The next capitalist revolution
economist.comWhat we need is a revolution in how people think about complex systems.
People nowadays throw ideas around thinking they have a good understanding of how systems operate or should operate, when in fact most are clueless and fail to realize their ignorance.
Society, economy, biological organisms, climate, cognition, etc are all complex systems, and no single person can claim to understand how they work, or the types of laws/rules we should adopt to govern their behavior.
Not all is lost though, as we have slowly started to augment our cognitive power, by means of computation, and in the process have improved our capabilities to analyze and understand these ever evolving systems.
I for one, have began to fight my ignorance by studying more books on complex systems. Here's a good one I've discovered recently: "Scale" by Geoffrey West.
Also, a useful collection of resources, courtesy of Santa Fe Institute: https://www.complexityexplorer.org/ (HINT: Go to explore -> browse section)
... and bonus, one of the most underrated channels on YouTube, Complexity Labs: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCutCcajxhR33k9UR-DdLsAQ
Exponential growth, feed back loops and side effects are all hard to reason about intuitively.
"Business Dynamics" by Stermer was surprisingly good.
"How we know what is not so" by Thomas Gilovich is a good tonic against arrogance (as is "Uncommon Sense" by Comer).
I really like SystemAntics (John Gall - Good luck finding the original!) about, mostly, how our arrogance fails us when we try to define systems that are complex and include humans...
> I really like SystemAntics (John Gall - Good luck finding the original!)
There's a PDF scan of this book available through Google search. Not a great PDF scan so it's not a comfortable read but it's doable. Anyway, I was only going to sample the book from that scan but ended up reading most of it because it was so good. Devastatingly bleak. Accurate. Subtle humor here and there. Highly recommended to anybody who hasn't read it yet. I just need to find a hard copy though ...
I agree that people generally should realize that their broad viewpoints on subjects that they are not familiar with are in a different category from those that they are very familiar with or those that are about specific situations. I disagree that the issue is just that these systems are too complex to understand on any level or that we can avoid having worldviews that encompass these subjects.
I mean we can just acknowledge that we have different worldviews rather than everyone having to agree that things are too complex to understand. I agree they are complex but that doesn't mean I can avoid having views on them.
> I mean we can just acknowledge that we have different worldviews rather than everyone having to agree that things are too complex to understand
Sure, we all have world views. When it comes to predictive power however, some world views are superior to others. At the end of the day, and at the level of detail we're currently capable of understanding reality, all of our models are wrong, but some are useful, hence why we keep pushing the process of scientific method, even though it has its limitations.
By acknowledging that something is complex, we can recognize we are limited in our ability to understand it – at least for now – which in turn leads us to question our current views and seek to discover and adopt better models, with even more predictive power.
The problem isn't so much having opinions as expecting strangers to value them.
When you are just another commenter on the Internet, your opinion just doesn't matter that much. It can be hard to get used to that.
Instead of just sharing our outputs, we need to share inputs. What did you read or experience?
While there is a lot that seems to fit with applying complexity theory to economics, I am always uneasy that the area just doesn't seem to yield any overriding direction for people to follow.
Powerful and followable ideas at the level individual decision maker, applied many times over can make big changes in systems. But what story can be told to capture the actions needed at an decision level?
BTW: you might find this paper interesting.
The measurement of any system is only as good as the quality of the data being measured. When the Black Swan comes computational interconnectivity of these systems will ensure they all respond together and that is not a natural design if on a short-term timescale.
Behemoths like Amazon are taking a flamethrower to complexity already. Want practically anything? Just click and the day after tomorrow it magically appears at your door.
Google, Amazon, Apple...they are reducing our IQs by simplifying our lives to the point of stupefaction.
>> Society, economy, biological organisms, climate, cognition, etc are all complex systems
You can't buy any of these from any company, and you definitely can't buy understanding of them.
TFA is about wealth and power, not human evolution
Have they? Go to Amazon and search, say, for "scissors". Which one would you buy?
The top result, tagged as Amazon's Choice, is the "AmazonBasics Multipurpose Scissors - 3-Pack" for $6.09. They look like everything I want in general-purpose scissors, there are tons of reviews from people who really like them, and the fact that there are three of them means that unless Amazon has just completely dropped the ball on this one I'll be set for a long time in the scissors department -- and if not, hey, I'm only out six bucks. Free two-day shipping with Prime.
