Xinhua — Xi stresses new concepts to guide economic work in 2018

The essential feature of the economy at the present stage is that it is in a transitional period from a phase of rapid growth to a stage of high-quality development, Xi said. 

He said from the present through the coming period, high-quality development is the fundamental requirement in determining development ideas, formulating economic policies and implementing macro-control measures.

"Achieving high-quality development is imperative for China to maintain sustainable and healthy development of the economy and society," Xi said.

According to Xi, the year 2018 is the first year in implementing the development blueprint outlined at the 19th CPC National Congress, and also a crucial year in carrying out the 13th Five-Year Plan (2016-2020).

"Economic work should implement new concepts, focus on new targets and put into practice new arrangements so as to lay a solid material foundation for the building of a moderately prosperous society in all respects by 2020," he said....

Members of non-Communist parties, All-China Federation of Industry and Commerce and those without party affiliations have submitted more than 80 opinions and suggestions during the past year, covering important topics including the Belt and Road Initiative as well as improvement of the real economy.

Xi said he hopes they can also contribute to the goals and tasks set at the 19th CPC National Congress, carry out deep investigations and research, and provide advice to resolve conflicts while also improving themselves....

Ecns
Xi stresses new concepts to guide economic work in 2018

Xinhua

Also of interest

Chinese online sellers pay $40,000 to take pictures with Obama

CGTN

Zhang Jun — China’s Vision for the Next 30 Years

Taking the long view with central planning.

Achieving the lofty development goals China's leaders have set will not be easy. But with a clear development blueprint and a powerful leader whose political clout all but guarantees continued reform, the country seems to be in a strong position to sustain its unprecedented economic success in the coming decades. 

Short article for addressing such a large undertaking, but it's comprehensive. The Chinese leadership knows where it wants to go. Now it needs to continue to actualize its vision for the country. Given the Chinese population is over a billion people it's a daunting task.

The leadership is not leaving this to the vagaries of the market. Markets are to be harnessed rather than left to themselves on the assumption of spontaneous natural order arising from "free markets" acting automatically as an optimizer.

Chinese socialism is challenging capitalism, while also using some capitalist methods such as markets. It's worked quite well so far, although some capitalist countries are shouting foul as their firms have to compete with Chinese SOEs (state-owned enterprises), leading to political friction over trade.

Project Syndicate
China’s Vision for the Next 30 Years

Zhang Jun | Professor of Economics and Director of the China Center for Economic Studies at Fudan University, Shanghai

Dan Steinbock — “Four Comprehensives” Vital to Progress, and China’s Demographic Future

At the recently concluded Fifth Plenum of the 18th Communist Party of China Central Committee, the “Four Comprehensives” became the grand blueprint for the 13th Five-Year Plan (2016-20). Each of the four tasks requires broad measures and pragmatic actions.

1. A moderately prosperous society
2. Structural reforms
3. Rule of law
4. Strict party discipline

Economonitor
“Four Comprehensives” Vital to Progress

In the West, one-child policy is often criticized as a “cruel Communist strategy.” In reality, most opponents of that policy were Marxists and the idea itself came from the West.

China’s Demographic Future

Dan Steinbock

The Power Of The Wealth Lobby. It's Disgusting Hubris. Some Are Blind To It. Others See Wealth As Superior Wisdom.

   (Commentary posted by Roger Erickson)

So what's it gonna be? Democracy by crowd wisdom, or oligarchy by idiocracy? If the latter, why not Central Planning by other means?

What if the aristocracy have no brains, just blind greed?

EU Ideologues “Crowd Out” Sanity

“[The EU’s leaders] ‘don’t want the [European Investment Bank] EIB crowding out private investment.’ "

Let me get this straight, they don't want aggregate options to crowd out prerogatives claimed by the few?

Why not?

They don't LIKE the tide of progress, change & evolution ... AND democracy?

Let's see 'em try to stop it! No matter how "successful" they are, it'll start up again after their tombstone is placed (if not before).

There's no stopping King Cahoots? We'll see.
2

Carrying on, what's an anagram for all the oligarchs? (Or for Neo-Gliberals.)

