a long shot

real cause; money multiplies, earth doesn't

2008-09-19T10:00:00.001-04:00

Money will multiply as long as there are profits, because people with money multiply their own profits that way. As JM Keynes among others pointed out, when real productivity approaches limits, multiplying money will drive profits to zero. Driving profits to zero triggers waves of collapse, providing a means for our responding to our limits on earth.

It takes a little exploration to lead people to just how the present waves of money collapse are directly related to declines in the profitability of the earth, but that’s a major contributor and the first cause. Correcting the various immediate causes won’t fix that first cause. None of the other causes would have mattered if profits were still multiplying dramatically as compounding money needs to remain stable.

Do yourself a favor, read my own or other peoples’ writings on it to find better questions for yourself. Explorers starve or get buried by avalanches for reading to pass judgment. You can come up with open questions in a blink, so don’t turn any page without finding one.

Best,

Phil Henshaw ¸¸¸¸.·´ ¯ `·.¸¸¸¸

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
212-795-4844 680 Ft.Washington Ave NY NY 10040 pfh@synapse9.com

"it's not finding what people say interesting, but finding the interest in what they say"

Now I've grown up!

2008-04-19T22:42:00.002-04:00

It may appear that everything I've ever said before was foolish... or at least from a different point of view. I still perhaps have some leftover habits from when I, like lots of other people, thought that showing other people how they were wrong might interest them in finding if I was right, and then look for a common understanding. I assumed I would someday find people whose sincerity in that way would be unquestionable. I thought I grew up with people like that. Well, lots of people's sincerity is genuine, but fragile in directions that mine may be strong in, and strong in directions where my own may be weak.

I'm still working on the same thing, reconnecting the mental and the physical. The human dream world is what we think makes us who we are, but we also have the chance and the ability to move on from where it has taken us. It need not be a farewell at all, of course, and connecting with reality certainly need not be the draconian kind of'dealing with reality' that it is often portrayed as. Well… paying attention to what’s happening in the small and large events swirling around you is good work, and will definitely have payback.

Phil

Overshoot self-correction to collapse in the S&P 500 Mar-Aug 07

2007-08-23T00:02:00.001-04:00

What's it look like to you?

The price swings in the S&P 500 over the last 4 months seem to display the natural complex system self-controls of the financial system 'fishtailing' to the point of failure. I've been talking about seeing that in the decision making about future energy sources as well. I think this type of systemic failure is generally the consequence of pushing self-correction mechanisms beyond their response limits. Trying to respond to each other too little and too late amplifies and leads to all failing at once. I don't know how to measure that directly, but observe the same system physics operating as in many other dynamic disordering cascades like the onset of turbulence in flows, and draw the conclusion from that.

[in case you notice, I label the downward overshoots as occurring at the top of the cycle, as they should be, because the overshoots are in the rates of change]

Link to latest quote: http://channels.netscape.com/pf/chart_quote.jsp?TickerSymbols=%24INX&time=6&ctype=hloc

In response you want to think of it as stabilizing the pumps that are going out of control. You want to relieve the pressures by turning off the pumps, and really hope someone takes a whole systems point of view toward seeing what's next.

smaller image - http://www.synapse9.com/issues/S&PmovementsAug07-Sm.jpg

larger image - http://www.synapse9.com/issues/S&PmovementsAug07-L.jpg

Phil Henshaw                       ¸¸¸¸.·´ ¯ `·.¸¸¸¸
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
680 Ft. Washington Ave
NY NY 10040
tel: 212-795-4844
e-mail: id@synapse9.com
explorations: www.synapse9.com

whether successfully averted for the moment or not, ...

2007-08-18T12:36:00.001-04:00

Hi folks,

...this week's global run on credit seems like a casebook example of how a natural system failure to provide growing physical returns on investment would effect financial commitments for endlessly growing financial returns. The naturally conflict.

One thing we can do is watch it closely, so others may learn from our experience. Because systemic collapse is a big physical process in a big physical system, displaying all-together new kinds of rapidly spreading behaviors, watch for that. If you see that sort of thing perhaps you'll 'believe your eyes and ears' and not feel the observations were 'planted' in your imagination somehow. Remember what things seemed to mean before and after and make note of it.

---

I've been using the mismatch between our unlimited economic expectations and their certain disappointment as a way to learn about natural systems and how they fool us for about 30 years. It's remains a rich and engaging subject. In June I sent out my first 'system collision warning' ever, initially in a post to the AIA environment forum. I said I thought the surprise discovery by the ethanol investors in May, that ethanol couldn't have the land they wanted because milk producers raised the price, signaled the tip of the growth system's physical collision with the earth we've all been waiting for, 'the big crunch'. The same kind of 'fishtailing' in the steering mechanisms of the world economic system I observed then in the energy markets also seems clear in the rapid, large scale, and indecisive maneuvering this week by financial institutions.

Just because growth expectations are fulfilled, even for hundreds of years, doesn't mean it's not certain that natural systems will fail them, and so our financial design that requires growth for it's own stability is a mistake. If this week's threatened global financial collapse is just a warning, well, then do take it as a warning.

Phil Henshaw                       ¸¸¸¸.·´ ¯ `·.¸¸¸¸
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
680 Ft. Washington Ave
NY NY 10040
tel: 212-795-4844
e-mail: id@synapse9.com
explorations: www.synapse9.com

RE: internalism...& things missing from approximation

2006-09-03T12:57:00.000-04:00

Stan,
Approximation sweeps away 'fuzziness', and one thing your and my conceptions are completely consistent on is "any system during its development moves from being more vague to becoming more definitely embodied". There are issues in differentiating descriptive, explanatory, and organizational/behavioral 'fuzziness', but it's those "fuzzy bits" that are the main thing approximation sweeps away. But studying the 'fuzziness' is central to finding the half of the universe that physics missed.

My analytical approach interprets it as evidence of the transitional systems which frequently can be found to have periods of implied derivative continuity in their measures, displaying some of their evolving internal dynamic structures. That's what I've been carefully studying for the last many years, but now mostly play with the wordings for to find some way to communicate.

Your grasp of the links to other fuzzy ways of thinking about the subject (it's history and citations) is far superior to mine, and hopefully I'll get a chance to ask you some questions about it shortly. When the research wave called 'fuzzy logic' hit, for example, I never thought it interesting because it seemed to be further interpreting the world as a set of fixed rules with a universal noise machine attached. Maybe I should look closer at that and other approaches. Remember, I'm with Einstein and don't think God rolls dice. God lets things develop on their own from the inside, but that's different from making changes without processes or causation.

Another thing we'd totally agree on is the unique individuality of events, and a third is "As a system hardens into senescence via the accumulation of information to the point of overload, it becomes unable to marshal the requisite variety needed to survive perturbations, and gets recycled". What is specifically meant by some of this remains "fuzzy" to me, to be more fully detailed by reference to the real shapes of things to be observed in their natural stages.

Would you say that opportunity is the principal cause of causal loops?, and so the principal interest of an internalist perspective, whereas opportunity is largely invisible to an externalist perspective and so usually ignored?

I had a nice long conversation on FRIAM with Nicholas Thompson on the meaning of homing systems in nature, and their taxonomies, ending in proposing it as a natural scale of consciousness. To summarize what I got out of it, thermostats have loops, and so an interior, but only a one dimensional awareness of the world. Natural systems with various levels of homeostasis have internal worlds of greater complexity and evident multi-dimensional awareness and responses to their environments. Mammals, consider a mouse strategically scurrying for it's hole and apparently homing to an abstract image, all have precognition on various rather high levels.

Nick initially seemed concerned with whether considering a thermostat to have any measure of consciousness would mean human experience was no longer unique. Part of the idea as it developed, is that having a taxonomic scale of emergent levels for consciousness meant there might be great distances between its ends and branches. fyi I think human consciousness is different in several ways, even if most of the difference traditionally seen comes from the externalist point of view that only humans have anything inside at all.

That somewhat extreme and faulty notion may be, itself, a pointer to one of the things so different about human consciousness. Our mental worlds are so very rich and complete, and compelling, they hardly need any support in reality whatever, i.e. we're able to be self-deceived in profound ways. What's the way around that?... perhaps watching the fuzzy bits in the natural connections, the indelible unique emergence of things. I think once people can observe them it naturally becomes exhausting to try to fake them..., making a stimulating natural bond between mind and reality!

