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Poverty and Wealth
Special Essays from The
Ethical Humanist - by Russell Doane
We smile sadly about those benighted souls won't study Darwin out of some kind
of commitment to a social group and its religious dogma. But I sometimes feel
the same way about those won't read economists. I'm not always sure what prior
commitment might be. But I believe that ethical citizens need to have a deeper
understanding than in most journalism and deeper than I hear in conversations.
I'm opinionated. I'm not going to limit myself what I've read in economics
texts. There will be lots room to disagree. But I've done some thinking and
try to cover a lot of ground in this series, in a way isn't too hard to take.
In part 1 here, I'll remind you of the most obvious features of our condition
as humanoid apes.
Nature Makes Apes Poor
Questions sometimes speak like answers. When hear someone ask about the causes
of poverty, I hear an implication that people make people poor. I was naked.
As an infant I couldn't catch a fish or thatch roof or knit a pair of socks.
Nature made me. Poor.
I was born in a wealthy society. But how did society get beyond the natural
poverty of natural monkeys? It is possible, of course, for people who once
accumulated physical wealth to have that wealth stolen or destroyed. But
those stories come later. First, we were born as naked apes without even
language. Nature makes us, hungry. Nature makes us, unclothed against the
cold. Nature makes us, wanting.
"Freedom from Want" sounds attractive political slogan perhaps. But the only
way to get there to die.
Wanting, though, does motivate productive efforts. And while people didn't
create nature's natural poverty, people have learned to create wealth.
I think it's largely been a process of learning a lot of clever ways to
cooperate. I'll explore some of these systems cooperation in later writing.
For now, I want you to keep in mind that wanting natural. It's part of the
standard equipment of humanoid ape. So in studying causes, we need to study
the causes of wealth.
TOP
Poincare, using the mathematics of Newton, discovered orbital chaos.
Fortunately, the magnitudes of chaotic energy exchange among the major
planets of our solar system are too small to affect life noticeably.
The same might not be true however among the asteroids or among the
planetesimals of the Oort cloud. From time to time, chaotic orbits
have unfairly hurt life on earth due to a collision or near miss
(dinosaur wipeout etc.).
Thermal agitation creates random events among human neurons. Some of these
affect consciousness, giving us ideas for action that are not derived from
our personal histories. Free will is in this way guaranteed by nature’s chaos.
We can also see chaos in the collisions of distant galaxies and in random
subatomic energy-state transitions. At all scales, nature has no commitment
to fairness or justice.
Chaotic competition among richly diverse species turns out, upon close
examination, to result in symbiotic cooperation. Similarly, chaotic-appearing
competition among richly diverse human actions turns out to result in symbiotic
cooperation among humans. Much of this chaotic symbiosis is called "business."
We know now that it is wise to protect nature’s symbiotic balance and the Greens
and other conservatives often warn us to do so. Similarly, Libertarians (in
Europe called Liberals) warn us about destroying the symbiotic cooperation
of free markets and volunteer investors.
Preachers and politicians can find in chaotic diversity many opportunities
to sell us Big Daddy religion or Big Mama states. When we are terrified
of nature’s injustice, their offer of protection by Authority appeals
to us and enhances their careers.
But it isn’t the authority of preachers and political leaders that gives
people living below the "poverty line" indoor plumbing and TV and
microwaves. Chaotic, competitive business does it.
Add the new ways of focusing attention with visual abstractions (diagrams,
graphs, etc.) and the chaotic competitive symbiosis accelerates so much
we call it the Industrial Revolution. But it’s still interwoven with
nature, so economic progress remains chaotically unfair and unjust.
TOP
Standing on a beach, you can see that nature’s chaos sometimes develops
periodic cycles. And with a visual overview, it’s obvious that we can't
blame evil people. But economic waves occur slowly, and we have no visual
overview. The ship of state undeniably does make waves, and the logical
Libertarian will want to blame all the waves on authoritarian coercion.
Yachts of wealth undeniably do make waves, and the logical socialist will
want to blame all of the waves on capitalist excesses.
Blaming evil others gives us a euphoric experience of social superiority.
It sells the products of global journalistic industries, whose primary
cash flow comes from news junkies. It sells us on the need for one political
party or person to counter the evil intentions of those we enjoy out-ranking.
At a rest stop, blindfold me. I will drive the turnpike so as to supply
the steering you demand. At first, moving slow, my supplied position will
match your demanded position well. But it takes time for your demand
to influence my supply. As we go faster, this time delay will cause increasing
departures from the close agreement of supply with demand that we both desire.
