Rethinking the Aid Paradigm

(discussion 5)

Meeting on 7th March 2024

• N.B. these notes are a personal record by John compiled after the meeting
  • here is a subsequent critique of these notes by John Waters

Attendees:

• Sandro Pampallona, (e.g. article) | Paula Bollini (e.g. article) | Felicity Jones | John Wood

AI Summary

• See Fathom's NOTES from 7th March meeting

Previous topics

• meeting on 14-08-23 (general range of topics)
  • further notes on value creation relating to 14-0-8
• meeting on 11-01-24 (refreshing the discourse of Development)
• meeting on 24-01-24 (conviviality and auspicious conversations)
• meeting on 7-02-24 (why monetary funding is problematic)

Key ideas

1. Consider embracing what Felicity Jones called the Cloud of unknowing in order to operate less rationally/predictively (see an ecological definition of wisdom.
   • This might invoke heresies that reveal playful exceptions, rather than known knowns.
2. The concept of a 'relational currency'. Money that would only exist when co-owned by at least 2 parties.
   • It would be designed to catalyse the finding of new synergies
   • i.e. innovation processes to locate local opportunities from bisociative meetings.
   • Instead of working as a sum, or index of things relational money would act as a map of possible relations.
   • Ownership could be re-assigned, but only one party at a time - so that each new holder may facilitate new synergies.
   • This process might, therefore, operate in creative pairs, or creative quartets.

The business of charity

• One reason for starting this group was the limited effectiveness of Development funding.
• Unfortunately, local complexity (e.g. emotional aspects of care) resist external management.
• The influence of corporate culture may also have introduced unrealistic expectations.
  • E.g. seeking solutions that are infinitely scaleable / quality assurance frameworks.

Trust in quantification

• In the last 10k years, humans tend to opt for control & certainty over complexity and ambiguity.
• The quest for imperial stability created order from standards, laws, categories and things.
• In this summative flatland of quantification everything is judged by dimensions, proportions and ratios.
• Success in achieving this has reduced many natural diversities (including ecodiversity).
  • e.g. by cultivating fewer species of plants, agriculture enabled us to feed more people.

Some background discussion

• Few would disagree that current Development Aid funding bid systems are, at best, sub-optimal.
• However, they deliver administrative transparency, explicitness and controllability.
• These qualities closely resemble those found in unit-based money.
• e.g. Accountability works by focusing only on locally convenient parts of the big picture.
  • See money loosely defined in the Glossary

Key features of money

• Sandro invited John to summarise his critique of unit-based money:

1. ALIENATING - unit-based currencies do not register human values or emotions (care, joy, fun, distaste)
2. EXCLUSIVELY SUMMATIVE - their precision depends on the oblivious self-similarity of numbers
3. REDUCTIONIST - they encourage wholesale thinking rather than diversity, difference, complexity.
4. UN-SYNERGISTIC - their fungibility hides vital synergies from us

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How did we get here?

• How humans acquired the cognitive abilities to trade with money is a long story.
• Creating imperial colonies meant scaling up communities beyond the Dunbar number.
• Governance meant increasing hierarchical accountability at the expense of local responsibility.
• Wider trading meant focusing less on local qualities and more on lower common denominators (e.g. quantity).
• The logic of unit-based money derives from extracting, shaping and collecting dead ‘stuff’ from the ground.
• We have been shaping homogeneous materials into talismans, tools, and weapons for 3 million years.
• It is likely that we increasingly learn to ritualise, fetishise, prize them as tokens ---> units of exchange.
• 5K years ago, we invented coding/counting/categorising systems (c.f. today's bureaucratic world).
  • e.g. accounting methods that routinely externalise (i.e. ignore) important, socially relevant costs.
  • e.g. numeracy that often debases or defies the natural synergistic order found in evolution.
  • e.g. the unsituated nature of alphabetical writing.
  • e.g. the profound ignorance embedded in clock time.
  • e.g. our increasing dependence on non-human sensors, such as thermostats.
  • e.g. legally defined agencies (e.g. 'bodies') existing as written documentation.
  • e.g. automated trading webs that can rapidly re-assign ownership (e.g. derivatives market)
  • e.g. our growing dependence on AI systems.