Factional Politics: Includes Furthering The Myth That Economics Is Ever Separated From Political Policy

(Commentary posted by Roger Erickson; hat tip to Chuck Spinney & Tom Hickey)



There IS no pure economics, only political-economics, aka, factional policy or, rarely, aggregate-policy.

Manufactured Crisis: The Untold Story of the Iran Nuclear Scare

Gareth Porter on the true history of Iran’s nuclear program

By Andrew Cockburn, Harpers

The emerging evidence about rampant & pervasive myths in both the social sciences and ongoing policy processes should trigger us to simply close down all economics departments ... or at least re-label them as "propaganda" departments set up purely to serve the interests of existing political campaign donors.

The whole premise of economics is to "study the human mind stripped of culture" ?

Impossible. Anyone saying that has never cracked open a biology-101 textbook, or even read many newspapers. At least not honestly.

Just google "feral children." People raised isolated from culture are NOT capable of developing what we think of as the human mind. For Pete's sake!

And orthodox macro-economics purports to study group behavior stripped of aggregate policy? Look, just quit bullshitting me. We are not an aggregate of feral-hermits or feral-communities. Aggregates operating isolated from Public Purpose are also NOT capable of developing what we would consider a group-brain or group intelligence. None of us is as smart as all of us, right?

Unless you flat out lie about the myth of Central Planning, while persisting in paying lip service to democracy.  (All Central Planning is equally fatal? It's just that Upper Class Central Planning is less fatal than than others? Is that the rationalization, among porkers feeding at the common trough?)

To me, them's fightin' words. It's past time to drive the stale numbskulls, rascals & idiot savants out of the temple of Democracy. The only survival option is to save them from themselves .... again. Anything less is long past boring. Their act was pathetic from the start. In fact, it's never been clear why an electorate this smart ever had any interest in the trap of gang, er "party" politics from the beginning.

It's amazing to consider how much ideological momentum it took to keep so much common-sense logic bottled up for hundreds of years, in so many fields.

It's simultaneously fascinating, frustrating & heartening to see these 3 articles in print, precisely for the rarity of seeing simple, straightforward, real thought actually slip through both "scientific," "political" and "journalism" industries.

It's nice to know that that can still happen - even if by accident. :) Yet it is also sobering.

One conclusion? Whenever something starts to be catalogued and systematized, then functionally adaptive wormholes through that catalogue-space begin to be denied, through sheer structural momentum alone.

Such institutional denial can have a strong effect on the herd minded.

Yet for evolution to continue, every herd must keep both it's conservatives and progressives operating safely within - not outside - adaptive tolerance limits. If all of us are smarter than any subset of us, then we need ALL of ourselves, to find ways to utilize ALL of our distributed talents, ALL of the time.

So does that mean having so-called conservatives sitting back and helping to CAREFULLY select from all the insanely great inventions generated by so-called progressives? Ya think? 

What on Earth is there to squabble about? We're staring at an expanding smorgasbord - one that can't run out, only grow, unless we knock the tables over while brawling - and it feels awfully stupid to waste time arguing about which dishes to taste first. As many as possible, ASAP? Then just share feedback, also ASAP, about how all the endless options taste? 

And then? Just follow the feedback momentum, instead of trying to grab some arbitrary option, and hoard it? This ain't rocket science. Hoarding slowly growing static assets instead of leveraging exponentially growing dynamic assets is a strategy of extreme ignorance. We're better than that ..... right?

Yet Another Claim That The US Is An Oligarchy, Not A Democracy: So Much For Rational Agents Having Access To ALL Necessary Pricing (or other) Data! :)

   (Commentary posted by Roger Erickson.)

US Is an Oligarchy Not a Democracy, says Scientific Study

Although it always worries many when a study group goes to the length of stating that they ran a "scientific" study.

Semantics.

Everything is "scientific," so just look at the details of the study terms and weigh relevance for yourself.

Note, that it can seem problematic when articles in peer-refereed research journals are "leaked" to the public ahead of actual publishing (since it's not clear if all the reviews are in). When is that crossing the borders between politics, PR and double-blind research studies? Sometimes when it's politically convenient? Sometimes when the TEMPO of discussion outweighs worries about validity? C'est la Vie. There's no reliable answer.

