingly, I’ll be doing some reading and thinking this week on Thomas Piketty, Paul Goodman, and Anthony Giddens.

I’m not sure how far I’ll get this week, but hopeful I’ll break the back of these topics.

The aim now is to flesh out each antinomy until it’s more-or-less complete.

Well, this was the most fun of the antinomies by far. There’s something about reality and fantasy that makes for interesting conundra.

I found myself getting into the struggle between science and faith. And that drew me somehow to the dialog between Einstein and Freud about the possibility of stopping war. Einstein was crystal-clear on Reality and pretty fuzzy on people (or perhaps wishful). Freud was unsparing about people. So much Reality is almost too much to bear.

Anyhow, that’s it for the vomitout of the 7 Hard Problems for now. I did about 22,500 words (a normalized 90 pages). That’s from when I started the vomitout in November to now (and remember I essentially took off December to write GoLang code). Not too shabby. And certainly enough to get a flavor for the core of the book.

Continuing with vomitouts.

We’re at the last of the 7 antinomies, probably my favorite: What We Believe vs. What Is.

It doesn’t get much starker than this. But slaves to the Pleasure Principle (see “Pleasure vs. Duty”) don’t need to fret: the deck is not utterly stacked in favor of “What Is.”

Wanton regard for “What Is” is just as bad as wanton disregard: paying no attention to “What Is” may make you a fool, but paying no attention to “What We Believe” makes you something just as bad: a Nego, a concept I want to explore in this section.

Briefly, Negos are people without a vision, cynics, pessimists, “glass is not just half-empty, it’s broken” kinds of people. We need vision to supplement respect for reality. You need both.

Lots more to do on “Global vs. Local”. I had a couple of conversations over the weekend with an old friend who was in town for my birthday. He challenged some of my thinking about why globalization is unappealing to “people” whereas it’s pretty interesting for “corporations”. And in particular he wanted me to give a better account of global capitalist companies and what they mean for the future of the nation-state.

But I’m going to stick with moving on to the next vomitout, and catch up on these themes in the future.

The next antinomy is “Technology vs. People”, which is really three things for me:

1. Techies vs. non-Techies. Not all non-techies are Luddites, but many of them are. What’s going on with the two different groups? This really begins with C.P. Snow’s idea from the 1950’s about “Two Cultures”, but there are a lot of threads to it.
2. Intelligent Machines vs. Humans. Are we doomed? Are AI scenarios that have us being Terminated really possible? What kind of time frame?
3. Future of Work in the age of intelligent machines. Are robots going to “replace” us? What does this mean? How might we manage this? What are the possible outcomes?

So I’ll be vomiting out on all these themes this week.

The novelty of this week’s vomitout brought some challenges with it.

“Pleasure vs. Duty” is a relatively new addition to the 7 problems (replacing an earlier Problem that was too closely related to existing ones). Because it was new, my ideas about how to pursue it were even more sketchy than in previous vomitouts.

I had some vivid personal entanglements (I guess you would call them) with Pleasure vs. Duty.

For example, I still rehash the part of the Disney movie of Pinocchio where Pinocchio, along with some real boys, turns into a donkey. (It’s a consequence of not applying himself to his studies, which, of course, turns a boy into “nothing but” a little donkey.)

And other fairy tales: the Ant and the Grasshopper. The Ice Queen, perhaps.

And these fairy tales, as I worked on the draft, suggested other “re-casts” of the antinomy: Freud’s “Pleasure Principle” vs. “Reality Principle”. “Passion vs. Necessity”. “Self vs. Other.” “Work-Life Balance”. All of them cousins of “Pleasure vs. Duty.”

I went with the flow of these various cuts at “Pleasure vs. Duty”, teasing out various nuances in each one.

Finally, at the end of the Deep Work “week” (yesterday) I realized that Aristotle (and Kant and Hume, among others) had had a lot to say about Pleasure and Duty and the Good Life. I resolved to dig into these sources some.

So:

1. There’s a deep agenda for this section
2. Lot of work still to do

As I’ve done with previous sections, I’m batching the work into projects to do downstream, and I’ll be proceeding with the vomitout — “Local vs. Global” next — this coming week.

Welcome your comments, as always.

OK, it was a nice holiday, and I had a great time writing some code (and solving some coding problems).

Time to get back in the saddle, back to work on 7 Hard Problems.

The basic idea for January is to vomitout the remaining “core” chapters of 7Hard. I’ll be kicking that off this week with “Pleasure vs. Duty”, which should be fun (no pun intended).

(With each of the chapters so far, doing the vomitout has raised a bunch of good points and questions and readings for further study. I’ve been complaining about the boatloads of new work churned up, but I’m basically pleased: the process is working basically the way I had hoped.)

“Pleasure vs. Duty” is a relatively new add-on to the list of seven problems, so I’m going to be scrambling for material, even core texts. Any suggestions are welcome.

So be it.

A friend wrote yesterday:

The cooperative/competitive discussion is going in a great direction. Love your application of it to education. And your flat-out declaration that it doesn’t prepare for work – which I agree with.

First of all, thanks for the feedback, DB.  I try to pay attention to every bit of feedback.

I think the tack of doing case studies from various institutions — family, school, workplace, government — works well for this chapter.   A lot of interesting anecdotes flow out of this, and it’s a nice framework for thinking about the dichotomy Cooperation/Competition.

I was disappointed as usual with the amount of vomitout I got done this week, but I’m holding myself in check on that until I finish all 7 of the problems and see if the overall project has helped forward the book.  I kind of think it has.

David Graeber’s books on bullshit jobs and the joys of bureaucracy were great serendipitous arrivals this week.  I immediately pressed Bullshit Jobs into service for the vomitout, and intend to do the same with Utopia of Rules once I read it.  Graeber is amazing IMHO.

I was able to get some stuff down on paper about hyper-partisanship as a form of failure on Cooperation/Competition but I’d also like to have more of a theory of “why hyperpartisanship now?”  I expect it has at least something to do with technological advances in both audience segmentation and soundbite-ology which are hastening a “normal” corrosion of democracy as we slide downhill toward… the death of the Republic?

On that cheerful note…