The Logic Off Topic list

Various posts have arrived in my Inbox extremely erratically over the last 
few days. Don't know WHAT Yahoo's been up to!! Those posts pre-dated others 
I had seen which had not made much sense because they were replies to posts 
I had yet to see. Given the tardiness with which they have got to me, 
please excuse me if this here post is late and by now irrelevant. If you 
consider it way off-topic even for the OT list then just hit your delete 
button forthwith!!!

In some prior posts about 'MP3's', 'Royalty-Free Societies', and 'OT: 
Armchair Historians', GA Moore wrote the following:


 > (...someone...) wrote that music is a necessity of life,
 > but you can live to 100 years old without music,
 > but you won't live more than 60 days without
 > food, and even less without shelter from elements and safety.
One of the great discoveries of the French intelligentsia such as Comte was 
sociological reasoning. What they discovered was 'groups'. The social 
sciences, in their various flavours, are about groups. No human group can 
survive without organization and the creation of a socio-cultural identity. 
This involves music. Music is a necessity of life to the group, although 
not necessarily a necessity for any one person within that group. Take any 
human group, no matter how poor or ancient, and you will ALWAYS find music 
and musicians ... even though the chances are very high that any particular 
human you select at random is not a musician per se but rather a listener 
or member of an audience. Even palaeolithic humans, where times seem to 
have been hard, created stone and bone instruments which archaeologists 
have found and recreated. Far as I know, the human group which does not 
regard music as a necessity to its existence -- ancient or modern -- has 
not been discovered. Indeed, human groups can be distinguished by the 
varieties of their musics, a facet of themselves that they regard as 
self-defining. In any case, even human beings close to death and/or being 
tortured take solace in music, in whistling, in humming to themselves ... 
which would presumably indicate that they regard it as vital to the 
preservation of their sense of self and their sanity. It might be true, 
theoretically, that on a purely physical level human beings CAN live to be 
100 years old without music, but the practical issue is that they simply do 
not. As a similarly practical issue nowhere is there a culture where even 
as much as a day passes without human beings participating in music. These 
are the economic realities that must be dealt with. It is not valid 
sociological reasoning to argue from the particular to the general or vice 
versa in this kind of way for parameters that are irrelevant at one scale 
are highly relevant at the other.

 > And if thats too abstract, think of it this way.
 > When the economy turns down, and people have less money,
 > the first thing they cut back on is
 > entertainment - dining out, movies, CD's, clubs, and concerts.
Hmmm. You are running into big problems here because just for starters, 
there are so very many different kinds of elasticity in economics. There 
are also so many varied reasons why the economy can go negative, and each 
has its different effects. So ... what exactly you mean by this remark is a 
little unclear, actually.

And, also, what proof do you have that 'entertainment' is the 'first thing' 
that 'they' cut back on? To which 'they' are you referring? Then again ... 
what's 'entertainment'? And what classes as 'first'? Economists spend hours 
and hours debating these seemingly simple things. (Until the economy turns 
really bad, of course, when doubtless even economists are forced to find 
better things to do!!)

 > They don't cut back on food, rent, electricity, car repairs.
 > (In economics these are inelastic and elastic demands -
 > meaning the demand for some things respond to price increases
 > while others don't).
Now you're really stepping into a quagmire. There are easy ways to cut back 
on food in order, for example, to spend more on 'entertainment'. Eat more 
potatoes is one. Food glides so easily over into entertainment and back 
again that this is again a difficult issue. There are also easy ways to 
'cut back' on rent. Default for a while. When the city is full of other 
people doing pretty much the same thing, it's very difficult for a landlord 
to replace you. These are facts of life. Worst comes to the worst, you can 
always just go homeless and just keep paying for batteries for the radio. 
After that, you can play air guitar. Notice that even playing air guitar is 
not doing without music. It is a practical method for getting hold of music 
at the maximum price one can afford ... which is nothing.

