Adaptive Feedback, Thoughts & Suggestions Not Adequately Disseminated - Change Nothing

(Commentary posted by Roger Erickson)

At least not soon enough to matter.

To adaptive aggregates, tempo always matters.

A rough semblance of an issue widely disseminated this week is always better than a perfect discourse delivered long after the fact .... to too few.

The following is from a Dec 1 book signing at the DC office of the American Federation of Teachers.

"In his 18 years as an opinion columnist for the New York Times, Bob Herbert championed the working poor and middle class. After filing his last column in 2011, he set off on a journey across the country to report on Americans who were being left behind in an economy that has never fully recovered from the Great Recession. The portraits of those he encountered fuel his new book,Losing Our Way. Herbert’s combination of heartrending reporting and keen political analysis is the purest expression since the Occupy movement of the plight of the 99%."

Less than 100 out of ~320 million residents of the USA attended. There was minimal (if any) press coverage in the local DC newspapers.

Herbert's conviction? "The truth will set us free." Yet he doesn't say when. Perhaps when the truth is adequately disseminated? To a threshold proportion of the electorate?

And if data is meaningless without context, don't we have to simultaneously disseminate adequately adaptive perceptions of our national context either simultaneously, or beforehand?

“Asked by a World War II veteran, ‘What happened to us?,’ Bob Herbert does what he has done all through his remarkable career as a journalist: He sets out to find the answers from the ground up. Searching out the stories and experiences of everyday Americans, and digging deep into facts and figures from ‘the high noon of capitalism’ to the widening gulf of our present vast inequalities, he takes us to the heart and core of our troubles while holding firmly to the conviction of his lifetime: that the truth shall set us free. Here is America as revealed by a great reporter whose empathy with everyday people inspires trust on their part, honesty on his and discovery for all who make the journey with him.” — BILL MOYERS, Former White House Press Secretary

“In a series of haunting portraits, Losing Our Way is an unforgettable reminder of the struggles facing America’s middle class today. Herbert has given us a sweeping picture of what has gone wrong in America—how we have underinvested in infrastructure, let corporate policies dominate the education debate and fought needless wars that resulted in a tragic waste of life. A brilliant and devastating portrayal that explains how our priorities and policies have gone awry, Losing Our Way will make you angry and determined to put our country back on course.” — JOSEPH E. STIGLITZ, Winner of the 2001 Nobel Prize in Economics and Author of The Price of Inequality

At the book signing, Herbert's book was available for purchase for $20.

If even 10% (32 million) of our residents received this book (which hasn't happened), that'd just transfer $640million from residents to the printers/publishers (including a tiny royalty to the author) - thereby feeding the very inequality they SAY that they want to erase. Might as well guarantee you'll never reach a goal, by triggering an infinite series of steps that also keep moving the target - like a clown kicking the hat he stoops to seize.

This is a distributed task which our aggregate cannot win without changing it's methods, to regain free, mandatory education of ourselves, by ourselves.

If those involved really wanted to make a difference, don't THEY need to be aware of changing context too?

Wouldn't it be far better to distribute Herbert's book as a free pdf, to every citizen in the USA?

There are more ways to lose our way every year, involving novel ways of losing track of both context and tempo.

Capitalism cannot operate separate from Statesmanship. 

Selling controlled access to insights works for personal competition among system components. Adaptive suggestions not actively broadcast & disseminated for free do not progress to Aggregate Adaptive Rate. 

There is no "I" (or capitalism) in teamwork, nor in policy, nor in statesmanship. 

If we cannot keep personal capitalism operating within tolerance limits, then we cannot preserve and manage Aggregate Adaptive Rate.

Statesmanship requires awareness of Aggregate Capitalism as well as the sum of Personal Capitalism, and it also requires the brains to see that our Aggregate Survival tracks dynamic co-optimization of the sum of those two variables across changing contexts, not optimizing either in isolation, in given contexts.

AS ~ Sum[ki(AC) + sum{Ij(PCi)}]

(i denotes transient contexts) 

(k & j denote context specific, polynomial variables)

Non-economist citizens used to learn such team concepts in the course of childhood, or at least in high school civics &/or calculus classes. What happened?

