Tom,
FQXi asked how should humanity steer the future. Didn't you equate humanity too much with the national perspective of U.S.A.?
At least you left the position of those philosophers and physicists who denied causality and the distinction between past and future: Russell, Einstein, ...
Do you hope for reaching more than emotional resonance? I am still fed up with "scientific socialism".
Regards,
Eckard
Hi Tom,
I enjoyed reading your essay. I particularity like the analogies of the fences with open gates and the knife being as important as the cake. You have set out a well argued vision for USA recovery.
I wonder whether climate change and falling oil production in the future will severely affect world trade because of the rising costs and difficulties of transport and logistics.Outsourcing manufacturing and importation of food and goods from all around the world has been cheap. It isn't sustainable though, it is wasting resources. It may be that local production and consumption become once more the most cost cost effective choice and more sustainable too. Then it would be more difficult to get a cut of the wealth by planning and distribution of other countries' 'cakes'. What do you think?
What part are you responding to? What leader?
Jonathan,
I agree. I should have taken more care to present the solution before the problem. Instead I put it all in a too-short abstract. The problem is depressing; I think there are too few, however, who understand what conditions the liberal secular ideal is responding to, why we fought a revolution here against tyrants from afar, and then another bloody war against tyrants at home.
In the news, there is this rancher in Nevada who grazes his cattle for free by stealing government owned land, and calls it his right to profit from the property and labors of others. His motives are clear -- he openly wonders if "the Negro" would be better off picking cotton than being unemployed and hanging out on the porch. Clearly, he feels entitled to own and control others and steal with impunity.
That issue is separate from the issue of fairness in land use laws -- it's a deeper flaw in the American psyche that hangs on to pre-Enlightenment ways of doing things. We can't afford it. The world can't afford it.
The rancher rides around on his horse waving the U.S. flag (this is literally true, for those who haven't seen the story) -- while contradictorily proclaiming that he doesn't recognize the government. He thinks the Constitution supports his right to plunder and exploit. If it were just this one crazy individual who holds these views, one wouldn't worry about it. The sickness and the ignorance has spread much further.
All best,
Tom
Hi John,
Yes, I agree -- we speak of the price of money as if it were goods. That's not in itself the problem, though. Money as capital is indeed a commodity that loses value when not traded -- when we reach the state as we have today, that investors are merely trading among themselves and withholding capital from wealth creators, eventually the value of even that limited trade degrades. Not good for either the investors or the investment, because of overproduction and underconsumption, which are two sides of the same coin.
Best,
Tom
Tom,
One of the main ways of sustaining the value of that excess capital is to have the government, ie. public, borrow it back and fund everything from wars to research with the over-production, then sell off any income producing asset, such as results of the research, to well connected private interests, so while it may not be 'the problem,' it is certainly a problem and one which is shortly going to trigger a crisis and crises are noted as opportune times for change.
I don't see much being withheld from anyone with even a slim idea for wealth creation, but I do see a lot of unsustainable wealth extraction being used to fund this financial production.
Regards,
John
Yes, John. The thing is that, " ... unsustainable wealth extraction ..." is equivalent to wealth reduction. Did you understand my point about eating the seed corn?
Thank you, Georgina. I agree in principle that local production/consumption is cost efficient. However, it leaves the locality vulnerable to economic instability (boom-bust), natural disasters and internal self-destructive feedback.
What I aim to describe is an effective, rather than efficient, global model -- where waste and redundancy are assets. That is, a continually shifting hub of redundant global economic activity is a self-similar, self-reinforcing network that dulls the effects of positive (i.e. out of control) feedback brought on by both internal and external challenges to global stability, while assisting local recovery when needed.
Such a robust network allows network nodes to act independently when they can and cooperatively when they must.
I have done no more than scan your essay -- though it looks delightful! I will comment when I can.
Best,
Tom
Hi Eckard,
Yes, I had a particular reason for focusing on the U.S. For the time being at least, the U.S. leads in the knowledge and technology management requisite to helping create and sustain a globally linked network of resources that can respond quickly and effectively to local economic and natural disasters.
Best,
Tom
Tom,
Very much so. So even though we frequently don't see eye to eye, sometimes that difference of perspective can lead to broader understanding in other subjects.
Regards,
John
Tom,
The American way of consumption did indeed conquer the hearts of many people worldwide and caused the collapse of Soviet Union. I am however not sure whether this temptation will still suffice as to get control over religious conflicts like in Syria, nationalism like between Russia and Ukraine, and the seemingly harmless unlimited growth of population.
When I was a boy, I read a booklet that told me the main center of power and culture was shifting from Greece to Rome, to Eastern Rome, from Spain to France, etc. Maybe, China could get leading in future if mankind will be unable to install an international secular power. I am sure having Nobel correctly understood in that question.
