Andrew's Wiki
Abc Economics

Purpose and Method

• “to express the fundamentals of economics so simply and clearly that even people of different economic schools and factions will be able to understand each other”
• “I shall not ‘descend’...[to] repetitions and restatements” but rather “go down into” them for clarity, simplicity
  • Another side of Pound! Clarity! Simplicity! Again we find another Modernist author doing something we thought s/he wouldn’t.
• Says repeatedly not to interpret more into his words than he actually says: “When I mean something I shall say it.”
  • Nonfiction’s relationship to imagism: both aim for clarity
  • Do not make me “imply” more than what I say: wants to avoid interpretation in non-fiction
• 16: “I spare the reader the history of barter, etc.”
• Written manifesto style, with lots of rhetoric, questions, answers, headings, subheadings, etc
• HE says he’s “Starting” when he’s already at chapter 6!
• 25: recognizes that people will object that he’s trying to create economics by will, not by intellect
  • what does he say? people don’t trust economic systems unless they’ve got GOODWILL behind them: that way they will ACT on it. Intellect not enough.
• Responsibility is key to a democracy; if you don’t have a sense of it, you should be in a despotism and deserve what you get 25
• “I am not proceeding according to Aristotelian logic but according to the ideogramic method of first heaping together the necessary components of thought. None of these ‘incoherent’ or contradictory facts can be omitted. A problem in the resolution of forces can only be solved when theforces are taken count of.” 27
  • This is no less than an intervention in the writing of political economy, of economics, in its style
  • He says you can’t in a “science” take account of things that “we cannot reduce to an equation,” but nonetheless he wants to deal with them.
• He applies same type of insight people are having about language to the symbols on money, and the value of money itself: he says that if you reduce the workweek by half, you could still give him same paycheck: “currency which is merely a convention, and a bit of paper with 10 on it is no more difficult to provide than a bit of paper with 5 or with 20.”
  • whereas it’s not the same with gold. it’s the floating values of money he’s tapped into right now.
  • He notes that needing to have the wage sound like the same quantity/number is due to “habits of mind…conventionality in the populace’s thoughts about money” rather than a need coming from w/in capital circulation
    • and of course he’s right b/c money-wage is only a certain percentage of the world’s total labor output, and that percentage wouldn’t change even if the raw numbers of hours changed.
• P E is too complicated for people to get
  • “It requires an almost transcendent comprehension of credit to understand this.” 36
• He realizes that people think his plan for having less money for less work and then having more time to yourself would end up in prices going down, would be a “pipe dream”
  • Since when did you last associate Pound with being too optimistic?
• “one’s duty to try to think out a sane economics and the try to enforce it by that most violent of all means, the attempting to make people think” 38
• “I go on writing because it appears to me that no thoughtful man can in our time avoid trying to arrange those thing in his own mind in an orderly fashion, or shirk coming to conclusions about them, i e, as a man living perforce among another men, affected by their actions, and by his affecting them.” 44
  • This sense of urgency might lead to fascism: he says that you can have the same economic effects no matter whether it’s despotism or democracy: “very much alike in so far as they affected the main body of the country’s economics” and then “the most immediate road thereto has a good deal to be said in its favor” 45
  • So that maybe there is fascism here, but it’s not the same thing as order in a book or poem b/c one is meant to, stop market fluctuations that make people starve, while the other is to kind of APPRECIATE the chaos.
• “I am now making simply a catalogue or list of offered ‘solutions.’” 50
• “That is an ‘impossible case.’ Or rather it is a crude statement, and there are various intermediate conditions.” 52
  • Language partly at fault, and it’s partly that reality is more finely shaded than “Science” of econ
  • However, he does trust that “vague” statements can be “reducible to mathematical equations and can be scientifically treatable;” nonetheless he says you will still have to “allow for accidents”
  • 55 “After all this is a very rudimentary treatise.”
• “Twenty years ago we were asked ot think that someone was being a ‘modern’ with a large ‘M’ economist because he ‘left out money’.”
• (A side note: usury for Pound bad b/c private banks end up charging governments for us of money when really that money is the public’s anyway)