Render (to tolerance limits) unto hoarders all that serves personal gains & copyrights.

Render unto OpenSource, all that serves Statesmanship and Aggregate Adaptive Rate.

Put another way, if we can maintain separation of Church & State, why not separation of personal capitalism and Statesmanship? It's the only way we'll survive.

It's either separation of Corporation & State, or Fascism. It's our choice to make, the sooner & more widely the better.

Letting civil servants & citizens be divided & conquered by sociopathic wealth hoarders isn't the answer. Just define their operational tolerance limits and let them live within them, like all components of an evolving system.

There is no path of aggregate survival that does not involve dynamically adapting equilibria between increasing numbers of conflicting forces. Deal with it. There is no point in any institution "winning" by killing it's teammates. That's an oxymoron of the most base sort, that only moronic NeoLiberals believe.

Nothing Makes "Sense?" Because WE THE PEOPLE Put Sociopaths In Charge Of National Policy! Time For AGGREGATE INSISTENCE On Something More Adaptive.

   (Commentary posted by Roger Erickson)

How many times have you heard someone exclaim: "Reality seems so IMPLAUSIBLE!"

Unleashing the dogs of Idiocracy

(Kudos to Natalie Brown!)

Paul Meli: "What happened to a simple understanding of accounting?

Seems like the default starting point of understanding is complicated

beyond belief. Hence the following timeless quotes from JKG."

...

“The process by which banks create money is so simple that the mind is repelled.” - John Kenneth Galbraith

"It is a far, far better thing to have a firm anchor in nonsense than to

put out on the troubled seas of thought." - John Kenneth Galbraith

...

"It's a travesty, and sad commentary, that JKG's quotes are timeless.

The 1st concept repels only because the 2nd one has already

become accepted as reality." [Me]

People really will do anything in their power to avoid thinking ... 99% of the time. We only have to prevent that last 1% from sealing our fate. Please teach your kids to question EVERYTHING, at least once a year, all their life.

How did things get to this state? And when do we allow our kids to learn better? When we elect the second, actual independent, president? The only one since George Washington? Or something even more adaptive? Isn't it time to take our leashes off?

End political leash laws.

Eurozone Instability & Austerity: Policymakers Still Discussing It To Death In Greece

   (Commentary posted by Roger Erickson)

Eurozone Instability & Austerity: Policymakers Still Discussing It To Death In Greece

Will this turn out any different than the parallel conference that Bill Mitchell is attending?

How to SANELY govern Europe?

If you read the Italy agenda throughout, it looks like a set-up & cover-up.

There will be token acknowledgement of people like Bill Mitchell on a panel, but the main topics & speakers are already set to "answer" the wrong questions. The whole conference outcome is already co-opted.

If these conferences are mainly about the right way to capitulate to the ECB NeoLiberals, then it's all over except the dwindling shouting.

The only possible outcomes are slow defeat ... or a riot at one or more of these conferences?

I'm just looking for signs of when the inevitable enough is finally enough. Parasites always drive adaptive aggregates to a phase shift in their organizational state - to either death or sweeping adaptive change. It's only a matter of time.

That will be the point where aggregates remind themselves that all contexts are transient, and that there is no fixed thesis.

We need no timeless thesis or antithesis, only unending synthesis.

Actually, we should honor and laugh at social parasites, for their service in driving our constant adaptive responses. Even if we get tired of swatting mosquitoes after the fact, and eventually drain whole swamps, we just generate novel new crops of our own parasites, as a fundamental outcome of our own social diversification. Diversity & self-parasites are dual aspects of autocatalysis.

The NeoLiberals will one day be dead. Long live the parasites!

Meanwhile, history repeats itself. Who could predict that modern Greece would be felled by a Trojan Bourse?

Is Economics, As Well As Most Other Policy Management Theory, Tragically, Comically Overrated?

   (Commentary posted by Roger Erickson)

Ya think? :(




Is there a recipe cookbook for cultural and economic policy evolution? :)

Just Do The Little Things That Make It Harder For All Citizens, Everywhere, To Work At Cross-Purposes?

Closest A Modern Politician Ever Got To Understanding The Dynamics of Adaptive "SYSTEMS"?

