Tecnologia della promessa

FINANCE AND WRITING – Money Changes Everything: How Finance Made Civilization Possible – William N. Goetzmann

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Argomento: invenzione della moneta e invenzione della scrittura… praticamente la stessa cosa –  invenzione dei numeri e invenzione della finanza… quasi la stessa cosa – guerra al linguaggio ambiguo –  tempio e burocrazia – mesopotamia: srl, interesse composto, ipoteca, joint venture, speculazione…

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Clay tokens from the ancient Near East symbolizing economic commodities. They are thought to have been used as a system of accounting and are also believed to be the precursors of the world’s first written language.

Note:MONETA COME PRIMA SCRITTURA

Mesopotamia gave the world its first cities, first written language, first laws, first contracts, and first advanced mathematics. Many of these developments directly or indirectly came from financial technology.

Note:MESOPOTAMIA

Cuneiform writing, for example, is an unintended by-product of ancient accounting systems and contracts.

Note:CUNEIFORMI

Babylonian mathematics owes its development to arithmetic and calculation demanded by its financial economy.

Note:MATEMATICA

Financial technology made possible not just financial contracts but also financial thinking—conceptual ways of framing economic interactions that use the financial perspective of time.

Note:PENSIERO ECONOMICO

finance is mostly about future promises. Promises are meaningless without the capacity to record and enforce them.

Note:TECNOLOGIA DELLA PROMESSA

The prehistoric roots of urban society in the ancient Near East extend back perhaps 7,000 years. By 3600 BCE, the cities of ancient Sumer arose around the confluence of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers in what is now modern Iraq

TEMPI

In short, the economy of ancient Near Eastern civilization required methods for producing and distributing basic foodstuffs locally to a concentrated urban populace and also ways of obtaining goods from afar.

Note:DALLA PERIFERIA AL CENTRO

writing; the ability to memorialize something now that can be interpreted unambiguously in the future.

Note:SCONFIGGERE L’AMBIGUITÀ

TEMPLES AND TOKENS

Although the text is eloquent, the cuneiform script in which the epic was first recorded owes more to merchants and accountants than it does to poets.

Note:L’EPICA DI GILGAMESH

Virtually all of the earliest tablets from Uruk were accounting documents recording the transfer of goods and commodities. They were administrative records used by some central governing economic authority—almost certainly the temple.

Note:SCRITTURA E AMMINISTRAZIONE

In the classic model of the Sumerian economy, the temple functioned as an administrative authority governing commodity production, collection, and redistribution.

Note:IL TEMPIO AUTORITÁ CENTRALE

Schmandt-Besserat’s theory is not universally accepted—some scholars question the basic idea of a transition from tokens to writing and point out discrepancies in the notion of a temporal evolution from models to signs.

Note:DAI GETTONI ALLA SCRITTURA

2 FINANCE AND URBANISM

The ruler is the people’s representative to the goddess, and he presents to her the fruits of Uruk’s labor. Since most of these commodities were perishable, we must presume that the temple redistributed them rapidly in some fashion. Apparently the numbers from the Uruk tablets indicate that this was a big job—taxing people in kind and then redistributing the results. In fact, this economic system—the reliance on a central distribution center, may explain the movement of people into the cities, closer to the temple. Judging by the size of the city in its heyday circa 3000 BCE, Uruk was home to more than 10,000 people.

Note:RAPPRESENTAZIONE DELLA VITA QUOTIDIANA SUL VASO WARKA: TASSAZIONE E REDISTRIBUZIONE CENTRALIZZATA

An economy based on large-scale redistribution of goods cannot function on goodwill. It requires pre-commitment—promises of delivery that allow planning.

Note:COERCIZIONE E BUROCRAZIA

Not surprisingly, the oldest known credit obligations are lists of individuals and the amount of barley they owe to the temple….Thus, with the birth of an economy based on central planning and redistribution came indebtedness and taxes.

Note:LA PRIMA OBBLIGAZIONE… OBBLIGAZIONE TRIBUTARIA

THE APPEARANCE OF COMPOUND INTEREST An example of the complexity—and perhaps the logical extreme of the concept of exponential growth—is a document in the Babylonian collection of Yale University, a clay cone about the size and shape of a large pineapple. Enmetena’s claim of compound interest is based on the premise that the profits from one year can be reinvested in the same productive enterprise the next year.

