Article Type : Opinion Article
Authors : Levintov A
Keywords : Economics and chrematistics; Taxes on and taxes for; Properties of money; Holism; Continuity; Discreteness; Laws of placement; Monotony; Universality; Naturalness; Perfection
The
article provides a sharp criticism of the Russian economy throughout its
existence in the conceptual field, and presents a forecast of the formation of
a new world economy. The historical field shows the evolution of money and its
functions, gives a geographical interpretation of money and the main
geographical patterns of their placement.
Conceptual
differences
Anticipating further
speculations, let us talk about some fundamental differences between the
geographical terms that make up a stable comprehensive list of terms and
definitions we will occasionally refer to:
The Earth (Russian:
Zemlya) means not only a planet but also a solid surface of the planet that is
not permanently submerged in water, as well as any uof ndeveloped, uninhabited
land, an open and yet veiled expanse, which, according to Heidegger, forms the
concept of Gegnet (derived from German "es gibt", i.e. "there
is", or "it is given") [6]. For example, Novaya Zemlya (lit.
"New Land"), Zemlya of Franz Josef (lit. Franz Josef Land), Severnaya
Zemlya (lit. "Northern Land"), Zemlya of Sannikov (lit. Sannikov
Land), etc.
Territory means a geographic area with developed
infrastructure, including engineering, transport, communication, financial,
social, political, socio-cultural, educational, and other technologies. It
should be also noted that English speakers sometimes mean by territory the same
as Russian speakers mean by earth/land: Unlike provinces, the territories in
the north of Canada do not have a sedentary population, are neither
economically developed nor controlled.
Landscape means a natural complex that develops
spontaneously, in the course of history, and in a natural way. There are almost
no natural landscapes that are totally untouched by human activity, even in
conservation areas and national parks: We were surprised to find out that you
have to pay for your inactivity and non-interference with nature, and pay a
high price.
Scenery means an
aesthetically developed area. Distortion and disturbance of sceneries is a
cultural, historical, ecological, and aesthetic crime that is still not liable
to punishment, at least in Russia.
Place is a unit of
space in geography. Just like a geometric and material point, a place has no
dimensions and no properties. A place is a basic ultimate object in geography,
just like an event in history.
In terms of any
territory, there are two approaches or consideration concepts:
·
The
concept of a blank slate, a palimpsest (a parchment used one or more times
after earlier writing has been erased)
·
The
concept of buried layers (just like in an icon, when a new image is painted
over the old one).
·
It
should also be mentioned that there are two types of territory use:
·
Development,
i. e. transformation of the place/territory, re-ontologization
Mastering, i. e. improvement of
operational means and methods within the territory/place.
Thus, we can use the following basic matrix:
|
"parchment" (a blank slate) |
"icon" (the buried layers of sedimentary
culture) |
Development |
Moscow, Manhattan |
Jerusalem, Athens, Rome |
Mastering |
Collectivization vs individual landholdings |
Car parking vs horse standing and stalls |
For almost seven centuries now (or even more), there
has been a tyranny that, according to Aristotle, differs from monarchy by the
illegitimacy of the transfer of power. It means, with rare exceptions, murders,
usurpations, coups, revolutions, plots, vagaries, etc [1-7]. It is no wonder
that all these events are often accompanied by continuous and rampant thievery
as the most striking manifestation of lawlessness. It was probably Konstantin
Tolstoy, a Russian writer of the 19th century, who described this situation in
Russia in one word: "Voruyut!" ("They steal!"). In 1830,
Kyiv was deprived of the Magdeburg right due to the fact that the local
authorities plundered the city treasury for ten budget years in advance. During
70 years of Soviet power, the Bolsheviks, headed by their leaders, plundered
the country, its wealth and mineral resources, robbed their own people. The
current leaders are an even greater marvel of greed and covetousness. The
country has not accumulated any progressive capital, remaining merely a raw
material appendage of the developed European countries and a supplier of
weapons for everyone who can't just get along. Unlike Western countries,
throughout its history, Russia has witnessed the supremacy of politics over
economics, political over economic in social life, as well as supremacy of
political passions over administrative and economic ones. The economic
"system" of the country is still Soviet at its core. Strictly
speaking, the naive form of economic management that emerged immediately after
the revolution due to the efforts of economically incompetent and ignorant
people survived to this day. In this vein, the Soviet monopoly enterprises of
1918, including Glavsvechka, Glavspichka, and Glavdrova, are not so different
from today's corporations such as Gazprom or Rosneft. They are all ugly, rigid,
and clumsy. That is exactly why situational and operational management in
Russia is replaced by long-term planning which allows no change or development.
