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Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach him to fish and he'll go into hock for all sorts of gear and spend all the time that he could be fixing the leaky gutters out on some piece of water annoying the fish. But, hey, it'll keep him out of the bars.

With me, it's "Give a guy a space on the internet to post his thoughts about anything that entered his mind on a 3 am pee break and he'll ramble on for pages until he runs out of thoughts. Here's me on money. Well, first, here's Margaret Atwood on money, specifically debt.

[from Margaret Atwood. Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth. in the Massey Lecture. Anansi. 2008. p.8]

The first credit card was introduced in 1950. In 1955, the average Canadian household debt-to-income ratio was 55 percent; in 2003, it was 105.2 percent. The ratio has gone up since then, In the United States the ratio was 114 percent in 2004. In other words, a great many people are spending more than they're earning. So are a great many national governments.

On the microeconomic level, a friend tells me of an epidemic of debt among over-eighteens, especially college students: credit card companies target them, and the students rush out and spend the maximum without stopping to calculate the consequences and are then stuck with debts they can't pay off, at very high interest rates. Since neurologists are now telling us that the adolescent brain is quite different from the adult one, and not really capable of doing the long-term buy-now, pay-later math, this ought to be considered child exploitation.

At the other end of the scale, the financial world has recently been shaken as a result of the collapse of a debt pyramid involving something called “sub-prime mortgages'—a pyramid scheme that most people don't grasp very well, but that boils down to the fact that some large financial institutions peddled mortgages to people who could not possibly pay the monthly rates and then put this snake-oil debt into cardboard boxes with impressive labels on them and sold them to institutions and hedge funds that thought they were worth something. It's like the teenage credit card ploy, but at a much greater level.

There you have it; that's our Margaret delivering one of her usual well-researched talks as a Massey Lecture. Part of her research may have been reading Karl Polanyi's The Great Transformation or Brett Christophers' The Price is Wrong: Why Capitalism Won’t Save the Planet. I hope she did because I didn't. Good grief, Polanyi's magnum opus goes to 358 very closely reasoned pages (as economists are wont to produce) and Brett Christophers' is just 40 pages behind him. They all make the same point though; namely, that debt is not good, especially when the fix is in. Here's the fix as I understand it.

You grow carrots and take some to the town market – you all have those summertime farmers' markets, don't you? You take your level 1 industry in producing something and go practice marketing. Everything is pretty much out in the open. We see the carrots and we may even get some samples to taste. We buy them and give you money and you pay your kids for shlepping the stuff to town. Marketing, level 1.

Someone, likely the town, owns the space of the market and rents out the stall spaces and perhaps the tables. It's still clear, even at signed contract level, just who owes how much for what and for how long. All still good.

But then "Farmers' Markets" becomes a company and goes public and the name is registered and the town can't use it on signage and all of the transportation of goods, real estate rental, "independent labour" for assistance (because if they're "independent" it means they have to supply all their own uniforms, vehicles, health care, etc) - all that becomes a unit to be bought and sold and repackaged and bought and sold again. If a market stall explosion is too picky to think about, consider corner grocery forced out or bought out by a food chain which in turn is bought out by LotzaStuff incorporated with pharmacy, food, clothing and hardware all in one location. Or think of real estate around Toronto from subdivision house to whole tract of subdivision to planned community of homes and services.

You might argue that these are not necessarily bad developments with the concentration of space and facilities. And if people (the real people who will live in the houses and shop in the stores) are in charge of the planning, it can work. It's the befuddlement factor we gotta watch out for. Brett Christophers also does a good job of pulling apart the elements of "market" and "capitalism" and his essay is worth a 10-minute study at this point. Go have a quick look.

Here's one of my heroes in the battle against creeping (creepy) capitalization, Corey Docterow, whose term "enshittification" has become synonomous with merchandizing by big business. This is from the end of one of his screeds and the full article is also worth studying with a coffee and time to digest both. I'm just grabbing highlights for you.

This moment we’re living through, this Great Enshittening, is a material phenomenon, much like a disease, with symptoms, a mechanism and an epidemiology. When doctors observe patients who are sick with a novel pathogen, their first order of business is creating a natural history of the disease. This natural history is an ordered catalogue of the disease’s progress: what symptoms do patients exhibit, and in which order? 

Here’s the natural history of enshittification:
1 First, platforms are good to their users.
2 Then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers.
3 Next, they abuse those customers to claw back all the value for themselves – and become a giant pile of shit.

This pattern is everywhere. Once you learn about it, you’ll start seeing it, too. Take Amazon, a company that started out by making it possible to have any book shipped to your door and then became the only game in town for everything else, even as it dodged taxes and filled up with self-immolating crapgadgets and other junk.

Corey says the process can be stopped. Read on.

You won’t be able to do it alone. Your personal consumption choices might make a difference to the merchants you patronise, but they have no effect on the policies that created our enshittogenic environment. Just as you can’t save the planet by diligently sorting your recycling, you can’t stop enshittification by “voting with your wallet” (those votes are always won by those with the thickest wallets, and that’s the billionaires who made money by enshittifying everything).

Take Amazon: to fix Amazon, we need policy solutions. We need to ban predatory pricing – selling goods below cost to keep competitors out of the market (and then jacking them up again). We need to impose structural separation on the company so it can either be a platform, or compete with the sellers that rely on it as a platform. We need to curb its junk fees, which suck 45-51 cents on every dollar merchants take in. We need to end its most favoured nation deal, which forces merchants who raise their prices on Amazon to pay these fees to raise their prices everywhere else, too. We need to unionise its drivers and warehouse workers. We need to treat its rigged search results as the fraud they are.