If I drive fast enough, your demand will arrive at the wrong phase in my supply
cycle. We will boom and bust.
Adam Smith’s explanation of supply and demand is timeless. That is why he did
not get us to understand how supply and demand could get into boom and bust.
He would have had to diagram the whole of the feedback loop. Only by staring
at the whole, could Nyquist discover the criterion for natural feedback cycles.
Adam Smith’s account was merely logical. Nyquist, however, asked the question
that only a visual overview could potentiate.
Investment to increase supply takes time. Working off excess inventory of
supply takes time. Neither of these is evil.
Explaining natural mechanisms, however, won't sell Time (or Newsweek).
Work to speed up the flow of feedback so that people won’t suffer from
waves of boom and bust can be ethical work. But the news junkie, gossiping
about bad people, needn't work. Cycling from social-climbing euphoria
to the sadness of being a non-participant in improving the conditions of
human life is the natural result of too much industrial strength bad news.
TOP
The study of economics is the study of human cooperation and its costs,
among people who are separated in space and time. It's hard to
understand trade so spatially separated that we term it Global.
But I think it is even harder to focus on cycles and relationships
that span the years and generations.
Intergenerational transfers of wealth can go either way. We can tax
ourselves to build bridges and tunnels that future people will be able
to use after we pay the costs. We can also burn fuels today that will
melt glaciers, raise ocean levels, and burden future generations with
the cost of building the dykes.
Faraday and Franklin and Edison are dead. If we owe gratitude for light
and heat and power made possible by past investments, we can't pay back
dead investors. But we can, in turn, invest for those far away and far
in the future whom we’ll never meet.
Nature provides senses of sight, smell, touch, and sound. But these all
operate only in the present moment and close up. Global and
intergenerational creation and transfer of wealth can’t be sensed
directly. We have to guide attention to such remote phenomena by the
skilled use of abstractions.
Investing in the growth of abstraction skills must be awkward. For it
is only when the brain is made awkward that it grows new pattern
recognizers and new pattern generators among the neurons. I can try
to find interesting examples and clear language. But if you won't
generate the ambition for awkward new efforts, my attempt at ethical
action will produce instead mere entertainment.
As I move beyond Part 1 and begin to explore the various aspects of human
productive cooperation, I’m only going to talk. To really see what I mean,
you are going to have to diagram. Some of you may have seen my four-page
handout "Picturing Thought." There, I've presented a number of simple
example diagrams. The text with them is compressed and not easy to read,
but the diagrams are elementary. If diagramming is new for you, even
elementary diagrams will be awkward for you to copy on your own paper.
But you can copy a simple diagram. Anyone can. And once you begin
to apply this core intellectual skill of the Industrial Revolution,
I think you’ll want more of its power. For with it, nature's myopia
can be at least partially corrected.
TOP
Wealth comes in two "flavors": inside the skin-bag, and outside. In part I,
I located the source of poverty: Nature made us poor. Now I want to locate
the major source of human wealth as the creation of productive capital equipment
inside the skin-bag. I'll call it culturing the ape.
Humans are Enculturated Apes
Enculturation has been a mysterious process, because we can only observe
the actions of the enculturated ape, but not the neurons. We're beginning,
though, to get some concrete knowledge so that the old terms "being" and
"becoming" can be improved. What used to be called "being" can now be
identified as the operation of all of the neurons in a humanoid ape's body.
And what used to be called "becoming" can now be identified as the growing
of new neuronal equipment. Enculturation is a major source of neuronal growth.
In Society of Mind, Marvin Minsky shows us many diagrams of neuronal
structure. I have space here only for a pale shadow of that work. Nature
supplies some neuronal structures as parts of our genetic inheritance. Then,
in life, we get stressed. And a brain under stress grows new neuronal pattern
recognizers and new neuronal pattern generators. The observable outcomes from
a stressed brain grown are called awareness and skill.
Enculturation is brain stress. Sometimes a guru or parent will set up a brain-stress
situation on purpose. Sometimes, life's little accidents do the job. Over time,
the growing ape grows capable and competent for human-culture existence.
Culture is A Kind of Wealth
Poor people don't have much. Typically, they don't have much wealth outside
the skin-bag, and they may not have much wealth in enculturated awareness
and skills either. But enculturated wealth within a person who lacks or loses
external wealth can work productively, and create new external wealth. A bunch
of German farmers moved to poor Russia or poor South America, and you soon saw
farms a lot like German farms. When boatloads of immigrants that included
Italian stone masons came to America, and very soon you saw amazing creations
here in stone. A bunch of Indians went from Gujarat to Kenya and you saw
India-like shops and businesses sprout like mushrooms (read all about it in
Thomas Sowell's famous trilogy).
