Hygge-II

[petussing]

The Social Democracy aspect seems in line with what Hygge does – no problem, including watching Gini Coefficient closely.

Thugs: please explain. What thugs? I have looked it up on Google (not the same as a local’s knowledge) and see a lot about football thugs in Denmark. I could see this as being an interesting opportunity for there to be a thuggish sub-culture in a very plain-vanilla society, built around sport and nationalism. And for this to become systematic crime of some kind. Maybe connected to the following (performance enhancement drugs, anyone?).

Black markets: any of you know Boris & Arkady Strugatsky’s 1976 The Final Circle of Paradise? It’s a late-Soviet scifi critique of capitalism, in which a drug culture pervades a seeming “paradise”. The obvious black market would be for drugs – another opportunity for stories.

Modern Monetary Theory: I suppose that this would be run conservatively so as to avoid inflation, which is the main criticism mainstream economists have against MMT. I personally consider that the extent to which the Fed is currently monetizing the US debt by purchasing vast quantities of Treasuries to prop up vast debt issued by the government already is one step away from MMT: the final step would be for the Fed to issue checks to citizens and businesses to offset a recession DIRECTLY – therefore no longer creating the illusion of a vast debt that “must be” paid. So I’m less troubled by this than I would have been last year. BUT this means two things: as you both presumably know, some non-mainstream theorists (C.H. Douglas of Social Credit fame, for example) considered that banks should not be allowed to create money by making loans, and that they should be limited to taking deposits and lending only on 100% reserve requirements. This would resolve problems associated with lending bubbles such as the 2008-9 crash, but would mean that bank lending as an engine of economic growth would be cut off. However, if the government itself took over the task of lending, it could ratchet growth up & down tightly – maybe your Hyggean government, enamored of control, would like that. Downside, of course, is politicization of lending, but this would again be an interesting source of stories. And of course the other problem is politicization of who gets government checks when things turn down - another source of stories. Here Public Choice Theory, about the problem with the individual interests of bureaucrats, created by leftists’ bete-noir James M. Buchanan (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_M._Buchanan), would come in handy as a mine for ideas.

[petussing]

One last thought: Pavlina Tcherneva is an MMTer whose thinking I find interesting. In this paper she develops a mathematical model of “state-as-monopoly-supplier-of-money”, which is interesting, but here I have in mind to draw your attention to her Conclusion on the potential role of the state as the Employer of Last Resort. That would mean Unemployment=0%. In India there is an incipient version of this, in which the government offers unskilled labor jobs for peanuts; I suppose in a more sophisticated economy practicing MMT, the government might pay a so-called “living wage”, as long as the low-skilled are not too high in number, and their job would perhaps be tied to taking training in some kind of higher-paid skill. What kinds of jobs? Maybe the things “essential workers” do in the US, which we have discovered during the pandemic are less worthy of derision than we had arrogantly assumed. An interesting aspect of a government that does this would be issues related to border controls… let your imagination run riot…

[yudhanjaya]

Aha. I really like this!

‘Thugs’ was a reference to alberto’s post on the previous Hygge, pointing out that various non-state actors would slowly begin to set up black markets of their own and police them. I should have been clearer.

This would resolve problems associated with lending bubbles such as the 2008-9 crash, but would mean that bank lending as an engine of economic growth would be cut off. However, if the government itself took over the task of lending, it could ratchet growth up & down tightly – maybe your Hyggean government, enamored of control, would like that. Downside, of course, is politicization of lending, but this would again be an interesting source of stories.

This is gold. It also fits in line with a government that is (supposedly) too afraid of externalities to let banks have free reign. And the political jockeying fits Hygge perfectly - a society that would essentially fork Risk-Bushido to develop a more Machiavellian version specifically around winning at politics.

Pavlina Tcherneva is an MMTer whose thinking I find interesting. In this paper she develops a mathematical model of “state-as-monopoly-supplier-of-money”, which is interesting, but here I have in mind to draw your attention to her Conclusion on the potential role of the state as the Employer of Last Resort.

