The V that laid the Gouldian Goose Egg from Henry Adams to Milton Friedman

[alice malice]

After the publication of AGTD the P-Industry accelerated its wagon while
the jumpers flipped over stacks of boys' books...and I suspect that, like
James Gatz, who kept a Ben Franklin To-Do list in the back jacket of his
Hop-Along Cassidy, young P kept a list somewhere...

but...but like Grover, the boy whiz kid in Pynchon's only short story (the
others reissued in that SL book are mere juvenilia (lower case j), and
though I take the author's reading of CL49 seriously and so classify it not
as it was marketed but as it read and would therefore place it next to
TSI on the short story shelf...

 and...oh, where was I?

Oh yes, um, the boy in the TSI who reads those Tom Swift books is disgusted
by the characterization of  the black man who shuffles and shucks under the
lash of the ghost writers, an Industry that mass produces books for young
readers, popping them up, as Grover describes the production,  like crispy
hot bread from a toaster, filling the boy's senses with delight, his mind
with ideas not so delightful.

In any event, there is in that story and in the juvenilia the fitful
flashes of Gold. The motif is buried, awkwardly in figurative language that
exposes the young thief's shaky hand, and literally in a motif he maintains
to this day, the gold that is waste, that is what a disposable society
buries in landfills, tosses on the lawns of its black neighbors, piles high
in the junkyard.

The Gouldian Goose is there in TSI. That because by the time TSI is written
the young author has read and studied the books that continues to shape his
art, and of these there none more influential than those of Henry Adams.

 Before he got back to Quincy, the summer was already half over, and in
another six weeks the effects of President Grant's character showed
themselves. They were startling--astounding--terrifying. The mystery that
shrouded the famous, classical attempt of Jay Gould to corner gold in
September, 1869, has never been cleared up--at least so far as to make it
intelligible to Adams. Gould was led, by the change at Washington, into CHAPTER
XVIII

FREE FIGHT (1869-1870)

THE EDUCATION OF HENRY ADAMS

the belief that he could safely corner gold without interference from the
Government. He took a number of precautions, which he admitted; and he
spent a large sum of money, as he also testified, to obtain assurances
which were not sufficient to have satisfied so astute a gambler; yet he
made the venture. Any criminal lawyer must have begun investigation by
insisting, rigorously, that no such man, in such a position, could be
permitted to plead that he had taken, and pursued, such a course, without
assurances which did satisfy him. The plea was professionally inadmissible.

This meant that any criminal lawyer would have been bound to start an
investigation by insisting that Gould had assurances from the White House
or the Treasury, since none other could have satisfied him. To young men
wasting their summer at Quincy for want of some one to hire their services
at three dollars a day, such a dramatic scandal was Heaven-sent. Charles
and Henry Adams jumped at it like salmon at a fly, with as much voracity as
Jay Gould, or his *ame damne* Jim Fisk, had ever shown for Erie; and with
as little fear of consequences. They risked something; no one could say
what; but the people about the Erie office were not regarded as lambs.


What has this to do with Milton Friedman? Thought you would never ask.
Well, V or Velocity in the key to Friedman's theory of money, as
Acceleration is the key to Adams's theory of History.


And Gould and Gold make the story.


Without reminding my dear readers of their Economics 101 Lectures, I beg
them to recall that Adam Smith, in his classic door stopper, The Wealth of
Nations, explained why gold, silver, material stuff is not the foundation
of a nation's wealth. A nation's wealth, as Marx well understood,  is
driven by the value of labor, of productivity, by what we now call
Technology and Capital and Trade (Ricardo).


In any event, Gould didn't need a supply and demand graph to cast his evil
spell. He didn't need to read Smith or Adams. He understood money supply in
a primitive way. He had a hunch that what Friedman would argue much later,
had value, if only he could get his arms around it.


V.    V= GDP / M1


That is, the Velocity of Money is equal to the level of GDP divided by the
money supply.


So monetary policy.   V. Get it?
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