The path to a better Amazon doesn’t lie through consumer activism, or appeals to the its conscience. Corporations, being artificial, immortal colony-organisms that use humans as their inconvenient gut flora, do not have consciences to appeal to. The path leads through coalitions: of consumers and merchants who are tired of being robbed; of workers who are tired of being immiserated and maimed; of competitors who are tired of being strong-armed by a monopolist bully; of tax-justice activists who are tired of trillion-dollar multinationals ducking their obligations. Systemic problems have systemic solutions, not individual ones. You can’t shop your way out of a monopoly.

Martin Luther King Jr once said, “It may be true that the law cannot make a man love me, but it can stop him from lynching me, and I think that’s pretty important, also.”

It may be true that regulation can’t force corporate sociopaths to conceive of you as a human being entitled to dignity and fair treatment, and not just an ambulatory wallet, a supply of gut bacteria for the immortal colony organism that is a limited liability corporation. But it can make that exec fear you enough to treat you fairly and afford you dignity, even if he doesn’t think you deserve it. And I think that’s pretty important.

There is a progression of selling from retail/wholesale markets to capitalism. This is an excerpt from "The future was social" by Stefan Collini writing a review of Polanyi's The Great Transformation.

But from the late 18th century onwards the most alert observers began to sense that there was a new type of society developing – new not just in Europe, but in human history as a whole – and here the criteria were economic and social. Briefly put, it came to seem that societies based on agriculture, crafts and the struggle for subsistence were being replaced by societies based, at least embryonically, on commerce, industry and the possibility of abundance.

That "possibility of abundance" has certainly caught the attention of some marketers who would use AI tools to get the most dollar from your wallet for their product. It's called "surveillance pricing" and it raises sleaze to a whole new level.

Also called algorithmic personalized pricing, the practice uses personal data to estimate how much consumers are willing to pay, then adjusts the price accordingly. Two shoppers, same store, same item: two different prices, generated by data neither of them can see.

A useful distinction first. Dynamic pricing, the kind used by airlines, hotels and rideshare companies, adjusts a price based on conditions like demand, the time of day or weather and applies the same algorithm to every customer equally. Uber’s surge pricing is the textbook example of dynamic pricing: every rider in the same area at the same moment sees the same multiplier. Annoying? Perhaps. Personalized? No.

Surveillance pricing is different. Where dynamic pricing responds to market conditions, surveillance pricing responds to the individual. It draws on browsing history, device, postal code, purchase frequency and inferred income to predict a person’s willingness to pay. Dynamic pricing seems to ask: “What are the conditions right now?” Surveillance pricing asks: “Who are you, and how much can we extract from you?”

Stores in many parts of the US use it (but you're not going shopping there anyway); Wab Kinew, NDP Premier of Manitoba has banned it; Doug Ford, Conservative Premier of Ontario thinks it's fine and says, "I believe in capitalism." When do you vote Toronto?

That should have been a conclusion, but this morning it wasn't. Two articles from my inbox just demanded to be read - one forwarded from Peter Mansbridge's substack and one from Walrus. They both dealt with algorithmic pricing, read "surveillance pricing" and they deal with ways that "the market" reaches down to the consumer's wallet with individual pricing.

The Walrus article described algorithmic pricing as a new shopping land mine, saying in part:

 When you deputize an AI agent to shop for you, you basically tell the computer program (or 'agent') what you want. …The agent then searches multiple retailers, evaluates options based on your preferences, and completes the sale.

In other words, the online shopping experience we’re used to—searching, comparing, clicking around, reading reviews, abandoning carts, returning later, and finally checking out—is being compressed into a short exchange with a chatbot. That convenience could be transformative. A genuinely loyal AI shopping agent could slash costs and force retailers into fiercer competition. But only if the system is actually working for us rather than quietly working on us.

 And the piece referenced by Mansbridge was from the Canada Letter in the New York Times and pointed to Tim Horton's franchisees in Quebec taking the company to court for unfair practices.

Among many factors, the dissident franchise holders blamed their lost profits on their inability to set prices. In dismissing that idea in its court filing, Tim Hortons confirmed that what customers pay depends on where they live.

The company has divided the country into 62 “price clusters.” In each of them, it constantly adjusts prices based on a variety of factors, including local competition, labor costs, income and the number of customers who pass through. Four times a year, the company tests prices.

It uses that data to set prices at the highest possible level that won’t send customers fleeing down the street to, say, McDonald’s for a better deal. Or, as the court filing put it, the system is about “balancing competitiveness with profitability.”

The court filing also shows that there is no such thing as a free coffee. It includes a chart showing that a combination of price increases and reduced loyalty benefits made Tims Rewards “self funded” within a year of its introduction in 2019. Habitués of Tim Hortons are effectively rewarding themselves along with customers who don’t participate.

Hopeful signs are the unions established at Wallmart by workers at Mississauga, Ontario and the ones granted to labourers at some Starbucks locations. Even Amazon warehouses in some US locations have been unionized, although that company closed its Laval site in Quebec rather than grant union status. Enshittification in a snit!

Those unions are the first and still the best defence against the oligarchy of capitalists. They've taken many forms over the centuries and their members have been lied about litigated against, beaten upon and shot at over those centuries as well. The main thrust of opponents is to try to convince folk that we are individuals, and that only as individuals do we have worth (wonderful Calvinist notion that) and our individual salvation (again) depends on our individually cleaning our rooms (as Jordan Peterson would have us do) and forgo that rally in the streets. Well, rally you guys. Remember these shots from 2022?

I went home and made the signs after feeling ashamed at seeing one young woman standing with her placard that read "Vaccines Save Lives". And she stood quietly on the legislature corner braving the insults of the truckers and anti-vaxxers who were protesting what they saw as an infringement on their rights. Beverly left her cane at home, which was probably a good thing from a legal perspective.