Magic Eye and venture capital
thoma...@my-deja.com
E.J. Dionne
The Washington Post
If I was king, I would call Kathleen Day, Washington Post
business reporter, to me, sit her down and say "Thank you for coming.
My Royal Entrepreneur in the French sense of the word refers to you as
his eyes and ears on the goings on of Sen. Gramm's Banking Committee
especially in regards to his intent to gut the Community Reinvestment
Act in order to allow bank managers, such as Albritton of Riggs, to
practice predatory strategies against minority communities, such as
red-lining and other forms of racial profiling which have exacerbated
economic decline and tended to thwart the wealth producing mechanisms of
capitalism, in those populations. Sen Gramm has shown some sign of
repenting of his perfidious Supply-side economics. The problem is not
only that George W et. al. (and Bill Bradley) are fully embraced of this
utopian, and fundamentally flawed, apprehension of the dynamical
workings of the commonwealth, but commentators in the national media,
such as Alan Sloan and Robert J. Samuelson, etc, &c and so on, are
likewise embraced of these models at the intuitive level. For example,
the Des Moines Register endorsed Bill Bradley today and its my
conjecture that the editors are as enamored of his economics as of any
character values or political agenda he may represent. They are comfy
with his economic assumptions, plus they probably appreciate the
mischief Bradley's candidacy represents for Gore..
"Well, in any event, Supply-side economics is a variation of
zero-sum modeling which is perfectly appropriate for accounting and
double-entry bookkeeping procedures after the fact but they are grossly
inaccurate characterizations of how the commonwealth actually produces
wealth, either in retrospect or in prospect, and tend to create exactly
the kind of distortion of the distribution of wealth throughout the
commonwealth such as America has experienced since 1981. Everything
that has gone wrong, and is going wrong with the economy, such as the
widening gap between the economic elites (people earning $70,000 or more
per year) and everybody else, in spite of the incredibly robust nature
of the American economic ecology. The implementation of the programs
proposed by George W et. al. or Bradley is merely tweaking a broken
system. If you keep on doing what you've been doing, you're going to
keep on getting what you been getting. That's why Alan Sloan can't
understand the AOL-Time Warner merger.
"On the other hand Gore, McCain and Congress, generally, , have
been working with dynamical models more closely associated with what My
Royal Entrepreneur in the French sense of the word calls "venture
capital" models and I call Adam Smith Stewardship Models since the
advent of Bud Schuster's massive transportation bill several years ago,
a legislative experience Bradley and Bush don't share.
In addition, both Gore and McCain have been involved in the "Spirit of
Hershey", the non-partisan community development seminars conducted at
the start of the last two Congressional sessions. I don't know if Gore
or McCain actually attended these sessions, but Gore's sponsorship of
the Re-Inventing Government program and McCain's identification with an
agenda I associate with Eisenhower Republicans, such as Dick Lugar's
urban renewal/affirmative action agenda in Indianapolis, is, for all
intents and purposes, Adam Smith Stewardship, that is, the practical
application of venture capital and the community as a capitalist tool.
This is the same stuff George Soros sponsored in Eastern Europe during
the reign of the Soviet Union.
"In any event, you seem to be the only person at the Post who is
evolving an intuitive grasp of dynamical economics and I wanted to both
encourage your inquiries and to offer an illustration for extending that
understanding. On the front page of Style today is a stereogram, the
so-called Magic Eye graphic. The 3D effect is created in our subjective
consciousness by a process of DIVERGENT focus, which is to say, each eye
apprehends separate aspects of the graphic and then re-combine the data
into the 3D gestalt, in this case, the boxing kangaroos. You are
probably also acquainted with the sketch which either looks like the
portrait of an old crone or of a younger matron in quarter profile.
This is likewise an example of the tendency of the intuition to create a
gestalt from data in the phenomenal world, but in this case, the eyes
are organized by CONVERGENT focus to select from the two perspectives
the sketch presents. We can consciously acquire both images, but the
lesson, epistemologically, is the profound nature of the unconscious to
intuit data in a process leading to a meaningful, if not useful,
pattern. As Jung says, the unconscious is really unconscious.
