Policy Agility Games. Join THE MOVEMENT TO RETHINK POLICY SPACE .... FAST ENOUGH TO MATTER

(Commentary posted by Roger Erickson)

Yet another toe has recently been placed in the water (or extended across the gap).

JOIN THE MOVEMENT TO RETHINK ECONOMICS

It's a good start, but heck, that's just a part of our task. It does no good to rethink any part of a whole, if we can't rethink every part, as well as rethinking the whole. That's true simply because - to remain a whole - EVERY part of any whole has to accommodate and adjust to changes in any component part, in real time.

We need far more of these self-organizing efforts, one for every old & emerging discipline ... and across them too.

Until then, too many citizens - and especially lawyers - miss the fact that
AdaptiveRight and CopyRight must be constantly coordinated, to manage the inherent conflict between those two strategies.

When it comes to rethinking exploration of policy space ... there is no half way. If we can't rethink everything fast enough to evolve our nation, then there's no point in rethinking anything.

American policy can't reflect what the growing numbers and diversity of Americans know ... unless we distribute emerging data as fast as the rising demand to explore our emerging options.

Exploring Policy Space requires Policy Agility, which requires Autocatalysis, which means actively driving the TEMPO and BREADTH of new feedback distribution as fast and far as needed.

Every sports team and army knows that. Why isn't the same obvious for all members of every evolving culture? Until it is, we can't achieve an informed electorate, or an agile culture.

When it comes to political-economics, there's a simple point to remember. Our ratio of personal-hoarding to communal-provisioning determines our rate of domestic as well as global nation-building.

Adaptive Rate is neither left nor right ... it's OpenSource!

So how do we OpenSource our own National Adaptive Rate? One piece at a time? Or all of it? After all, recognizing Policy Space does no good, if we haven't already achieved Policy Agility through extensive practice. That's like reading a book and recognizing that you could in theory ride a bike. It still takes practice, to automate all the reflexes that can keep you from falling off. We need a LOT more cultural practice, at all forms of Policy Agility.  Let's go beyond the SuperBowl, and have continuous Policy Agility games.

The saddest part? We knew this 200 years ago.

"A popular government without popular information, or the means of acquiring it, is but a prologue to a farce or a tragedy, or perhaps both. Knowledge will forever govern ignorance, and a people who mean to be their own governors must arm themselves with the power which knowledge gives.”

James Madison in his 1822 letter to W.T. Barry

And of course there's more. Even people armed with knowledge - or other things - aren't saved, until they accumulate enough practice at effectively wielding their assorted "armaments."  In the end, we are what we practice, not what we possess. The importance of our dynamic assets ALWAYS significantly outweigh the value of our static assets.

We've Heard That One Before ... "Japanese Yen Heading For Hyperinflation"

   (Commentary posted by Roger Erickson)


Yet it's still rather breathtaking to realize how many don't grasp that the bad joke is on themselves. And also very sad.  Only thing hyper inflated is the criminally vicious humor shared by both victims and perps.

"Japanese Yen Heading For Hyperinflation"

Is it immoral to take candy from your own babies ... and their lunch (and diapers, and toys, and roof ... and future) too? When is enough too much?


The problem.

(Note that he even helped turn it in.)

Next: one step to understanding how to fix it.





That and an introduction to Ben Franklin, Abe Lincoln and Marriner Eccles.

Is that asking too much?

If more citizens orient to current reality by age 10, maybe then we could start a much needed national discussion about Policy Space and Policy Agility. So far most citizens respond to that request with a blank stare, like a deer in the headlights.  That's not gonna cut it ..... in the struggle to have our Democracy and use it too.

Who's Holding The Reins? Literally, No One! Electorates Are Some Data Late And A Context Short Of National Return-On-Coordination.

   (Commentary posted by Roger Erickson)

When systemic accounts decline, who, in the end, is accountable? Where does the fiat stop?




This matters because Bill Mitchell notes that "National Accounts" are continuing to decline.

And it's not just Australia.

You know, Bill, reading all your useful summaries of already published data ... one can't help recognizing how droll this all is.

The so-called "Business Cycle" - and bubbles/booms/busts/Bull-Mkts & Depressions too - are simply the result of various permutations of old/young buffoons failing to network adequately.

When distributed components of a SYSTEM quit sending/receiving/analyzing and testing collective responses to enough of their own distributed feedback .... well, then their system breaks down.




Then the insane return-on-coordination that we call human culture rapidly declines, as an inevitable result.

That core reason WHY cultural systems get too far from unpredictable Cultural Survival Paths is the same old story throughout the history of planet Earth.

[semi-social amoeba, Dictyostelium discoideum]

The real message is that if WE don't evolve a BETTER WAY - ASAP - to manage our own affairs, then some other system WILL quickly replace us, as sure as permanently multi-cellular species replaced single-cell cultural approaches.

It's all about our NET Policy Agility, in our demanding race to explore Policy Space (aka, perceived or allowable options). Until these phrases are familiar to every citizen, we'll continue to do less than we're capable of doing.