In any case, you have not specified exactly what you mean by 'elasticity'. 
Not only that, but elasticity is an entirely relative measure. Suppose that 
we're dealing with a government that wants to increase its tax revenues. 
Then what it knows is that if it raises the price of an elastic good the 
imposition of the tax will not show itself in an increase in the price of 
the good, but rather in a relatively high fall off of demand. Therefore, it 
will not earn much revenue. There is not only this, however. It's also a 
question of where the burden of the tax imposed is going to fall. It will 
fall largely on the suppliers of those goods for they will have to absorb 
that increased tax. A discussion of elasticity, therefore, is a discussion 
of how an increase in price, or a relative increase in unit resource price, 
or else a relative decline in available resources, is going to be 
distributed across the economy. The suppliers are faced with an increase in 
price, or else decline in resources, that they cannot recoup by passing on 
to the consumers because the consumers are perfectly happy to demand less 
of that good. Notice, please, that this is about relative distribution and 
relative prices, and not simply about absolutes. Therefore, taxes are not 
generally levied on elastic goods because the revenue gains are so small.

Things are very different with inelastic goods. In such cases consumers are 
very much less sensitive to price differentials meaning that, from the 
suppliers point of view, increased costs can be readily passed on and will 
be taken up by the consumer. When demand is perfectly inelastic, which no 
good is, really, then every single percentage point of price increase can 
be passed on immediately without there being any change in demand. 
Therefore, governments tend to favour imposing indirect taxes on relatively 
inelastic goods because they can interfere in the market for their own 
purposes without affecting overall demand too greatly.

Please notice, again, that this is about RELATIVE prices and RELATIVE 
distributions within the group on account of shifts in prices and 
resources, and is not so much about the behaviour of any given individual, 
nor about absolute goods and services when abstracted and considered alone. 
To do so pretty much destroys the concepts of value and price and resources 
and renders economic speculation virtually redundant. That's to say, one 
shouldn't be considering music alone ... it should be considered relative 
to other goods; and those other goods music is gathered together with need 
to be chosen with care if they are going to enhance the issue under debate. 
In this instance, there is no evidence and you have provided none for your 
assertion -- when considered at the group level of common interactions 
which is where prices are relevant -- that music responds substantively 
differently from food, rent, electricity or car repairs.

Another issue is: what does it take for a good to be 'elastic'. Well ... a 
good becomes elastic when consumers are price conscious with respect to 
that good ... and also when they have an alternative. As soon as there is 
an alternative to something, then a good becomes more elastic. Therefore, a 
becomes more or less inelastic (there always is this relativity) according 
as to whether or not alternatives are available. Therefore, people do not 
simply 'cut back' on 'entertainment'. They need entertainment. All members 
of human groups do. What they do is find 'alternative methods' of having 
the same thing. Thus the elasticity or inelasticity to which you are trying 
to refer only makes sense by referring constantly to the alternatives that 
people seek.

In other words, you cannot just say 'elastic' or 'inelastic' just like that 
... which is what you are trying to do in order to come to your conclusion. 
You are taking a concept used in economics for a very specific purpose -- a 
word that has a very specific meaning in the discipline -- and 
extrapolating from it to far more general conclusion. However, that 
conclusion is based on that specialized meaning, with the problem that it 
need not necessarily validate that more general conclusion.

All elasticity and inelasticity within economics means is that if, in 
general, a change in Variable X causes a change in Variable Y, then 
relatively between the two we have an elastic situation if relatively small 
changes in X cause relatively responsive and noticeable changes in Y. By 
the same token, of course, if there is relatively little response then -- 
relatively speaking -- we have an inelastic situation BETWEEN THOSE TWO. 
Again, there is nothing absolute going on here.

One should also constantly bear in mind that economics is about price -- 
which is in its turn about GROUPS and their interactions. That is to say, 
price is about how the members of a group interact with each other and how 
they allocate their resources in the face of certain postulated conditions. 
A primary postulation is, of course, the doctrine of limited resources.

