Where Are The Statesmen (& Women) Who Can "JUST SAY NO!" ?

   (Commentary posted by Roger Erickson)

An ex-senator, a former CIA officer, and an Iraqi mogul lobby Congress for a private army, led by Saddam’s officers, to take on the terrorists that have trampled America’s proxies.

What could go wrong?

Wasn't ISIS started by, and is still led by, Saddam's officers? You can't make this up.

Create 2 sides, & sell weapons to both? That sounds rather familiar.

Twerks fur mi!

Where indeed are the Statesmen who can "Just Say No!" ?

And, ahem, the Stateswomen?

What happened to an ounce of prevention? Not profitable enough? Just think how little a microgram of prevention would have cost, back when we had the options of not overthrowing yet another government, to, you know, prevent an audit of some corporations shady bookkeeping.

Revolutions are always justified, but invasions and rebellions alike are always betrayed ... before they're even finished?

A reminder: Fiat currency operations are NOT about individuals making personal gains in the stock market. It's about making people aware of aggregate options worth exploring.

"How do you get people to explore their options."

Personal or aggregate.

In a conversation years ago, Warren Mosler asked me: "How do you get people to explore their options."  That was a killer question that stopped me in my tracks, and honestly, I've been researching it ever since. And, the answer is: that much is actually known, most of it is actively ignored, it's not formally taught in K-12 schools, and the task gets bigger every year ... and harder, every day that we neglect it. What is known is subtle, trivially easy, not immediately profitable, but is the actual key to sustaining short term, medium term and long term cultural evolution. It's all about an ounce of preventive preparation avoiding the spiraling repair costs associated with narrow, get-rich-quick schemes.

To repeat an old message. MMT is not economics. Rather, it is a description of pragmatic fiat currency operations, which COULD be applied to fiscal and monetary policy, if there were even a few more pragmatic people left in the USA.

What Happens When "Producers" Don't Need "Consumers"?

   (Commentary posted by Roger Erickson)

How many citizens remember the definition of a tangent, from high school geometry?

Much has been written recently about automation disintermediating currently "secure" human jobs, and the supposedly dire threat that any and all newly invented tools now pose to human culture and humans themselves. Few stop to ponder the fact that we've been inventing labor-saving tools since the first twig was poked into a termite nest, long before the first flint chopper was knapped. New tools have always posed a transient challenge, followed by the freedom to turn our attention to other things.

Now, however, supposedly modern humans seem to be having problems TURNING THEIR ATTENTION to bigger and better things.

Uh, ... maybe OCD* is the problem, not tools or automation?

Consider (but please don't get overly side tracked on the specifics of) just one of many, many examples, hat tip to Shai Schechter ‏

"Truck driving most common job in 29/50 US states. What will happen when trucks don't need drivers.

Oh, I don't know. What did our ancestral primates (and their teeth) do, when gnawing raw meat from bones was replaced by cooked meat sliced with flint knives?

Can we please NOT descend into discussion of the trivia related to each & every such "what happens" question, and instead ponder what things will be like 2, 3 & 7 or more generations out? My persistent point is that our smorgasboard of new options worth exploring swamp each and every negative associated with population growth and our new inventions. I call this the Traveling Entrepreneur's Task, but it's also the Context Nomad's Task or the "SOCIAL-SPECIES DILEMMA," and it's at the heart of the utility & purpose of fiat currency, or denomination of ongoing (& expanding) Public Initiative. We've been doing that for ~3.5 billion years on planet Earth. Let's not lose track of that.

3 seconds of stopping to think produced this response.

I'd worry more about invention of the auto-consuming robot. What happens when "producers" don't need "consumers"? :(

Pun intended. But seriously, take our aversion to thinking .... PLEASE!

Is it too much to ask fellow citizens for, say, 60 seconds of silent, actual thought? What might THEY come up with, if asked to respond to this question?

Years ago, when visiting elementary schools for the NIH, to help reconsider science education, I used to ask this type of questions of kids. Up to 5th grade, kids everywhere had no problem demonstrating truly astounding imagination! You couldn't contain it! Sadly, you could palpably see the intellectual repression kicking in somewhere in 6th grade, in the form of repressed imagination regarding the future, replaced with too much slavery to "efficient performance" in the transient present. Much of the original imagination of student humans had - unimaginably - been contained and destroyed, reminiscent of the destruction of the once limitless Bison and cod fisheries of the Grand Banks.

NeoClassical Ideology & Collapse Of Human Imagination ... will that be our epithet?

For now, let's leave these dangling options for readers to explore on their own, unimpeded by any restrictions. The rising ranks of unemployed should have plenty of time to think, instead of just mindlessly watch tv.

Please notify me if any NeoClassical mouth-breathers re-discover the concept of infinite tangents, and then apply it to reconsideration of our instantaneous position on the evolutionary path of homo sapiens. Where do we go from here? Off on some random tangent?  Or do we THINK about the continuous, strenuous thinking required to keep within striking distance of our unpredictable survival path?  Well?