Neuronal wealth has the enormous advantage that it remains alive for as long
as its ape-home remains healthy. War doesn't destroy this kind of enculturated
wealth, and it goes wherever people go. Moreover, parents and educator-trainers
can pass it on.
TOP
In Part 2, "Culture," I defined "becoming" as the growing of new neuronal
equipment -- the growing, be enculturating stress, of new human capital.
At that time, perhaps you saw value in that definition. But that was then.
Right now, how much value does this idea still have? In the moments
between, did your values change?
In the several essays of Part 3, I'll consider many aspects of what people
value. For human value judgments define what we'll call wealth. Being
wealthy means you've got or can get what you want now. In this essay,
I'll just explore the most fundamental observation about human values and
the definitions of wealth: they change.
Abraham Maslow in the mid 20th Century drew
a visual display showing a hierarchy of human values. It was a
stable-looking pyramid. Survival values like food, water, and protection
from the weather were on the bottom. Self-actualization was at the pinnacle.
But this appearance of stability can be highly misleading. In one
illustration of this that I've heard, an airline pilot flies along in
a serene state of self-actualization, all more basic needs having been
satisfied. But then fire breaks out in engine number two. Suddenly, the
survival values are on top, and self-actualization is no longer the highest
value.
Most of the chaos in human value judgments isn't that extreme. Yet all
of us know, if we think about it, that hunger and lust and the search
for a gas station...all values come and go.
I hope that I have set you up here to recognize one of the deep flaws
in authoritarian thinking. No authority can possibly know the priorities
of the citizens, for they are chaotic.
Ludwig von Mises, writing in the same era as Maslow, said "Since nobody
is in a position to substitute his own value judgments for those of the
acting individual, it is vain to pass judgment on other people’s aims
and volitions." In his critique of the classical economists he wrote
that "...the failures of present-day economic policies are to some extent
due to the lamentable confusion brought about by the idea that there is
something fixed and therefore measurable in interhuman relations."
The sales pitch for command-and-control of an economy by generous
government authorities typically promises that everyone will be freed
from their wants. Want the trains to run on time? Want the potholes
in your street fixed? Want pornography banned? Want jobs? Want clean
air? Want war on the enemy? Want peace? Want nature’s unfairness
ruled out?
Rank-and-file is a militaristic image of authorized behaviors. The
freedom to alter our personal values can probably be seen as one of
the marks of what we may call the wealth of modernity.
TOP
One of the fundamental human phenomena made clearer by economists is
the creation of value by trading. This is only possible if wealth
is located in inner experience. (I’ve previously said that being
wealthy means you've got or can get what you want. Wanting is
an inner experience.)
If wealth were located in material objects, trade couldn’t create
human value. So those who deny the reality or importance of inner
experience have a really hard time understanding how the cooperating
of human beings in a trade can create wealth. It seems to an ardent
materialist that something can't be created out of nothing.
Somewhere I've heard the following illustration. Suppose a boot maker
is down to his last hide, and a hog farmer shows up wanting a new
pair of boots. It is possible that by trading the whole hide of the
farmer's pig for a pair of boots made from a small part of the pigskin,
both people can prosper?
The pigskin doesn’t undergo a material transformation. And the boots
(once they are made) are not transformed. But somehow, each person
is very willing to give away something. They're doing it voluntarily.
They both perceive themselves being enriched.
Look inside the two inner experiences, and you can see that the hog
farmer sees pigskins as easy to get and the boots as not so easy.
And the boot maker views boots as fairly easy to have, but pigskins
seem from his inner view to be not so easy. It's their differing
value judgments that make trade profitable.
Those who might say that free markets are unscientific are right.
Science (or at least the view of science we usually take) has given
us wonderful understandings of physical things. But free trade
between cooperating persons depends fundamentally on the chaotically
fluctuating value judgments in people's psyches. The physical
objects being traded between farmer and boot maker can be weighed
and measured scientifically. But not values. And especially, not
fluctuating inner-experience values. Wants are not the usual focus
of science.
Ken Wilber in his Theory of Everything advocates "...both interior
development and exterior development-- the growth and development
of consciousness and subjective well-being, as well as the growth
and development of economic, social, and material wellbeing."
His four-quadrant diagram of human development shows scales of
improvement of interior as well as exterior, and individual as
well as collective developments. But 19th and 20th century
disasters show that in some regions of the world, an exterior-only
mindset made free trades inscrutable.