"Sorry. I get a little pedantic sometimes, but my point is that
the tendency of the American educational system, especially the
specialized business and engineering agenda arising out of the
sociopolitical experimentation of the '60's, is to rely exclusively on
models arising from convergent cognitive organization, models such as
Supply-side economics as well as the ideological requirements of
political correctness associated with both the radical left and the
social conserveratives. Ayn Rand's inductive reasoning is a perfect
example, as is the political system of William F. Buckley, Jr. and Bill
Clinton's spin on almost anything or Gen. Barry McAffery's drug policy
or Gingrich's Renewing America agenda. By itself, convergent focus is
like Alice's Restaurant: you can get anything you want, excepting Alice,
so long as you consistently construct a logical structure from whatever
premise which will accommodate the outcome you wish to achieve, while
excluding any data or value inconvenient to your ends.
"Adam Smith Stewardship, on the other hand, requires both
convergent focus and divergent focus and, in the case of Smith's
economics, it is essential to understanding the dynamical nature of his
observations to be able to apprehend both the mechanical nature of his
economics as they are embedded in, and arise from, Scripture and the
socioeconomic nature of the Scottish commonwealth, that is, the economic
ecology, from which he comment. I mean, Smith is fully cognizant of
both the seen and unseen, in the Metaphysical sense of the word, in his
models, and he is using the cognitive tool Newton provides to separate
the Metaphysical Realm, the Man-made Realm (in the Randian sense of the
word) and the Kingdom of God. In other words, he posits the mechanics
of the interplay between the Metaphysical realm and the Man-made realms
as if there is no Kingdom of God in the same way an architect will
construct plumbing in and of its own dynamics. I mean, shit flows down
hill and money flows from point to point and these things of the
Metaphysical realm Man can directly influence relative to F=MA in order
to amplify and enrich those things arising of the Kingdom of God, which
are beyond our dominion to influence. Yet, it is exactly the dominion
of the Kingdom of God from which Smith expects to profit: the object of
the exercise is to achieve the greatest bang for the buck from those
gifts arising from the Kingdom of God by rendering unto Ceasar what is
Caesar's as effectively and efficiently as possible, in a progressive
manner, and across both horizontal and vertical economies of scale.
"Supply-side economics and other zero-sum, closed-system
mechanical models, on the other hand, are based on the materialistic
Metaphysics of Rand, which is composed of just two elements, the
Metaphysical and the Man-Made and tend to rely on vertical economies of
scale, exclusively, which is why convergent focus and Aristotelian
structures are the singular characteristic of these systems of inquiry.
The problem is that vertical systems invariably, and necessarily,
express diminishing returns when projected beyond their practical index
of scale, which is why Alan Sloan cannot understand the AOL-Time Warner
merger and why Microsoft Word software is progressively sucking up more
computer capacity while delivering less and less practical application.
"Well, hell, I beginning to confuse myself. The point is that
the economy operates dynamically across a horizontal plane interspersed
with vertical structures systemically. Zero-sum models, such as the
models used by George W et. al., Bill Clinton, Newt Gingrich and Bill
Bradley, rely solely on CONVERGENT methods of inquiry and can only
accommodate vertical economies of scale. In order to understand the
dynamical nature of our economic ecology, it is necessary to be use both
DIVERGENT and convergent methods to apprehend a fuller gestalt, which is
necessary for developing economic programs which will eliminate the
distortions and inequities of Supply-side economics. As I say, a senior
at Brown delivers an orientation workshop in venture capital and the
community as a capitalist tool with the Women's Institute for Leadership
Development which introduces these methods of inquiry which you might
find useful in a fun and profit kind of way. But the issue is to
enlarge your analytic vocabulary by the inclusion of both CONVERGENT and
DIVERGENT focus. On the bounce !"
But I'm not king.
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