So Nice Of These "Evo-Economists" To "Allow" Evolution To Proceed

   (Commentary posted by Roger Erickson)

Everything You Need To Know About Laissez-Faire Economics. A Conversation with Alan Kirman

Huh? This SOUNDS right, but there's something subtly wrong. They're treating biology as though it's novel, and something to be fused into existing economics.

The reality is the inverse, and that Warren Mosler is right. The entire finance industry is more trouble than it's worth ... to humanity. In fact, it really is predatory, by it's very nature. So is our macro-economic policy - which should revert to simple logistics accounting, as real civic goals are set and pursued.

Otherwise, there's the danger that economists will someday also discover thermodynamics ... and even ecology? They'd try to fit those fields into "economics" too. If that happens, we're toast! Ideology would rule, and would ruin, all thinking whatsoever.

Meanwhile, don't hold your breath waiting for them to understand engineering, or culture.

Actually, this state of affairs is astounding ... since so many real science PhDs have gone into finance the last 30 years. Apparently, even most scientists aren't willing to really think, if their job depends on them thinking out of aggregate paradigm.

Podcast for Dec 10. Interview with Roger Erickson.

Conversation with our very own, Roger Erickson.

Dec 10 Podcast with Roger Erickson.

Joe Romm — Biology Major Bobby Jindal Pleads Ignorance On Evolution And Climate Science

Inconvenient truth. Jindal caught out by Howard Fineman.

House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) says he can’t be expected to know about climate science because he is “not a scientist.” Same for Florida Governor Rick Scott (R), Rep. Michael Grimm (R-NY), and Sen.Marco Rubio (R-FL). 

But what happens when a highly educated guy who did study science in college wants to run for national office in a party that increasingly stands against facts and science? In the case of Louisiana Governor and perennial presidential wannabee Bobby Jindal (R), you act dumb and make tortuous statements. 

How dumb? 

At a breakfast organized by The Christian Monitor, Jindal was introduced as a biology major, Rhodes Scholar, and former President of the University of Louisiana System. Naturally, at one point HuffPost’s Howard Fineman said, “I want to ask a couple of science questions.” 

Jindal cluelessly fails to see what’s coming and excitedly interjects “I’m a biology major.” Fineman is happy to repeat that point and, of course, then asks him a bunch of obvious science questions, including whether he accepts evolution. 

So Jindal now feels compelled to explain, “I was not an evolutionary biologist.” Yeah, Jindal apparently got one of those Biology degrees from Brown University (with honors at the age of 20!) that doesn’t require learning about evolution — the central organizing principle of modern biology.

Climate Progress
Biology Major Bobby Jindal Pleads Ignorance On Evolution And Climate Science

Joe Romm

Biology-101 ..... Does Institutional Persistence Without Change Slow Adaptive Rate? (Does a Duck Swim?)

   (Commentary posted by Roger Erickson)





So was Minsky the only economist who ever took biology 101?

Why don't all economics students learn this BEFORE starting college?

"The very stability of institutions .. is .. the source of political decay [as] circumstances change and institutions fail to adapt."

Ya think? (Really, I had no idea that people in other professions had NOT learned that at the onset of their education!)

That observation was the STARTING point of the theory of evolution - articulated and discussed as early as 1840 - and the onset of modern biology.

170 years ago, and that's not an axiom of economics? What the hell happened to the fundamental concept of a well-rounded education? Today's specialists wander only among their own choir?

If at least 10% of an electorate doesn't understand some prerequisite for democratic organization ... then that electorate won't require their politicians to understand. Consequently, Policy Space will shrink, and Policy Agility will dwindle. Without an informed electorate, an informed policy staff is highly improbable.

It's that simple?

"We" as a people are what we (in aggregate) train and practice becoming? Failing to quickly incorporate adaptive perspectives into preparatory education amounts to yet another shabby trick - played on ourselves!

This naturally leads to a simple conclusion, borrowed from the field of statistical process control. "Cease, forever, checking for [Adaptive Value] after the fact. Instead, [continuously manage Adaptive Value from the onset of the development process]."

In short, if we don't revitalize K-12 education, we can't succeed in our own Adaptive Race. Nor will our erstwhile democracy.