OpenSourcing the article in question to the lay public, for full AND TIMELY public review, certainly helps the rate of dissemination of public discourse, and public learning from the diverse components of itself. Overall, that's why most of nature openly broadcasts most data, and then races to recognize new patterns and discern their implications for new contexts.

In this case, we have both occurring, though asynchronously. The authors of this study are Martin Gilens and Benjamin I. Page, and their article is eavailable from their edu website as a pdf, entitled:

"Testing Theories of American Politics."

So why bother with subsequent publication in a peer-reviewed journal operating behind a paywall? One reason is simply the layers of tenure-track processes that this publishing process involves, for both authors and reviewers. University academic operations are quite as due for a systemic overhaul as our banking system is. Most people outside of academia simply aren't familiar with the arcane, outmoded operations involved in University management.

Given all that, go get 'em, USA. How do YOU spell "D.E.M.O.C.R.A.Z.Y?"

Personally, I think this article should be discussed by every classroom & household in the country. We'll worry about how scientific it is throughout the ongoing discussion. Whether oligarchy or democracy, the big point to remember is that success tracks the quality (including tempo!) of distributed decision making. That reminds us that it's always a war between Central Planning (by any other name), and effective Democracy.

Data-Wise And Context-Foolish, On A Scale More Epic Than Ever Before. The Task of RIGHT-SIZING AGGREGATE CONTEXT-AWARENESS

   (Commentary posted by Roger Erickson)




In case you haven't noticed. THE USA WON.

Yet now we're addicted to the form, and have lost track of the function.

The corollary message that this whole Snowden-NSA affair drives home?

The awesome, overwhelming power of the USA.

I don't see how anyone reading the details could conclude anything else except the fact that the US won, hands down, and now has the capacity to easily know & ward off literally every significant challenge occurring anywhere. We can, will and do know seemingly everything about anything ... but nothing about what any of it is for.

The bigger message here is that we don't seem to know what to do with that capacity, and with our victory.

We are actually misusing our victory so badly that we're actively trying to stuff square success into the round jaws of failure.

The only constant seems to be our systemic ineptitude despite overwhelming brilliance in every narrow discipline.

We're simply back to data-wise and context-foolish, on a scale more epic than ever before.

Even though we've been better than this before. 

We obviously couldn't KEEP our better capabilities. You have to conclude that our grandparents would be disappointed, and downright ashamed of us. We're supposed to be better than this, can be, and will. It's only a question of how, and when. Why is not up to us. If we can't regain our adaptive role, someone else will do that TO us.

The ONLY things that we don't over-teach in our schools?

As a start, how about the fact that, by definition, interdependencies between truly novel discoveries cannot be predicted? Certainly not in real time. And, that failing to acknowledge & explore unpredictable inter-dependencies is a guaranteed way to keep interrupting our systemic success? 

We are actively lying to ourselves about the unpredictability of systemic failure. Systemic failure is guaranteed by the unpredictability of emerging interdependencies. We only need to ditch the arrogance that leads us to lie to ourselves about our predictive power ... and then go about the easy task of discovering the awesome interdependencies generated as a totally free byproduct of our narrow discoveries. This is NOT rocket science. It's simple, aggregate practice.

To illustrate the easy part, say three people independently invent a hammer, a metal nail, and a saw. Do we arbitrarily focus on war hammers, nail-bombs and CIA-torture methods - and in keeping others from using hammers, nails & saws? Or do we discover carpentry, house-building, architecture and art - and who knows what else? It's all in our outlook, our ability to parse feedback, and our amount of practice at assessing aggregate outcomes.

WHY are we turning something so easy into something so difficult?

If the NSA can presume to predict the proclivity of oppressed, under-educated people to resent our actions, then they sure as hell COULD also acknowledge, track and report the proclivity of our own sociopaths to presume that they know how to constrain our Aggregate Adaptive Path, by Central Planning!

Further, the NSA's same methods could be re-purposed to Adaptive Use by our full aggregate, to track and assess our electorate's balance of listening over-much to our few sociopaths, versus to our entire aggregate's feedback. 

If we want Democracy, we have to invest in methods to extend and then KEEP it's benefits. That's exactly what we are not doing. Instead, we're investing in keeping admirers in other countries from emulating what we've already achieved. That reduces to investing in our own failure. It's self-assisted suicide policy, and we should outlaw it. Our own adaptive rate is our most valuable moving target, and we've taken our aggregate eye off of that target!