Note:INTERESSE COMPOSTO

A cuneiform document from a slightly later period in the third millennium BCE demonstrates not only the importance of raising livestock as big business, but also the extraordinary level of mathematical sophistication it required. Most interesting from our perspective is that it represents a key development in the software of finance. It is a mathematical model of growth used to formulate a long-term financial plan. The tablet came from a city called Drehem—a place associated with livestock…The text is an abstract model of geometric growth using mathematical tools….

Note:PIANI FINANZIARI

All people, urban as well as rural, tend to lend things to one another. They do this even when the benefits from such helpful behavior are not immediately apparent. In small communities, people lend their tools and their time to one another. While they may expect reciprocity in the future, they do not explicitly write a contract to formalize it. Such cooperation is a form of insurance. You help out when you can afford to do so, and you call on your neighbors when you find yourself in need.

Note:PRESTITO E ASSICURAZIONE

This contrast between implicit and explicit contracts embodies civilization’s ambivalence toward lending—perhaps it just doesn’t feel right to charge a friend or neighbor interest, because reciprocity was our pre-urban method of adapting to crises.

Note:INTERESSE… CITTÀ… SCONOSCIUTI

The invention of debt and the emergence of interest to incentivize lending is the most significant of all innovations in the history of finance. Debt allowed borrowers to use money from the future to meet obligations in the present.

Note:L’INVENZIONE DEL DEBITO

the fundamental role that borrowing and lending played in the ancient economy in the Ur III period and suggests that even in a highly controlled and hierarchical economy, lending was essential.

Note:CENTRALITÀ DEL DEBITO

3 FINANCIAL ARCHITECTURE

Hammurabi’s code specifies the rate of interest on silver at 20% and on barley at 33⅓%. What is most important about the code is not what is says but what it represents. The code is a uniform legal framework for the entire the Babylonian empire. It covered everything from criminal law to family law, commercial practice to property rights.

Note:CODICE DI HAMMURABI COME DEFAULT

It would not matter what someone wrote on the surface of a bulla or on a cuneiform tablet if these documents were not recognized as a promise that, if broken, would be discovered and punished.

Note:LA LEGGE E I CONTRATTI

The ancient financiers in Ur, like other merchants, kept running accounts. Among Dumuzi-gamil’s records are indications that certain payments were credited to individuals. While not as sophisticated as credit cards, these “tabs” at various merchants and financiers minimized the need for hard currency.

Note:CARTE DI CREDITO

Courts existed in Mesopotamia to adjudicate property disputes, and it was not unheard of for lawsuits to span decades.

Note:TRIBUNALI

It is interesting to note that Mesopotamian legal codes guaranteed property rights to an even greater extent than they guaranteed what we now call human rights. For instance, a person had the right to sell him- or herself into slavery or pledge his or her liberty as collateral for a loan.

Note:GARANZIE DEL CREDITORE

It is difficult to escape the conclusion that, while the first loan contracts and the legal system that enforced them may have made the Mesopotamian economy efficient, they made life miserable for the working man and woman.

Note:COMMERCIO ANTEPOSTO AI DIRITTI UMANI

There is considerable scholarly disagreement about the extent to which the traders and merchants of ancient Mesopotamia were independent agents or worked for the state.

Note:C’ERA VERA IMPRESA PRIVATA?

The exciting thing for financial historians is that these equity contracts represent concrete evidence of a limited partnership—in which the limited partner assumed no liability beyond the value of the paid-in capital.

Note:SRL… DILMUN

Many of the tablets deciphered by Van De Mieroop and other Assyriologists indicate that such financial tools as loans, mortgages, and limited partnerships were collaborative ventures.

