I read the following phrase in a news article this morning, and immediately thought of Pete Peterson, various esteemed Nobel Prize winners, and orthodox economics.
"That’s what they are afraid of. If people get educated, no one will listen to them."
The context relates to the very question of equilibrium in democracy, any other culture, or any systemic organization.
Why should we preserve prior customs? Should we preserve all of them, or just some? How many should we change, at what rate? And why should we ever change anything? You can idly debate these questions forever, but meanwhile, ongoing context drives far faster change on the ground. The real changes we respond to are unpredictable, and always more far reaching than we can imagine.
No culture - and no ideology - can survive by simply staying the same.
So, of course there has never been equilibrium. Not even since the supposed Big Bang - or presumably even before, or there wouldn't have BEEN a Big Probability event in the 1st place. As an American citizen, I'm deeply embarrased that equilibrium is still even a topic among our supposedly educated economists. It only implies that they were born in barns, and have been kept isolated all their lives from all the other system sciences ... who got past that point hundres of years ago, and today rarely see the need to discuss it past 1st grade.
We always have new options to explore, and we are all, always, refugees from yesterday's ignorance. It's our own Luddites, fearing loss of lost prestige, that we should fear the most. It's a simple clash of momenta in a system dynamically biased to grow. Their momentum is petering out [no pun intended], while we have the future, which is worth struggling to achieve sooner rather than later.
Note to Luddites: If you note a change, and fear it, it has already occurred. So why not adapt with it? I suppose that's why they're Luddites in the 1st place. They can't change fast enough to contribute to our Adaptive Rate. So how do WE keep the Luddites and Petersons from harming our Adaptive Rate too much for us to bear? Tough question. Can we do that gracefully, or must we be as clumsy as they are?
If keep our electorate more generally informed, no one will listen overmuch to Pete Peterson, or the Deficit Terrorists, or the 1%, or the TBTF banks, or Control Frauds, or the televangelists ... or even the Politicians.
Think about that. If we develop methods for keeping Americans informed, in real-time, of what all American's know ... then who needs Politicians, or any other forms of demi-ignoramuses?
Our cultural task - if we're to survive - is to continually develop methods for accelerating change that is ever more smoothly titrated. One of those methods includes ways of gracefully ushering both Peterson-style & Taliban-style Luddites offstage, before they shame themselves excessively by blindly impeding needed changes. That includes exactly those changes demanded by increasingly complicated and fast moving context. Such methods involve sub-methods for conditioning ourselves to gracefully resist the lure of obsolete beliefs, while just as gracefully replacing them with whatever operations our changing context dictates. Unselective, unexamined credentialism in all forms has to go, or it will kill us simply by slowing us down just as we need to constantly accelerate graceful, unpredictable, adaptive change.
Our ability to navigate growing policy space tracks our growing policy agility, which begins with being amenable to change.
For our cultural growth rate to stay the same, everything has to change.
And if we want our Adapative Rate to actually accelerate? Just let the operations speak for themselves, and then listen. It should be easy. It's only hard if we let the Luddites-Taliban-Petersons of the world constrain our natural growth.
If Pete Peterson is in the say of our nation's growth, please just gracefully usher gramps to a seat of honor out of our harms way, ASAP. If that's what he wants, heck, give him a gold-plated chain and a gold-plated rocking chair, and a bevy of obsequious servants to bow and say "Yes, Sir" and "No, Sir." We could combine that with training beginning acting troupes. The cost would be cheaper than another $29Trillion screw-up & subsequent policy paralysis. Just get Peterson out of our way.
Our cultural task - if we're to survive - is to continually develop methods for accelerating change that is ever more smoothly titrated. One of those methods includes ways of gracefully ushering both Peterson-style & Taliban-style Luddites offstage, before they shame themselves excessively by blindly impeding needed changes. That includes exactly those changes demanded by increasingly complicated and fast moving context. Such methods involve sub-methods for conditioning ourselves to gracefully resist the lure of obsolete beliefs, while just as gracefully replacing them with whatever operations our changing context dictates. Unselective, unexamined credentialism in all forms has to go, or it will kill us simply by slowing us down just as we need to constantly accelerate graceful, unpredictable, adaptive change.
Our ability to navigate growing policy space tracks our growing policy agility, which begins with being amenable to change.
For our cultural growth rate to stay the same, everything has to change.
And if we want our Adapative Rate to actually accelerate? Just let the operations speak for themselves, and then listen. It should be easy. It's only hard if we let the Luddites-Taliban-Petersons of the world constrain our natural growth.
If Pete Peterson is in the say of our nation's growth, please just gracefully usher gramps to a seat of honor out of our harms way, ASAP. If that's what he wants, heck, give him a gold-plated chain and a gold-plated rocking chair, and a bevy of obsequious servants to bow and say "Yes, Sir" and "No, Sir." We could combine that with training beginning acting troupes. The cost would be cheaper than another $29Trillion screw-up & subsequent policy paralysis. Just get Peterson out of our way.
As an American citizen, I'm deeply embarrased that equilibrium is still even a topic among our supposedly educated economists. It only implies that they were born in barns, and have been kept isolated all their lives from all the other system sciences ... who got past that point hundres of years ago, and today rarely see the need to discuss it past 1st grade.
ReplyDeleteThis is key to the problem. The mainstream economics profession is part of the problem rather than part of the solutions, and it is a huge part of the problem, as R-R goes to show as one of the most recent debacles of perverted "knowledge."
Every time I see yet another economics paper extolling a "breakthrough" observation that "equilibrium does not exist" I'm dumbfounded.
ReplyDeleteThe breakthrough is the realization that these troglodytes actually thought it DID!
Stasis does not exist? Ya think? That's such a trivially given axiom in every system science it's rarely discussed. Imhotep knew that, 5000 years ago. Every nomad appreciates it first hand.
How is it that economists don't? Were they raised with a silver spoon up their butt? Then taught to brown nose aristocrats? How else ya gonna explain it?
They may as well all put on pointy hats and go work for the Pope.
It's like all economics textbooks have subliminal messaging indoctrinating students into the flat-earth society.
Learning about economics is like learning about some cult of ignorance. The more you learn, the more the hair stands up on the back of your neck.
ReplyDeleteThe common theme in all this is that people that call themselves othodox economists have apparently never discovered that there are dozens of other fields of system science: physics, chemistry, biology, ecology, anthropology, engineering, etc, etc, etc.
ReplyDeleteThere's nothing economists have bothered their little pin heads about that wasn't well worked out in other fields hundreds if not thousands of years ago.
I see only a confluence of ignorance, arrogance and naivete.
My personal theory is that economics is a court phenomenon growing out of aristocracy, with the same kind of view that argued that the Highland Clearances made systemic sense.
As a consequence, orthodox economists are always exporting dynamic value in exchange for static value. What could be more stupid?
This search outcome sums it all up.
https://research.stlouisfed.org//fred2/search?st=Human+capital
"capitalists" ignore human capital, i.e., they don't even recognize the term "return-on-coordination?" 'Nuff said.
And we give Nobel Prizes for this stuff?
Maybe they can't spell either, and just lost track of the "ig" tag.
"And we give Nobel Prizes for this stuff?"
ReplyDeleteWell, not real Nobel prizes. That, too, was an invention of the aristocracy to give some prestige to a infamous discipline.