Recovery
Aside from a nagging cough and some bubbling down in the depths of my right lung, I seem to be on the mend. The antibiotics are putting paid to the sinus infection and the worst of the symptoms, namely the aches, dizziness and chills, have passed. Hell of a great way to spend a Spring Break.
I had plans after all. Get some writing done. Revise some lectures. Work on my swimming endurance so I could pass the Lifeguard certification and get a part time job I might like this summer. Maybe even get some reading done.
Well, there wasn't much of any of that.
Joint Writing Project - 02
I managed to get some research in on this over the last few days, in spite of the illness. I also managed to get some writing in, maybe a thousand words. My partner in crime also managed to get some work done as well. They will be focusing on the cultural-mythological aspects of this story. I'm concentrating on some of the harder science based material (I can't be more specific, it'd spoil the story).
We both have a pretty clear idea of what we do not want to do with this story. This was something that was a problem with the first attempted Joint Writing Project, which was never completed. My partner in that project had, I think, different objectives and agendas in mind. I simply wanted to tell a story.
This time around, and I have a different partner for those wondering, we seem to be on the same page of the play book.
We'll see how it goes.
Economics on My Mind
I never took an economics class in college. I don't think the topic was ever discussed in great detail in high school and if it was, it was so brief as to be unmemorable. If you asked me why I didn't take an econ class, I'd tell you that it probably stemmed from a fear that it pertained to mathematics and that it wasn't that much different from accounting.
So I traipsed through college, taking history course after history course, which would sometimes, briefly, touch on economics, before moving on to something else. At the 100 level there would be blips, especially in Larry Cox's American History classes at Maple Woods. At Park where the "I Skip the Wars" Professor held court, it seemed we spent most of our time on baseball, catholicism and engaged in classroom debates much like the forum firefights of the science fiction community.
In other words, it was fucking pointless. When Park sends me letters asking for donations I am sometimes tempted to send them a letter demanding my money back for the worthless degree I got from their school.
At the graduate level, economics usually revolved around Marxism only long enough for the professor to bash capitalism, conservatives, Republicans and anyone else who wasn't a Yellow Dog Democrat before moving off to other topics. Granted, my level of education and value for it at UMKC was far higher than at Park. It should be as I paid through the nose for it.
But economics?
It didn't seem to come up that much.
Now, I did do a paper in grad school touching on the reasons why the British did not intervene in the American Civil War. I had to push myself pretty hard to get the numbers put forth by Owsley in King Cotton Diplomacy but I managed to get the gist of his point, that a cotton glut prior to the American Civil War undermined the Confederate notion that they could cut off cotton and thus draw the nations of Europe into the conflict.
And I worked up another paper, not so good, on how the Black Death caused a spike in labor prices, which drove up the cost of business for the English nobility thus forcing them to raid France for booty in order to continue funding their lifestyle. My thesis was that this prolonged what we know as the Hundred Years War. I used primary source documents to account for changes in tax revenues, prices of labor, goods, and used the practical example of what it might take to maintain one to three horses for an English Knight.
Yeah, in retrospect, that later paper is probably not that good. I'm loathe to even mention it and if I had my druthers, I would not have taken six hours of material on The Black Death. But I needed a Research Seminar and a Colloquium in European History. The Black Death was what was available.
So, why am I pondering economics?
First, it concerns Research Project Number - 05. I can't get into the details of this project but it seems to me that it is a book about economics. It has to be. How does one build an economy where one does not exist? How does one salvage an economy where one once existed? Perhaps the Black Death material might be useful after all. How do you establish a viable currency? What about debts? Credit? All of the problems which plagued the Founding Fathers and perplex us today in 2010 are tied up in this project.
The first feeds into the second. I naturally turn to my training as a historian to understand how such problems have been tackled before. This led me, eventually, to Alexander Hamilton's Bank of the United States.
