Xinhua — Chinese growth philosophy to help navigate through new industrial revolution: Klaus Schwab

China's 13th Five-Year Plan reflects its ability to embrace the new industrial revolution and its growth philosophy will help it play a leading role in the process, World Economic Forum founder and executive chair Klaus Schwab said Saturday. [Special coverage]

The Fourth Industrial Revolution is not science fiction -- we are already in the midst of it, he told Xinhua in an exclusive interview ahead of the upcoming Annual Meeting of the New Champions 2016, also known as the Summer Davos Forum.

"It will not only change what we are doing and how we communicate, but the whole of society and our identity," he said.

More than half of the Chinese population are prepared for the Fourth Industrial Revolution and the 13th Five-Year Plan reflects this ability, he added. The blueprint, released last year, outlines China's development path for the next five years, with growth driven by innovation, coordination, green development, opening up and sharing.

Schwab expects the five principles to be beneficial to China's future economic growth, and among them, innovation is the most important principle to the progress of the Fourth Industrial Revolution.

The new wave of technological developments will not only bring opportunities such as increased productivity, but might widen the gap between the rich and the poor due to exposure to the latest tools, he pointed out.

Therefore, sharing is important. Governments should ensure the benefits of new technology are shared domestically and globally, he said.

There might be some layoffs due to technology such as robotics. The process will be a kind of destructive creation, with old jobs reduced and new jobs created. The challenges lies in the different speeds of the two process, he said, adding that the government and business communities should ensure people are retrained and new jobs created.

Building a green economy should be the goal of all efforts, and that will take coordination and synergy between governments and the business community. More than that, there needs to be more networking, not only within a country, but also on a global scale, thus, underscoring the need to continue to open up, Schwab said.

China is one of the largest markets for robots and is supplying the world in many other technological areas, said Schwab, who was impressed with the flexibility and reliability of the latest drone product developed by the Shenzhen-based technology firm DJI, a leading manufacturer of commercial and recreational drones for aerial photography and videography.

"I think China can play a leading role in shaping the Fourth Industrial Revolution," he said.

Meanwhile, as China is part of the global economy, it should facilitate global dialogue and cooperation to manage development within a fair environment, Schwab added.

ECNS
Chinese growth philosophy to help navigate through new industrial revolution: Klaus Schwab
Xinhua, edited by Wang Fan

Klaus Schwab is German engineer and economist, best known as the founder and executive chairman of the World Economic Forum. His wife and former secretary, Hilde, co-founded the Schwab Foundation for Social Entrepreneurship. — Wikipedia

Also

The first of the achievements is that the SCO has advocated and put into practice the pioneering Shanghai Spirit, which features mutual trust, mutual benefit, equality, consultation, respect for diverse civilizations and pursuit of common development, said the Chinese president.

Xi puts forward five-point proposal to consolidate, deepen SCO cooperation
Xinhua, Editor: Gu Liping

Subsistence Living Amidst Hoarded Plenty - vs - The Insanely Great Performance Of Social Species

   (Commentary posted by Roger Erickson)

The “sharing economy,” or a brief recurrence of sharecropping mentality? Or both? Should we be complacent, giddy with relief, or expect even more depressing hardship before sanity breaks out again, on a larger scale? Is everything going to change as much -  better or worse - as plentiful prophets are always claiming?

"You only find this new economy if you look hard for it. In Greece, when a grassroots NGO mapped the country’s food co-ops, alternative producers, parallel currencies and local exchange systems they found more than 70 substantive projects and hundreds of smaller initiatives ranging from squats to carpools to free kindergartens. To mainstream economics such things seem barely to qualify as economic activity – but that’s the point. They exist because they trade, however haltingly and inefficiently, in the currency of postcapitalism: free time, networked activity and free stuff. It seems a meagre and unofficial and even dangerous thing from which to craft an entire alternative to a global system, but so did money and credit in the age of Edward III."

Uh ... so what? I'm not sure this helps anyone. It's just stating what all can see, without making any useful suggestions, or any useful warnings.

Let's start with the warnings. A national government is the ultimate current example of cooperative coordination, and is a remarkable achievement for any population. Tearing an organized government apart, and attempting to replace it with isolated pockets of coordination is NOT necessarily progress. In fact, that's the same, insanely juvenile, logic that various Bolsheviks & Capitalists, from Stalin to Pol Pot to Scott Walker and the Koch brothers, fell back on. Tear some highly evolved thing apart, and plan to replace it with something better? Like 5-yr olds dismantling a watch, that strategy rarely, if ever works, while evolution does.

Meanwhile, if you look at the insane profit margins of firms like Uber, they present ample opportunities for Capitalists (or Pol Pots) to - once again, and a little bit longer - steal the commons. This time, they're stealing your time, which is rather like belling the cats. Except this time it's belling the distributed cats that invent innovations, so that the bell-makers can steal them faster. The form changes, but not the goal.

Yes, new forms of coordination will continue to break out, but don't expect pickpockets with MBA degrees to stop stealing whole railroads.

Sinks in any system stop destroying aggregate output ONLY when sources surround sinks with enough warning lights and stop signs.