This economic "system" is characterized by economic coercion (which
is nowadays called encumbrance) and forced pricing (when prices are dependent
not on the interaction between demand and supply but on a third party, powerful
and political). One of the organizational factors of the economy for many
centuries has been the so-called "state goals and interests". Each
time they turned out to be the goals and interests of the ruling coterie or a
master tyrant. One of the centuries-old paradoxes of the political and economic
situation in Russia is the fact that both politics and economics have a
fundamentalist (parallelist) nature, while the financial market is
opportunistic (non-parallelist) in grain. This makes the incoherence of the
economic sphere with regard to the economy and finances inevitable.
Modern economy or, according to Aristotle's
definition, chrematistics (the art of acquisition) is going through a major
crisis that can turn into a total wreck when reaching the limit [2].
Throughout the history of the economy, money evolved
in the following way:
·
women, slaves, cattle
·
Primitive money (cowrie
shells, squirrel or marten pelts, nogata, etc.)
·
metallic coins
·
paper currency
·
non-cash money
·
local currencies
·
cryptocurrencies
(bitcoins, etc.)
These money evolution stages have some common trends
and tendencies, specifically the following:
·
The further the process
goes, the more virtual and volatile money becomes
·
The further the process
goes, the more symbolic it gets
·
The further the process
goes, the more off-limits to the masses money becomes
·
The further the process
goes, the more fragile the system gets
Throughout its history, chrematistics is
characterized by "taxes on”: On property, real estate, income, activities,
etc.
The last two centuries have passed under the banner
of technologization, which triggered both the rapid growth in labor
productivity and an ethical cataclysm: Now no one is responsible for the
integrity of the working process and the product of labor, since this process
is divided into plenty of specific procedures and operations. The sequence of
these procedures and operations is called technology. Today, true workers and
laborers are almost gone (except for poets, philosophers, painters, and
composers), but instead, the cast of office-based employees has become
widespread: These people are paid for their working time. Deep down, we hope
for salvation to come, manifesting itself as the creative class, but it is such
a weak hope since the entire technosphere, anthroposphere, and even, to a
certain extent, noosphere are technologized. In opposition to chrematistics,
the economy as the art of household management is shaping up, or rather,
resurrecting: Local economy and local currencies, as well as the gift economy.
Together they restore the ethical values we've already lost and the values we
are losing, first of all, Protestant ethic, the ascesis of hard work
(indutria), and salvation through vocation (Beruf, Calling). This type of
economy is characterized by "taxes for”. Self-taxation for land
improvement, charity, local projects and affairs. Perhaps also a new,
"game" economy lies ahead. Here are two metaphors to describe this
type of economy:
In Brazil, there is a tiny underground lottery for
the poor that came into being as an opposition to the official state lottery:
The poor can't afford the latter, and, what is most important, it is the
gambling poor who understand that there is no point in playing with the state.
The state will always win. That is why this illegal lottery with zero-sum games
is so popular. It's rather about feeling the thrill of competition than about
winning;
While professional
players (Manchester United, Barcelona, Bayern, Boeing, Colgate, Lloyd, etc.)
play on the field, the stadium tribunes are full of people who want to play
too. But they can't play against Messi, Ronaldo or Elon Musk! And that is why
they stay on the tribunes, making tiny bets offered by illegal, quasi-legal and
legal bookmakers and therefore playing too! The weakest player in the
confrontation between modern money, global cybercash, and local money, is
apparently modern money and that is why it is doomed to perish in the process
of the evolution of money. Local and global money will be separated by
membranes (semiconductors), just like spectators in a modern stadium are
separated from players by bars and policemen: Global money can be converted
into local money but local money is not exchangeable.
