Self-generating Money & Self-consuming Education

Steve Talbott has some fine rumination over at NetFuture #172, (found via Kevin Kelly)

Money for money's sake (and ridiculous Ponzi dremes dressed as sound stewardship) has an awful tendency to lead economies astray. A snip:

One might argue that the only way money can multiply itself is by doing useful work in the world. But this is patently false, and the falsifying evidence is by no means obscure. In the subprime mortgage mess and the ensuing credit crunch we've seen as vividly as possible how money's pursuit of its own increase - while temporarily successful for some people and businesses - can be founded upon anything but real value. It just seems painfully obvious that the more our focus shifts from particular desirable work to a quantitative concern for money as such, we lose the only rootedness, the only reality principle, that preserves us from repeated episodes of economic chaos.

From personal savings to pension funds, from stock markets to currency exchanges, from commodities to hedge funds, the amount of money "invested" in the usual sense of that word has in recent decades grown explosively. Money's pursuit of its own increase has become such a big thing in our society - so customary and all-enveloping, so doctrinally fundamental - that to question it will seem bizarre to many people. Doesn't the investment industry - a significant chunk of our entire economy - see itself as dedicated almost solely to the art of multiplying money? How many of us, when we invest our money in stocks, ask what the money will accomplish in the world rather than what its rate of return will be? And aren't most corporations in the business of maximizing profits first of all, rather than performing a task for the sake of which they try to remain at least minimally profitable?

Yes, it requires a little subtlety to sustain the distinction between the pursuit of monetary gain and a striving to accomplish something worthwhile. But economists are nothing if not subtle, and the task is hardly beyond them. And in this matter the underlying difference at issue, however subtle its playing out in particular circumstances, is in principle as dramatic as it could possibly be. Everyone can immediately recognize the incompatibility of the two stances.

As we've learned around our place in the course of helping businesses freshen up or refind themselves, profit-as-by-product, as proof of worth, is a pretty good philosophical and practical guide. Money don't love you back, or more importantly get out and push, no matter what Elliot Spitzer thinks 5-grand a night will get you. More on this and related topics in an Ad-Club talk here.

Further down-scrolled in issue 172, he looks at the intersection of Edu and IT. With no qualitative traffic lights, the wreckage is there, but some seem to want to call the mash-up "dynamism" or, worse, "education." In a Standards of Learning test, a CPU and a hard drive beats a smart 10th grader hands down. In a Synthesis of Knowledge test... well, the 10th grader still loses cuz no-one's teaching her to synthesize knowledge--harder to peg a pay raise, promotion or a vote or an election to that metric, no matter how much more useful it's emphasis may be.

Another snip:

Let's agree, then, to reject a fact-shoveling model of education. And let's try to forget, for the moment, that the computer, with its "knowledge databases" and "information storage", its uploading and downloading of "content", its input and output of "critical data", has done more than any other human invention to rivet the fact-shoveling model of education upon our imaginations. What we still need to realize is that the dynamism we're looking for in education is, in the first place, a dynamism of minds, not a dynamism of computerized search tools, however valuable these may be in their place. Without minds capable of attending in a sustained, focused, ever more deeply penetrating way to whatever aspect of the world and its problems we are addressing, all those tools simply put us even more at the mercy of shallow automatisms of the intellect than did the static content of shoveled knowledge. We end up frozen, mesmerized by the dazzling, mechanical play of information taking place before our glassy, screen-fixated eyes - a play that we mistake for our own understanding.

I find it stunning that an intelligent commentator [Robert Cringely -ed.] can cite computer searching - googling - as a fit symbol for an ascent from "static" to "dynamic" values. Type in a search string and skim through the disconnected, decontextualized fragments spit out by the search engine - yes, one can conveniently find certain things this way. More and more, as society continues to restructure itself around such tools, this will become the only way to find things. It certainly has its peculiar advantages. Yet how can one deny that our use of this digital ejecta in any reasonably educated sense depends upon mental skills having little to do with - being almost the opposite of - the intellectually empty exchange between student and search engine?