How Banal The Sum Of The Last 60 Years Is! Have Solutions, Won't Deploy Them.

   (Commentary posted by Roger Erickson)

See the context of this article, and then the killer comment about Kenneth Boulding.

RGE: "Anyone paying attention in anthropology-101 or biology-101 would have told you Graeber was right, before he had to document the obvious & well known, for unlearned audiences. [Reality is still ignored by most, no matter how well known by a few. That's why academia is largely academic.]" 

TH: "This is the great weakness of disciplinary education as a model. It breaks the wholeness analytically and never repairs it synthetically.

The world badly needs a meta-disciplinary model based on general systems theory.
This is why Kenneth Boulding switched out of economics and into general systems theory [GST] as one of the co-founders. He was somewhat of a precursor of MMT, btw, and Randy has written about him."

Great point, Tom. Couldn't agree more, though we might have different view on some aspects of deployment timing.

It's not clear that the entire world is ready for GST, any more than Europe is ready for the euro, but economics and several other social sciences certainly are!

Why aren't some disciplines ready, while some are? Simply put, GST became trivially not-helpful to the mass of specific researchers (because vague concepts like aggregate adaptation & macro economics are not ready to be fused with physics), yet something analogous to GST should STILL replace macro economics .... if there is still any intelligent life to be found in that discipline.

GST, stripped of over-promises to physics/chemistry/biology/etc, should be tremendously useful for universities seeking to fuse English/Philosophy/Anthropology/etc into a standardized form of "Liberal Arts" and "Social Sciences."

AMO?  For "adaptively modified academia?"

In fact, SETI should turn it's attention to helping to vet economic faculty & students - not to mention politicians! :)

Further, both GST and MMT absolutely must drop the trailing T as inappropriate. Replace it with an O.

General Systems Operations (or just call it culture).
Modern Monetary Operations (just fold it into general operations).

And where does this lead us? To how banal the sum of the last 60 years is!

All the sturm & drang of politics, policy & academic revolutions comes down to the pathetically slow metamorphoses of human cultural aggregates recombining minor components into new forms for new needs.

Yes, Maude, it really is that mundane.

What does it take to just do the obviously necessary, sooner? Perspective, mostly.

Aggregates fusing academic disciplines (or repurposing entire workforces) is as trivial as an individual combining shoelaces with shoes - or quickly taping 2 things together with duct tape, before rigging more permanent solutions. It could and should happen dynamically and without discussion ... and rapidly! That's what Cultural Adaptive Rate is all about. Adjusting and tuning.

Mostly, it's about redirecting preserved hoarding instincts, from local hoarding of tangible assets ... to distributed hoarding of coordination skills.

Hoarders of institutional momentum are terrified by change, while leaders & evolvers are not. In the end, surviving social species must RAPIDLY scavenge and re-purpose their own Luddites, in order to compete with the other social species that do so.

Nevertheless, we're on the same path as the first social species that evolved. Today we're just traversing trivially different contexts, at yet another scale.

We have met the enemy of autocatalysis, and he is us. "We" are both the sum of all, tangential, institutional [phenotypic] momentum ... and the pending adjustments too. It never ends.

Whatever.

We're now back to this.

  Methods drive results,
    Which demand reassessment of Desired Outcomes,
      Which drive coordinated actions,
        Which drive interactions,
          Which drive awareness,
            Which drive selection of new methods ....

A circle has no start and no end. You can come at this from anywhere and find ways to catalyze it further.

And an aggregate this big has members starting at every possible point, simultaneously & continuously. That's true for all recombinant systems.

So we're back to the obvious ... that we face an arduous, escalating tuning task (return on ever-scaling coordination) that will never end, as far as we can tell. So why isn't that reality the #1, consistent message throughout ALL forms of education & training, at all levels?

Again, don't ask me, ask your mirror.

Propaganda, or, “Poor Methods Get [Apparent] Results” - Bill Black and Gresham May Recognize This ... As A Familiar Analogy

(Commentary posted by Roger Erickson)

“Poor Methods Get [Apparent] Results” - aka, “A Lot Of What Is Published Is Incorrect”

Richard Horton richard.horton@lancet.com

Actually, any honest student of orthodox economics, political science and "government studies" may recognize the same. Not just researchers in biomedical sciences.

The key questions?

1) What is to be done?

2) How long do we have? What's the half-life of feedback-based agility recovery in a network expanding faster than its inter-connects?

