Escalante
Image: Kiss by Bridget Riley.
Kim Stanley Robinson in his sci-fi book Green Mars describes a space elevator. It’s a concept for getting into space from Earth without rockets — you take an elevator right up to orbit. You have a single stand that takes five days to travel up. He describes it like this:
No one ever saw the full spectacle, for no witnesses had the senses necessary. Proportionally the cable was far thinner than a human hair – if it had been reduced to a hair’s diameter, it would still have been hundreds of kilometers long.
There’s this cable that is a hundred metres across, say, big, wide, but if you’re standing close enough to see it, you can’t see either end. Yet if you’re standing far enough away to to see both ends of the space elevator, it’s going to be too thin to make out. It’ll be invisible.
That’s what the financial system is like to me, for us. If we’re standing close enough to it to understand the human impact of debt, we don’t understand the bank, we can’t see the scale, we can’t see the edges. But if we’re at the level of macroeconomics, at the level of the banks and government, we miss what’s actually going on, at a human level. The scale difference is just too huge.
I want a Here & There map for the financial system.