“Salescritter” is both more gender inclusive and more species inclusive than “salesman.” And no more syllables than “salesperson.”

Some products and services have what I call a high “salescrittership quotient.” These are the ones that naturally adjoin to the word “salesman:” vacuum cleaner, encyclopedia, used car, insurance… Used cars merit particular attention as they are the subject of a famous problem in economics; the “lemon problem” of information asymmetry. Now groceries are something a typical person is buying all the time. A consumer with decent memorization skills who shops multiple supermarkets will instinctively be able to identify which items in a supermarket are above or below the “going rate.” So, there are no salescritters in the supermarket; just people to handle transactions, and fewer and fewer of those. It’s basically a self-serve operation. Persuasion still enters into it in packaging, placement and other psychological games, but commissioned salescritters are not present there, as it is a relatively transparent space. The danger zone is the few-and-far-in-between purchases that are also the big-ticket purchases. Further informational disempowerment ensues if it’s a non-elective purchase. The TV commercials that shout the loudest are furniture stores and replacement windows. These are also very salesy industries, characterized by high pressure commissioned salescritters. One wonders if each industry (or each category of product or service) can be characterized as having a “salescrittership quotient” (SQ) that might be high in the case of home improvement contractors, low in the case of supermarkets, and medium in the case of, say, shoes.

What about the point of intrusion of the necessity of selling into everyone’s life—the job interview? Tim Harford tells us the following:

Then there’s the market for jobs. How many of your colleagues are lemons? If you’re competent but can’t prove it to your boss, you may prefer to be a freelancer. If other competent workers think that way, it may explain why you think your colleagues are idiots and they think the same about you.

I’d like to think that in a post-privacy, radically transparent world, it will be a trivial matter to verify any information on a job application or resume. Hopefully this will mean less need to sell oneself in the interview, but I wouldn’t hold my hopes too high. As Tim Harford says, the outlet seems to be self-employment, or having to sell yourself every single fucking day. We shall see. I don’t expect extreme transparency to solve all the world’s problems, but hopefully it will help level the playing field between the value of BS and the value of other skills.

Joshua T. defines salesiness (in the context of software) as “quantity of suits & money to be dealt with in order to get actual technical detail,” and transparency as “the degree to which the authors interact with the community on defects and releases.” Suits and authors both perform gatekeeper functions. Joshua rates various products high, medium or low on these and four other scales. I suspect they are inversely proportional to each other.

Is it the case that involunary dissociation is the flip side of voluntary association? What if we did it the other way around and practiced involuntary association and voluntary dissociation? Would that be so horrible? It would seem to me about equally horrible. Thick voluntarism without compromise, if it existed, would imply voluntary association and voluntary dissociation. Come and go as you please. Assuming (strictly for the sake of argument) that thick voluntarism is impossible, should we not at the very least strive for voluntarism that is thickerer?

The libertarian left, the folkx who embrace markets while rejecting capitalism, are always quick to point out that “free market” used as a media buzzword refers to something that is anything but free, and the think tanks and lobbyists who advocate what they call free market are in practice proponents and beneficiaries of subsidy and rent. This adequately distances the left libertarian movement from “free market” ideology as bankrolled by big business interests. The thing is, the genuinely principled advocates of laissez-faire capitalism are also critical of “free market” as all-too-commonly understood, and are quite orthodox about advocating an utterly subsidy-free society. How does the left-libertarian view of what does or doesn’t constitute a free market, constrast with that of principled, no-quarter right libertiarianism, of the type that calls itself anarcho-capitalism? Maybe there’s no difference of opinion there about what free market is; with any differences being about what it implies. To quote Hagbard Celine’s tract Never Whistle While You’re Pissing:

ANARCHISM: That organization of society in which the Free Market operates freely, without taxes, urury, landlordism, tariffs, or other forms of coercion or privilege. RIGHT ANARCHISTS predict that in the Free Market people would voluntarily choose to compete more often than to cooperate. LEFT ANARCHISTS predict that in the Free Market people would voluntarily choose to cooperate more often than to compete.

Of course, I’ve always assumed that competition is a defining feature of the Free Market, so it has always seemed natural to me that anyone who prefers cooperation over competition should be anti-market (anagorist). One thing I must find is developments of market theory (if any) that don’t start with the assumption that human nature is competitive.