The desired outcome of the process we call "coordination" is to reduce any & all frictions, from individual frictions to institutional frictions. Success tracks our ability to fine tune the little things that keep us and all of our institutions from working at cross purposes. (Kudos to Col. Casey Haskins for helping to drive home that concept.)

Who controls what Marx called the “power of knowledge?” To a biologist, that seems like a specious question - revealing that the questioners mind is trapped in the capitalist dogma of agent-based competition to seize & control - for what sustainable purpose, they never explain.

Doesn't it seem more sensible to instead ask, why anyone would limit the power of aggregates to compound knowledge? Isn't that the same logic as "why shrink the flock of geese that lay golden eggs?"

To a biologist, this whole discussion is an aberrant tangent. Capitalism is no more than the mores of a bandit or Cossack camp, a population with members recently & briefly ripped from integration in a social species. Given time, even bandit bands re-invent coordination & teamwork, and return to their social-species instincts. The only question is, how much time? The answer depends on the cleverness the bandits wield, and the contexts they find themselves in. No one said evolution is easy, just unstoppable.

Our "general intellect" won't blow anything sky high, except in the mind of the aberrants. It will just allow us to regain the aggregate-intellectual-agility we once had in fluid tribal societies, before our growth spurt created our existing, supra-tribal population sizes, and thereby briefly turned us into the less-agile bandit super-society we call capitalism.

Paul Mason seems to be missing his own forest, by populating it with one too many of his own, distracting trees. All those little experiments in "sharing" on a larger scale? They started from scratch, mostly BECAUSE few, if any of the participants knew they were supposed to read attempted summaries of unpredictably distributed innovations, by people like Paul Mason. And, as noted, they were just prevented from continuing coordination on a national scale, through use of a functional government serving the needs and desires of the people.

It may come across as harsh, but what useful purpose does Paul Mason play? He travels around telling people what they see in their own mirrors? I don't get it. Does anyone remember the name of the Dinosaur who traveled around telling compatriots that the end of sauropods was occurring? Methinks it was rather obvious to all, and they didn't throw parties for scribes recording the obvious. In fact, they probably ate him.

Now about those requested suggestions. What would help cut through all the useless chatter and clutter of banalities? Maybe cooperative interactions with each other? How many of each other? There's the rub. If citizens could know summaries of what ALL of their co-citizens knew, they wouldn't have to worry about their food supply or "money" supply. They'd have more options, plenty of free time, and literally endless suggestions. For now, I'll only make one suggestion.  Personally, I think that we should be paying one helluva lot of attention to what gets taught in those cooperative kindergartens. Tomorrow's aggregate adaptive rate may well depend largely on the utility of such adaptive methods.

We are what we practice, we practice what we train, we train what we teach, and we teach what we see (not what we say).

In the end, we as a people learn the dynamic sum of what we do, and our descendants live with the outcomes we deserve.

It's literally not enough even to do unto others what you would have done to you. To make your culture even more adaptive, you now have to do unto the 7th generation yet unborn what subtle, small things you would have had your ancestors prepare for you. That's how subtle & complex our adaptive challenges now are.  In other words, our challenge is to think ahead, as never before, and more every year.

If that cascade isn't actively and exquisitely coordinated into a whole greater than the sum of it's parts, then we get the distributed civil war of capitalism, instead of the insanely great performance of finely tuned, highly adaptive, social species.

What On Earth Happened To All Our Ancient Tribal Methods? We Don't Practice Enough To Find What Scales.

   (Commentary posted by Roger Erickson)

Humans have been coordinating on a truly massive scale, for tens of thousands of years ..... without computers, without convertible currency systems, without pencil and paper, and even without agriculture.

How? By constant practice.

And along the way, incredibly useful methods were invented, and practiced, including methods for conflict mediation, among many other applications. Those many tribal methods don't all scale, unadjusted, to fit our current, supra-tribal population densities & mixing rates, but most are necessary but not sufficient steps to practice, while constantly discovering how to organize on an ever greater scale.

Yet here we are today, with nearly everyone acting as though all those finely tuned tribal coordination methods never existed, and that coordinating is a totally new invention. :(

The Theology of Consensus

For Pete's sake! Have we thrown out our cultural methods with the bathwater, not just the baby? Most neighbors today don't even know how to co-run a neighborhood meeting anymore, let alone scale up a supra-tribal democracy. They never get enough practice.

Theologists of all stripes (including the economic theologists) mean well, but they have no prior experience, and near zero practice. Heck, even car salesmen have a personal theology, made up on the spot. That doesn't mean their theology works for their aggregate. Only feedback from group practice determines what does & doesn't work.

Many biologists & anthropologists & ecologists (& other natural scientists) lament the lack of effort to select more critically from our endless list of theologies (and other aggregate habits). Natural selection is eventually coming, of course. We're just not practicing how best to respond, once the hour strikes, or at least not paying much attention to how things are going.

Would we be instantly far better off if we swapped all banksters and orthodox economists for anthropologists and "primitive" tribal leaders? I'd sure vote to give it a try. At least the latter 2 groups have lots of practice and experience at something other than looting and bamboozling.

