How Best To Prevent An Overly Narrow, Capitalist and "Corporate" Approach To National Policy Development?

   (Commentary posted by Roger Erickson)



While we watch the Davos Dun Masters contemplate how to more gracefully co-opt Democracy worldwide, one can't help but recognize an underlying pattern playing out in every nation pretending to practice democracy.

How many have seen this particular policy example, concerning increasingly concentrated, corporate ownership of crop plant development?

While the details of corporate crop plant development are interesting in their own right, it's simply another example, of the same root process issue seen everywhere. The Davos Dun Masters own a million of them, in every industry known to man.

It is NOT the particular tasks that vex us!

It is our methods for handling an endless stream of tasks that is handicapping us.

Must every market process generated by a supposedly social species, inexorably be owned by a tiny subset of the supposedly "social" animals that create the culture? That, by definition, is an oxymoron, if you know the definition of a "social" species and the benefits that being social bestows.

Please read on. And please focus here on the methods for achieving a social culture, not the particular cause, plus the follow-on, MAINTENANCE methods required to continue benefitting from being a culture capable of generating dynamic markets.

Opposing Monsanto dominance of genetically engineered crop plants?

It's not entirely clear that raising $ to oppose Monsanto is the best selling point, yet the long term methods needed to best prevent the detriments of overly narrow policy development ... now those are worth thinking VERY CAREFULLY about.

In this case, how best might we prevent a narrow, "corporate" approach to crop plant breeding?

First, what is the Desired Outcome here, for any nation?

Suggestion: No matter what good eventually comes from genetic engineering of crop plants, it should NOT be predominantly owned by a narrow set of stakeholders.

Overly narrow stakeholder sets in a democracy? That's just disparity & feudalism under a different guise!

Or, if you prefer, another feeble attempt at Central Planning.

When it comes to comparing capitalism and communism, what is the functional difference? Both feature only slightly different approaches to achieving Central Planning by an oligarchy. Call them crude vs sophisticated approaches to mercantilism. The theory they hide behind matters not. It's the actual implementation that matters to us.

Overly Centralized Planning - no matter how it's achieved - always goes awry precisely because of the failure to adequately sample the required feedback spectrum.

If we want and have a Democracy, just USE it?

There is NEVER any adaptive value in letting social processes by owned by a few. Translation: static wealth disparity cuts required social processes off from necessary social feedback. Therefore, society degrades.

Surely there's a better way?

Who says capitalism is necessarily inimicable to Democracy? 

If my logic, below is correct, then capitalism & democracy needn't comprise an oxymoron. Just don't treat capitalism as the ONLY tool in your social toolkit.

We're back to a very simple point. There is no adaptive path - or transient point of stability - in the natural world, that is not a dynamic equilibrium between multiple, conflicting forces. Or call them conflicting factions, if you're having trouble diversifying valuable analogies fast enough.

What is it that a social species hosting a human culture really wants?

We want to stay on a dynamic, adaptive path. So, we constantly need new methods for chasing that unpredictable path. THAT IS THE ONLY THING THAT KEEPS US ALIVE!

Narrow ownership of something in a given context is meaningless for groups who survive only by successfully migrating through continually changing contexts. Thoreau, among others, warned us of that, long ago.

The most valuable skills to own are our dynamic abilities, namely our abilities to detect every one of our methods that we need to change, and to drive coordinated changes ASAP. As Wallace & Darwin pointed out 150 years ago, our Adaptive Rate is literally our lifeblood. Or, as Shewhart put it, 80 years ago, the highest cost is our cost of coordinating the changes that comprise Adaptive Rate.

The only thing Thoreau, Darwin & Shewhart didn't specify was the obvious corollary.

Since methods drive results, it is our rate of discovering & developing methods that allows us to generate and reap the insanely great returns on coordination. Apparently "T, D & S" assumed that American electorates would be better educated than PT Barnum did. 

Our core dilemma boils down to this. If "T, D & S" were right about our methods for maintaining the quality of the American electorate, then we'll be fine. If PT Barnum was right, then you may as well start looking for another country to migrate to.

Once said that way, it's clear that overly narrow management of static assets are a burden not only to individuals, but a dangerous brake on our national Adaptive Rate - as Thoreau pointed out 170 years ago.

"Most of the luxuries and many of the so-called comforts of life are not only not indispensable, but positive hindrances to the elevation of mankind."   Thoreau

Having access, on-demand, to those luxuries is not the problem. The personal time tied up in hoarding selective access to them is the hindrance. The act of excessive hoarding takes the hoarder out of social play, and compounds that damage by slowing the Adaptive Rate of the aggregate. The result is a skyrocketing Output Gap, due to idling of static assets.

Every tribal society on earth - even our own, tribal ancestors - warned us of this, from the beginning. Our dilemma is that the staggering return on coordination stockpiles static assets. Then it takes time for our dynamic assets to see how to optimally leverage those static assets. That group calculation time is typically grossly extended by the personal hoarding of what are, by default, Central Planners. To hoard is to express Central Planning, which only slows increasingly dynamic use of existing static assets, and hence slows national Adaptive Rate.

So, the struggle between personal and social temptations continues, unabated. Only those cultures able to discriminate the greater benefit of dynamic, social assets survive. There are few, if any, real hermits left, for good reason. They can't compete, except as parasites living off the human social culture they can't comprehend.

Personal hoarding degrades the incredible, group efficiency of pass-through economic methods. Why? Because it degrades & slows our ability to leverage those static assets for pursuit of the most valuable assets of all - our dynamic assets, which allow us to reap the return on coordination.

This is NOT rocket science. Just keep capitalism as one of many accounting metrics, and use them all as checks and balances upon one another. What could be more simple?

That way we can have our supra-tribal population size, our increased diversity, and our pass-through economy too. What's to worry about? That outcome is better than having our cake & eating it too.