Infrastructure always requires redundancy
(otherwise, it turns into service and loses its intrinsic properties). The
redundancy of the financial infrastructure is ensured through the abundance of
money. By this, we mean not the money supply but a variety of types of money,
from the familiar (gold and other monetary metals, stocks, bonds, letters of
credit, and other financial instruments) to exotic ones, both circulating and
potential (vodka, clean water, time, ideas, projects, myths, utopias,
activities). In ancient times, money became a symbol of products. Together,
they formed the concept of "goods" (the word "symbol"
derives from the Greek word "together", "the second half").
The time is coming when money itself will get cluttered with various symbols,
equivalents, and synonyms. Humankind boxed itself into a technological corner
which requires a transition of the concept of infrastructure from a testing
ground and a conglobulation of technologies towards a set of reproduction
cycles that together form the polysphere. In this case, the following
reproduction (cyclic) processes should be considered as leading ones:
·
Recycling
·
Reusing
·
Renewing
·
As well as other
numerous reproduction processes (reincarnation, resuscitation, reproduction,
rebirth, return, etc.)
Alongside the
aforementioned cycles, compact (both in time and in space) ephemeral twisters
of ideas, projects, utopias, etc. are shaping up too. While these twisters
"hover" in a homogeneous environment or sphere, nothing happens, but
as soon as a twister's foot is formed (as soon as it is able to contact with
and penetrate into other spheres), a "vortex" is released. This vortex
is called innovation. Gradually, very slowly, we are moving towards the
polarization of our world: We will occupy the vacant and specially protected
lands with corresponding polarized places, bearing a harmonious and naturalized
polysphere of territories, landscapes, and sceneries, disturbed by the
invigorating whirlwinds of innovations.
Formally speaking, there is no geography without
history. And for the theme of our discussion, history is particularly
essential.
A
Brief history of money
In Ancient Egypt, trade
was practically prohibited. That is why money was rarely used and often
appeared to be gold and silver bars or copper spirals. In China, there was an
agonizing search for money equivalent: Rice, salt, paper, etc. However, all
these attempts ended tragically. In India, gold circulated between the rajas
(it was basically hoarded), while silver was a currency of merchants and copper
was the currency of all the others. Money became a regular occurrence in
Ancient Greece which created a peculiar symbolic economy ("symbol"
means "half" in Greek), where the product turned into an item of
goods only after acquiring its specific symbol, i. e. price and some description.
This system gave birth to modern price lists, bills of lading, instructions for
the use of medicines, and other documents. Ancient Greeks, who used small
cattle as money (pecos), quickly realized that this kind of "money"
is prolific. As a compromise between the owner of the livestock and its holder,
the idea of interest emerged. Even back then, the interest rate amounted to
30%. Money as a widespread phenomenon is
indelibly linked to the market economy. And it's a curious chapter in history.
In his book "The Germania", Tacitus says that the Germanic tribes of
the 1st – 2nd centuries led a semi-nomadic lifestyle: They spent two years
wandering and then returned to the abandoned camp to spend another year
engaging in crop farming in order to have enough grain for the next three
years. They would find their camps by the smell and heaps of droppings around
the perimeter of the camp, by these marks. During the period of early
feudalism, peasants who settled upon the land paid rent (mark) in kind to their
margrave (markgraf/feudal landowner). Excess payments entered the barter market
[5]. The situation changed with the beginning of the Crusades. Marktplatz is
still a central square in many Central and Eastern European cities, including
Russian ones. In Scandinavia, such squares were called tork/torg, which means
"square": Hence the origin of the Russian word "torgovlya"
(trade). Feudal knights, starting for Palestine, had to exchange their real
property for movable assets (weapons, horses, squires, and soldiers of
fortune). For that, they had to melt down family silver to make coins. The
turnover of money drastically increased and began to displace bartering in the
market. The second factor of the rapid development of monetary circulation and
trade comes from the Age of Discovery and the gushing flow of silver and gold
