Bibek Bhandari — This is China's happiest city

Ranking quality in indexes, such as happiness and quality of life is difficult, since quality must be quantified to do so in formal modeling, and quality involves subjectivity in a subject-object relationship. Even though difficult, it is worth doing in order to arrive at more comprehensive understanding of economics, which is supposedly about satisfaction ("utility") in a Utilitarian paradigm.

Sixth Tone
This is China's happiest city
Bibek Bhandari

See also

US News & World Report
Best States Rankings — Measuring outcomes for citizens using more than 75 metrics

Data Powered by McKinsey&Company

David F. Ruccio — Varoufakis’s Marx

This is an important post. This the clearest and best assessment of Yanis that I have seen, largely in his own words. It also explains why YV is a "pseudo-Marxist." He is a realist who understands Marx rather than a Marxist revolutionary. That is his strength or weakness, depending on one's point of view.

Relatively few realize that Marx was actually the real liberal who recognized that  human freedom is the basis of advancing civilization — as did Hegel for that matter, from whom Marx inherited the dialectic as Hegel had inherited from the ancient Greeks. But Hegel did not write on economics. 

Although even though Marx ended up writing on economics, he was chiefly a philosopher and his doctorate was in philosophy. Marx approached his work in terms of the enduring questions with a few toward creating a systematic approach to them based on the paradoxes of the human condition that develop historically — the apparent contradictions that drive and historical dialectic based on an internal logic that is actually consistent, even though it appears to be contradictory at turning points. Every question generates answers and the answers generate further questions. Now we would call this a complex adaptive system characterized by reflexivity (feedback) and emergence (innovation).

This is the basis not only of the human condition, which is "experimental" and adaptive, but also the historical dialectic that operates on the basis of exploring the range of possibilities. Like a homing device, humanity oscillates among options in his search for the target, which is distributed freedom rather than the freedom of a few.

Yanis understand this, and understand that the neoliberals are not actually liberal at all. They are not for distributed freedom but plutonomy on the back of labor.

Occasional Links & Commentary
Varoufakis’s Marx
David F. Ruccio | Professor of Economics University of Notre Dame Notre Dame

Stephen Bevan — Unemployed? You shouldn’t just take any job.

Being in poor-quality work which, perhaps, is boring, routine or represents underemployment or a poor match for the employee’s skills is widely regarded as a good way for the unemployed to remain connected to the labor market – and to keep the work habit. But Butterworth’s data contradict this. The HILDA data show unambiguously that the psychosocial quality of bad jobs is worse than unemployment. Butterworth looked at those moving from unemployment into employment and found that: 

"Those who moved into optimal jobs showed significant improvement in mental health compared to those who remained unemployed. Those respondents who moved into poor-quality jobs showed a significant worsening in their mental health compared to those who remained unemployed."

So now we have a slightly different answer to the question about the unemployed being better off in work. Yes they are, as long as they are in good-quality jobs. If they are in bad jobs, there is a perversely strong chance that they will be worse off – especially in terms of their mental health. 

Again, for those who think that there should be punitive undertones to policies to get unemployed people back to work would do well to question whether the “any job is a good job” maxim is as accurate as they like to think. Moreover, we should probably question whether the revolving-door characteristics of some policies in which many people fall back out of work soon after being found a job might – in part – owe their poor performance to the damaging psychosocial quality of the work itself.

This shouldn’t stop us from straining every sinew to help people find work. But it should make us think a lot more about how the quality of jobs can affect our health and productivity.…

The Washington Post
Unemployed? You shouldn’t just take any job.

Stephen Bevan | Director of the Centre for Workforce Effectiveness at the Work Foundation and an honorary professor at Lancaster University

ht Dan Lynch

We Need Public Trust (And Scalable Verification Methods), Not Just Public Institutions

(Commentary posted by Roger Erickson)




In ongoing discussion with friends at the Public Banking Institute, we often return to a state of talking past one another.

It's obviously my fault. Trying to think ahead always seems to come across as opposition - especially if articulated clumsily. At least initially.

Guess I really do need more practice at saying "Yes, And" instead of "No, But."

It's not enough to think .... one needs to constantly PRACTICE all the arbitrary hand-shaking protocols too, just to effectively communicate with all parts of your own, diversifying electorate.

Does the following help?

Some of my PBI friends (not all) get so involved in local projects that they tend to forget about the implications of national policy.