Freedom for voluntary exchanges will not solve all human problems
and will not even solve all of the problems of wealth creation.
But a blindness to the value of voluntary trade for the creation
of wealth is disabling. Make sure you get this!
TOP
Material wealth is not the only kind that enhances human life. Sensory
pleasures, and the enduring satisfactions of contributing in others'
lives enrich inner experience.
But there’s something subtle about the pleasures from art. Poor peasants
for many centuries have gotten together to sing, play musical instruments,
and dance. The investment that many have made in high skills despite
having little material wealth must be satisfying keenly felt wants.
Can we identify them?
A fundamental principle of artistic composition can be said in a phrase:
dominance-and-variety. Establish a dominant weight of line in a drawing,
a dominant color and a dominant texture in a painting, a dominant musical
key, a dominant sculptural shape. Then, without going too far such that
the dominance would become unclear, play with other weights, other colors
and textures, other keys, other shapes. But why is this the valued
principle that it is? What want is being satisfied?
In Part 1, I reminded you of nature's chaos. There's no theme in nature
that we can depend on. And nature is not clever enough to be playful.
Dominant themes and a playful decoration around them can demonstrate that
we are cleverer than nature; that we humans are capable of rising above
nature's chaos.
Perhaps we can see here a kind of competition with nature. We have
self-discipline, and nature doesn't. We can create and maintain a dominant
theme of our own choosing, and nature can't. We take delight in our play,
and nature is too stupid.
Sounds and sights and moving and touching produce their own natural
pleasures. But I think these are not enough to fully explain the intense
investments that people make in artistic skills. There’s also the
euphoric thrill of winning against nature.
And there’s also the dark side of nature's chaos -- the threat of nature's
storm and fire and lava and earthquake and flood and plagues and droughts.
Artistic accomplishment puts us in a winning posture, and perhaps helps us
deny our fear and death.
Competition with nature and denial of nature's threats are not anyone's
favorite justification for art, I suppose. We prefer to be vague. We just
like art, and if we can afford art, then why not indulge ourselves. What's
the harm -- and what could be the harm in avoiding too deep an inquiry into
all this?
But some of us want to improve the conditions of human life. And what's our
definition of improvement? What will be our criteria for comparing
alternative clever proposals?
Some of our criteria for design should come, I believe, from knowing what
works with nature, and what nature prohibits. The nature of the humanoid
ape in particular can work with or prohibit the workability of our clever
proposals. Denying our competitiveness with nature, or denying our
fears, won't help.
TOP
I invest. You speculate. They gamble. This is a joke, but three words
persisting side by side cannot be exact synonyms. Investors know the
complexities involved, and they expect that their relationship with the
investment will be costly to break. Speculators know what's up, but they
have a cheap exit strategy. Gamblers neither know nor care about
anything but the odds.
As the morning’s speaker, I'll give $20 to someone to keep for one year.
This widely witnessed loan could cost me in three ways:
-
If I encounter an opportunity to invest, speculate, or gamble during
the year, I've got $20 less to play with. The borrower has $20 of my
previous freedom to act, and I am less free.
-
If the borrower dies, we'll all be
grief-stricken. And the heirs may
not have been present; so will my $20 come back? The likelihood of
loss may be low, but if I lose, I lose $20.
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Politicians love to promise government programs, but they hate to
lose votes by acknowledging what taxpayers will pay. Run to the
money-printing presses instead of getting it all by taxes and you'll
get more greenbacks opposite the same goods. We hate inflation; but
no particular politician looks guilty.
The third risk of loss is by now widely acknowledged, and we sometimes
can't connect the dots to punish particular politicians so it gets
factored into calculations as if it were nature's doing. Or if it is
extreme inflation, we find a scapegoat.
The second risk of loss is far less likely, but it's a total loss if it
occurs. Written contracts and the "rule of law" to enforce contracts by
the threat of weapons and prisons can reduce this risk, though it's
never reduced to nothing at all.
The first cost is not a risk, but a certainty. I have rented out my freedom
to invest, speculate, or gamble at will. If holy scripture or a law brands
it "usury" to collect any rent on the freedom to act that I have lent,
I have to hope for some friendly tit-for-tat. Among friends, that'll
probably be OK. But loaning something of value to a stranger and getting
no rent for it would be clearly unacceptable. No relationship and no
rental payment, no deal. No loan.
The confinement of loans to friends and relatives is a brake on the transfer
of accumulated wealth from those who don’t see investment opportunities to
strangers who might just have a highly productive investment in view. It may
not be a big deal in any one year. But a one percent retardation of effective
investment each year, compounded for a couple of centuries, can make a
difference in economic productivity so great that the retardees might call it
poverty. Especially when TV shows call them the rich.