Does this remind you of ...

a) Innocent Fraud?

b) Control Fraud?

c) Gresham's Dynamic?

d) Responses to Paradigm Shifts?

There are so many possible outcomes, that we have to focus on methods and emerging perceptions of outomes, not just milestone goals.

Aggregate Methods drive aggregate results.
Aggregate results drive aggregate awareness.
Aggregate awareness demands coordinated action.
Coordinated aggregate actions drive aggregate outcomes.
.....;Aggregate outcomes demand changing aggregate methods.

All this allows us "to make a [continuously] more perfect union" ... among our aggregate parts.

The Entire Discipline Of Economics Has Become So Misused That It's Current Use Harms More Than It Helps

   (Commentary posted by Roger Erickson)

Definition of "economics": what aristocrats call "creative accounting."

So what does Economic Policy mean? That we have a policy on accounting, aka "economics?"

Isn't that akin to having a policy on records keeping, and art, and photography, and reporting? Yes, it's true Maude. Aristocrats have a policy on all those things, and that core policy is called propaganda - instilling the claim that THEY matter more than YOU, or WE collectively do.

Definition of aristocrats: sociopaths, projecting their value metrics on to us.

Can we fault every idiot for promoting an idiot-centric policy? No. We knew they were idiots before we agreed - possibly out of boredom - to experience the movie.

Can we fault ourselves, for trying to ignore idiots, and even kicking them upstairs where we naively imagine that they can do no harm? YES!!!

If you try to ignore aggregate policy, you soon find yourself being ruled by people dumber or at least more ignorant than you are, promoting idiotically illogical policies - just because we let them.

Do idiotic-policies make sense, for an evolving aggregate? Not for very long, if ever, or even transiently. Idiotic policies are, by definition, the policies of parasitism, just because the perspectives are so narrow, and typically unchanging. 

Evolving reality dictates that there are always things - many things - that we have to start doing differently. Trying to resist that change makes you, by definition, a parasite, draining your aggregate of the Public Initiative needed to keep exploring emerging options, via adaptive change. Has everyone agreed that parasites play no useful purpose, in culling the least progressive? No, comically enough.* Yet it's equally true that the aggregate selection process cannot be left to the parasites, aka aristocrats, aka economics experts, aka sociopaths. Progress is too important to be left for our self-parasites alone to judge.

That's why trying to use tracking numbers to create, evolve, lead or invent .... is just so brain dead that it's embarrassing. Invented, numeric tracking or feedback metrics are for assessing execution, NOT for selecting milestone goals or aggregate Desired Outcomes. So please cease, forever, the habit of confusing Desired Outcomes with infinite, alternate path progressions. **

Consider this article as an example:

What Uncle Sam really owes

These authors - and commentators - seem to mean well, yet by the faux logic expressed in their article, Quarks owe infinite Planck units to Hadrons, or to something. How will they ever pay that Universal debt? (Doh!)

They've become part of the problem! What does their line of reasoning imply? That the universe is insolvent?

Has S&P lowered the financial rating of homo sapiens yet? :(

Some days it hurts my head just reading the oxymoronic things economists say. It's like reading archaic views about how many pinheads can dance on your view of reality.

Warren Mosler eventually came to his conclusion that "The entire finance industry is more trouble than it's worth."

I'll now add that "The entire discipline of economics has become so misused that it's current use harms more than it helps."

Yet here's a MiddleClassKiller line from the UncleSamOwes article.

"since the founding of the country, the U.S. government has never had a negative net worth"

Net worth? Net worth to whom? It's not at all clear how to "value" the issuer & user of a set of denominating numbers, or who to delegate the "valuation" process to. Certainly not using those invented numerals themselves! And certainly not by those fixated on uselessly hoarding public fiat!

Surely you jest?

No? Oh, my Denominator!!! Then please do the following thought experiment, and reconsider once you're sober.

If YOU decide to issue yourself enough "Initiative Denominating" ratings (purely in order to accurately track and "organize" your personal initiative, mind you) ..... have YOU instantly exceeded YOUR net worth to yourself ... simply by CREATING your tracking numerals, out of thin air?

After all, in double-entry accounting, every CREATED metric (supposedly) has to be balanced by an equal & opposite debit from the SOURCE of that metric. 

[Pause ... to let that sink in.]

So, ask yourself. What is the source of personal and private initiative? Please don't tell me that you think that it's always and only a lust for transaction-denominating numerals - by "intelligent, perfectly competing, agents" .... competing for use of their own feedback reporting numerals.