Part One

• Wants to attack capital, not property: capital as something that has a claim against someone’s labor, whereas property does not
• Overproduction is something that already happens and nature and doesn’t cause a crisis there. Extra stuff merely rots.
• Says that “objections to slavery” are sentimental or idealistic, and haven’t prevented actual slavery from occurring
  • instead each person needs to have some sense of responsibility or be a “Skunk” 14
• 15: study of economics relatively new
• We have plenty of goods, so production is not our problem. Distribution is the problem. No reason people should starve. Economics should figure out how to not let people starve.
• Calls money “tokens”
• Where do problems start? there’s a “jam” “Some of those who work or would work or could work are left without paper tokens. 16
  • Why? Seems like there’s too many people fighting over work.
• The Start to Solution: limit everyone working to five hours a day
  • No one has satisfactory REASON why this wouldn’t work but merely hums about rising costs w/out really proving it (Pound is reacting against the silliness of P E)
• Is money a strict correspondence to goods made, an order (deliver these goods), conditional (compromise, concession), or magic? 17
  • It’s not TRUE b/c some people don’t get their tokens: first it was artists, then artisans and clerks, and now there’s a problem
  • Inflation has been unfair, not making more production yield more goods: controlled in secret by banks
    • England doesn’t have public, independent treasury, unlike America (1830s, Van Buren)
• Everyone deserves to find work if they’re willing for it
  • So you can’t let some men go around doing three or four men’s work
  • Hence we need control: for people to decide FAIRLY what your production is worth, make sure it gets you in exchange the faith worth, and makes sure work and goods are distributed fairly

Part Two

• We must get people’s good will and interest in the problem of economics – not impress their intellects
  • founder of Sinn Fein: “Can’t move ‘em with a thing like economics”
• P E has a problem in getting people interested: “Marxian economics deals with goods for sale, goods in the shop. The minute I cook my own dinner or nail four boards together into a chair, I escape from the whole cycle of Marxian economics”
  • That is Marx didn’t make clear the LIMITS of his economics 26: P E hasn’t found its limits, although the other sciences have
  • “The arts of commerce are built on personal application of the laws of value”
    • he pays more to have his coffee delivered at his door, and to get his tailor and cobbler to in effect come to him b/c he’s lazy: that’s a personal evaluation of what matters, has value
    • what does he mean? law of value is person specific: he says a “good woman” costs probably less than a “bad woman” to marry; and if you have to pay more for a meal in a hotel that’s better than what you can cook at home for less, it’s the fault of your cooking skills.
    • you have to think about how people think, about commerce AS AN ART: “Goods in the window are worth more than the goods in the basement” 27 (arrangement) and why one cafe owner gets biz and “his neighbor” does not
    • An Individualistic P E: laws don’t mean all b/c application by individuals matters too
      • this matches what Jennifer Wicke says about Keynes’ discoveries about the market
• It’s an art
  • Pound says it’s a major diff to realize that his grandfather built a railroad not to make money but out of an ARTIST’S impulse to create, build, make: constructing is fun, slyness, skill 27
• You must think about WILL
  • says economics won’t progress unless it takes will into account
  • “will toward order, will toward ‘justice’ or fairness, desire for civilization, amenities included” 27
  • if that will is intense, you have to keep it in mind
• Thesis
  • People must act intelligently, or we need some group to control it
  • Overproduction is only a problem when you overmarket
  • Politics today: prime action to determine border between private and public
  • Economics today: prime action to make sure that people can’t demand more than they actually own/have produced
  • People work twenty years, four hours a day; or ten years, eight hours a day
    • that is, to keep money distributed fairly, distribute work fairly
    • if they want to “work” more than why don’t you do unpaid work like “work as any artist or poet works, let him embellish his home or garden, or stretch his legs in some form of exercise, or crook his back over a pool-table or sit on his rump and smoke. He would get a great deal more out of life, and, supposing him to have any rudiments of intelligence, he would be infinitely more likely to use it and let it grow, and in any case he would ‘get a great deal more for his money.’” 29
    • LEISURE
    • Notice how like Wilde he equates growth with leisure time, that isn’t idle but isn’t work either
• Time 29
  • Better life: less money, more time
  • Worse life: more money, less time
  • Again we have a reevaluation that money isn’t the only or best kind of value (Wilde agrees), and he says 30: if you have four hours a day of private activity you’d have “a damn sight better life”
• “Freedom from worry, inherent in the reasonable certainty of keeping one’s job, must be worth at least 25% of ANY income.” 30 … and the only way to get that is to shorten work day so everyone gets to labor; you will reduce it periodically according to mechanical innovation