Holy scripture forbidding "usury" is, well, holy. It's not to be questioned.
So if you're stuck with it, and if you begin to suspect that the wealth you
see on TV is totally out of reach, would you be angry enough to kill? And
if so, whom would you kill? The local guy with the book? The rich you
see on TV?
TOP
We make up our utterances, diagrams, and other abstractions to guide
attention. When we use abstractions to guide our own attention we call
it thinking. When we guide others' attention we can call it
communicating. If we mis-direct attention we can call that lying,
dissembling, being disingenuous, etc.
Thirst, hunger, pain, and sensory pleasure also guide attention. You can
put "attention" in the middle of a diagram, and show dozens of
influences. They collect in three main streams: your body, other
peoples’ abstractions, and your abstractions.
Pay attention to the honesty and friendliness of our own inner
abstractions, and we invest in an ethical, inner-directed self. Or buy
into unfriendly or dishonest self talk, and we can make ourselves "poor
in spirit."
Pay attention to other peoples’ deepest and wisest abstractions, and we
invest in cultural enrichments that support our ethical actions. Or buy
into gossip ("news") about human foibles, and we can have ourselves
talked into bitter, ineffectual passivity.
Pay attention to the basic needs of our bodies, and we can keep our
bodies in the best condition that nature's unfairness allows. Buy into
unhealthy choices and we can. dissipate life's possible bodily
pleasures, along with the health that supports activity.
Wisely guided attention doesn't guarantee the accumulation of physical
wealth. But it helps, especially when a whole community shares enriching
abstractions. People may have been Calvinist by historical accident, but
it isn't totally accidental that cultures guiding attention to work and
thrift accumulate goods.
Emergencies prompt those with accumulated goods to share them with those
less fortunate. And if we have been led to believe that those more
fortunate will be too self-focused to contribute out of their voluntary
focus of attention on unfortunate others, we can democratically coerce
them through taxes that pay for social programs. But voluntary or
coerced, goods are temporary.
Permanent physical wealth. must be re-created as it dissipates. And the
inner experience of self-support is itself a kind of wealth that people
shouldn't be denied by excesses of gratuity. Building ethical culture
long-term can't be done by transferring goods. Long-term, enculturated
habits and skills of attention are the deepest sources. It's the capital
equipment between the ears that counts. And major parts of that capital
equipment affect human outcomes by the trained guidance of
attention.
TOP
I have chosen to emphasize the inner experience of wealth, for we live
in a time and place of ardent materialism. So I’ve defined wealth as the
inner experience that we have or can get what we want. However, inner
experience is partially constrained by material conditions. And our
material conditions are created to a major extent in the modern world by
human creativity.
Natural creation includes not only raw matter of the Universe, but also
the creations of the species. If you know Darwin's explanation, you've a
head start on human creativity as well. In future pieces I will consider
random accidents, selection of valuable accidents, and conservation of
creative results. All of that is parallel in both human creation and
Nature. But creative commitment seems to be uniquely human.
In one sense, we create all of our abstractions. We make up assertions,
for example. And we make up expressives. We may assert that "the facts
speak for themselves" but this utterance is itself made up to guide
attention.
Guiding attention to some part or aspect of what was created in the past
will tend to keep us passively idle. And expressing who we are being in
the present moment also doesn’t propel us toward a possibly improved
future. The other three "speech acts" that I've taken from the work of
philosopher John Searles do, however, open up possibilities for fresh
creation. Declare an intention. Immediately you'll become aware of the.
differences between what you've declared and current conditions. In his
book, The Path of Least Resistance, Robert Fritz calls this
awareness "structural tension." If you keep yourself aware of your
declaration, and maintain your commitment to it, you’ll tend to create
thought and actions which will close the gap.
Make a request. Immediately you'll become aware of the risk that the
person or people to whom you made the request will ignore it, or even
may explicitly turn you down. If you choose however to stay committed to
your request, there's a tension created and maintained. You've made a
vacuum; it may get filled eventually either by a responsive action or by
a promise.
Make a promise. Immediately you'll become aware of the gap between what
you've promised and the current situation. Thoughts and actions will
tend to occur to you for closing this gap, as long as you stay aware of
it and don't renege on your promise.
