Yet Another Civil War Between Capital and Adaptive Culture?

   (Commentary posted by Roger Erickson)

How many times must we needlessly repeat this war?

As long as the blind business of extraction - vs evolution - promotes Roll-Up strategies?

For Pete's sake! Gov is NOT akin to a household, any more than components are akin to a system, or teammates are akin to a team. Scale presents entirely novel options. It IS different to be a whole which is greater than the sum of it's separate parts.

Yet on this point, macro economics teaching is clearly and nearly universally broken.

Do university physics programs teach students that Quantum Mechanics & Relativity are akin to Newton's physics? Of course not!

Yet economics essentially does. It's a rare economist who's learned the simplest aspects of fiat currency operations.

How can anyone moral teach economics without teaching currency operations? By acquiescing to the banking lobby? THAT'S not pedagogy. It's cowardice.

And it's also not ...

How We Ended The Last Civil War Between Capital and Adaptive Culture.

We can't end a civil war by having both sides improve technique. Adaptive change requires improving training methods available to pre-combatants, until they recognize and start exploring better options than repeating the same, stupid war with no resolution. Teach emerging context, not just existing data?

Orthodox macroeconomics is a long-running sick joke, which never was funny. Why did the Ignorant Electorate KEEP hitting it's collective head with Civil War? (And who said we're not supposed to ask?)

There is a better way. Make progress, not frictions.

For the case of endlessly competing roll-up strategies, it's all a question of who's chasing whom. Rather than running from corruption on a treadmill .....

it's better to be trampling Luddites, on an ascending spiral.

Every time I think of this general topic, Joshua Chamberlain's words come to mind.

"We know not of the future and cannot plan for it much. ... But we can ... determine ... what manner of men we will be, whenever and wherever the hour strikes and calls to noble action."

To paraphrase Joshua Chamberlain for today's civil war: 

We cannot know what specific contexts the future may bring, and therefore cannot much prepare for them. 

We can, however, determine what sort of Adaptive Rates our aggregate can muster when those contexts strike. 

To better determine those capabilities, we can practice continuously re-mapping & RE-VISUALIZING all of our emerging cultural processes, so that we can maintain practice at making Rapid Adaptive Transitions throughout our own culture.

Following the Money Through Real MICC Political Operations By Oligarchs ... Right Past The Smokescreen Of Orthodox Economic Theory

   (Title by Roger Erickson; content posted with permission)




Chuck Spinney exposes "farce readiness":

Congressman Buck McKeon, Chairman of the House Armed Services Committee (HASC), is in charge of one of the most important committees in the Congress. In theory, the HASC is supposed to oversee the Pentagon via its investigatory and budgetary responsibilities. In theory, the HASC's job should be to protect both the soldiers at the pointy end of the spear and the taxpayers who are sacrificing their hard earned treasure. 

In practice the Chairman and most of the committee members are wholly-owned subsidiaries of the Pentagon and the defense industry — a self-interested faction in sense defined by James Madison in Federalist #10. In practice, the HASC, and its sister committees, overlook and pump the flow of taxpayer dollars to their allies and patrons in the Pentagon and the defense industry. So, while congressmen and senators wave the flag, asserting ad nauseum that supporting the troops and their combat readiness are their top priorities, the flow real money indicates this is rarely the case.

In Versailles on the Potomac, the iron law of any policy analysis aimed at uncovering real priorities is -Follow the Money. And the best way to begin any analysis of real budget priorities is to trace the flow of funds, patronage, and power around the iron triangle of the military - industrial - congressional complex, aka the MICC.

The revolving door is a (the?) key lubricant to the money flowing around the triangle. The flow sets the incentive structure for the different players: 

congressmen and senators (their staff members) retire to become lobbyists and industry consultants or move to high level Pentagon jobs; 

ditto for civilian and military employees of the Defense Department (and they also move to congressional staffs); 

and members of the defense industry (as well as the panoply of defense oriented think tanks) move back and forth between the Pentagon and industry. 