Mathematics Of Human Return-On-Coordination ... Pattern-Recognition Prerequisites Modeled

   (Commentary posted by Roger Erickson)

Did prehistoric conflict hastened human brain's capacity for collaboration?

Sure. Experienced rugby players would tell you that, and chimpanzees too, if they were interested in talking more. :)

As you might guess, the distributed return-on-coordination tracks both pattern-recognition skills AND group practice.

If specific neural organs like the cerebellum help mediate smooth coordination among all the muscles & countless muscle fibers of the human body ...





... then what specific CULTURAL ORGANS might - with enough aggregate practice - continuously mediate more return-on-coordination across entire markets, economies, cultures and nations?

You name it. The future's the limit.

Complaining About Your Own Clerks Is A Symptom Of A Failed Aggregate.

   (Commentary posted by Roger Erickson)

I sympathize, but that complaint is so overly simplistic that it hurts more than it helps.

It is sellers who offer credit to buyers who pay over time, and with diverse substitutions.

That's how we create the increasingly complex transaction chains called an aggregate economy. 

For the most part, banks just denominate those credits & debits, although they often act as publicly "licensed" middle-men or market-makers who manage distributed liquidity on behalf of the public at large. 

Denominating distributed credit & dynamic liquidity is a necessary but not sufficient part of continuously increasing our cultural adaptive rate. Don't even think of throwing that baby out with the bathwater.

Bankers are accountants for the electorate. They are simply clerks who manage our books for us. It's up to US to regulate their behavior and pay.

An aggregate complaining about it's clerks is exactly like bad parents complaining about the behavior of their own kids.

Face it. If our aggregate is dissatisfied with their own servants, both the problem and solution are visible in the aggregate mirror. So just look closer, and help regulate this aggregate's own behavior.

Complaining about YOUR OWN CLERKS is a symptom of a failed aggregate. The solution is always to examine your group's own state of distributed organization, and come up with a way to coordinate on an even larger scale.

Look no further than your own mirror. Continuously finding new methods, for continuously scaling up all the expanding features of an adaptive culture ... well, that task is up to us, not anyone else.

When you look in your mirror, do you see only the static components and static values? That's just what was already produced yesterday.

Look closer and longer and, upon reflection, discern the return on coordination and the many dynamic values, already present, plus those which are always newly emerging.

Once you can recognize dynamic value, it should be obvious how to re-regulate bankster behavior and more optimally manage the behavior our lowly bank clerks. Just start acting like a co-owner ... of democracy. If YOU don't act like an owner, don't expect your lowly clerks to not act like they own you.

Same Reason Our Schools Are Failing Our Students? Mismanaging Planet Kindergarten.

   (Commentary posted by Roger Erickson)

Eventually, knowing"WHY" to work/fight/learn ... (motivation) ... always trumps "HOW" to work/fight/learn.

Since motivation drives continued innovation.

The law of multi-level selection? Those who know why they work/fight/learn will always run circles around those who only know how?

If there is no consensus Desired Outcome, then aggregates display lagging orientation to why or how to accomplish ... what? The awesome return on net coordination is possible only when aggregates are working towards a consensus Desired Outcome.

Meanwhile, past history repeatedly shows that all individuals learn best & fastest via unbiased exposure to emerging context. So success tracks instilling optimal learning habits as a prerequisite, BEFORE setting off to master endless strings of emerging tasks.

That's why Froebel invented Kindergarten.

A similar lesson applies (on a different scale) for individual aggregates, not just the individual components of given aggregates.

Surely that reminds you of biology (including, eventually, the human species), which was left - initially unbiased - in a (relatively) safe environment (planet earth), where it could learn all on it's own - without outside bias or micromanagement?

Which sadsack ever said there was any conflict between religion & the scientific method?

For gods so loved the world ... that they didn't try to micromanage it's development? Hopefully.

Yes, everything we ever needed to know we're learning here, from one another. Only one question. Will humans ever stop fighting, and graduate from planet Kindergarten?

A Vaccine Against the CDDC Virus (Confuse-Disorient-Divide-&-Conquer Social Virus) .... Coming to a K-12 Curriculum Near You (If We Want To Maintain A Resilient Democracy)

   (Commentary by Roger Erickson.)

Madison, Washington et al warned us against factionalism ... the measles of mankind.

"One way to keep [a voting block of] 50 million [poor people] fractured is through disinformation."

class warfare and how America's poor are held back

Once retired professional athletes are waking up to that fact, maybe there's hope.

It's also a hopeful sign that other citizens are starting to notice that many politicians don't know how fiat currency operations work.

Yet why is it taking so long for all these signs to be noticed, by more people? Is it partly because voters, in their turn, don't understand politics or politicians?

In general, most people in nearly all of our rapidly growing variety of disciplines don't understand much about the other disciplines. The downside is that our electorate understands LESS about its nation's context every year.

To generalize from an old academic joke, "citizens receiving increasingly specialized education and training know more and more about fewer and fewer of themselves, until they end up knowing everything about nobody (and about no aggregate context)."

