Showing posts with label progress. Show all posts
Showing posts with label progress. Show all posts

Tuesday, January 3, 2017

Jean Pisani-Ferry — The Abandonment of Progress


Elites are starting to wake up and are realizing there is a pressing problem they had better get busy solving if they want to stay in power. At least some of them are.

I would not call it the abandonment of progress as much as the stalling of progress and that is the problem. If the progress were distributed there would not be these issues.

There seems to be a prevalence of linear thinking and a dearth of dialectical thinking.

Project Syndicate
The Abandonment of Progress
Jean Pisani-Ferry | Professor at the Hertie School of Governance (Berlin) and Sciences Po (Paris), currently serving as Commissioner-General of France Stratégie, a public policy advisory institution

Thursday, June 25, 2015

Chris Dillow — Managerialism vs innovation


Is creativity no longer an option that increases efficiency and effectiveness of real resources in the long run but also but necessary in a complex adaptive society faced with emergent challenges some of which are existential? Sir Ken Robinson thinks so. R. Buckminster (Bucky) Fuller thought so.

One of the key rationale for libertarianism of both left and right is freedom to explore, which is a necessary condition for development and expression of creativity. Some even so far as to hold that creativity is a key feature of human nature and the ability to develop creativity is a natural right. Those deprived of that right risk failure to become truly human.

This is a key argument against the wages system as being a form of slavery that treats humans as less than human in treating labor as other commodities exchanged for money in commodity markets. It is also a deep critique of the class system in that it prevents all classes from expressing the potential of their species nature owing to the conditions under which people live. See Marx's theory of alienation and Marx's theory of human nature

As a life scientist, Roger Erickson is constantly emphasizing the significance of adaptive rate and return on coordination for a complex adaptive system to meet and exceed the challenges of emergence. Broadly speaking, creativity is a necessary condition for this, and incubating creativity is therefore of the highest priority.

The most significant matter is that since creativity is natural, nothing needs to be added. Rather, the obstacles just need to be removed. This can be accomplished through enlightened approaches to education and management that prioritize the important rather than mistaking the trivial for the important.

Stumbling and Mumbling
Managerialism vs innovation
Chris Dillow | Investors Chronicle

Monday, February 16, 2015

Yet Another Civil War Between Capital and Adaptive Culture?

   (Commentary posted by Roger Erickson)


How many times must we needlessly repeat this war?

As long as the blind business of extraction - vs evolution - promotes Roll-Up strategies?

For Pete's sake! Gov is NOT akin to a household, any more than components are akin to a system, or teammates are akin to a team. Scale presents entirely novel options. It IS different to be a whole which is greater than the sum of it's separate parts.

Yet on this point, macro economics teaching is clearly and nearly universally broken.

Do university physics programs teach students that Quantum Mechanics & Relativity are akin to Newton's physics? Of course not!

Yet economics essentially does. It's a rare economist who's learned the simplest aspects of fiat currency operations.

How can anyone moral teach economics without teaching currency operations? By acquiescing to the banking lobby? THAT'S not pedagogy. It's cowardice.

And it's also not ...
How We Ended The Last Civil War Between Capital and Adaptive Culture.

We can't end a civil war by having both sides improve technique. Adaptive change requires improving training methods available to pre-combatants, until they recognize and start exploring better options than repeating the same, stupid war with no resolution. Teach emerging context, not just existing data?

Orthodox macroeconomics is a long-running sick joke, which never was funny. Why did the Ignorant Electorate KEEP hitting it's collective head with Civil War? (And who said we're not supposed to ask?)

There is a better way. Make progress, not frictions.

For the case of endlessly competing roll-up strategies, it's all a question of who's chasing whom. Rather than running from corruption on a treadmill .....


it's better to be trampling Luddites, on an ascending spiral.

Every time I think of this general topic, Joshua Chamberlain's words come to mind.
"We know not of the future and cannot plan for it much. ... But we can ... determine ... what manner of men we will be, whenever and wherever the hour strikes and calls to noble action."
To paraphrase Joshua Chamberlain for today's civil war: 
We cannot know what specific contexts the future may bring, and therefore cannot much prepare for them. 
We can, however, determine what sort of Adaptive Rates our aggregate can muster when those contexts strike. 
To better determine those capabilities, we can practice continuously re-mapping & RE-VISUALIZING all of our emerging cultural processes, so that we can maintain practice at making Rapid Adaptive Transitions throughout our own culture.


Wednesday, January 8, 2014

Lorenzo Marsili — Europe is diverging: ignore it at your peril

Without the possibility of monetary devaluation to keep imbalances in check, and without courageous common fiscal policies, austerity calls for internal devaluation, at the notable expense of labour, social welfare and of investment for growth. A 2013 report by the Red Cross highlights that Europe is the only continent on the planet where the number of poor people is increasing rather than decreasing. This should come as a tremendous shock to all of us. Ungoverned, the process of economic divergence risks locking Europe into long-term stagnation, rising inequalities and chronic unemployment. This is not the prophecy of a Cassandra, but the bulletins of the ECB and the IMF read without blinkers.
OpenDemocracy
Europe is diverging: ignore it at your peril
Lorenzo Marsili

The cradle of modern civilization is rotting away, with progress reversing.