Any combination of young-to-old buffoons can quickly run whole cultures off a cliff, or linger too long in the past, long past when context has changed - IF THE WRONG SPECTRUM OF PEOPLE ARE HANDED THE POLICY REINS!!! If policy attempts proceed without adequate feedback .. the result is random, which is bad ... by simple statistics alone. The bigger the system, the smaller the ratio of adaptive to maladaptive action patterns there are. We have to ramp up our distributed selection efforts as fast as our options accumulate, or else we end up consuming ourselves.

With the proverbial wave of a little pinky, clumsy policy can undo any amount of agile strategy, tactics, technology and distributed brilliance & effort. Democracy works exactly to the extent that NO ONE tries to just do "their" job, and ignores participation in distributed feedback.

A system really does mean a system, and only the most agile systems survive to keep evolving.

An agile system means one that oscillates back and forth between resiliency and efficiency, as frequently as needed, no matter how fast it grows. Switching between resiliency and efficiency means QUICKLY reconnecting all feedback to all feedback, on demand, before just as quickly relaxing to a just-adequate solution to a transient context, before it changes again.

We can talk and argue endlessly about all the details of all the late, expensive repairs to degraded systems (call them various ideologies) ... but the approach that will win in the end is to raise citizens who first gain, early on, an appreciation for their own, evolving cultural system, and then NEVER LOSE IT! That's the only way to have citizens who know how to leverage culture and policy space, not just their personal space.

Every other approach is a losing strategy. No organically growing system can keep up with expensive repair alone. Only cheap, prevention adaptation works. We won't recover or move on until this message results in very systemic overhaul of K-12 education. Until then, we'll keep churning out a majority who are some data late and a context short of national return-on-coordination.

A Group Intelligence is a terrible thing to waste, but we're trying our best to do it.

"The Speed At Which [Teams] Could [Adjust] Would Make Mental Flexibility In Leadership Even More Valuable"

   (Commentary posted by Roger Erickson)

[ ... political and other pressures ... resulted in the appointment to high command in ... of so many mediocre and even incompetent [policy leaders, in all categories].

Why on earth isn't that need - to assess and promote policy agility - considered a truism for economic policy today, and all other policy disciplines?

This is a great read. One of my suggestions as required reading, for every highschool freshman in the country.

For comparison, why the hell didn't Obama just instantly fire and/or force the retirement of every single one of the GORBS*, the day after his inauguration, back in 2009, like half the country fully EXPECTED him to do?

* GORBS = Greenspan, Geithner, Orszak, Rubin, Bernanke, Summers

Yearly Democracy Vitamin Supplements: Review 1 Marriner Eccles, and Call [One Another] After Cogitating

   (Commentary posted by Roger Erickson)




"VitaFiat" - there's no lethal dose, so even more can't hurt. (Cures mental constipation too.)

How Marriner Eccles saved America

Truly astounding reading.

"In 38 pages of testimony, he shocked the senators [of 1933] by not only precisely listing the failures of the economy, but laying out a five-point plan for fixing it."

[You have to wonder. If there were a 2nd Coming, of Marriner Eccles, would US Senators of today not only decline to invite him to testify, they'd impeach and lynch him? Sadly, I'd have to guess yes. Maybe next year WE will be smart enough to select some more learned and intelligent Congresspeople, in BOTH houses? America, Uncle Sam needs YOU ... to select smarter, less sociopathic Congresspeople.]

1933 US Senate Testimony of Marriner Eccles

1938 Marriner Eccles Address Responding to Criticisms Leveled by Orval Adams of the American Banking Association

The Marriner S. Eccles Document Collection at the St. Louis Fed Archives

ps: Eccles was a product of his times, and of course not infallible per all future challenges. He started out thinking in - at least flexible - gold std perspectives, yet nevertheless guided the USA into a currency regime where "money" is backed NOT by static assets limiting policy agility, but instead where a "fiat" currency is instead backed by the underlying dynamic asset of Public Initiative, which, by definition, can always be as agile as policy demands.

Very Useful Historical Analysis of Blunders On Europe's Path To A Shared, Fiat Currency System - By Bill Mitchell

(Commentary posted by Roger Erickson)



Options for Europe – Part 2

Great history review here by Bill. Much of the historical thinking he reviews held equally well for economic policy deliberations in the USA as well, and still does.

That history drives home the point that we should never let theoretical economists anywhere near national policy?

And we should also never let any single lobby, in this case banking, dominate policy?

Policy agility requires consensus? Otherwise, you end up with a constrained policy space. If populations could keep that simple idea in mind when approaching group policy, theoretical economists would be kept in check.

Coordinate narrow factions - ignorant by definition - through appropriate checks and balances? James Madison's anthropomorphic, 1776 summary of system science still awaits application of appropriately adjusted methods, for constantly changing situations.

To explore group options, we need far less discussion of theory, and far faster evaluation of new, more indirect methods?

For every intractable cultural task, there is a solution, and that solution will always involve invention of methods allowing yet another level of indirect, cultural adaptations?