I'm not seeing the problem here?
Well, if you fail to see the limitations and assumptions upon which your decision making process rests, then there's nothing of value I could add. Your decision making model via-a-vis scissors purchasing is perfectly acceptable. But it's just one model. Would you use the same model if you were, say, a tailor?
The one with with most 5 star ratings!
Fiskars.
From a reputable vendor, no less.
My takeaway from this article was mainly about how much competition should be fostered within the system.
One interesting thing about the neoliberal era, it seems, is that the things in it seem to be simultaneously very big and very small.
There are some very big things -- cyberpunk-style megacorps that literally have free rein to make and remake entire markets and populations -- and at the same time very small things -- gig workers, freelancers, contractors, and other kinds of "entrepreneurs" that are out on their own in a dog-eat-dog world of hustle.
I think the question is less about whether we should have more competition, and more about whether this can be done safely. As it stands, you basically have two choices, modeled after the above: to become a cog in a machine (or a machine-in-the-making), or be completely out on your own.
Can something sustainably exist in the middle, and without being consumed by the big thing or becoming the big thing?
None of this matters, not one iota. The world is choking in the filth we are creating, all while people like this pontificate about the next generation of the system that positively reinforces the creation of filth.
This sentiment is as old as religion: it's the good old millenarian instinct. People constantly think the world is on the precipice of something transformational (good or bad).
We'll see. My money is on things chugging along pretty much as they have been. I think this planet can take far more than we can throw at it.
RE: the article - seems like common-sense recommendations but no specifics. We'd all like to see more competition. The question is how to get there with as few side effects as possible. The specifics are the hard part.
I don't want to be around when we discover the planet can't actually take more than we can throw at it. We are unable to deal with minor pokes of the planet (storms, fires, earthquakes). Imagine what's gonna happen when it really pokes at us. We're probably gonna get wiped out. This planet is more fragile than people think and our power to control it is miniscule.
The planet has been around a while and taken a lot, certainly more than we can throw at it. Now, wether we can survive is another issue. But the planet will be just fine, especially by the standards of geological time.
I wouldn't bet we can't find a way to blow the planet up as well... But the comment is about our survival on this planet.
This planet is more fragile than people think
Citation needed.
It would be very difficult to totally wipe out humans - including all remote tribes, all underground sealed bunkers. I'm not saying that's perfect, but the less-bad it gets down from that kind of global catastrophe level, and the less sudden it is, the greater the number of humans who will survive it.
As for the planet, what does it mean for it to be "fragile"? It survived whatever impact split The Moon off.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permian%E2%80%93Triassic_extin...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collapse_of_the_Atlantic_north...
"the only known mass extinction of insects.[9][10]" - one event that serious in 6 billion years and the planet wasn't destroyed, is your cite for how it's fragile? I'd expect tool-using humans to prepare better, survive more, and recover sooner than the creatures described there, wouldn't you?
"Cod: Over 35,000 fishermen and plant workers from over 400 coastal communities became unemployed.[..] federal government intervened, [..] income assistance [..] retraining of workers [..] Newfoundland has since experienced a dramatic environmental, industrial, economic, and social restructuring, including considerable emigration,[18] but also increased economic diversification, an increased emphasis on education, and the emergence of a thriving invertebrates fishing industry"
and the present status 20 years later is "recovering" up to possibly 10% of earlier levels - nothing like the million years to recover of the previous link.
Change happened, people adjusted to it in many ways. That sounds resilient, not fragile.
Us tool wielding humans are gonna get wiped out just like those insects. Whenever the forces of nature hit us our tool wielding seems to matter very little.
My point re: the fishery collapse is that all the tool yielding people didn't forsee the collapse and when it happened were unable to deal with it effectively. You're not gonna have 20 years to figure stuff out if climate changes dramatically, ecosystems collapse or some feedback loop kicks in. The scale/force/power of these changes is well above our current ability to engineer and our illusion of power is going to disappear very quickly once our society and infrastructure disappear. The romantic notion of 50 people in a bunker surviving and continuing the human race while the oceans turn into acid .. not gonna happen.
Fragile generally means something like you drop a glass on the floor from 30cm and it completely shatters. If you drop a mug on the floor from 2 meters and the handle breaks off but it still works, it's not fragile. If you hit it with a meteor and it breaks, it's not fragile.
