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Rule One: Nobody Has a Clue
I am getting towards the end of Technological Revolutionss and Financial Capital by Carlota Perez.
It’s full of useful stuff, but after reading Chapter 14, The Sequence and its Driving Forces, I have a problem.
Perez seems to assume that the actors know what they are doing. She projects a mechanical understanding of human society and the various actors. She seems to experience “production capital” and “financial capital” and “socio-institutional framework” as forces trying to impose their will upon the world.
I don’t like the mechanical Newtonian world view. I believe that the modern paradigm, proposed by Kant, is that we only know appearances. Everything else, starting from the image of the world that our brains construct from the so-called visible-light “photons” that flood into our eyes, is an imaginary construction, a castle in the air.
Now, I believe that technological revolutions start miles away from “production capital.” They start with some yokel with a crazy idea. There was John D. Rockefeller, a store clerk, that started thinking about the barrels of oil out back. He saved the whales because Pennsylvania oil worked in oil lamps that God thought would look really cool in Hollywood Westerns. Or Andrew Carnegie, a telegraph messenger, but a telegraph messenger for Thomas A. Scott of the Pennsylvania Railroad. And that started his ascent, because he got to know a bunch of people that could help him. Henry Ford started as an apprentice machinist, then started building cars in a workshop on his parents’ farm. Steve Jobs was the adopted son of a coastguard mechanic. He and Steve Wozniak developed Wozniak’s Apple I computer into the Apple II. Elon Musk was born in South Africa and determined to get to the US. So, at age 18, he filled out the forms to immigrate to Canada.
In other words, in what Perez calls the “irruption” phase, what is actually going on is a bunch of yahoos, nobodies trying out new stuff. We don’t know anything about the guys that had good ideas, but only the guys whose good ideas worked and who were able to get their good ideas that worked into production and into the minds of consumers.
Of course, as more and more people get to hear about these new ideas that work, there gets to be a “frenzy” as everyone wants to get in on the action. And typically too many people get into the frenzy on borrowed money and go bottom-up when the frenzy tops out. Because nobody knows when and how the “bubble” will pop.
In the subsequent recession or depression, Perez writes,
at such times, the role of the state and various social forces becomes indispensible for shaping the direction in which society will move [thereafter].
You think that the “state” and “social forces” have a clue what is going on and what to do about it? Please! The response of the state is inflation, as in FDR going off the Gold Standard after the 1929 Crash and Ben Bernanke doing QE and QE2 in response to the 2008 Crash. And then there is the inflation financed government spending that probably, experts will one day agree, delayed the economic recovery.
The only thing that governments know how to do is print money and go to war.
My basic point is that we should all understand that, most of the time, nobody has a clue. Nobody has any idea what new ideas are going to work. Nobody has a clue about a boom in the stock market. Nobody has an idea about how to regulate finance and balance the various financial concepts from debt to equity. And nobody has an idea about how the get the economy back on track after a crash.
Governments and elite cultures are based on the assumption that political and cultural leaders know what they are doing. They don’t! They are just faking it.
That’s why I am always looking for ideas that accept that we really don’t have a clue and are stumbling along trying to avoid bumping into things. One of the ideas that has half a clue about this is the venture capital startup culture. The venture capitalists consciously fund a bunch of startups because they know that you cannot know in advance which good idea will turn out to be the good idea that works.
| perm | 02/07/26 1:04 am ET | comments |
Trying to Dial Down Politics and Religion
What is it about politics and religion that they seem to go together like bacon and eggs?
I think it’s because politics is a boy thing — fighting the enemy — and morality is a girl thing — “I’m never speaking to her again.” So if you combine them it’s almost like a nuclear plant going critical.
If you are into politics or religion, you need to maximize your power. To energize the men, you need to persuade them that it’s a crime that things are the way they are, and we need to fight until we change things. To energize women you need to persuade them that people are suffering because of the way the things are the way they are, and we all need to complain until they change things.
If you want to legislate a program for universal child care, you need to persuade everyne that it’s a good thing to help mothers and to get billionaires to pay, and a bad thing that it’s so hard and expensive for moms to find childcare and so bad that billionaires don’t pay their share.
If you want to conquer the world, like Mohammed the Prophet, you go to war against the evil infidels. If you are the Crusaders you sail for the Holy Land to free it from the Muslim hordes.