Members of diverse system-science fields have been saying that for decades. Centuries, in some cases. Call it statistical process control, or ecology, or autocatalysis, or evolution. Call it what you want - even political economics - ... just DO something to adapt group methods at the same pace that change occurs? For Desired Outcomes to stay the same, EVERYTHING has to change? Constantly? To adapt to changing situations, we need citizens with situational awareness and the audacity to change anything that needs to change.

Can we please start retaining that simple fact throughout K-12 education? That's how we can damp the frequency of Ayn Rand acolytes (and sanity-lite's) like Paul Ryan, or 99% of our Congresspeople. They reflect our electorate, after all, which reflects the mal-adaptive operation of our K-12 school curriculum.

We as a people are what we let our Congress practice. And our Congress is what our citizens practice during training and education.

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

(commentary posted by Roger Erickson)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

Further discussion.

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

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

The only question that matters is this.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Will The ACA - "ObamaCare" - Be A LONG TERM Benefit, Or A LONG TERM Burden To The USA?

(Commentary posted by Roger Erickson)

A popular sentiment among early supporters goes as follows:

"ObamaCare doesn't regulate Your Health Insurance,it regulates Insurance companies that bankrupt you!"

In response, RH writes privately:

"GIVE ME A BREAK ... It was written by the health insurance companies.

Yes ... Obamacare eliminates the denial of insurance on a pre-existing condition.

But that reduces the profits of some private entity, somewhere.

The solution suggested by the Insurance Industry Lobby? Increase insurance plan rates across the board, reduce access to as many treatments as possible, and also cap allowable fees for clinicians of all stripes. [RGE: No income cap for insurance firm CEOs, obviously.]

And if given citizens can't afford the cost, have the public-at-large subsidize the cost.

The only incomes NOT regulated are insurance company incomes. This is a net money maker for the insurance companies as well as the pharma and medical device firms. The key issue is that the ACA does NOT allow the government to use its purchasing power to bring down prices.

Further, the ACA is a net burden for Middle Class citizens (especial healthy young adults) ... for clinicians of all stripes, and - I will call this one - for all retirees, who will see both increased costs and reduced access to services.

***

The ACA "does not allow the government to use its monopoly purchasing power to [set price limits]."

I suspect RH put their finger on it. That seems to be the clearest, killer mistake in the ACA policy approach to public health maintenance. 

Look at it this way. One, universal component of all public organization is to set a floor service level, that all citizens are guaranteed. Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness are just a start. Every service that an electorate decides it wants universal access to, as a public minimum, is most easily regulated by imposition of a "public option." For a long time, public schools were a good example. Mandatory, free access to minimal public education did wonders for the USA. 

Should mandatory access to the most basic public healthcare be any different? The approach of establishing a "floor" automatically puts a cap on how much private services can charge for presumably enhanced services. A public option never harmed private universities. Nor does it guarantee the demise of private health insurance or services. It only sets, by default, a reference for citizens to refer to, when considering health services. With no public option, that reference is zero. So it's a question of what level of mandatory, minimal health service the public wants to set for itself, at what cost.

How long will it take our country to catch on? Will we love ObamaCare for a year, then loathe it forever? If policies have warts, we can always adjust them, you say. That's true, yet it's also true that when we make adjustments, we can make things better, or worse. Our real need is to always have enough perspective, feedback, analysis, testing and assessment to be agile! Is the entire ACA implementation process agile? Hardly. Show me a single Congressperson who has read the entire act, start to finish? Show me a citizen who grasps the options that insurance companies can explore, going forward?

Given that insurance companies wrote the ACA, surely they had ONLY the best, long term interests of the US Middle Class in mind, every step of the way? :) 

Ok, all laughter aside. Instead of maintaining insurance company profit margins, we need to embrace indirect methods for chasing our enduring goal, ensuring adequate income for the Middle Class? Right now, citizens may want to hope for the best, and prepare for the worst. Basing national policy and election choices on hope hasn't served us very well so far.

We may not survive this.

It's death of the Middle Class by a thousand narrow cuts ... inflicted by our own, "successful" merchants, sprinkled among ourselves? Forgive ourselves? We certainly don't know what we're doing, since we haven't discussed any policy step widely enough to even find out!

This whole process reminds me of a bad cancer-care joke.

"Any chemotherapy will work. The trick is to keep the patient alive long enough (or to see which one works fastest)."

It's just now that we're talking about our own cultural-auto-immune disorders, on a national scale, not just cancerous cells in the body of one person.

All the individuals and lobbies clamoring to sway policy have lost system perspective? The patient usually doesn't survive those situations. The policy staff is not only impossibly slow and clueless, they've become agents of the social-cancers themselves! That's what "cancers" and parasites do in all systems, they hijack the policy apparatus - to narrow rather than systemic benefit.

Loss of policy perspective is possible only when an electorate loses system perspective. Once perspective is lost, policy agility soon declines and policy space goes unused. Then the Control Frauds, aka social cancers, aks system parasites inevitably take over ... for lack of effective resistance and regulation.

Instead of being distracted, confused, divided and conquered by narrow lobby interests, over a succession of single issues like Healthy Insurance of, by and for the Insurance Lobby, we as the Middle Class, need to define our own, Desired Outcome, and then elect OUR own policy representatives, tasked with listening to US well enough to matter.