... anyway, that's one of the main things I see missing from approximation... :,)

'dice' or 'approximation', does it matter?

2006-08-06T12:44:00.000-04:00

I've been meaning to do some new digging on Einstein's enigmatic complaint. In a recent program on Channel 13 (I think, but I can't locate it now) a recognized physicist portrayed Einstein as unable to accept uncertainty in nature, and that view seems to be becoming one of the prevalent understandings of the issue (see Wiki link below). On the face of it, since Einstein was a founder of statistical physics, it seems unlikely. "God doesn't roll dice", is about something else. One of the things I finally found today to expose the deeper issue was Niels Bohr's long, polite, emphatic last-word on the subject (Bohr 1949). Bohr says that what Einstein objected to in QM was the elimination of causality and continuity.

"Yet, a certain difference in attitude and outlook remained, since, with his mastery for coordinating apparently contrasting experience without abandoning continuity and causality, Einstein was perhaps more reluctant to renounce such ideals than someone for whom renunciation in this respect appeared to be the only way open to proceed with the immediate task."

Curiously, the violations of theory or nature expected by both sides in this long debate don't seem to have turned up in the many decades of argument and experiment. QM works fine, so apparently the bizarre way in which QM treats physical events as occurring without taking any time or involving any process, i.e. abstractly following rules in the complete absence of any means for doing so, doesn't matter. Both Einstein's (impossible) and Bohr's (necessary) views on the matter seem to have been simply wrong.

I guess my preference is the conservative approach. If it doesn't matter whether the disconnects of nature expressed by our best tool are physical or informational, there's no need to argue about it (i.e. within the 'shut up and calculate' school of thinking). The matter is far from settled, I realize, since provocative proofs like those of Bell's hypothesis seem to support the idea that QM's weirdness is physically real. That real weirdness still appears to be entirely contained, and to not violate causality and continuity anywhere other that within QM, however.

Where I think it may ultimately matter is in encouraging the idea generally that nature functions as a set of abstract rules without processes, rather than through incompletely understood physical processes which our rules approximate. I think whether you interpret nature is physical or informational on a macro scale probably matters a lot. The two models at least appear functionally different and need to be looked at.

The central problem I see with interpreting physical events as a function of rules is that those rules need to either refer to definable things, or to have a player. I don't think either of those is demonstrable as a generality, and the opposite is much more the usual appearance of the problem.

Is there anywhere it would really matter, one way or another?

------------- Niels Bohr 1949 Discussion with Einstein on epistemological problems in atomic physics. http://minerva.tau.ac.il/physics/bsc/3/3144/bohr.pdf

------------- Wiki link - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Einstein "Einstein never rejected probabilistic techniques and thinking, in and of themselves. Einstein himself was a great statistician, [19] using statistical analysis in his works on Brownian motion and photoelectricity and in papers published before 1905; Einstein had even discovered Gibbs ensembles. According to the majority of physicists, however, he believed that indeterminism constituted a criteria for strong objection to a physical theory."

Calculus for History Majors

2006-04-26T00:44:00.000-04:00

As we discover the huge role complex natural systems have in change of all kinds, we’re finding that evolving systems are our environment, the whole context and much of the shape of history. It’s high time history majors learned about the best method available for reading their changes. A most curious and revealing thing about complex systems is that the first evidence of emergent change is often a display of the physical property that corresponds to the central mathematical idea of calculus, continuity. In a mathematical function you can define a slope, and the same is true of almost any real change in complex systems. Complex systems evolve through progressions, and applying a logic like that of calculus to measures of change over time shows you where the progressions emerge from the noise and when they shift. It reveals a great deal about the nature of a system because it provides direct evidence of it’s creative behavior as a whole.

That has never been the reason for teaching calculus, but it should be. The usual reason for teaching calculus is to give students their first (after 9^th grade geometry) emersion experience in rigorous mathematical thinking. For history majors a little taste of that would give insight into the history of ideas, but it would give them little of use for understanding the world around them. Natural systems are not snapped together out of perfectly fitting parts like a mathematical proof is. They go through periods of eventful and uneventful change, well, like the history of civilizations, climates, ecologies, languages and life in general do. The basic partly mathematical question is when can you look at a series of dots, and call it a curve? When can you say change has shape? If it has shape, it likely involves a complex system, and you can read the dynamics of the shape to identify change in the system’s internal structures. There is no single test, of course, since no series of dots gives a definitive description of anything, especially not a complex system. It’s a kind of forensic exercise, finding shapes in the data, and clues in the shape that can validate them, often taking special note of periods of growth or decay, isolating the central continuity by reading through the noise and fluctuations, to find the consistent progressions that hold up to scrutiny..

In a sense what historians will be doing with a tool like this is original systems-physics research on the subjects in which they are immersed, since natural systems are essentially locally original worlds of internal physical relationships, unique separate universes. Some complex natural systems might be amenable to mathematical description, but surely not most. What they’re more amenable to is story telling, which can be very usefully grounded in fact by directly reading the shapes of their evolutionary events, using the underlying ideas of calculus. It’s just calculus reshaped a little for exploring things beyond mathematics in the new world.

Phil's state of the planet 06

2006-04-05T23:35:00.000-04:00

Last week I had a rare privilege to be exposed to some of the best of the visionary hard science and planning for saving the Earth from its more glaring human catastrophes. There’s a very bright picture, with an unusually dark side. Were in genuinely deep trouble. The conference was put on by Columbia Univ. Earth Institute, Jeffrey Sachs director and leader.

The bright side is that there does seem to be a path for changing energy consumption technologies in the developed world to keep ocean levels from rising more than 3 to 10 feet in the next century, holding it to a quarter of what it might well be, if we follow a fairly tightly scripted science-led and politically driven global program. There are also slightly less clear but equally hopeful ways to keep the rapid growth of impoverished and incompetent human populations from increasing to a point of combined environmental and population collapse. There are a variety of neat technologies and excellent strategies embodied in the UNs Millennium Development Goals (MDG), for developing competence in impoverished communities, but these also need to be science led and politically driven.

No, political movement I know of has ever done anything like these things before, except for the US A-bomb or the moon shot projects, but not to worry. The insurance companies are onto the severe consequences of failure and some of the big conglomerates are getting the idea quickly too. Its in no businessman’s interest to operate on a failed and humiliated Earth with population collapse, the loss of most historic coastal development, and the rest of the long list of shocking and embarrassing probable losses. Still, there’s a fighters good chance of turning things around, if everyone joins in and nothing else comes up.

Its hard to pick favorites among polished gems and I just wish everyone had a chance to hear the two days of rapid fire displays of great work in this save the planet field. Two of my favorites among the 30 or so were Steven E. Koonin, the scientist hired by BP to lead their green energy effort, and Stewart Hart who made a very convincing presentation on how visionary investment in the bottom ¾ of the human pyramid (BOP) could power Earths economic development for the next century. I highly recommend that you look around the conference website (below). The original. Power Point presentations are all supposed to be available soon, though I don’t see where they're posted yet.

The dark side it that this save the planet stuff may all be fantasy. The threats seem real enough, and the desire and organizational talent for doing something are quite real too, and its quite impressive how aggressively this community of scientists and planners are expanding their experience with the nature of the global problems we discovering. The problem is no one seems to be looking beyond their experience to why were discovering this stream of huge new nearly insoluble problems. There was no mention of the exploding footprints of endlessly accelerating economic development, no questioning of the economys rigid rule of ever more rapidly accelerating expansion. Its quite ridiculous, but they acted as if it was just dandy to trundle buckets around for the sorcerers apprentice. I think its a total disaster. Were stupidly accepting as our quest and duty to solve ever more insoluble problems and dont give even 5 minutes of time to what is making our amazing ever increasingly complex problems ever more insoluble. There’s science for that too, but somebody’s got to ask!