from the New World. Paradoxically, the countries that stood to gain from this
flow were Germany and Switzerland. They were in the shadow of the process and
had to pit their ascesis of non-acquisitiveness and hard work (Lutheranism and
Calvinism), as well as their Protestant ethic which constituted, according to
M. Weber, the spirit of capitalism, against rolling in gold Spain, France,
Portugal, and England. The third reason was the rats: The import of rats into
the port cities of Europe led to the spread of terrible pestilences, primarily
the plague. These pestilences wiped out up to two-thirds of the population of
Europe. Depopulation resulted in the fact that professionals and the fruits of
professional labor became scarce. Previously, hired labor was despised
(according to Cicero) or didn't exist at all: Peasants did not work for hire;
they were owned by a feudal they worked for. The introduction of hired labor
gave rise to the pricing and consumer market model. The 16th century went down
in history as "The Little Ice Age": 84 years of this century were
lean. The famine was so severe that human flesh was sold in the markets of
France [3,8] and caused more deaths than any pestilences. This greatly affected
the shortage of workers and professional skills. And finally, Jews became yet
another reason for the growth of money turnover. After the Reconquista was
complete, Queen Isabella ordered all Moors and Jews who refused baptism to
leave the Iberian Peninsula. They were banned from taking away money, objects
of value, and such. Many Moors went through Gibraltar and Tarifa to Africa,
while Jews went through the Pyrenees to Europe. Before leaving, all the Jews
had to make up a property inventory (it was initially called a membrane) in the
presence of a rabbi and eleven witnesses. With this piece of paper that was
technically not worth a penny, they got underway to produce it in a fellow
subject's bank somewhere in Lombardy, in the hope of securing a credit
equivalent to the sum of inventory. Soon those membranes received the name of
banknotes and turned into paper money. They were not real money and that is why
we will call them finances. Money (metallic coins) and especially finances have
become the most important tools (financial instruments) of the market economy
and its institutions (financial institutions), including banks, loan offices,
insurance offices, trusts, pawnshops, stock exchanges, etc. Suffice it to
recall that the first bourse in Bruges (16th century) was set up by Jewish
brokers. The term "bourse" probably appeared because the sign of
three purses ("borse") hung on the front of the house where merchants
met. Exchange trade (without any goods) first used metal money. Traders'
wallets were stuffed with coins. Then exchange trade developed its own
financial instruments, futures and options. Money is a fairly modern
phenomenon, however, the quite objective laws of money had been formed and
formulated in the course of economic history long before we were born. We will only mention two of them.
The
Fisher equation
MV=PQ
Where: M is money supply,
V is velocity of circulation,
P is price of goods,
Q is quantity of goods
Due to the extensive trade infrastructure, cities
manage to sell and resell the same goods several times. An increase in the
money supply velocity also causes the rate of inflation to increase.
Gresham's
law of the monetary systems (the Law of Hoarding)
Bad money tends to
drive good money out of circulation: For instance, nobody is willing to part
with gold, hereby turning it into a treasure (thesaurus). Gresham's law
underwrites the activities of counterfeiters: Everyone tries to get rid of
dubious money which, as a result, rapidly gets into circulation.
To a great extent, money disagrees with geography
and geographical analysis: it strives for cosmopolitanism, while geography
looks for spatial differences. Maybe, this is exactly the reason why most
geographers suffer from the lack of money. Cowrie shells, scattered along the
shores of the World Ocean, were used as the first means of payment. They meet
all the requirements applied to money as a universal store of value and,
therefore, a universal medium of exchange, payment, and accumulation:
·
They are beautiful
·
They are all the same
·
They are timeproof
·
They won't deteriorate
·
They are of no
practical and utilitarian use and are therefore completely useless beyond the
scope of exchange and trade.
Various ancient
currencies within the Ecumene laid claim to being cosmopolitan, including Greek
talent, drachma, obol, and lepta and Roman denarius, quinarius, and sestertius.