Bill Gross Close To Tripping Over The Definition of Fiat ... Let's Hope He Falls On A Dictionary

Commentary by Roger Erickson

Scrooge McDucks ... Say. Isn't that just an alias for Fiat McClucks? If it spends, taxes and lobbies by fiat ... maybe it IS all just fiat? Yet what good is fiat if we practice it on everything except thinking? Cluck, cluck. Poor McDuck. Clever enough to acquire a duck suit, but still no wiser than a chicken.

Bill Gross notes that extreme wealth disparity triggers declines in distributed savings, and declines in distributed investment too. Both are obvious, logical points. However, his ONLY suggestion is to tax the wealthy more?

Why? To get more fiat? For whom? For the issuer of public initiative contracts and public initiative coupons - i.e., fiat currency?

Note to Bill. The US Treasury doesn't need any fiat back. Beardsley Ruml said so, on page 35, 68 years ago!

Here's a hint to Bill. Let's assume the Treasury DID need to get some fiat back, in order to get more fiat to express. You know, in case the sky was falling. I'm just clucking! Bear, er .. duck with me.

1) What would it do with that extra fiat? Spend it on public contracts? :)

2) Who would get to earn and keep some of that extra fiat? Labor? But ONLY if their income increased more than their taxes did?

So, Bill, EVEN IF THE TREASURY DID NEED TO GET YOUR HOARDED FIAT CURRENCY BACK, IN ORDER TO HAVE SOME ... it would have to spend it and tax labor at lower rates to achieve anything with it.

So, count me dense, but ...

3) Why not just encourage the Treasury to spend more on labor NOW, instead of waiting to get your taxes back?

4) Why not just drastically reduce taxes on labor? NOW! Instead of waiting on both clawed-back fiat AND arbitrarily delayed initiation of further fiat?

What on earth is the difference between 1,2 versus 3,4? Only tempo?

And maybe parsimony? And even then, ONLY for this particular context? Yes, a fiat currency regime ALLOWS for an expanded Policy Space and increased Policy Agility. It guarantees neither, however. Only fiat combinations of awareness/initiative/intelligence guarantee faster/better/leaner application of fiscal and monetary policy tools.

What? Bill Gross says 3&4 might further reduce the buying power of his remaining private savings hoard MORE than strategy 1&2 did? Higher inflation than 1&2? Really? Maybe. It depends .. on a LOT of implementation details. Yet isn't increasing inflation just an increased tax on saved capital - i.e., just what Bill wants? And, hasn't Bill already concluded that the timeless purpose of national policy is to increase our real economic options, not just hoard fiat numerals in bank accounts?

Look Bill, mathematically, it hardly matters whether you raise taxes on capital faster than you raise taxes on labor ... OR ... you lower taxes on labor faster than you lower taxes on capital. Right now, please do whichever is bureaucratically simplest in our current situation. That is, use Occam's Razor. In a fiat currency regime, the difference between those two situations is purely a matter of semantics, not reality. Either way, the amount of fiat used to denominate a desired adaptive rate is a dimensionless number, one that scales with the size, adaptive rate, context and arbitrary habits of a given population. What matters is the social computation latency - and policy latency - required to recognize and implement adaptive policy. Reducing that latency across multiple situations STARTS by recognizing that 1,2 and 3,4 are mathematically the same.

You are VERY CLOSE to rediscovering the definition of "fiat." Go for it! Pull a Ruml.*

* What's that Ruml-ing I hear in the distance?

Dynamic Value As Capital - What's Missing From MacroEconomics, And GDP Too

   (Commentary posted by Roger Erickson.)



If any economist wants to hear a description of what's missing from macroeconomics, here's a great example.

Achieving Greatness by Giving Control and Creating Leaders

... the concept of leadership [and group agility, AND policy agility, as real capital] is certainly more complicated than taking and receiving orders. As retired U.S. Navy Captain David Marquet explains in the following video, it’s about creating an environment that empowers the members of an organization to think creatively and take psychological ownership of the mission at hand, whatever it may be. [And, providing them with adequate venues to practice exactly that.]
It’s about “giving control and creating leaders, not taking control and attracting followers,”

Put that in your ISLM and, instead of smoking it, just blow it up? And toss ISLM in the garbage?

What's missing from GDP? It tracks only static assets. Not dynamic assets. As Steve Hansen points out, GDP became increasingly less useful as we transitioned further from a product to more of a service economy.

Leadership?  

Leadership, leadership everywhere, but nary a drop applied to enlarging our policy space. Or to increasing our policy agility.

  Rhyme of the Ancient Marriner Eccles

The Economics of Organization

Commentary by Roger Erickson

This is a neglected topic that many disciplines should be able to find common ground in. How can an adaptive system maintain a competitive Adaptive Rate if its information channels don't allow any and all system feedback patterns to float freely?

Should our 1% Central Planners dominate cultural information exchange?

Data is meaningless without context, and if an electorate cannot stay adequately abreast of FULL context, then it is taking complete uncertainty, not just extreme risks regarding its own national security.