Another of my favorite presenters at the conference, who pointed out how our ways of solving problems sometimes consistently make them worse, was Parker Mitchell of Engineers w/o Borders who went through a variety of stories of how the best intentioned technology interventions in 3rd world communities failed the test of organic fit. A 'failure of organic fit' a precise statement of what’s wrong with our intervention in Iraq, for example. We have great intentions but are making a God awful mess because we have no idea what were doing, trying to reengineer someone else's natural human communities that have completely different ways of thinking from us. Our failure with the under developed world is the same thing. It is my belief that the whole rapid growth of the incompetent majority portion of the human population (see John Coomber & Joel Cohen ) is the direct fault of incompetent charity over the past century, and that’s where we really need soul searching and better technique. Well, that, and understanding the growth imperative and how to get rid of the stupid thing.

State of the Planet 06
http://www.earth.columbia.edu/
http://www.earthinstitute.columbia.edu/sop2006/about.html

4 of many great presenters
Steven E. Koonin,
http://www.earthinstitute.columbia.edu/sop2006/bios/koonin_s.html
Stewart Hart
http://www.earthinstitute.columbia.edu/sop2006/bios/hart_s.html
John Coomber
http://www.earthinstitute.columbia.edu/sop2006/bios/coomber_j.html
Joel Cohen
http://www.earthinstitute.columbia.edu/sop2006/bios/cohen_j.html
Parker Mitchell
http://www.earthinstitute.columbia.edu/sop2006/bios/mitchell_p.html

How could we possibly tell?

2006-03-29T09:17:00.000-05:00

How could we tell whether we've ended up being at war with the natural defenses of the indigenous dessert community of Iraq? The fact that the behavior of the 'insurgency' is seemingly so illogical and counter productive for what would be presumed to be their own interests is one good clue. Natural system responses are not planned or based on policy analysis, but on gut reactions. Quite often enough natural system defense mechanisms are self defeating. In biological systems there are lots of ways defense mechanisms mistakenly attack the body they're supposedly acting to defend. We call it MS or allergies or inflammation. In Iraq the field of conflict has now become very complicated, with apparently several different communities, and us, all involved in attacking each other in the name of protecting themselves, to the clear detriment of anyone's actual good interests. It's inter-community mayhem, and apparently our responsibility for setting it off.

Back when it was ghostly quiet in Iraq, the days and weeks following our invasion, the fall of Baghdad and our scattering of the structures of government, the first sign of independent organization arising in that land were the scattered crazy desert renegades running out into the open and shooting at the passing massive army of ‘liberation’. Our guys thought that was really hilarious and mowed them down. Then a few days later they came out in two’s, and then in four’s, this time hiding behind the burning wrecks. As their style evolved it exhibited the classic easily recognizable progression of exponential growth. At that time in our own internal political conversation we were still deceived by an illusion that Iraq presented an imminent danger to us, still not aware that we invaded another country without a single scrap of solid evidence of a threat. Here was the first evidence of the reality on the ground, and we thought it was a joke.

What should you say when you’re in an unfamiliar situation and see evidence of growth in response. Well, the thing you usually say about a really big important learning experience is “ah ha!” because growth is clear concrete and reliable evidence of something much bigger going on. We should have said the obvious, “take me to your leader, you are people we need to include in returning Iraq to it’s natural owners, we apologize for mistaking you for someone else in the confusion”. There was a real window of opportunity that we missed.

What we chose to say about it, and still choose, is to call them ‘thugs’, trying the same trick of character assassination that has been so productive for our political establishment throughout it’s rise to power. It’s a great little shortcut to power to slay your opponents with self aggrandizing insults, but it makes the natural world your enemy.

Risky Play

2006-02-17T00:19:00.000-05:00

Anyone in charge of almost any kind of organization, throwing a party, running a business, etc., will want it to build up to a point where it’s exciting, but not to where you loose control. You usually want things to approach the edge of stability, but not go over it. It’s fun, and in business, makes money and gets the most out of everyone.

Perhaps the deep sort of common experience that explains it is playing with a water hose as a kid. The fun really begins when someone turns up the pressure and the person holding the nozzle at the time (usually one of the girls) gets scared and lets go. It wasn’t the pressure so much that made the hose go out of control, but naturally slow reaction times in correcting minor mistakes holding it steady that multiply. Everyone flees screaming their heads off, having a wonderful time. It’s the same edge involved with the inherent thrill and danger of speed. Playing the edge of control makes a great contest with yourself or others, and going over it in a harmless way, is often huge and memorable fun. Dangerous play, like driving ever faster up a mountain road, is huge fun too. Only those who know the fine edge of what is and is not play survive it, however.

Unfortunately our economic system does not know where that fine edge is at all. It has no brain. Over the past few centuries it’s been huge fun always exceeding our expectations, even granting that it’s been more fun for some than others. However you rate the experience, though, as operated the world economy is positively destined to go out of control. Continually multiplying the through-put of a system necessarily leads to multiplying mistakes in controlling it, i.e. destructive consequences as critical signals multiply faster than competent responses. Where I think you can see that today is in critical issue overload. The common thread to all our competing great world problems is that they can’t be solved because people are distracted by all the other multiplying great world problems. There are also a certain number of poignant glaring mistakes being made and going unattended.

Many of us would point to one or another favorite issue, loss of security, loss of rights, rising major climate change, extinctions, etc. Some of us have long and growing lists. Here are two I’m really bothered by. The US is attacking terrorism in a way that terrorizes the major religious community it comes from. It seems basically incorrect and profoundly dangerous. In comparison, perhaps it’s just perfectly laughable that the controlling political movement in the US is trying to restore simpler times at home by disabling government functions and shifting government debt and taxes from the rapidly growing part of the economy (investment) to the completely non-growing part (wage earning). It doesn’t fit our myth in several ways, granted, but seems to be happening. It’s totally operatic!

So this is what I think. Growth has been fun for a long time, mostly staying on the fine edge of play. That has apparently ended. There are things that can be done about it, to get the fun and fair play back, non-disruptive and highly effective things potentially, but paying a price of another kind. It’s a new kind of physics that touches personal matters. For some it would be admitting we’re licked, when every bone in our bodies refuses, only because reason paints a vividly clear picture of the alternative. For some it would be admitting that humanity is just another living thing in the sense of having a life of growth and maturation like anything else, with no special dispensations on that part of life of any kind. For some it would be feeling queer about the need for inventing a new kind of control strategy. We need to make a global group decision, yielding to self-interests so plainly drawn that we choose to give up what many feel is a sacred right, to passively multiply our savings, in order to retain continually evolving stable free market business and political lives.

I have an unusual vantage point, and my writings are frequently found to be unsatisfying because of it I think. It would really help me make my work more accessible if you complained about where it falls short, over-reaches, seems just plain wrong or unbalanced, or whatever. I seem to somehow have learned how to look at complex natural systems, those things where the whole is greater than the sum of their parts, from the inside and outside at the same time. Most people just don’t recognize that things that grow even have an organizational inside. Most people don’t recognize that their own image of the world even has an outside. Yes, having a strange perspective is problematic, and a pain in some ways, but it also exposes tremendous beauty and occasionally fabulous choices where there seemed to be none before. It apparently came from and continues to be, I guess, a somewhat risky form of play.

By 2020 - The Year of Clear Vision

2006-02-10T21:59:00.000-05:00

By 2020 the investors of the world will see their self-interest and stop compounding their returns, allowing the global economy to climax at a high stable rate of change, forestalling the climax of investment by expectation failures, environmental collapse, conflict and mistakes.

The real limit of economic growth is mistakes. I mention this because exponentials are spookily explosive, seem like nothing & follow w/ major affects. If you see a road sign saying 'Curve Ahead' you know if the car starts tipping it's too late to slow down. The curve of an exponential gets ever more radical the further you take it, and it's a mistake not to slow down.

The explosively increasing complications of growth are already quite evident. Look at how nearly all responders to Katrina were disabled by confusion. That's what information overload does when things really matter. I think many people failed miserably, but can't entirely fault them for being dumbfounded with deciding what to do in the midst of a general system failure. That's what Katrina was, and it can go global. Soon we'll see this as inherent in the exploding complexity of endlessly accelerating change, and that it is an absolute and dangerous limit to economic growth.