Instead of bothering to attack the NSA and our MICC, let's stop them in their tracks, and repurpose the MICC, just like we did with the banks in 1933. We can repurpose the MICC by gifting them a killer technology called a social mirror (full, aggregate, feedback awareness). Given a mirror, repurposing them will be incidental ... but only if they're forced to actually use our social mirror.

There is, actually, a simple, concluding question to draw attention to.

It's not just continuously right-sizing fiat currency supply that matters to a dynamically changing population.

How does any aggregate Right-Size Aggregate Context-Awareness?

And then continuously KEEP it right-sized, despite unpredictable changes?

For Those Who Can't Grasp Democracy - Consider the 2nd Derivative of Disruption

   (Commentary by Roger Erickson)

No Central Planning, No Central Control

There is plenty of evidence that large human "democracies" of this sort existed in multiple sites worldwide, in between cultural "development" cycles.

Evidence: large population or temple sites showing outcome of large-population labor, absence significant, long-term evidence for present-day combinations of agriculture, weaponry and/or warfare - e.g., Stonehenge, Catal Hyuk, Harappa, and many paleolithic & neolithic sites in South/North America, Asia, Africa & Europe.

One simple, unproven hypothesis is that it is our rate tool invention itself that stresses us.

When a subgroup of humans invent a new tool, practice or process ... they invariably misuse it (typically against their neighbors) for a long time, before settling into an optimal pattern of adaptive, distributed use (i.e., common sense slowly becoming common & obvious, through reverberating feedback).

Then another game-altering tool/practice/process is invented, which allows some parasites to bully the system again ... just 'cuz they can ... until we all wise up again.

You'll even hear this from experienced businesspeople: "I finally learned that just because you can ... doesn't mean that you should."

A core question for ORGANIZED systems is how to invent new tools, and AVOID misusing them before adaptively using them. This boils down to be the 2nd derivative of disruption. Just because some entire system has to be rebuilt per an altered design, doesn't mean that burning it down and starting from scratch is ALWAYS the most adaptive procedure. 

Rather than eradicating prior clans and clones before repopulating a new niche, a key advance invented by social species is to RAPIDLY scavenge, rescue and reuse existing populations, for immediate application to new tasks while accelerating exploration of new options in new niches. Whether you call it re-deployment or reorganization doesn't matter.

There are ways to titrate that path which produces the most new options, soonest. That titration method requires FULL-GROUP FEEDBACK, and we call it Democracy. Following that path requires continuous, real-time, statistical evaluation of the complex moment of adaptive power in a distribution of lost-vs-gained, net+local option-exploration.

Such titrated evaluation requires a statistical evaluation of a 2-stage optimization process. Keep the components well fed PLUS grow the net systemic options. Neglecting either stage feeds disparity, but not net adaptation.

How Best To Prevent An Overly Narrow, Capitalist and "Corporate" Approach To National Policy Development?

   (Commentary posted by Roger Erickson)



While we watch the Davos Dun Masters contemplate how to more gracefully co-opt Democracy worldwide, one can't help but recognize an underlying pattern playing out in every nation pretending to practice democracy.

How many have seen this particular policy example, concerning increasingly concentrated, corporate ownership of crop plant development?

While the details of corporate crop plant development are interesting in their own right, it's simply another example, of the same root process issue seen everywhere. The Davos Dun Masters own a million of them, in every industry known to man.

It is NOT the particular tasks that vex us!

It is our methods for handling an endless stream of tasks that is handicapping us.

Must every market process generated by a supposedly social species, inexorably be owned by a tiny subset of the supposedly "social" animals that create the culture? That, by definition, is an oxymoron, if you know the definition of a "social" species and the benefits that being social bestows.

Please read on. And please focus here on the methods for achieving a social culture, not the particular cause, plus the follow-on, MAINTENANCE methods required to continue benefitting from being a culture capable of generating dynamic markets.

Opposing Monsanto dominance of genetically engineered crop plants?

It's not entirely clear that raising $ to oppose Monsanto is the best selling point, yet the long term methods needed to best prevent the detriments of overly narrow policy development ... now those are worth thinking VERY CAREFULLY about.