Note:JOINT VENTURE

Ea-nasir and the other investors in the Dilmun trade were something like capitalists. In the classical sense of the term, their money was used to make money. Although we do not have statistical information about the prevalence of this kind of capitalism in second-millennium Mesopotamia, it had important implications for the structure of society, and, in particular, the emergence of a stratum of economically independent individuals

Note:CAPITALISTI

Loan forgiveness edicts were common both before and after Rim-Sin’s reign. A cone tablet in the Middle Eastern galleries of the Louvre represents an edict issued by the populist reformer Urukagina. Circa 1900 BCE, this ruler promised to restore the power of ordinary citizens of the Mesopotamian city-state Lagash, who had suffered under the heavy taxes of the palace and the temple. The proclamation abolishes the tax collector and rids the city of usurers, robbers, and criminals. This not only abolished debts but also demonized financiers—

Note:RIFORME CONTRO LA SPECULAZIONE

Loans and investment contracts of the ancient Near East could be denominated in grain and even in units of labor; however, many of them were denominated in silver. This is strange, because silver is not native to Mesopotamia. Where did the silver come from, and how did it become a unit of accounting in the financial system? As discussed near the start of Chapter 1 the natural endowments of ancient Iraq were modest. Basic things like timber and copper had to be obtained through foreign trade….The ancient Mesopotamian city-states had to obtain silver in trade. In the early second millennium, roughly contemporaneous with the reign of Rim-Sin and the activities of the traders of Ur, one city in the northern part of Mesopotamia—in the region called Assyria (from which the name “Syria” is derived)—became a major trading entrepôt for silver…..

Note:ARGENTO

The Assur trade was financed by loans as well as sophisticated equity trading partnerships that extended over multiple years.

Note:COMMERCI E FINANZA

The relevance of the Assur trade and its aftermath is not simply that an extensive trade network existed—or that city politics could be organized around commercial principles, but rather that silver could be regarded as an essential input to economic life.

ASSUR

Sete di uguaglianza

Giustizia e uguaglianza

Support for Redistribution is Shaped by Compassion, Envy and Self Interest not Fairness by Alex Tabarrok

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Tesi: chi chiede più uguagliamza lo fa  spinto da sentimenti quali invidia, egoismo o compassione. In lui il ruolo della giustizia è marginale. Questo è interessante poiché segnala come questo istinto sia un residuo del nostro passato vissuto in bande poco numerose di cacciatori-raccoglitori. Infatti, in situazioni del genere, diversamente che nelle grandi società attuali, inclinazioni del genere potevano essere funzionali.

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Hayek argued that support for redistribution was driven by emotions that had been optimally evolved for small, hunter-gatherer societies

TESI DI HAYEK SULL’ EGUAGLIANZA

The authors use surveys to measure an individual’s disposition to compassion and envy. For example, for compassion there are 11 items such as “I suffer from others sorrows,” or (negative) “I tend to dislike soft-hearted people,” and for envy there are questions like “It is so frustrating to see some people succeed so easily”. In each case there is a scale from strongly disagree to strongly agree.

L’ANIMO DI CHI CHIEDE PIÙ EGUAGLIANZA IN SITUAZIONI SPERIMENTALI

Compassion, envy, and self-interest independently predict support for redistribution in four countries with different economic histories and distributional policies

LA SCOPERTA CHIAVE DELLA SPERIMENTAZIONE IN LABORATORIO

It’s easy to be skeptical of survey answers (I prefer measured actions) but answers on questions like this have been shown to be predictive for a variety of behaviors and there is an internal logic among the answers that suggests real motivations and behaviors are being measured.

I SONDAGGI SONO UN MEZZO AFFIDABILE?

What makes these three items–compassion, envy and self-interest– interesting is that each of these can be understood as having evolved for functional reasons in the ancestral environment

PERCHE’ IL RUOLO CENTRALE DI INVIDIA COMPASSIONE ED EGOISMO È TANTO INTERESSANTE?

L’ élitismo dei poveri

That Was No Discovery After All – The Beautiful Tree: A personal journey into how the world’s poorest people are educating themselves – James Tooley

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Trigger warning: –  l’istruzione privata funziona per i ricchi. Ma per i poveri? – perché i poveri di tutto il mondo si rivolgono prevalentemente al privato per la loro istruzione? – due pregiudizi sull’ istruzione privata –  tutti vedono senza guardare in faccia la realtà della scuile del terzo mondo – la trasparenza del privato come carta vincente nella concorrenza pubblico/privato – le analisi reticenti, due casi esemplari: Sen e Oxfam – fatti riconosciuti e non valorizzati: l’arte di nascondere quel che succede –

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the private schools might be there, some might even be better than the public schools, but that’s only because they are selective. “They take the cream of the cream,”

Note:IL PREGIUDIZIO CANONICO SULLE SCUOLE PROVATE

“Most of the schools are shocking, there is a shocking turnover of teachers, they’re not trained, they’re not committed, and the proprietors know that they can simply get others because there is a long list of people waiting to come in.”