I am NOT dismissing anything about Public Banking. In fact, I couldn't agree more. There should be many more Public Banks, at every level. Nationalize TBTJ mega-banks. "State-alize" many regional banks, and "County-ize" & "City-ize" many local banks. It's necessary.

That still won't be enough to restore our cultural agility. Not now, and not ever.

I am trying to think ahead, and consider why Public Banking will always be necessary but not sufficient. There are further issues that must be included in the mix. That's why I keep bringing up the "3i's" of contingency management.

Impact;
In-Flight;
Instigators.
...If you don't address all 3, simultaneously, you can't win (excepting luck).

That advice applies not just to current frictions, but also to our own future actions, and selves.

So one obvious implication sticks in my mind. No amount of practice at local tactics (or regional strategy) replaces interleaved attention to national policy. That's just common sense. The inverse is also true, of course. We need both, not either in isolation.

You cannot tell from the presence of public banks alone whether a public is ceding national policy space to NeoLiberal ideologues.

The archetypical Public Bank, the state Bank of North Dakota has had zero impact opposing the slow return of NeoLiberal national fiscal policy the past 80 years. There's no evidence that they even tried!

Meanwhile, the Federal Reserve, for example, is a Public Bank. Heck, Congress is a Public Institution too. 

None of that means that any public institution is immune to being co-opted by Control Frauds. 

Foxes will always seek to be appointed to head local, regional and national Hen Houses. Our need isn't just for more hen houses - which we always need. We ALSO need continuously evolving methods for keeping our own foxes under control.

Plus, those new methods must be more scalable than previous and current methods.

So I'm always thinking of ways to have our public banks AND our national policy too. To me, that's the minimal challenge worth pursuing. Otherwise, you're saying "No class war or Control Frauds in local politics, but they are ok in national government." Lots of luck with that approach.

That is not setting our sights high enough.

The root issue is trust (AND to verify).

If we can't trust private enterprise to run all banks, what can we trust private enterprise to run? Garbage collection? Police Departments? Our MICC?

If we want institutions we can trust, regulate the damn industries!

The root solution is regulatory methods.

What we really want is evolving methods for maintaining Public Regulation ... of all industry sectors, and all components, private or public. That timeless logic is the only way I see how to tackle our exponentially rising organizational tasks.

"More is Different" - it sure is. So how do growing human populations manage more of themselves?

By always bridging FROM current-scale methods TO our emerging, larger-scale behaviors, with NEW METHODS ... that's how. In plain words, that means by ALWAYS thinking ahead, and NOT just on what we're already working on today.

Every 50 years or less, we have a wholly new scale of organizational issues. Issues that today's methods and institutions won't adequately address.

How will we regulate all our emerging, scale-dependent activities?

Not by micromanaging every discipline, but by instilling subtle, new methods allowing us to continuously regulate distributed TRUST, and thereby cultural resiliency. The key issue is to constantly improve the quality (including tempo) of decision-making that is always increasingly distributed.

We can't do that by scaling up committees, or micromanaging existing processes.

Take the ancient example of siRNA allowing micro-regulation of massively larger genomes, and thereby eventually enabling massively multi-cellular species, eventually called Eukaryotes (e.g., humans). We couldn't have evolved just by having more "public" proteins. That's like expecting to put enough police cars on the streets to enforce all traffic laws. That approach - regulating self with more self - just won't scale.

Similarly, stages of larger-scale human culture were possible only after invention of language, writing and other miniaturized, "scalable" technologies.

Again. Self-regulation of more self, by micro-management WITH more self, just doesn't scale.

Replacing self-regulation with ingenious micro-regulation technology allows us to have our "more" and organize it too. All we need from our growing population is their feedback, not distributed-regulation with their actual selves.

Take the same principle applied to Blue Collar policing. The breakthrough method for retaining trust in police is public verification, i.e., not only adding more layers of "Public Policing" but adding miniature lapel-cameras to every cop on the beat.

Face it. We'll never trust enough of our accountants and bankers - public or private - until they wear lapel-cameras too, or something analogous.

What we're doing now is never enough, because there'll be more of everything tomorrow, and more is always different, because interdependencies that are insignificant at one scale eventually become significant - or overwhelming - at another scale.

Ancient cathedral builders learned that, the hard way. So do all people in all professions, ... but never fast enough.