The murky images in my crystal ball imply submergence of a new sub-species of humans, destined for rapid extinction. Dumbo NeoClassicoSenseless, or the "DNCi" - disappearing from reality faster than a receding hairline, warbling their erble logic all the way. 

The sad part is how many passive homo sapiens may needlessly follow them off on some fixed tangent, & over the nominal cliffs the DNCi invent.

What's in YOUR crystal ball? Just the present view imposed by the DNCi, or endless new options worth exploring?

* Really, I'm surprised that adhering to NeoClassical Economics isn't on this list. 

    Or maybe it is, and we just don't notice? 

    Here's another thought:

     If variant wiring of many neurons within one central nervous system can produce OCD behavior in one individual, can variant policy wiring in public discourse produce OCD behavior in a nation's government? Since we're in charge of constantly rewiring both examples .... can't we fix or at least significantly mitigate both, with careful, persistent management, training and practice?  Say, isn't that called Democracy, and acting like a co-owner?

How Do You Get People To Explore Their Options? Give 'em Enough Income To Keep Doing So.

   (Commentary posted by Roger Erickson)

Speaking of trust, an erstwhile cartoonist examines the ...

Trans-Pacific Partnership

and, quite accidentally, ends up considering trust in government, and how to get people to explore their options. Could be worse. He muddles some of the issues regarding Free Trade, but at least he's against blind acceptance of the TPP ... for the simple reason that it ASSUMES that we can trust our lobbying process that produces the government we have. Amazing. We need a cartoonist to explain that? Maybe so.



What's also amazing? I keep reading (including in the TPP comic) of people getting Nobel Prizes for rediscovering common sense that peasants carved into stone inscriptions WAY before the Egyptians built the pyramids.

Don't rely on existing assumptions? (Daniel Kahneman) No kidding? That predates humans! Ever see a penguin afraid to go in the water even though it can't see any leopard seal?

Multiple people may both cooperate & compete simultaneously? (John Nash) Wotta concept! :( You mean like symbiosis, autocatalysis, or teamwork?

Weepin' Buddha on a decline! Are these people joking?

I'm sticking to my thesis. ANY aggregate* or network going through a growth spurt HAS to get clumsier (& dumber), before it can regain & extend agility.

Can I get a Nobel Prize for reminding the new, clueless hoards of THAT age-old observation? :( Or does anyone even care about getting Nobel Prizes any more, since our aggregate went through it's latest growth spurt, and triggered another round of deflation in aggregate intelligence?

Why? Good heavens. Do you have to ask? A network dependent upon interconnections & feedback ... that suddenly doubles it's number of nodes without increasing it's feedback interconnects by N! (AND TUNING them all) .... is a clumsy, ignorant network. [N! = N-factorial]

How fast does it take a disorganized, growing network to re-organize on a larger scale?

It takes time.

What's the half-life of feedback-based agility recovery in a network expanding faster than its inter-connects? 

There are endless options, but in our current challenge, we (or another country) will eventually evolve a culture that pushes to re-organize on a bigger scale, faster. Or maybe human nation states will do that through symbiosis - which sounds less statistically likely. Witness the EEU struggles, and the history of "Monetary" unions. How system evolution eventually occurs can't be predicted by prior systems, only discovered by trial and error.

We named our goal as "Adaptive Rate" over 150 years ago, yet we're still spewing students faster than we're reminding them what their core challenge is.

Until then, it seems that our culture won't have hit rock bottom until someone gets a Nobel Prize for rediscovering that 2+2 = 4. Once we stop sinking lower, we can turn the corner & start regaining cultural agility, and AdaptiveRight will reapproach survivable balance with CopyRight. It's a simple balance for any adaptive system: keep components alive a & adequately provisioned ... WHILE growing the system. Components eating their system is dumber than sawing off the limb they sit on.

* (not just adolescents, i.e., an aggregate of cells who go through an aggregate growth spurt, and yes, get clumsier before they can regain agility;  do I have to repeat this 12 times?)

We Can't Have Our Evolution And Centrally Plan It Too

   (Commentary posted by Roger Erickson.)

(Too bad financial liquidity isn't included in that plot!)

The image above drives home the ancient lesson that increasing capabilities always rest upon increasingly distributed foundations. That's true for weight in architecture, inter-relationships in resilient networks, and education in human populations.

As evidence, Bill Mitchell recently reiterated an idea that recurs periodically, but never quite often enough.

“A massive boost to public education is required."

Yet clearly, “more” education alone won’t necessarily help. “Different” education is also required.

For example, something along the lines of OBT&E, which is a method, and also a reiteration of Natural Selection.

It's also clear that each and every one of our methods is necessary but not sufficient without ongoing adaptive intent - which becomes a method for coordinating all other methods. The utility of all methods still depends upon slowly molding a human culture with a collective focus on Cultural Adaptive Rate as the common guiding light - for all the milestone, Desired Outcomes we pursue as we continuously muddle on.