Smart Companies? What About Smart Electorates? Smart Countries? Smart Governments?

   (Commentary posted by Roger Erickson)

How Investing in Good Jobs Lowers Costs and Boosts Profits

The Good Jobs Strategy ... shows that even in low-cost settings, leaving employees behind with low wages and bad jobs is a choice, not a necessity. On April 4, we’ll discuss how smart companies are turning the Walmart business model on its head by investing in good jobs while earning strong investment returns. Sponsored by UFCW and the AFL-CIO.

These are merely politically correct ways of discussing loyalty in teamwork. 

For Pete's sake! Common sense is no longer allowed to be declared sensible until a photogenic university professor declares to be? And then only for "smart companies" with "strong investment returns."

Unfortunately, the good prof & the AFL-CIO don't define the terms of what constitutes a "strong investment returns." How long will it take until they realize that they don't really agree on the terms of that definition? Yet another generation of stalled labor-capital reforms? Is this the AFL-CIO's way of admitting defeat?

Something subtle is missing here, and it's not clearly apparent until you analyze what they're actually saying. This whole "Good Jobs" approach reminds me of Deficit Doves. They're trying to agree with their masters while also agreeing with the serfs ... at the same time? Doesn't that always turn into groveling?

Smart professors don't miss the point? 

Only clever ones trying to tout the uber-capitalist party line, masquerading as aggregate common sense? Usually in order to get tenure, and maybe a fellowship or endowed chair from an institute set up by some billionaire (non-labor) capitalist.

Can we just skip all the capitalist mumbo jumbo, and get straight to the point? 

Wouldn't a "Resilient Electorate Strategy" represent adaptive reality, and therefore common sense? Can't we just come right out and say that? Apparently not, because ~1% of people hoarding vast amounts of static assets feel that they have too much to lose personally, if they relieve constraints on and control over the rest of the electorate.

Bad move. Always suicidal. It's only a matter of time.

How did supposed capitalists forget that labor-capital is also one of the equal, arbitrary classifications of "capital?" Biasing a system to persistently make some forms of capital more equal in all contexts than other forms of capital is - by definition - constraining aggregate options, draining resiliency and reducing aggregate agility.

Yet that is obvious only if one stops to actually think.

Maybe we need to forget capitalism? And just go back to consistency across biology, anthropology, sociology, democracy and statistical process control? Let the capitalist mysticism go the way of the pythagorean mysticism?

Natalie Wolchover — A New Physics Theory of Life

This is a follow-up post on the recent post on the origin of life in dissipative structure. It is more detailed and traces the history of the concept, but still it is easily accessible without knowledge of the field. There's also a link to Jeremy England's paper for those who would like to look deeper.

Quanta Magazine
A New Physics Theory of Life
Natalie Wolchover
(h/t Yves Smith at Naked Capitalism)

Travis Gettys — Physicist says he’s solved the big mystery — how life came from matter — and he may be right (via Raw Story )

Physicist says he’s solved the big mystery — how life came from matter — and he may be right (via Raw Story )

The origin of life is basically inevitable from a mathematical standpoint, according to one physicist, and “should be as unsurprising as rocks rolling downhill.” Jeremy England, an assistant professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology…

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Peter Turchin — Blame Rich, Overeducated Elites as Our Society Frays

Complex human societies, including our own, are fragile. They are held together by an invisible web of mutual trust and social cooperation. This web can fray easily, resulting in a wave of political instability, internal conflict and, sometimes, outright social collapse.
Analysis of past societies shows that these destabilizing historical trends develop slowly, last many decades, and are slow to subside.

The Roman Empire, Imperial China and medieval and early-modern England and France suffered such cycles, to cite a few examples. In the U.S., the last long period of instability began in the 1850s and lasted through the Gilded Age and the “violent 1910s.”

We now see the same forces in the contemporary U.S. Of about 30 detailed indicators I developed for tracing these historical cycles (reflecting popular well-being, inequality, social cooperation and its inverse, polarization and conflict), almost all have been moving in the wrong direction in the last three decades.

