More upsetting ideas for the linear economists and Enlightenment democratists.
9) The wealth gap does not exist as such.
Criticising the income distribution implies that quality of life, happiness or whatever personal satisfaction can be generally improved through the improved distribution of money. i.e., we can spend our way to better lives. Optimising for the *potential* to spend does not necessarily affect the ability to obtain desired goods and services.
Recall that money may have originated a proxy for relationships, and that it is now a measure and entity with its own dynamics. Note also that the available quantity of, say, surgeon time available, rare earth metals for green energy devices, and truffles are constrained by factors vaguely, if at all, by personal incomes. Fixing the measure of inadequate social relations will fix neither the inadequate social relations, nor the probabilistic processes that generate products and services of unequal quality.
The gap to address is the opportunity gap. What new norms of social relations can we conceive, test (and mostly reject) that will scale well to meet our current and future needs? Meritocracies have succeeded quite well in the open source world, but concentrate decision-making, decision-taking, and decision-enacting in an even smaller portion of the population than do democracies.
10) The wealthy and powerful are not always purposefully evil.
Almost every system fails to consider some stakeholder existing outside the system logic. Godel might claim that it's impossible to know about such missing stakeholders.
Whatever the likelihood that wealthy and powerful individuals are born disposed to deliberately keep others down, every decision-maker is subject to incomplete information. One cannot know everything there is to know about a decision before making it, otherwise it would not be a choice as such.
Most humans include and exclude individuals in their groups based on similar sets of social, cultural, vocational, political and various intrinsic and extrinsic factors of identity. They often surround themselves with people of like attitudes, with whom social capital bonds become strong. Hipsters do this with trends, vying for exclusivity to being the first to adopt. Similarly, foodies with rare culinary experiences, science fiction and fantasy fans with knowledge of various cannons, heroin addicts with safe suppliers and injection sites, boating people with... boating stuff, and strange academics in high towers with access to pre-press papers. Everyone includes and excludes, and only some of the time are criteria connected to money or governmental power.
11) Long-term sustainability is depends on short-term sustainability.
In the long run, we're all dead, but presumably we want to make the best of the temporary islands of stability we have and see now. It also means we need always to be ready to jump at the same time to several other islands. Biology deals with this pragmatically: Produce offspring who can themselves produce offspring, and call it a day.
For humans, this implies: acknowledging and fulfilling a hierarchy of needs, not counting on martyrdom, and doing all the boring day to day things (don't get shot at) so that we or our descendants are at least around to do the next big thing.
12) Jobs, policies, corporations, people, etc. are not the source of capability.
There are two possible sources of net inputs into the global economy: The Sun, and time. The sun provides energy (mostly via plants), while time provides opportunities for processes to use that energy to arrange local environments in more advantageous ways.
A process--say, a human--can generate advantage (or "value") through directed or thoughtful rearrangements of their environments. They can eat and/or cook dinner, manufacture widgets, arrange other humans, devise new ways to do things, etc. whether in a "job" or not.
Directed and thoughtful means that use of time and energy provides a net gain of either or both *in the immediate local environment* (that is, they are fit), and provide opportunities to draw support from nearby environments. (This is Kauffman's fitness peaks and valleys.) The directed and thoughtful actor must not only have the capability to take risks through accrued resources and advantages, but *must* take risks to explore nearby environments in order to be part of a sustainable system.
13) The system of everything is not (yet) useful.
a) The Westphalian statehood model explicitly implements a economic model of social organisation, via exclusivity to land areas containing material resources, people who harvest time, and the ability to harvest energy from the sun through plants.
But The sun and time do not respect arbitrary political or economic borders. They may respect physical geographic borders (and perhaps social borders). Yet our measures and policies of finance and economy assume that systems are bound by lines on paper. Clearly, such faulty models will diverge from reality in interesting and unpredictable ways.
The problem is complicated because of the long lag time and many unconsidered factors between our adjustments and feedback from the system. Economic policies and interventions like job creation, infrastructure investment, or tax changes takes months to years to come into effect and report. And our knowledge of how to instrument the systems we seek to influence, or to know about other systems our systems touch, is limited at best. Abstract measures about total composition or growth or "rates" do not tell us much about the dynamics of a system, yet we expect to be able to optimise for such measures.
b) Exports is the wrong way to think about macro growth (not "macroeconomic" growth).
Against what do individual states push to assert their advantages? other states. Individuals push other individuals. Regions push other regions. Firms push other firms. The world pushes or compares against what? There's an import/export assumption in there, that exports are necessary for economic and social growth. To whom does the "global economy" export? Since the globe as a whole cannot export across space to another globe, at the end of the day we must export across time.
Our measures of growth are therefore conceptually temporal (year over year growth) yet with such measures we want to inform policies regulating competition predominantly across space (individual, firm, and political entities).
c) We focus on measuring individual local phenomena in hopes of informing policy about system phenomena. We do not have the science to deal with a system of everything. Of consequence, we know that adding or subtracting 30,000 jobs will most likely *affect* a local region, and that effect may even be sustainable locally. But we cannot expect to make informed decisions with respect to how the system is thereby affected in the short or long term.
At best, we can and should consider how actions within our own system (howsoever defined) do not negatively affect the fitness of *systems* that provide inputs or take outputs at the same level. It's entirely acceptable to make another system more sustainable by destabilising its inefficient subsystems. Pareto says that the human stakeholders will get by in a better way on average.
14) The credit crunch is the system is correcting itself.
Excessive borrowing to run unsustainable programs appears to be a significant factor leading to the current situation. If one believes in a mostly linear economic model, why is it necessarily a problem to not dump more goods onto congested markets while we wait for markets to coordinate and clear? Returning to the lifestyles of 1999 for a period would be such a hassle, what with rampaging hordes, Scarlett fever, sabre-tooth cats and all.
A list of unpopular potential actions that change some major constants alone or in combination.
a) fix the interest rate globally and durably (perhaps at 0% as some middle friends had suggested) so that loans revert to being based on trust;
b) severely restrict the ability to divine new currency (again, perhaps limiting it to zero as the bitcoin folk have tried) so that sustainability problems cannot be hidden;
c) start re-implementing local informal (currency and non-currency) systems of coordinated effort to see how they can collaborate and emerge new kinds of higher order phenomena, given our current information-sharing capabilities.
d) identify, evaluate, and quite possibly and tear out assumptions made when most humans lived to the age of 30 in one village. Modify some other assumptions to suit our current time in which humans live to 100 as global citizens.
These actions (conveniently) require unpinning many of the laws we've developed since the Enlightenment or earlier and selecting laws that people understand and respect. It might inconvenience some to return democracy from the rule of law to the rule of people.