Of course, another central difficulty is that there is a difference between 
the price elasticity of demand, and the price elasticity of supply, and the 
income elasticity of demand ... and between lots of kinds of elasticities. 
Which particular elasticity did you have in mind because you have not 
specified?

Also, what is highly relevant to the situation you are trying to discuss is 
the cross elasticity of demand. The cross elasticity of demand is the 
change in the demand for one good caused by the change in the price of some 
other good. Once again, it is about relativity. The cross elasticity of 
demand is important because it is about the only way to quantify (and 
economics is a science) the relationship between a given price and demand 
and other prices and demands. These all go together to make up the demand 
and supply determinants. If cross demand elasticity is not brought in to 
the discussion then there really isn't much point in talking about price or 
income elasticity of demand because the networking of goods and services to 
which people respond in their interactions with each other is being 
completely ignored. Thus elasticity alternatives must be considered before 
coming to any kind of conclusion of this kind.

The most common determinants are the demand ones. These, of course, are a 
part of the ceteribus paribus conditions used to create the demand curve. 
They are generally accepted as five in number: income, preferences, other 
prices, expectations of buyers, and number of other buyers.

Supply side curves have, of course, their own 5 determinants: resource 
prices, technology, other prices, expectations of buyers, and number of 
other buyers.

Not only that, there are production possibility curves to be considered. 
These depend, of course, upon technology, upon education, upon the quantity 
of labour, upon capital, upon land, and also upon the general level of 
'entrepreneurship' in the group. Then ... there is the aggregate demand 
curve which is constructed of consumption, investment, government purchases 
and net exports. Also ... short-run average cost curves which in their turn 
depend on technology, wages, other production costs ... etc. etc. etc.

I'm sure you get the idea.

In the situation you seem to be describing -- i.e. a person deliberately or 
voluntarily being deprived of food and nourishment -- there will still be 
people in the group that contains that starving person and whose overall 
consumption levels will remain totally normal. One of the things those 
other people will be doing is using music. Economics is about groups and 
the interactions between groups. In such a situation, therefore, niether 
the aggregate demand nor the average individual demand is changing by any 
significantt factor even as just the one person starves. Even if that one 
person is a king. I cannot, therefore, see what it is you are trying to 
demonstrate by pointing to just one person starving for I fail to 
comprehend by what rationale an indisputable truth about the physical 
limitations of one person doing without food become a de facto fact group 
about a whole GROUP of people and their attitudes to or need for music.

If, on the other hand, you are talking about a whole GROUP that is 
starving, then the quantity of music produced by that group is certainly 
not going to decrease to zero by any stretch of the imagination because 
what at least some of the members of that group will do is write songs 
about the pain and the injustice of their state of starvation; and what 
those songs will do is discuss what they might or might not be able to do 
given the beliefs, motivations, politics, religion, ethics and so forth of 
that group. That is to say, a disruption of their prevailing market 
equilibrium will lead to a change in the demand determinant and thus a 
shift of the demand curve ... but the resulting demand curve will be 
remarkably similar to the previous curve. What there will have been is a 
fairly simple and straight forward rearrangement of goods and services 
within that community so that a new set of equilibrium prices is produced. 
A new equilibrium state with a new equilibrium quantity of goods and 
services will be produced. In the case of music, that change might well 
show itself in a change in the general thrust and character of the music 
created. The major point here is that when the whole group starves then the 
quantity of music produced will absolutely not decline to zero. How, 
therefore is pointing to the elasticity or inelasticity of demand (relative 
things) become a relevant or determining argument?

Much the same happens in the case of supply-side shocks -- you simply get a 
new set of equilibria.

What IS true about the situation is that price is a group incentive. Price 
is the primal lure. And -- accepting the theories of Adam Smith and the 
other great economists of yore -- it is through price that the group comes 
to a new settlement about its equilibrium set of activities in the face of 
its now diminished resources. Every community has its scale of relative 
prices. Human groups can pretty much be distinguished by the prices and 
resource allocation decisions they come to -- RELATIVELY -- regarding the 
various goods and services summed across the community.


