Tuesday, March 19, 2013

How To Avoid Colossal Mistakes - like Orthodox Economics?

Commentary by Roger Erickson

It's actually tragically comical that we're still having this same discussion, 2000+ years after Sun Tzu, Buddha or Socrates.

The answer is simple. We avoid making foolish, arrogant presumptions on a grand scale. Examples are legion, so let's just list a few, recent tokens.

First we slaughter 40,000 elephants (passenger pigeon, bison, Grand Banks etc)?
Now, we're decimating and exhausting the US middle class.

Will we recognize our error - again - soon enough this time? We never have. Bookies overwhelmingly have the USA disappearing within 100 years.

What COULD we be doing, in known practice, to improve our survival odds? More common sense, less presumptions? That's how we could avoid big mistakes. Yet we rarely focus quite enough on the long term. We're conservative at heart, and won't change until an alternative is proven beyond all doubt. So-called "conservatives" maintain an evolutionary recovery path, and "liberals" explore those emerging evolutionary options which are eventually adopted by surviving mixes of both camps. Why on earth they ever fight over the unavoidable partnership is beyond me, but there must be a sound evolutionary reason for it. Perhaps squabbling groups are slightly more agile when it comes to keeping our center of cultural gravity closer to a meandering survival path? Our fall back method for maintaining distributed feedback is distributed squabbling? We can do far better than that. Argument is just crude vs sophisticated negotiation.

Whatever the reason, here's what always seems to happen.

A situation with, say, N variables, grows into a situation with N+y variables.

No matter how much we know about the original N variables, if we miss the fact that the degrees of freedom have expanded from all permutations of N variables, to all permutations of N+y variables ... we have gross uncertainty, not just knows risks, and are highly likely to completely miss any newly optimal paradigm!

Sound familiar? That's basically the reason why all species evolve limited lifespans, and spawn new generations de novo, for new situations. That's how biological species avoid prolonged bias.

Human nomads did this just fine for >100K years ... until we developed "cultures" and started demanding stable "traditions." Almost all cultural traditions are suicide as situations change - but which rare ones aren't? We can only discover THAT by trial & error. 

Biologically, we're honest about mixing, and we respect the awesome adaptive power of Sexual Recombination. Why then, are we so biased against Cultural Recombination? Quite literally, we need to be screwing more cultural traditions, and remixing our cultural cuisine as rapidly and thoroughly as possible. Someone's mis-educating our kids to think otherwise, and it's killing us. Humans used to be able to go anywhere and become anything - within one generation. Then we got infected with mass culture and mass religion, which we had no naturally acquired cultural immunity to. Any survivors, however, will be increasingly immune to mass cultural pathogens.

Further, why on earth are we so ideologically biased against selecting from our own, intrinsic Options Recombination palette? We have an options cuisine unparalled in human history, and we're being picky, insisting on sticking to meat & potato policy options?

@#$%^&! Who cares about inane debates between orthodox economic theorists, who wouldn't know real-world operations if they tripped over one? They sound like cowardly, irrelevant, already dead rabbits pompously philosophising over YOUR, not just their accepted fate. DeLong & Krug-bunnies? Just switch the channel off and turn away. Nothing to see here. Go back to exploring your real world operations. Before it's too late, and the habit is lost.


Back to reality, and our task of changing methods fast enough to keep up with changing options. We can't accelerate human generational turnover fast enough, so we may have to make humans and human culture more agile, so each generation can go through many more changes within one lifetime. Or do something unexpected.

Psychologically, no adult generation is never prepared for the emerging rate of change that it, itself generates! But whatever they start with ... is all that our kids know! Piece of cake, for embryos, for kids and for continuous cultural-embryogenesis. Mostly, we need to teach kids & grandkids existing key principles, plus how to arduously select extremely rare, newly emerging, key principles.  Then we need to get us and most of our traditions the hell out of their way.

Mathematically, and in peasant logic, it's simple. Instead, we've royally screwed up our mass education ideology. We're actually working hard to educate people to be less, not more, adaptive. Worse yet, most of the world desperately wants to emulate the USA as is!

Some of us will survive this, but there's no telling whom. Do you love your kids? How about the kids in your neighborhood? What could you tell people, fast enough, to make a difference for very many of them? How about this as a start?

"It's not about balancing fiat [whatever THAT means]. It's about exploring emerging real options."


9 comments:

Tom Hickey said...

Why on earth they ever fight over the unavoidable partnership is beyond me, but there must be a sound evolutionary reason for it. Perhaps squabbling groups are slightly more agile when it comes to keeping our center of cultural gravity closer to a meandering survival path?