We have countless options, and they are usually increasing. Increasing our cultural Adaptive Rate reduces to collectively sensing, on any given day, what permutations of our ongoing choices will actually optimally INCREASE rather than reduce our net options.

That’s a practical math problem. In fact, it's a constantly changing, massively multi-variate, adaptive cultural calculus task which we can only pursue via brute-force group calculation (utilizing massively parallel feedback, i.e., by Democracy). By definition, our survival challenges can never be modeled as fast as they change. We have to calculate them, via distributed, organized trial and error. That, plainly and simply, requires complete focus on re-connecting everyone to everyone, and summarizing all available feedback soon enough to matter.

No predictive power, but seemingly limitless adaptive power.

In other words, you can't have your evolution and Centrally Plan it too.

It seems that the baseline for all evolving organizations - of any sort whatsoever - is to have 80% of the components (whether cells, humans or even whole nations) enslaved & poorly managed by a minority still operating by yesterday's methodologies. Some things are always, briefly, the "keystone" species which both enforce existing structure & constrain Adaptive Change in every ecosystem. There are no clear lines separating phenotypic persistence, Institutional Momentum, and hegemony. Yet we must manage those distinctions as best we can.

That's our burden, as an evolving, growing aggregate. You better embrace & enjoy that task, 'cuz it's not going away.

That's the reality of organic growth. Central Planning is always fighting a staged retreat while racing to stay relevant to the expanding numbers who are escaping their comprehension.

On a personal level, it's not so different from what grandparents observe, as first their kids and then their grandchildren spiral out into the future.

It's up to us to make OUR continuous AND INCREASINGLY DISTRIBUTED transitions either relatively graceful, or rather tumultuous. How? Equally clearly, that depends on how we prepare our future citizens, by managing distributed education.

Cultural embryology, that is.

I’ll liberally paraphrase Joshua Chamberlain, circa 1865. 

“We have zero predictive power, but through training and education, we can determine what aggregate adaptive rate we can generate, when each novel group challenge appears.” 

What's that old saying? If you really love something - even the future for you, your kids and your nation - then set it free? No, not unprepared in the middle of the road, figuratively, but in a somewhat protected practice field, and then make the sacrifices necessary to protect it as it learns how to be free from your constraints.

That seems to be what human evolution is all about. We can't have our aggregate evolution and Centrally Plan it too.

No, 2 + 2 (+ something unexpected) never equals just 4. Yet our electorate has to keep making that calculation on a national level, every day, and adjust to the continuous surprises. Human cultures compete on the basis of their aggregate cultural-CPU designs.

What's that mean for citizens? Probably the following message.

If you can't stand the physical math, get out of the evolution!

The alternative is already apparent.

(Right now, we're not using our brains in any organized way, either.)

What Was At Stake, And Ultimately Lost ... From Within. Are We Seeing The Demise Of CONTEXT NOMADS?

   (Commentary posted by Roger Erickson)

Have you ever come to recognize a people's failure to adapt, and lead themselves?

That observation can be made in more than one current setting.

In fact, it's a widespread & unmet challenge among literally billions of humans.

Here's just one of many, illustrative examples.

Andy:
"Unrelated Bill, but perhaps you will allow me to recommend a wonderful documentary and, in my view, a valuable historical record about the Miners strike in Britain in 1984-85. It’s called

Still the enemy within 

It looks at the strike from the miners’ perspective and that of their wives and crystalizes the battle (literally) between the State and organized workers plus what was at stake, and ultimately lost."

That's from a comment at: While Europe debates a placebo the disaster deepens

What is an observer of these - and many more examples - to conclude?

First, perhaps, that this all ties together rather simply. Our major difficulty is orienting so many people to the nuance of emerging group context. Organizing & re-organizing on this scale poses a novel recruitment task requiring new methods plus learning how best to wield them after they're invented. The herding cats metaphor applies as never before.

Second, that regardless of which & how many details are discussed, these are all rather straightforward failures to organize & re-organize any & all methods ... as context changes. That's certainly one general conclusion.

Our biggest problem seems to be our own, aggregate lethargy, mostly a cognitive lethargy. We're simply getting in our own way. No single challenge we hear people lamenting is in of itself in the least bit daunting. Our ancestors would howl with laughter watching us - once they sorted out the unfamiliar but un-daunting context.

Why? Because, none of our present stories are conceptually different from previous sad endings, such as the self-programmed demise of the Greenland Vikings, not to mention countless other stories of prior human challenges, successes and failures. We've come all this way, and now suddenly billions of homo sapiens can no longer execute staging, linking & sequencing of more group agility? That really is comical, as well as tragic.

Humans used to be good at change. In the past several hundred thousand years, we spread all over the entire globe in multiple waves - incredibly quickly - as NOMADS.  And along the way we quite incidentally diversified any & all of our methods AT WILL, as we became many different cultures, and even formed and recombined different subspecies!