 > How is this relevant here? Because everyone on this list who makes their
 > living in full or part from music would be affected by a downturn in the
 > economy - perhaps even to greater affect than the general population.

Can't argue with a 'perhaps'.


 > Less money going to clubs,
 > means bands have less money to go to a studio, etc.

As immediately above ... can't argue with a 'perhaps'.


Someone else wrote:
 > > > yes; it's hard to even know where to begin in responding to this.
 > > > So Japan didn't have a flourishing art/music culture until the last
 > > > 20 years "when they got rich"?

GA Moore responded
 > No, thats not what I said. Of course, there was a long and flourishing
 > culture (along with a long history of military shoguns and conquest).
I really do not understand what the bracketed statement has to do with the 
price of fish, actually. Or with the price of music for that matter. Every 
human society bar none always has, and always will, settle upon a price and 
a quantity for its music according to a set of priorities that will be 
determined by the interaction of the members of that group the one with the 
other and with the resources made available to them. It surely bears 
repeating that not a single society ever discovered by anthropologists and 
sociologists has done without music. This holds up no matter what may be 
the relative elasticities and inelasticies, whether considered from the 
supply or the demand side, of its resources, its goods, and its services.

 > I have interacted with a lot of Japanese for the last 15 years,
 > and been to Japan three times, and there is really a change.
What is to be expected? There has been a change because there has been a 
change in the economy meaning that there has been a change in the nature of 
the economic transactions undertaken by the group. But ... music in Japan 
has NOT gone from zero to 'something'. Nor, for that matter, has it gone 
from 'near-worthless' to 'worthy'. It has simply changed in its nature as 
the society has changed. But then again, this is not saying very much 
really for that is pretty much what music IS. That is to say, exactly the 
same statement holds for the USA, and whether you consider say the music of 
Charles Ives or jazz. Taking jazz more specifically ... no other society 
produced it although many others have happily taken it on board and are now 
enjoying it. Jazz was/is an economic transaction, expressed in/through 
music, that was originated by the interactions that took place amongst the 
given group(s) of human beings who happened to constitute up the USA during 
that epoch.



OK ... my fingers have gotten very tired now, never mind my brain, so I'm 
going to try and just rush quickly through the rest. (!!!)

 > Right now as we speak,
 > there are thousands of Japanese here majoring in art and music and
 > whatever strikes their fancy.
Pass.

 > However, you'll find few Taiwanese,
 > Vietnamese, or Chinese majoring in the arts - instead you'll find them in
 > the Engineering and Science departments
Pass.

 > - just as there were many
 > Japanese in the 50's and 60's.
Pass.

 > Its a matter or priority, and things like
 > art and music come lower on that list compared to other things.
This I will NOT pass by. To repeat: an economy and a group allocates its 
resources amongst the members of that group in order to produce what is 
'acceptable' to 'most' members of that group given those resources and the 
current structure and interactions of that group.

'Lower on the list'? To those who actually make the music, the music that 
they make is NOT lower on the list. Once again, one cannot move from the 
general to the particular, or from the particular to the general, this 
fliply. It is simply that there are less people who are able, given the 
resources and interactions, to devote themselves to making music. Given 
those conditions, few musicians can be supported. Or, to be much more 
accurate, less musicians can be supported than can be supported in a nearby 
economy with just that little bit more in the way of resources available to 
it. To support more musicians than are currently being supported would make 
the price of other goods fall to a point where there might well be more 
social discontent than there already exists amongst the members of that 
group. Price and social structure are the interactions of relevance ... 
with price being the method by which economists try to study the latter. To 
try to conclude any more than that is not supported by the evidence which 
is -- once again -- simply about price and the relativity of demand. The 
average price pertaining to the various interactions occurring across the 
whole of the group should never be confused with the realities pertaining 
to any one given member of the group. Elasticity and inelasticity is a 
statement about prices -- which is immediately a statement about the 
relativity and relationships of the individuals in the group.

