Aristocracy Is Dead ... So Why Isn't Orthodox MacroEconomics Gone Too?

  (Commentary posted by Roger Erickson)

Having studied biology for years before ever paying attention to economics, I immediately wondered where the heck orthodox economists get their many, strange ideas.

Nothing made sense until something plausible dawned on me:

Orthodox MacroEconomics is an extension of Aristocratic "Court Politics" 

and is at heart a management theory for how an upper class can best rule "the masses."

To me, that explains nearly everything about orthodox macroeconomics and its inane list of things that human behavior "should" include. It's an unfortunate set of vague myths blindly promulgated by groups as diverse as aristocrats, property owners, cattle herders, and capitalists. Meanwhile, we always knew that human behavior can evolve as fast as new contexts arrive (at least so far). There's a fundamental dichotomy here. Peasant reality is that we have zero predictive power. We only know that recombination on all levels works, with few bounds.

What are the implications? A rare, honest person states one aspect of the obvious.

Aristocracy is Dead

So why is orthodox macroeconomics still kicking us while it holds us down? We're only down because we're LETTING a dead-man-walking hold us down.

Well, that, and also partly because too many dimwit escaped serfs only want to be Aristocrats themselves, if given the chance. Doh!

Meanwhile, as always:

Actual Human Behavior Makes A Mockery Of Orthodox Economic Models  

... (but Rulers Don't Care To Notice)

Ya think? So there's yet another another flaw in orthodox economics: the presumption that emerging aggregate outcomes should be logical? Really? Why doesn't this invalidate the entire field? There's a seemingly obvious answer.

"Thaler began to keep a list of things that people did that made a mockery of economic models of rational choice."

Well, that's yet another indicator that orthodox macro-economics grew out of aristocratic politics, not tribal common sense based on trial-&-error progress.

"Logic" is just a body of perceived patterns, which we use when trying to extrapolate from past experiences to future predictions.

Biology, chemistry, physics, etc, etc have amply proven that the past order of any system does NOT predict all of it's future options.

Aggregate degrees of freedom are a function first of aggregate inter-dependencies - which grow factorially with system growth - PLUS any changes in external context, which may or may not change at seemingly fixed or unpredictable rates, but always change nevertheless.

Orthodox macro-economics has become an increasingly impossible yoke to live with. This is one parasitic baby we'd do well to throw out with the accumulating bathwater.

Call it "Marie's Dilemma":

Replacing All Transient Macro Economics With A 1-Page Forward

(Commentary posted by Roger Erickson.)

Yes, it's past time to throw out ALL the old text books, and re-assess everything, using a leaner template. After all, even literature majors eventually realized that "everything needs to change, so everything can [appear to] stay the same".

My current tack was triggered when an old friend sent an old quote:

"A goal without a plan is only a wish."

Unknown

That's similar to something FDR said:

"It isn't sufficient just to want - you've got to ask yourself what you are going to do to get the things you want." Franklin D. Roosevelt

Someone like Imhotep probably said something quite similar, 5000 years ago.

Either way, my friend was registering a complaint ... wondering why insurrection hadn't yet accomplished anything more tangible.

He has a right to complain about complainers ... yet the deeper reality is that even all such statements don't even come close to summing up our real challenges.

There's an expanding dichotomy here, that few learn, only because we don't bother teaching it early enough.

Methods w/o a goal? Problematic.
Goals without plans & methods? Also problematic, for inverse reasons.
Historical solution? Endless examples of multi-variate selection.

How does evolution muddle along when with every new moment, our boiling electorate of diverse, recombinant components generates billions of changing goals ... and millions of changing plans?

Obviously NOT by something as impossible as computing prices, or perfecting equilibrium among simplistic, predictable agents. That would be incredibly naive, and quickly suicidal!

How does our electorate get by? Not by any dogma known to man. It's always - in net - different this time, and always subtly so, so that literally EVERYONE has to practice recombination of all goals (known & emerging) and all known plans (known & emerging) ... all interleaved, in real-time.

It's The Covariances & Correlations, Stupid! :)

Until our election campaigns achieve that level of discussion, not much can change. So what has kept us going all these millennia? Not lack of either wishes & plans, but always just barely enough recombinations of wishes_PLUS_plans, being selected (by Context) as some adaptive re-mapping of current net-features to emerging net-options.

Capiche? :)

What's YOUR comfort level in interfacing with NET, aggregate context? Do you want something for YOU, or for your net system? To survive, humans have evolved by maintaining a growing population where most want some fraction of both, but in every possible proportion.