In this case, how best might we prevent a narrow, "corporate" approach to crop plant breeding?

First, what is the Desired Outcome here, for any nation?

Suggestion: No matter what good eventually comes from genetic engineering of crop plants, it should NOT be predominantly owned by a narrow set of stakeholders.

Overly narrow stakeholder sets in a democracy? That's just disparity & feudalism under a different guise!

Or, if you prefer, another feeble attempt at Central Planning.

When it comes to comparing capitalism and communism, what is the functional difference? Both feature only slightly different approaches to achieving Central Planning by an oligarchy. Call them crude vs sophisticated approaches to mercantilism. The theory they hide behind matters not. It's the actual implementation that matters to us.

Overly Centralized Planning - no matter how it's achieved - always goes awry precisely because of the failure to adequately sample the required feedback spectrum.

If we want and have a Democracy, just USE it?

There is NEVER any adaptive value in letting social processes by owned by a few. Translation: static wealth disparity cuts required social processes off from necessary social feedback. Therefore, society degrades.

Surely there's a better way?

Who says capitalism is necessarily inimicable to Democracy? 

If my logic, below is correct, then capitalism & democracy needn't comprise an oxymoron. Just don't treat capitalism as the ONLY tool in your social toolkit.

We're back to a very simple point. There is no adaptive path - or transient point of stability - in the natural world, that is not a dynamic equilibrium between multiple, conflicting forces. Or call them conflicting factions, if you're having trouble diversifying valuable analogies fast enough.

What is it that a social species hosting a human culture really wants?

We want to stay on a dynamic, adaptive path. So, we constantly need new methods for chasing that unpredictable path. THAT IS THE ONLY THING THAT KEEPS US ALIVE!

Narrow ownership of something in a given context is meaningless for groups who survive only by successfully migrating through continually changing contexts. Thoreau, among others, warned us of that, long ago.

The most valuable skills to own are our dynamic abilities, namely our abilities to detect every one of our methods that we need to change, and to drive coordinated changes ASAP. As Wallace & Darwin pointed out 150 years ago, our Adaptive Rate is literally our lifeblood. Or, as Shewhart put it, 80 years ago, the highest cost is our cost of coordinating the changes that comprise Adaptive Rate.

The only thing Thoreau, Darwin & Shewhart didn't specify was the obvious corollary.

Since methods drive results, it is our rate of discovering & developing methods that allows us to generate and reap the insanely great returns on coordination. Apparently "T, D & S" assumed that American electorates would be better educated than PT Barnum did. 

Our core dilemma boils down to this. If "T, D & S" were right about our methods for maintaining the quality of the American electorate, then we'll be fine. If PT Barnum was right, then you may as well start looking for another country to migrate to.

Once said that way, it's clear that overly narrow management of static assets are a burden not only to individuals, but a dangerous brake on our national Adaptive Rate - as Thoreau pointed out 170 years ago.

"Most of the luxuries and many of the so-called comforts of life are not only not indispensable, but positive hindrances to the elevation of mankind."   Thoreau

Having access, on-demand, to those luxuries is not the problem. The personal time tied up in hoarding selective access to them is the hindrance. The act of excessive hoarding takes the hoarder out of social play, and compounds that damage by slowing the Adaptive Rate of the aggregate. The result is a skyrocketing Output Gap, due to idling of static assets.

Every tribal society on earth - even our own, tribal ancestors - warned us of this, from the beginning. Our dilemma is that the staggering return on coordination stockpiles static assets. Then it takes time for our dynamic assets to see how to optimally leverage those static assets. That group calculation time is typically grossly extended by the personal hoarding of what are, by default, Central Planners. To hoard is to express Central Planning, which only slows increasingly dynamic use of existing static assets, and hence slows national Adaptive Rate.

So, the struggle between personal and social temptations continues, unabated. Only those cultures able to discriminate the greater benefit of dynamic, social assets survive. There are few, if any, real hermits left, for good reason. They can't compete, except as parasites living off the human social culture they can't comprehend.

Personal hoarding degrades the incredible, group efficiency of pass-through economic methods. Why? Because it degrades & slows our ability to leverage those static assets for pursuit of the most valuable assets of all - our dynamic assets, which allow us to reap the return on coordination.