The basic silliness here is that double-entry accounting is an invented bookkeeping method ... that overlooks the original, ongoing and constant act of creation we call reality, life, evolution, markets and economies ... which all constitute the cost & return on coordination. 

How silly is it for an accounting system to overlook creation of what it's trying to accurately track? Well, it's embarrassingly dumb, down to it's very axioms. Possibly fatally dumb. Nay, suicidally dumb.

Could we possibly compound such an error? Only by using such stupidity to craft Desired Outcomes, assess milestone goals and craft policy. No aggregate is that stupid though, right?

How do YOU denominate your personal initiative? By loaning tracking numerals to yourself? And then declaring a debt to yourself? Or do you set and achieve Desired Outcomes, and just use accounting when & as needed, to help in exploring emerging options?

So how does an aggregate of people denominate their Public Initiative? Not ONLY by issuing tracking numerals to themselves, and then panicking at the thought of being permanently on the hook to themselves for the burden of creating more transaction-denominating numerals.

Can we go back to real, and how it's created? Please?


                ###
________________________________________________


* [Will conservatives even realize that they are eventually the butt of their own, excessive joke?]

    [2000 years later (and at least 3.5 BILLION years after the 1st social molecules), and we're still fitfully rediscovering system dynamics ... and marveling as though it were something novel? Don't weep for your electorate, USA, they may be past saving.]


** [Aristocrats & Economists are the one attempted exception proving the Law of Selective Aggregate-Self-Employment: "Those that know how will always have a job, and those who know why will eventually be their boss - unless we suicidally cede why to how." Good luck trying.]

Aggregate Dystopia – Groupthink and Denial on a Grand Scale; Refusing To Acknowledge The Simple Act Of Aggregate Growth

   Commentary posted by Roger Erickson

Take another example, please!

Eurozone Dystopia – Groupthink and Denial on a Grand Scale

Once considered from another perspective, why should this surprise anyone? Is pan-cultural "dystopia" really so different from the painful, required responses required of other, observable growth spurts? Do the random DETAILS really matter that much? There are 1001 ways to reconfigure any nation, culture or economy. Yet it has to start with a consensus Desired Outcome, and the distributed will to achieve it, regardless of how.

Look at it this way. Just like human adolescents, any aggregate undergoing a rapid growth spurt HAS to get clumsier before it can re-establish how to rewire it's feedback & self-control instrumentation & management apparatus (e.g., "neuronal" systems), in order to regain and/or add aggregate agility for the new, enlarged size.

The red lines in the plot above are hypothetical, but believable, based on what we've already observed. Do institutional, national and cultural rates of change HAVE to peak, and decline? Is death and rebirth also the fastest way for nations and cultures to grow, just as for individual humans? Or can the pattern of cultural growth rate transition to a smoother, continuous progression?

Clearly, subtle extensions to Darwin's theory of evolution must be appreciated. Species and aggregate survival depends NOT just upon adaptive rate, but also upon the ability to sustain positive adaptive rates, and then also upon the ability to avoid intervening backward steps. It's the evolutionary rate, stupid! That rate is the running sum of all Output Gaps and Adaptive Gaps. Once opened, those gaps can never be regained. Allowing those gaps takes our destiny out of our own hands, and increasingly places it in the hope that competing aggregates may be even dumber and lazier than we are. Good luck with that hope.

For now, it's enough to stress that for a growing aggregate, e.g., a growing nation and/or human culture, it's the institutions which have to emerge, disappear or evolve in some new pattern, in order to fit changing scale. Even literature majors eventually catch on to this primordial reality.

"Everything [beneath the surface] needs to change, so everything can [appear to] stay the same."

Ya think? By one perspective, some quite obvious stages of adaptation are:

1) Recognize that self-awareness & self-control changes with size;

    (That's when honest feedback says things aren't working; "frictions" start to accrue,

     from skinned knees in adolescents, to depressions/recessions/class-wars in aggregates)

2) Prepare to change many things, as size changes (practice);
    (In physiological systems, various agents (molecular signals and/or hormones) have 

     evolved which help to actively grease the skids, so to speak, so that rates of 

     deconstruction & reconstruction in neural systems tracks the rate of growth in other 

     organ systems. This is true for everything from pupating insects to molting birds to

     growing human teenagers - and is still evolving in human super-aggregates, i.e., nation 

     states & human cultures)

3) Define success (what should the new-size aggregate be capable of accomplishing?) - and then don't settle for anything less.
    (Individual human "outcomes" and adaptive responses have slowly been defined, over 

     millenia of evolution. Human cultures are virtual machines, capable of rapid 

     adaptations ... when they select to adapt. If this perspective was instilled in our 

     education process, maybe our schools wouldn't be so obsolete.)