Any ancient nomad could do this! Before breakfast. Without breaking a sweat.

Go anywhere and be anything ... in 2 generations. That's what we've always done. Call it the "Traveling Entrepreneur Task."

In fact our kids ... when we leave them alone ... can still do this with ease.

So what happened to too many of our present adults, in so many different settings? We're no longer geographic nomads, but since other aspects of context keep changing, we always were - and remain - Context Nomads.

Why are too many of our adults just sitting down and refusing to keep changing, even as the rest of the human troop (including their own descendants) go on exploring the next context?

Our primate ancestors came out of Africa and went everywhere. Now we honor them by refusing to keep going, by exiting the past & present ... and exploring new dimensions of cultural reorganization and evolution?

For shame.

Sayonara, old folks sitting down on the path. You're history. Do your descendants a favor, and quit urging them to hunker down with you, and abandon Nomadism.

No rapidly changing methods, no survival.

It's a wonderful, always changing world. Our aggregate options are expanding exponentially. And it's a shame that so many people can't find joy in simply exploring it AND all it's changes.

The Reservoir Of Misinformed People Still Seems Overwhelming - Time For Some Cultural Self-Shaping

   (Commentary posted by Roger Erickson)

This is cultural parenting, from 2 years ago.

Starbucks Employees to Send Politicians Message on Cliff

Starbucks workers in Washington will write “Come Together” on cups this week to encourage U.S. politicians to reach a compromise to reduce the national debt.

Weepin' Buddha on a decline! That was then. Has anything changed?

National debt? For a fiat currency issuer? Someone should ask them how we can have a deficit in fiat. What does that even mean?

Listening to most of the press corp try to talk about fiscal policy is like listening to a troop of ballerinas trying to discuss ballistics.

Try as they might, everything they say is just totally out of context, and out of paradigm.

Marriner Eccles must be turning over in his grave - in despair at how ignorant of fiat currency operations his country has become.

Beardsley Ruml must have died from embarrassment!

Managing a fiat currency supply is always and only about inflation, deflation and enough liquidity to explore existing, highly distributed, options available to a citizenry. 

At this time, we have a gross lack of liquidity for well over 80% of our - mostly idle & severely underutilized - electorate, NOT an excess of liquidity. There are things to be done & people eager to do those things.

Yet they're being told that their coordination can't be denominated.  Why? We're out of denomination units.  ??  Come again?

The talent available in this country could be accomplishing insanely great and unimaginable things. Instead, we're arguing about balancing fiat!!??? Is this a cruel joke, or just plain ignorance and lazy thinking? Comedy Central, or a nightmare of NeoLiberalism?

The Principle of Prior Plausibility is just a principle, it's not a NeoLiberal law. With some cognitive effort, we can wake up and change ANY maladaptive cultural-habit, not just personal thinking habits. Most people will do anything within their power to avoid thinking - so will entire Middle Classes - but not ALL people or all electorates, ALL of the time. Maybe 2% or less of humans constitute "Stem Thinkers," rather like stem cells.

The culture of the USA used to be a unique, thinking "Stem Culture," but now we've largely decomposed back to a collection of NeoLiberal dimwits.

The rest of you? How can one serve your country without at least taking the time to know at least a bit about the actual operations for the topic one is trying to talk about? Bloomberg's level of reporting is making an absolute joke of every aspect of our national security and domestic policy. Nearly the entire media coverage of fiscal policy is irresponsible & far past the point of Innocent Fraud. More like Irrelevant Insanity.

Arbitrarily insisting upon "balancing fiat," whatever that means - especially while disregarding any connection to REAL national context - is by itself only a superficial and out-of-paradigm way to insist upon national suicide. That's a cultural-habit that will break itself, the hard way, if YOU yourself don't help break it, sooner.

...

On the other hand ... there ARE signs of hope, no matter how meager. :)

Brutal verdict from Generation Z. "Facebook is just for old people posting pictures of their kids and grand-kids."

Ok, enough of the good news (that scalable methods for public discourse ARE rapidly diversifying - maybe they'll reach a new, unpredictable critical mass). Meanwhile, back on the funny farm ... .

The parasite's NeoLiberal trick is in keeping 'em 99% fleeced, not 100%.

To re-shape this situation, maybe ask a 10yr old what insanely cool thing they'd most like to do, when they grow up. Maybe something like (but not restricted to):

1) live on the moon;

2) travel to Mars, or

3) reinvent another Golden Age here on planet earth.

If they say "that isn't possible," ask them "Why Not?"

If they're looking to us (or NeoLiberals) for options, that's OUR problem. If they wonder why we are constraining THEIR options ... then it's THEIR problem.

(Kudos to J. Paul Getty for triggering this generalizable concept.)

Is Economics, As Well As Most Other Policy Management Theory, Tragically, Comically Overrated?