Here's another old joke. Our nation and it's context have become hidden from our own view, buried beneath a churning mass of blind specialists, like a cloud of mosquitoes obscuring a victim. No wonder we're stumbling around like a drunken policy apparatus. We can't even tell if that's a pink elephant encapsulated by all the blind men!

More fundamentally, not enough citizens formally recognize that over-adaptation to transient context - excess efficiency - is a death knell. Why? Too much specialization, thereby shedding the capacity for resiliency, while also instituting runaway feed-forward loops cementing institutional momentum!

That constitutes growing dissociation rather than growing coordination.

What we have is a blind cultural growth spurt, where growing aggregates have to GET clumsier before they can discriminate the signs of their growing clumsiness (aka, less agile democracy). Recognition is required before an electorate can start taking steps to regain agility, on yet another scale.

Until then, we're all stuck with understanding less about ourselves, about our context and about our options.

We have a name for classes of humans stuck in that limbo, devoid of the talent of discernment.

Homo lemmings - defined as a sub-class of homo sapiens who regularly say that "no one could have expected" reality.

No pain, no urge to adapt. What if there's less capability to recognize looming cultural pain soon enough to take early evasive action? Then there's less willingness to adapt and survive, even if options are clearly presented.

Tell that to our legions of citizens with 30 second attention spans, who have come to accept countless exhortations to not read, not explore and, worst of all, not think - and certainly not outside the boxes - or cubicles - they've been handed.

Give these people an opportunity to think, and they are prone to call you a "lazy writer."

Is there a vaccine for lazy writing? Yes, and we call it extinction, ironically, since provocative writing, which asks readers to actually think, IS a cultural vaccine. A vaccine against a vaccine is therefore an example of self-assisted suicide. Those who don't get enough remedial practice at agile thinking are sometimes termed "literalists" - people who can only see what is, not what can be.

Literalists are people who, when faced with contexts describable ONLY through a seemingly near-infinite polynomial set of interdependent variables, have difficulty imagining more than one variable changing at one time. Agile thinkers, on the other hand, practice the cultural equivalent of combinatorial chemistry - throw everything together, change many variables simultaneously in many, interleaved, experiments, and practice the ability to discriminate novel signals, on the fly, from the expanding mass of noisy data.

Literalists, ironically, often call agile-thinkers lazy. Usually because the literalists won't stoop to asking enough questions to keep up. So who are the lazy ones?

In the end, there is a simple solution to that particular friction - between the literalist and agile ends of the thinking spectrum. How much could it hurt to add many more agile-thinking "games" to all levels of K-12 education, so that a threshold proportion of citizens get adequate practice at our constantly escalating task of coordinating on a larger scale - aka, get them practice at emulating evolution? That's one elegant way to prepare a growing electorate for a better balance between long-term cultural resiliency and instantaneous cultural efficiency.

Tom Atlee — Comparing “Wisdom of the Crowds” to Real Collective Wisdom

“The Wisdom of Crowds” is about how accurate (or not) dozens or thousands of people are when they are guessing the number of beans in a bottle or predicting who is going to win the World Cup. The number of times their average collective guestimates are accurate is remarkable – which is the subject of Surowiecki’s book. But is that what WISDOM is really about? 

If some individual could predict the outcome of this year’s US elections, would we call them wise? Is that what we proclaim Christ or Buddha as wise for doing? 

I would love it if we would reserve the terms “wisdom” and “wise” for guidance that makes life better – especially useful guidance that makes life better for most or all of us – including all the creatures of this living, fragile Earth – over the long term. That’s what we need wisdom for, now more than ever. 

The traditions of the world’s great religions are one source of that wisdom, if we are mindful and heartful about which aspects of them we choose to follow, such as the near-universal Golden Rule of treating others the ways we would like to be treated. That’s wise. 

Various forms of systems thinking – from shamanism to ecology and complexity sciences – offer such wisdom because they deal with the wholeness and interconnectedness of the world. Nature’s ways of solving problems – as revealed by the sciences of biomimicry and evolution – also offers such guidance because nature’s solutions (and ways of generating solutions) have arisen and proven themselves through millions of years of testing.

Public Intelligence Blog
Tom Atlee: Comparing “Wisdom of the Crowds” to Real Collective Wisdom

DH Garrett — The Red Line

The Red Line has been crossed. It is a dangerous time. As it is, prospects are grim; the world is shifting to a climate from hell, and the powers that be are mostly just accelerating that demise; but if all of us, most of us, even many of us reach out, and grasp each other's hands, we just might make it across.

"An alternative, sustainable world is, of course, where resource regeneration is at least as great as resource depletion. It's a world where emissions are no greater than the ability of the planet to absorb and process those emissions. Of course it's a world where the population is stable or maybe even decreasing; where prices internalize all costs; a place where no one is hungry or desperately poor; a place where there is true enduring democracy."

Truthout
The Red Line
DH Garrett, Truthout | Op-Ed

Bank Lobby Still Trying To Kill Credit Unions (blind pursuit of profits over nation and citizens)

   (Commentary posted by Roger Erickson)

Starts out as a local issue raised by one lobby.