The net result of this perpetual rotation is an upward spiral of personal enrichment, the enhancement of status and power, and most importantly, an industry-friendly defense budget. This “friendliness" manifests itself in continual pressure to shovel money to the modernization accounts (R&D & Procurement) and those contractor-friendly parts of the increasingly privatized Operations and Maintenance (O&M) budgets.

In a decision-making milieu dominated by the Iron Triangle, real combat capabilities: force structure and highly trained, professional soldiers, airmen, and seamen are necessarily a lessor priority. 

The pressure to rob readiness to save modernization is present subtly during periods of increasing budget growth, but it becomes blatantly grotesque when the budget comes under pressure imposed by reduced rates of growth or cutbacks, as was the case in the early to mid 1970s, the early 1990s, and today. 

The legendary “hollow military” of President Jimmy Carter the late 1970s, for example, was the delayed result of the explicit decisions made during the Nixon administration to rob the the readiness accounts to protect the modernization accounts in 1973. My first report, Defense Facts of Life, produced during the late 70s, documented this result in detail using official DoD data.

Déjà Vu All Over Again

Today, the defense press is again dominated by reports describing the Pentagon’s need to cut force structure and the O&M personnel budgets.

Which brings us to the A-10.

The A-10, one of those rare low cost weapons whose effectiveness in real combat has far exceeded expectations, is rapidly becoming a poster child of the “rob readiness to protect modernization" mentality of the Iron Triangle.

The DoD, the Air Force, and now HASC Chairman Buck Mckeon are determined to send the A-10 to the boneyard, in part because they want to save money by reducing a force structure. In this case that force structure component conveniently has an O&M budget with a low amount of contract services support. This cutback would have a minimal impact on the money flowing to contractors. The name of the game is to protect the money flowing to the contractors by sacrificing the A-10 as part of a larger strategy to save Procurement and R&D programs like the troubled F-35 or the more fanciful new long range bomber, which promises to make the F-35 look like an exercise in prudence.

Of course, as my friend Winslow Wheeler explains below, the pathologies implicit in the A-10 decision go well beyond sending very effective airplanes prematurely to the boneyard to cut personnel and O&M costs: the most serious loss will be a trained cadre of airmen who are dedicated to putting their lives at risk, if necessary, to supporting the soldiers doing the heavy lifting on the ground. Retiring the A-10 is therefore a big step down a slippery slope, because this loss will only be replaced at great cost in treasure and blood in some future war or a future budget speedup (e.g., like that during the Reagan Administration)

We saw how the slippery slope to a "hollow military” evolved insensibly out of seeming painless decisions in the early 1970s, and those, like Chairman Buck McKeon and Secretary Chuck Hagel, who ignore that history are condemned to repeat it. But they won’t be asked to pay the bill.

Chuck Spinney

Buck McKeon's A-10 Sell-Out

by Winslow T. Wheeler

ps: more from Howard P. “Buck” McKeon

Why The Gritty Details Of Operations Matter - While Pondering The Madcap Effort To "Balance" Fiat

   (Commentary posted by Roger Erickson)



One simple example:

Functioning militaries prefer not to send soldiers into the field, until they can, proverbially, disassemble & reassemble their weapons in the dark. One of several reasons is that without that detailed familiarity, they won't know the limits of what their tools are and aren't capable of in different contexts, when there's a need to push them to survivable limits.

In general, every functioning system known - from physics to biology to human cultures - is incredibly densely engineered, and is rife with useful shortcuts & hacks. The next iteration of any system is built by those who can navigate the DETAILS of the prior iteration.

Here's another useful insight into why given operations matter, and how much, in given contexts.

We need more tables analogous to this, for other contexts and disciplines.

Such tables could be very useful, even for economic theorists. Any suggestions?

