Replacing All Transient Macro Economics With A 1-Page Forward

(Commentary posted by Roger Erickson.)

Yes, it's past time to throw out ALL the old text books, and re-assess everything, using a leaner template. After all, even literature majors eventually realized that "everything needs to change, so everything can [appear to] stay the same".

My current tack was triggered when an old friend sent an old quote:

"A goal without a plan is only a wish."

Unknown

That's similar to something FDR said:

"It isn't sufficient just to want - you've got to ask yourself what you are going to do to get the things you want." Franklin D. Roosevelt

Someone like Imhotep probably said something quite similar, 5000 years ago.

Either way, my friend was registering a complaint ... wondering why insurrection hadn't yet accomplished anything more tangible.

He has a right to complain about complainers ... yet the deeper reality is that even all such statements don't even come close to summing up our real challenges.

There's an expanding dichotomy here, that few learn, only because we don't bother teaching it early enough.

Methods w/o a goal? Problematic.
Goals without plans & methods? Also problematic, for inverse reasons.
Historical solution? Endless examples of multi-variate selection.

How does evolution muddle along when with every new moment, our boiling electorate of diverse, recombinant components generates billions of changing goals ... and millions of changing plans?

Obviously NOT by something as impossible as computing prices, or perfecting equilibrium among simplistic, predictable agents. That would be incredibly naive, and quickly suicidal!

How does our electorate get by? Not by any dogma known to man. It's always - in net - different this time, and always subtly so, so that literally EVERYONE has to practice recombination of all goals (known & emerging) and all known plans (known & emerging) ... all interleaved, in real-time.

It's The Covariances & Correlations, Stupid! :)

Until our election campaigns achieve that level of discussion, not much can change. So what has kept us going all these millennia? Not lack of either wishes & plans, but always just barely enough recombinations of wishes_PLUS_plans, being selected (by Context) as some adaptive re-mapping of current net-features to emerging net-options.

Capiche? :)

What's YOUR comfort level in interfacing with NET, aggregate context? Do you want something for YOU, or for your net system? To survive, humans have evolved by maintaining a growing population where most want some fraction of both, but in every possible proportion.

For every individual in an aggregate, there's a huge & growing spectrum of characteristics to select a spot among. By one measure, it starts with sociopaths on one end, and ends with martyrs on the other - with every spot in between filled with other representatives of humanity. Are you:

* more comfortable with individual goals & metrics, 

* more comfortable with "regional" assessments of "progress," or 

* driven to ponder the long tail of reality (that EVERY goal and EVERY plan is by definition transient, and more so every day - and that there is no point in having any component of any system FULLY realize any conceivable goal or FULLY develop any conceivable plan)?

All goals and all methods - and all their permutations, local or net - ALL change, before they're even consummated. Get over it.

Each example level of interest described above takes increasingly more time, and redefines completely different definitions of success.

For the whole aggregate, navigating "Multi-variate Recombination Space" - i.e., evolving - is rather analogous to daily rebuilding & daily practice at sailing increasingly unstable versions of racing boats in increasingly stormy waters. You either stay on the Future Shockwave, or you become part of archaeology. "Systems" - including human cultures - keep their race boat afloat by ALWAYS keeping a diverse crew on hand, one able to bridge the moving gap between evolving infrastructure and emerging bleeding edge.

PLUS, some of those newly spawned components do nothing other than DISCOVER how to re-connect the growing, changing range of crew & components.  If the goal is to keep evolving, then one of the variable plans has to target ways for continuously inventing new methods, and continuously REDUCING the novel, emerging aggregate frictions, not adding to them.

All this brings us back to yet another old quote,

"The wise man says 'Yes, And.' Only the fool says 'No, But.' "

I'll close with 3 messages for those bothering to write instantly-obsolete text books - of any kind.

“In preparing for battle I have always found that plans are useless, but planning is indispensable.” Dwight D. Eisenhower

If examples like the coordination & teamwork exemplified during WWII didn't change EVERYTHING pundits thought they knew about economics, then said pundits are part of the problem, not part of the solution.

When Atlas shrugged, his aggregate got buggered.

What Aspect Of SCALE & Aggregate Degrees of Freedom Don't We Teach To Enough Kids, In All Schools, Everywhere?

