Thursday, May 9, 2013

Demand and Supply: The Fatal Flaw of Over Applying Static Logic in a Dynamic World

Commentary by Roger Erickson

THIS is the fruit of hoarding fiat?












Taslima AkhterApril 25, 2013. Two victims amid the rubble of a garment factory building collapse in Savar, near Dhaka, Bangladesh.


And the ongoing response is ... nothing? No adaptive response? The only adaptive response would have been prevention.

And ... it only gets worse!

Dan Alpert @DanielAlpert11m
Competitive devaluation now de rigueur as nations grab shares of LIMITED GLOBAL DEMAND relative to GLOBAL #OVERSUPPLY.

Limited global demand? Who and what is LIMITING global demand? And why? (Are YOUR appetites & ambitions satiated? Show me some which are!)

Oversupply? In 3.5 Billion years on this planet, have we EVER been oversupplied with anything? Not even imagination! I don't recall any mention in biology or thermodynamics about an oversupply of Adaptive Rate, or an oversupply of methods for countering entropy. Also, there's no evidence of limited demand for either. Maybe the Hubble telescope will see an inter-stellar sign saying "No Vacancy" - but our bigger problem right now is staring out from our own mirrors here on earth.

And WHY are WE (the 99% in each country) letting it happen? Are we all meekly embracing our own finality? And are we doing so without demanding to DO something meaningful with ourselves - the supply - while we're here? Our whole species is facing an ongoing BE or DO moment, and the distributed indecision is literally killing us. We can tighten the tolerance limits, but only by demanding that we supply ourselves with constantly adapting tolerance limits. We have a never-ending self-tuning task.

We have infinite fiat. Just set goals worthy of our "oversupply?"

This ain't rocket science folks. We're exhibiting a very fundamental flaw in actual social logic. Get over it. Follow reality, NOT virtual models that purport to represent reality. Changing models are supposed to CHASE reality ... FOREVER, not diverge from it.

Yes, we ALWAYS have limited demand for what we no longer want or need. That's why we have children! The human species does not need US! At least not more than transiently.

The ONLY thing that's ever in oversupply are actors trying to over adapt to transient contexts - and thereby slowing progression of the whole play. They're called the 1%. Just move 'em out of the way. They're already obsolete, so don't waste a second worrying about it.

Only a Dinosaur 1% would ever claim limited demand and oversupply. Saying something so stupid can never be anything more than a static admission of looming, dynamic extinction.  Good riddance!
    NEXT!

(Good thing the 99% are generating human reserves on the fly. We're in a desperate, unending race to survive the excess stupidity of our own 1%!! They're the lemons coming off the assembly line. They're statistically unavoidable. Just don't elect them as "leaders." Quit stepping in the leadership.)



16 comments:

Roger Erickson said...

Why do we fear inflation 10x more than deflation? Some billionaires are terrified that the fiat they'll never spend might have reduced buying power? When? After they're dead?

This is so illogical it defies belief. How can obsessively, compulsively clever people be SO FREAKING STUPID? We don't need a theory of credit or capitalism. Just teach kids to RECOGNIZE the OCD capitalists among us.

OCDC (obsessive-compulsive dumbass capitalists ... on crack - OCDCC)

Roger Erickson said...

Glad others are saying the same thing.

Neil Wilson ‏@neilwilson
"The problem with society, today, is not lack of money or debt but lack of ideas"
http://gu.com/p/3fy4n/tw

Ya think? Why doesn't every kid learn this by age 10? It's called initiative and audacity.

Let me rephrase. Humans are BORN with this trait instilled. WHY are we so stupidly beating it out of them by age 10? ??

Matt Franko said...

Wow powerful picture Roger... rsp,

Roger Erickson said...

"Life is warfare." Seneca

http://philosophical-quotes.com/quotes/seneca

Roger Erickson said...

He couldn't have anticipated the double meaning.

"We become wiser by adversity; prosperity destroys our appreciation of the right."
Seneca

Ignacio said...

"obsessive-compulsive"

You may be onto something here regarding hoarding...

We don't need a theory of credit or capitalism but we desperately need a theory of hoarding and empirical research on it. And comparing it to OCD may be a starting point because similarities are there. (Salkovskis model could explain it, see here for a short intro to the subject: Psychological treatment
of obsessive–compulsive
disorder
)

Roger Erickson said...

We have multiple theories - even neural circuit & pharmacological proof - of OCD.

What we need is to track & be aware of it's expression rates in different fields.

It's well known that we purposely overstock sociopaths in "leadership" positions. We just need to interact enough to identify the tolerance limit we've already passed SHOULD be.

Everything's easy with group practice. We're just not doing it.

Roger Erickson said...

oops

We just need to interact enough to identify where the tolerance limit we've already passed SHOULD be.

Tom Hickey said...