Whenever the forces of nature hit us our tool wielding seems to matter very little.
55,000 people were displaced or evacuated in California just now, with a current death toll of <100. They didn't just move all at the same time by luck and on foot; vehicles, radio, TV, fire tracking helicopters and satellites all helped keep 50,000+ people alive in the face of a natural force. We reinforce buildings against earthquakes, we build tornado shelters, the Svalbard Global Seed vault, Dutch land reclamation dykes and countless flood defences around the world, earthquake and tsunami early warning systems, storm tracking weather satellites, and every building with lightning conductors since the 1700s.
With the spread of humans around the world, even huge events like the "imminent" Pacific North West USA Cascadia zone earthquake wouldn't affect most people. Something would have to kill 50% of humans just to take the world population down to 1972 levels. 75% of people is still higher world population than it was in 1900.
What's left? Anything which affects the globe. Climate change, which is currently being talked about in a "2C in 100 years" way which is a lot more than 20 years, and ... supervolcano emissions or massive solar flares or meteor impact. And a handwavy "if some feedback loop kicks in and the oceans acidify".
The romantic notion of 50 people in a bunker surviving and continuing the human race while the oceans turn into acid .. not gonna happen.
What about whole countries putting acid rain covers over their crops and water purifiers? One project in Israel desalinates 150,000,000 cubic meters of seawater every year, providing for 1.5 million people.
If we can plan for a colony on Mars, anything that happens to Earth it will still be hundreds of times more habitable than Mars, even if that means everyone who remains living inside some kind of habitats.
No colony on Mars yet... A colony on Mars relies on Earth. 2c in 100 years isn't the problem. The problem are the low probability events. Animals can run out of the forest during a fire, I don't really see that the humans did significantly better. We didn't stop an entire town from burning down, we didn't have enough of an advance warning, death toll may be well beyond 100, we don't even know how many people perished in the fire.
It is simply foolish to be pushing on this system for no good reason. I don't want to roll a d100 dice where if it comes out 1 we all die. That's a terrible gamble. Sure 90 out of 100 would only be a hotter world with more storms and fires and vast stretches of land disappearing under the oceans.
People have been saying that forever.
Although the amount of resources required to produce $1 of GDP has gone down ~90% in the last century.
Economic growth = figuring out how to do more with less.
Is there some alternative system that you'd prefer?
> Ronald Reagan fostered competition across much of the American economy.
How did he do that?
Serious questions: who's working on innovating economic systems that take us out of capitalism?
Forget competition... What about market-wide transparent collaboration?
“Neither Hayek, nor Habermas”
Nozick?
Capitalism is literally the private ownership of the means of production, aka simple freedom. We in the US have never lived with anything but crony capitalism. Capitalism is the only process so far that creates wealth for everyone. If people are unhappy with our current form of capitalism they can look directly to the Marxist policies our government has tilted towards the last century that are supported by both the 'right' and the 'left'.
This is one of those really tough areas where the problems are so significant and comprehensive that the approach people want to take immediately gets into their worldview and belief system. And no one readily changes their worldview, so its difficult to have productive discussions about such things.
Nevertheless I will state my worldview and hopefully mention a few specifics that might be anchor points for an attempted discussion.
Technology _alone_ cannot solve our societal problems, but I believe that there is great opportunity to address them by better incorporating the right technologies into society.
And I believe that peer-to-peer distributed (and so decentralized) technologies offer quite a lot of promise. Starting with the idea that over-centralization, whether it stems from a more socialist traditional system or a more capitalist traditional system, is one of the main problems, and technologies that are inherently decentralized can address that.
Well, maybe I will just start with a few premises. I would like to suggest that we should re-evaluate all of our societal structures in a technological context. I think that we can usefully think of them all as types of (mostly primitive) technologies.
For example, I suggest that money is in fact a technology. It is probably the most fundamental technology of society. I think that although an over-reliance on traditional money obviously causes problems, the answer is not to simply de-emphasize its use in society, although that can help in certain contexts. I believe that we should upgrade the technology of money and in doing so we can improve the functioning of society.
I also believe that government is another type of fundamental technology for society. It should also have its technology upgraded.
Another idea I have is that there is a fundamental interaction between money and government which we normally refer to as "corruption" with the idea that this is an abnormal state for the relationship. However I believe that the close relation between money and government in their present primitive forms is a core structural element, i.e. corruption is structurally guaranteed.