Seeing growing errors from making huge decisions too fast brings the problem home. Look at global warming and the historic frequency of radical climate change. Long Island is just a sand bar after all, and it's not outside reasonable possibilities that we'd have to significantly abandon it. Take the 30 year failure of wage growth and exploding deficit spending and completely impossible long term budgets that disguise it. We have all kinds intractable problems that are different in kind from any that humans have ever dealt with, like the one addressed here. How do we calm explosive economic change when all the financial drivers of it seem so inviolate? Self interest. Our great problems are too big, changing too fast and seemingly hopeless, it’s all bad news, over our heads, and most people are just not interested. It becomes apparent that we will be making major changes in how we live, either the easy way or the hard way. Against all indications, I think we'll choose the easy way. Having to cope with a failed global system is simply not part of the standard business model, and someone’s going to notice.

Fortunately an actual ‘easy’ way exists, and it's kind of cool, more than a little radical, but possible and cool, and matches the core problem to a ‘T’. There's a built-in control valve. We can choose to cap our historic cultural and economic leap from the Middle Ages (starting 600 years ago when growth began) and maintain a high stable rate of change. It can be done with a suspiciously potent but simple change of habit, spending investment returns. Multiplying the returns on investment by reinvesting them is the direct mechanism of exponentially driven change. Letting go of only the multiplying part would allow the economies, otherwise largely unaltered, the freedom to continue rapidly evolving. Government will give us better information about natural systems, but there would be no threat to free market individual or business decisions. We'd go forward with fresh purpose and vision earned from the experience.

Spending the returns is also the one non-disruptive way to bleed excess pressure from economic bubbles (if you can identify the parts). It might be done in massive emergency quantities in order to reverse the collapse of what you could call the 600 year bubble, presently building. It might be possible to turn the clock back a little after otherwise irreversibly beginning a collapse. More study of the option would clearly be needed, but it's basically just the readily available option for individuals to ask their investment fund mangers for their gains in order to spend or donate them. One simple way to start would be a tax policy to eliminate taxes on investment returns that are consumed, i.e. passed on to others with no lingering strings attached.

That and further steps in the same direction would raise sales, employment and incomes, reducing government expenses and raising government revenue, and by rejuvenating them, slow disinvestment in established businesses, methods, skills, plans, purposes and people... maintaining the real level of investment at or near it's highs, allowing continued rapid change. What makes it possible to see all this, is considering the system as a whole, and studying the kinds of evolving systems that achieve changes of state, that we might copy.

Construction Estimate

2006-02-05T12:42:00.000-05:00

The question is what's our exposure on global warming. For one small part of it we may need to build a 10 foot high sea wall on the entire world coastline. My guestimate is that that would be about $5,000/ft for the cost of straight forward construction on solid ground. It would be far less than the reimbursement of property owners for the first 10 ft elevation of their property. The earth's coastline is about 844,000 km, though I doubt that includes the intricacies of wetlands and estuaries etc. The places where environmental protection, waterfront access or shipping locks and other things are needed would also add to the cost. Maybe you'd just say screw it and screw them with half the world's coastline and cut the losses with that part of it. The places that wouldn't be saved from rising waters by a sea wall include big sand bars like Long Island New York. It's just a pile of sand, and it leaks. They already have a problem with salt polution of limited fresh water and ten feet of sea water might make it largely uninhabitable anyway. Given that we take a few losses like that, the base cost of the sea wall is about $13 trillion, with some significant upside risk and liability and some embarrassing possible savings. Hmmm.... What could we do with a spare $13 trillion and the remaining shreads of our integrity (as if we had it to spare) ?

-a great lecture on the paleoclimatology http://www.agu.org/webcast/Overpeck.html -

Looking up the cost of scrubbing the CO2 you find various things, that maybe there's no way to do it, from an environmental group (http://groups.msn.com/AAEA/carbondioxide.msnw), and that "direct air-CO2 capture may be able to compete with technologies for reducing CO2 emissions from vehicles and other small or mobile sources" from University of Calgary researchers (http://www.businessedge.ca/article.cfm/newsID/10181.cfm). Their plan is to use direct air extraction of CO2 in locations where there are efficient ground storage strata. If that worked it would allow global barter of licensed pollution shares and control of greenhouse warming without changing all our energy technologies. Hay, I got an idea, lets do that! Note, this is hardly a comprehensive review of the technologies out there, but I think quite accurate about the relative panic situation we are actually in. Yes the cheapest CO2 reduction measures at present are probably still in conservation, but conservation is inherently a diminishing return and producing multiplying returns with it is contradictory. Yea it's complicated, but let's hope someone around here is about to take the Earth seriously.

There's still an obvious question, where do we even get the money for the cheaper solutions? Here's where I gloss over all the details and leave you with a disconnect. The one large uncommitted asset for change is always the returns on investment, the flow of funds individuals usually use to reinvest and multiply their personal influence and future returns in a changing world. In all natural systems that same flow seems to exist, but gets passed on freely, effectively composed of rewards for good work received passed on as rewards for good work done. It's the pass-through of legitimate earnings into legitimate earnings that gets blocked by reinvestment and is causing the mounting 600 year bubble we're presently in. See, I glossed over everything and left you with two ropes, one in each hand, and maybe no way to connect...

Pealing the Onion

2006-01-22T15:34:00.000-05:00

The clear root of terrorism is a major world religious community that has come to look at us with such horror and disgust that they approve of their sons blowing themselves up in protest. That seems more than strange, but no one seems to be trying to explain it. From an evidence point of view, facts are facts, though.

That community seems to see something about us from the outside that we can’t see from the inside. The difference between inside and outside views of natural systems is a common blindspot. No doubt, looking closely at someone else’s ugly reflections of us is unpleasant, and they may be really missing things too, but because any complaint has some valid basis, it could be important for us to consider it.

We long have, and still do, actually seem to be blowing ourselves to smithereens with money, and we have often appeared to hold all else in profound disregard. As our speed of change accelerates with compounding investment, and we maintain confidence that growth will solve even the exploding crop of imbalances it creates in our lives, we now seem to be loosing control of events to boot. Two cultures, at war, both mesmerized by blowing themselves up. It’s a remarkable parallel.

The right freedom to protect

2005-10-29T08:09:00.000-04:00

Delaware Supreme Court didn't actually give a blanket protection for the anonymity of abusive speech, though that's how the decision has been portrayed on NPR. Biz Report says it found that Smyrna town councilman Patrick Cahill needed to make a stronger case that he and his wife, Julia, had been defamed before forcing Comcast Cable to disclose the identity of an anonymous blogger. A blanket protection for anonymous abusive speech is not what we want. We all have to accept harms to our own interests to protect the good of our common interest, and the harm of personally admitting to abusive speech is a small price to pay for protection from abusive incitement from secret sources.

The right to be vicious in your speech, just so long as it isn't really true, as argued on "On the Media" today, is stretching the purpose of freedom of speech the wrong way. What we need to protect is a freedom of truthful speech, with a generous tolerance for misunderstanding, misstatement, colorful expression and the pain of exposure. Protecting internet anonymity for the purpose of encouraging incendiary misstatement is wrong. Just because some harm to an author might be prevented by hiding their identity in some cases, there's a greater harm in allowing an open season on the truth with a blanket protection of anonymous sources.

Among other things it would imply that abuses of free speech like the "Swift Boat Vets for Truth" could be done anonymously. Wild speech does come up occasionally, and should be protected and seen for what it is, including who says it. Guaranteeing anonymity opens the door to abusive, deceitful and criminal incitement, the opposite of what free speech is intended to guarantee. I personally think that public interests should be capable of identifying any source on the web, and that free thinking people should do the work of holding them accountable for using it responsibly.

Crimewave's end again

2005-10-22T19:47:00.000-04:00

On Aug. 7 this year I posted "A Quick Study" of this same history of murder rates in New York State. The relatively sudden and very final end of the murder crimewave, that started in the 60's innercity unrest, is a dramatic indicator of an internal cultural change. Unlike the major community change of heart in the 60's that lead to the crime wave, the end was by a similar dramatic community change of heart that was largely silent. The question is, what happened?

The strong systems indicator in the curve is how it rapidly shifts from high and bumpy to low and dead flat, a clear change of state. There's really no outside factor yet identified that matches that timing or finality of change, nor explains the more or less sudden relief from a long persistent culture of violence. In that post I also commented that in the studies I'd read it was odd that no one seems to have asked the people involved what they thought happened. There probably are some scientists who have done so, but I decided to go ask the question on the streets of NYC myself, and see what I got. It's good reading.(http://www.synapse9.com/cw/cw_interview_notes_10-22_audio.pdf)

It certainly is only one data set, but does expose an unheard from inside point of view. I just handed out a blow-up of the curve asking "were you around here in the 90's", and "do you remember what happened here", leading them a little until they proposed something they remembered going on that might have caused it. The file contains brief notes reflecting 50 good conversations with people, four audio file links, and my compilation of the reasons people gave. It's always great to get out and talk to people, and one rarely has something to ask them that is so central to their own lives and mysterious at the same time. Judge for yourself. Naturally I described what I could make sense of, but people raised some very interesting things.