Part Three

• Recap
  • Money: certificate for work done
  • The work should be socially necessary
  • Distribution of enough money, which necessitates distribution of money
    • (noting that people always ask for work before free stuff)
  • Fair distribution of certificates
• Time is not money, but rather “a very important lever” in the getting of things
• B/c no one except socialists read Marx, there’s no good discussion/critique of him
• Again, better life w/less money and more time
• LEISURE
  • “Leisure is not gained by simply being out of work. Leisure is spare time free from anxiety.
  • “Any spare time not absolutely obsessed by worry can be made the means to a ‘better life.’” 35
• He characterizes his solution as “Jeffersonian” b/c he notes how much stuff you can make for yourself
  • His influences here: Confucius, Jefferson (whom he lovably calls “T. J.”), Van Buren
  • He says it’s American, but no one in America is American in this way anymore
• And his less work solution is great b/c won’t create more “sassy typists” and “bureaucrats” 35
• What’s the problem? To get people to understand that less work won’t mean less buying power in the grand scheme of things.
  • “It requires an almost transcendent comprehension of credit to understand this.” 36
  • “The plain man cannot in any way comprehend that the accelerated movement of money when everybody has a little means greater comfort than the constipated state of things when a lot of people have none.”
    • “constipation” is when overproduction produces a glut that leads to job loss, wage loss = poverty
  • Although the benefits would reach people w/in matter of months, they wouldn’t “PERceive” these effects until later
    • They wouldn’t understand that even if your wages are lowered, you would still have same real wages b/c all prices are dependent upon the value of the money circulating: that is depends on how much people are currently spending. If they’re spending less, then prices will go down to adjust for that.
• LEISURE
  • “Two hours more per day to loaf, to thin, to keep fit by exercise of a different set of muscles, as distinct from overwork and the spectacle of several millions in idleness….!” 36
  • The next paragraph: “I am an expert. I have nearly lived all my life, at any rate all my adult life, among the unemployed. All the arts have been unemployed in my time.” 36
    • This also puts fuel to my fire about saying that modernists didn’t actually always see their writing as a day job….!
• Free trade (between 2 countries) is possible, but you have to fix your INTERNAL economy first, not use “Free trade” as a way to get people’s minds off fixing what’s wrong here.
  • governments “commit every conceivable villainy, devilry and idiocy and to employ foreign affairs, conquests, dumpings, exploitations as a means of distracting attention from conditions at home, or to use the spoils of savages as palliatives to domestic sores or in producing an eyewash of ‘prosperity.’”
    • this is in the line of lots of socialist P E critique, from Ruskin on what real wealth should look like (ie your servants, your workers should be well fed and healthy and happy) to Rosa Luxemburg against empire the Webbs against war…
    • and he further notes that the spectacle of wealth is “Bait” to keep people still go along w/the system
• Malthus
  • Says that limiting family size won’t be a total solution. 38
  • (His acceptance of Malthus is more along the lines of Martineau…not very socialist but more apologist…he thinks people who overproduce kids are just merely “idiotic”)
• Self-Help
  • He flagellates his audience is being stupid
    • They’re lazy and forgot American values of founding fathers
• No matter the type of government, economics “is concerned with determining WHAT financial measures…must be taken…by government” 39 they determine the IDEAS, not how it’s going to be done, and there are always multiple answers you can find 40