Cultural information channels allow free flow of all available and emerging feedback, so that a populous may at least attempt to know much of what it's members know. In every form of systems science known, an Output Gap, Achievement Gap or Agility Gap inevitably follows a Distributed Information Gap.

Given that an adequately informed electorate is the best defense for a free people, what is the point of letting personal profit motives throttle what information flows through still-significant cultural feedback channels? Today, that still means our regional media firms.

So, Should the Koch Brothers Own The Tribune Newspapers?

If not, who should manage and regulate public information channels?

Further, if the Tribune and other, privately-owned media outlets are all bottlenecks limiting how quickly America can know what American's know .... what other self-informing models should we turn to to keep us all best informed of what minimal data best defines looming contexts?

Fluidly evolving required data flow patterns is a requirement for maintaining Adaptive Rate, in any system - whether an intracellular, physiological, military, economic or cultural system.

Our most compelling need is to continue to have MOST OF US sort out what few things are relevant for further national evolution, while promptly ignoring everything that isn't.

However, that primal issue ISN'T EVEN MENTIONED in economics textbooks!

We need to enlarge our policy space and increase our policy agility - and both require significantly faster TEMPO in altering our public information channels. How can can we get there from here? What new methods do we need?

Measuring National IQ With a Simple Policy Agility Test?

Commentary by Roger Erickson

Jerrit Erickson writes ... [we're] skeptical of the practicality of IQ tests, but there's something very profound in here.

Predicting [Personal] IQ With a Simple Visual Test
"The results of a visual test where people were told to quickly detect movements showed similar IQ results as a classic intelligence test. 'The relationship between IQ and motion suppression points to the fundamental cognitive processes that underlie intelligence, the authors write. The brain is bombarded by an overwhelming amount of sensory information, and its efficiency is built not only on how quickly our neural networks process these signals, but also on how good they are at suppressing less meaningful information."

Let's make some useful connections:

IQ and Visual Signal Suppression?  How about National IQ and Policy Agility?

Intelligence and jobs? How about national intelligence and job markets?

Unqualified application, vs quiet review of options?

Automatic visual "mapping?  How about auto-representation of emerging options?

Sensory Gating?  How about Policy Gating?

Schizophrenia?  How about national-schizophrenia?

Economics? How about context relevance?

Adaptation? How about national-self-tuning?

Self tuning?  Without distributed resources?

Policy Agility? How about methods for connecting distributed decision-making?

Policy Gating? Without adequate student training?

Data stuffing?  How about Map Making?

Discussing these in an economics blog gives citizens a chance to also perceive a national culture as an entity able to develop ... with or without national-schizophrenia-like attributes. As you'll see below, it's absolutely criminal that ecology, biology and systems theory are not absolute prerequisites for opening what passes for economics and policy textbooks! Our present national policy process could easily be described as "national schizophrenia."

Jerrit: "How good they are at suppressing less meaningful information?" This sounds like the strongest published confirmation yet of why many famously smart people didn't do well at school or couldn't hold down a 9 to 5 job. In some expressions, intelligence is indistinguishable from laziness or apathy.

Indeed. What's that old saying? "When you come across a group of people digging themselves into a hole, they'll always ask you to jump in and help them dig." Those who immediately question where the whole process is going ... are less able to muster the initiative to participate. They may even appear to be uncooperative or unemployable, while those most motivated to participate feverishly are motivated primarily by rank ignorance and stupidity!

Before we begin relating this to economic policy, note that the range of comments at Slashdot isn't auto-arranged so that all readers can parse the commentary "at a glance". Nor is it easy for a given reader to rapidly and automatically parse the spectrum of commentary on their own! :)  So much for technology.

For every bit of information, it is more important to have a "map" of "options space" to fit the data into. Without context, data is meaningless. [Also, it's assumed - based on past feedback - that readers who have never perceived anything past the end of their own nose will stop reading here. Hopefully that will cut down on some of the previous, irrelevant feedback. There are only a few ways to recode the statement "I'm clueless. Therefore I'm angry."]

For those readers who are less perceptually myopic, there's a 3rd confluence as well.

Those humans whom we call schizophrenics have long been known to have a deficit in sensory input suppression - often called sensory gating. The condition seems obvious in retrospect, given their inability to suppress randomly triggered neural patterns, such as hallucinations and unexpected associations. Initial evidence suggests that the population incidence of schizophrenia has been stable for centuries, suggesting that the syndrome represents peak assembly skill applied to the pinnacle of human development - already perfected over 200K years ago.

It's not yet known if only a few or multiple molecular-catalyst failures during development are responsible for the behavioral pattern we call schizophrenia. The subtleties of human neural development may have been largely solved over 200K years ago, but that doesn't mean we can ignore the basics when it comes to our diet and environmental quality. More importantly, schizophrenia as we term it is observed ONLY in homo sapiens. Using these observations as an analogy, it seems obvious that the unique features of distributed organization that are seen ONLY in large-scale human cultures are susceptible to subtleties seen in no other system whatsoever!  Our most compelling need is to continue to have MOST OF US sort out what few things are relevant for further national evolution, while promptly ignoring everything that isn't.  Ya think? It's called methods for getting everyone on the same page.