Why can't national populations re-define and "re-wire" their national institutions? And why won't they do so a helluva lot faster than in previous decades? Only for lack of intent, education, preparation and practice? What else do we have to do, that is all that more enticing or important? Watch videos? Overeat? Get drunk & pass out on the curb? Hoard nominal currency units?

All that is at stake is our cultural adaptive rate.

And all that's waiting is our endless list of expanding, aggregate options.

What are YOU waiting for?

Is There Any Bureaucracy (Or Orthodoxy) In The World With An Intact Legacy? World Upheaval Now Guaranteed.

(Commentary posted by Roger Erickson)

On the Verge of Disaster - Or a Miracle

(but not for the reasons the author imagines)

(& all this from an author who thinks that the USA has a "massive debt overhang")

(yet there is agreement that, "financial repression finally backfires" )

Back in Oct, 2014: "the Bank of Japan shocked the world, announcing a massive expansion in its own asset purchases timed to coincide with the government pension fund’s announcement that it was getting out of JGBs and into global equities."

Huh? Given all this out-of-paradigm nonsense, the author is surprised that predicted outcomes sometimes don't occur? Someone should tell him that we have zero predictive power.

[Not to mention that Japan had already announced an increase in sales taxes actually DESIGNED to equalize & thereby invalidate the effect of their fiscal "stimulus" - and was about to hike them further!]

First, Japan's "Gov pension fund" is simply an accounting agency within the Japanese Gov, i.e., one obscure expression of Japanese policy.

Second, let's not even dwell on how the Japanese gov's move into foreign equities turned out. Instead, look for coherence in their internal logic. Is there any?

How many would actually applaud if the Japanese gov next "shocked" the world by issuing Yen (¥) not to directly provision the nation & population of Japan, but instead to directly invest in foreign equities? (Would many eyebrows be raised? How many would really be shocked?)

You couldn't make this up.

Not only does it seems like the Japanese gov agencies collectively don't know what they're doing, ..... but it also seems as though their different bureaucracies and policy lobbies either don't know, don't understand or don't care what one another are doing!

And the picture is not markedly different in the USA or Europe, or elsewhere around the world!

Everywhere you look, in G7 or other country policies, the ongoing outcomes seem more like the results of mob rule by independent agencies or lobbies running on their own auto-pilots, operating at least semi-independently. Regardless of their respective paradigms, there is no coherent, overall policy logic (unless some entity is purposely sowing confusion, in order to disorient, divide & conquer).

Our electorates are electing no leaders capable of commanding? Anywhere? (Or else it's worse, and actual instigators are still operating in stealth mode?) It sure looks that way.

This all means great risk, and complete uncertainty, as well as great opportunity. Seemingly, any dark horse nation has a great chance to win this chess tournament, because every bureaucracy worldwide seems to be operating out of paradigm for current contexts.

I can't sense any coherence in announced policy steps from the USA or G7.

Are you sure we changed administrations? Either we're leaderless, or there really are active agendas which continue to incidentally confuse, divide & conquer the entire world, coming from distributed lobbies now dominating USA (& G7) policy.

Either way, too few lobbies pushing this many boundaries ALWAYS clumsily produce unpredictable outcomes.

This world population is too big & too inter-connected to be either:
a) without a coherent policy formation process (e.g., leaderless &/or fractious), or
b) amenable to world governance (regardless of which Central Planners make a play).

I see only approaching turmoil, or at best, incredible dumb luck.

What's your sense?

Let's Just Start Taxing Economic Policy Lobbying, Instead Of Sales & FICA Taxes?

   (Commentary posted by Roger Erickson)

Damage-Subtracted taxes, instead of Value-Added taxes? DST vs VAT?*

John Cochrane Explains Neo-Fisherism

Really? When is too much too much? Orthodox economics - like Aristocracy - has turned into nothing more than hoarding behavior. First people hoard static goods, then they soon hire academics to train shamans, create political-religions, and finally flood us with "economic" theory - in distracting attempts to hoard public fiat, and cultural perspective itself.

Personally, if I became President, I'd do something to seriously tax all this excessive economic theorizing that somehow accumulates as paid lobbying - unproductively dominated by "savers hoarding" instead of "labor producing" ...