   (Commentary posted by Roger Erickson)

"It is not enough in a situation of trust in the commonwealth, that a man means well to his country; it is not enough that in his single person he never did an evil act, but always voted according to his conscience, and even harangued against every design which he apprehended to be prejudicial to the interests of his country. 

"This innoxious and ineffectual character, that seems formed upon a plan of apology and disculpation, falls miserably short of the mark of public duty. That duty demands and requires that what is right should not only be made known, but made prevalent; that what is evil should not only be detected, but defeated.

"When the public man omits to put himself in a situation of doing his duty with effect it is an omission that frustrates the purposes of his trust almost as much as if he had formally betrayed it. It is surely no very rational account of a man's life, that he has always acted right but has taken special care to act in such a manner that his endeavours could not possibly be productive of any consequence." 

Edmund Burke

(Hat tip to RM Mitchell, who rediscovers the oft discussed concept of "Innocent Frauds," yet conflates it with guilty or knowing fraud.)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Economics_of_Innocent_Fraud

http://www.levyinstitute.org/pubs/wp_622.pdf

http://weeklysift.com/2011/07/18/the-sifted-bookshelf-seven-deadly-innocent-frauds/

An Athlete That In Theory Had Eaten His Fill And Bet His Life That He Could Outrun A Bear

   (Commentary posted by Roger Erickson)



Capex growth to slow

A complication occurred for this "athlete." The belly sequestered all the nutrients, and the legs are screaming & cramping in the 1st 100 yards.

"Structural" adjustments in the legs isn't gonna do squat.

[or rather, using the same word, with different semantics ... anything else but! :) ]

Proper, preventive, training & diet matters, and produces more adaptive resource distributions. We all hope there's another chance to learn that lesson. Praying that the bear catches some other idiot first isn't a reliable survival strategy.

This athlete needs MORE, not fewer, automatic stabilizers. Especially at the policy end. No tool helps much, if it's use isn't practiced, BEFORE it's needed. Even less if it's not even used.

There's many a fail 'twixt the theory & the outcome?

Might wanna pay a bit more attention to the actual operations, regardless of the theory?

The Depth of Interdependencies Which Have an Effect on "Economics"

(commentary posted by Roger Erickson)

If you read the following article, it's hard not to appreciate the cascade of events and policy decisions which can alter the economics of the outcome state.

A Canadian Looks At Decision-Making In American Policy Outcomes

If we make enough elected officials exempt from enough things .... then anything is possible, right? Even on Wall St.

If we imagine going even a little way further down that path, we can then easily imagine a situation when overt preparations for and outright practice of even the most heinous of crimes, physical or financial, are not technically illegal. Right?

So group success tracks the quality of ALL prior decision-making? Where have we heard that before? Evolution as the sum of all Adaptive Rates? No wonder current NRA leadership is hiding some of it's narrow-minded excesses behind the excuse of religion. It's not even easy to discover who NRA leaders are, except through critics of the NRA, so alternate views of NRA leaders are offered here.

It's always time to consider how and when and why we should be actively shedding maladaptive habits, as well as searching for the rare, new cultural tools that actually improve, not just complicate, our cultural adaptive rate. When considering the economics of a group adaptive race, shedding burdensome habits and policies is usually more important than adding new ones, just like shedding unnecessary weight from a race car is more productive than adding more engine power.

That immediately brings up the question of group-wide assessment methods. Without adequate assessment methods, how will we - as a culture - ever know if we're making progress ... or regressing? The quality of our distributed decision-making obviously tracks our ability to gather a NET assessment of the sum of our distributed outcomes.

At this point you may be wondering how measures as diverse as GDP, childhood deaths, mental health costs, interest rates, security costs, fiscal spending and net policy development all intertwine.  Good!

Is the return on coordinating all those things discussed by economists? If not, how do you quickly explain return-on-coordination to our legions of under-prepared politicians and policy staff?  It's obvious that no one person can answer that question adequately. It takes a nation to raise and select a productive policy office holder.

What else can we add to this discussion of policy interdependencies? Maybe the observation that group success and survival is not purely about our distributed methods and distributed rights? And that adaptive policy development is obviously also about how we collectively use those methods and right.  Do we use them in ways that make as a nation greater than the sum of it's parts, or as a disorganized mob? Answering that question also takes a nation.

