Manufacturing In EVERY Country Can Survive ... If Electorates Repurpose Their Own People With Enough Agility

(commentary posted by Roger Erickson)

Bill Mitchell writes: Manufacturing in Australia can survive if it shifts focus

I love and value Bill Mitchell's exhaustive work immensely, so please take the next line as a form of endearment!

As usual, this is incredibly long-winded … yet it eventually circumnavigates a simple concept, one that hit me from day one, the day I found Warren Mosler's website.

Many non-Economists would just put the underlying issue in less banko-morphic terms, like this.

In scaling up from a tribe to a nation, the two hardest things to conserve are:

1) affinity, the knowledge that YOUR people are your greatest value;

2) the REAL return-on-coordination, which comes as a unpredictable benefit to and consequence of nationwide affinity.

Sure, we as a national electorate have lost nation-wide affinity, and hence return-on-coordination. That's true in ALL large economies. It’s largely a problem of system scale outracing old, mostly tribally-developed methods.

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Further discussion.

A special instance of the dilemma is exemplified by the classic "Fallacy of Scale." If YOU stand up at a sports stadium, YOU will get a better view. However, if EVERYONE at the stadium stands up, the net, collective view of the audience is not likely to change. You just swap the problem unique to one context, for a similar but unpredictably re-distributed problem, unique to the new context now created. In short, the audience extended significant effort, with no statistically significant benefit! That's a net, REAL loss to community.

Inter-person and inter-group affinity is an even more important case. Without affinity, motivation to monitor and manage interdependencies lags, since the gut-level implications aren't maintained by graphic experience. That's when interdependencies not front and center, start to fall through widely distributed cracks in any growing culture.

The only question that matters is this.

“What methods can return us to national affinity, and systemic loyalty?”

(“Over the rampant treason we have now?”)

Note: Perhaps the adaptive solution is not to mindless push all local processes to extremes of efficiency, as in the brain-dead approach of SixSigma. That just creates a brittle system with unwarranted and maladaptive management costs, rather than a resilient system auto-managing itself with agility.

Rather, as physics, chemistry, biology, Shewhart and Deming long noted, "flat, open, constantly re-connected organizations," where extreme disparity is NOT allowed, can easily self regulate to deliver long-term resiliency. Systems scale only to the extent that they develop methods for scaling the affinity and return-on-coordination that allows Policy Agility to be valued above all else, for it's constant expansion of Policy Space.

Industrial and economic evolution tracks manufacturing shifts, which track shifts in policy agility, which enlarge policy space, which tracks policy adjustment methods?  Ya think?

So what are WE, as a supposedly sentient electorate, going to DO about our policy lethargy? Tune in? Get involved? Converse, test, assess? When, pray tell? Cultural advancement is NOT something ANY of us can do on our own - only by ALL of us teaching all others, by SELECTIVE example. (Not just by personal "success." What have you done for your country lately? How would you even know? Maybe the 1st thing we need is a consensus Desired Outcome. You know, the Cultural Vision thing? As a prerequisite, that would require far more distributed Public Discourse than we get from the smattering of talking heads most of us now rely upon. Subsequently, even with a Desired Outcome in hand, we won't know if we're getting closer of farther, without a constantly upgraded set of Assessment Methods.)