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.