Could you link the paper? India’s version is quite fragmented in implementation, since it’s an enormous place where individual states hold significant power, regardless of what the press generally sees - for example, Kerala is a completely different game from the central Delhi government. But I will start digging there - I know some folks, formerly, at the Center for Policy Research, who might be able to give me enough information to have an idea of what state to look at.

[petussing]

It’s sketchy. I’ll look around. Here it is (p. 19 of 20): https://modernmoneynetwork.org/sites/default/files/biblio/Pavlina_2007.pdf

[petussing]

Here is a pretty good detailed description of what a government-based Employer of Last Resort program looks like, with specific reference to a program in Argentina after the 2001 default called “Plan Jefes”:
http://www.levyinstitute.org/pubs/wp_732.pdf

[alberto]

@petussing

the potential role of the state as the Employer of Last Resort.

I was going to ask, Philip… if the local incanters are MMT people, then they should not be running UBI at all! They should be running a Public Service Employment programme, MMT’s flagship policy. Hygge is a fantastic opportunity to try to imagine how that would even work in practice. I find the problem fascinating, because, once you have PSE, it makes sense to use the workforce strategically, to produce public goods. This is acknowledged by Kelton, Wray etc: I wrote about it here:

@alberto

Its main policy objective is of course employment itself, but there is a list of additional ones:

• To guarantee a basic human right to a job, as outlined in the UN Declaration of Human Rights and President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s call for an economic bill of rights.
• To implement an employment safety net. […]
• To serve the public purpose. […]
• To be used as a vehicle for addressing other social ills—urban blight, environmental concerns, etc.

Emphasis mine. So, if Hygge has a large workforce that the local top incanters can deploy towards “social ills”, they have two problems:

1. “Provisioning”, aka making sure they don’t create more purchasing power than purchasable things in the economy, thereby driving inflation, like you say.
2. Allocating effort among “social ills”.

That leaves the augurs with two big, nice problem. “Provisioning” is a sort of centralized economic planning – or at least I cannot think on any other way to do it. I imagine some kind of Leontiev’s input-output matrix method, whereby Hygge augurs would declare that, indeed, we have enough consumer goods to sell to the people employed under PSE, no inflation is forecast.

The second problem is to estimate the impact of alternative allocations of that workforce. This cannot be done by measuring GDP-like transactions, because workers are producing public goods, for which no markets exist. You could probably measure physical impacts, but then you have to measure a gain in, say trees planted in terms of foregone art exhibitions. A wicked problem indeed – one can only hope that aethnography has developed ways to make reasonably accountable, participatory decisions. Perhaps these ways are the distant descendants of the methods dear to @amelia and myself.

These two activities would be close to the fully planned economy of lille-Hygge. The (major) difference is that lille Hygge-plans everything this way, whereas stor-Hygge does not plan its market economy (producing private goods), but only its public service economy. Maybe the two Hygges could even share software and methods… this way we get closer to @Joriam’s original vision.

I am pretty inexperienced at macro. @petussing, would you be up for taking a crack at imagining running the central bank in Hygge?

[petussing]

But… but… I completely agree – no, not a UBI – they should be running a whatever-you want-to-call-it, a PSE or an ELR (Employer of Last Resort), which is what I called it in my post on this. Emphasis on “Employer” – jobs. So yeah.

The thing that links a PSE or ELR so tightly to MMT is that in order to fund it you are much better off controlling the money supply, so you don’t need to worry abut creating inflation. Moreover, in order to control the money supply tightly you severely limit the ability of banks to create new money by making loans (in a way competing with the central bank), and a rather simple way to do that is a 100% reserve requirement (only, unlike currently in the USA, you really mean it, and you don’t allow so-called “sweep accounts”, which banks use to “sweep” current account deposits, which are subject to the reserve requirement of 10% in the US, into overnight virtual savings accounts, which are not subject to RRs – this is why the RR hasn’t changed in the US in decades. But anyway…)

Ah, but I am an American – where no market exists – create one! That’s what carbon credits are, after all. So although there was never a market for climate change control before, suddenly one exists because a value has been created in an artificial market for releasing carbon into the atmosphere. Such a market exists in Europe also, of course, but it is so far moribund because politicians don’t want to piss off BOTH industry and consumers by setting a realistically high carbon price (at least $50/ton) and raising prices for products that include a lot of carbon (like Bitcoin, for example, because of high energy use, or of course planes, or lubricating oils, plastics, etc.).