... and get back to actively managing a highly dynamic economy based on more/faster/wider feedback based on better/faster/more cultural instrumentation.

Surely we must stop letting these hoards of Economic Policy beginners continue over-modeling an economy as an adequately described, static machine running at constant load.

A dynamic democracy is not a simple machine, it's an incredibly dynamic, rapidly evolving bio-cultural engine. Just stop trying to constrain our democracy & culture.

I've now read enough economics literature to stop reading it.

What do we need? Funny how those words cheques & balances come back to haunt us. :)

The original checks & balances intended by the Constitution were hacked within 8 years, when we let factions create political parties instead of sticking to our intended practice of finding consensus Desired Outcomes anew, with every year of changing context. The easiest time to betray any revolution is immediately, while rebels are still thinking that they won.

Disorders of hoarding behaviors in defined central nervous systems are continuously studied, yet those individual disorders are trivial compared to the impact of distributed hoarding behaviors in definable cultures, whether the cultural boundaries are defined by markets or nations. We won't address cultural hoarding until we invent new methods for training citizens to acknowledge and study it. By then, we'll have distributed disorders on a supra-cultural scale. Will the quality (including tempo) of our distributed discourse rise to meet that looming challenge, fast enough for humans to survive? Not if we don't start practicing audacious new methods, ASAP.

We need more methods, not models. And more practice, not just theory.


* A sin tax on public practice of economic theorizing, just like on other forms of gambling? Sure. Why is it ok for rich lobbyists to gamble with public policy, while poor people may only gamble their personal options in casinos (owned by rich people)? Yes, political parties are casinos, where naive voters are enticed to roll their dice - while not playing with House options, nor the Senate's. :(

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?

Different Dynamics Every Year - Who Sets the "Desired Outcome," And What Determines How Much It Differs From Actual Outcomes?

    (Commentary posted by Roger Erickson)

Pretty interesting feedback, with additional commentary appearing soon from Chuck Spinney, at his site, The BLASTER.

Why are Central Asians Flocking to Syria & Iraq after Neglecting Afghanistan?

This sort of feedback reminds us of the sheer volume of ethnic/linguistic populations holding different views than ours in the USA.

Really makes you realize that we should be growing our own culture here at home - as our own best protection! - while being careful to avoid too much meddling in the affairs of foreign populations for short term profit (to some).

Eliminate those FICA & Medicare taxes NOW (& some labor/sales taxes too), before it's too late to matter!

Here's the underlying message: If we don't take active steps to maintain a resilient, innovative, audacious Middle Class in the USA, we won't last long. We're only ~5% of the world population, and that proportion is shrinking. Do we really define success as killing or at least conquering everyone who's different?

Every war is a cultural surgery.

What do we value more in the end, the diversity of the rest of the human species, or just the oil & other commodity resources they currently possess? This isn't so different from other transitions we've made. Back in 1830 we valued whale oil more than whales. That opinion finally reversed, but only just in time. Other's weren't so lucky, from the Great Auk to the Beothuk. What makes us so confident that we won't also be cavalierly cast aside by the rest of humanity? If we keep treating them and their commodities as ours, what else can we expect?

If we want to be valued, there are smarter ways than conquering.

"We came. We saw. We made a more perfect union."

What Shapes a Culture's Cognitive Capabilities?

(Commentary posted by Roger Erickson.)



Contrary to what naive economists believe, existing systems are NOT collections of fully independent, calculating agents. Rather, each is an incomprehensibly tuned syncytium, with incredibly densely engineered and deeply tuned, seemingly endless lists of interdependencies. Everything depends upon everything else. The insanely great return on coordination is the logic that drives all social species, including humans - and ESPECIALLY humans.

Therefore, the following is the type of question we should be asking about our culture, and it's political economy policies.

What Shapes a Child’s Sense of Humor?

[Hat tip to Sanjeev Kulkarni.]

This is a useful question to pose. At this stage of inquiry, the particular cognitive capability being examined almost doesn't matter. All examples are instructive when it comes to considering what aspects of context, Desired Outcomes and practice is shaping a given system's cognitive capabilities.

Next, consider the following, and keep asking the same type of questions.

A human brain is just a network of neurons.

A human culture is just a network of humans.

Does a culture have a sense of humor? How does it develop? How about all the other cognitive capabilities that both physiologies and cultures develop?