Runs amok when that lobby loses sight of all other inter-dependencies, and forgets that there must be tolerance limits on everything. Or else we don't have a culture. Only a mob. 

Instead of blind competition, what about the return on coordination?

http://www.frbsf.org/education/publications/doctor-econ/2005/march/credit-unions-regulation-supervision 

http://www.stlouisfed.org/publications/pub_assets/pdf/re/2013/b/banks_creditunions.pdf 

https://thefinancialbrand.com/29640/credit-unions-fight-banks-over-community-charters/

(hat tip Tom Hickey)

You want context? Consider the words of Marriner Eccles, 1932:

"The operation of our money world has failed to be our servant and instead is our tyrant and master." 

"We must correct the causes of the depression rather than deal with the effects of it!"

That was 82 years ago!!! Has the US electorate lost sight of Public Purpose? Have we lost sight of national goals?

International Coordination To Do ..... WHAT? Loot the MiddleClass ... everywhere?

   (Commentary posted by Roger Erickson)

South Africa pleads for global coordination amid Fed [QE?]

The 1% of every OTHER country, not just ours, wants to feed off of the US MiddleClass too? Just WHO is coordinating WHAT here? The 1% coordinating international Control Fraud?

??  I thought it was our $US, and their problem. No?

Instead of the 1% everywhere "coordinating," what if the MiddleClass of all countries coordinated? Or heck, even the MiddleClass of the USA alone!

What would "we" tell the Free-Trade = Free-Labor looters, and their little banksters too?

That we're not ALL in Kansas anymore?

And, maybe also tell 'em to stick their 1%-size heads where the sun don't shine? 

"1, 2, 3 ... all together now .... co-ordinate!"

Our Core Problem? Dumbing Down of Citizens. That's Also Our Core Opportunity.

   (Commentary posted by Roger Erickson)

This is not as simple as most may jump to assume. It's actually very puzzling. So what's the autocatalysis model for this dilemma?



As an aggregate grows, there is no mathematical way for any citizen to know what every other citizen knows.

The resulting dilemma can be viewed two ways:

1) As a mathematically unsolvable dilemma, and a hopeless race to make adequately informed voters; or

2) As an obviously solvable dilemma (given evolution, physiology, & the huge aggregate of cells that makes each of "us"); namely that we needn't be universally informed. Rather, we need only to constantly re-develop ways to regulate affinity, trust and "fidelity" across all the delegated parts of a growing aggregate (our nation), which can only survive through common purpose.

We have to know much, but not all. Only how to maintain coordination.

#2 is the only rational approach to all calls for an "adequately informed" electorate.

EVERY citizen needn't be universally informed, but EVERY CITIZEN MUST BE ABLE TO COORDINATE WITH ANY OTHER CITIZEN, WITH AGILITY.

However, there's a catch. A corollary of #2 is that we must learn to trust and delegate, and NOT to assume we know the operations or context of operations outside of our own area of expertise. Otherwise delegation to teammates doesn't work. A group of ignorant people each assuming they know it all is even worse than an uncoordinated group of fairly knowledgeable people!

Make no mistake. It takes extra work to become fully immersed in the full context of more than one discipline. Most never achieve that. We all are constantly assuming things that we should verify, before committing our aggregate as much as we do.

Many people learn just enough to make themselves dangerous, as misguided voters. It truly is a dilemma, neither as trivial as most think, nor as insolvable as others think. If the tens of trillions of cells in the human body can automatically grow, organize and mobilize themselves - starting from a single egg cell - then so can a nation of mere hundreds of millions.

There obviously has to be some constant balance between education of citizens, and their methods for regulating affinity, trust and fidelity (loyalty to nation).

We know tolerance limits always come in at least pairs. In this case, we can't survive if the average citizen knows too little, yet at the same time we cannot ever achieve the nirvana of every citizen knowing everything. There'd be no time to act, even if the latter were possible, and we'd succumb just for lack of group agility.

So where is the dynamic compromise, and how do we maintain it, as it shifts in all it's countless facets?

War, for example, is too important to be left to the generals. By extension, EVERY process is also too important to be left to the presumed process owner!

Simultaneously, the quality of distributed decision-making includes the factor of tempo, and all of us must constantly act, quickly enough to matter, based on insufficient data, just in order to keep informing the aggregate about changing context! An approximate solution today is better than a supposedly perfect solution next year .. which never comes, because EVERYTHING always changes by the time next year rolls around.

The solution lies in our diversity. By delegating many example processes simultaneously, our numbers eventually define all measures of success, by surrounding success with enough failures to recognize it! Then we, as a social species, rescue most or all of those delegated to tasks with negative results, and accelerate further progress by reassigning them to new exploration, instead of having to grow new citizens from scratch. That's how social species outdo non-social species, and how teams outdo any hermit, no matter heroic the hermit.

Where does this leave us, as a constantly growing aggregate? We're left with a need for large numbers of teams with overlapping areas of expertise. No citizens can be left in isolation, uncoordinated or "left" to own un-aligned cultural processes. And, no "Central Planners" can be allowed to try to micromanage all of us.