This is NOT rocket science. Just keep capitalism as one of many accounting metrics, and use them all as checks and balances upon one another. What could be more simple?

That way we can have our supra-tribal population size, our increased diversity, and our pass-through economy too. What's to worry about? That outcome is better than having our cake & eating it too.

The Age-Old "Massively Parallel" Design Advantage For All - SELECTED - Task Subsets

Commentary by Roger Erickson

That is, the same, evolutionary reason that nervous systems ended up with massively parallel CNS network designs, notwithstanding the occasional demand for insane signal propagation speeds in things like, e.g., the extremely long, giant squid motor neuron axons.

Computer Chip Design Wars

By the same logic, shouldn't our national policy apparatus be going for deliberate, Distributed Planning? Rather than the supposedly faster benefits of Central Planning?

National Policy Design-Wars?  Isn't that what's always going on? Yet have you EVER met a national policy advisor, Congressperson or Federal Agency Head that you could even HAVE this present discussion with? Not since Rexford Tugwell or Marriner Eccles in 1933? They were both, figuratively, born in a barn. Maybe we should all be.

It's Ye Olde Question of which method comes out better in the long run.

If we were just interested in doing EVERYTHING we know how to do right now, and doing everything faster, then yes, Central Planning by dictators - or a Communist Central Party, or a 0.1% financial aristocracy which owns all our Congresspeople - would work.

However, our reality is that our emerging goals - what few, new things we next have to selectively FOCUS on doing well - always matters far more. What part of ongoing natural selection don't the 0.1%, naked-emperor, currency-hoarding Central Planners understand?

Massively parallel feedback assessment drives Natural Selection better than any other known design? Same as in cultural-market-systems as it does in central-nervous-systems? Democracy works?

Ya think?

Right now, achieving an electorate where everybody was, literally, born in a barn, sure is looking like it would be an improvement. Instead of becoming MORE massively parallel in our selective feedback and distributed natural selections, we've become massively isolated. Worse, population growth and increasingly narrow training is accelerating distributed isolation faster than collective efforts to re-connect our electorate.

Good luck with that.

If we don't select which FEW things make the MOST difference in return for the least effort ... everything else we race around distracting ourselves with won't amount to a hill of beans?

Ya think?

Too Few "ICC" Lobbies Making Up Our Central Planning Cabal

Commentary by Roger Erickson

It's the height of irony, to see the MICC and a few other industrial-strength "ICCs" buy up control of our policy apparatus ... IN THE NAME OF AN ONGOING CRUSADE AGAINST Communist Style CENTRAL PLANNING!

You really couldn't make this up. Ideologues destroying Democracy in a misguided rush to control it's "true" nature .... from their narrow point of view. They can't see the resiliency for all the conformity?

As an example, the following is an awesome summary & statement taken from the battleground of a token, industrial Natural Selection process.

'In his May 14, 2013 interview with Fortune Magazine, ARM CEO Simon Segars mocked the personal computer market as a place "where two people have controlled it and the person that makes PCs runs on 2% profit margin and can't afford to innovate anything other than which shade of grey the plastic is." At the time, Segars's ridicule of the personal computer industry came against a .. backdrop of claims that ARM architecture has been installed within more than 95% of the world's mobile phones. Over the past 24 months, of course, Microsoft and Intel have expressed their financial and ideological commitment to building out mobile businesses. The moves out of Segars's "two people," however, have increasingly reeked of desperation. For once, Microsoft and Intel are finding themselves largely shut out and unable to bully their way into a lucrative market.'
   Microsoft And Intel Are Getting Desperate

Increasingly reeking of desperation?

Does that sound familiar to people in a large variety of disciplines, including all those asking whether our national whole is still greater than the sum of it's parts?

We could quite obviously say the same thing about the 2 "people" (aka, our 2 political parties) who are running policy in this country. They can't let go of the MICC & a few other "ICC" lobbies [making up an increasingly narrow Central Planning cabal] AND they're constraining OUR Policy Space AND dooming OUR Policy Agility to a 2% (or less) growth rate!