Thursday, December 5, 2013

It's A Pity That The Entire DNC Fails To Realize That One Of Their Stated Goals Precludes All The Other Ones!

  (commentary posted by Roger Erickson)

They need help finding a graceful path to occupying more consistent logic, not just fervor. Fervor is a necessary start, but it's not sufficient. Conflicted logic precludes return-on-coordination?

Do you have additional suggestions for encouraging well meaning people to dig into actual currency operations, not just superficial semantics?

Apparently Marriner Eccles and Beardsley Ruml weren't enough, not to mention Warren Mosler, or Bill Mitchell or Randy Wray or Stephanie Kelton.

This could be critical step in educating tens of millions of citizens, so please be very careful and very encouraging when responding to the originator of this twitter poster.

Vote Democrat ... to support this agenda ..? or help them update it?





Tuesday, November 19, 2013

Zack Beauchamp — Why The World Is So Unequal — And Why It’s Getting Better

Consider two passages. The first is a brutally succinct narrative of the moral shame of our time, global poverty: “Almost a billion people still live in material destitution, millions of children still die through the accident of where they are born, and wasting and stunting still disfigure the bodies of nearly half of India’s children.”
The second tells a rather more optimistic story: “Income and health have improved almost everywhere since World War II. There is not a single country in the world where infant or child mortality today is not lower than it was in 1950.”
That these are from the same book, Princeton economist Angus Deaton’s The Great Escape, is no doubt obvious given the subject of this review. But their juxtaposition reveals the core of Deaton’s argument: humanity’s greatest moral failure is also our greatest success story. The sheer scale of our world’s horror can boggle the mind, obscuring the realness of the suffering that suffuses the globe. The death of one a tragedy, a million a statistic, as the old saying (falsely attributed to Josef Stalin) goes.
And yet, despite our still shameful levels of indifference, we have succeeded in making millions of lives immeasurably better, gains that have largely come in the last 250 years….

Thursday, December 27, 2012

Marshall Auerback — Let’s Cut the Crap About Japan’s ‘Lost Decade’

While economic growth may help to improve standards of living and to meet the needs arising from population growth, it is not clear that there is a direct relationship between improved welfare and economic growth, especially for developed economies. The case of Japan shows us that we need, alternative measures to the Gross Domestic Product, such as the Genuine Progress Indicator, (which incidentally show no significant improvement in U.S. economic welfare since the mid-1970s – so who has really experienced ‘lost decades”?). Rising socio-economic and environmental problems have outweighed the gains from increased final output. It’s time to move away from the simple caricature of Japan and consider whether we need a better way to measure economic progress.
Global Economic Intersection
Let’s Cut the Crap About Japan’s ‘Lost Decade’
Marshall Auerback

Sunday, January 22, 2012

"It’s the Socioeconomic Segregation, Stupid"


In moving beyond No Child Left Behind in ways that are humane, effective, and efficient, we must implement education policies that challenge economic inequality rather than increasing it, which will require an about-face for most politicians on both sides of the aisle of the corporate jet.  One thing that schools can do in this regard is to take seriously the research by James Coleman, which has been ignored or misused since it was published in 1966, just one year after Congressional approval of the first ESEA in 1965.
Coleman’s findings are here summarized by Coleman scholar, Gerald Grant (2009):"Simply put, Coleman found that the achievement of both poor and rich children was depressed by attending a school where most children came from low-income families. More important to the goal of achieving equal educational opportunity, he found that the achievement of poor children was raised by attending a predominantly middle-class school, while the achievement of affluent children in the school was not harmed. This was true even if per-pupil expenditures were the same at both schools. No research over the past forty years has overturned Coleman’s finding . . . (p. 159)." 
Coleman also found that the longer that poor black children were stuck in low SES schools, the lower their achievement moved in comparison to middle class children.
Read it at Common Dreams
On US Education: It’s the Socioeconomic Segregation, Stupid
by Jim Horn
(h/t Rohan Grey via Twitter)

Education is arguably the single most significant economic factor, in that it is the sine qua non of survival and progress, fundamentally influencing everything else. As such it is foundational.

Sunday, January 8, 2012

Progress and the vanished frontier


Ultimately, the current debate about more or less government is a distraction from the real question: What combination of government and industry is most likely to restore Americans' sense of a shared future? And that formula must be wrapped in a narrative that explains why progress isn't what it used to be, even though Americans can't imagine a future without it.
Read it at The Huffington Post
America's Problem With "Progress"
Jonathan D. Moreno
Professor, University of Pennsylvania; Senior Fellow, CAP; Author, The Body Politic: The Battle Over Science in America

I've been thinking about this for some time, too. America has a frontier mentality but no longer a frontier. That's turned into a serious problem with admitting reality and has resulted in much denial. The fact is that the US is turning into Europe, which lost its frontier centuries ago and has adjusted. The loss of the frontier is relatively recent for the US, and the countries mindset has not yet reflected the full implications of that.