The solution is for every set of process experts to be involved with AND ANSWERABLE TO - at least a few other disciplines, and actually an entire spectrum of other process owners. That's the only way to keep all processes dynamically oriented and aligned with unpredictably shifting group or Public purpose. That spectrum of interactions must be non-negligible, different for every discipline, and span everything from nearly complete oversight from "neighboring" disciplines, out to minimal feedback exchange with a "long tail" of citizens in other disciplines. And, that feedback and oversight spectrum must be flexible, able to change at will, in real time.

We could make a cultural regulation song, modeling the total number of cultural parts as the cultural "alphabet," or a-z.

"The i-zone's regulated by the S[j-z-h]-zones,

and the j-zone's regulated by the S[k-z-i]-zones ...

the ... t-zone's regulated by the S[u-z-r]-zones ...

and that's how we survive at all!"

Except the shifting, regulatory connections of an agile aggregate would be better illustrated by a collection of amorphous, social amoebas rather than a fixed-form skeleton.

Does everyone have to know everything? Impossible.

However, can every delegated process owner, in turn, regulate enough of their neighbor's processes to ensure fidelity to group function? Sure. That's how we got this far.

Did anyone expect it could be any other way? That's what a social species does.

This represents the most primitive levels of mathematical grouping, developed centuries ago and considered trivially obvious in many disciplines. The fact that this minimal expression of aggregate logic is not a requirement for either politics or theology is simply astounding.

We cannot survive as a nation if our very politics are dominated by the absolutely most systemically ignorant people among us. If we don't improve politics as-is, it's failings and lacking will be the death of our nation.

The Sad Death Of An Adjunct Professor Sparks Some, But Too Little, Labor Debate, Possibly Too Late

Commentary by Roger Erickson

Here is another example of how more people in more professions every year are "just eking out a living" - without any explanation for why we should settle for that outcome.
The Sad Death Of An Adjunct Professor Sparks A Labor Debate
   (hat tip John Leonard)

With this kind of dis-coordination, our Output Gap must be - voluntarily - off the charts. We've been slogging away at our current course for over 30 years now. Isn't it past time to stand up, look around, and consider other options more carefully?

As a start, who are they, exactly, who are volunteering us for this suicide mission? Why? And to what purpose?

And if both their motives and desired outcome are suspect, where are the legions declaring "Hell No, We Won't Go" quietly into a state of total dis-coordination? If reducing our Output Gap is an alternative goal, then halting compliance with the anarchists is an obvious, early step. They can't volunteer us for self-assisted suicide if we simply refuse to cooperate.

If return-on-coordination - i.e., teamwork - is the highest return, by far, why are we throwing it away, instead of discarding stuff we DON'T need anywhere near as much? What other selections might we be making, instead? If there are so many options, why aren't we exploring them?

This is natural selection at work, folks, and at the moment WE are not selecting wisely. Is the sad death of the entire US Middle Class really our choice?

Dirk Ehnts — Survival of the least skilled?

Recently I have been thinking whether intelligence is aimed at finding the truth or aimed at survival. I came to the conclusion that the latter was right, but that we can use reason to build a society where the two coincide. Institutions matter....

...the lesson is to create institutions that bring out the best behavior of human beings. And for those that say that this suppresses freedom: we already have lots of institutions that influence us. Think of school, families and so on. These are not natural, so we might as well think about how to improve those institutions. The result could be a survival of the most social.

econoblog 101
Survival of the least skilled?
Dirk Ehnts | Berlin School for Economics and Law

"Survival of the fittest" is about species survival through natural selection, not individual survival through competition as social Darwinism has it wrongly. The most "fit" supposedly have more chances at leaving offspring, hence their DNA, which on balance favors the survival and spread of a species over time through adaptation to emerging environmental challenges.

David Ferguson — Plants use underground fungus network to send ‘distress signals’ to each other

Plants use underground fungus network to send ‘distress signals’ to each other (via Raw Story )

British researchers released a study on Thursday saying that plants can communicate with each other by using an underground network of fungi. According to the BBC, the study, published in the journal Ecology Letters, said that plants signal each other when they are under attack by aphids to that other…

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Zhu Min — The Global Economy’s New Path

In this environment, we must diligently pursue policy coordination at the global level. To achieve an orderly realignment of consumption and investment worldwide, policies that boost investment in one part of the world should match policies that boost consumption in other parts.

In particular, advanced economies should implement fundamental productivity-enhancing reforms, the eurozone should strengthen the currency union, and emerging market and developing economies should boost their domestic sources of growth. And these policies should be consistent with fiscal and external stability. Moreover, financial-sector policies and regulatory frameworks should be coordinated at the global level, in order to design and implement consensus-based rules – thereby addressing the problems posed by very large, global institutions that are considered too big or too complex to fail.

Only with such global coordination can we reduce, and possibly eliminate, economic instability and disorderly adjustments both at home and abroad, even as we seek to maximize the benefits of the inevitable changes in the global economy.