Urban blight would only be a little tougher. But the big problem is of course not urban blight – we are solving this all over the US in cities by “gentrifying” poor areas, and therefore turning out poor people from crumbling apartments, razing them, and substituting young upwardly mobile Dual Incomes No Kids (DINKs – no I did not make this up) in condos. The problem is where do you dump the poor, and in this case the answer is you issue them a housing voucher – not as in Houston one that only works in down-market neighborhoods, but one that allows them to rent anywhere they want. Naturally this creates class conflict – more stories! It could be monetary (directly via the central bank a la MMT) or fiscal (from the Department/Ministry of Housing or a separate PSE administration), and in Hygge I would think they would tie it in with the PSE, so that you would generally be required to sign up for the PSE if you get a housing voucher (unless unable to work), and they would probably do a tie-in requiring that children remain in school until they at least graduate high school, or even better a trade school or college after high school. This would be somewhat similar to Brazil’s Bolsa Familia and/or Mexico’s Oportunidades “conditional cash transfer” schemes, which have been impressively successful:
(https://vox.lacea.org/?q=blog/bolsa_familia_reforms)

Maybe… what does running a central bank entail?

[yudhanjaya]

The Dandelion Republic is coming along nicely https://edgeryders.eu/t/the-dandelion-republic-microdistrikt/

I can see the math of MMT, but I’m afraid I’m not well-versed enough in its nuances and problems to posit an equilibrium. @alberto, may I ask you do as you did for the Covenant and weave in yours and @petussing’s ideas into Hygge?

[alberto]

@petussing

so-called “sweep accounts”, which banks use to “sweep” current account deposits, which are subject to the reserve requirement of 10% in the US, into overnight virtual savings accounts, which are not subject to RRs – this is why the RR hasn’t changed in the US in decades.

Ha. I did not know this!

@petussing

Ah, but I am an American – where no market exists – create one! That’s what carbon credits are, after all.

Interesting challenge! I am staying out of this one, though, because I was part of the 1990s drive to bring market solutions to environmental problems – are you old enough to remember the Blueprint for a Green Economy? – and it crashed so painfully and comprehensively that I never want to touch the stuff again. It resulted exactly in what you say:

@petussing

a market exists in Europe also, of course, but it is so far moribund because politicians don’t want to piss off BOTH industry and consumers by setting a realistically high carbon price (at least $50/ton) and raising prices for products that include a lot of carbon (like Bitcoin, for example, because of high energy use, or of course planes, or lubricating oils, plastics, etc.)

But, but, if you can see a path that made Hygge succeed where OECD countries have failed… well, go for it!

A possible source for an alternative take is Mazzucato’s Mission Economy. I am still reading it, and need to think about it, but I like her idea of market shaping. The main idea is that you disentangle market allocation from value theory: you steer value from the top, jettisoning marginal utility theory altogether, and then use markets as pure allocation devices. It’s partial equilibrium all the way down, without general equilibrium. But, of course, we could do both: you can do market instruments à la Blueprint in Hygge, and I can find somewhere else to tinker with Mission Economy ideas.

Actually, just thought of something: Philip, would you be up for a 1 hour open online discussion on “using markets to address social ills: from externality theory to mission economies”? It should be fun, and maybe we can bounce ideas off each other about cool stuff to implement on Witness.

[hugi]

New Hygge is now online on the website, along with the Dandelion Republic!

[petussing]

Here is The Economist’s analysis of Mazzucato’s “Mission Economy”. My wife works for NASA as a Russian interpreter, so I have seen everything from as a kid watching the moon landing to the current shape of the agency. This is the Big Project approach to government – it implies much more confidence in the government’s capacity to manage large projects than I have. It seems to me we remember the few successful ones and forget the many failures. And obviously we forget how much groundwork and dedication and continuity and mutual agreement is necessary to establish the groundwork for that successful big project. Here is the whole thing:

" Mission Economy. By Mariana Mazzucato. Harper Business; 256 pages; $29.99. Allen Lane; £20.