Crucially, any currency all over the world represented the trimetallic (gold,
silver, and copper) or bimetallic system. Only recently, mints began using
nickel and alloys. Even in the Middle Ages, when monetary diversity flourished,
all European coins were freely convertible: Doubloons, florins, guilders,
thalers, marks, piastres, guineas, pounds, ecu, francs, and other coins could
be freely exchanged in almost any European city, though the reputation of many
currencies was sometimes greatly tarnished by the "weight reduction"
of money and the introduction of various admixtures, which even included clay. Money
in Russia and in ancient Rus wasn't really money in the usual sense of the
word, neither in their origin was (tamga a customs tax to the Golden Horde) nor
in their nature: Kyiv princes paid off their bogatyrs with grivnas. Those were
necklaces made of silver. A ruble was considered to be a cutout piece of the
grivna. The depreciation of the Moscow ruble compared to the Novgorod ruble
under the rule of Ivan the Terrible was so severe that the unfortunate Novgorod
was finally drowned in blood. The government of Tsar Alexis Mikhailovich tried
to issue copper money in large quantities to equate them with silver money
which led to the Copper Coin Riot. Peter I, after the decisive victory over the
Swedish Empire forces, nearly introduced the wooden ruble. Stalin and
Khrushchev personally set the official exchange rate of the ruble, as well as
its gold content, and these are just a few examples. Today, there are four
global currencies in the world: Dollar, euro, pound sterling, and yen. The
Chinese yuan is also heading towards the big four, but that's it. These five
currencies are hardly a vast geographic footprint. The Jews, these same old
cosmopolitans played a prominent role in the cosmopolitanization of money
circulation by means of paper money (at the turn of the 16th century).
The introduction of membranes (also known as
banknotes, future promissory notes, and letters of credit) caused the
devaluation of money. Its value was measured by the weight of gold and silver
(and copper) and equated with the value of goods. Paper money and finances that
originated in them are fragile, ephemeral, have no direct bearing on goods and
services, and therefore are risky and fraught with crises, in particular,
crises of credit and trust because it is generally assumed that something real
and valuable lie behind these pieces of paper or computer bytes. Though, in
truth, there is nothing of the sort. Finances are secondary money that is even
more conventional and virtual than the universal equivalent to everything. And
these convention and virtuality, as well divorcement from the real economy, and
even more so from the household management, turn financial instruments into an
even riskier means. While money goes for convertibility, finances, for all
their pronounced cosmopolitanism, is always specialized and functional, and
therefore it is hard to imagine a pension contribution that is exchanged for a
bill of exchange, a letter of credit that is exchanged for a block of shares,
or a loan that is exchanged for an insurance policy, although it is exactly
this kind of frauds that was highly popular and widespread in the first half of
the 1990s in Russia that yearned for both real money and real financial
instruments after the period of Soviet power. One of the most important
financial instruments is investments. During the Soviet era, capital investment
financing (that was the name for investments back then) was consolidated in the
State Planning Committee, the State Construction Committee, and the State Bank
(Ministry of Finance) of the USSR. Every business executive dreamed of getting
into the State Planning Committee limits: Even those investment objects that
were included in the five-year plans (these plans basically acted as state
laws) were not guaranteed to get into the State Planning Committee limits.
Planned and reporting information on the capital investments, as well as on
their territorial and sector-specific profiles, was kept in strict confidence
and wasn't available to researchers, including geographers. Perhaps, that is
what accounts for the fact that Russian geography lacks serious influencers,
traditions, and methods of investment analysis. Transport, Transfer, and
Transactions (Financial and Cash Flows) as an Object of Geographical Research.