   (Commentary posted by Roger Erickson)

Ya think? :(




Is there a recipe cookbook for cultural and economic policy evolution? :)

Just Do The Little Things That Make It Harder For All Citizens, Everywhere, To Work At Cross-Purposes?

Bill Mitchell: Available Operations ... Are Not The Same As Initial, Past, Current & Eventual Use.

(Commentary posted by Roger Erickson)

MMT – lacks a political economy?

What was the phrase?

First they ignore available operations, then they laugh at the idea of exploring options, then they fight to constrain aggregate options ... then the aggregate survives.

With inspiration from Gandhi, as well as evolutionary history. , where natural SELECTION = Outcomes Based Training & Education (same thing).

Perceived Injustices Are Meaningless Without Context ... Surviving Reality Requires Continuous Exploration of Response Options

(Commentary posted by Roger Erickson.)

Injustice?

"If the wealth of the world's 5 richest families was confiscated no human being would have to starve again."

This one misses the point, even if technically plausible. Better to define optimal tuning options, rather than ONLY define current injustices.

Problem? The rich are given, and are hoarding, immobilized, an outsize proportion of present fiat?

Suggested alternative? Why bother confiscating it? Just alter the ratio of feeding it (excessive hoarding) vs feeding dynamically distributed fiat. The huge hoards of unused fiat would wither as fast as they accumulated - or become irrelevant.

Why? Because today's net public fiat is always dwarfed by tomorrow's. It's been unstoppable for 4.5 Billion years!

How Public Initiative (fiat) used is NOT. That depends entirely upon the quality (including tempo) of OUR distributed decision-making.

Here's a suggestion. Participate, yourself, in defining your own local and your own country's distributed options.

If you don't, some deranged economist will!

And that will only constrain the rate of exploring our cultural options.

Then you'll have to deal with the PRINCIPLE OF PRIOR PLAUSIBILITY, where an initial hypothesis builds outsized institutional momentum, SOLELY for lack of early opposition or alternatives. The statistics of phenotypic persistence dictate cultural agility. If we want to adjust quickly, then we have to end some cultural habits as fast as we start other ones ... or be far more selective about which ones we start!

Hence Leonardo's famous maxim.

"It is easier to resist at the beginning than at the end." Leonardo da Vinci

He might just as easily have said "be selective," rather than just "resist."

And an immediate corollary?

"Democracy works better when practiced every minute, instead of trying to repair it every four years."  RGE :)

Call it the "Broken Democracy" approach. :( The prize to keep our eyes on is our own, constantly increasing Cultural Adaptive Rate. That's the best way to prevent the crime of innocent fraud.

ps: If we question the adaptive value of human fat, why don't we question the cultural utility of obese wallets that immobilizes people in gated communities? A fatty liver is bad for personal health. A fatty wallet is bad for cultural health. Anything beyond 0.1% having fatty wallets is an epidemic of unhealthy demand leakages, i.e., sloth.

(effects of liver cirrhosis)

Stages of cultural damage?

  From healthy culture (distributed decision-making)

  To cultural financial fibrosis? (bought politicians; "yellow" NeoCons)

  And on to cultural liquidity cirrhosis? (free trade? foreign adventures?)

Any artists care to illustrate a cirrhotic Wall St. poisoning American policy agility?

The Roots Of Political Gridlock? A Foolish Population & Their Options Are Soon Parted

   (Commentary posted by Roger Erickson.)



Definition of a foolish population? One that doesn't listen well enough - or often enough - to enough of it's own, growing spectrum of feedback ..... to know what it knows!

You want yet another perspective?

Control Fraud:

"voters will not get angry ..if they don’t know that money is being stolen in the first place."

(?? And if they don't realize that national outcomes are being diverted, regardless of how much "money" does or doesn't seem to change hands?)

This is an incredibly long and detailed essay, above, by Francis Fukuyama ..... and yet he goes to all that trouble without making any suggestions for what to do about the challenges he lists!

I find the straightforward approach of OBT&E - or OSCE - to be much more productive.

Quit separating the endlessly emerging challenges from the early and continuous adjustments?

Forget Combinatorial Chemistry. We're undergoing Combinatorial Culture - and have to parse the simultaneous changes the best we can. That ALWAYS means forcing early decisions with insufficient data, but not TOO MANY! We've been doing this for 4.5 billion years, so don't panic. In fact, we've gotten really good at it, and now practice the refined approach called "social species."  No matter the context, social species solve emerging challenges by ... "being social" - i.e., by exchanging, analyzing and quickly (& continuously) acting upon ENOUGH of their own, available feedback to surf unpredictable reality.

Do we have to do that on a larger scale every year, by inventing & testing entirely new and more scalable methods?

Sure. That doesn't mean it's not doable.

What happened to American ingenuity?

We seem to be trying our best to tax it out of existence, with FICA, Medicare and other income taxes on what's left of Jane and Joe Sixpack of the former Middle Class.

We now use the hyper-efficient NSA to detect any sign of public feedback.



