spewed

Well, I've got my thoughts about what Arcosanti "should" do ... OK, what "I want" Arcosanti to do ... hmm ... still rather silly.

Perhaps at least this might be of interest. Now, I am not one of the hangers on who is afraid of money, to put it one way, or hates money, to put it another. I rather like the stuff, and, a stick in your eye, you haters, for years have been determined to get some. Pursuant to that I really have concentrated a bit, looking at this, that, and the other thing quite intensively. Well, really, I've looked at stock charts at great length. But there are people out there, and very successful ones - we call them investors - who express considerable skepticism about the charts, and that thought did nag at me a bit. After stubbornly not paying them much attention for a long long time, I finally did wade into their world a bit. I found some things to read about Warren Buffett, mainly.

Well, in so doing I learned something very interesting about finance. I mean, you would think I learned lots and lots of interesting things about finance, but, in a way, finance is actually very simple, and it's just one thing.

Now, if finance is such a simple thing, then I guess it doesn't need much explaining, and everybody already knows all about it. But, clearly, the vast majority know nothing about it. They have no clue. Here's what the vast majority of people thing: they think finance is just luck. OK, sometimes you've got to roll the dice. People who seem to know something about it are telling me that, yes, I should invest, so, I'll invest, and hope for the best. Maybe I'll get lucky.

Of course, there are people "in" finance, and surely they know what it actually is. But it appears to me that a lot of people in finance actually do not know what finance is. I mean, they know what it's supposed to be, but they don't really understand it, and they think it's actually something other than what it's supposed to be. They think, in a word, that what it is is a form of cheating. And so, these people in finance - that's what they've decided to get into - say to themselves, well, that's the way it is, finance is a kind of cheating, so I will give it my very best shot. Later, when they get caught, and are accused of cheating, they say "well, I was just practicing finance." They even actually mean it.

There is, by the way, another large group who think finance is a form of cheating and they, therefore, will have nothing to do with it. They are, therefore, deliberately not in finance.

Let me correct course a little and explain that what I mean by "finance" is investing. Now, everybody does know that investing - finance - is a way things get done. Everybody knows that ... I mean, we can debate whether these things are legitimate, but we do depend on them ... that things we depend on get done through finance. So maybe finance is a form of cheating, or maybe it's just luck, but it's sadly apparently necessary. Ah well.

I'm not actually in a position to get us out of this trap. Finance is a nasty business. That's because life is a nasty business. Nasty, nasty ... though it has its good points. That's the best I can do where it comes to offering an out from the nastiness of it all: it does have its good points. Maybe I can synthesize my thesis this way: if we concentrate on the good parts, we might have a chance. But, back to my 'splainin'.

Here's how finance works: people put resources into some endeavor - and all resources are (this I got from Marx, I mean, he said it, and I thought, well, that actually makes sense) fundamentally work - and they hope for a return. It would be nice if people invested hoping to support good work, a return be damned, or maybe the good work itself would be the return, but, reality is reality, and, really, we mostly invest for a return. Actually, if we look at it very broadly, the return that we might get - if, say, we rely on luck - is good work, or could be described that way. But, reality is reality, and it very often doesn't matter much how good the work is if it does us personally no good. Maybe that's the real distinction. Averaging everybody's experience out, we quite simply must have a return for ourselves. The work that's done has its good and bad points, and, in the end, if it's good for me, it's good, and if it's not, it's not.

Now, you may not believe me, but I actually am an idealist. I passionately want to support goodness, pure, unadulterated goodness. That might not be very realistic, but a mission doesn't have to be realistic. Or, it might be realistic. Maybe I can penetrate the layers of reality and achieve goodness.

Anyway, there is this thing called reality. Let me shift the focus. Let's talk about questions of scale. Put it this way: maybe, if we only want to do something small, we don't need finance. Here I'm using the term to describe some kind of collective effort. Maybe, if all we want to do is something small, we can do it with just our own personal resources. You know, even those great mothers, Russia and China, have stock markets. If you want to do something somewhat big, or something very big, finance comes into play. Above a certain scale, in fact, the stock market comes into play. And, just to make sure we get to the root of the matter, money is the life blood of the stock market, so, yes, we are talking about money. But I still haven't explained what finance actually is.

So, if we want to do anything even modestly big, we have to take some of the complications out of it, and the way we do that is money. Several people put money they've "made" by working (or that somebody made by working) "into" something. And, very broadly speaking - reality being what it is - those people hope for a return. In order to simplify things, they usually hope for a return of money. Reality being what it is, if they don't get a return of money, it's probably going to hurt, quite possibly a lot. If they do get a return of money, it's probably going to feel at least somewhat good. So, they hope for a return. Now, we've already discussed the fact that most people seek a return, and the concomitant relief from pain it brings (not to mention the pleasures it brings) by means of either luck or cheating. Or, well, to be a little less cynical about it, perhaps most people sense that at least a modest return can be achieved through what we might call good behavior. Listen, respectable experts tell us to invest some money so that we won't starve in our old age, and trusting respected experts is a form of good behavior, so perhaps most people, rolling the dice, go with a trusting attitude, invest some of their earnings, and get at least a modest return on their investments. Some will argue I'm just dreaming, and that most investors loose, but I suspect they don't have any more statistical evidence than I do. I suspect most people invest and get a modest return. That leaves probably a fairly large number who invest and loose, or don't invest and loose, and some who, one way or another, win big.