The roots of the current American predicament go back to the 1970s, when wages of workers stopped keeping pace with their productivity. The two curves diverged: Productivity continued to rise, as wages stagnated. The “great divergence” between the fortunes of the top 1 percent and the other 99 percent is much discussed, yet its implications for long-term political disorder are underappreciated. Battles such as the recent government shutdown are only one manifestation of what is likely to be a decade-long period....

Bloomberg
Blame Rich, Overeducated Elites as Our Society Frays
Peter Turchin | Vice President of the Evolution Institute and Professor of Biology and Anthropology at the University of Connecticut

David Ferguson — Plants use underground fungus network to send ‘distress signals’ to each other

Plants use underground fungus network to send ‘distress signals’ to each other (via Raw Story )

British researchers released a study on Thursday saying that plants can communicate with each other by using an underground network of fungi. According to the BBC, the study, published in the journal Ecology Letters, said that plants signal each other when they are under attack by aphids to that other…

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The Biology of Politics

commentary by Roger Erickson

Tom Hickey dug up a forgotten book. C.Wright Mills — The Higher Immorality (1956) that triggers questions about the biology of politics.

This book continues the tradition of pragmatic self-analysis that's been strangely lacking in ambition in the USA these past 50 years.

There's nothing in this book, of course, that wasn't previously written thousands of years ago, by Dravidian, Sumerian, Egyptian, Roman, Greek, & Sanskrit writers - and artfully plagiarized by demented but curiously useful people in various religious texts. So what could we do differently? What part of common sense is failing to propagate through our electorate, via the process we call politics?

First, note that methods drive results. Math is a useful example. Advanced math was used by a  notable few like Imhotep, 4000 years before the efficient decimal notation made accurate calculation accessible to the mass of humans. Point is that our operational methods count, far more than most assume, and are rate limiting for group-wide leverage of seemingly available group options. (Ditto for MMT & economics, but let's not go there right now.)

There's a patterned cycle to politics, which we can call the biology of politics.

Every wave of innovation places newly efficient people & practices in positions of influence. Grasp of those innovations also defines an intrinsic buffer shielding the newly powerful people from the early stages of even further innovation lurking in the wings. The trick to continued adaptation is to make that buffer stage powerful enough to achieve change, yet transient enough to QUICKLY avoid denying further change.  An "innovate/deny" cycle ensues, where innovation and denying others rapid access to the same innovations follow one another just like a predator/prey relationship curve (think bobcats/rabbits). I/D or P/P cycles continue, like a moth circling a light, until one of two things happen:

a) the predator depletes the prey, and must wait for an outside perturbation to replenish the prey despite the predators best efforts; (restarting the cycle);

[This is where both species trip over a deeper truth, look around, and then go about their business as though nothing had happened.  If they don't perish, how long can they go on mindlessly repeating this cycle?  Tens of thousands, even millions, of years! Have supposedly brilliant humans shortened that cycle to only hundreds of years?  Are we supposed to be impressed with ourselves?]

b) some statistical chance allows the predator & prey time to recognize co-dependence on an identified, outside resource, at which time they can transition to a domesticated, symbiotic relationship akin to shepherd/herd.

For Libertarians, the kinetics (tempo) of our existing I/D-P/P process is individually acceptable, and even attractive. However, for families, tribes, nations and species (and those Libertarians with brains) ... anything slowing the relentless increase in national and species adaptive rate is absolutely not acceptable, and constitutes group suicide.

Why haven't we invented coordination methods that do for crude politics, what decimal notation did for hieroglyphic-based mathematics? What teaching operation would make it dirt easy for all youth to fully perceive the higher returns available from scaling coordination? That would make them unimpressed with politics as is, and immune to propaganda.  How do we permanently capture Mills' message, and free ourselves from continually forgetting & rediscovering it?  It's not lack of an accurate chronometer that's holding us back now, it's lack of an accurate "coordination-ometer."   Better yet, an accurate Coordinometer.  We don't need students to know more, we need them to know how to zero in on how little of the right things each needs to know in order to solve any situation through coordination.  And we need them to know why - and how - to do that better/faster/cheaper every single year!  Instead of just the facade of school sports teams, we should have Coordination Leagues for kids, to replace the no longer great game of politics.