Among the big missing pieces of data, from a systems point of view, is whether each city of NYS had the same trend as the aggregate (all of them together), and particularly whether the turning points for each city were all at the same time, or in sequence. That would suggest or rule out several paths of causation. One might also ask, did I bias my findings by possibly asking the questions in a way that determined the answer I got? People do indeed commonly find what they're looking for because of that. Well, I found something like I was looking for, but I tried to be careful about that. I did push people to recall what was going on inside the culture, events without names, things easily forgotten. From my own experience of living on West 96th street at the time I thought the turnaround might have had something to do with those amazing memorial murals that the wild style graffiti artists made on handball walls all over town for the families and friends of the victims of the street. I never guessed that when I asked people about that specifically they would remember but not give it much importance. The timing and kind of message of those memorials sent is a good match for the timing and kind of change that occurred though... so who knows. That a huge sudden change in our local culture of such enormous importance would go essentially unnoticed is still the most amazing thing.

Ok Ok, I give up

2005-10-04T20:48:00.000-04:00

What remains hidden in the hot debate over "intelligent design" and Darwin's evolution, miraculously, is the strategic location of the odd gaps in the fossil record. Where they're located is rather embarrassing to both sides.

I think if you're thinking clearly about the problem, not defending one side or the other, the answer is obvious. The gaps in the record contain almost all the biological change that the theory of 'little steps' is supposed to explain, occurring at the origin of most species. Evolution actually proceeds by big steps (the dirty truth). The chain of connection from species to species is still obvious, it's just that the steps between them are big, separated by long periods without change. It's deceptively called "punctuated equilibrium" (not 'big steps' which would actually expose the problem), invented by Steve Gould and Paul Eldridge in 1972. Not too bad a summary is available at http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/punc-eq.html.

Most scientists have been trying to hide the real truth ever since, saying stupid things like "that's what Darwin meant all along", and the "fitness landscape must just have that profile" etc. Blaming it on the Deity, on the other hand, having him intervening again and again and again, at the origin of every species in the long long chains of them, makes him look stupid or at the very least indecisive. Worse still, God is then portrayed as a major interventionist strangely uncaring about *us* and our squabbles. If you understand where the gaps occur (many coordinated changes happening rapidly in a single niche, local growth spurts), how they occur is obvious.

what's the plan man!

2005-09-24T18:06:00.000-04:00

I’m not getting much sleep lately, taking on too much, burning with ideas; not a good plan. But then neither is humanity’s plan for us all to make decisions 16 times faster every lifetime forever. It indicates we’re missing something, like where the heck are we going anyway! Sounds presumptuous perhaps, but I can fix that. The underlying problem is that our perceptions of where we are operate on a sliding scale.

We always see change as a little more or less compared with the present, always sliding our base of reference with the change, and that denies us the overall comprehension of things that would come from seeing where we are on nature’s absolute scales. It takes a little getting used to, but nature uses the same scale for everything, the developmental history scale, growth and decay, adjusted to the time horizon of anything that’s happening. It doesn’t matter whether it’s a spark with an invisible seed that starts from nothing and grows to maximum intensity in a thousandth of a second, or a world civilization with an invisible seed that starts from nothing and grows to maximum intensity in a thousand years. Every kind of happening goes through the four phases of development: Inflation, Integration, Disintegration and Decay, a life cycle. You can read the turning points and judge your place and role in what makes them tip one way or another.

Being oblivious to the consequences of making decisions 16 times faster every lifetime forever(1) is a bad plan. It’s a very very bad plan to do that with your own physical life support system, also designing it to get 16 times bigger every lifetime forever(1). What natural systems do, the ones we’d like to emulate I think, is not to reinvest their positive feedback in compounding rates of growth until they explode with contradictions and collapse. What they find instead is a point in development they’d like to refine to perfection and divert their positive feedbacks to that purpose instead.

Whether to pursue growth to destruction, climaxing your creative efforts with loosing your base, or taking growth to perfection, climaxing your creative efforts with broadening your base, is a very common choice in personal-scale social and business matters of all kinds. What’s keeping mankind from making good common sense decisions about it globally are partly the various vested selfish interests. There’s also the fact that the scientists can see that there must be limits rapidly approaching of all kinds, but have not been able to make any useful model of living systems. More than anything, though, our inability to judge where we are and where we’re going as a civilization is because of its vast scope and that it looks to us as if it was static at any given moment. That appearance is what our sliding scales of perception present us which hides where we are on nature’s absolute scale.

The question is, are we getting messages from the future? Are we heading into a period of ever more rapid dodging of natural limits? Is there anything we’d like to perfect in how we live in this fantastically beautiful place we found to experiment with? What are the likely consequences of pushing the speed of human development, consumption and change to a point of failure? We can each know these answers. All that’s missing is the common sense realization that much of what applies to creative happenings on a personal scale also applies to any other.

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1) 3 1/2% real growth = real doubling of activity to make decisions about every 20 yr. In 80 yr life => 2*2*2*2 = 16 times, making each year's change about half the size of the whole system of 80 years before, forever, supposedly....

Failure in responding to Katrina

2005-09-04T12:03:00.000-04:00

So soon after the embarrassing failure of emergency response it’s a little risky to venture an explanation. The appearance is that government planning for emergency response to “the big one” failed to include providing food and shelter for those stranded by it. My opinion is that the problem was mainly that FEMA kept following the plan they had on file even when it was apparently not working. I think both key failures, the bad plan and bad leadership in response, come from the scale of the problem. The disaster caused by Katrina was different in kind and was treated as only being different in degree.

I really don’t want to minimize the direct fault of the personnel in charge of the state and federal response, even if exemplary ability to change plans in the midst of a crisis may not be in their job description. It should be. The plans that would have worked fine for smaller disasters were incompetent for the bigger one. The “big one” did surprising things. For one, the evacuation plan seemed to selectively evacuate the people who ran everything in response to unexpectedly heavy storm damage and the loss of all communication. The effect was to tear the institutions of community, city and state apart. Blinded and crippled it’s no wonder that the emergency responders could only seem to stagger around. Judging from results, that was the plan.

Looking at it from the other side it’s possible that had the planners noticed that the “big one” would be different in kind they’d also see that the state and federal response would be necessarily inadequate. Maybe the needed difference in response would have been good local civil defense plans and supplies.

If nothing else the people stuck behind have clearly acted helpless and apparently had no civil defense training whatever. That they acted helpless was partly their own fault of course, but if there were only stores of critical supplies left for the purpose, it might have made a huge difference in both fact and appearance. It might take leadership, like federal mandates, to persuade neighborhoods to do adequate civil defense, but the professional planners probably need to do a better job of telling the feds horror stories like that of New Orleans to persuade them to do it.

There’s lots of other blame to go around, for the breach of the levy on Lake Pontchartrain, for building below sea level on a storm path in the first place, etc. The fact is that you can’t always be prepared for the worst and nature is full of hazards. Like one old friend liked reminding me, this is life, and nobody but nobody gets out alive! Ultimately we’re dealing with a crappy hand and making the best of it, and do a rather fine job of that in many ways, exemplified by New Orleans.

My other concern is with the plans for recovery. I won’t say much for the moment but this. A vibrant community, urban spirit and way of life such as New Orleans represents is actually a living thing that grew up on its own without anyone knowing the design. We certainly don’t know how to make these kinds of things that make life wonderful any more than a farmer knows how to make corn without seed. What we can tell about the ‘seed’ of a living community spirit is that it lies in the connections between the people, which the defacto solution for the city was to break and scatter. That is really not good. Galveston was never the same again after it was hit by a great storm, and New Orleans seems sure to be greatly changed too. In life and nature you can never go back. There is, though, a way to improve the chances that the real ancient cultural roots of New Orleans will survive to thrive again. It a lesson that applies to lots of other situations too. Keep the connections going. In the shelters have neighborhood corners, fund the local paper to expand its web site, capture unused public access TV, etc. You can’t tell where that’s going to work, but you can be sure, I think, that the chances of a living community decay rapidly with its connections severed.