In july 1969 America launched three astronauts into space, landed two of them on the surface of the Moon and safely returned all three to Earth. A remarkable demonstration of American might, the achievement still dazzles more than half a century later; no country on Earth could replicate the feat today. The contrast with America’s bumbling response to covid-19 could scarcely be more glaring.

In “Mission Economy” Mariana Mazzucato argues that societies ought to abjure tired ideologies and embrace the policy approach that put astronauts on the Moon. By setting grand missions for themselves, she writes, and deploying the power of the state in practical ways, they can become more prosperous and equitable. It is an appealing idea, even if America has rarely looked less capable of purposeful collective action.

Ms Mazzucato is an Italian-born economist of a heterodox bent, whose work has long challenged standard economic thinking about the role of markets and government in generating innovation. Her best-known book, “The Entrepreneurial State” (published in 2013), argued that American technological prowess is owed in large part to the strong influence of the federal government, which funded and bore the risk of the initial development of many critical 20th-century technologies. Conventional economic wisdom remains a target in her latest work, too.

Scepticism among dismal scientists about government involvement in markets is based on faulty assumptions, she insists. Common complaints about state meddling—that governments are less efficient than private firms, cannot pick winners, and are staffed by self-interested bureaucrats concerned only with their own status—are belied by an impressive record of government successes: developing the foundation of the internet, for instance, or extending financial assistance to Tesla. Not every public investment pays off. But, in Ms Mazzucato’s view, neither is the record of privatisation of public assets and outsourcing of public tasks an unmitigated triumph. In America and Britain they have produced plenty of wealthy consultants, she says, but not a revolution in public-service efficiency or vast savings.

A rethink is thus overdue, the author urges—and the Apollo programme reveals many ways in which a capable state can create economic value. The sense of purpose and urgency that infused the programme in the 1960s motivated the government agencies involved to innovate, Ms Mazzucato writes, as well as to improve communication and weed out inefficiencies. Retaining important technological capabilities in-house enabled nasa to engage in a more sophisticated fashion with private contractors and monitor their progress better. It also helped the government retain talent, since working for the state could involve meaningful engineering work, not just banal paper-pushing.

And the programme’s technological demands—like the need for smaller, more powerful and more reliable computers than were available at its inception—put pressure on contractors to innovate. They did so, fearlessly, because the state shouldered much of the risk associated with moonshot technologies. The government’s demand for cutting-edge kit sowed the seeds of the computing age to come. The mit Instrumentation Laboratory, tapped to develop guidance and navigation systems for the mission, swept up 60% of America’s output of integrated circuits at the peak of the Apollo effort. For its part, nasa helped shape the industrial ecosystem of America’s tech sector: to avoid becoming too dependent on any one contractor, it spread business around, implanting know-how across many firms.

These points are compelling. State projects can certainly go wrong, but there is no mistaking the vital role governments played in facilitating the development of rich economies. Conversely, the weakening of state capacity—to provide badly needed infrastructure and basic services, educate citizens, root out corruption, and so on—has hurt America’s dynamism and the welfare of its people. There is no shortage of daunting global problems in need of solving; Ms Mazzucato singles out the fight against climate change, campaigns to improve public health and efforts to narrow the digital divide.

Yet in the end it is hard to feel inspired by her book. America launched the Apollo programme at what may well have been the zenith of its state capacity. Not only was the government at its most capable, but state initiatives enjoyed maximum public legitimacy and confidence. That proficiency had been forged during decades of crisis: two world wars, a devastating depression and an existential superpower stand-off against the Soviet Union. The bipartisan consensus that supported a strong state shattered long ago; a new sense of national unity and purpose cannot be conjured out of thin air.

Arresting as Ms Mazzucato’s views on economic development are, her book does not really offer a route back to that purpose and cohesion. But that is what America needs most. Sadly, those goals look as remote and inaccessible as the Moon."

[petussing]

If you think it would be good to talk about this in a forum, I would be glad to do so.

