mahiwaga

As I drove through the hidden streets of L.A. yesterday, on the final leg of my trip back home from S.D., I found myself haunted by this song by Ben Folds, who sings a requiem to the late Elliot Smith:

The refrain really got me:

It’s too late
Don’t you know
It’s been too late
For a long time

As much as I’ve muttered and fretted about the emptiness of my life, and how, in the end, I’m not going to make it, there is still a little part of me that hopes that I’m wrong, that maybe there’s something I can do to salvage this, or maybe luck will smile upon me and save me from this wretched existence.

But I can’t help wonder if the decisions have already been made. The key defining points of my life have already passed, and it’s all about playing the end game, however long that might be.

I was actually first introduced to Marxist crisis theory while reading a fantasy novel, Perdido Street Station, by China Miéville. My simplistic one-liner about crisis theory is that it predicts that increasing prosperity actually diminishes the ability of labor to produce the same amount of profit, inevitably leading to a clash between capital and labor. But mathematically speaking, what this means is that the normal progression of a capitalist economy starts off high, but steadily declines, eventually approaching 0 asymptotically (although never actually reaching zero). There is probably a critical point where crisis occurs, and wealth becomes redistributed in some manner (usually violently.) This restarts the engine of capital expansion, which again inevitably declines.

The human mind has no real way to intuit non-linear processes. By definition, these non-linear breaks are typically unpredictable. Hence, we end up with mathematical singularities. These singularities are where human knowledge and theory break-down, and they are present in all fields, from cosmology to technology to economics. Around and during the singularity, all known rules breakdown.

Ambitious physicists involve in cosmology believe that if they delve deeply enough, they might be able to describe these singularities, or perhaps even prove that they don’t really exist. Of all the fields, perhaps, they have made the farthest progress in trying to understand non-linear processes, but again, that knowledge is incomplete.

We just don’t understand the nature of processes that can’t be normalized to a straight line.

But I suspect that the singularity will forever remain unfathomable, except maybe in the retrospectoscope. We may very well eventually understand the history of the Big Bang at some point, but I don’t think we’ll ever be able to successfully predict what will happen to the matter in a star after it collapses into a black hole.

It is interesting that so many apparently disparate fields can share the same mathematics. I was first impressed by this when I was taught the equations and graphs for exponential growth. Phenomena as diverse as the number of bacteria growing in a Petri dish, the number of radioactive particles in a chunk of uranium, and even the accumulation of compound interest can be modeled by these equations.

But humans seem to be most able to deal with equilibrium situations, or at least steady-state situations. When the slopes of these equations are the steepest, at the beginning of the growth or decay processes, we probably have the least amount of knowledge. When you are in equilibrium, any perturbation still favors the equilibrium state. The steady-state is more fragile. While some perturbations can still be rectified, others will cause the system to crash.

In these phases of rapid growth or decay, it is exceedingly difficult to predict what effect a perturbation will have. This is where evolving systems are most vulnerable. Too much a perturbation and the system will crash entirely.

Interestingly, what a capitalistic economy probably most resembles is the cyclic model of the universe¹, in which the universe experiences multiple cycles of big bangs followed by accelerating expansion. One way to look at such a universe is to imagine the plot of logarithmic decay (representing the vacuum energy as a function of time) repeating continuously, with a disjunct at the end of the acceleration phase. Here (again, still a mathematical singularity, unless you extrapolate to additional dimensions, I guess) the system resets.

Similarly, each cycle of capitalistic expansion eventually stagnates, until a crisis occurs (like the Great Depression, or WWII, etc., etc.) at which point the system resets, driving yet another cycle of economic expansion.

The laws of thermodynamics decree that both the universe and the global economy will always trend towards a state of lowest energy. In the case of the universe, it is vacuum energy that necessarily decays. In the case of the economy, what decays is the profitability of capital. This is encapsulated in such observations as the law of diminishing returns, and specific situations as illustrated by the Singer-Prebisch thesis.

I think thermodynamics is the biggest argument against a completely laissez-faire economy, because if you let the Invisible Hand manage things, the economy is guaranteed to always end in the shitter, usually in a catastrophic manner. I’m not saying that planned economies can actually prevent these catastrophes, but they can probably shepherd us through them in a more controlled fashion. If the analogy is to an explosion, laissez-faire would have all the pieces scattering all over the place, while a planned economy would be like an internal combustion engine.

Just finished watching “The American Gangster” with Denzel Washington and Russell Crowe, which documents the rise and fall of the drug lord Frank Lucas in the late ‘60’s to the mid ‘70’s, concomitant with the Vietnam War era. (The New York Magazine has an article about him.)

The hilarious thing is that he gets his supply of heroin directly from the source, in the jungles of Southeast Asia, and he is able to get a connection in the U.S. Armed Forces to smuggle the stuff for him in the coffins of dead servicemen.

Russell Crowe plays a cop appointed to head a division of the newly-created Drug Enforcement Agency, who comments sarcastically that the government probably doesn’t actually want the War on Drugs to end, since it employs so many people: cops, social workers, clerks, lawyers, judges, prison guards, wardens. He estimates that at least 100,000 people would be unemployed if the War on Drugs ever ended.

The Southeast Asia angle is kind of eerie, though, considering that we are engaged in a land war in Asia. (One of the classic blunders!) It’s interesting that we don’t really get any news about the war in Afghanistan. But I hear that ever since we invaded, the opium trade has increased immensely, with Afghanistan now providing 90% of the world’s heroin supply.

The War on Drugs angle is also still pretty evident. Sending people-of-color to jail is what keeps the unemployment rate low, and part of the reason why Walmart has such low prices is that they employ prison labor. (Maybe not the actual employees, nor the workers who manufacture their goods, but certainly the builders of their super-stores.) I have no doubt that the federal government intends to continue prosecuting this futile “war.”

What is even funnier is that when I was a third year medical student, I did a rotation at the County Hospital in Chicago. Now, apparently, every city has their drug of choice. For example, in L.A., it’s probably cocaine, in San Diego, it’s crystal meth. In Chicago, it’s heroin.

So this guy comes in for asthma (and after we discharge him, we find that he left behind an empty 40 that he had been drinking the whole time in the Emergency Department.) And as he’s wheezing and huffing and puffing, he’s explaining to me the history of heroin. How no one really shoots it any more except for the really strung-out junkies, because you can get it so pure that you can get high enough just from snorting it. He even explained that this increase in purity occurred back in the early ‘90’s, in part because the supply of heroin in the U.S. shifted from Asia to South America, making transport much easier, and everything became cheaper and purer.