Domesticating Ourselves - better/faster/cheaper.
Species have been domesticating one another for billions of years (starting way before mitochondria & chloroplasts), and even humans have domesticated other species for over ten thousand years. Yet humans, like all existing species, still struggle to perceive the benefit of accelerating domestication of their own, diverse subgroups and their range of individual behaviors, so that the aggregate can - through artful teamwork - always pursue the higher return on coordination, sooner rather than later.

That peak return can always be tapped, by simply recognizing the bigger available resource that feeds both the herd (populace) and the predators (criminals) who feed on them. An unending sequence of the same, enduring pattern is there for all to see, but it's only visible through population-wide information sharing.

Try this approach on all examples of non-scalable behaviors. "Look, instead of you stealing from me, and me wasting time fighting you, let's just both cooperate on getting more resources from my newly discovered source? Let's cut out the useless middleprocess. Let's OPEN SOURCE." If you only get a blank stare from Clarence, the slack-jawed yokel, then at least ensure that his kids receive a better education.  Over 312 million people won't make a transition overnight.

The most common response is already known. "Aw. It's too hard. You don't seriously still believe in all that 'more perfect union' BS, do you? The Constitution is dead & gone."

That disillusionment and fatality is the biggest hurdle we face. So let's face it head on. For every seemingly insurmountable task, there is a solution, and that solution will always involve another level of indirection. Math was made accessible & scalable through decimal & later notations. In older times it was common for tribes and nations to openly declare group challenges and create open competitions, to look for indirect solutions from any source. The Longitude Act of 1714 was one of the smartest things the otherwise pathologically criminal British aristocracy ever did.

If not a Congressional ACT, we at least need an OpenSource Challenge, for discovery of a way to ensure that an adequate proportion of our 5th graders can permanently perceive "return on coordination" as our optimal return. In short, a method allowing us to rapidly OpenSource more of ourselves. That way, not only could HP keep up with what HP knows, the entire USA could know far more of what the USA collectively knows.

***

The Higher Immorality: excerpts from

"The Power Elite" C.Wright Mills, Oxford Press, 1956 

"Laws without supporting moral conventions invite crime, but much more importantly, they spur the growth of an expedient, amoral attitude." 

"If there is no such thing as a self-made man, there is such a thing as a self-used man, and there are many such men among the American elite." 

"Those who sit in the seats of the high and the mighty are selected and formed by the means of power, the sources of wealth, the mechanics of celebrity, which prevail in their society."

ps: Imhotep, John Harrison & quite a few other 'notable inventors' started out as pragmatic carpenters.  We need to find the OpenSource carpenters, wherever they're unpredictaby distributed.  We need them to invent better/faster/cheaper ways of finding themselves, and better/faster/cheaper ways for all of us to leverage all of us.  It's not enough for HP to know what HP knows.  HP has to know what HP is doing, and will do in any surprise, and also the recent outcomes of it's efforts.

Pretty Much What I've Been Saying - A "Gold Std" is Distracting Bullshit

Living Cells Show How to Fix the Financial System

Although this is pretty superficial. They had to dumb it down for Bloomberg audiences.

Basic message is that developing systems repeatedly adapt by connecting everything to everything, and then settling into the simplest system-state that allows agile net responses to a given situation or context. In biology it's called "ontogeny" and goes on through a process of sexually recombinant replicas.

The first trick for a given culture, market or system of any sort, is to add enough instrumentation to automatically TRIGGER reconnecting everything to everything - as fast or faster than contexts change.  Then, once each highly plastic system-state is achieved, the next trick is to to automatically TRIGGER rapid re-settling to yet another new state, complete with endless hacks too complex & context specific to bother replicating. We refer to the second process as the dead-end of "maturity."  It's always easy for an outside observer to see what SHOULD occur, but something entirely different for a complex system to actually initiate & execute re-equilibration fast enough to matter.

The real race is always to make more "tunable" systems, not to say what they should do. What to do is the easy part. How to actually "get'r done", fast enough, is all that really matters. Adaptation = a system that automatically triggers it's own re-organization, fast enough to keep up with changing context.

In Warren Mosler's words, "How do you get people to explore their options?" That's the key. The options almost don't matter. Developing teams & populations that will aggressively explore whatever group options come along is - in practice - all that matters.

