“PROSPER RETURNS BEAT THE S&P 500″! Who the hell is the S&P 500, anyway? Sounds impressive, and old. I probably need a lot of money to invest in that one. While I have the foggiest inkling of who the S&M 500 is, I have a better idea of who I’m lending money to through Prosper.com, a lending exchange that I have been lending through since June.

Face to face lending through the security glass of the internet is profitable and fun. While the thought of giving money to a complete stranger who rocked up to his computer with a loan request and a photo of his dog as title, may sound reckless to all y’all, I will simply continue to ask: who is the S&P 500 to you?

Since I started lending, I’ve been competing somewhat with a friend whose investment portfolio and bidding history are as completely open to public scrutiny through such tools as LendingStats and Eric’s Credit Community as my own. Every listing I have bid on and the status of my loans are there for all to see. I am an open book. Don’t like my investment choices, you have got the evidence to confront me.

LendingStats and Eric’s Credit Community manage my confessions. How good I am is for them to figure. All I have to do is take responsibility. And I have to take responsibility, because the internet will never forget. It has registered my contractual commitments. Oh, the Internet, it may just be a more belligerent grudge holder than the Holy Ghost.

But what do I have to hide? Not that many people actually care about individual lenders or borrowers. All the discourse I have encountered is concerned with understanding the crowds: the lenders, borrowers, and groups as wholes. Financial analysts don’t want to see the face of individual lenders and borrowers, they want to see the face of the whole.

While I see little wrong with that, I think us lenders need to make it more complicated for them to pin us down, and by that I mean we need to be able to unpin ourselves. P2P Loans need to become liquitable. Imagine an exchange for issued Prosper.com loans. There’s nothing inconceivable about it and it will only serve to benefit the market by giving it a security that is extra-theoretical.

The ability to transfer loans, that is to trade them for money, will give a better sense to lenders of the worth of their portfolio than would a comparison to statistical computed probability of loan defaults. Furthermore, it will increase the amount of money in the peer to peer market because more lenders will be attracted to the table by the ability to sell their loans if they happen to need cash for another investment. For borrowers that means there will be more lenders out there.

A different sort of analysis will then take place, instead of these discussions over the abstract groups of borrowers and lenders, specific interest will be taken in the lenders and borrowers themselves. If I prove to be a discerning lender, other lenders or even institutions may take note of me – for it may just prove to be of financial worth to buy a piece of my portfolio.

Transferability will be the challenge to Ian Ayres’s conclusion in Super Crunchers: “We are living in an age when dispersed discretion is on the wane.” Increased transferability will keep the tension between dispersed discretion and centralized authority.

The finance industry will be crowd sourced. And as it so remains by such developments as increased transparency and transferability, I will continue to have this choice, to refuse to sit here and be what I have become. I will be able to trade it.

Among practical men the idea prevails that Government can do nothing but “keep the peace.” They say all higher tasks are unsafe for it, impossible for it,–and in fine not necessary for it or for us. …

Keeping of the peace is the function of a policeman, and but a small fraction of that of any Government, King or Chief of men. Are not all men bound, and the Chief of men in the name of all, to do properly this: To see, so far as human effort under pain of eternal reprobation can, God’s Kingdom incessantly advancing here below, and His will done on Earth as it is in Heaven? On Sundays your Lordship knows this well; forgot it not on week-days. I assure you it is forevermore a fact. That is the immense divine and never-ending task which is laid on every man, and with unspeakable increase of emphasis on every Government or Commonwealth of men. Your Lordship, that is the basis upon which peace and all else depends! That basis once well lost, there is no peace capable of being kept,–the only peace that could then be kept is that of the churchyard.

- Thomas Carlyle, The New Downing Street.

Part answer: The Global Brain.

I think there is a communism that will not fail to deliver. The Israelites in the desert, or Jesus with his disciples, or the community of the Spirit (for they were all filled by the Spirit) in Acts 4:31ff – are all examples of classless societies (in the guise of first feudalism-God the suzerain, then a monarchy-Christ the King, and then ?-the Spirit the ?). And why they worked, I think was because the principal of justice was in their midst. But they all appear to have been temporary societies, they appear to have failed in time. Or did they? What do you think?

- something I posted on Jono’s blog that I had just that day developed a little more extensively in my head, but not yet in writing. The musing continues:

Of course everything I’m saying is debatable – but that’s part of the point – it is being debated, which means there is something there. The Levites, a class, but potentially a misappropriation of the word. [1 In addition there are some interesting discussions out there (Gottwald, Bloch) that’d suggest so much as that the ancient Israelites in Egypt ran a sort of ‘peasants revolt’ against the Egyptians with revolutionary focus and unity on YHWH and his promised city. Appropriating that thought to the Jews at the time of Jesus – that is Jesus and his coup of Jerusalem. And then for the folks in Acts – the revolutionary focus is on the Spirit and the Coming Kingdom.

… none of God’s social experiments ‘worked’ or at least had staying power. The desert community that together ate the same meal over and over again soon forgot their YHWH, his political system not practical or enlightened enough or something. Thus more practical gods, say the fertility inducing Baal, and more human leadership, say that one would have in a king, were sought after.

Christ’s little order of merry disciples didn’t have much staying power either – donkey riding, palm leaves, and miracle menus didn’t keep the disciples from packing it in and going back to fishing.

And the little community in acts – their spirit centeredness quickly seems to fade into the “larger political system” – note how by the end a Levite (!) sold some property and brought the money to the feet of the apostles. Difference established that seems out of kilter to verses prior.

… there is a curious progression here … . An evolving relationship to an incarnation of god and a morphing notion of the coming city/community are both at the centre of these revolutionary-like groupings of people.

The free market imperative: “Innovate!” [1]

Communist China’s political idea: “Continuous revolution”. [2]

The Presbyterian motto: “Ecclesia Reformata, Semper Reformanda” [3]
Within all three of these statements is contained a force of iconoclasm reconciled with a force of reconstruction.

The innovator takes on set methods with a new method – one more cost effective, more efficient, and more thrilling. The communist storms illegitimate bases of authority to open up space for more principled engineering. The reformer hammers institutionalized diversions from the truth to open a space for the return of truth.

While Calvin opposed claims that he was an innovator, I’d argue that the sense of the word is different than the one used today. Innovation, continuous revolution, and continuous reformation share in a sense of moderation. Well done they navigate between the past and the future, between the way things just are and the new that is better.

The relationship of the three concepts, each coming from different spheres – political, economic, religious – contribute an interesting figure to consider, because the three concepts are potentially so similar.

Upon the reconciled grounds of these three concepts, could the three spheres be reconciled?