However, that primal issue ISN'T EVEN MENTIONED in economics textbooks!

Nor is it taught as the prime issue for every pre-teen or later student, regardless of the discipline being studied.

Individual sensory gating? That's passe. Surely we need new catalysts to help us accelerate national Policy Gating? Ya Think?

Jerrit's email was also quite correct in surmising that every system - "biological" or not - has to include distributed methods for self-tuning, based on any and all available sensory feedback.

Without a self-tuning infrastructure, you don't have an adaptive system.

Adaptive systems are able to seemingly pump information upstream against the gradient of entropy - leading many to label the accelerating resource capture as "reverse-entropy," even though that conflicts with the exact, narrow meaning originally defined by physicists. [Later on, oddly, Heisenberg's uncertainty principle didn't even mention degenerate semantics! :) ]

The very term "auto-catalysis" itself assumes accumulation of sub-processes that tilt the system at play into additional resource trapping. After all, what is acting as the catalyst, and what is acting as a substrate for the catalysts to act upon? Can a lock and a key "auto-catalyze" one another? Only if they remain oiled, and if something has machined them to fit - or selected from enough options to find two that DO fit. There are always preconditions, plus expanding options that are only explorable through diversity, recombination, and enough resources to drive the break-neck exploration.

It's immediately a given that what we call life itself - or even a deity - is a statistically inevitable and unending consequence of our preceding context. If there's a resource gradient, any given ensemble will settle into forms that accumulate and trap more and more of the available resources - at a RATE that depends upon available diversity of both substrates and sub-catalysts.

We cannot achieve a recombinant culture without maintaining highly distributed resources. That part is trivial. A vibrant middle class is a matter of national security.

Finally, what does all this quite obviously imply about economic policy?

At our latest level of social-auto-catalysis, we're still awaiting the latest, greatest method that will actually allow us to parse our current volumes of available feedback.  Only then can we subsequently improve the auto-catalytic quality of our distributed decision-making.

Don't hold your breath, but it IS inevitable.

Ok, maybe not BY the graduates of our current school system, but somewhere, somehow, it'll happen. It's inexorable statistics. All we can affect is the rate, and whether those involved are our descendants, or not.

Our job should be to get out of the way and LET it happen sooner? Ya think? But how?

By training young students to ALWAYS and QUICKLY zero in on "where is this going?" Again, YA THINK? That way even economic policy teams might see through the clutter and actually regain interest in national, not just personal, outcomes.

Could we actually do that with our school systems, instead of forcing citizens to hoard largely irrelevant data - lacking any meaningful context? Easily! Overnight. We'd just have to re-purpose every existing K-12 teacher in the country, but we could turn this country upside down, within a year.

Why not? The only good bureaucracy is an adaptive bureaucracy - in which case it's no longer a bureaucracy. [At least by our current use of the word. :) ]

As they say in India, or at least in their Parliament, "Can u Babu?" Wall St. was even worse than that, so we'd better not. Our very survival depends on accelerating our intrinsic ability and practiced skill at treating EVERY goal, policy, strategy, tactic and tool as something to instantly weed through. What should we be looking for? Signs of relevance or irrelevance to the new outcomes we're capable of imagining every day? You would think, but few of our politicians or voters appear to have much practice at that anymore.

The only thing keeping the USA from exploring insanely exciting options is our own STUPID austerity. What on earth are we saving up our fiat for? It's only as good as what we apply it to, and we can apply it optimally only if we regain our lost ability to screen out irrelevant cultural bullshit FASTER every year, not slower.

Seriously Lagging Policy Agility - A Call to Methods

Commentary by Roger Erickson

How do we fail Situational Awareness? Let me only begin to count the ways.

Obama Renews Offer to Cut Social Safety Net in Big Budget Deal

Interviews about Chinese real estate

Israel exempting it's US military aid from sequester

Who’s Turning Syria’s Civil War Into a Jihad?

A country with bad political theater

Boots on Campus

Neo-Imperialism and the Arrogance of Ignorance

This list is too long to complete. Yet there is a very clear conclusion.

A combination of "massive corruption" / "debt crises" / wrong moves ... points to seriously lagging policy agility in governance structures .... worldwide. [We have corruption in the USA of course, just different permutations than elsewhere. Examples are Control Fraud on Wall St, the MICC, and in political campaign finance - not to mention political strategy itself.]

We're guaranteeing that our kids must live through "interesting times". Why? We have so many huge options ... and instead we're off bombing Afghanistan?  Hell, it'd be cheaper to just bomb Death Valley! And now we're gonna bomb Mali too? And, we're still preparing - and uber preparing - for what - Iran? Is our end game a plan to use drones to assassinate corrupt Communist party members across China, or honest citizens here at home? Go for both? Who's hollowing out whom?

Sounds rather like you can never go wrong underestimating the median intelligence of crowds. Methods for getting their attention have become the dominant catalytic methods for social adaptation. Having a message is necessary, but by no means sufficient - by any stretch of the imagination.