Note:SECONDO PREGIUDIZIO

For Sajitha it was clear: if many—or even a few—parents had higher aspirations for their children and wanted to send them to private schools, then “they should not be allowed to do so, because this is unfair.” It’s unfair because it makes it even worse for those left behind.

Note:PROIBIZIONISMO… LEFT BEHIND

It was one thing to argue that “education for all” could be secured only through public education supported by international aid if you were unaware of private schools for the poor. But as soon as you knew that many poor parents were exiting the state system to send their children to private schools, then surely this must register on your radar as being worthy of comment in the “education for all” debate?

Note:LA COSA PIÙ SCONCERTANTE

India, enrollment in primary private schools was already above 30 percent, and there was “a further acceleration” of the numbers by the late 1990s, “especially in areas where public schools are in bad shape.” In urban areas, the trend was even more startling, with the proportion in private schools estimated at 80 percent or more. As I read this, it seemed hard to reconcile these statements with the notion that private schools were patronized mainly by the elite—

Note:DATI PER L‘INDIA

Rather than further explore their choices, Sen criticized poor parents for making them: in villages in Uttar Pradesh, he wrote, poor parents’ response to nonfunctioning public schools was “to send their sons” to study in “private schools.”

Note:AMARTYA SEN

A major source of Sen’s evidence was the Public Report on Basic Education (the PROBE Report)… It too was clear that “even among poor families and disadvantaged communities, one finds parents who make great sacrifices to send some or all of their children to private schools…

Note:FONTE

The PROBE team’s findings on the quality of public schools were even more startling.

QUALITÁ

So what was the secret of success in these private schools for the poor? The report was very clear: “In a private school, the teachers are accountable to the manager (who can fire them), and, through him or her, to the parents (who can withdraw their children). In a government school, the chain of accountability is much weaker,

Note:COSA RENDE MIGLIORE IL PRIVATO?

I read the summaries at the beginning and end of The Oxfam Education Report, a standard textbook for development educationalists, and again I found only the accepted wisdom that governments and international agencies must meet the educational needs of the poor.

Note:ALTRA FONTE RETICENTE

But then again, hidden away in a chapter titled “National Barriers to Basic Education,” was the extraordinary (but downplayed) observation: “The notion that private schools are servicing the needs of a small minority of wealthy parents is misplaced. . . . It is interesting to note that a lower-cost private sector has emerged to meet the demands of poor

Note:TENUTO BEN NASCOSTO

That poor parents in some of the most destitute places on this planet are flocking to private schools because public schools are inadequate and unaccountable seemed to me to be hugely significant territory for development experts to concede.

Note:UN FATTO RICONOSCIUTO MA NON VALORIZZATO

exploring this conundrum that something the poor were doing for themselves seemed to be systematically ignored by development experts

Note:L’ENIGMA

He told me: “The governor asked me, “Why are you putting your energies into building schools? Leave it to the Ministry of Education.” But if we waited for government it would take 20 years. We need schools now.”

Note:PROFESSOR SULEYMAN… SOMALILAND

We visit one at the foot of the hill, Ubaya-binu-Kalab School, with 1,060 students, charging monthly fees of 12,000 Somaliland shillings, about $5. The owner told me that 165 of the students attended for free, the poor again subsidizing the poorest.

Note:POVERI E POVERISSIMI

I was ready to start the research—promising to examine in more depth the phenomenon of private schools for the poor in India, in a range of African countries, and in China, too. TheJohn Templeton Foundation was taking a risk:

2003 ANNO MAGICO

Quell’idiota di Dummett

Michael Dummett: A Bumbling Anti-Racist – When Reason Goes on Holiday: Philosophers in Politics – Neven Sesardic

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Trigger warning: – antirazzismo a scrocco – antirazzismo da operetta – dogmi come se piovesse – compagnie imbarazzanti –

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Michael Dummett was Wykeham Professor of Logic at Oxford and Fellow of All Souls College. He is one of the most celebrated philosophers of the twentieth century,

Note:CHI È

Paid by Oxford to Do Research, Does Politics Instead

Dummett was knighted in 1999 for “services to philosophy and racial justice,” but his contributions to these two areas were not always in perfect harmony.