The very concept of "Concurrency" applies equally well to the capture of our entire policy apparatus by a few, rigid "tangents" - trying to keep us fixated on linear policy directions exactly when the path of reality meanders so unpredictably that it literally screams, daily, for more flexibility and policy agility - NOT fixed, ideological tangents. 

Where are the boundaries between creeping concurrency in the MICC, Control Fraud, and the new Wall St FICC (finance-industrial-congressional-complex)?

Only in our myths and dreams, which can now see ONLY by keeping our heads stuck in a hole in the ground? There is always a better way. We really must just let ourselves select it. That means steering past all the tangents, and going with the wisdom of consensus. It's out there, if all the ideologues will just let us all adequately sample our own, increasingly diverse feedback. Democracy ain't rocket science. It's just listening to all of us, steering away from frictions, and going with the confluence of "easy" and "insanely useful." That boils down to the return-on-coordination with and within the bulk of the electorate, the Middle Class. We can do this, EASILY, if we simply argue less and coordinate more.

How Comically Ironic That The IMF/WB Annual Meeting Occurred In DC This Last Week, Parallel To But Upstaged By The Bigger Drama Queens

Commentary by Roger Erickson

Yet while they're dragging their own, US Democracy down the drain, the "Traditional Values" crowd in the USA is more worried about a few % of the human population being Drag Queens? You can't make this stuff up fast enough. At least they're no longer traumatized by sinistrals - despite the embedded word!!! With sexual/educational/cultural recombination always generating this much diversity - why not just have more in all of our policy channels?

That aside, were the competing DC dramas an example of the chief cretins showing the little suits who's still boss?* :(

C'mon. It's not fair. The banksters finagle all year, and then can't get a minute of continuing scrutiny? How's a dishonest bankster supposed to get any consistent publicity, with this kind of grandstanding by the very politicians that they bought and own? :(

Oh. Wait. What? 

What the heck IS going on here? Does anyone really know? With this many conspiracies either working overtime or furloughed, the conspiracy-writers are accusing the hopelessly confused audience of racketeering - just because they're collectively unable to pay up! You gotta admit, it does look suspicious. to see so many broke simultaneously. Empty pockets is no excuse from the unlawful, folks. While you were distracted, the banksters requested that we pledge some future collateral, so that THEY can balance OUR fiat.

You just can't make this stuff up. Are the professional joke-writers not getting their own joke? Or is the audience not getting the double-entendre, even as the theater doors are barricaded ... from the inside. It's too complicated, folks, so just focus on the plot you've paid to see unfold. The promised audience-participation comes at the "intermission," and most are guaranteed to be surprised.

With these performers and this audience, what good is a ingeniously novel set-up, if neither can recognize the paradigm? The bigger punchline may as well come and go in a parallel dimension.

Imagine a dynamic value comedian trying to tell a unpredictable-valuation joke to a static-value audience? All the audience members hear are random tangents?

Wait, there's a counter-attack by the banksters, and a new effort to regain the publicity edge!  The little suits have noticed something in their tangential cross-hairs, and advise that we can zoom off [in a STRAIGHT line, of course] and be there in 20 years! Plus, it's a green target! They can smell it!

Green Light for a New World Bank Group
"Six months ago, the World Bank Group’s member countries** endorsed a bold plan to end extreme poverty by 2030 and promote shared prosperity. On Saturday, they gave the Bank Group the green light to reposition itself to better tackle these goals."

Reposition, huh?*** Just a minor matter of guaranteeing their Central Planner salaries and perks for a few more decades, until WE achieve THEIR predictions. :( It's playful, it's cruel ... and the sheer repetitiveness is actually bold, you have to admit.

* Meanwhile, the divergence between audience income & price of popcorn just increased again. Plus, there's gonna be a new health-insurance surcharge on the extra salt we're advertising to ourselves. Forget the health-insurance exchanges, we're dealing with a one-way bankster/MiddleClass exchange. Both political parties are recommending that 99% of citizens grab their socks. :(

** Couldn't help but notice this additional punchline on the WB site. Happy Cows Help Save the Planet  Is there a double-meaning in that? Have they switched from calling us "Muppets" to calling us "cows?" Or are both those terms just the official, new banking designations for people from the previously lower & middle class - now to be permanent - castes?