Could it be that “free market anticapitalism” incorporates a non-hackneyed definition of free market and a hackneyed definition of capitalism? The left libertarians seem at least to be on speaking terms with the people who say capitalism is simply another term for voluntary activity. I have a problem with that definition as, given a choice, I’d rather not practice capitalism, which I understand to mean “running a business.” To me, capitalism is just another word for opportunism. Not something I consider a crime, but not something I consider an admirable personality trait, either. I only resent opportunism when it seems to be a prerequisite for survival, you know, the need to “hustle and grub in the world of commerce.”

Many formulations called “third way” have been advanced over many years. These denote a variety of things. In the 1930’s, “third way” generally referred to “mixed economy,” or a synthesis of socialism and capitalism. By the 1990’s, the understanding was that “third way” was a synthesis of conservative and progressive ideas, with a very explicit understanding that all this operates within a capitalist economy. This is an example of what they call moving the goalpost.

More generally, third ways get suggested when someone wishes to suggest a third alternative to a supposed dichotomy. Hence we have third parties, third genders, third sectors, etc. These particular types of third way seem to suggest something outside, rather than between, the strongly implied binary choices; a non-colinear third point.

“Hard anagorism” is a rejection of the assertion that all economies can be categorized in terms of ‘market’ or ‘command.’ “Soft anagorism” is a less assertive claim that rejects the assertion that ‘market’ and ‘command’ are mutually exclusive characteristics of economies. Perhaps the best known school of anagorist thought today is Parecon, or participatory economics. They seek to demonstrate that economic planning can be pried apart from command economics.

For the hard anagorist, the riddle is how to achieve participation in the economy with neither permission nor money. For the soft anagorist, the question is whether the amounts of both of these quantities that are needed can be dramatically reduced. Soft anagorism is most of what I will write about in the present blog. That is because I find it a more fruitful area of inquiry.

Obviously, in this context, we mean voluntary austerity, not the type of austerity plan imposed on a population as part of a program of market-based reforms. Voluntary austerity means cheap living as an art form. It can also be a religious thing. Voluntary austerity in pursuit of anagory takes the monastic formula of “poverty, celibacy and obedience,” drops obedience, suggests (but by no means requires) the substitution of family planning for celibacy, and studied economic minimalism for poverty.

I’m joining the mass exodus. The mission (such as it is) of the present blog will be continued at astoundingteam.com/wordpress. See you there!

Anagory or anagorism is offered as an alternative to agorism. Anagorism is like free market anticapitalism but minus the market part. Topics of interest include:

• continuing the search for end runs around the Iron Laws of Economics.
• seeking strategies that assume the validity of the Iron Laws, but look to salvage the maximum possible amount of idealism from compromises between what we believe to be true (i.e. competition) and what we believe to be right (i.e. solidarity).
• unmasking the Invisible Hand through reverse engineering and radically transparent projects in economic cooperation.
• networking and brainstorming with like-minded people.

This blog is created as a migration to WordPress of the Blogger blog Es un alimento muy completo. I will start by rewriting and refining those posts at alimento which are fairly directly related to the subject of anagory, and hopefully will be inspired enough to break ground on new anagorist arguments and topics.

Seems one of the featured (bankrolled) videos on YouTube is some kind of astroturf presentation condemning what they call the “bad cap tax.” A Google search on the quoted phrase “bad cap tax” (as of this writing) produces exactly one result.

The website

costaricaprivatecertifiedguide.com

directs one to

http://odilfmvt.cz.cc/fast-scan/

which runs an apparent Java exploit which shrinks the browser window to a very small size. Re-maximizing it reveals the message:

Windows Security 2011 has found critical process activity on your PC and will perform fast scan of system files

Elitism is the belief that wealth and power are evidence of virtue. The ‘liberal elite’ meme is Orwellian in the sense of ‘ignorance is strength,’ ‘freedom is slavery,’ etc. As with all memes, the strategy of choice is assertive, relentless repetition.

The people who parrot the ‘liberal elite’ meme would like us to believe that academia and the media are dominated by liberals, or leftists, or at any rate people they disagree with. This may be true of academia (though I have my doubts–economics department faculties tend to be well to the right of center) but is so obviously untrue of the media (who rather aggressively frame issues in right vs. center terms) that ‘liberal media’ used as if it were one word is a patent falsehood. Even if media and academia were liberal dominated, the implication that they are the power centers of society is laughable. The amount of real power in media and academia is trivial compared to the power in big business, and in the military and intelligence services, as well as of course government in general.

It all follows the usual pattern of propaganda. The assumption seems to be that if you repeat something enough times, many will believe it to be true.