The Wealth Diaspora: Paying it Backward
To pay it forward, you give for the sole benefit not of yourself, but of your children's children's children. This has been associated with (in part thinks to the semi-campy film of the name) wild karmic Random Acts of Kindness, but doesn't necessarily by the original definition.
The weird thing about our culture is that somewhere in the last half century we suddenly (in economic timescales) started paying it backward (in a cultural sense, at nearly every level). The modern credit system has enabled us to spend now, for the sole benefit of ourselves, and leave the burden of payment to ourselves at a later date. It's amazing really, how short-sighted it is. On the other hand, it isn't hard to see why the often Armaggeddon-obsessed Conservative backward-lookers often don't see a problem with this sort of "ownership society" in which what I have now is based only on the potential of what I might have in 50 years.
Debt has become a reverse commodity. The sure irony of it all is that even with its IOU nature, which to the average person says that it is worth less than the money it takes the place of, debt has become in some cases more valuable than the money it represents. Visa freely gives you that $15,000 credit this year because it is really worth more than that to them. What's more, after brief "trustworthiness verification" they manufacture as much debt as free and easy as they want. In essence, Visa is printing an equivalent of money for free whenever they feel like it and their "feel like it" revolves solely on the potential of a person and their assumed trustworthiness to pay it back(ward). In economic theory, in the end (the ...
Book of the Moment: Shadow of the Giant
Shadow of the Giant was a real quick read for me. I finished it in about 4 days. I was surprised at how easy it was to slip back into the political intrique of the Ender Universe Shadow novels. The interesting thing about this one it the twist in storytelling. I realized after the fact that the name is quite apt. In this novel the now giant Bean isn't the center. It was a natural progression of the story in Shadow Puppets, really. The story does a great job of wrapping up the lives of two of the main characters living under the shadow of Bean: Peter the Hegemon, and Petra, the woman he married and had kids with in Shadow Puppets. The interesting and somewhat surprising thing is that there is still so much to tell. I won't provide too much in the way of spoilers, but the book provides some excellent bridgework into the Speaker of the Dead trilogy, and ends with a glimpse of the unified earth (as was obviously what the last three books were leading towards, and is obvious from early in the Speaker of the Dead trilogy). What it just barely gives us, however, is a glimpse into the early to mid colonozation period (if the Speaker of the Dead trilogy were to say occur in the late colonization period), and those are some threads that are desperate to be unravelled. (Spoiler (scratch and see): Particularly the brief tangent involving Randi and her child (one of Bean and Petra's stolen embryos), given the name of Achilles Flandres II, has only just barely been scratched, and really needs to be unravelled.)
I am looking forward to the next installment (I will make the prophecy/suggestion that one of the next books needs ...