For every individual in an aggregate, there's a huge & growing spectrum of characteristics to select a spot among. By one measure, it starts with sociopaths on one end, and ends with martyrs on the other - with every spot in between filled with other representatives of humanity. Are you:

* more comfortable with individual goals & metrics, 

* more comfortable with "regional" assessments of "progress," or 

* driven to ponder the long tail of reality (that EVERY goal and EVERY plan is by definition transient, and more so every day - and that there is no point in having any component of any system FULLY realize any conceivable goal or FULLY develop any conceivable plan)?

All goals and all methods - and all their permutations, local or net - ALL change, before they're even consummated. Get over it.

Each example level of interest described above takes increasingly more time, and redefines completely different definitions of success.

For the whole aggregate, navigating "Multi-variate Recombination Space" - i.e., evolving - is rather analogous to daily rebuilding & daily practice at sailing increasingly unstable versions of racing boats in increasingly stormy waters. You either stay on the Future Shockwave, or you become part of archaeology. "Systems" - including human cultures - keep their race boat afloat by ALWAYS keeping a diverse crew on hand, one able to bridge the moving gap between evolving infrastructure and emerging bleeding edge.

PLUS, some of those newly spawned components do nothing other than DISCOVER how to re-connect the growing, changing range of crew & components.  If the goal is to keep evolving, then one of the variable plans has to target ways for continuously inventing new methods, and continuously REDUCING the novel, emerging aggregate frictions, not adding to them.

All this brings us back to yet another old quote,

"The wise man says 'Yes, And.' Only the fool says 'No, But.' "

I'll close with 3 messages for those bothering to write instantly-obsolete text books - of any kind.

“In preparing for battle I have always found that plans are useless, but planning is indispensable.” Dwight D. Eisenhower

If examples like the coordination & teamwork exemplified during WWII didn't change EVERYTHING pundits thought they knew about economics, then said pundits are part of the problem, not part of the solution.

When Atlas shrugged, his aggregate got buggered.

Odd How Long It Takes For This To Sink In

   (Commentary posted by Roger Erickson)

"Among the numerous advantages promised by a well constructed Union, none deserves to be more accurately developed than its tendency to break and control the violence of faction." James Madison

And Madison took his examples from Greek & Roman writings 2000 years old!

The problem can't be one of education alone. Rather, our sea of people is simply expanding faster than are our old methods for encouraging cultural diffusion of ideas.

If HOW we run student education & workforce training doesn't change, fast enough .... we inevitably end up with "dead zones" at the bottom of our expanding sea of (changing) citizens.

It's not just factions, it's all aspects of all Union or team or workforce interactions.

If you don't like change ... you can't love your own kids, or our changing world.

Recombination. Ya gotta love it. There's no alternative.

Right To Cultural Life Party, Sponsored by MANLI. Please Notify Jane and Joe Sixpack.

   (Commentary posted by Roger Erickson)

X-ray image of a pregnant cat with six kittens.

Now imagine a nation-wide "X-ray" of an entire, pregnant nation, usually bulging with a distributed, fetal Middle Class, the output not just of sexual-recombination, but also of "cultural recombination" on a massive and massively parallel scale.

Now image Neo-Liberals aborting that entire fetal Middle Class.

And everyone else too, in the process.

Right to Cultural Life, anyone?

Or do you really want Free Trade in Middle-Class-aborting methods - practiced by "elite" social parasites? Sounds to me like class-based, forced eugenics masquerading as orthodox macro-economics, with any surviving MC-preemies doomed to permanent sharecropper status, until our culture declines and starves.

Herding sheeple to fleecings.

The Control Frauds and their Neo-Liberal economists are definitely working together.

(Thanks to Russ Huntley for help modifying the image.)

This message comes courtesy of MANLI.  "Mother's Against Neo-Liberal Idiocy."

The Original Liar's Loan

Who had proper title to Eden? :)

Clouded Title: The history of religious crusades and ethnic cleansing of indigenous peoples by invaders claiming the right to appropriate other peoples property based on Papal dispensations, biblical manipulations, or ancient religious connections to other peoples territories.

That's a fascinating topic, with deep implications.

Law of the Jungle <==> Law of Bungled Title? <==> Law of Semantics?

Before getting lost in the maze of implications, let's jump straight to the conclusion.

The only higher law is the Law of Recombination, given that the highest return is always the return on coordination. Anyone settling for ownership & theft is settling for far, far less than they could be part of.  Ben Franklin recognized this, in his famous "table talk" to the 1st Constitutional Congress.

We should stick with our original rallying cry. "We came, we saw, we made a more perfect union."  That focus on coordination is what produced the greatest wealth in human history.  Anything less is embarrassingly stupid. Progress always follows Open Recruitment and careful selection of optimal recombinations.

ps:  Multiple CopyWrong lawsuits are in process in the Court of Reality, claiming that Eden was a plagiarized idea.  Is nothing really sacred among crooks?