*** Personally, I'm into cheap, classless stories, where the cows & Muppets & Drag Queens rise up, caste out the exorcists, and in the process purge their own demons. Especially if there's a disclaimer that No Socks Were Grabbed in the course of this Audience Participation Democracy. Is that show playing anywhere off Wall Street?

Coming Full Circular Logic - Nobel Foundation Seeks Cash Boost With Hedge Funds

Commentary by Roger Erickson

Why have a Central Planning Committee hand out cash prizes for innovation?

Werks fer mi!

No wonder everything the Nobel Committees do seems more orthogonal to emerging reality, every year. Reality bubble anyone? They don't seem to even know what one is.

No amount of statistics applied to flawed concepts helps predict adjustments to unpredictable reality?

You'd think they'd get around to analyzing methods for how we adjust and evolve, instead of still deluding themselves with nonsense about prediction.

Zero predictive power, but (so far) unlimited adaptive power? So how come we're still fascinated with the alchemy of prediction? Forget Al Qada, it's our own Al Chemists that are morphing into new sects.

Americans Are Hostages Of The 'Terrorists' Of Wall Street - And Half Way To "Stockhold" Syndrome Too

Commentary by Roger Erickson

It's called no child left NOT behind, the veil of kabuki BS.

Do pictures say a thousand words, or what?
  Multi-media conveys a million words?
    And an in-context, sensorimotor experience conveys infinite words?

And yet, in the end, we still have 315 million people held hostage by ~0.1% of the dumbest, least culturally adaptive dipshits imaginable!?

So what is wrong with the simple truth cutting through ALL of these words, visualizations, conceptualizations, paradigms and unfolding realities?

Nothing?

Then let's get busy folks, and throw 'da bums out. We've got FAR better options to be exploring.

Central Planning isn't even interesting or enticing ... unless you're into hostage situations and "Stockhold" Syndrome - and other forms of cultural navel-gazing.

We're Americans. We have unimaginable group ingenuity. The only thing our erstwhile central "masters" have are some feeble, ideological plans. Their plans are boring to worse than tears. We got bigger fish to fry.

Move along folks. Nothing to see here in Plan Central. Just Luddite death & decay.

hat tip Russ Huntley

Our Central Planners Think That THEY own OUR Fiat?

Commentary by Roger Ericksn

The Sad State Of Consumer Income

This is a very useful article by Steve Hansen, detailing ongoing reality in ways that even Jane and & Joe Sixpack should comprehend.

In short, we're crash dummies being run into a wall of orthodoxy.

Public statistics are looking a bit grim.
  Yet if you look more closely .... it's much worse!
    And if you look EVEN closer ... it's far worse than that!!
(How many are already afraid to look closer?)

What can be done? Private prison industries? Divert Aggregate Demand to  ....  Aggregate Remand? We can't afford to exercise fiat ... unless that initiative is directed at constraining the untrained initiative of under-educated, under-trained, under-employed citizens?  ??  Let me TRY to get my head around this.

Most ... of .. our ...  initiative ... is  .... spent ... by ... dwindling numbers of Central Planners (the 0.1%) ... on .... bizarre endeavors driven by twisted thinking?

Why, now that I've dragged it out of myself, that's the only statement that's made sense all year!!!

Our Central Planners think THEY own OUR fiat?

Their concerted initiative has deprived us of ours? How is that possible? It's a policy choice. One that "works" for us ... until we decide it doesn't.  Can some more of us PLEASE make a decision? An adaptive one?

How tragically silly. And ironic. We're unleashing weapons of cultural self-destruction right here in River City? If the NeoCons can't see it, they must be hiding it from themselves.

Two questions for Americans.

1) If we don't completely re-evaluate how we do functional public education in the USA, what will happen to our descendants?

2) And even if we re-invent K-12 education, will even that matter .... if we don't find a way to gracefully re-invent all of our currently failing governance institutions?

Besides currency operations, how many things which we learned in the 1930s - or since - have we simply not bothered to tell enough of us? Will we start communicating stuff that matters more often? Will we listen? Or are we all closet OldneoCons, hiding emerging reality from ourselves ... and our kids - to no avail?

P2P Debates: Arguments for and against central planning

For those interested.

P2P Foundation
P2P Debates: Arguments for and against central planning
Michel Bauwens