[alberto]

Yes! Look at this:

First steps into the Edgeryders learning program: understanding Mazzucato's "Mission Economy"

Heads up: I want to try out that learning program we have been talking about in the RezNet’s meeting earlier in the year. The problem is how to do that without being crushed by overhead and organizing. So: One hour of conversation on a topic. No slides. Only commitment is preparing a few talking points, maybe 10 minutes. No hosting. Community managers invited, like anyone else, but with no obligation to care about anyone else. No promotion/comms. Put in on the platform with a week lead time, m…

However, this was made to accommodate @yudhanjaya’s time zone (Sri Lanka), so that might be very inconvenient for you. But you and I could just make our own appointment for that…

@petussing

Here is The Economist’s analysis of Mazzucato’s “Mission Economy”. My

In the end, the Economist’s review of Mazzucato is underwhelming. They seem to say: “She’s right, all the way! but we cannot trust the government to be up to the task”. This is a blatant fallacy. Government capacity is not a parameter, but a variable. NASA was not inherited from the British Empire, but built from the ground up. NASA is a byproduct of Apollo, not vice versa. It took a mere ten years from foundation to Apollo 13; and the average age in the NASA control room during the lunar landing was 26.

Earlier this week I heard a lovely seminar by Scott Page, who argued that the decision of building an institution to support some kind of allocation has two consequences: the allocation itself, plus something he calls “civic capacity”, which has the sense that societies get better at deploying coordination mechanisms. If you do a lot of things with markets, you will get good at building markets; if you do lots of things by democratic processes, you will get better at democracy, etc. It also works in reverse: if we stop government from doing anything of substance, it will become bad at running things.

[petussing]

OK, Alberto – I’m in. It is not inconvenient for me late at night Central US time, up to 2 AM.

I have ordered the book and it will take about ten days to get here. I’ll start on talking points (probably expanding, confirming and finding sources for the ideas below), but I do not see how ten minutes could even enable laying the basis for an opinion on this question.

It’s a very interesting and important topic. I agree with you, up to a point. The Economist’s article is referring to current governments – large countries in the so-called “West” (which somehow includes Japan but not China or Russia) do not have a sufficiently unified government and electorate, to say nothing of policy continuity, to embark on such a project. I can’t think of many. Maybe some northern European countries – the usual Scandinavian suspects – of course they are precisely the ones who need it least. Your country, Italy? Of course not. Mine – the US – consumed with political infighting, and likely to be for the foreseeable future – the only good thing about that is that the future is hard to see, according to a Danish saying quoted by Niels Bohr. France? Mr. Macron would like it to be so, but he is very unpopular. In South America, Brazil is the country with greatest potential, which it has never somehow fulfilled, and it seems to be backsliding for now – who knows if that could change? Currently it seems the merest fantasy to imagine such a thing as a “Mission Economy”, and as we know, the best is the enemy of the good.

Nevertheless, what I would do is not state the obvious about current problems, which I just did, but to consider what would be necessary for a country to have the fundamental resources to pursue such a project. And I hope to consider this not from the perspective of a fantasist, but of a realist.

So for example, the US was initiated by Dwight Eisenhower, a Republican. It was formally launched by John Kennedy, a Democrat. It was able to continue from 1961 to 1972 and conclude under the Presidency of Richard Nixon, a Republican, primarily because it was organized in large part as a Cold War project, in competition with the then-USSR. This immediately suggests that the best way to rally the populace and Presidents of both parties is if there is a clearly identifiable and realistically nation-threatening enemy to push against. China is the obvious candidate at present. Maybe that would work.

But if you look at institutional capacity, the US government bureaucracy has suffered greatly under President Trump, who very very actively tried to subvert every department of the US government to serve him personally and his interests. Joe Biden has an enormous project rebuilding just about every department, with the odd semi-major exception of NASA (with the minor exception of all climate-related activity, which is being rebuilt). I don’t know how European countries are in terms of institutional capacity – Britain’s was supposed to have been great, but has produced a good deal of failure during the COVID-19 crisis. The same in a number of European countries (except, again, a few northern European ones).

And the entire concept of a government bureaucracy which is dedicated to the goals of the American people is subject to question. Yes, the CDC has done a good job during the pandemic, even as it was continuously undermined by Mr. Trump, but this raises the issue of how to ensure that bureaucratic goals do in fact follow the benefits of the populace, and who determines that? I mean, look at the American Environmental Protection Agency, which was basically gutted, and became an agency promoting coal and oil interests. How can that be prevented in today’s febrile political atmosphere?