'Higher on the list'. This is simply another way of saying that out of all 
the demands held within the group, a few more resources can now be handed 
over, through price, to those amongst the group who are a little bit more 
interested in music. However (a) the same holds for every other activity in 
which that society engages (including, for example, a proclivity for 
buiding armies and waging war). Then there is also (b) the fact that 
priorities of the GROUP should not be confused with the priorities of the 
individuals composing that group. Price is simply a method of interaction 
within the group as each individual makes a bid to try to play a part in 
how the overall resources should be allocated. In this regard, economics is 
about competition and the allocation of scarce resources. Therefore ... 
musicians are competing directly with warriors (and everyone else). 
Musicians compete on equal terms in that ultimately the price of music and 
musicians is set by both the social structure of that group and the price 
offered to musicians ... with price being a function of social structure 
and vice versa. This is not an 'either-or' situation. Societies and groups 
are free to have both soldiers and musicians -- and they do. What they must 
do is make decisions (most usually through price) on which one to increase 
their expenditure on relative to the others -- working as always through 
price, resources and social structure.

Music is always of the utmost importance to someone or other within any 
human group. It is simply that when there is not much money or resources 
around, musicians do not get allocated a great deal of society's resources 
... which means that their music could well be eventually and actually far 
more passionate and 'insightful' to other members of the group simply 
because they speak not only for themselves and for the difficulty that they 
have making a living as musicians, but also to and for those who can spend 
so little of their time and resources upon music. Musicians will sing of 
such things for their audiences ... and musicians will fight to get those 
resources by trying to encourage the members of the group to direct 
resources at them through the power and the fervour of their offerings. In 
this regard they compete just as effectively as do soldiers for soldiers 
must also try to persuade their community by whatever methods they think 
appropriate. Those methods will be reflected in price and social structure 
... along with every other demand and every other call upon resources.

You are confusing 'value' with 'price' and 'value' with 'resource 
allocation'. But price is simply the way of mediation between value and 
resources. Groups are always checking prices to see if they match up with 
their values and the resources they see before them. If they do not then 
they amend price and/or social structure to get a better match.

You seem pretty much to be saying that simply because a given society is 
not in a position to allocate many of its resources to music, then 
therefore the little music that it does produce must have little intrinsic 
value both to them and to the outside observer. (Otherwise ... why are you 
giving those comparisons between poor societies and rich ones, or between 
non-military ones and military ones?) This simply is not so. If a society 
of 1,000 souls can only afford one professional musician then there is 
surely a case for saying that in that case that single musician has a much 
greater value to that society than do musicians in a society of 1,000,000 
but that has 500,000 musicians.

 > Quibble with the details if you like,
OK!!

To be honest, at first I really wasn't going to bother simply because I 
just didn't feel like writing all of this. But ... a few spare moments came 
to hand. Also, I was frankly baffled by the things you had said and I did 
want to understand them because, to be honest, they run counter to 
everything I know. So ... I am hoping to learn something. Fundamentally, I 
just do not see how the conclusions you are drawing are supported by your 
premises, by your evidence, or by the reasoning that takes you from your 
premises and evidence to your conclusion. Your conclusion may well be valid 
but at present I do not see how.


 > but all of us - pro or amateur -
 > are producing "icing on the cake" of society, not the main course.
I can only beg to differ with you on this point. Nothing 'icing on the 
cake' that I can detect about music based upon the evidence -- which is how 
real people in real human groups do actually conduct themselves. Musicians 
are as much 'icing on the cake' as are soldiers, actually. One can tell 
this from the price offered and from the efforts made to get music. Both 
musicians and soldiers are allocated resources, by society, in the exact 
measure that society wants them given the interaction between value and 
resources acting through price and social structure ... and also given the 
fact that soldiers and musicians must both compete against the issue of 
limited resources that characterizes economics.