Why we're all mostly out of the loop

2005-08-20T16:09:00.000-04:00

From early childhood we’ve all experienced consternation with being shut out of the conversation, say defining circles of friends, that would have been very important to us to feel part of. There are even exclusive story loops within families, between mom and the kids separate from between dad and the kids, for example. Sometimes it’s very funny, and sometimes very sad, what remains hidden from the adjacent conversation. Stories that travel in small circles, defining exclusive communities, are actually everywhere, from determining whether we “get the memo” in the office, are “clued in” on what’s hot in fashion or music or ideas, and even whether we share in the “terrible truth” about the other political party, religion, social movement, nationality or race. Personal and cultural circles are not fixed, of course, but growing and changing their inside stories and how they circulate all the time. Because this is how shared ideas normally develop, within loops, there’s a lot of confusion simply because everyone is left out of most them!

It’s quite fortunate that nature is not nearly as confused by this arrangement as people are. Nature is organized in much the same way, as local behavioral loops that develop and play out in a common environment. Networks of behavioral loops that grow from small beginnings are what ecosystems are, or volcanic eruptions, weather systems or electric sparks, not to mention living organisms. It’s what families, businesses, economies and neighborhoods are too. One thing that all the objects of the world we care about have in common is a loose structure of closed behavioral loops that grew from small beginnings. Nature runs on them like local software. We’re not talking particularly about things having a physical inside and out here, but a behavioral one, like open markets where connections can be made on an anytime/anywhere basis. The parts of two different ‘behavior loops’ can overlap and still remain quite separate, and often do.

Why loops? Well, using a sort of Darwinian explanation, it’s because only loops have the possibility of growth, and only those loops that grow ever get noticed. Sun, soil and rain are absolutely critical to a plant, all being factors that can tip the cascade of events or not, but it's the seed, the network of loops, that grows.

So why are we all so out of the loop? We’re surrounded by them. The unseen structures of nature are hidden inside them. And we’re all just barely starting to figure it out.

8/28 …oh, yea, and… fourthly, their real chains of connection are mostly untraceable and run backward. They’re open chains of opportunity not closed chains of necessity. That screws up most of human reasoning. The behavior loops of nature work like bucket brigades where each person in the chain picks up a bucket from wherever they find it and puts it down where anyone else might pick it up. You’d think this wouldn’t work… and you’d be right, it wouldn’t work to execute any plan. Nature, fortunately, isn’t following a ‘plan’, and that’s why everything gets to follow its own, and interactions are so resilient and flexible! A little more explanation might be in order, but may not be much help for understanding why complex natural systems work ‘oddly’ in that way. Human thinking is more comforted by rules for what is necessary. Well, there are some rules for natural systems (all systems come from growth & what grows is their loops) , but you need to start where you always start, with basic unguarded observation, hoping something soaks in.

A really quick study..

2005-08-07T10:25:00.000-04:00

The curve of murder rates in New York State, from the 1960 to 2004 shows the great US crime wave, a little more dramatic in New York than elsewhere. Notice the shape of the sudden decline at the end. It's an exponential decay curve, (collapse to fading away) that continues. We knew the abrupt decline of the crime rates was mysterious. This is why. Practically the only thing that could explain sudden collapse and decay of crime rates is if part of the crime culture was a living thing, and it died. Could that be? Yes, sure, think of the crimewave as representing a short lived culture, like a bigger and more complicated than usual fad. It could die for the same reason the Soviet Union collapsed and died, loosing it's appeal to those involved. With the crime wave I think it may have been the crack cocaine that finally did it. By the 90’s the ghetto anger of the 60's was no longer fresh, there were limited but real gains in civil rights and economic opportunity to replace it, and crack was really messing up the drug lords' lives, all combining to make the criminal lifestyle stop being cool.

To my surprise after posting the above (slightly edited now) I discovered the NY Times had an excellent Week In Review piece on the very subject, “Where Killers are Out of Style”. And I had a chance to discuss it at length with my criminologist friend John. He doesn’t see cohesive self-organizing natural systems behind everything that happens the way I do, but did admit that there was also an unexplained resurgence of New York City as a whole, highlighted by the rejuvenation of Times Square and the coming high tech. boom, at about the same time.

I don’t think any of these kinds of things are run from the mayor’s office, as Guiliani claimed over and over. Yes, the mayor did add police and got them back in the neighborhoods and to tend to quality of life crimes etc. That’s good, but it was in concert with a wave of good things happening, and crime didn’t decline proportionately, but collapsed, and nationwide, catching absolutely everybody off guard! Others have pointed to a statistical correlation between the states with the highest increases in abortion rates in the 70's and declines in crime in the 90's, but you can't make a causal connection with that. It just says that both things tended to happen in the communities where the 60's crime wave hit the hardest in the first place. Well, there's no surprise about that! The abortion correlation doesn't explain what the original eruption and its sudden resolution were about in the slightest.

I think most social trends display classic group behavior, swells and flows of culture that we're all part of, but that no one clearly understands or controls. I see them as natural open system events like those of ecologies, or like storms and weather. They are much better treated as independently evolving living things in their own right. It definitely adds to the intrigue that they’re made from us and we can be quite unaware of them, they act dynamically as wholes and have no fixed parts or apparent structures, and have no spokesperson.

It's hard to read culture without bias of course. I don't have it documented, but in all the articles I've read about this, including this one, I don't think I've read any mention of the observations on what happened from those most involved. That's very odd. Someone surely must have noticed something being different, with the crime rate dropping by about 2/3! It would be good to find a way to ask.

The bigger big con

2005-08-07T07:59:00.000-04:00

Personal lives can always be seen as complicated, or not, depending on our moods if nothing else, so perception isn't necessarily a good gage. Most of us, though, notice the continual change in what we deal with in our work, personal & public lives. Decade after decade, life keeps getting much more complicated.

It's the tell-tale sign of a truly stupendous oversight. Continual economic growth is achieved by creating exponentially more complicated tasks, forever. It's the kind of thing that could lead to either real disappointment in what we're building, or real tragedy when it fails. The hope of limitlessly growing wealth, like the promise of a free cure for every ill, is a remarkably easy sell. What was it Barnum said...? Maybe we should put our hopes for mankind in something else.

¸¸¸¸.·´ ¯ `·.¸¸¸¸
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Three Mass Movements, 60 years

2005-07-31T18:14:00.000-04:00

Islamic Terrorists – death to America, fundamentalist Muslim, jihad, martyr, Sharia law, straight to heaven

60’s Radicals – peace, civil & women’s rights, soft tech, sex drugs rock & roll, communes, love & harmony

Neo-conservatives – anti communist, government & liberal, pro-military, family & life, anti-gay, born again

These three great mass movements, as strangely different as they are, each multiplied from almost nothing to represent huge open communities of interest only because they struck some true chord in human experience. It’s an obvious fact. Actual fraud by an evil wizard wouldn’t have the success each of these have had, because huge cross sections of people are just not that stupid. What’s quite interesting, of course, is that the basic validity of each is extremely hard to see from each other’s point of view. Trying to force your mind to do it tends to leave you blank and angry.

To me it’s apparent that each of these great mass movements represents a separate reality, not just a different style or group of opinions, but a profoundly self-validating world view that places the others outside its experience, alien and unwanted. Ask yourself, do they act like they’re off living in a bubble??? If the answer is yes, and you start with a list of others… well then it’s time to discuss what to do about it. Aliens are here and now, and all over history. For centuries we’ve mostly denigrated, repressed and murdered them, and that’s not good enough. A friend reminds me, look at the 600 year repression of the Irish, for just one of a million examples. We all deserve better.

I’m not proposing a ‘freedom of reality’ any different from religious freedom, but mainly pointing out that there’s a need for improved strategies for dealing with it. Hate speech and its use for dehumanizing mind-control, by power hungry leaders, manipulating us with their war chants and fevers, are fairly easy to spot if you look for them. On the other side, since there’s something to be learned from other realities, we could try making a point of listening, perhaps most intently to their small voices.