The problem with capitalism is that pursuit of self-interest in the extreme, ie. "rational" utility maximization, is inherently irrational and favors hoarders suffering from a Freudian anal complex that manifests in OCD as a symptom.

The problem with democracy is politics, which involves pursuit of power and attracts the megalomaniacs, control freaks, narcissists, paranoids, and also the criminals looking to leverage power.

Neither system is working as advertised owing to the defective construction and overlooking of design flaws.

Roger Erickson said...

Of course. Every new tool we adopt brings as much harm as good, until we develop methods for using it within tolerance limits, and then actually practice using it within those limits.

If all you've got is capitalism, everything looks like an acquisition.

Anonymous said...

Quote: "The problem with democracy is politics, which involves pursuit of power and attracts the megalomaniacs, control freaks, narcissists, paranoids, and also the criminals looking to leverage power."

I disagree.

We don't have a democracy or even a true republic.

A true republic as described by Plato disallows those holding public office to ever own private property again as to be completely disinteresting parties aka the philosopher-kings are a separate caste from the demiourgoi.

A true democracy doesn't have elected office but rather a process of sortition.

Quote from Aristotle: "It is accepted as democratic when public offices are allocated by lot; and as oligarchic when they are filled by election!"

The United State is and always has been a elitist oligarchy.

We have made limited attempts of republicanism with various rules regarding lobbying and corruption but have never gone anywhere near true republicanism where every politician is a top level academic and profession scientist/technocrat aka "philosopher kings" and once elected is completely removed from all private enterprise and must rely only on a public stipend.

As you can see we have nothing close to either a democracy or a republic.

I would suggest that best form government wasn't even imagined by the old philosophers who couldn't even conceive of the kinds technology we can now build.

I would suggest a noocracy i.e. cloud based A.I. and big data enhancing crowdsourced decision making via liquid feedback and bias correction systems.

Republicanism and Democracy are outdated were never really part of any real political system and never will be.




Roger Erickson said...

"Republicanism and Democracy are outdated"

That's for sure.

Unknown said...

@septeus7

Amy attempts at "reform" and "getting money out of politics" is doomed to failure because they are always half-measures at best. The only manner of maintaining the form of our current system and purging rampant corruption among the political class is, upon entering office, to ban them from receiving anything from anyone ever again. No gifts, no financial assets, no job after retirement from public service, not even Christmas presents family (capitalists will inevitably attemt to corrupt familial bonds and traditions into channels for graft.

Such a system would immediately weed out the opportunists and villains who see public office as a stepping-stone to greater ambitions.

Roger Erickson said...

The electorate has to indicate that they WANT this. Otherwise it'll be miraculous luck if they get it otherwise.

Matt Franko said...

Ignacio,

From the paper:

" In this approach, obses­
sions are conceptualized as normal intrusive thoughts, which the
sufferer misinterprets as a sign that harm to themselves or to
others is a serious risk and that they are responsible for such harm
(or its prevention)."

So this is from some sort of fear..

Bill Mitchell has called 'savings' iirc 'a hedge against uncertainty over time' so the savers out there I believe are acting in some sort of defense of some sort of fears of this uncertain world we are in...

I dont know if you have ever heard of the case of the Collyer Brothers here in the US in NYC years back:

"On April 8, 1947, workman Artie Matthews found the body of Langley Collyer just ten feet from where Homer had died. His partially decomposed body was being eaten by rats. A suitcase and three huge bundles of newspapers covered his body. Langley had been crawling through their newspaper tunnel to bring food to his paralyzed brother when one of his own booby traps fell down and crushed him.[8] Homer, blind and paralyzed, starved to death several days later.[8] The stench detected on the street had been emanating from Langley, the younger brother."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collyer_brothers

Pretty bad case of hoarding ...

rsp,

Ignacio said...

Yes Matt, the compulsive behaviour is a mechanism that mitigates stress and anxiety derived from the believe that something improbable would happen, and you would be responsible for it for not have acted before.

As with a lot of psychological disorders, is a matter of degree. For example, it's a fact that between 60%-80% of the subclinical (non pathologic) population have some sort of obsessive-compulsive behaviour, but OCD is considered a disease because how intrusive and inadaptive it is, and the psychological discomfort it creates to the subject.

So 'some savings' is a reasonably behaviour, but you could say that 'excessive saving' (to diminish the angst created by uncertainty) are completely inadaptive (would a society formed exclusively of hoarders function? no). When you translate this to policy, it's a recipe for wide-scale disaster.

An other important factor of OCD is the lack of proper cognitive tools of the patient to cope with the obsession that stresses him. The development of OCD is a factor of both ambient inputs and personal characteristics, but it may be possible that 'hoarders' haven't acquired the the emotional and cognitive tools to cope with uncertainty (they are 'terrified' by uncertainty, instead of accepting it as most living organisms do, and is even worse when the uncertainty is from a lack of understanding, because a man-created system like money can be as certain as we want it to be).