Next Steps for OpenSource Social Media, Inter-Connectivity and OpenEconomics

Take all the economic doom & gloom as one example. As another example, take all the kerfluffle about the Artificial-Intelligence "singularity", and fears that we'll be conquered by our own Borg machines.

Not to worry. As anyone experienced in Operations vs pure theory will probably appreciate, what matters above else is adaptive agility, and how to build more of it, cheaper/faster/better.

The way all "selection" occurs is through ontogeny - the rebuilding from scratch of complex systems, rather than the constant, recursive tuning of systems already to densely engineered to context. The desperate race to densely engineer JIT/JAN* solutions to fleeting contexts, dictates that endless hacks must be utilized. So many hacks are eventually used that all system hacks, from genes to fore brains to gold-std Central Bank operations, are first built on top of old hacks, and eventually completely replaced. They are rarely, if ever, redesigned.

* (Just in time / Just as needed)

Ontogeny works via agile recombination. NEVER underestimate that. Ontogeny means semi-random regeneration, where everything is reconnected to everything, and ONLY THEN relaxed to the minimal connections, data exchanges & inter-dependencies needed in order to map system function to a given, fleeting context.

There's a reason why all known complex species generate planned obsolescence into their members. Most lifetimes are tuned to the recent rate of context change that cannot be handled by plasticity of member behavior. Instead of endlessly hacking older systems, it's safer to re-launch updated models after intervals dictated by accumulating experience.

In the case of economics of nation states, it's not about the static assets tracked by economists & accountants. Rather, it's about the group intelligent agility quotient (GIAQ) that a given electorate can muster as contexts keep changing.

Design-build in construction is a practical analogy for those not familiar with biology. Decades ago, architects & builders recognized the divergence of what can be designed, vs what can actually be built, in sequence. Rather than the high cost of re-building with increasing frequency, a logical solution was formed. Design & construction were fused, basically dictating that only the skeleton of a design was constructed, before anyone attempted to finalize the more superficial design details. The same logic is followed in various forms of "Agile Programming", where initial function is tested before trying to nail down all superficial features & interdependencies.

Cultural evolution is no different in principle than physiological evolution. As contexts change, how quickly can a given culture reinvent itself & explore as many of it's available options as possible? What social catalysts can it invent - and how soon - to accelerate the process of re-connecting all old & expanding numbers of citizens? Then, how quickly can the same or different catalysts work in reverse to allow an enlarged population to relax into the minimal connectivity patterns allowing it to tune to a new context? And, how does it perform both steps WHILE ALSO retaining the intrinsic capability to do it all again, as soon as needed?

At the end of the Civil War, Joshua Chamberlain famously said: "We know not of the future and cannot plan for it much. But we can ... determine and know what manner of men we will be, whenever and wherever the hour strikes ... ."

Today, we must ask of ourselves and country a more distributed question. We still cannot plan for a completely unpredictable future. Yet we can, indeed, determine what multi-level, adaptive rates our citizenry & diverse processes can muster - when the micro-second strikes.

We can do that by developing the social instrumentation to connect everyone to everyone, upon demand, JIT/JAN. We can also allow most people to settle into the practiced routines that allow us to optimally adapt to a given context. When that context changes, however, we must have a populace previously and fully aware of the need to rapidly meet demands for radically adaptive change, and expecting to meet that challenge sooner or later. A population comfortable with change, and trusting it's ability to change, will be the superior "Context Nomads."  A population not prepared, will be less likely to successfully migrate across successive, changing contexts.

Can we retain a Context Nomad culture? Of course we can. We're already over-able to accomplish such maneuvers, as our various military, sports, theater, music, charity and business entities amply prove. All we're missing are two subtle requirements to scale group agility nationwide. First, incorporating "adaptive change at any moment" more fully into our teaching, training and practice habits. Second, selecting the social catalysts that allow us to practice responding to whatever changes we advise ourselves to prepare for, including surprises themselves.

We're mostly there. We've always had social mobilization methods, and are well on our way to formalizing them in virtual forms capable of supporting data throughputs previously unheard of !