Well crafted declarations, well crafted requests, and well crafted
promises don't occur without enculturation. Humans train each other for
these acts of speech. Schools, however, tend to use Plato's Academy as
their touchstone, and the big new capability in ancient Greece was the
making of well crafted assertions. The skills for the three speech acts
of creative commitment tend to run in families. Or sometimes a mentor at
work provides training. But because we have not institutionalized such
training, we might suppose that leaders are born, not made.
TOP
Leadership toward a possibly improved future depends critically upon
commitment. Someone has to declare, request, or promise. Truths may set
us free, as the ancients said. Doing something to create human value and
wealth, however, isn't extrapolation.
This is not easy to observe in the presence of what like to term the
academic conceit. For once creation is accomplished, assertions can very
easily fit it all with the past. History can be made to look like an
inevitable extrapolation of trends. Plato's Academy as our touchstone
for what is real academic work will not give us the best training for
creative commitments.
Declaring a purpose different from today's reality, making a
well-crafted request, making a well-crafted promise, or some combination
of these acts of speech guides our attention away from what we've
inherited from past creations. They set up a tension that can propel us
forward toward a changed future. Now let's consider the next step: chaos.
Scientists in the 20th century made it clear that the random variations
that Darwin's explanation depends on are pervasive at all scales, from
the intergalactic to the subatomic. So we know that a human brain that
is warmer than absolute zero will be subject to chaotic fluctuations of
electrical states. It's commonly called noise. Without this noise we
would be fully constrained by our structure and history. But in the
presence of a little chaos here and there, we can have a new idea.
Having a new idea ends with conscious attention on the idea.
But that's not how it starts. The conscious event is the end.
The process starts with the creative commitment. The brain responds to
passionate commitment. The commitment appears to set up a filtering
process so that just a little bit of that chaotic noise leaks through
into consciousness at times. Ideas can be viewed as the result of the
brain's automatic filtering out of all the noise except that which
matches the commitment.
Some people believe their prayers get answered. Well, they do! A prayer,
a passionate commitment, sets up the filtering. The idea that enters
consciousness can be called an answer, if the passionate commitment is
called a prayer. However, I prefer a mechanistic interpretation. My
brain serves me. Its structure has evolved to enrich my consciousness
according to the influence of any keenly felt wish.
That's the good news. The bad news is that nearly all of my clever ideas
are unworkable. This would not be so if I still walked the grasslands
stalking game and digging up tasty roots. But modern life is more
complex and the criteria for selecting valuable ideas are more numerous.
So a lot of the filtering today has to be done consciously, and much
more cautious selection of just a few ideas is needed.
TOP
Alex Osborn demonstrated that it's effective to separate the recording
of clever ideas from the process of applying conscious criteria to them.
He called his structure for this "brainstorming." Budgeting time for
just producing ideas, without any conscious effort to judge them, gives
people license to be less cautious about their utterances. Crazy ideas
are OK. Weird associations allow one person's sane idea to trigger
someone else's crazy association. A team or group can create in this way
a far richer pile of clever ideas to sort through.
All of them will be in some way clever, but few will be workable. A
conscious process of selection will use four kinds of criteria:
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Criteria from the study of nature, usually called "science."
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Criteria to reflect the current possibilities and limitations of
human technology. Nature doesn't change, but the current state of
technology does, so these criteria can't be taught in school once and
for all. Creative people need to read and attend seminars and talk with
experts continually.
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Criteria to interest investors. Some people hate this, but hating it
just wastes energy. No designer or design team is likely to be able to
produce the full human value of its creative work all on their own. If
it won't attract others and get investors to commit, it's an idea with
no future.
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Criteria reflecting the values attributed to citizens, clients,
patients, customers or whoever might be affected or helped (these are
the hardest criteria to collect, and I'll not detail here the very
demanding methods that have been worked out).
The best method for creative selection that I know was invented by
Stuart Pugh. He listed all of the criteria down the left edge of a giant
wall-size matrix. Along the top edge, he put a diagram showing an
overview of the current system or process. Then as people made clever
proposals for an improved system or process, a crude diagram of that new
clever idea was added to the top edge. As ideas accumulated, the top
edge showed all of the accumulated concepts. At each session, usually
two or three per week, the column under each proposal was marked on each
criterion's row. A plus meant it seemed better than the current system
or process on this criterion and an "s" meant it looked about the same.
Oops! There were usually a few minus signs, too, showing that the new
clever idea would be unworkable, because it was inferior to what was
done currently.
Does all of this sound tedious? Yes, it is real work. People who are
willing and able to do real work make the modern world modern. The use
of visual abstractions is at the core of the work. It's what is new,
intellectually, that makes revolutions revolutionary. But it still isn’t
easy.