Achieving Public Regulation comes down to inventing subtle new methods for monitoring key portions of increasingly distributed decision-making, so that we can maintain alignment across our growing electorate, and retain trust in ourselves.

There are always more insanely great things our aggregate can achieve .. but only if we invent ways to trust and verify the aggregate utility of our own, distributed actions.

Or regulate.

Econolosophy — History v Statistics

History and statistics serve a common purpose: to understand the causal force of some phenomenon. It seems to me, moreover, that statistics is a simplifying tool to understand causality, whereas history is a more elaborate tool. And by “more elaborate” I mean that history usually attempts to take into account both more variables as well as fundamentally different variables in our quest to understand causality.

To make this point clear, think about what a statistical model is: it is a representation of some dependent variable as a function of one or more independent variables, which we think, perhaps because of some theory, have a causal influence on the dependent variable in question. A historical analysis is a similar type of model. For example, a historian typically starts by acknowledging some development, say a war, and then attempts to describe, in words, the events that led to the particular development. Now, it is true that historians typically delve deeply into the details of the events predating the development – e.g., by examining written correspondence between officials, by reciting historical news clippings to understand the public mood, etc. – but this simply means that the historian is examining more variables than the simplifying statistician. If the statistician added more variables to his regression, he would be on his way producing a historical analysis.

There is, however, one fundamental way in which the historian’s model is different from the statistician’s: namely, the statistician is limited by the fact that he can only consider precisely quantified variables in his model. The historian, in contrast, can add whatever variables he wants to his model. Indeed, the historian’s model is non-numeric.[1]

Econolosophy

History v Statistics

There are advantages and disadvantages of quantitative, numeric methods and qualitative, non-numeric methods. In the first place, qualitative, non-numeric methods can incorporate qualitative, non-numeric methods, but the reverse does not apply, since quantification is limited to that which can be reduced to quantity without sacrificing anything that is relevant.

This is clear in equating price with value, for example. Value is qualitative and price is quantitive. The key assumptions on which conventional economics rests involve the quantification of economic value independent of other values in terms of price discovered in markets, as well as the quantification of utility. These are simplifications that eliminate from consideration a great deal that is both qualitative and also relevant. While a calculus of utility is an arbitrary construct, there is no moral calculus at all.

On the other hand, history is able to view context holistically in terms of both quantity and quality. Whereas power other than market power is irrelevant in conventional economics, it is central in history.  It is also central in economics as Marx and institutionalists recognize.

 

FlipChart Rick — Hierarchy Works

There has been a lot of excitement about Zappos new hierarchy free, self-organising, boss-less organisation. The holocracy, as it’s known, is all very zeitgeisty. My Twitter timeline is full of articles about smashing corporate hierarchies and getting rid of executives. Last year, Gary Hamel, described in Fortune magazine as ‘the world’s leading expert on business strategy’, told the CIPD conference that “management is a busted flush” and organisations should be getting rid of their managers. And, of course, everyone knows that Generation Blah don’t like hierarchy. Executives, reporting lines, procedures, organisation charts – all that stuff is just so square, daddio.

 At what looks like the other extreme of management philosophy, Amazon has gone for a neo Taylorist model with high control over workers at all levels in the organisation. It’s not very trendy and, on the whole, my Twitter timeline doesn’t like Amazon.

But, of course, Amazon owns Zappos. Under one corporate roof, what looks like a social experiment is taking place. Two rival philosophies of management are being tested out.

Pieria
Hierarchy Works
FlipChart Rick

The chief difference between hierarchical and consensual organization is selection of leadership. 

Hierarchical organization operates from a chain of command with leadership slot filled from above and preserved by title, rank, and privilege ("perks"). Retention may be ruthlessly based on performance, but the fact remains that the structure is crystalline and rigid.

Consensual organization is based on natural leadership. A leader is one whom others choose to follow owing to superior qualities not restricted to achieving objectives effectively and efficiently in Drucker's Management-by-Objectives style. Deming's Total Quality Management is closer, but it still subordinates people to results and process to structure, whereas they need to be balanced and harmonized for synergy. 

