Long but important. Well-documented.
Read it at Washington's Blog
Lack of Trust – Caused by Institutional Corruption – Is Killing the Economy
by Washington'sBlog
(h/t Yves Smith)
Fits right in with P. R. Sarkar's (Shri Shri Anandamurti) theory of social change and Ravi Batra's application of it in the present context.
4 comments:
Not just killing the economy, but unraveling the social fabric.
What disturbs me is the catastrophically low trust of the US Congress. How can a country maintain a democracy if it despises its legislature so thoroughly? I’m worried that this country is poised for an authoritarian takeover by some charismatic general.
I'm going to suggest something radical. Our Institutions are corrupt because they are inherently incapable of being anything else. Joseph Taitner has a theory of social, political, and economic decline based on complexity theory which I believe has some merit.
Our system is based on the 18th century concept of representation of people by elected legislators who are in principle supprose to work for us and our interest. Let's think about it. In the earlier stages of our republic neither our society or our economy was very complex relative to today's social and economy and the number of people per respresentative was considerably lower that it is today. So by complexitity theory there has to a point where the growth in complexity and ability to transfer vital information from the people to the representative class disconnect. Each representative in congress supposedly represents about 800,000 people and if we assume that 1 in every 1000 has some important information needed for effective legislative action or congressional oversight do the math that gives each congressman 36 seconds to assimilate the information that 1 in a 1000 has assume a 8 hour work day in which he does nothing else. Even if we are to assume an even higher ratio of 1 in every 10k person has vital information there is simply no way a single congressmen could every claim to represent such a large number in any equal and fair manner. I conclude from this fact is basis for what we institutional corruption is nothing more the logical necessity of limited representation.
In order to even appear as being functional the Congress must choose to ignore the people and simply rely on the filtered information provided by the Oligarchy. They have no choice. It is time for new form of government. The people must develop a new system of mass representation or one of direct legislative action.
We must think of process whereby we can use the tools of advanced communications to picked and sort the best ideas among ourselves and forced directly into legislatiive consideration. We must institute this new and use it to displace the old system which is no longer viable in any sense.
Exactly. As organizations become more complex, do does their organization. There is a "law of diminishing returns" wrt to the size and complexity of an organization.
Two solutions have been proposed recently. The first is expanding the number of representatives proportionately to reflect population growth over time, and secondly, to institute direct democracy now that it has become feasible technically.
A lot of this will be resolved with the development of AI, but that is years away. But in time, decision-making will become digitized. By then brains will have come passé. But we aren't there yet.
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