Meeting notice: The 01.04.02 meeting will be held at 7:30 p.m. at the Royal East (782 Main St., Cambridge), a block down from the corner of Main St. and Mass Ave. If you're new and can't recognize us, ask the manager. He'll probably know where we are. More details below. <-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-> Suggested Topic: The abiding assumption of classical economics is that all dollars are equal. Everyone knows this is not right -- a person willing to save ten bucks by cutting his own lawn might refuse a hundred to cut his neighbor's. Similarly everyone has at least one budget category dedicated to money that he or she feels they can 'afford to lose'. Such funds might be given to charity or spent on frivolities or invested in high-risk projects. The difference might be described as being between capital that is expected to be productive and capital that is not -- slacker capital. It might be speculated that these two categories of money have quite different effects on the culture. Roughly, with lots of exceptions, productive capital homogenizes while slacker capital differentiates. Productive capital seeks transactions with lots of history -- cases where the odds are easy to calculate and the operating concepts highly standardized (if for no other reason than to keep transaction costs low). Slacker capital represents the source of funds that differentiate the culture by funding experiments in expressiveness, like paying paintings (on the low end), or (on the high) Ted Turner's Buffalo Commons, or Dennis Tito's ISS tour, or these back-to-back round the world sailing contests that go on all the time. Productive capital funds the Spice Girls; Slacker capital funds Tuvan throat singing. Productive capital funds phone companies; slacker capital funds dirigible wireless or fiber-through- the sewer. Productive capital funds Time-Warner; slacker capital funds Napster, and so on. Thus it would seem to be worth asking how technological change in general and progress towards the nanoscale in particular affects the relative allocation between productive and slacker capital in the society. The question is complex, since slacker capital does not necessarily rise with income. Someone residing in the top economic percentiles might force every dollar to go to work, while those further down might channel quite substantial fractions of their income into culturally expressive but non- productive outlets. Similarly slacker capital is at some risk of being scooped up the government, since that is the category of money where resistance to higher taxes might be weakest, and while the government does spend money casually, it does not do so with the style or imagination that gives slacker capital its cultural importance. Opinions? <-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-> In twenty years half the population of Europe will have visited the moon. -- Jules Verne, 1865 <-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-> Announcement Archive: http://www.pobox.com/~fhapgood/nsgpage.html. <-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-> Legend: "NSG" expands to Nanotechnology Study Group. The Group meets on the first and third Tuesdays of each month at the above address, which refers to a restaurant located in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The NSG mailing list carries announcements of these meetings and little else. If you wish to subscribe to this list (perhaps having received a sample via a forward) send the string 'subscribe nsg' to majordomo@world.std.com. Unsubs follow the same model. Discussion should be sent to nsg- d@world.std.com, which must be subscribed to separately. You must be subscribed to nsg-d to post to it and must post from the address from which you subscribed (An anti- spam thing). Comments, petitions, and suggestions re list management to: nsg@pobox.com.