Where can we start? Everywhere, of course. Here's just one of many places to start. Are all members of the NRA our enemies? Or is it just a question of - quickly - bringing them into our NET assessment methods? Can all citizens reach consensus on desired-outcomes? If so, adaptive usage patterns for all our methods and rights will fall into place. If not, we're already on the path to civil war. Chew on those economics.

Daniel Little — Simulating social mechanisms

A key premise of complexity theory is that a population of units has "emergent" properties that result from the interactions of units with dynamic characteristics. Call these units "agents". The "agent" part of the description refers to the fact that the elements (persons) are self-directed units. Social ensembles are referred to as "complex adaptive systems" -- systems in which outcomes are the result of complex interactions among the units AND in which the units themselves modify their behavior as a result of prior history.

Scott Page's Complex Adaptive Systems: An Introduction to Computational Models of Social Life provides an excellent introduction. Here is how Page describes an adaptive social system:

"Adaptive social systems are composed of interacting, thoughtful (but perhaps not brilliant) agents. It would be difficult to date the exact moment that such systems first arose on our planet -- perhaps it was when early single-celled organisms began to compete with one another for resources.... What it takes to move from an adaptive system to a complex adaptive system is an open question and one that can engender endless debate. At the most basic level, the field of complex systems challenges the notion that by perfectly understanding the behavior of each component part of a system we will then understand the system as a whole." (kl 151)

Understanding Society
Simulating social mechanisms
Daniel Little | Chancellor, University of Michigan at Dearborn

Paul Volcker has Policy Exactly "Banckwards"

Paul Volcker says: "We are left with the certainty, however awkward, that active participation in an open world economy requires some surrender of economic sovereignty."

That is exactly, 100% backwards. When does innocent fraud become innocent treason?  Or become innocent assisted suicide?

Reality: Adaptive growth of existing aggregates requires active tuning of inter-aggregate trade.

An adaptive race is NOT open.  It is contested among competing models who may converge, but only after exploring different options and either fusing and/or observing one another.  Our model within the USA is open.  That does not hold either outside the USA or even in our own banking lobby.

If all you've been educated at is banking, every problem looks like a double-entry accounting book. Someone tell Paul that banking does NOT account for evolution, or aggregate wealth creation?

The famous Spanish phrase “you are more stupid than a amoebae” is losing credence because the social amoebas are an incredibly useful model for examining our own social behavior.  Does a billion year old species manage it's "currency" more intelligently that Paul Volcker seems able to grasp?  Of course it does.

I can think of no greater danger to the sovereignty of the USA and the hard-fought freedoms and welfare of it's people, than the narrow policies promulgated by overly isolated lobbies. 

Who would have predicted that the sovereignty of the USA would one day be ceded to the very banking lobby that we fought our Revolution to be free from? 

And the purpose of that lobby? To serve the narrow interests of merchants, not the general welfare of the people. Please recall the timeless words of Tom Jefferson, who noted the following. "Merchants have no country. The mere spot they stand on does not constitute so strong an attachment as that from which they draw their gains."

Paul Volcker or Tom Jefferson?   No competition.  I'm with TJ.   

Paul Volcker, there's a place outside Mayfield, Nebraska where you can deposit your message.  Give me liberty from banksters, or give me death.

Democracy only works with adequate checks & balances between existing lobbies. With all due respect to Volcker, he's remarkably unlearned about anything sans banking.  The moment of adaptation in the world today still lies WITHIN evolving countries as species, not ACROSS a collection of over 200 diverse countries.  And it definitely does not reside within the IMF.  Bankers & merchants do not yet rule the world, let alone wield anything even laughably close to full group intelligence.   If Paul Volcker only knew 1/1000th of what Americans know, he'd certainly never say say anything so preposterously ignorant, or harmful to the very country the purports to stand for.

There is no point of stability in the natural world that is not a dynamic equilibrium between conflicting forces.

What's the only way any ship of fools stays alive? They NEVER haphazardly yield total control of policy to any one fool alone.  Group intelligence, by definition, lies within the body of discourse generated by a collection of fools.

Let's not be in a rush to yield our policy apparatus to the banking fools.