My theories – part 3

Okay, after the allegory of the turnips, I suppose I should elaborate a little more.  The idea came to me when thinking about how I think we measure the wrong thing when we talk about Gross Domestic Product.  GDP is really just the measure of how fast money changes hands in society.  That’s one of the basic definitions on Wikipedia, and I think it appears like what everyone talks about when the talk about GDP is who bought what at what “price”.  But the point of the turnip allegory is that there really is no value in simply exchanging money.  Nobody did anything different in that transaction – nobody was wealthier.  We simply exchanged wealths.  Now, what we do with the wealth we have exchanged in the future is the important thing.

So the question went like this – suppose someone can produce calories more efficiently than they consume them?  That person would be considered a positive surplus calorie generator (PSCG).  In my example, that was Jill – she found a rock and was able to use it to gather 11 turnips in a day rather than 10.  Let’s assume that she does this for 10 days in a row.  Now, she could actually take the whole day off from harvesting turnips and simply study her rock – to see whether she could do even better than 11.  This, then, is called “research” – when you have a surplus of calories and spend it attempting to find a better way to harvest calories in the future.

Let’s say Jill does decide to spend her 10 turnip surplus on researching her new rock, but at the end of the day she is no better off than she was before.  She still harvests 11 turnips per day and Jack harvests 10.  So, after another 10 days she has an additional surplus of 10 turnips but this time she gives them to Jack, with the admonition to use the rock and attempt to harvest more than she can in a day.  She knows that he might not be able to do any at all – maybe the rock will prove to be a big waste of time.  If so, Jack goes back to using his hands for 10 / day, Jill uses the rock for 11 / day, and every 20 days or so they both take a day off and start laying around doing just nothing for a while.  Maybe they start to explore, go off in one direction or another.  Or maybe they just swim in a stream and enjoy a relaxation.  Regardless, they can do this because their society produced more calories per period than are consumed.  They are, in effect, Net Positive.

In part 4 we’ll discuss identifying resources as stockpiled or renewing, and then we can get into Surplus mesurements.

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