Trusting old habits

• The desire for certainty and simplicity is not confined to managers of Development Budgets.
• As Sandro said: "beneficiaries always say - just give us money, supplies & materials.
• As Felicity conceded: we all want resilient livelihoods...
• Survival in a complex, diversifying environment is risky, so humans plan for order and symmetry.
• Often, the safety of the herd is best maintained when it acts according to familiar customs.
• Unfortunately, our mainstream economic institutions continue to act as though stranded assets are valuable.
• Short-termism is a pervasive trope and the ethics of long-termism is slow to develop.
  • e.g. the simplicity and short-term certainties of logging is compelling (see the value of trees)

Evolution and diversity

• Imagine if we adopted methods that were less predictive, more locally situated, more creative...
• After all, evolution created global homeostasis without a plan, recipe or funding strategy?
• It facilitated our collective survival through diversification, synergies and experimentation.
• The more diversity it created, the more opportunities emerged - leading to more diversities, etc.
• This is why heuristic and abductive reasoning often trumps rules and algorithms.

The importance of relationality

• Whereas money focuses attention on discrete things, the living world finds synergies in combinations.
• Fortunately, relations always outnumber - and outclass - the things that comprise them.
• Synergy emerges when things work together, therefore relations are more important than things.
• This means we can do more with less — by re-combining what we have — to find new synergies.
• We need the educational syllabus to put relationality and synergy onto the curriculum.
• One reason it is missing is because of a collective institutional fear of unpredictability (i.e. risk).
  • Synergy as "the behaviour of whole systems unpredicted by the separately observed behaviours of their parts taken separately" (Buckminster Fuller).

Relational currencies

1. My idea is very much a work in progress as it seeks to apply Euler's numerical principle as a system of value.
2. The concept of (unit-based) money derives from tokenising homogeneous materials
3. Its design therefore makes a unit (e.g. dollar / Euro) resist the natural synergies by only working summatively.
   • i.e. unlike living systems money cannot, therefore, grow or multiply, so we see 'profit'.
4. Like all such (extracted and finite) materials it is bound by the law of diminishing returns.
5. To be fair, these materials (e.g. gold, silver, coal) possess intrinsic synergies that constitute homogenous assets
6. first order synergies
7. synergies of synergies
8. It follows that money should only work in co-ownership - as a catalyst that is bisociative.
9. Instead of working as a sum, or index of things it might act as a map of possible relations.
10. If ownership could be re-assigned (one at a time) each new holder might facilitate new synergies.
11. This process might, therefore, operate in creative pairs, or creative quartets.

Trusting the clown

• Felicity spoke about recent famous transitions from clown to politician (or President)
• Could Development (funding) bids apply the creative fun of clowns/jesters/dissidents/children(?)
• Human cultures are highly complex entities that can be understood as paradigms.
• This term is useful for grasping the forces that sustain particular assumptions, beliefs and habits.
• This may be why paradigms are intrinsically conservative and tend to outlive their usefulness.
• Indeed, if conditions change, the catalytic visions of a few heretics may aid our survival.
• Science may seek enduring truths & repeatable phenomena, but exceptions can hold more value.
• We have more evidence from the past and the present than we have for the future.

Local currencies

• We briefly discussed local currencies but without much detail:

1. Local Exchange Trading Systems (Michael Linton)
2. Time-Based Currencies
3. Bank Job
   • Their film
   • Their local currency
   • Their local Power Station
4. Brixton Pound (Charlie Waterhouse)
5. Hackney Pound (Les Moore)
6. Bristol Pound (Diana Finch)
   • N.B. this thread of the conversation is ongoing and, as yet, inconclusive.