There were the French Wars of Religion between Catholics and Huguenots in the second half of the 16th Century (Rumor has it that the Chantrills of old were French Huguenots). There was the German Thirty Years War in the early to mid 17th Century that started as a Protestant rebellion against the Catholic Hapsburgs and escalated into a full-scale European war with the French, Swedish, and Spanish monarchs joining in the fun.
If you were the Protestant Dutch in 1688 you invaded England so you could make it fight against Catholic France.
And let’s just stop there.
One thing that really gets people riled up is martyrs: people that died for the Cause. Here’s an example just down the street in woke fancy-pants North Seattle.
If you are a woke liberal, and especially a woke woman liberal, Trump is a dictator and ICE agents are Nazis. If you are Vice President Vance then Alex Pretti is an “assassin.” I wonder who will win the messaging war.
Of course, after January 6, conservatives tried to make the unarmed Ashli Babbit into a martyr, without much success because liberals wanted to brand all J6 rioters as “armed insurrectionists.”
Look, I get it. Men have been defending their territory since the chimpanzees, and women have been expecting to be protected since human babies got big heads and needed to be birthed way before a baby could look after itself.
But I think we can do better. But how? Clearly, political leaders and religious leaders know how to push the right buttons, and the rule of the lowest common denominator means that leaders push the easiest buttons to get the reaction they want and the power they crave.
One of the things that has impressed me in my life is how men have dialed down the warrior ethic from actual fights and duels to the competition of sports and the competition of the market economy and its special modern variant, the tech startup culture.
But whatabout women? It is my belief that we have made a really big mistake in imagining that women can perform like men in politics and in the adminstrations of corporations and government: women don’t do hierarchy, not instinctively. My faith is that somewhere out there are women that just can’t take it any more, and that those women will walk us away from the government welfare-state and school system and create new “communities of care” that look after people in the world in the way that women have instintively done down the ages. For instance, in a neighborhood near me during the late COVID unpleasantness the women set up micro-schools for their children when the bureaucratic and administrative system closed down the government “child custodial facilities” that we foolishly call “schools.”
I wonder if, with the imminent collapse of the woke frenzy, a new age will dawn in which women just start reorganizing the care part of human life according to notions that engage the natural and human-developed instincts of women. It would be fascinating to see something like this develop before I go and join my ancestors.
| perm | 02/05/26 11:27 pm ET | comments |
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Christopher Chantrill
He runs usgovernmentspending.com, the go-to resource for government finance data, and is a frequent contributor to the American Thinker. He lives in Seattle, Washington. Click for more.
“I love this guy.” — Steve Ballmer
A Commoner Manifesto
Commoners have nothing to lose but their shame
America does not have a “white supremacy” problem. It has a “spoiled, unhinged, white liberals” problem. — Kayleigh McEnany
At their worst, men have a Culture of Insult and women have a Culture of Complaint. At their best, men have a Culture of Courage and women have a Culture of Kindness.
The simplest way to understand human society is as Three Layers such as Nobles, Yeomen, and Serfs.
My take on Three Layers is my Three Peoples Theory of Creatives, Responsibles, and Subordinates.
I believe that we moderns live in Three Worlds: the War World of politics, the Market World of the economy, and the Life World of family and neighborhood.
The world that we all live in today is the one created by the German Turn in philosophy, psychology, science, and meaning.
But our modern elite, the educated elite, has taken, I believe, a Wrong Turn and has imposed a cultural Great Reaction on the world, a lurch back to the primitive. This manifests in the elite’s conceited Activism Culture and its patronage of Subordinate people as its Little Darlings.
The principal reason for the elite’s Wrong Turn has been that it does not understand and does not want to understand how the Three Peoples’ Religions are necessarily different.
The root of the educated elite’s Wrong Turn is its conceit that it knows what the world needs. I think there is a better way; I call it “A Good Life Better than the Left”.
ABC of Politics – Activism Culture – “Anatomy of Revolution” – Allyism – Critical Theory – Downstream-ism – Dutch Finance – German Turn – Good Life – Great Reaction – Little Darlings – Perfect Plan – Women in the Public Square – Ruling Class – Three Layers – Three Peoples – Three Peoples Religion – Tribalism – Two Cultures – Wrong Turn
Today’s topic: An Analysis of Curtis Yarvin's Three Layer Theory