After all, a group intelligence is a terrible thing to waste. So why not examine our own, and consider how to keep adaptively shaping it?

Language, Memory, and Cognition in Infancy and Early Childhood

Old topics, by now, even if deeply neglected.

What about "Cultural Language, Cultural Memory, and Cultural Cognition in Cultural Infancy & Early Cultural Childhood?"

When does an evolving culture ever exit "childhood?" When it has stopped changing fast enough, has therefore started to die, and has spawned descendent cultures - whether it knows it or not?

Is the very fact you have to tell some adults the following ... a sign of how badly our culture has failed?

Read and talk to your kids, to enrich their cognitive development.

If we have to tell our own citizens that group & cultural & national intelligence is held in their body of national discourse, and not intrinsically in the citizens itself ... then we've already failed on an epic scale?

Stop Pegging Aggregate Policy Options To Narrow Interests & Perceived Personal Options. Aggregate Options Are Bigger Than Any Of Us.

   (Commentary posted by Roger Erickson.)



Personal hoarding of a hill of beans? All that ever produces is more old farts, plus grandchildren guaranteed to be neglected in diverse ways. Working harder to guide aggregate options by way of limited, personal perceptions just won't work, no matter HOW HARD our 1% Central Planners try to think for us, instead of with us. At our present rate, we might as well beat our collective heads against a wall, in unison. Democracy is simple. Just LISTEN, all the time, to all of us. If that keeps getting more difficult, then develop the needed methods, instead of bickering about old methods that can't scale to present needs and opportunities.

Fiscal & monetary policy almost always comes down to attempts to yoke or peg constantly expanding aggregate interests & options to narrow interests & perceived personal options. Aka, pegging public dynamic fiat to private static wealth metrics, which is always and only a function of trust and organizational alignment.

The rare times the two align are most often in times of war ... if even then.

By definition, a growing aggregate ALWAYS needs better/faster/leaner methods for practicing ways to grow affinity, trust & alignment. That seems to be our primary gating issue.

Ironically, the only - widely accepted - formal methodology that comes close to addressing our primary need is the science of military mobilization, which is itself still far off the needed mark needed for our national agenda, and is mostly misused by clueless electorates & policymakers. Luckily, that whole approach seems to be slowly transitioning back towards a timeless, OpenSource science of "outcomes based training & education" or OBT&E.

First [perfected] by Colonel Casey Haskins at Fort Benning, Georgia, OBT&E develops individual confidence, initiative, and accountability in addition to mastery of specific skills. While most training focuses on drilling students to a basic level of performance, with OBT&E the focus is on the total outcome of a task or event rather the particular way it was achieved, [thereby] encouraging the development of tangible skills and intangible attributes such as [group agility,] creativity and judgment.

Just let easy happen ... instead of mobilizing to fight ourselves?

Perhaps more flash MOBT&Es* will be the trigger that transforms us to our next level of achievement?

* Mobilizing OBT&E

What Aspect Of SCALE & Aggregate Degrees of Freedom Don't We Teach To Enough Kids, In All Schools, Everywhere?

   (Commentary posted by Roger Erickson)



(Photo: walking towards, instead of away from, an impending tsunami of context changes.)

Why is it that group intelligence always seems to recede just before devastating changes in group context? Ordinary humans are clearly talented enough to devise many practical applications for exploring perceived options. There are countless examples, from sublime to mundane, such as this one.

Most Pet Lovers Don't Perceive Equal, Parallel Need To Help A Handicapped Middle Class

Do we have to practice austerity, or can we achieve everything we can imagine, and more?

Application of our talents is clearly gated by the process of recognizing and orienting to local, regional or systemic context. Perceptions & practice then drive us to optimize an increasingly complex combination of actions, so that we can all sail through that thicket of micro-to-macro contexts. Social species work exactly BECAUSE recombinant member interactions provide compounding group resiliency.

Please ask every talented person you know, to design some Automatic Stabilizer policies, for a struggling and starving Middle Class.

We are what we practice, even at a cultural scale. So what triggers do we need, to get more of ourselves to perceive our own, constrained, self-handicapped electorate?

Too few seem to see a MiddleClass limping down the road to oblivion, right into the path of another set of predatory sociopaths, whether "Brits" in India, or an Upper Looting Class that eventually self organizes everywhere.

To avoid these self-inflicted constraints, we need an electorate that practices simultaneously perceiving the full spectrum individual needs, AND team dynamics, AND social interdependencies. To maintain Adaptive Rate, a working culture has to juggle all available input, and keep all it's increasing options available.

