The Matrix of Economic Engines.
The matrix of economic continuums.
Prosperity consists of an appropriate if not an optimum matrix of economic
engines.
What does that mean? Ha. Wouldn't you like to know. For the rest of us, who don't go by "meanings" as do that certain incompetent minority that seems to enjoy infiltrating every organization in existence, we have to realize that, since the age of machines, nobody significant enough to make an impression has ever bothered to really build the most important machine ever -- the economic engine. So very little is known about them.
However, being the kind of guy that likes to step way back and look at the forest instead of the trees, having traveled the globe twice over and taken the time to try to piece this puzzle together, I began to notice the concept. It is possible, my friends, and even those who don't like me, you too, to generate wealth anywhere on the face of the earth, and for that matter, if you ever manage to get your beastly little bottoms into space again, anywhere in the universe.
Why should I have been able to find out rather than great learned economists and specialist captains of industry and so on? Well, the secret divulges itself only to those who are not trying to enrich themselves. Actually, finding out about economic engines was a side effect, an extra benefit to other things I was seeking to find out about that I considered of greater priority.
But there are basic underlying principles of economics and the flow of wealth that cannot be noticed by those preoccupied with personal enrichment or even those who cater to them. But I feel compelled to write about this being somewhat horrified by the now apparently unnecessary and avoidable poverty of both the poor and the rich.
It is said that the New York Stock Exchange is an economic engine, and I address that idea in a little article called "The Bull Market". Actually it really grew from a working piece of an old economic engine (I suppose the little engine that could) that went way back to the Dutch Knickerbocker days when the place was called New Amsterdam. It was a stock yard for cattle.
But the economic engine wasn't the miniscule little stock yard. It was the combination of the roads and the ports. It was an engine that came to be in place not by the intention of people but rather due to a sort of accident, almost, or more a coincidence of the elements of merely one type of economic engine that moves the flow of wealth.
Later aspects of the history of that "little engine that could" were the great significance of it's parts. The incredible construction of the Erie Canal, the advent of one of the first international airports that in those days used sea planes, LaGuardia. Then of course there were the train connections and the momentous bridges, now average, but momentous for their times, and the tunnels.
These are still economic accidents and as such, tend to contribute more to the poverty of most other areas than the enrichment of some few. Many are resigned to the fact that that's the way it goes and that's life in the fasting lane. And you people swallowed it. Hook, line and sinker. You just accept everything at face value don't you? Well, let's step back a little. It's actually a beautiful forest when seen from the mountains. That is, what's left of it.
So the engine alone was quite an accident but that wasn't the end of it. It was it's eventual role in the Megalopolis Matrix that was to become the powerhouse of the United States of America. Now it's not my intention here to write a concise history of the economic development of the East Coast or anything of that nature. What I'm trying to do here is to reveal the underlying principle of the wealth now observable in early twenty-first century America. But that's not the reason for the article. It's merely an example. A poor example.
The engine of New York is in a barely appropriate matrix with it's counterpart engines in Delaware, New Jersey and Massachusetts. It's southernmost extremity may be construed as Atlanta, but I tend to think it might be only as far as that opportunistic port area of Norfolk, Virginia. Though barely qualifying as an economic engine matrix, it is sufficient to generate the wealth to make the United States the super power of the early two thousands.
Yeah. Whoopie. So what. Whatever, man. Somewhere in the world, where they aren't resting on their stinky laurels, someone, no matter who, is going to catch on and realize that they don't have to just get by with good enough. They are going to engineer their economic engines to the optimum, and then assemble them into a viable workable optimum matrix and then go on to construct several successive additional matrices and leave you in the dust.
But I'm wasting paragraphs, here. Just surf on, bunkie. Maybe one of my visitors from Singapore or the Seychelles or the Ukraine will benefit more from this than someone stilted enough to be a plastic flag waver proud of merely good enough. Surf on. See you in the page-exited stats. Some day they might be saying "America? Oh, yes. Wasn't that before they learned to live without dependence on agriculture?"
These first primitive observable elements of real economic engines, those that don't depend on market momentum, or their bull or bear gremlins, are still enough to construct and engineer a healthy matrix. If the principle cities are linked with roadways, new cities will appear at most of the crossroads. Of course, few nations can afford the recourses to build roadways at will, let alone install airports, build canals, lay railroad track and so on. But that's really not how engines have to come into existence. Basically, they build themselves. The secret is in tuning them as the vintner trains the vines.
For example, the super highway system in the United States. It's going the wrong way. It runs predominantly north and south, east and west. Straight, more or less, up and down and side to side at kind of right angles approximately.
It was Hitler's idea, as far as I can tell, and then brought to America by Eisenhower. But they built it in a grid-like fashion. Interstates 5, 15, 25, 29, 35, 43, 55, 57, 65, 69, 75, 77, 79, 81, 87, 91, and 95 are some examples of the north-south types of highways, one of which I had a premonition of before it was built, 91, on which my future father-in-law was to work (Premonition of I-91). Interstates 8, 10, 20, 40, 64, 70, 80, 84, 90 and 94 are some examples of east-west types of highways.
The appropriate directions would have been not up and down and sideways on the map, but running diagonally. North-east to south-west and so on. And then diagonally the other way, North-west to south-east. And then interlinking the subsequent crossroad cities with rail and air and secondary roads. Of course the north-south roads would work if they went anywhere but they stop at borders which is another problem for economic engines (see "The Border Guard"). This would have produced an optimized nation-wide grid of economic engines producing the first truly national matrix the wealth of which would have vaporized the 2004 national debt without blinking.
A secondary road in itself is an economic engine. So are each of the crossroads in a city grid. At least potentially, depending on the connections and the proximity to the variety of factors that would make an economic engine. Again, realize we're limited in the concept of being able to apply such principles that would bring an economic engine into being. Some might argue otherwise, but if they became less concerned about being considered right all the time and more concerned about getting around to the actual they might make a little progress for a change.
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Copyright © 2004 by Paul A. L. Hall. All rights reserved.
Email: economics@paulhallart.com
Did you hear about the economist with a wig? He had to pay.