It is clear that tangles of financial instruments and money also spawn more
intensive flows. In the real economy, it is inconceivable that 80–90% of the
country's finances and money are concentrated in one and the same place, while
transport and economic links between cities and regions only run through the
center. However, financial geography tolerates such madness. This
super-concentration of finances is typical of all the fields of the world
economy, though in a much more moderate shape. New York, Chicago, London,
Paris, and Tokyo are the quintessence of the global financial system. But in
this case, Zipf's law should rather be applied: The level of finance
concentration in the N center is equal to the level of finance concentration in
the first city (New York), divided by the rank of the N center. According to
Fernand Braudel, goods are usually sold eight times on their way from the
manufacturer to the end consumer. The intensity of transactions in the
financial market is usually even higher [8]. Nowadays, thanks to the Internet,
transfer and transaction rates are close to zero-transportation, the dream of
science fiction writes of the second half of the previous century
(zero-transportation is the term introduced by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky in
their science fiction novels with the fictional future setting called "The
Noon Universe" (Russian: "Mir Poludnya") – a fantastic method of
transportation without loss of time). Strange as it may seem, these absolutely
insane, fantastic rates made the financial and monetary system even more
vulnerable and risky. Now money can be made and wrung out of thin air. Whereas
feudal lords of the beginning of the second millennium BC had to spend months
or even years to exchange their real property for movable assets, today such a
transaction, property transfer from hand to hand, takes even less time than
shaking hands. Today, financial movements and transport are kept off the radar
for commercial reasons. However, as early as only 20–30 years later, people
will be genuinely surprised at why we and our ancestors were trying so hard to
keep in secret something that should be plain to see. Any financial institution
(bank, stock exchange, insurance company, pension fund, trust, etc.) is just a
trick that encompasses a plenitude of incoming and outgoing flows. With modern
means of communication, this trick can be both virtual and fragmented into many
tiny tricks. If this is the case, then our traditional decent geography won't
be able to do or analyze anything.
The geography of activities is yet young. We have a
good knowledge of production geography. Much less we are competent in
consumption geography. We know nothing about the reproductive geography and we
are absolutely blind to the geography of activities and the geography of
financial activity, in particular. It is clear now that the distribution
(transport) of finances is not channeled in any way and has no
institutionalized "communication routes." Swift (Society for
Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication) is a very cumbersome
international interbank system for transferring information and making
payments. It was founded in 1973 and includes more than 9,000 banks from 209
countries (as of 2010). It covers only the banking sector of the financial market
and only partially. It is also clear that, just like radiation and neutrinos,
finances are all-pervading and, like neutrinos, are believed not to have any
rest mass at all, are in constant motion, therefore, it is extremely difficult
from a geographical point of view to hold them fix and locate. The formula for
making pizza in any pizzeria includes the cost of all pizza ingredients and its
final price, which can include even the cost of home delivery. It's a financial
transaction well-cooked at 500 ºF. What is the point and sense of financial
activities? The hypothesis involves the simple idea of formalizing the
relationship between administrative and economic entities. If today's economy
(chrematistics) is the art of acquisition, then the economy as the art of
household management (or, to be precise, the art of housekeeping) can also
exist and it does, for example, in the form of the gift economy, and,
therefore, there can be other economies, other finances as well. If social and
financial technologies dominate in chrematistics (society as a means of finance
or wealth accumulation), then financial and social technologies should dominate
in the gift economy (finances as a means of growth in prosperity). A loan can,
just like it does nowadays, have positive interest rates. But its interest
rates can be also negative since the money of the future is always worse and
less reliable than real money. Financial activity as such is meaningless. And
the more meaningless money and finance are, the more intense the financial
activity and its actors get. Thus, finances can act as an indicator of
administrative and economic activity. The active trading in the financial
market means the loss of the significance of other activities, in full
accordance with Fisher's law: The less bread is produced, the faster it rises
in value and the more intermediaries there are between the cropland and the
grocery shelves, and thus, the longer the queues in the stores are. The
shortage of goods in the late 80s – early 90s of the last century is a most
striking example of it. Even W. Sombart (1863–1941) warned that the domination
of the production and supply over consumption and demand in the market is
inherent in the fact that it can become more profitable for a manufacturer not
to produce goods since a shortage causes prices to rise [9]. This was
brilliantly illustrated by the Soviet economy in the last decades and years of
its existence. If we imagine the distribution of finances and the junction
points of their flows as a map, we will see a map of life devaluation. We will
learn that meaninglessness is the main backdrop to our life and the sources of
meaningfulness are extremely rare, small-scale, and exclusive. Thus, we finally
arrived at the key aspect of this article, to the concept of a financial place.