TOP
When natural selection results in a new species, it has to be
regenerated to keep it alive and spreading to fill its niche. Something
similar has to happen to the things humans create, too.
If you have been watching computers evolve, you may know that the
original 8-inch floppy disk is extinct, and so is the 5.5-inch disk.
You probably also know that the videotape is on the way out. The TV
picture tube is pretty much the end of the line for the vacuum tube,
and solid-state flat-panel displays are spreading. The steam car and
the steam locomotive are gone, and nearly all steam engines today are
steam turbines. And so on.
If a business tries to persist in making buggy whips after horses are no
longer the most valued way to propel carriages, that business itself
will have to die out, and its jobs will go, too.
The pain of losing a long-standing job is perhaps not comparable to the
pain of losing a well-loved creative proposal. But the logic of the
situation is the same: to make way for something that could work better
for people results in painful loss. Journalists love to focus attention
on the losses, because the public gets a euphoric sense that it is
morally superior to those bad others who (they think) run the world
unfairly. If you have not been trained so that you can participate in
what makes the modern world modern, it is attractive to be offered this
palliative. But the same people who will want to accuse those bad others
of greed will delight in a shiny new bargain.
It’s the citizens, clients, patients, customers, etc. who cause the
economic pressure that makes obsolete jobs die off.
It’s the citizens, clients, patients, customers, etc. who cause the
success of new things that propagates improvements.
Investors, the people who own the businesses, go along for the ride.
When we see that something is going to be made obsolete, we sell it.
When we see something that looks like a viable new improvement, we want
to buy into that business. But in a free market, the freedom that drives
selection is the freedom of citizens, clients, patients, customers, etc.
to buy the new creations.
Change is the dirty end of the stick. Change hurts people. No ethical
person who sees how the world works espouses change.
Improvement is the clean end of the stick. Every ethical person wants to
propagate improvements to the human condition.
How certain must it be, then, that it is the same stick? How can we
design our new creations for more gain per unit of pain? You’ve got to
be a clever diagrammer. More on that later.
TOP
Emerson said that if you can build a better mousetrap, the world will
beat a path to your door. His friend Thoreau found at the Harvard
library a French account of Eberhard Faber's pencil-making inventions,
and father and son Thoreau may indeed have received growing revenue. But
Faber and his French copycats had little incentive to help Americans
make pencils and get the world penciling.
Word-of-mouth may have done it for mousetraps. Searching in a library
may have done it for pencils. But these creations spread too slowly to
afford their creators a big incentive to keep on creating useful wealth.
Propagating useful designs at high velocity is a social good.
Velocity increases the rate at which poorer people get richer.
Patents and copyrights allow creators to hope for a substantial share of
the wealth they create while they’re still alive to enjoy it.
Advertising spreads awareness of the new goods faster than word-of-mouth
or searchers in libraries would. The industrial, green, health, and
quality revolutions would not have attained velocity enough to be called
"revolutionary" without these velocity enhancers.
When people are only academically trained, they can decry the unfair
distribution of wealth almost in the same breath as they sneer at these
devices for speeding the distribution of wealth. The natural myopia of
the senses doesn't allow a systemic vision. People need diagrams to see
how innovation works as a whole.
Remember creative selection? Remember how tedious it was to even read
through the steps in the process? It is a lot more tedious to actually
do it! Without the incentives provided by patents, copyrights, and the
availability of advertising, fewer people would endure the tedium.
Of course, what's been created already is right in front of our faces.
The labor of creative innovation isn't performed in our presence. The
choice to make a commitment, work through the tedium, and persist
through to wide propagation is mental, that is, it's even less visible.
People who haven't been guided by abstractions to envision the process
of innovation as a whole can easily be misled into a churlish posture of
superiority.
So here is something you can do. Would you be willing to get a clean
sheet of paper and a pencil, and make a diagram of the creative process
as a whole?
And would you be willing to share your diagram with some other people,
so they can see what you mean?
I think there are a lot of people out there who would really like to
move off the sidelines and become participants. Your visual overview
might show them how. Is that ethical action?
TOP
Jobs are structures in which people get paid to satisfy wants.
Creating such a structure isn't hard. Abraham Maslow, an American
psychologist, in 1943 drew up a pyramid of needs, and he put bodily
needs near the bottom. Thirsty? I'll find some water and a gourd, and
satisfy your want. Hungry? I'll find a rock and bring down a squirrel.
Natural myopia won't prevent this.