Yet if they detect any ... do they just call in the newly weaponized SWAT teams? What's next? Diverting the imaginary Social Security Trust In Fiat Fund to support drones for neighborhood police?

There is a better way, obviously - but we have to select it from current options. We can invest in developing reasonable, reasoning, free citizens ... or we can invest in imprisoning them in their own faux security.





Yes, there's an app for that. We're still working on bullet proof apps for the unborn, all the way to their source ... ovaries and testes. Support the RIGHT TO STRIFE fund! Since that obviously won't be enough, will we encase our brains in impenetrable shielding too? Or just our institutions and their momentum, since that's always tangential to our culture's unpredictable Adaptive Path.

If a shrinking Policy Space and declining Policy Agility is what we think we want, then we're doing a good job. Unfortunately, those goals are incompatible with what we all say we want for ourselves, our kids, our grandchildren, and our 7th generation yet unborn.

"Progress is impossible without change, and those who cannot change their [methods] cannot change anything." - George Bernard Shaw

Evolution Don't Care About Metallic Or Any Other Imagined Peg For Adaptive Rate.

   (Commentary posted by Roger Erickson)

Week In FX Asia: India Caught Between Inflation And US Fed

?? What? Surely it's more accurate to say that India is caught between conformity & lack of bold leadership?

Expanding options call for bold exploration? And increasing quality of distributed decision-making?

Not complaints as to why someone or some agency doesn't make life easy for the co-dependent 1% parasitizing the middle-class in given countries?

Life was tough back in the 1920's/1930's, when most countries went back off the intra-nation gold std for good, and instead opted for policy agility, and using their brains more often.

It was also tough in 1944, when the US Gov re-started inter-gov convertibility of $US for gold (can't be smart all the time!), and again in 1971, when the US Gov finally ended inter-gov convertibility of $US for gold.

Listen. Why the hell can't all nations & all citizens go back to the time-honored convertibility of general welfare of the people for Public Initiative, aka FIAT?

Is there any other floating correlate that matters?

Evolution don't care about metallic or any other imagined peg for adaptive rate. Social evolution follows the quality (including tempo) of distributed decision-making. Get over it, Luddites & Libertarians, we're a social species, not independent hermits.

If There's A Distributed Will, There's A Crowd-Sourced Way. We Just Have To Find Methods.

   (Commentary posted by Roger Erickson.)




Someone please tell the 1% to quit trying to micromanage the 99%, by trying to buy all the politicians? It just doesn't work? Jane & Joe Sixpack could tell 'em that, and General Patton could have too, if they'd listen & read.

There are creeping consequences. Here's a prime example.

On the Failures of American Universities

That message holds 10x for failure of public policy institutions too?

Plus, the article doesn't say enough about remedies for this widespread sclerosis.

Do we have to have an aggregate heart-attack to trigger bureaucracy bypass surgery?

What's it take to get this electorate to practice some healthy-policy living?

We need Economic-Illness prevention. Maybe some economic-fitness-gurus would help. Do you know any that aren't one-trick ponies? :(

Never tell 320 million people HOW to do things? Progress for 320 million people means allowing consensus on what BIG challenges to tilt at, and then letting all that diversity amaze ourselves with it's distributed genius?

Yet don't despair. If there's a distributed will, there's a crowd-sourced way. We just have to find methods.

The methods we need are ways to ask people to LET themselves help them achieve. As Einstein and Shewhart suggested, imagination is always more important than context-dependent knowledge. Normally that quickly makes one think of maintaining social agility by right-sizing AND right-distributing our currency supply, a sore subject. Yet even if NeoLiberal Luddites are trying to constrain our fiat-metric supply, today our IT-enabled culture can still explore alternate forms of cultural currency.

It's only a question of how many potshots at our own feet we want to take before right-sizing our cultural imagination and cultural adaptive rate.

"Two capitalist tools for every plutocrat, and 99% holes in every aggregate?" Wotta campaign slogan! Please start suggesting better ones. We need about 320 million alternates to select from.

Most Common Way To Entice People To Explore Their Own Options .. Is An Opportunity To Destroy Other People's Options?

(Commentary posted by Roger Erickson)



In email from Warren Mosler, this part was especially entertaining;

"[Auto] Manufacturers are experienced at gaming the [vehicles sold] numbers."

Imagine where we'd be if Gutenberg hadn't made the illegal move of inventing printing. Or what if permanent Copy/Patent-Right had gone back to the original AdaptiveRight and OpenSource of evolution - faster than it already is?

Seeing that much effort to avoid sharing data here in a mature USA industry sector makes one appreciate how mal-adaptive policy adaptive rate remains in less coordinated industries (e.g., Wall St.) and economies.

Plus, it makes you realize how vast the untapped potential of human nation-aggregates already is! Our dynamic Output Gap is always far bigger than the static output gap we already recognize.

And, war remains the most reliable way to recruit return-on-coordination?

Wait a minute. The easiest way to entice people to explore their own options are opportunities to destroy other people's options? Go figure!