Regards,
Eckard
A theory of how to fix the world:
We don't intend to debate the liberal ideal here -
we believe in it. We think it's the only sane
ideal among all choices, because it doesn't
expect the individual or the society to do the
same things over and over again only to get the
same undesirable results; it expects the
individual to grow on her own terms. What we
intend, is to frame a scientific perspective that
allows both believers in democracy, and the
opposition, to coexist and prosper in the
inevitable transition to a democratic world. For
if this transition is not inevitable, extinction of
the species is all we can look forward to.
We are trying not to write a political tractate -
facts are as they are, and we offer to explore a
fact-based scientific, not political, solution.
Politics, nevertheless, can as easily pave the way
for science as for special interests that pay for
their privileges with expensive lobbying of
legislators.
We may see a particular structural model, then,
as a mode of communication by which individuals, and cultural/political organizations of
individuals, can freely contribute to the
common well and drink from it, without being drowned in some doctrine of forced behavior.9
The motivation for Lim, et al, derives from Bar- Yam's extensive research in complex systems,
culminating in the theory of multi-scale variety. This theory generalizes the principle that
lateral, rather than hierarchical, distribution of activity and information drives system
effectiveness: "In considering the requirements of multi-scale variety more generally, we can state
that for a system to be effective, it must be able to coordinate the right number of components to
serve each task, while allowing the independence of other sets of components to perform their
respective tasks without binding the actions of
one such set to another." 10
Underlying is a hidden assumption we wish to make obvious: human free will transcends cultural and
political boundaries; if the means to cooperate is available, the will follows.
The means to guarantee entitlements - food, clothing, shelter, education and mobility - is a
logistics problem.
We want to explore how high-tech logistics
management of many small and redundant
systems, linked in a robust global network,
makes it possible to guarantee equal global
sharing of resources without depriving
individuals of personal access and use of as
much property as they can acquire, in unequal
measure. The idea of ownership in this model
shifts from control of people to control of real
property in a distributed system:
Bar-Yam introduced multi-scale variety, the idea
that independent subsystems allowed to organize
around task coordination at different times on
different scales, makes the larger system
effective. One can summarize: locally efficient
use of resources assures global effectiveness in
the creative growth of resource availability -
with the caveat that local subsystems remain
independent, because otherwise the drain on
local resources will reduce subsystem
effectiveness and cause an undesirable positive
feedback loop by lack of sufficiently varied
resources to sustain required tasks.
A remarkable 2006 result of Dan Braha and
Yaneer Bar-Yam 17 demonstrated that in a selforganized
communication network, a
continuously shifting hub of distributed activity
causes the map to sometimes vary quickly and
radically on local scales over short time
intervals, even while the map itself shows little
global change aggregated over long time
intervals.
This abstract model would mirror complex
military movements and communications, if we
considered the map as a theater of operations thesize of the globe. That is, each communicator in
the network has at their workstation all the
necessary resources to deliver a message and
coordinate events, sometimes acting as the hub
of activity, sometimes as the beneficiary of
information and sometimes as provider of
information. Point is, the metastability of the
system over time suggests that a continually
shifting range of activity represented by
changing hub configurations is self limiting; as a
result, the global domain is largely protected
from the danger of positive feedback - i.e., a loss
of system control and potential widespread selfreinforcing
destruction.
Etc.
Didn't answer my question. What leader? What act? I think you understood not a word of what I wrote.
Eckard, I think that an equitable distribution of resources, even with unequal consumption, will obviate 'leaders' entirely on the global level, and the need for them. The world is capable of self organizing around our common needs and desires, so long as we are willing to give up control of people, in favor of rational control of resources.
You bet, John. Thanks.
Tom,
I can't transfer enough parts in a single message. My message is: save us from saviors of the world. What we get is: Disruption; Sanity checks; Censorship; Blacklisting; Containment; Violence; etc.
James Putnam
The leader in my question was Yaneer Bar-Yam.
James Putnam
Then you are absolutely wrong, and don't comrehend a thing of what I've written.
Tom,
One misses concrete examples. For instance the Lim quote ("Violence arises due to the structure of boundaries between groups rather than as a result of inherent conflicts between the groups themselves") sounds meaningful, it makes linguistic sense, but what happens if it's applied to, say, Israel-Palestine or Northern Ireland? What are the "structures of the boundaries" as differentiated from the "inherent conflicts between the groups themselves"? More specificity please.
The sideways idea is interesting. It has a warrant in the structure of societies in mid-evolution (say the feudal period in Western Europe ... distributed nodes were definitely the game). Studying the history trading routes is always fascinating. Why do societies become increasingly hierarchical and centralized? Actually, Marx had some thoughts about that. So does Pitteky more recently. It has a lot to do with initial conditions plus the fact that accumulation tends to accumulate accumulatively.
A TV show my wife and I watch (we even record it when we're not home) is "Down East Dickering" on the History Channel. I see it as a sideways model even though I'm not conned by the scripted quality of some of the narrative. Anyway you observe wealth being created and consumed on a very elemental level by imaginative exchange of goods and services by skilled and decent people who know what they're doing. It makes one proud to be a human being.
Actually it's Pikkety.