Abraham Maslow's Eupsychian Management and Theory Z (different from Ouchi's theory z and an extension of MacGregor's contrast of theory x and theory y) are much more in the consensual style of creating a holistic culture of success and fulfillment, quantity and quality. Not coincidentally, Maslow was a friend of anthropologists Ruth Benedict and Margaret Meade, and their influence lead him to study tribal culture and incorporate it into an analysis of a psychology of human nature as universal rather than basing a theory on a particular temporal, geographical and cultural subset of humanity. It is therefore no accident that his management ideas are closer to the consensual and incorporate a wider range of quality. See "Abraham Maslow: Father of Enlightened Management" by Edward Hoffman, Training Magazine, September 1988, pages 79-82.

The devil is in the details, however. A theoretical management style must be instantiated in a particular context. Scott Adams has made a lot of people laugh and himself a lot of money by lampooning management by fad, for example.

The challenge is integrating the many facets of organizational structure and management into institutional arrangements and culture through a combination of explicit rules and implicit customs and conventions, which involves integrating the scientific (quantity) and humanistic (quality) approaches. See, for instance, The Capitalist Philosophers: The Geniuses of Modern Business–Their Lives, Times, and Ideas by Andrea Gabor, Times Business (2000) for a summary of the ideas of Frederick Winslow Taylor, Mary Parker Follett, Chester Barnard, Fritz Roethlisberger and Elton Mayo, Robert McNamara, Abraham Maslow and Douglas McGregor, W. Edwards Deming, Herbert A. Simon, Alfred Du Pont Chandler and Alfred Sloan, and Peter F. Drucker.

Bonnie Kavoussi — Tupperware Brands CEO Rick Goings: U.S. Is 'A Walmart Market'

Ask the CEO of Tupperware Brands, and he'll tell you Americans are cheap.

Rick Goings accused U.S. consumers of not valuing "quality" while explaining Tupperware's disappointing sales in North America, during an earnings call Tuesday....

"They buy price," Goings said of Americans. "Europe buys quality, Japan quality."

My friends in import/export tell me much the same thing. Americans are interested in price and quantity rather than quality, whereas international buyers are interested in quality and are willing to pay the price to get it. But I'm not sure that this is anything that new, i.e., Wal-Mart inspired. 

Rather, it's likely that Wal-Mart has been successful seemingly because Americans want inexpensive goods and don't care if they are cheap, too, since "stuff" is not expected to last long anyway. 

International buyers have a different mentality, wanting high quality products that will last them for some time. In other words, non-Americans tend to be savvy shoppers, while American enjoy shopping. Utility is a cultural thing, apparently.

The Huffington Post
Tupperware Brands CEO Rick Goings: U.S. Is 'A Walmart Market'
Bonnie Kavoussi

Japanese economic minister — requirements for a new growth model

At the individual level we have seen unambiguous signs that the economic climate is contributing to discontent. Public sentiment has undergone a distinct shift, and we can be far less certain that a return to previous levels of economic growth can erase this dissatisfaction. Through the Occupy Wall Street movement and other demonstrations, we have heard not only a message of anger at the current situation, but the desire for something else; for something more. The search is underway, particularly among the young people of the world, for a new model of growth.

A fundamental assertion for any new growth model, that is, dynamic and inclusive growth, is that three basic elements -- the economy, society, and the environment -- are each integral and must all contribute to overall improvement. Such thinking is not superfluous or a luxury that can only be afforded during periods of strong economic performance. It is critical to recognize that we must seek to provide not only prosperity, but also leave behind a healthy social and natural environment for future generations.

The new growth model must, in other words, impart more than economic gain. In recent years governments around the world, including Japan, have quietly turned their attention to research into the question of happiness and quality of life. How do we measure, or even define, such a concept? What factors contribute? In an era when so many people face stark economic challenges, does it even matter? Fundamentally, how do we meet the needs of society, and of future generations?

Research and, one could argue, the message from demonstrations around the world, would indicate that the contribution made by society and the environment play an integral role in ensuring our citizens realize their personal goals. Such factors are therefore critical to both prosperity and sustainability; an important part of the new growth model.

Read it at The Huffington Post
The Search for a New Growth Model
Motohisa Furukawa | Japanese Economic Minister

Looks like at least some of the TPTB are listening to the voice of protest and getting the message that globalization is not working based on the model in terms of which it is being applied.

Furukawa also talks about introducing quality rather than only considering quantity, which is border on superstition for most mainstream economists.

He also introduces the economy, society, and the environment as macroeconomic trifecta requiring resolution instead of only the traditional growth of production, employment, and price stability.