BMHOTK!

What happened to "WE came. WE saw. WE made a more perfect union?" :(

The eventual epitaph of the USA may someday feature words from an old folk song, appropriately connected to un-prosecuted fraud. (Shades of banksters with loyal, misguided accomplices!)

Hang down your head dumb electorate,

hand down your head and die,

Hang down your head dumb electorate,

poor souls, you've gone bye-bye. 

Met ourselves in the mirror, there we took our lives,

met ourselves in the mirror, shot ourselves in the foot. 

(repeat Chorus) 

This time next context, reckon we could'a still been here,

'stead of just a past tense, swinging from an old memory; 

Met ourselves in the mirror, shot ourselves in the foot,

hadn't been for orthodox, we'd still be here with even more diversity.

Our old image in the mirror, didn't wanna see no change,

hadn't been for fixation on stasis, we'd still be dynamic and free.

(With apologies to Laura Grandchild)

Can't Make This Up. Hoover & Roosevelt as DoppleKabukiGangers

   (Commentary posted by Roger Erickson.)

"Given later developments, the campaign speeches often read like a giant misprint, in which Roosevelt and Hoover speak each other's lines."

- Roosevelt adviser Marriner Eccles, on the campaign of 1932

and

The fight that just won’t die.

It was all an accident?

Roosevelt eventually unintentionally DID what Hoover originally? intended, but wouldn't/couldn't/didn't get DONE in time to matter?

In retrospect, it seems clear that as nations and populations grow, that their fundamental operations must be re-organized, as a function of sheer scale alone, if not context. "Experts" such as Hoover can easily do more harm than good by unnecessarily opposing required change that they don't understand, while "beginners" like FDR can do tremendous good simply by having the courage to allow change, regardless of whether they understand it.

There is a fundamental difference between understanding process, and understanding process change - and especially rate of change.

Above all else, we need our entire range of people & personalities to have more humility, so that they can embrace and explore the potential of our constantly increasing diversity?

Have aggregate options, will explore!

That should be on our national business card.

Ever faster change, from grandparents to parents to grandchildren, is something we all have to embrace, if that generational cycle is going to continue unconstrained.

This Hoover/FDR tantrum may be a great lesson on intentions, adjustments and allowances, where both players come away looking better than all originally thought, but for reasons entirely different than ALL initially presumed! :)

History is never what we're actually told?

There's a fundamental difference between a tactical officer, and a LEADER willing and able to let tacticians operate?

It takes a different kind of leader, for every scale (and tempo) of policy development?

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?

Neoclassical Economic Theory Has Done Nothing More Than Serve Ideological Ends, And Is More Concerned With Justifying Capitalism Than Analyzing It.

   (Commentary posted by Roger Erickson)



That is a complete & colossal failure of the entire field by arrogant complacency, if nothing else.

No amount of studies by economists will make a dent in this problem. Every referral to any economist whatsoever - as an authoritative reference - only extends the slavery of policy to economic theory.

Non economists have to simply decide what they want to use economic theory for - and quit deferring to economists.

It's a simple, operational question. Let reality be the judge, and let economists write books about what just evolved, AFTER it does.

To generate evolution, we have to explore emerging options, and discover which unpredictable permutations do and don't increase our Adaptive Rate.

As usual, the theory will slowly follow emerging operations.

Until then, please quit hanging on the words of these shamans & self-avowed priests that call themselves economists. They're a victim of their own religion, but we don't have to be.

It simply does not matter WHAT any economist anywhere says. What matters is why whole populations listen too much to their propaganda, and divert themselves from exploring their own options.

Put down the frigging text book. Look around, and in the mirror too.

You want proof?  Consider this.  

"For the Big Probability Event so loved the universe that - for 13.7 Trillion Years - it did NOT send economics."

That's a tool we invented, to repetitively shoot ourselves in the MiddleClass with. Apparently, only because it'll feel so good when we stop using it. :(

A theory, after all, is always and only just a bit of imagination, to eventually be proven wrong by trial and error exploration of our expanding options.

How May We Permit Ourselves To Scale Up The Product of GROUP_LEARNING X GROUP_CREATING?

   (Commentary posted by Roger Erickson)



We've all learned a lot, since bumping into Warren Mosler, branching out of other fields, and having to learn what we didn't want to have to know about ... namely the difference between sane and insane aggregate economic policy.

Yet it's not at all clear what that knowledge gets us, if we don't know how to leverage what we all now know.

There's a famous, very old quote (dubiously attributed to Caesar), that triggered a still evolving thought process.

"It's better to create than to learn. Creating is the essence of life." JC, ~50BC

Yet where would individuals or electorates be, if they hadn't LEARNED that insight? :( [They'd be roughly where WE are?]

2000 yrs later, we've only slightly restated that train of thought.