Where does there exist a society -- just one -- that has had its soldiers 
... but no musicians? It is true that expenditure on these two groups does 
not increase or decrease at the same rates ... but then so what? This holds 
for all goods of whatever description and is one of the things that makes 
societies different. Neither music nor soldiering appears to go down to 
zero as the resources available to a given group decreases. The people in 
those groups simply undertake reallocations of their time energy and 
resources given the ensuing changes in the social structure and the 
accompanying changes in the relativity of their joint demands upon their 
resources.

Sorry but musicians produce a most important 'main course' of and for 
society. That's what the evidence shows. The service produced by musicians 
is easily as valuable as any good or service produced by any hunter or 
soldier. That is what is surely made clear by the doctrine of prices and 
goods, and by the elasticities and inelasticities of demand and supply and 
of goods and of their originating resources. Who, after all, produces the 
songs and the ditties that soldiers sing as they go off to battle? Who 
produces the songs and the music that sustain them even in the face of 
death? And who writes the songs that the hunbers sing as they march bravely 
out into the bush praying and hoping for a kill that day? What is the price 
of music? This is surely a question that is worth discussing with the 
palaeolithic hunters who spent literally hundreds of man- and woman-hours 
scraping away at stone and bone to make flutes. Don't think they'd have 
much patience, actually, with someone who was trying to tell them that what 
they were doing was just some kind of 'entertainment' or 'diversion', and 
not something that was a real part of the real main course of human history 
and of every known peoples recorded in that history.

Musicians earn their price. Literally. Since no group of people has ever 
done without them it is surely reasonable to conclude that they are as 
vital to humanity as food, air and water ... because certainly, they have 
all consumed food, air and water in order to do what they did ... and there 
must be a reason. One grounded, furthermore, in necessity.

 > Mozart only created music at the whim of his patron.
False.

 > Bach wrote for the church.
Also false.

 > Before the renassance there wasn't much serious music.
Again false.

 > I guess musicians need to eat too.
True.

 > However, musicians and artisits, despite their feelings of self-importance,
 > are really not essential cogs in society.
False.

 > The most essential needs are to farm or hunt/gather, and maybe to defend 
the homeland.
False. An 'essential need' is to maintain the identity of the group and 
this has never in human history been done without music. Far as I know, 
defending the homeland has also never been done without music. Why else, 
for example, did Hitler praise Wagner so very highly?

 > Its only wealthy societies that afford a healthy music/art life.
False.

 > And as much as musicians may hate war, its
 > usually strong countries with strong militaries which provide an
 > environment for art to flourish and grow.
False. If art and music were not flourishing and growing in 
'pre-industrial' societies, then they would not suddenly start flourishing 
and growing in military-industrial ones. If you want a far more apt 
analogy, then music and art are like a gas. A gas always expands to fill up 
the maximum amount of space and to take into itself the maximum possible 
amount of energy given its pressure and its volume. Music and art similarly 
and always expand to take up the maximum quantity of resources they can 
given the resource base, social structure and number of persons available. 
That is what the economic evidence and theories seem to suggest.

 > The Greeks and Romans had literature, poetry, archetechure, creative
 > government experiments with democracy - but they also warriors, slaves,
 > and conquests.
So what? Excepting only the democracy, the same holds of every other 
government and peoples which have all produced their distinctive brands of 
literature, poetry, archtecture and the like. Or are you going to suggest 
that only rich democracies can produce creative music? This, given the 
examples you give, does seem to be the conclusion you are drifting towards. 
It is certainly, of course, an opinion to which you are perfectly entitled, 
but from what I understand of both economics and the historical evidence, 
it is not one that can be supported by these specific arguments and 
examples you are giving.

 > A good example is modern Japan. During the 1950's - 1970's they were in
 > workaholic mode to rebuild their country. Now in the past 20 years that
 > they have gotten rich, there are many great Japanese artists, musicians,
 > etc.
Again, pass.

Kool Musick
Keep Musick Kool


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