   (Commentary posted by Roger Erickson)



(Photo: walking towards, instead of away from, an impending tsunami of context changes.)

Why is it that group intelligence always seems to recede just before devastating changes in group context? Ordinary humans are clearly talented enough to devise many practical applications for exploring perceived options. There are countless examples, from sublime to mundane, such as this one.

Most Pet Lovers Don't Perceive Equal, Parallel Need To Help A Handicapped Middle Class

Do we have to practice austerity, or can we achieve everything we can imagine, and more?

Application of our talents is clearly gated by the process of recognizing and orienting to local, regional or systemic context. Perceptions & practice then drive us to optimize an increasingly complex combination of actions, so that we can all sail through that thicket of micro-to-macro contexts. Social species work exactly BECAUSE recombinant member interactions provide compounding group resiliency.

Please ask every talented person you know, to design some Automatic Stabilizer policies, for a struggling and starving Middle Class.

We are what we practice, even at a cultural scale. So what triggers do we need, to get more of ourselves to perceive our own, constrained, self-handicapped electorate?

Too few seem to see a MiddleClass limping down the road to oblivion, right into the path of another set of predatory sociopaths, whether "Brits" in India, or an Upper Looting Class that eventually self organizes everywhere.

To avoid these self-inflicted constraints, we need an electorate that practices simultaneously perceiving the full spectrum individual needs, AND team dynamics, AND social interdependencies. To maintain Adaptive Rate, a working culture has to juggle all available input, and keep all it's increasing options available.

What aspect of SCALE don't we teach enough kids, in all schools, everywhere?

Instead of hoarding static assets as rent, why aren't we seeing the value of employing everyone to explore our full range of cultural options, so that we can practice achieving even more than what any individual can currently imagine?

Join a citizen's army? Be all that, together, "we" can be?

Support cultural intelligence? A group mind is a terrible thing to waste?

Why don't more emerging students grasp the scale of the group options to be explored? What methods do we need, in order to change our re-emerging electorate back towards a more adaptive path?

Methods drive results?

  Milestone goals drive methods?

    And Desired Group Outcomes drive milestone goals?

      And interacting imaginations drive Desired Outcomes - aka, Group Imagination?

We can't get there by having everyone wishing to hoard above average amounts of static assets. The reality of the boring outcome actually achieved from that dream has repeatedly been trivial compared to increasing our dynamic assets, an alternate outcome which is available to any organized aggregate - but only if they first recognize it.

David Ruccio — "Such an economy kills”

Marxian Notre Dame economics professor David Ruccio reviews Evangelii Gaudium and its implications. Nice analysis by Professor Ruccio, and a good blueprint for change by Francis in which he sets the objectives but not the means, since different countries will have to address these goals in their own way based on context.

... Francis, without providing institutional details, outlines a general approach to work that simply cannot be provided by the current wages system. It creates an opening to imagine a radical reorganization of the economy, at both the microeconomic and macroeconomic levels, in which workers participate in making the fundamental decisions in their workplaces and the economy as a whole is coordinated (might we say planned?) so that existing inequalities and forms of exclusion are eliminated.

In the end, Evangelii Gaudium suggests a fundamental reorientation of the current economic debate: to admit the devastating effects of current economic arrangements on the broad masses of the population and to take up the imperative of restructuring the economy in the interests not of the tiny minority at the top but of those at the bottom who are subjected on a daily basis to processes of exploitation, oppression, and exclusion.

Occasional Links & Commentary
"Such an economy kills”
David F. Ruccio | Professor of Economics University of Notre Dame Notre Dame

Chris Dillow — Efficiency Vs Sanctity

The point here is that efficiency is not an incontestable value. It collides with others, the belief in the sanctity of some goods.

Economists tend to have a tin ear here - they just don't hear the arguments against efficiency....

I don't say all this to take sides. I do so merely to show that values are contestable, but that a debate about them is possible.

Stumbling and Mumbling
Efficiency Vs Sanctity

Chris Dillow | Investors Chronicle (UK)

I would frame it the way that Peter F. Drucker did, "Efficiency is doing things right and effectiveness is doing the right things." Effectiveness involves choosing goals and this choice involves normative criteria, i.e., "values." efficiency is subordinate to effectiveness, since efficiency is about means and effective about goals, and means are subordinate to goals.