So how do we get more institutions, and their methods, to be more agile? Time to pull the fire alarm? Not a call to arms, but a call to methods. Methods for exploring cultural options faster/leaner/better.  We need another George Marshall to clear dead wood from the Pentagon, another Marriner Eccles to clear dead wood from the Fed, another FDR to clear dead wood from the Administration and SCOTUS and ... while we're at it ... another electorate, just to clear dead wood from the POTUS, Congress and all levels of political office.  If you're wondering whose methods are obsolete, look in the mirror.  It's long past time for a complete makeover in the USA.

Do you see any international trends in White Collar criminology and social anthropology to offset all this bad news? We need to damp down the stupid and encourage return-on-coordination - simultaneously. Any methods for actually getting attention? Attention for more distributed, resilient and agile democracy methods? Not yet? Why not? Do you really love your kids?

Capitalists say it all boils down to incentives. Why is it that supposedly educated people can't see the biggest return of all, the return-on-coordination? Can YOU make people see that 500 lb gorilla incentive lurking in the room? It appears to be invisible to most people.  Either that or it's so dynamic that they simply can't sense it fast enough to matter. Perhaps what we really need is ultra-high-speed Optionography - to help slow witted people sense dynamic value incentives, sooner. We used to just call that public discourse and distributed feedback.

Does Cultural AQ* = tPD/tdDF**?

* Adaptive Quotient
** ratio;
tempo of Public Discourse to tempo&distribution of Distributed Feedback;
distribute enough, diverse feedback widely & quickly enough;
then discuss & distill if widely & fast enough - to arrive at the few adaptive principles key to each situation;

Coordination Ingenuity. Citizens are Still Born With It. Nowadays They Enter Professions Without It.

Commentary by Roger Erickson

If WE individuals are so smart and educated, then how come our NATION is so screwed up? Instead of overwhelming details, lets stop, look at our situation, and look for things to simplify. As a start, lets consider coordination of human discourse, natural selection, cultural adaptive rate and cultural evolution.

Personal Situational Awareness.All of our citizens are constantly distracted with details that don't matter. Of course those details seem to matter, but never as much as we think they do. As individuals, our constant need is to carefully select our actions, so that we generate a ratio of many details becoming irrelevant as the consequence of one action. Individuals navigate through life by keeping that ratio high. If we don't, we're stuck with static growth plus rigidity, which never ends well.

Group Situational Awareness.As citizens in a family, community and nation-state, we live not just in a social setting, but an intensely eusocial one where we can't succeed by acting alone. Humans are successful ONLY when they compare notes and find the fewest, distributed changes that render the largest number of irritating details irrelevant. Call it social tuning, but we're champs at it, when we take the time to do it well, or bother to do it at all. Faster growth track adaptive adjustment, not social rigidity.

So why, at this particular time, aren't more citizens bothering to coordinate, enough, more of the time? Right now, is it largely because they're not getting enough group practice?

Behavior: Individual Default Mode vs Practiced Group Mode.

Our default mode as individuals is to conclude that existing "herds," committees and electorates are never adequate for all existing tasks. That's always true, by definition, since every group success simply generates additional options, and the task of exploring them - before some competing group does. Yet that doesn't mean that herd-like electorates won't soon be up to those tasks. 

Instead of decrying current group capabilities, we make progress when we just get on with enlarging our group capabilities. In politics, it's called enlarging policy space, and increasing policy agility. It shouldn't come a surprise that solving those tasks requires group practice, but, amazingly, we're producing over-trained "professionals" and citizens who are indeed surprised by that fact, if they even come to grips with it at all. In short, we're not preparing most citizens to practice group coordination as their original, fall-back habit. We are what we practice, so it seems we need to rethink early education. If we don't, then we're stuck with one current result: narrow theorists running national economic policy, and jealously defending their personal turf against pesky irritants citing mere operational realities.

If there's a better way to begin organizing 315 million people, what do we start orienting to? Regardless of the details, the highest return is always the return on coordination. Could we generate better coordination, nationwide? Ya think? Currently, our dynamic asset allocation sucks, and hence our Output Gap is large and growing. We're certainly failing to optimally leverage our dynamic assets. Do we really need to spend another decade arguing arcane details? Shouldn't we just island-hop past every detail which we can make operationally irrelevant? Let's get on with it.

Exploring Group Options.If there are always an emerging shortlist of simplest things we could do to produce the biggest change - how do we prepare ourselves to look for those things, find them and leverage them? It starts with the distributed situational awareness that prepares people to look for their own opportunities to help consider and recognize group options. Immediatley, that requires increasingly distributed group feedback, and constantly expanding group discourse.  

There's a very simple reason why tribal cultures relax to ~5 hours a day of physical work, matched with inordinant amounts of discussion time. The simple fact is that the time spend discussing and carefully selecting group options worth exploring pays off far more than ANY amount of individual heroics.  Return on coordination trumps all other returns.  Measure twice, cut once. Sample group feedback adequately, explore fewer dead ends.  Sure, we can fill up a given niche - and overadapt to a given situation - by running a static automaton 24x7.  Yet to invade a new niche, and expand our options by orders of magnitude, we need people working half-time, and spending half-time planning ways to tackle bigger challenges.