“If only HP knew what HP knows, we’d be three times more productive." then-CEO Lew Platt, of HP

Platt's quote is touted as key to the explosively growing field of knowledge management or "KM", proving that all humanity can, will and does miss it's own, prior points.

What IS the obvious point? If we marry together the lessons attributed to Caesar, Darwin & Shewhart//Deming, we get: 

"If we all continuously learned & shared just how little we all need to share, in real time, in order for our nation to CREATE faster/leaner/better culture ... then we'd never have to worry about our Democracy." RGE :)

It seems obvious that we can't separate learning & creating ... except by dying. 

Our REAL, not just nominal, question is how to scale up the product of GROUP_LEARNING x GROUP_CREATING.

Any ideas about new methods that would allow us to create more of that "product?" 

We are NOT constrained by a net lack of knowledge.

Rather, we're lacking methods for letting ourselves sample enough KNOWN options. Worse, we have known option-exploring methods, but lack methods for allowing ourselves to apply distributed use of those subclasses of known methods, whether little or widely known. 

The outcome is that our population is in the same situation as HP's staff was 20 years ago. The US electorate is overflowing with knowledge and practiced methods ... and lacks only a few extra submethods for triggering exploration of national options. Those options can be better explored WITH an ongoing cascade of parsing methods, from best known methods (if they still apply to a non-recognizable pattern, or new context), to desparately_random trial & error.

The more I ponder this, the more our current Democracy reminds me of a patient with Parkinson's disease. Those patients can initially DO most things if prompted by triggering cues, but progressively suffer from declining ability to self-trigger their own voluntary actions. Their symptoms start with difficulty triggering physical movements, and progress to inability to trigger voluntary thoughts, and eventually even autonomic impulses such as breathing.

The evolved operations of vertebrate behavior-motor physiology reveal sub-parts of the basal ganglia as critical brain structures which "gate" all the inter-dependency circuits allowing conditional behavior of individuals.

The factors gating the more distributed functions of a human culture are not specific cultural ganglia. Rather, they are the distributed checks & balances we attempt to maintain, and the sub-methods we employ for creating, KEEPING and extending necessary cultural checks and balances.

We always need NEW METHODS, for tuning and adding to our repertoire of checks and balances, the operations we depend upon in order to explore our emerging options.

The only thing we know for sure about choosing the policy-formation methods we need is that they must help us steer - faster/leaner/better - through the unpredictable obstacle course that we loosely call "succeeding contexts."

Does that help? What core methods can we employ MORE of, in order to create, KEEP and extend the distributed checks and balances which we continuously need MORE of?

Guy May Have Seen A Burning Bush, And Heard a Forgotten Voice Bubbling Out Of His Suppressed Memory?

Commentary by Roger Erickson

Maybe he fell into a trance while viewing a burning economics textbook in Harvard Square?

"In the next 12 to 24 months, capital markets are going to struggle on account of... are you ready?... not enough government debt." Shah Gilani

Why, that's amazing!!! Where could he have POSSIBLY come up with such an idea ... in the year 2013? :(  

At this rate, our group brain may fatally shrink it's cultural perspective by short circuiting it's own dialectic field. :)

Given the tendency for more specialists to know more and more about less and less, until they all know everything about nothing ... maybe we really WILL all end up as Libertarians.

How do we fight that trend, and adequately manage public perspective, not just individual perspective? How did Shah finally get this far? Maybe he had a dream where he was visited by the ghosts of Eccles'/Lerner's/Vickrey's/Mosler's/Godley's/Wray's/Mitchell's/other's-publications-past .... and their chorus's too?

Not to mention that the wording itself is so precious. (Banks will be forced to hold more [fiat] treasuries.)

Given that treasury securities are expressions of group credit invested in diverse forms of private liquidity ... haven't they ALWAYS - in one form or another - been a requisite consequence of expanding human activity on planet earth?

More people to express fiat?

Each with more options, yearly, for expressing both individual AND group fiat? (Unless we REALLY screw up.)

Don't be surprised that more net fiat is expressed?

Nevertheless, "It's a miracle?"

Only on planet Dogma, where the true believers Hear No Obvious, See No Obvious, and Speak No Obvious ... until it's [again] seen as a divine revelation.

Maybe it's so obvious now that even novice thinkers can taste, smell & feel it? Even if they obviously don't yet understand it? :(

Fine. Given this latest comedic twist, let's try a strategy adjustment. Hold "Burning Tush" events in WalMart parking lots, outside Ivy League economics departments, and in front of hedge fund offices. Heck, even on YouTube. Play Mosler tapes at the burnings, from hidden speakers. For effect, periodically dub in something like Bill Cosby's voice :

  "Noah! This is the Public."

[Public:  "Build me an economy. Make it F(P,Fiat) by F(O,Fiat)" *]

[Orthodoximists**: "Right! .. uh .. What's a fiat?" ]

Anyone know how to animate a ghost of DoubleFacePalm fiat?

* function of both population and individual options

** Orthodoximist: "Specialist in extracting dogmas out of asses."