Time Minimization: Sonata for Social Science Theorists
1st Movement (Scholarship), adagio Economic model: minimize cost. But what about primitive societies, the ones we all descended from, which had no money? What was cost? Geographic model: minimize distance. But what about futuristic societies, the ones emerging in our time, with beam me interaction? What will be distance? Generalized model: minimize effort But how to add cost and distance and all the other apples and oranges which make up effort? How do you measure effort? 2nd Movement (Imagination), andante If I had eternity, I could build the Great Wall with the effort of my arm alone and maybe a spoon for technology. walk sooner or later across any continent a hundred thousand million billion times. invest a measly dollar at a miserly one-percent return and wind up with all the money in the cosmos. 3rd Movement (Theory), vivace Thoughts the slave of life, and life times fool seventy, eighty years to live twenty-four hours a day life cycle constraints pan-historically, cross-culturally, measurably we (collectively, theoretically, not necessarily consciously) minimize time the ultimately scarce resource for anything living.
Stephan Poems