What aspect of SCALE don't we teach enough kids, in all schools, everywhere?

Instead of hoarding static assets as rent, why aren't we seeing the value of employing everyone to explore our full range of cultural options, so that we can practice achieving even more than what any individual can currently imagine?

Join a citizen's army? Be all that, together, "we" can be?

Support cultural intelligence? A group mind is a terrible thing to waste?

Why don't more emerging students grasp the scale of the group options to be explored? What methods do we need, in order to change our re-emerging electorate back towards a more adaptive path?

Methods drive results?

  Milestone goals drive methods?

    And Desired Group Outcomes drive milestone goals?

      And interacting imaginations drive Desired Outcomes - aka, Group Imagination?

We can't get there by having everyone wishing to hoard above average amounts of static assets. The reality of the boring outcome actually achieved from that dream has repeatedly been trivial compared to increasing our dynamic assets, an alternate outcome which is available to any organized aggregate - but only if they first recognize it.

BIG DATA? .... Use It EVERYWHERE .... or don't bother applying it anywhere

   (Commentary posted by Roger Erickson)

[Serf] hunting is now a matter of ‘big data’ and not how well [serf's] perform at an interview

Is anyone else underwhelmed by this advice? Applying Big Data to achieving even more wealth & income inequality?

There's a puzzle here. Why can't these same logicians apply systems logic to all steps leading to aggregate output? Such as ounces of prevention, not just pounds of system cure?

If they were really capable of a bit more imagination, they might think of applying their BEEG EMPLOYMENT BRAINS and BIG DATA methods to preventing systemic social ills inexpensively, not just hideously expensive ways of supposedly repairing them.

How, you ask? Here's how. To have more novel inventions, and even faster cultural evolution, we could use a LOT more people adequately self-employed, i.e., finding it easier to HELPFULLY generate their own income from their co-citizens. That's better than just helping small numbers of oligarchs maintain a pool of starving, desperate serfs, on hand for whenever the slow-thinking Central Planning feel that docile "workers" are needed.

There's an accumulating list of suggestions for how to maintain cultural aggregates with more distributed net income, and hence far more aggregate agility - and adaptive resiliency.

1) no FICA tax?
2) no medicare tax?
3) significantly lower income taxes on labor
4) cure the monomaniacal fixation on the "deficit in fiat"
5) reduce the micro-regulation of micro-businesses? [Ya think?]

6) And, of course, start prosecuting some of the Control Frauds?

7) And, start regulating at least SOME of the larger banks again.

8) But all that presupposes an electorate that can select at least a FEW intelligent + honest politicians - and KEEP selecting similar ones.

9) So as a capper, we need methods for re-shaping this electorate into one that views aggregate policy as a logical process, and a straightforward science to practice?

10) We have enough people who know HOW to do that, but they're not the same people who know yet HOW to get this electorate to LET us do that. Too many specialists & too little shared context awareness. We need a small-scale skunk works demonstration? Somewhere where it's possible for even a few aware people to QUICKLY allow a local electorate to allow itself to excel?

11) We need specialists who can humble themselves just enough to work WITH people who can and want to get elected, and themselves have enough humility to do whatever is needed. Organizations are defined as collections of specialists who can also look past the distributed inexperience (and egos) of themselves and others, and work for big outcomes, not just settle for Pyrrhic personal victories. Do those who know how to do specific things want their country to be successful ... or do they want people to know that they were right? In a large electorate, EVERYONE is inexperienced about something. That's what diversity means. The good part is that it's so easy to find people to work with and hence for one another. Teamwork works. The bad part? We're all conditioned to criticize - and be impatient with - people who don't specialize in what we specialize in. Teamwork works ONLY if members actively look for ways to cooperate on big outcomes, while patiently ignoring irrelevant details and minor frictions. That means looking beyond personal frictions, as a matter of rote.

   (That's another - simple - subtlety about systems, which we could, in our schools, easily teach to every 10 yr old ... but don't.)

None out of 11? That's bad. So far.

How bad? That always depends on how long does it take a mulish aggregate to reorient to continuously changing context.

'Bout as fast as aggregate 2x4s appear - in the form of unexpected system shocks? Shocks can be very dangerous & violent. If that is the ONLY fallback tool we rely upon to trigger adaptations, one of these days the USA mule may not survive a reawakening.