Project Syndicate

The Global Economy’s New Path

Zhu Min | Deputy Managing Director of the IMF and a former deputy governor of the Peoples’ Bank of China (2009-2010)

Solidarity Economics

Defining Solidarity Economics

But what exactly is this "solidarity economy approach"? For some theorists of the movement, it begins with a redefinition of economic space itself. The dominant neoclassical story paints the economy as a singular space in which market actors (firms or individuals) seek to maximize their gain in a context of scarce resources. These actors play out their profit-seeking dramas on a stage wholly defined by the dynamics of the market and the state. Countering this narrow approach, solidarity economics embraces a plural and cultural view of the economy as a complex space of social relationship in which individuals, communities, and organizations generate livelihoods through many different means and with many different motivations and aspirations—not just the maximization of individual gain. The economic activity validated by neoclassical economists represents, in this view, only a tiny fraction of human efforts to meet needs and fulfill desires.

What really sustains us when the factories shut down, when the floodwaters rise, or when the paycheck is not enough? In the face of failures of market and state, we often survive by self-organized relationships of care, cooperation, and community. Despite the ways in which capitalist culture generates and mobilizes a drive toward competition and selfishness, basic practices of human solidarity remain the foundation upon which society and community are built. Capitalism's dominance may, in fact, derive in no small part from its ability to co-opt and colonize these relationships of cooperation and mutual aid....

At its core, solidarity economics rejects one-size-fits-all solutions and singular economic blueprints, embracing instead a view that economic and social development should occur from the bottom up, diversely and creatively crafted by those who are most affected. As Marcos Arruda of the Brazilian Solidarity Economy Network stated at the World Social Forum in 2004, "a solidarity economy does not arise from thinkers or ideas; it is the outcome of the concrete historical struggle of the human being to live and to develop him/herself as an individual and a collective. 

Similarly, contrasting the solidarity economy approach to historical visions of the "cooperative commonwealth," Henri de Roche noted that "the old cooperativism was a utopia in search of its practice and the new cooperativism is a practice in search of its utopia." Unlike many alternative economic projects that have come before, solidarity economics does not seek to build a singular model of how the economy should be structured, but rather pursues a dynamic process of economic organizing in which organizations, communities, and social movements work to identify, strengthen, connect, and create democratic and liberatory means of meeting their needs.

Success will only emerge as a product of organization and struggle. "Innovative practices at the micro level can only be viable and structurally effective for social change," said Arruda, "if they interweave with one another to form always-broader collaborative networks and solidarity chains of production-finance-distribution-consumption-education-communication."

This is, perhaps, the heart of solidarity economics—the process of networking diverse structures that share common values in ways that strengthen each. Mapping out the economic terrain in terms of "chains of solidarity production," organizers can build relationships of mutual aid and exchange between initiatives that increase their collective viability. At the same time, building relationships between solidarity-based enterprises and larger social movements builds increased support for the solidarity economy while allowing the movements to meet some of the basic needs of their participants, demonstrate viable alternatives, and thus increase the power and scope of their transformative work.

Dollars & Sense — Real World Economics
Other Economies are Possible!

Organizing toward an economy of cooperation and solidarity

Ethan Miller

You'd Think People Would Catch On .... That This Is Not Business As Usual

commentary by Roger Erickson

6m trapped in poverty: Poor earning Brits fail to cover cost of living
More than six [UK] million workers are not earning enough to drag their families above the breadline. And for the first time since records began, working families in poverty outnumber the 5.1 million jobless households in poverty.

Unlike in the USA, Cameron's UK administration forget to re-define official poverty levels downwards fast enough to keep 'em conveniently below median labor-class incomes.  If you want to stay ahead in a continuous race to the bottom, you need the finish line to fall faster than the contestants.

When will the 1% and their newly poverty stricken acolytes catch on? When they start suggesting euthanasia, and start running out of lower classes to keep their incomes and wealth levels above? Will that be before or after we all re-recognize that we'll either hang together, or hang en masse? What good are supposed honeypots if there are no ant "servants" to utilize and re-consume the group output that honeypots hoard? What good are even capitalist Central Planners who think that they can personally dole out Group Intelligence faster than the quality of distributed decision-making - even among those on the dole - can rise?

Forget Al Qada. The worst terrorist threat is always Uu Qanta, and it's staring out from your own mirror. The only way to kill that terrorist threat is to kill the notion that we can control, rather than simply unleash and enjoy, the quality of coordinated, distributed decision-making. Instead of seeing increasing gross liquidity as a deficit, call it by it's more appropriate name - "asset."

Note to Central Planners. There is no way to hoard and dole out Group Intelligence, Group Agility and Group Adaptive Rate. It's equivalent to hoarding group suicide. Good luck with that.

When will our mega tribe realize that they themselves are the prime asset, that currency is simply liquidity, and that anything hindering society-wide liquidity limits return on coordination - and hence our future options? Hopefully not after it's too late to avoid setting us back another generation. Hopefully at least slightly before then?

There is a better way.

