Familiar Death Spiral? Spending More, To NOT Deliver Fewer Things.

Commentary by Roger Erickson

Pentagon Choices ‏@PentagonChoices17 Sept
@POGOBlog Meanwhile cost overruns for 98 major weapons systems are running at 31%, over at the Pentagon pic.twitter.com/pJ6gkMZTyj

What military contractors call "Concurrency" is the same as a concept biologists call "maladaptive phenotypic dominance."

That means, excessive expression of some random set of traits, which subsequently turn out to be mistakes. Most people might roughly describe that as random, institutional momentum or habits taking us off course. In short, that happens when a subset of citizens are taking us all in a direction we may soon regret, if we even survive to express any regret.

More on DoD Concurrency.

DoD Concurrency is no different in principle than our many over-investments in cultural oddities like Big Finance, Control Frauds and Pompous Politicians, etc, etc, etc.

It's a state that inattention to group logic delivers any group to.

Why? It's a group-awareness issue. If a growing, changing group doesn't re-sample all it's internal feedback, and assess all it's options at an adequate rate ... it can't know where it's going. The whole point of steering is to react soon enough to avoid crashing into unexpected things that crop up, and instead arriving at a succession of preferred destinations.

If the wrong choice of driver is allowed ... eventually, the passengers only hope is that they'll wake up and realize where they've landed ... before it's too late to recover from their position. Even if they're lucky a few times, there's no long-term future in betting against the house, or playing Russian Roulette - by not paying attention to which chauffeurs we hire.

Daniel Little — Epochs and the social actor

It was suggested in an earlier post that important aspects of an individual's mental furniture are influenced by the concrete historical and social circumstances in which he or she is raised (link). Let's try to get a little more specific about this idea. How does historical context influence the behavior of the individuals who come to adulthood during its scope?

There are several kinds of practical cognitive features that seem to be historically conditioned. By "practical cognition" I mean the processes through which actors conceptualize their social environments, make sense of the activities going on around them, process their own desires and goals, and set out with a plan or strategy of action.

I can think of at least four largely independent features of social and practical cognition that seem to be importantly dependent on the social and historical context in which the individual develops from childhood to adulthood: social frameworks of interpretation; social norms; practices and habits; and enduring features of character. Let's look at each of these in turn.

Understanding Society
Epochs and the social actor
Daniel Little | Chancellor, University of Michigan at Dearborn

"Rent Theory" as a Symptom?

After reading Michael Hudson's essay, "Veblen’s Institutionalist Elaboration of Rent Theory," one can't help seeing rampant rentier mentality as a symptom, not the original cause.

Component momentum in a system comes as no surprise at all within biology or system theory, or even psychology or anthropology.

From other system perspectives, runaway rent-seeking habits are one specific that falls under the more general heading of institutional momentum. Other names are phenotypic persistence, principal of prior plausibility, etc, etc ... or just random habits unrestrained.

The deeper issue is why the group momentum of such habits isn't recognized, diverted & shaped to other purposes sooner. That comes down to failure at group-wide, situational awareness, followed by failure to automatically trigger appropriate checks & balances in a complex system - a topic well discussed by the framers of our Constitution.

In small tribes, daily or weekly group-wide council discussions address this group awareness requirement. However, given our population size, no current media process parses all our distributed observations fast enough.

That leaves one pondering how far off track we really are, and what the recovery steps are.

Just when we need to be distributing enough resources & time to continually improve the quality of our distributed decision-making abilities ... we've instead gone off the rails.  Our policy decision-making habits are already so concentrated that our population-wide, self-regulation gap may be widening beyond control. Worse, our distributed situational awareness may have lost ability to reconnect. Is the probability of recovery already insignificant? How would we know?  Can that gap be estimated quantitatively?

(And arranging terrorist events just isn't an adequate rallying cry anymore. Black Ops thinking just won't cut it as a continuous mobilization strategy.)

Rampant rent seeking is a symptom of distributed disconnects, & failure to evolve checks & balances as fast as our options are expanding. As a nation, culture or system, we're distracted, and it no longer matters what the distractions are. The core problem is that we can't parse our options fast enough to optimize how we explore them. The result is random policy drift by elites reconstituting Central Planning by any other name.

We need indirection, and the communication throughput to capitalize on best options that some will inevitably stumble upon before all will. It's no longer a question of if HP needs to know that HP knows. Rather, we need to know how quickly HP needs to know what HP knows. There's no other way to drive continuous improvements in group agility.

How WOULD we drive continuous improvement in group agility?  Group practice?  When was the last time YOU acted like an owner of your democracy?

Every day, there are always many things we should start doing differently.  Yet if we don't actually start, it just won't matter what we would'a, could'a, should'a done.