I realize that convincing people of these views would require quite extensive prose. But it is unlikely that those with different worldviews would be convinced and I am tired of writing this answer so unfortunately I am not going to try right here. However at least I have explained some of my viewpoint.
Anyway, I think that Ethereum and related or similar technologies are moral causes because they allow us the possibility of upgrading core technologies used in society. We can upgrade money with cryptocurrency. We can upgrade government using something like Ethereum-based decentralized autonomous organizations. I think that you need to upgrade money _and_ government at the same time and be sure that your system considers them as closely related so that you can handle "corruption" in a structural way.
Shameless plug: I wrote a blog post a while ago using your premise to argue why decentralized technologies wouldn't be useful to society: https://www.notion.so/Yet-Another-Rant-About-Blockchains-ece...
Interesting take on decentralized technologies. It feels to me like attacking (or defending) decentralized technologies in general is a bit abstract though. Just taking Bitcoin for example, where would you see this concept of racing to the bottom and trading away your values (outside of the shortcomings of the technology itself). Since it's a platform for holding and trading assets, I don't think there is the competitive aspect that would drive any of those behaviors, but maybe your article is focused on competitive scenarios more than anything else.
But even when there is a notion of competition you say that to avoid the traps left around by an imperfect (perhaps unavoidably) system of incentives, coordination is necessary, questioning the need for a decentralized system in the first place. But is that really so bad/superfluous? What if the coordination necessary to make a decentralized system work led more easily to a desirable and elastic result than something crafted by hand. Again, maybe it's too abstract, but I picture a decentralized governance system where members would have to coordinate to achieve a proper equilibrium. For example the biggest hurdle to fighting lobbyism effectively isn't coordination from competing interests, it's the lack of resources. Wouldn't a decentralized system negate the power of money, networking, services, preferential treatment (and even blackmail) even if it still ended up causing/requiring coordination?
That is a well-written and interesting article. We have very different belief systems. My apologies for not having the motivation to try make a rebuttal.
Maybe you will consider _not_ downvoting my comment because it will fade out and no one will even be able to see it. That means my ideas will be dismissed without consideration by new people to the thread.
I am not downvoting your comment.
>I think that Ethereum and related or similar technologies are moral causes because they allow us the possibility of upgrading core technologies used in society.
Hilarious. What a desperate attempt to pump ETH by some poor bagholder.
Ethereum doesn't exactly have the best track record of being a truly "decentralized" cryptocurrency, does it?
I own maybe $50 worth of Ethereum. It is decentralized though.
> Ronald Reagan fostered competition across much of the American economy. > A similar transformation is needed today.
Reaganomics is the cause, not solution to, today’s capitalism crisis.
That is a bold large-ish declaration. Would you be kind enough to define: 1) Today's capitalism crisis, and 2) Reagonomics' role in being the cause instead of the cure?
Thanks so very much.
I found some documentary footage from the era that I think explained this quite well - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2NrWX-FsXgQ
Nice clip. I'm sorry that I don't find it compelling for the purpose of answering the question as asked. Maybe you went to a different logic school.
I got kicked out for abduction.
At least you're funny. (And, no, I have not downvoted you)
Personally I'm amazed that people appear to like the cheap shot I made with the spitting image clip, but hate the formal logic joke.
These downvotes are unfortunate given this statement is objectively true.
I didn't downvote the person, but I did ask for clarification and got downvoted.
Can you explain your claim 'objectively true'? There are too many non-concrete nouns running around for me to be able to keep track of...
I'm sorry but I don't think the 80s are really something that can be explained to someone that didn't live through them, which I assume you didn't, otherwise you wouldn't be asking for clarification on Reaganomics.
I loved the 80s so much more than the 70s, so I'm not sure where you are coming from.
EDIT: I did remove an insult from an earlier draft of an earlier comment that you were probably a kid (as most people here are) that didn't remember the 80s. Since you are apparently not, my question still stands. (I don't have a pin-up of Margaret Thatcher any more, though...)
I think the downvotes are coming from the lack of context accompanying the GP’s bold statements.
Not sure what's expected here. I mean, this is hardly the format for 20 page dissertations on lived history. I'm guessing these downvotes are coming from folks that are missing context because they're in their 20's and don't actually know anything about Reaganomics, what was proposed vs what the actual observed outcomes were, etc.