That't the conclusion I've come to. Messy, but that's what we've evolved so far.

Our fall back method for maintaining distributed feedback is distributed squabbling?

Reflective of the level of collective consciousness. As a species we are evolving in the direction of greater universality, and we've beat our closest primate relatives by a huge margin. But there is still as vast horizon before us.

We can do far better than that. Argument is just crude vs sophisticated negotiation.

The driver and obstacle at the same time is interest. To the degree that interest has not been universalized ("we are all in this together," "all of one and one for all," "do unto others...") interest is vested, and there are turf battles.

We as radicals can see the opportunities but are neutralized by the process that creates drag in oder to avoid consequences of rashness.

It works as long as innovation doesn't increase complexity too fast. The problem is that now we are creating problems on a scale that we cannot scale solutions to.

Adaptability is now scalability in the age of globalization and the globalization of challenges. So far we've scaled up the industrial age to the degree that we've fouled the nest.

Can we ramp up solutions in time to keep from poisoning ourselves as a species? It's nip and tuck at this point, with a lot of promise from innovation and a lot of drag due to ignorance and interests vested in the status quo.

It may be that some pruning is in store.

Roger Erickson said...

Right, Tom.

We seem to be fusing biology & philosphy, and converging our jargon & semantics more all the time.

ps: "pruning" ain't the way I'd characterize what's coming;

"culling" seems more appropriate :)

Roger Erickson said...

ps: Most people don't understand the way we're using "scalability"

Not every process or institution or even population has to scale up, but net options have to scale, as the Product of population_X_capabilities.

Tom Hickey said...

"culling" seems more appropriate :)

Agree.

Also agree that scalability is the issue. The knowledge is there, and so are the resources. We just can't scale them up as a species to meet emerging challenges from increasing complexity very well. It's largely a coordination problem to begin with and then it becomes an engineering problem wrt design and implementation. If we could remove the obstacles, the path would become obvious. It's not a matter of developing new knowledge at this point, although some innovation wrt energy is needed, like it would be nice to have fusion.

Tom Hickey said...

BTW, most of this has been said decades ago by the like of R. Buckminster Fuller and Kenneth E. Boulding.

BTW, Randy is an expert in Boulding and Mathew Forstater teaches the class in Environment, Resources, And Economic Growth at UMKC.

So these ideas are familiar to MMT economists also.

Roger Erickson said...

We've had ecologists & evolutionary biologists discussing these things for decades before either Boulding or Fuller were born. We've had scattered people discussing such ideas off & on for well over 2000 years.

What we don't have are methods for getting consensus across multiple, increasingly isolated disciplines, OR focus of all on consensus principles as the goal.

We have pragmatic individuals, and even small groups. However, show me a pragmatic nation!

Doesn't matter what some individuals know. America can't get itself to know what Americans know - soon enough to matter. We need adequate population penetration agreeing upon that as the key to pragmatic, national agility.

No one can predict what methods would get us there. We just need to bite the bullet and get more practice?

Tom Hickey said...

We've had ecologists & evolutionary biologists discussing these things for decades before either Boulding or Fuller were born.

That may be, but in the Sixties and Seventies, people like Fuller and Boulding were cultural icons, and most literate people in the counterculture read them and discussed them in the exploration of options.

Now forgotten and not replaced when the counterculture was co-opted, corporatized, and went mainstream — for a price. The commercialization of music is a good example that everyone is familiar with, and out of that came copyrights and a lockdown on intellectual and artistic property.

The only way the ideas were scalable was through commercialization and they were quickly stripped of the spirit. IN fact, Woodstock was the winding down of the countercultural era and the beginning of the commercial one.

If that wasn't scalable in a way that left the ideas intact, I don't know what will be. In all likelihood, things would have to get so bad globally, the masses would rise up angry. and then the outcome would be very uncertain, since history show that crowdsourcing under such circumstances can produce very different outcomes.

Roger Erickson said...

"If that wasn't scalable in a way that left the ideas intact, I don't know what will be."

It wasn't, obviously.

No one knows what will be. Guess we gotta go back to massively parallel trial & error - and be flexible enough to accept whatever does, even if it doesn't fit our feeble expectations. :)

Tom Hickey said...

On the other hand, a lot of the countercultural revolution did scale and very quickly. People that grew up subsequently aren't aware of this, but if you grew up in the forties and fifties, as I did, the transformation was huge, but the cost was pretty high too.

It could be that we are approaching another transformational turning point, as Strauss & Howe, and Ravi Batra predict, but this time more political and economic than social and cultural.