As just one application for the table given, you can look at the details of why these operational issues mattered to the software running competing computer-networking protocols, and which ones survived.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berkeley_sockets
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DECnet
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Excelan

So how on Earth did orthodox economists (& religious ideologues) end up presuming that banking operations don't matter, only pure theory?

Whatever the obtuse explanation is, the real issue is how to correct that flaw. Rather than telling people HOW to do that, let's leave it up to distributed human ingenuity. My only prediction? Orthodox macroeconomics is NOT going to survive the demands of reality.

(Either that, or we'll kill ourselves trying to make it work. Bill Black pictured that in a group email several years back - something to this effect. "If one country seemed to thrive by balancing it's budget and being a net exporter, then we'll all be better off if EVERY country was a net exporter, with a balanced budget, right?" Is that why several countries are discussing bases on the moon? To accommodate the excess exports, while the orthodox achieve Earthly gridlock, by "balancing" aggregate fiat?  That or pinning themselves down with one or a few fixed, Pyrrhic tactics, while ignoring any & all ways of actually achieving a Desired Outcome.)

"Material Footprint of Nations" vs "Return on Coordination of Nations"

Commentary by Roger Erickson

Well, some economist wag has come up with the novel idea of finally getting real (hat tip Dan Flemming). How long's it been, 80 years? Fiat mystics are rare indeed!

Regardless, ya gotta wonder if these geniuses will ever catch up with another, truly underwhelming concept - whether we can MOBILIZE our coordinated efforts in order to keep pursuing ongoing reality. Say, like we did from 1933-1945, when we dramatically expanded our Policy Space, and drastically improved our Policy Agility. Since then, it's been a long, staged retreat to the stale, constraining safety of our treacherous old lover and dominatrix, TINA "The Monetarist" Islm (who, incidentally, fervently believes that we have to first GET fiat [i.e., public initiative or teamwork] from some prior owner - conveniently, a "real" plutocrat - before we can leverage it). Who's calling whom mystical? If you're puzzled by the House of Wonkers argument, don't feel bad.

Will the confluence of reality and our pursuit of it ever occur in the charade we call economics? Personally, I've come to doubt whether we even want those two to meet. The ideologues might screw things up even worse, and - once they realize it's out there - simply insist that reality pursue them! Better to keep the economists locked in their ivory tower, where their immunity to reality can't do such immediate harm.

Meanwhile, it's just amazing that we won't let our electorates immediately and directly jump to a real-time comparison - say, of the "material footprint of nations" with the potential "return on coordination within nations."

After all, what's stopping us? Ideology? Admittedly, that and some things called basic intellect and contact with context too.

Until then, it's all kabuki shadow banking, and hot air issuing from where tail meets dog. In all sympathy, if I was in that position, I'd keep wagging too. Anything already overvalued has too much to lose, and either acts with humility for the common good, or - most commonly - turns to self-protective fraud and screws the pooch.

Alexander the Weight-of-Logic vs the Guardian Knotheads

There is infinite trivia to uselessly argue about in every situation, but only one adaptive group survival path to extend.  What's orthodox is simply an instantaneous tangent to unpredictably unfolding adaptive paths.  Our job is simply to avoid staying on orthodox tangents too long.  Capiche?

How?  Well, what's eventually obvious in any situation is simply an operational result left after cutting through what's discovered to be irrelevant in our current tangent. In practice, that means asking "what part of what we KNOW has to be discarded first?" That can always be determined fastest by exploring all the options with the fastest parsing strategy (aka, natural selection). [ps: If you're uncomfortable with certain uncertainty, just drop out and wait for the truck described below to pick you up. You won't feel a thing.]

So far, accelerating adaptive rate involves the 2-stage strategic combination of expanding the diversity of feedback AND monitoring all inter-dependencies between feedback channels. That's the simple reason why evolving systems always expand in order to win adaptive races. If we ever run out of Adaptive Space in our universe, we'll know it's time to change some fundamental limit on the selection tempo. When that happens, we'll presumably trigger another Big Probability Event (aka, a Little Whimper). Succeeding generations of Luddites will only perceive it - eventually - as yet another Big Bang (i.e., the last truck to hit 'em; they never do get the license plate #, because such trucks scavenge the road kill & throw it in back of the truck).  Luddites only wake up on the next iteration of endlessly nested rides.  Face it.  In the long run, we're all Luddites waiting to happen.

