Systems

I went for my walk tonight - just over to the CIBC and back - and was thinking about how interest compounds on a credit card balance, and how it compounds on an RRSP. One ought to pay down one's credit card debt before buying long term savings, even shorter term things like GICs, so that one doesn't hemmorage money needlessly. But here's the rub: if you need money down the road, in the long term certainly, but also in the midterm, it makes sense to maintain a balance on the credit card and buy the GICs now so that you are sure to have, say, rent for, say the summer months when you're not getting paid by the university. (See that? The shift from 'one' to 'you'? Yeah, it was me all along.)

So the upshot is that a broader view of the whole system - where the system is here just a few factors over a few months - shows you a sound result that is counterintuitive. It rests on the assumption that I would make bad decisions if left to my own devices. That's probably true. Just getting a savings account and diverting money from a checquing account into it makes a psychological difference in spending habits - ask around. It's still the same amount of money (fiction though money mostly is, it's a very useful fiction to maintain...and one of someone else's authorship which is a bitch) but although it's the same amount of money, it's been put into a different virtual-pile, and somehow that makes a difference. It ought not to, not really, but there it be.

Maybe this is a piece of what I'm after - a coherent picture of systems. I've studied a few...in philosophy one can hardly help it. In this case the banking system can be used to help slow down my bad decisions by making it possible to enact a good, sound decision now in a moment of sound decision making, rather than leaving the door open to making a series of small bad decisions further on that would erode my utility.

So that is what I was thinking until some jackass in something four-doored and white with too-rich-smelling exhaust completely ignored the rules of right of way and edged into an intersection blocking my line of march. My thinking didn't need to change all that much to see the corollary. We set out a codified system of rules and laws to govern situations, then teach people the rules, so they don't have to intuit them locally and alone (which most people would do badly) and so that we don't have to come to some series of in-the-moment agreements on procedure when faced with something like right-of-way. The rights are set out, mostly understood, and periodically ignored but pedestrians, cyclists and the like expect this to happen, and don't walk blindly across roads when the lights are with them even though they have every right to do so.

This is where I'm going with this one: I think the same things that stand true for traffic and short-term money management as stand for the civil service, the military, corporations, the university (why not), families, and the Church. They may well stand true for the economy as a whole, if there were such a thing as the economy as a whole - there may not be, and even if there were I certainly wouldn't understand it. About the only person I know who could explain it to me thinks I'm going to be a priest and scares me a little. Oh yeah, I think the systemic rules work for culturally specific and local forms of courting and dating behaviour...more on that if I get it worked out.

There's something coherent in all this, it has something to do with being guided by systemic organizations, and that the systems in place have the great virtue of being crafted calmly, and the horrendous shortcoming of being impersonal.

Still, I think it was a bit of progress on this, and a damned fine autumn walk. The evening sky is changing. After sundown, it becomes a shade of blue that grows deeper and richer the longer you look at it. It's a sign that winter is coming, and it was just great tonight.

3L