Subsequently, it's a matter of getting EVERYONE constant practice at quickly recognizing and exploring those options as they do emerge. It all starts with national goals, since citizens can't practice teamwork if they don't know what they're looking for. Given the unending string of unpredictable situations, our adaptive methods themselves become our goal.  Our #1 goal could simply be to keep ourselves in a highly practiced state, optimizing our ability to adapt, regardless of what we have to adapt to?

Staying In The Race, ByAdapting.

We are in a constantly accelerating adaptive race, but aren't making our students and citizens comfortable with that fact. There's no need for fear, loathing, anger and wasteful bickering - especially over irrelevant details! We're fully prepared to enjoy the race at hand. An old saying in car racing is that slow is smooth, and smooth is fast. Every race boils down to a selection process, selecting to do just the right things in just the right order and timing, before moving on to the next race. The same is true of cultural adaptive races. We just call it cultural evolution instead of a race, but the principles are the same. Success follows group practice, and our practice at group discourse hones the quality of our distributed decision-making.

Evolution is simply an endless litany of claims that herds can't get smarter and more agile, even though they always do ... eventually ... by adopting unpredictable permutations of a greater array of methods. Inevitably, they have to do that slowly, before they can do that quickly. What's merely improbable always gets done, sooner every year, despite our increasing efforts to actually stop it from being done.

Active Discourse as Natural Selection.Herds and electorates - aka, human cultures - evolve by ACTIVELY SELECTING unpredictable permutations of more methods, from growing toolkits. Human cultures initiate natural selection through active discourse, and accelerate adaptive rate by honing full group discourse. They use that discourse to accelerate selection of all the distributed physical tests involved in exploring options - i.e., what to do, in what order, in transient situations. ACTIVE DISCOURSE soon delivers the merely improbable, through iterative practice.

The same age old process is observed everywhere - from quantum mechanics to biochemsitry to human culture.  Intially build out lean novelty, then see how much relaxation you can get away with, while building up distributed resiliency again. Then do it again. Without distrubuted resiliency, there's not enough distributed diversity to discover and focus on the next improbable task ... before some other culture does. Without enough practice at coordinating, we can't concentrate and then redistribute static and dynamic assets fast enough to matter, when situations demand agile national policy.  Human cultural adaptation always comes back to reforming national cultures that can expand policy space and policy agility faster than others can. In the end, we always hang together, or we hang separately.

How do we start practicing and growing distributed policy agility?The puzzling part is why we - supposedly smart humans - are at this moment increasingly overtraining people in all professions to possess narrower situational awareness. We're generating too many people afraid of change, just when we need people comfortable with the opposite. Must we have a die off? Or can we just completely change what we call basic education? And do so quickly?

Every year, more citizens seem subject to very real threats for allowing things that preserve other peoples required degrees of freedom. Such "frictions" are inherent in tuning any system, and optimally distributed adjustments must be found, through accelerted discourse. 

As one arbitrary example, consider how insurance regulations, physician malpractice fears and inflexible public health laws, etc all constrain patient options. That brings us back to the dead end of attempting growth through rigidity - which never scales very far. Slowing group growth only occurs when groups don't practice changing enough distributed options often and rapidly. It's no surprise that groups who aren't prepared to change, change more slowly than groups that are prepared and have been practicing. What happened to coordinating American ingenuity? Kids are still born with that as a natural trait, and enter school with it. Nowadays they just exit school without it.

There's an long list of things we need to start doing differently. And an even longer list of things we could start doing differently - if we were more prepared. Why don't we prepare all kids, students and professionals to practice generating agile change? It should be fun, not always threatening.

Evolution, aka scalable natural selection, boils down to simply discerning - on an increasingly larger scale - what's fun & profitable to change, and avoiding what isn't. That requires practiced agility, otherwise called life. Instead of enjoying life practice to the fullest extent of our capabilities, we're constraining couch potatoes in detention. The outcomes is that they don't know what to do if they ever do escape detention. No wonder. They never got enough practice.

"Recess ogres*" started in grade school, and are now infecting every adult profession too? Why? It's not enough to hate kids? We have to hate ourselves too? This can't go on. It's gonna crack.

Our Tea Party is simply a food fight in Congress. Note to Congress and to our electorate. The existing methods used by Congress are so obsolete you should be ashamed for not diversifying and becoming more resilient, sooner. Will you fix some things in your own House - and Senate - before trying to run a country whose diversity you're less aware of every year? Quit meddling in tactics that must exhibit increasing diversity, and instead focus on some policy steps that really are critical. How about expanding our policy space and increasing our policy agility? Tomorrow?


* Recess Ogres:  The mean people who volunteer to haunt elementary school recess periods, stomping, pounding staffs, and constraining exhuberant kids from expressing innate exhuberence. "Don't run. Don't talk. No discourse. No thinking. Stop moving. Stop having fun. No smiling. Stop. Stop. Don't. Don't. No. NO!"

Their mantra is: "American ingenuity is a PRIVILEGE, not a right." The orginal rentiers. They're actually instructed to act as though they really hate kids, and citizens too. And they get lots of practice at it.