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\chapter{}
Enter cliometrics. If legend, folktale, myth
is a form of information and meta-history,
featuring un-individualized heros as variables, then cliometrics is meta-meta-history ---
the kind that makes it easier to match events
up to number-series and can incorporate
genetics-as-coded-logic --- which itself can
be used as a kind of history (as history can be
used as a kind of genetics). Each particular
person, each event generated becomes a variable in a statistical series. Chosen events in
a time series are matched up to chosen sets of
self-transmitting individuals. Cliometrics is
a sub-branch of those statistical time-series
that computer archeologists are so found of
retrojecting back to creation in the attempt to
make history compatible with logical operations. Cliometrics is quantified history in
which people and events are graded along
an importance-scale and matches up to a
time-scale established by archeology and
evolution. Cliometrics, more than any other
kind of historiography, is computer-compatible history.
But then, ascent-mythology reenters. All
event-clusters on an evolutionary series are
in fact fungible. The billions-years-trajectory
is mapped onto a short stretch of human
history, just as an infinity of natural whole
numbers can be, say, mapped onto all the
possible fractions between one and two. But
like any series, such a construct depends on
the measurable regularity of events. Catastrophe, the unexpected, must be integrated,
smoothed out. The catastrophe is cut apart into small segments, the compression stretched
out and we see that event in regularized, even
fragments. Why evolution --- which is supposed to move in glacially incremental
steps --- is matched up to history --- which
takes place in only a short time --- is an
obsession --- progress, growth, incremental
gain --- that the 19th century foisted on us.
Humans have not changed, not evolved, in
all the time they have been on earth.
Then the proposition that evolution, as
applied to humans and their history, is the
movement from simple to complex, from
less to more, from worse to better, from chaos
to order, from primal virus to sub-human to
human to angelic to god, doesn't work.
Whereas the latest studies are purported to
demonstrate that more than fifty percent of
the economy is information work, a case can
be made that whatever the conditions, peasant, primitive,
factory worker, more than
fifty percent of the work was \emph{always} informational. (Which intrudes a touch of the
miraculous, for when, how and with what
blinding speed, did humans become the way
they are?)
The very act of selection, grading and
valuation, in order to constitute part of the
latest national rememberance-treasury of
our enterprise, to make it fit to be good will,
it must now be said that these events are
convertible into these numbers, these increments. For it is part of the equity, the capitalization placed retroactively into the start
up of the enterprise; a set of past events
converted into numbered, stored and convertable values. After all, even eventless,
invested capital must have some history. In
any pool of money, there lurks an implicit
collage of time series.
Now if cliometrics is to have any usefulness, not only must religious history and
mythology be quantified and arranged into
an accretive time series, but it must be valued. Once quantified they may be translated
into other metrical disciplines through a
complex series of conversions shuttling
back and forth in time. (Although, before
this can happen, a rewriting and re-evaluation of the meaning oftime itself is required.)
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