1977 European Commission MacDougall Report

   (commentary posted by Roger Erickson)
Bill Mitchell: "If you read [this] Report in detail you will wonder why the Eurozone [currency union] was ever created."

We wonders, my precious, yes, we wonders.

So why was it created, over the objections of all then-rational people? Several of it's early proponents have since issued mea culpas, but not enough to matter. Yet apologies are not needed. Only corrections and fixes.

Yet it all comes down to methods. A common saying posits that any set of methods will work, if you get the right people to run it.

What were and are the Desired Outcomes of the currency union?

Are they being met?

Does the EZ even have a method for assessing whether Outcomes are being met or not?

If they do, have EZ citizens elected the right people to make this system work?

                                          ***

So why was the ECU created, despite rampant warnings? The core answer framework is circular, even before considering the details that Bill Mitchell reviews.

Clearly, many European governments, plus EEU Parliamentarians, were elected that did not represent the interests of European citizens.

Also clearly, that only happened because European citizens did not elect representative who had their citizen's interests in mind.

If citizens don't know where they want to go, all voting options look the same?
Citizens of Europe - and everywhere - only greater distribution of adequate Situational Awareness will save you now, or ever.

WHY Do We Keep Electing Overly Isolated Theorists To Policy Responsibility Positions, OVER Involved Practitioners?

Commentary by Roger Erickson

Here's another example of very clear thinking by Warren Mosler, ..... pointing out shamefully MUDDLED discourse on fiscal & monetary policy by those who know economic theory ... but NOT banking methods and practices.

Comments on Volcker article

Mosler makes some killer points here. Points that every American deserves to hear made.

The upshot? As always, the difference between theory & practice is smaller in theory than in actual practice. :( Volcker is clearly talking isolated ideology. 

Volcker & Mosler should have been WORKING TOGETHER, INTIMATELY, the past 20 years! Instead, Volcker has remained isolated in his exalted ivory tower, and the US Middle Class has paid the penalty for the resulting policy clumsiness, and missed outcomes.

Sadly, the ruling theorists never catch on.

Even sadder, WE keep electing overly isolated theorists to policy responsibility positions, OVER involved practitioners.

WHY do we do that?

That's our $100 question. We need a balance of operations/practitioner/theorist staff in all operations, just to chase changing context fast enough to matter.

EVERY system process is too important to be left to the presumed process owners. That is the very definition of a system - use of cross-process feedback to coordinate multiple processes into a whole. Why? To produce a whole that is greater than the sum of it's parts. This ain't rocket science, folks. We've always known this. For whatever reason, we're just not doing the obvious.

What idiot would ever ADMIT that keeping emerging theorists & emerging practitioners in isolation from one another is a pragmatic, adaptive idea? None? Because the missing feedback always kills those who remain uncoordinated ...  if any opponents anywhere actually do get a bit more coordinated?

So why is isolation a FEATURE of our class-based approach to self-governance?

If you can suggest ways to get more Americans back to talking more frequently with more Americans .... then for heaven's sake, please start!

Familiar Death Spiral? Spending More, To NOT Deliver Fewer Things.

Commentary by Roger Erickson

Pentagon Choices ‏@PentagonChoices17 Sept
@POGOBlog Meanwhile cost overruns for 98 major weapons systems are running at 31%, over at the Pentagon pic.twitter.com/pJ6gkMZTyj

What military contractors call "Concurrency" is the same as a concept biologists call "maladaptive phenotypic dominance."

That means, excessive expression of some random set of traits, which subsequently turn out to be mistakes. Most people might roughly describe that as random, institutional momentum or habits taking us off course. In short, that happens when a subset of citizens are taking us all in a direction we may soon regret, if we even survive to express any regret.

More on DoD Concurrency.

DoD Concurrency is no different in principle than our many over-investments in cultural oddities like Big Finance, Control Frauds and Pompous Politicians, etc, etc, etc.

It's a state that inattention to group logic delivers any group to.

Why? It's a group-awareness issue. If a growing, changing group doesn't re-sample all it's internal feedback, and assess all it's options at an adequate rate ... it can't know where it's going. The whole point of steering is to react soon enough to avoid crashing into unexpected things that crop up, and instead arriving at a succession of preferred destinations.

If the wrong choice of driver is allowed ... eventually, the passengers only hope is that they'll wake up and realize where they've landed ... before it's too late to recover from their position. Even if they're lucky a few times, there's no long-term future in betting against the house, or playing Russian Roulette - by not paying attention to which chauffeurs we hire.