Journal WillWare's Journal: Helping local business
People have often talked about supporting their own local economy in the context of helping the economy overall. There are even folks who like the idea of creating a local currency. I think these are good ideas.
The recession is like a bunch of dominoes. Each domino has continuous inputs and internal state variables (orientation and momentum), and a discrete output (falling over), so each domino amplifies the pervasive phenomenon of falling over. A company's discrete output is the decision to lay people off. So there's a thing here of amplifying the bad karma and passing it along to others. One preventive measure would be to avoid needing to pass along bad karma: a company with better financials can sustain more troublesome inputs before it is forced to lay people off. In the domain of human relations, some people can take a lot more crap than others before snapping at somebody else. So this amounts to good management.
Maybe supporting the local economy is a form of good management? Maybe a local currency can better represent values that are cherished locally but dissed by the wider economy? Maybe it doesn't matter where the money goes, as long as it keeps moving around? Maybe keeping the money local prevents it getting sucked into some value-sink in Washington or Wall Street?
Supposing I can absorb abuse for a longer time before passing along bad karma, this may reduce the net intensity of bad karma but it lengthens its total lifetime. In a perfect world one could hope to reduce both the intensity and the total lifetime of bad karma. This reminds me of an interesting result from control theory: if there is any frequency for which the system's gain is exactly -1, you end up with instability, or persistent oscillations. This is called the Bode stability criterion. Here's another link.