The current clear candidate for a Mission Economy, in the US or practically anywhere else, is climate change. Unfortunately inequality doesn’t arouse enough passion and population-wide deep commitment. Most people don’t “get” the connection between social justice and national power, and the huge differences between the left and right over military power, the management of the economy (just mention the word “capitalism” in a quiet room of people with varied political opinions, and you will understand…), etc – would make it very hard to build unity. Even China might be brought in to work on climate change reduction/mitigation, although this would reduce the Cold War-style motivation. But how can Greta Thunberg be a poster child for climate change to motivate rural Americans? And I assure you, rural Americans would have the power to subvert such a program, such that it would be unlikely to be able to proceed without a plan to bring them along willingly.

Or probably anywhere else. Many countries are becoming divided along urban and rural lines – think India or France – and rural people are fighting back against the long-standing arrogance and disdain of urban elites. There are also dividing lines on immigration – the wrong immigration policy could subvert and destroy any “Mission” by creating divisions between supporters and opponents.

So the whole political conversation would have to be filtered through the lens of how it would affect “the Mission” – could a nation’s politicians stay on message like that? How can they be induced to want to? What’s in it for them? Apollo spread around a TON of money in projects to the home areas of powerful politicians to enable the project to succeed.

So I look forward to talking about this.

[petussing]

So… I have been thinking about this some more. And have a couple of additional thoughts:

1. Although the Apollo mission was great, and I love it, it is less clear what it did for America. NASA talks about useful space-related products, but I think what was best about it is how inspiring it was. It didn’t put food on anyone’s table, aside from providers of space-related technologies. It did not solve the race problem. It didn’t make the country more productive. It made Americans feel better about being Americans, but it did not solve any of their actual problems.

2. It seems to me that rather than being a START of anything, Apollo was a CULMINATION. It was initiated and completed, as I mentioned, as a result of the Cold War with the USSR. It was supported by an American government that was achieving goals of national unity, such as Civil Rights legislation and environmental legislation – this series of laws occurred throughout the period, again under both Democratic and Republican administrations. It seems to me that the ability of the country to improve itself came about most importantly because many of the people running the USA at the time were children or young adults at the time that the United States fought World War II. The victory in that war propelled a sense of national Destiny which, regardless of whether all the consequences were benevolent or not (clue: many were not), enabled US voters and legislators to suppose that it was time to solve some of the worst problems in the country, such as Jim Crow laws and environmental destruction resulting from the industrialization of the earlier 20th century.

3. Many of the most vociferous supporters of Mr Trump and of backsliding in race and environmental protections today were young at exactly that time – in the 60s. Many of them became resentful of legislative support of certain groups of people, because they felt that everyone should advance on their own, or because they didn’t like race-based protections or preferences, or sometimes because they were just racists. They didn’t like being restricted in what they could do on their own property. They didn’t like the influence of “experts” and “liberals” whose determinations were not explained to them, or who simply thought they were stupid and not worth consulting – these resentments have grown for decades, or even since the Civil War – over 150 years.

   It is entirely possible to say that the populism we see today is a direct result of the successes of the 60s & 70s – those successes, as it turns out, were not successes for a pretty significant part of the population – about 40% – and they resented being disdained, ignored, looked down upon. Had more effort gone into ensuring widespread support for these policies, perhaps there would have been less resistance that only emerged over 50 years later.

4. If this is true, then the REAL base for a fundamentally strong society has nothing to do with projects, which are mere epiphenomena on the surface of what is really going on – in the minds of the population. To solve this kind of issue requires a completely different set of policies. Forget mega-projects, work on capacity-building but don’t see it as the main focus. The main focus must be EDUCATION. First off: start education at age three, not five (as in France) – take children from the homes of amateurs and let professional work with them for five hours a day. This in turn means that the insane disdain in which we hold the educators of young children should be replaced with well-deserved respect, signaled by greatly increasing pay and resources available to teachers, ensuring high levels of education for the educators of young children, ensure that programs are sufficiently attractive that they can be selective in the candidates they choose. And the people teaching children should be highly trained and competent in conveying math and science concepts to young children.

