Loud

When I was young(er) I wanted to be a screenwriter, a cliché, I know. In my teenage head the equation was a very simple one: I loved writing and I loved movies. What I didn’t understand was that there is a basic distinction between that of creating written works and that of a teenager’s joy of consuming movies as entertainment. Nonetheless, naïve as this was, I pursued that path with somewhat more dedication than was the norm for the teenage Baldur, and I became a part of the second batch of students to enrol in Iceland’s first film school.

The school was designed to be a short term affair, located in the MÍR building whose claim to fame was holding talks on and doing screenings of obscure, indecipherable Russian films, and the organisers crammed all they could into three months of talks, followed by a group-production of two short movies.

My film maker/screenwriter aspirations faded with my enthusiasm for film, while my appreciation of the written word, Icelandic or English, only grew, but one aspect of my short education in the arts of screenwriting stuck with me and continues to inform all of my writing for any form.

If you look past the proliferation of nonsense derivations of Joseph Campbell’s drivel¹ the structure of a screenplay has simple components. The larger narrative superstructure is based on acts; the acts are built up of scenes which are tied together by a single something, an emotional event or theme; while the scenes themselves are made up of beats, each beat being a single subject.

The beats melt a bit into each other and aren’t as divisible as their description might imply, but I’ve found the concept to serve as a useful building block for most of my writing projects, personal, work or academic.

All of the blog posts on Humane Economics last week, were two-beat posts, set-up and punch, if you will. This was a pre-meditated tactic as I tried to approach Humane Economics as a writing project in a more organised manner than I had with any of my previous blog projects. Short two-beat posts work very well for the kinds of issues that can be broken apart and boiled down to a series of ‘facts’ or probable-guesses, but not all issues lend themselves to that.

Issues and problem domains tend to be either convergent or divergent.² Convergent problems lend themselves to the essentialist, platonic thinking that dominates modern society, where the goal of arriving at a single truth or essential quality through a logical, rational process is an attainable one. Solving convergent problems are the cornerstone of modern science and thinking as they lend themselves to being described, written down and passed along.

Divergent issues tend to all those that involve humans and rely on human behaviour. Every approach or analysis leads to a spiral of related but irreconcilable issues and problems that you have to either accept and transcend or simply leave out. Divergent problems are generative, systems with often simple rules which nonetheless manage to create unimaginable complexity. Solutions to divergent issues cannot be written down and passed along but have to be led towards and lived through. Writing about divergent issues isn’t as much writing about what they are as much as it is about what they feel like, so that you can recognise them when you encounter them in life.

But divergent issues can be described and one such description is through mathematics: fractals and multifractals. Where convergent fields tend to be dominated by gaussian-randomness with manageable or measureable risk, fields dominated by divergent issues are leaves on the winds of fractal randomness, unpredictable and full of irreducible risk.³

Economics, like art, literature, psychology and social sciences is a field full of divergent issues. These fields have enough convergent issues to tempt practitioners into treating the whole kit and kaboodle as a convergent science, and in the process they push the art of the field further and further into the unapproachable distance. Markets are dominated by fractal randomness and mathematicians have known this for decades.

Economists have, on the other hand, been willfully ignoring this for just as long.⁴

A short two-beat blog post can’t tackle a divergent issue. Some issues are irreducible, you need space to move, room to manoeuvre around the problems, and to do that the posts simply have to be longer.

I’ve spent some of the last four days trying to manoeuvre around the subject of the economics of social media as marketing, trying to find a point that could be broken off and cast into a blog post without committing undue harm to the divergent and holistic nature of the problem. The post I’ve posted today is just a first attempt, an initial foray into the subject.

I plan to try to post on Humane Economics a mixture of longer posts on divergent issues and shorter posts on convergent issues. What the exact, eventual blend will be like, I don’t know. Sometimes the process of putting one’s own understanding into words just has to be a little bit complicated.