In the case of the AI "singularity," it's far fetched. Who's going to rewire millions of new cpu models every 9 months or less? Who's going to redesign and rebuild all the "catalyst" machines that will redesign hardware? And what reference survival purpose will that hardware be aligned to?

What's seems inevitable is an inflection point in human GIAQ. Once our populations are better "instrumented," and can rapidly parse all OpenSource info across large populations - to converge to what matters most in any context - then large human aggregates will "know what they all know," upon demand, and be prepared to use it with agility too. After that, it's entirely a matter of practice.

Our cultural challenge is rather like that of the ~70 trillion cells in your body having their cake, and being able to wield a credit card, refrigerator, table, plate, knife & fork too - before someone else eats our lunch - and us - first! Tempo is always part ofan  agility equation. With group practice we can eventually even link, stage & sequence ingredients, utensils & ovens.

What proportion of available data is passed between your 70 trillion cells at any instance in any context? Amazingly little. Only what absolutely needs to be. 70 Trillion is a very large number. In comparison, with only 312 million members in the USA (2012), we have one helluva inflection point to go through ourselves.

There's still an additional subtlety that Economists & IT people don't fully appreciate from biology. It follows a thread that Walter Shewhart stated back in the 1920s - "Data are meaningless without context." We also know that most data are also irrelevant even within a given context. What we always face, therefore - in our adaptive race with tempo-driven milestones & frequent choke-points - is that all historically known instrumentation systems are under two types of unrelenting pressure. First, to converge to reduced bandwidth just minimally necessary for the RANGE of contexts we encounter. Secondly, and simultaneously, to retain the ability to adjust that range - through rapid recombination - to the changing demands of new contexts.

By studying the envelope of data exchanges required over time, we can evolve social media channels tuned to the minimally productive bandwidth which allows adaptive group agility.  We can do that WHILE retaining the capability to change any bandwidth, as needs change.  Developing the tools to change anything even faster is the real adaptive race.

The bandwidth point is consistent with all known sensory systems. All of our known physiological senses are constrained to the particular visual/auditory/tactile/olfactory/taste/vestibular BANDWIDTHS describing the minimal envelope of challenges we've recently faced. We've learned we don't NEED most data, and so don't need to collect, parse, separate or use most of it. That saves a LOT of overhead, and is an intrinsic part of agility, ontogeny & evolution. We can augment our data bandwidth at will, but will waste time doing so UNLESS and UNTIL it's actually required. 

As an aside, investors may think of the differing rates-of-change of multiple social-media data bandwidths as analogous to 2, 20, 50 and 100 day moving averages. In social media, however, the bandwidth of each data channel can drift with time, based on full-group feedback about group outcomes.

Rigorous bandwidth tuning will apply to all our emerging, OpenSource social media channels. There's an urgent need to "cut down the useless chatter" when short-term group agility is needed. The signal/noise ratios required for specific group maneuvers is a dynamic property defined entirely by context-specific group practice - called OutcomesBased practice. More to the point, to tune social communications upon demand, we'll need to describe, define and invent social sub-catalysts specific for the task of tuning social-media catalysts upon demand.  OpenSource social media already demands nested levels of catalyst & sub-catalysts.

We're just starting the process of applying OutcomesBased training to social media. Once practiced, the outcome will be astounding, compared to our previous abilities.

Only then will we be able to replicate agile social ontogeny, and drive the Adaptive Rate of the USA at a tempo ensuring not just survival, but also insanely great accomplishments we can't possibly predict or even imagine.

The point of sex: parasite evasion

Telegraph: Scientists discover the point of sex

Now researchers have discovered that animals reproduce together, rather than simply cloning themselves, because it helps them to ward off parasites.

The findings support the evolutionary theory that blending of two animals' genomes creates an offspring with a new genetic code which may make it more resistant to attack, experts said.

Cross-fertilisation helps creatures stay a step ahead in the continuous "arms race" with parasites, which are forever evolving to try and infect them.

Biologists have described the situation as "Running with the Red Queen" in reference to the character in Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking-Glass, who tells Alice: "It takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place."

Interesting article. Now how do we apply this knowledge to economics and finance to evade economic and financial parasites infecting our body politic?