Part Four

• All (political and financial) privilege makes people think they’re exempt from responsibility, not full of it.
  • Except the first generation of any system
  • Real goodness is the ability to combine thought with ACTION 44
• Captal not durable, may rot
• “There have been so-called systems based not on any sound thought or equation but on nothing more than a temporary accident: as say the chance of swapping glass beads to the heathen” 46 and some of these systems have last and lasted
• Problem involves not just shortening work day but fair distribution of money slips: “That is the main question andthe overwhelming question of economic science. It is, I should assert, open to permanent solution. Scientific solution. But a permanent and scientific solution of it would still leave uswith the necessity of practising the ART of economics…There is no way of dispensing with the perceptive faculties…will ever have to guess.”
  • They Know You Can’t Limit All Contingency, But Will Limit What You Can
    • “In the world of Kerugers and Mellons you might say the switchboards are enveloped (on purpose) in darkness….with all the solvable problems solved, clear and in the open…there will still be need to use wits.”
      • So some is preventable, but not all.
  • What is his reaction? “there is probably no equation other than the greatest watchfulness of the greatest number of the most competent.” 47
• THERE IS A SCIENCE AND AN ART IN ECONOMICS
• Some nations control their finances; others are financed (and then there are degrees w/in this position) (means that some countries let their financiers walk all over them) (passive voice)
  • maybe he’s learning that to control you have to take note of chaos
    • for example 49: “there is a very great margin of error….possible in a quite workable and quite comfortable economic system” – but there’s a level he says is necessary: the “adequate”
• Profit, slips that “flowed continually down into the ground, down into somebody’s pocked” “a certain part of the credit-slips received by the entrepreneurs were wormed down a sort of tube” 50-1 – which resulting in too many goods and not enough credit slips to buy them with
  • talked about his interlocutor econimist man the Major, “he figured…the paradox was all on paper. All of which requires a bit of thinking. Manifestly we have seen companies building new plants out of ‘profits.’ Manifestly we have seen crises” 51
• In order to make sure there’s no slippage between the issuance of the credit slips and the moment of “cashing it in” by exchanging it (slippage b/c some credit slips ‘go down a worm-hole’ b/c of company reinvestment), you need to admit the credit slips in terms of WORK DONE (in terms of HOURS), not in terms of money equivalent 51
• Inaccurate accounting prices to determine cost of production, errors which have accumulated and become reified, this is what makes the prices of goods too high to get the goods to the right people. People can’t get brooms, they don’t get sold, and failure. 51
  • High price not best business practice
• LEISURE
  • Where the chapter ends, again!
  • So you only get a certain amount of paid work. “Over and above which, he can paint pictures on his wall, stuff his armchairs, breed fighting cocks, buy lottery tickets, or indulge in any form of frugality or wastefulness that suits his temperament so long as he confines his action to his own property.” (what he owns: “confined to his own home and front yard”)
    • this is private “unpaid work” space…same as leisure space or no?
• A whole chapter, titled, “Digression perhaps Unnecessary,” he reaffirms “a home for each individualism” “from that I should build individual rights” and then from there “Balance” your rights w/those of others.
  • He says this works for economics and politics both. It’s an American pragmatic position, I’d say. Rawls put into economics.
• LABOR
  • “The terms ‘labor’, ‘work’...apply to the man with a shovel, the clerk, the transporter, the entrepreneur, etc. Everyone who acts in the transposition of the article from mother earth to the eater” 53
• He reduces economics to component parts that each system needs to solve: the goods; transport; use, consumption; money (“a small amount of ‘money’ changing hands rapidly will do the work of a lot moving slowly” – nice energy stuff here, miniaturization!) 54
• “This looks like a mare’s nest or like wilful confusion!” 54 but then he goes on and answers it…. “after all this is a very rudimentary treatise” 55
• Justice: “The state conceived as the public convenience. Money conceived as a public convenience. Neither a private bonanza.”
• Market
  • “Half the modern trouble is the mania or hallucination or idee fixe of MARKET and market value. The fundamental difference in wealth is that of animal, vegetable and mineral kingdoms.”
  • He notes that people who deal in sheep – “Crises in the sheik and sheep trade seldom occur” – b/c they count their wealthy in property, not money if sold, ie market value.
    • and says “I mean the shepherd sits around, with a boy and dog” rather than difficult labor…. 56. Sometimes they knit.
• Economics as a Modernism b/c he Wants the New: “How long shall the dead hand rule, and to what extent” 57
  • However it must recognize natural multiplication, ie animals and vegetables do naturally tend towards reproduction and overproduction w/out much of our work 57
• Problem: property v “The earth belongs to the living” (Jefferson)
• Overproduction: he says the only real problem is space to put the extra stuff but we have plenty of space. Cites a sign “translatable as” “Mountain to let, capable of enalping 30,000 muttons.” 58
• LEISURE
  • “It is…idiodic to expect members of a civilized twentieth-century community to go on working eight hours a day”
  • “This is not a theory of the leisure class. It is in fact of leisure humanity (ie civilized human life).” 59

Problem…sigh

• “Dictatorship as a Sign of Intelligence” chapter
  • “man of the hour, force of will, favored of fortune”
  • he says it’s more interesting to think of Mussolini as intelligent man, not as “Big Stick” ie force physical 68
• Keynes: says that something was “simple enough to be understood by anyone save possibly Maynard Keynes” 69
  • suspects the “his writings arise from motives lying deeper in the hinterland of his consciousness than courtesy can permit me to penetrate”

Quotes David Hume a lot

• Hume, The Balance of Trade, qtd 71: “and they adopt a hundred contrivances, which serve no purpose but to check industry, and to rob ourselves and our neighbors of the common benefits of art and nature.” (referring to modern governments)
• Major Douglas is the guy he’s talking to C. H. Douglas