Note:FILOSOFIA E ANTI RAZZISMO

An Oxford philosophy professor admits he “abandoned all attempt at creative work in philosophy” and “gave no more time to thinking about philosophy” for a full four years

Note:QUATTRO ANNI A UFO

Dummett’s way of waging a battle against racism had itself many strange and illogical aspects.

Note:FINANZIARE LA LOTTA POLITICA

Upon receiving the information that someone has been refused by immigration officers, Dummett “dash[ed] to the airport as quickly as possible,” and it is only then and there (at the airport) that he “had to find out what [he] could about the case and say whatever [he] could on the refused person’s behalf.” This means Dummett went to the airport with the intention of defending someone’s right to stay in the United Kingdom without knowing the background facts of this person’s case at all.

Note:MODALITÀ DI AZIONE

A Logician’s Strange Route to Empirical Truth

even beliefs “conforming to a palpably powerful prejudice” may in fact be (strongly) supported by evidence.

Note:L’ IQ DEI NERI MANDA IN CONFUSIONE DUMMETT

Later Dummett tried again, but in a different way, to show that the possibility of a significant genetically based IQ difference between racial groups can be dismissed a priori.

Note:DIFFERENZA IMPOSSIBILITA’ A PRIORI

Although Dummett insisted than no one can rationally think that the great majority of members of any racial group are intellectually inferior to the great majority of members of some other group, some scholars doing research on these issues have thought exactly this (and offered a rationale for their view).

Note:JENSEN

Dummett was clearly wrong in his resolute claim about what “no one can rationally think.”

Note:ERRORE MARCHIANO

One does not expect this kind of misjudgment about elementary statistics from someone who received the prestigious Lakatos Award in the philosophy of science (which, as noted, Dummett did in 1994).

Note:ERRORE INATTESO

A Pimp, a Criminal, and a Racist Invited to Talk at All Souls College

Another troubling feature of Dummett’s political activism is the company he (occasionally) kept.

Note:COMPAGNIE IMBARAZZANTI

A ludicrous but menacing local figure had named himself “Michael X” in the hope of attracting some cross-Atlantic street cred: as a Trinidadian pimp and hustler called Michael de Freitas he had won notoriety as an especially nasty enforcer of evictions for a rack-rent landlord named, in one of those Dickensian coincidences, Mr. Rachman. The soi-disant X had a group—actually a gang—called RAAS. The letters were supposed to stand for Racial Adjustment Action Society and some white liberal clergymen and similar dupes were induced to take it seriously, but in Caribbean patois, as one soon discovered, a “raas” was a used tampon. . . . At Oxford in my first term, a rather silly Catholic bleeding-heart don named Michael Dummett managed to use his privileges to get X to speak in the All Souls dining room.

Note:HITCHENS SPIETATO SU DUMMETT

Michael X was not just a criminal but a vocal and notorious racist too.

MX IL RAZZISTA VIOLENTO

If you ever see a white man laying hands on a black woman, kill him immediately. . . . Whitey is a vicious, nasty person.

Note:UNO STRALCIO DEI SUOI DISCORSI

For these statements he was later convicted of inciting racial hatred and spent eight months in jail.

Note:CONDANNATO

If despite all those red flags Dummett was still willing to lend support and respectability to a thug, pimp, and racist, this raises another worry about his judgment.

Note:DUMMETT EDOTTO DI TUTTO

A Sham Engagement with Philosophy

Could we imagine, by way of analogy, a surgeon who became upset about some social injustice and who, although continuing to work at the hospital, devoted every moment he could spare to his noble political cause and gave no more time to thinking about medicine for years? Hardly, because his lack of dedication to his profession would be soon detected by his patients, colleagues, and administrators, and he could not hope to keep his job with such an attitude. It is a sad testimony to how irrelevant and dispensable philosophical activity has become

ANALOGIA COL CHIRURGO