5. The educational program should be similar nationwide, and all programs should be overseen to ensure that they do not stray far from the ideal. ACTUAL history should be taught – that the United States was founded upon genocide, and to a significant extent built upon the bodies of slaves – in many US states both of these topics are glossed over, which means that people raised in the entire country do not have the educational background to understand why it is important to promote social justice, because they think that was all settled 60 years ago. Children should be taught to CELEBRATE culture, not just be “tolerant”. This is a multicultural country, and it has been one of the most important sources of its strength – that legacy is both emphasized (in the myth of “a nation of immigrants” – many of those were aboriginals and colonists and slaves) and downplayed (focus on the dominant Anglo-Saxon culture). And math/science all the way up. Arts all the way up. Physical education and training all the way up – not just school teams, but for every student.

6. This kind of bedrock would enable all the rest – excellent bureaucracies, national unity, an educated voting public – as well as a society which understands and embraces science. Without it you have wrenching change whenever a liberal party is replaced by a populist party of the right or left, and no continuity, and no chance for what the French call “les Grands Projets”.

[yudhanjaya]

Hi, @petussing, just dropping a line here to let you know I haven’t been ignoring this excellent thread, merely stuck with other work - and will come back to visit your thoughts as soon as possible.

[iouxo]

I had some fun with an AI demo system that creates images from text, and had it make visuals based on the Distrikt descriptions. Here’s Hygge!

[nadia]

It’s so cool you did this @iouxo Had a chat with @prgrzn_10 about lots of ideas for co-creation of the artwork. One option was to agree on one frame size (ie. standard dimensions for images). So we can nicely present them next to each other or remix or whatever. The other was to pick a common theme. A third could be make it so that we make a line outline for perspective and some key elements based on the story, and then everyone can remix or whatever while keeping some coherence:

E.g here

[nadia]

we could easily make ones based on the AI images e.g

[iouxo]

@yudhanjaya

Hygge (formerly Distrikt 1; alternatively, Hygge)

The description of Hygge continues:

TALENTS

Pat Ayedemi was known to be a great teacher of the art of debate, often using the language of logic and rhetoric to bring up points that the audience would have otherwise overlooked. In the early days of the Smoothing Years, he became increasingly active in the politics of Witness and Denton’s government. As a result, he began to be seen as a key advocate for the creation of the State Machine École.

He had always been an advocate for the reform of society and for change of government. However, this is perhaps not where his passion lay. Rather, passions not known to the public lay closer to his heart, and he was a politician who was driven by them. The political ambitions that drove him are not unlike those that drive Hygge: they are not necessarily about justice or equality in general, but about making the city more just.

THE STATE MEMORIAL

The memorial is dedicated to the memory of the fallen: their loss is commemorated annually. It was erected in the center of Concord City, to honor the lost. It is an open casket, with a simple marble base, set upon a small altar that stands just outside the doors. A single candle burns on a silver stand, while bouquets and other offerings sit nearby. There are flowers at every corner: petunias, irises, lilies, daffodils, carnations, and others.

A large statue is placed directly behind the front door, next to another statue, of an older woman sitting beneath a tree. Both of them are depicted holding hands. Below the feet are names, dates, and locations of memorials that have been dedicated since before the Revolution. These two monuments are the final resting places of all the soldiers who fought and died in the battle of Denton’s Revolution.

STATUE

Built of wood and covered in blue cloth, this monument sits in Concord City’s square. The plaque says that this memorial was constructed by hand, to represent the dedication of the military to the Constellation as a whole.

The sculpture depicts the war of the Seventy Years, which ended with the formation of the State Machine École, and in doing so created two new laws designed specifically for civilian use: a system of social services and security (in contrast to the State Machine École, whose function is mostly economic) and civil rights.

There is a legend that says it was Goro that initiated the Memorial and its design, the erecting of the Statue and even founding of Concord City itself.

(Explanation: I fed the Hygge story into a storytelling AI and this is what it created… Not unlike what Goro would do. I just clarified some paragraphs, made the text more coherent and added the part about Goro. Hope you enjoyed this flight of fancy!)