The main cause for this discussion now is what seems like a new openness, following the recent London bombings, to discussing what to do about Islamic terrorism. The problem seems to be with a fringe of a fringe, but when you look closer the roots are really with a very widespread community. There’s no doubt that effective police work, perhaps focusing on terrorist recruiters and schools, strong leadership from Muslim teachers world wide, better investigative reporting by the press, government security measures & constructive world engagement, bridge building people-to-people contact and church & community leadership, etc. will all have their good effect.

The main thing though, as I see it, is asking, why do they say “death to America”. That this is a central structure of their distorted reality makes it a wide open invitation to interfere with their rigid iconic image of us by acting in a way that does not fit. All we’d need to do is come to understand some of our ‘great crimes’, deep insults to others that we’ll probably be very glad to get rid of, if only someone would kindly help us and point them out.

Health Care or Immortality?

2005-07-28T08:26:00.000-04:00

It’s very telling that healthcare costs have been soaring at 3-4% above inflation since the 60’s, and no one seems to be talking about the underlying cause. Its share of GDP has grown from 5.1% in 1960 to 7.0% in 1970, 8.8% in 1980, 12.0% in 1990, 13.3% in 2000 and 15.3% in 2003. It has actually tripled, and is still heading higher (1). That’s perfectly unsustainable. All the restraints we’ve struggled to put in place have slowed it but failed to change it, and the impact on businesses large and small are visible everywhere. On the public side the Medicaid funding crisis is far larger and sooner than that of Social Security, and more and more individuals are losing their benefits. Major change is about to happen.

Why we’re not talking about what’s doing it is the key. It isn’t because we don’t see the threat. It’s because we’ve run out of solutions that can be easily discussed in public. Most options seem to require a drastic change in our promises or values, so the politicians can’t talk about them. All would agree, doing nothing will only make matters much worse, but we’re still not doing anything.

To open it up we need to talk about the real cause. The problem is that we’re inadvertently trying to buy immortality. It’s quite simple; we’ve made what used to be called a bargain with the devil. We’ve accepted the wonderful gifts of modern science and its ever more effective and expensive medical advances, and cling to an idealistic insurance model for sharing all natural risks. Good health used to be a matter of luck, and free. Now science has made it a matter of cost, multiplying exponentially the closer it gets us to achieving our impossible goal, to always be cured. It’s actually one of the strangely beautiful laws of nature, that perfection is unattainable because approaching it takes ever increasing effort to progress by ever smaller steps.

One option is to conclude that medical insurance was just a bad financial idea from the start. It is indeed flawed. It’s like having unlimited demand (good health provided at a prix-fixe) chasing unlimited supply (an ever exploding menu of great treatments). The challenge is to design the market forces differently, so that the total price remains constant while the benefits of the service continually improve. To do that requires being able to measure and compare costs and benefits, and there is some good work under way in that area.

Alternately, we could do simple rationing, cut out expensive care for hardship cases, expensive end-of-life care, expensive experimental and rehabilitation services, and various other things. Ultimately we could just stop insuring anyone who gets sick. These things might provide insurance more efficiently, with excellent average returns. The problem, of course, is that people are not numbers. Still, any effective system will have the effect of making us decline the most expensive care.

Few of us think we abuse the system when we get imaging studies for an odd swelling behind a knee, for example (it might be a blood clot, say). What we usually fail to do is consider with the doctor whether the measurable risks and benefits justify the expense compared to simpler treatments. That’s a complicated question, but we need to learn how to ask and answer it.

Using that kind of reasoning we might begin a general system redesign by deciding that everyone has to assume the risk and responsibility for their own health care decisions. We don’t want HMO lawyers or the government making the decisions for us. We might also choose to keep the ‘all risks’ type of coverage we have. Where the pinch would come is in providing insurance payment only for new services with lower costs for the benefit than the old ones, with patients assuming the marginal cost of choosing treatments that are less efficient. For the same measurable benefit, if the new treatment costs less you get it, if it costs more, you don’t. Just accepting that ideal would be a start. With good design, benefits would then keep getting better and costs would remain the same. We’d need to measure the costs & benefits and provide consumers with the information. These are significant hurdles that would take time, effort and money to develop. Perhaps there’s no other way to get the information needed to make good decisions.

You could call it the “Complicated Sensible Plan”. One thing is for sure, strong medicine is needed.

(1)health care cost stats http://www.kff.org/insurance/7031/print-sec1.cfm

Real Complication

2005-07-03T11:39:00.000-04:00

One of the strange long held ideas of the conservatives is that if you take money away from the federal government it will help restore old ways and simpler times. The supposed connection is that “tax tax spend spend liberals” were inventing needless government activity to meddle with business and private lives. The solution? Give away the money and budget pressure will force reducing the needless expenditure. Giving away money is always popular anyway.

I’m an architect and loose money every day providing mandated services I can’t sell, so you’d think I’d be jumping up and down in support. What I think kills the design business these days is redesign. The requirements are so complex that the solutions are less and less flexible and small changes force rethinking complex issues. We can’t sell that. Government has something to do with that in terms of new reg’s, but if you ask where modern complication comes from it’s pretty quickly apparent that it’s not from government really, but simply from economic growth. The complications of growth are not caused by the change in GNP, but by multiplying 1) the number and kinds of parts of our world, 2) the intricacy of their connections and 3) the power of their influence on each other. It’s called productivity.

Increasing productivity also gives us 4) increasing expectations, 5) increasing overlap between our (personal, business & interest group) spheres of influence, 6) confrontation with natural limits and unexpected environmental impacts, 7) information explosion and generational separation, 8) increasing opportunities for both new services and abuses, …etc. It’s a lot to contend with! Growth is revolutionary, continually accelerating reorganization of everything we know, a change of the earth and the meaning and structure of everything in our lives. It’s not just an increase in cash flow.

Adapting to it is a huge challenge, and a lot of that falls on government. If government could complain about the complication of modern life for itself I think it would be the biggest complainer. The real complication is that growth can only make things better (i.e. worse), and reining it in will require, as Einstein said, a whole new way of thinking. Arguably the conservatives offer a 'whole new way ot thinking'. They favor market forces over direct regulation, for example, and I think that's part of the answer. It doesn't work if the problem keeps exploding, or if you don't have a way to inform the markets that doesn't overwhelm them too. ...yep, you guessed it, another complication.

Myth v. Myth

2005-07-02T21:26:00.000-04:00

Two years ago President Bush said “Bring them on”, but we still haven’t asked where the terrorists are coming from. That’s a real insult to the 1500 American dead and many more Iraqis who have been sacrificed to the cause since then. President Bush’s heroic myth of Iraqi liberation ignores the question, speaking as if the terrorists are just some band of criminals and losers. Our great free press mentions almost nothing about it except maybe that some of them are Suni and some come from abroad. The terrorists themselves don’t say, perhaps just too enraged to speak. Even the New Yorker Magazine, usually so reliable in detailing the hidden places in the world where everything comes from has completely missed the chance to just go and find out.

Where do they come from then? It’s kind of general, but the available evidence is that they’re from a fairly open multi-national community of people willing to sacrifice their sons to the cause of protesting the US. They apparently live by a distorted common myth about the world themselves, an open interest group to be found spread, apparently, throughout all Muslim society. I base this on the clear facts that 1) they come from Muslim communities all over 2) they’re clearly in touch 3) the more we kill them the more there are and 4) terrorism is an extremist form of protest, not a play for power.

If this is the case the only way to win the war on terror militarily is by silencing its source community, genocide. Some people might hate enough to do that, but there are also obvious drawbacks given how its community is intermingled in open societies around the world. To kill it we have to kill nearly everyone. Wouldn’t it be better to find out how to address its community myth and relieve their animosity towards us, so they stop sending their sons to kill and be killed in protest?

Relieving other people’s fears about you means dealing with people who hold you in contempt. It is tough unpleasant business requiring great creativity and emotional support. It seems we have a choice between that or endless killing.

Trading up

2005-06-24T20:54:00.000-04:00

Thomas Friedman made a very good point in his op-ed column on CAFTA in the Times today (6/24/05). The hazard of protectionism in a rapidly growing global economy is shutting yourself out, proverbialy cutting off your nose to spite your face. With China on the make, particularly, it is almost certain that trade barriers between the US and Central America would undermine joint ventures between US designers and Central American producers. Competiton with China is going to be nip and tuck and we shouldn't let protectionist urges do that.