Kids, teaching this is a first class son of a bitch. But here it is in a nutshell.
When Washington becomes the President, the economy is in bad shape. How bad? Here is what Paul E. Johnson tells us in The Early American Republic 1789 to 1820.
Johnson tells us that Hamilton's report to Congress on the public finances in 1789 was that the debt fell into three categories.
The First Category was Foreign Debt: $11 million (I'm guess this is contemporary dollars not 2010 dollars).
The Second and Third Categories were debts by the Federal and State Governments to Private US Citizens: This amount ran to $48 million total (half and half).
Gotta pay the foreign debts, everyone agreed. You had to do that in order to borrow more money. Fair enough.
What about the rest of it? Well, here is where it gets sticky. Speculators had moved into the market and bought up the Federal and State IOUs many private citizens held at rock bottom prices, far less than face value. If you don't have any money at all, then maybe a little bit of money is better when the economy is in the shitter, right?
Most of those IOUs were held by banking interests in the Northeast, New York Stockjobbers, as Thomas Jefferson would call them. If the government paid off the IOUs at face value, it would concentrate a massive amount of wealth in the Northeast, exacerbating sectional rivalry, concentrating power, etc.
Gets better. Here is what Hamilton wanted to do.
Hamilton wanted to concentrate the state debts, the IOUs and combine it with the Federal debt, make it all one in the same. Consolidate the debt as it were.
Johnson says it better than I can so I'll quote him.
A permanent, unified debt would attract the wealthiest financiers in the country as creditors and would render them loyal and dependent on the national government. If you are wondering, that is page 12 in his book.
The goals were simple enough.
1. Pay off foreign debt.
2. Take control of state debt.
3. Enhance the power of the Federal government by financing the public debt.
4. Obtain credit at home and abroad.
Follow me? If you did, then you are doing pretty well. I have a hell of a time sorting this out. The nearest example I can think of is either consolidating your credit card debt in order to reduce interest and overall payments or consolidating your student loans. I am fairly certain that the moneyed interests would support this because they'd get a better return on Hamilton's system than they would on the status quo.
And yet it is still so much mush in my head. It is easier for me to see why Jefferson opposed the Bank in the first place. If I walk into a classroom and offer to pay all of my students credit card bills, toss in the cellphone bills while you are at it, I'll pick up a fair amount of power and popularity in very short order. The creditors will want to talk to me, not them. I can understand that too.
I can talk about political ideologies with relative ease in my classes. I was definitely trained on how to do that. I can talk about social history if I absolutely have to though I avoid it like the plague. I have no difficulty talking about science, technology, industry and foreign relations. The military material comes to me without much effort at all.
But economics . . . money is the sinews of war, so goes the saying. Not only that, but the issue of economics is driving one other concern.
My fiction writing. What will the new model for making money as a writer be? Does anyone know with any certainty? In my actual stories, how does economics play a role? A practical concern is Forces Velaysia universe of The Limb Knitter. I know that Forces Velaysia is a closed command economy but it has been sustaining itself for nearly 80 to 90 years during a time of war. How does that work?
I should know how it works because economics, to one degree or another, shapes the culture.
Thus, as I proceed through the semester, I find myself wondering why I wasn't made to take an economic history course in college?
So it goes.
Other Fronts
You can see that Hamilton is on my mind. I've got a week to get him sorted out for another go at explaining the National Bank of the United States. My students are bearing down on their second exams, later than I'd like. They will probably get them on April Fool's Day, April 2nd and April 4th respectively. I'll have to crop the third quarter a bit in order to get to the Civil War in American History 120 and the Cold War Era in American History 121.
And it is time to start applying for jobs for the summer. I suppose I should grit my teeth and start applying for security guard jobs as a hedge against the lifeguard position.
So it goes.
Respects,
Steven Francis Murphy
Author of The Limb Knitter and Tearing Down Tuesday
North Kansas City, Missouri
18 hours ago