Cultural Error Correction Occurs Only With Adequate Cross-Discipline Interaction and Feedback

Commentary by Roger Erickson

Peter Radford has a dead-on commentary about the decline in academic economics and subsequent policy advice - and it's causes.

Error Correction and Ethics

The accelerating insularity " ... has resulted in a near total elimination of a common understanding – or common memory – of its development."

I couldn't agree more. Imagine how much worse our net problem is, when this observation is extrapolated outside the economics field alone, to our entire national culture!

Make no mistake, cultural growth, decline and death is a biological process. Key steps and their entire patterns can be observed, analyzed, documented and actively responded to ... OR NOT!

Tempo matters when absorbing the impact of benefit and harm. There are always tolerance limits that, if exceeded, preclude futher experimentation. To avoid straying outside those tolerance limits for too long, we need both action and agility. How does a culture achieve those skills except through prior practice?

What kind of practice? Active, even agile, responses by a whole culture require culture-wide feedback - to guide accelerated achievement of desired outcomes. Why don't all stages of our education systems focus more on scalable teamwork? Any lesser outcomes in a national culture occur only for those electorates who get exactly what they deserve - in return for their bickering. Instead, we could be taking the easy route of full coordination - and enjoying the insane returns that coordination generates. Ben Franklin nailed it over 200 years ago, we must all hang together, or we shall surely all fail as a nation.

Smart makes easy accrue. Only stupid makes thing hard, long term, via short-term hoarding and long-term neglect.

Please, insist on the former.