We can't accelerate return on coordination without getting rid of all royalty and most royalties, forever. Every bit of personal initiative withheld and forgone (i.e., hoarded) forgoes some compounding return on coordination. The only way to optimize growth of any organization is to both grow the system AND keep the components adquately maintained. That's a 2-stage optimization task, neither neo-capitalism nor neo-socialism alone, but a dynamic function of both continuously summed. This is NOT difficult. Any 12 year old exposed to algebra can learn the core concept of return on scalable teamwork, aka return on coordination.

Shadow Boxing a Mirror, and Going for A Knockout.

Why are these camps of billionaires fighting? (see below)

And why are the 99% fighting among themselves, instead of coordinating?

What part of situational awareness isn't obvious to all of these people?

After all, they are ALL products of our reknowned education system!

Weepin' Buddha on an incline! We have to work hard to keep ourselves this collectively stupid. It's seems highly improbable that this could happen by accident - yet it's always been this way. The hardest thing in the world to come by seems to be perspective - and especially the property of not fighting it when it knocks on your door.   When we have group options expanding at an exponential rate, let's just agree to ignore 'em one and all, and instead take another swing at the mirror?  Are we really in agreement?

Interview Transcript: Greg Palast: The War Between the Billionaires, And Election Theft
Part one of an interview with Greg Palast, about the book Billionaires and Ballot Bandits. There's a war between two kinds of billionaires-- The Vampire Squids and the Vultures. And yes, this affects the elections and the nine ways they are going to be stolen and corrupted.

We better hope there really is a Bozone Layer.  Otherwise, we might trigger the next Little Whimper.

Economics of The People Against Themselves

commentary by Roger Erickson

We're seeing the unfolding story of the people against themselves, which is tragic.  A capable populous divided, cannot be stood on it's ear by anyone but itself.

A mind may be a terrible thing to waste, but a Group Mind is an order of magnitude worse thing to waste. Bill Mitchell, makes a valid point familiar to anyone working with any scalable system, whether biology, military, networks, software, or anthropology. "The brightest minds can be so dumb in particular circumstances."  Unfortunately, that holds more than triply for group-minds, i.e., collective intelligence ... aka national policy. The only way to leverage the economics of a group-mind is to exercise it. Otherwise, the dynamic value of having one doesn't compound, while the static costs keep scaling.

There are countless other examples than the one Bill Mitchell uses, such as our counter-productive efforts to NOT prosecute fraud, and instead over-zealously prosecute those who attempt to refer fraud cases. Given what our actual capabilities are, it's surprising how poorly we select what to use those capabilities on. It almost seems that frauds are running the asylum. The only other credible theory is that our distributed divisions render us conquered by our own disorganization. What would Pogo say about the irony in that reality? We've met the evil genius dividing & conquering us, and that distributed intelligence also defaults to us, simply for lack of exercising it's own, distributed IQ.  The perennial greatest enemy to each of us is all of us.

So why do locally capable aggregates tend to dissociate and fail as they grow? Simply because any rapidly growing population size initially makes more of it's members more isolated - regardless of whether growth occurs by numbers alone, or by increasing specialization of dedicated members. Any form of growth always dooms us to become collectively dumber, before we can get collectively smarter again, through expanded group practice. Coordination always has to chase population demands, and the latency of catching up differentiates surviving vs extinct cultures. For social species, every adaptive race is eventually a race to scale up coordination faster than either population or distributed capabilities does.

During that race, the cost of coordination rises exponentially faster than population size alone, and is ALWAYS the highest cost, by far, in any organized system. The ONLY return that exceeds the cost of coordination is the return-on-coordination. Hence, scalable coordination methods are the ONLY things worth investing in. It's the only way to save ourselves, our nation and our children. Everything else is a life-threatening distraction for all people in all cultures.

How badly will we have to fail, before it's again clear that we must once again quickly organize on an even greater scale? When we recover the ability to smoothly self-organize faster than we spawn new members? An amoeba can do that, so can every human embryo. However, no human culture on earth can gracefully do that yet - except the internet. We have brutal national growing pains that are embarrassing to watch in the mirror.

When will we learn, fast enough? Will the next milestone occur when everyone currently over 30 dies off? Or are we making Luddites faster than internet engineers? We don't need kids who cry wolf, but we certainly need kids who will cry "mobilize!" Since we're spawning more people, and exponentially expanding group potential, we need to continually mobilize to reach for insanely great things ... or else we regress, through our own intrinsic overhead, the cost of coordination.

I keep coming back to a simple, obvious but seemingly still uncommon conclusion. We need to accelerate how fast we learn to hoard coordination capabilities* - and we desperately need to reduce hoarding of everything else - since everything else only slows us down, and hampers coordination. Instead, we're still hoarding everything EXCEPT return-on-coordination!  And we're encouraged to do so by the failed paradigm of a totally brain-dead, maladaptive economics orthodoxy!   At this rate, some other culture could eclipse us rapidly and completely. Why isn't THAT threat to national security our #1 political campaign issue?

*ps: In fact, what we need to hoard, and continuously develop, are methods for accelerating our coordination capabilities. Or else we're toast.