The idea of a place is closely associated with the
acknowledgment of the discreteness of space. A place, like an event in history,
is (or can be) an ideal object. A place is a unit of infinite space, just like
a beat of waves of the beach is a unit of infinite time (the Russian word
"raz", meaning "time" as in "time, and time again, and
a third time", derives from the Greek word "???", meaning
"a blow" or "to beat"). A place (top, locus, and situation)
should represent the reduction of some spot in space, and therefore it is
important to understand what is reduced and abstracted (i. e. raised to the
degree of indeterminacy) and from what:
Coordinate
determinacy is replaced by spatial indeterminacy which is expressed with such
words as "somewhere", "here", "there", "over
here", and "over there". A place is a trace of activity in
space: Not every activity, and not always, leaves traces. A financial place, in
our opinion, is the fragment of space in which financial instruments and money
act as the dominant element of the goings-on and as their goal. To describe the
construction (structure) of the concept of a financial place, let us prescribe
a certain conceptual matrix. The gap between economically rational disposition
and reasonable location is filled with the entire world minus economic
rationality. And therefore, understanding the laws of location means
understanding the laws of existence too. Or, we can just persuade ourselves
that such laws do not exist, end of story. Let's try to single out some of the
laws of spatial location, or, better said, the laws of appropriateness.
Every location strives to be what it is. The world
resists changes with its every place and at the same time is susceptible to
change in its every place. We can easily throw a stone into the water but the
waves, travelling in concentric circles and created at the point of contact of
the stone with water, quickly die out and the pond regains its former calm and
unruffled appearance.
Any location tends to iterate the entire cosmos. Every
place has everything that this place can hold and therefore everything new that
appears in the given place displaces some existing things or deforms the
existing things with its proximity. Americans do not banish wild animals and
birds from their cities but staying in the cities, these living creatures turn
into a loathsome company, into beggars, into enemies and victims of
domesticated nature (pets and house plants) and technology (cars, roads, etc.).
Any location, even a completely artificial one, is a
complex. A complex is a natural or naturalized combination. The process of
naturalization includes the establishment of new connections and linkages that
give a touch of completeness and perfection of place to the morphology of the
material. We are meant to understand and feel this through the beauty and
harmony of every place, even if it is a terrible harmony. Activity is not to be
placed. It positions itself on its own in the course of its historical
development. At the same time, intersections and intertwinements with other
types of activities are also important, for example, intertwinement of
winemaking with culinary and other arts, or with recreational activities. These
intertwinements and combinations already make cause-and-effect relationships
disappear. However, everything seeks connection with everything else, drawing
its meaningfulness from both itself and its linked environment.
Any location is already performed and therefore
perfect. Any act of disposition sooner or later "dies" in the
location and finds the desired peace of a place. At the same time, space
possesses the following properties:
Holism is the continuity of space in time. A historian is happy to cut time into periods and epochs, whereas a geographer cherishes the continuity of time, dynamics, the course of development, there is no timelessness for him or her but it's the opposite in history. Think, for instance, of any chronology: Only a tiny fraction of time is lined with events. Everything else is ignored. A geographer can only take similar liberties with space, while treating time with deep respect. Continuity is the continuity of space in space. A geographer rarely thinks about holes in space and cannot stand the speculations on interregional voids. A geographer can always find other places on the way from one place to another. And, despite the fact that a geographer thinks of the world in spots and areas, he or she always demonstrates professional fortitude, pulling such spots together. Districts are typical closed areas. Being morphologists in their nature, geographers transform the discreteness of the world into such indicators as density. We are talking not about the density of space but about the density of its content (population density, road density, grass or stand density, phytoplankton population density, etc.). Most often, the density, with its fundamental or devised threshold indicators, becomes the basis for dividing territories into districts, zones, etc. Geographers exist in both continual and discrete spaces. It is the discreteness of the world that makes it possible to draw boundaries which is a fundamental part of the work of any geographer, regardless of his or her specialization. Discreteness justifies the juxtaposition, location, and other objective characteristics of certain objects existing in space. With regard to money and financial instruments, this matrix shall be interpreted as follows:
Properties laws |
Holism |
Continuity |
Discreteness |
Monotony |
ubiquity |
presence of a unit of price measurement |
concentration and presence of centers |
Versatility |
transference |
convertibility |
globalization |
Naturality |
absence of stationary mass |
conformity to the nature of the economy |
conciseness |
Perfection |
completeness of actions |
security |
place localization |