Currency Operations (MMT) is just one example of diverse operations accelerating net Adaptive Rate, dragging Luddite theorists along, kicking and screaming irrelevant inanities.

Ongoing politics provides countless other examples of theory trying to triumph over real operations.  Here's another informative example where credentialism fell off the wagon.

Good Riddance Petraeus

"If only Petraeus and his colleague generals remembered the smaller -- but far more relevant -- ideas inculcated in all of us Army officers in Infantry School at Fort Benning in the early Sixties. This is what I recall from memory regarding what an infantry officer needed to do before launching an operation -- big or small -- division or squad size.

Corny (and gratuitous) as it may sound, we were taught that the absolute requirement was to do an "Estimate of the Situation" that included the following key factors: Enemy strength, numbers and weapons; Enemy disposition, where are they?; Terrain; Weather; and Lines of communication and supply (LOCS). In other words, we were trained to take into account those "little ideas," like facts and feasibility that, if ignored, could turn the "big ideas" into a March of Folly that would get a lot of people killed for no good reason.

Could it be that they stopped teaching these fundamentals as Petraeus went through West Point and Benning several years later? Did military history no longer include the futile efforts of imperial armies to avoid falling into the "graveyard of empires" in Afghanistan?

What about those LOCS? When you can't get there from here, is it really a good idea to send troops and armaments the length of Pakistan and then over the Hindu Kush? And does anyone know how much that kind of adventure might end up costing?

To Army officers schooled in the basics, it was VERY hard to understand why the top Army leadership persuaded President Barack Obama to double down, twice, in reinforcing troops for a fool's errand. And let's face it, unless you posit that the generals and the neoconservative strategic "experts" at Brookings and AEI were clueless, the doubling down was not only dumb but unconscionable. [highlight mine]

Here's a suggestion. Let's add the following as part of every Oath of Public Office, from local towns up to Federal elected officials.

"Do you swear to adjust to the Situation, the Whole Situation, and nothing but the honest Situation - so help you Reality?" That's one suggestion for how we could continuously select better ways to cut through the Guardian Knotheads of Ludditeville. Simply hew them with the weight of logic, and quickly move on.

Collective allegiance to the weight of adaptive logic is always more important than any few Truths, no matter how artfully selected.

Selecting too few truths from many constitutes perversion, in the form of Selection Strategy gone awry.

"EVERY process is too important to be left to the presumed process owners." Without that full-group review of all relevant feedback, we have doomed mob, not a democracy.

We Do Stupid Bigger/Faster Than Anyone Else!

commentary by Roger Erickson

Fabius Maximus writes About the violent mobs in the Middle East. And in America

"Every large event, every fork in the road, signals the need to stop and think about our course of action. America today is defined by our refusal to do so, as we see in our reaction to the riots. Our mob psychology mirrors theirs, but we tend to reply with greater firepower."

***

There's a lot of truth in that statement. The insight applies to other fields, and certainly to orthodox economics.  Eventually, the loser in any repetitive competition will be the one who can be manipulated into getting angry, losing control of their own actions, and refusing to think.  After that, the winning opponent is inside the losers decision-cycle, and outmaneuvering the loser.

What was the orthodox response to the operational invention of an agile, scalable, fiat currency regime?  The orthodox economic community fought back with an overwhelming volume of academic BS.  They tried to silence revolutionaries with greater volume if not quality of firepower.  And, of course, there's a lot of anger still be slung around.  That's not science, where answers, not argument is the key concept.

When all sides lose their temper?  There is no long term improvement.  There is only failure to make a more perfect union.