First, though, let's take a moment and celebrate the problem. It's been a hundred years or so that the developed economies, the US and old Europe mainly, have been doling out a few fish and unsuccessfully trying to teach the rest of the world how to catch their own. It was a largely disappointing enterprise, save for easing our guilt for being rich and not knowing how to share it. Just last week we signed onto canceling the debt of a number of African countries, for example, giving up on decades of old pump priming that didn't work. So, maybe it's not quite uniform, but globalization is indeed now finally here. If it's a surprise, well then it's a great surprise, wonderful evidence that long patient effort in support of just causes can really pay off. Think about it, wouldn't the world be a disgusting place if it didn't?

Of course, now that we can declare significant success, we also have to figure out what to do about it. Globalization does indeed bring with it serious competition, leaving us undercut on a lot of our best hands. One otherwise hidden painful loss is all our formerly internal legal and cultural agreements on how businesses should behave, now effectively thrown in disarray. Business culture itself spreads the good, and bad, practices of those that spread most rapidly. Other deals are off. We have to do over our deals on the basic problem that business leaders have a feduciary responsibility to undercut their employees and their environments. Do we let it be just a free-for-all with the lowest standards of the inexperienced societies sure to win in the short run? Do we take carefully designed steps of self-defense? Do we take responsibility for teaching those following our lead how to do something better than just get away with the most money? They say business does better when it doesn't wreck its people or its place. Are we willing to wait for another hundred years while the rest of the world finds that out?

Look, we've got computers, we can do it. It'll take some effort developing standards and self-correcting mechanisms, but there's no reason the world should trade favorably with businesses which, for example, don't respect their environments or include in their costs either credible retirement plans or set asides that allow workers to save for themselves. Too sudden a change, or too heavy or loose a hand, would definately invite abuse, but that's no reason not to find some reasonable place to start and to persue globally raising and equalizing business standards, aiming even well above where our own are now. The businesss providing the best stewardship would finally get a direct reward for it, a huge plus. There's also the other motivation... If we don't we're likely to loose our shirts. We got the car started, now the job becomes one of steering.

I think that's pretty good!

Why I've been so quiet

2005-06-23T00:17:00.000-04:00

Call this a draft, maybe I’ll come back to smooth it out. I try to be daring, pure in heart and completely honest. It’s not easy, but it sure does feel good when I am able. Some people seem to have chosen to simplify the problem, to have either their faith or their reason shut out the other half. I find each needs the other, without reason faith has no relevance and without faith reason has no purpose.

My dad was a physicist, the ultimate staid rationalist and a very regular old fashioned Protestant. Life was rather dull, and then I smelled a rat, actually lots of them, conventional thinking that simply didn’t have the ring of truth. That was a long time ago. Trying to be considerate, of course, there’s now no idea I wouldn’t still gladly smash to bits if it does not have it.

It’s not, for example, quite truthful to harden individual sites to protect them against terrorism. It doesn’t create a barrier against terrorism. It acts more as a diversion of the threat toward unprotected targets, and doesn’t recognize the nature of the problem. Open societies are based on trust, and there's a breech. We need to accept the threat and face the problem. There's only one way to end it really, and that's to stop making enemies. That’s easier said than done, of course, and there’s much to say about who could be reconnected and how, but let’s consider the antithesis.

Vilifying your enemies is a tried and true practice of charismatic leaders, and well worth smashing to bits. It’s both strategically misguided and deeply un-Christian. Christ taught us the power of love, not the love of power after all, and the latter is what vilifying your enemies is largely for, in addition to running up your own false pride and dishonestly subjugating your listeners. When faced with a threat do we then need to abandon ourselves to panic and give up on self-defense? No, but resisting the urge to hate and the war feavers it feeds will get you threatened with that and worse.

just making up the losses on volume!

2005-06-22T21:59:00.000-04:00

It’s curious that the Republican's new twist on the Social Security reform ignores both the long run solvency of the system and the long run solvency of the people who rely on it. Yes, the new idea makes a tiny bit more sense than for the federal government to borrow the life savings of its citizens (that was the last great idea)! Now the idea is to give away the trust fund surplus that future generations will need. Fortunately people are really stupid and it endears them to you to abuse their trust. Once upon a time if you wanted to be taken seriously you’d try to actually address the problem.

The Democrats are not shedding a lot of light in the darkness either. "No comment" is no help at all. What seems guaranteed is that the projections everyone agees on are not likely to be far off, long term declining savings, long term declining employee benefits and long term declining government benefits. We need to match that to long term increased life expectancy and long term increasing medical, energy and housing costs. It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that this does not work, that economic growth simply isn’t doing what it’s supposed to.

Is getting richer all the time making us poorer anyway? It could really be. The last 35 years, my whole work life, have been really rich for some folks, for example. I now own a computer and can be read around the world, which is neat. I’m now a seasoned professional, quite good at what I do and the highest paid guy in a respected firm. Funny thing is I remember a good starting salary in 1970 was $10,000. Yea I did some other things, and I'm not the owner, but discounting for inflation I still haven't matched that good starting salary yet! I think that's weird. [http://www.nber.org/data] Individual experience, of course, generally does not make a good aggregate measure, but may accuratly characterize trends of a sector. Here the real story doesn't seem to be about the whole, but the persistently diverging experience of the parts.

When they're right theyre right!

2005-06-20T21:22:00.000-04:00

Joe Frank, the late night NPR weirdo, renders his imaginary average American characters and situations with a wandering laser beam, creating fascinating strangers. Last night he started talking philosophy, gave me the opposite reaction and I just had to shut it off. We’re all not good at something it seems.

For a while I've been wondering how I can give credit where credit is due to the neo-cons. I’m generally loath to give them and inch, considering their tendency to ridiculously abuse any opening. It would be SO helpful if they would just say what they mean, for example. I can't tell, was it a mistake or an accident that the neo-con led welfare reform in the 90’s, made practical by President Clinton, actually produced a liberating experience for a lot of people formerly trapped on the dole? Who knows? Time and again the neo-cons are so quick with rhetoric cloaking obviously mean proposals with heroic images it’s impossible to tell which they’re more snowed by, and they’re anything but consistent. What about this not "legislating from the bench" idea that seemed so important a few years ago. Politicizing the judiciary now seems to almost be their central purpose! What is that?

I don't think there's any more long standing neo-con objective than to reduce government spending and return to simpler times. It wouldn't have occurred to me perhaps, and they have made a big point of it, but why, at the same time, are they also leading promoters of the things complicating all our lives, amplifying our impacts on the earth and adding to the tasks of government, this endlessly accelerating economic growth? They’re not the only ones, but they have sure stuck their noses in it, and it doesn’t make sense. They promote a return to simplicity and exploding complication at the same time. I think what happens is that we get the one message from a fear of loosing our freedoms, and the other from our big and little greeds, and somehow stick it all together. Real smart! With all due respect, we’re all perfect idiots sometimes, perhaps especially when it comes to the important things. Life is too confusing and we really do need someone less involved in the passions of our own inspiration to help set us straight.

Shrinking government is a very good idea… a great idea. Government is essential for some things, and can deliver with excellence, but we've all seen hopelessly inefficient and counter productive bureaucracy and felt powerless to do anything about it. Maybe we could introduce budget competition between work groups within the same department, using peer reviewed performance measures. Lets look at the problem and do something. Lets also look squarely at what’s actually making government's task more complicated.

It's the boundary problem. We're all continually increasing our spheres of influence, living in a finite world, and dealing with the overlap requires more and more complicated coordination with 3rd party oversight, government.

a passer bye

2005-06-19T13:57:00.000-04:00

I’d really like to apologize to him for arguing with what he thought Senator Durbin meant about torture at Guantánamo recalling Hitler, Stalin and Pol Pot. He was in such anguish, a passer bye on the sidewalk who challenged me with his feeling of insult while I collected signatures to put a slate of local candidates on the upcoming primary ballot in NYC. Even if I think being inhumane to prisoners harms our cause, not acknowledging his life changing experience with real torture was a mistake. I have a lot of radical ideas, easily misunderstood, and I’m in awe of how the worlds we create within our minds bounce off reality and each other, sometimes shaking us to the core.