Even a legislative committee can be smart enough to create such simple
jobs. Coerce merchants into paying a bounty on bottles, and the drunks
and crazies of the street can see a way to get paid a few nickels. But
today, we want "good" jobs.
Good jobs satisfy wants nearer the top of Maslow's pyramid. We want not
gourds, but running water. We want berries in winter and an iPod full of
music. Jobs that are structured to satisfy modern wants can't be created
by natural myopics. It takes abstraction skills to design such a
structure and build it.
Good jobs occur in structures of cooperation. Organizing such structures
of cooperation and keeping them going takes skills that few classrooms
teach. Can you develop and utter a well-crafted declaration of purpose?
Can you develop and deliver a well-crafted request? Can you develop and
then keep your work with a well-crafted promise? Organizing cooperation
needs these skills with abstractions. But most schools teach truths.
Truthful assertions guide attention to parts and aspects of prior
creations. But creating a good job is creation for the future.
Declarations, requests and promises are essential.
For the creation of some of the best jobs, even a complete set of skills
with acoustic abstractions isn’t enough. A good business plan might
entail the development of a system or process too complex to be seen as
a whole merely by talking about it. A comprehensive overview allows some
of the "bugs" to be seen and revisions made. This may set up for jobs
that endure, because the cooperative organization will endure.
A comprehensive overview, using a system or process diagram, might be
tested against comprehensive criteria, to see how it would fail if
enacted. I've suggested in an earlier column, "Creative Selection," how
this work can be structured.
The skills to create good jobs are relatively scarce, because they are
acquired in families or in on-the-job activities. Meanwhile, our
educational institutions are churning out people whose most developed
skills are only good for telling truths. Graduates of some fairly
prestigious educational institutions can find themselves in an almost
childlike relationship with the few people who can create the good jobs
that they want.
Scarcity of supply tends to make demanders bid up prices. Have you
wondered why leaders of big organizations can command such huge
payments? I think I’ve shown you here some of the reasons.
TOP
I've said that people are wealthy who have or can get what they want.
But wanting is an inner experience. Someone who wants people to want
what he or she can supply will have an incentive to make up abstractions
that change that inner experience. The formerly rich can be made to feel
poor.
Our educational institutions are currently turning out an excess of
people with assertion skills. (In Plato’s Academy, their model, was
focused on newly improved skills for making good assertions.) If you
can supply truths that aren't in high demand, can you create wants that
will possibly increase your pay and status?
Politicians can develop abstractions that make people want the services
that only governments can supply: policing, war, and other applications
for weapons and prisons. For if we aren't feeling a want of coercive
services, we won't tax ourselves.
Journalists can develop abstractions that make people want more of what
they can supply. Truths about other people that give us a euphoric
feeling of superiority will sell the product. Global gossip gathering
("news") makes journalism pay.
Scientists can guide people to want more assertions about global
scarcity or global warming or possible life on Mars or the likely
weather next weekend. This way, we want more science.
Charities can guide our attention to the sad plight of those they're in
business to serve, and we want more charity workers.
There’s an unhappy bias here. Assertion-mongers can best make us want
what they can supply if they generate pessimism.
Politicians, journalists, scientists and charities join with writers of
books and editorials to guide attention to difficult circumstances. Then
they can sell us their assertions about why things got difficult and
whom we should blame. If we were allowed an inner experience of wealthy
contentment, we'd not want most of what they are skilled to supply: more
assertions.
Material wealth can be sold in this same way. It's through the work of
some of these same assertion-sellers that we're aware of that. But some
of us have both enough stuff, and enough guff about having enough stuff.
I think it is one of our ethical responsibilities to be careful about
what we allow ourselves to be talked into. An inner experience of
poverty, in the midst of all this plenty, isn't going to bring out the
best that is in us. People who haven't yet been reached by the full
benefits of the industrial and the green and the health care and the
quality revolutions need our cheerful energies to be spent on
intelligent and friendly ethical actions. I think it'd help if we count
our blessings.
TOP
There is value in stability. Investments in relationships get less
valuable when people move away. Investments in skills get less valuable
when industries that used to need those skills die out. Effortless
habits stop working when roads and familiar businesses get rebuilt or
closed. As consumers of what other people produce, we'd like the
familiar pathways and stores to remain in place, but we'd also like
shiny new products, new services, new ways to travel, new excitement.
As producers of what other people consume, we'd like the familiar job
with the familiar relationships in the familiar setting. But sometimes
we'd like a new opportunity, if it is attractive enough, in a new job or
a new organization or in a new city.
In short, we like creative instability when we're in the driver’s seat,
but we don't like instability imposed on us by other people who do
things to spoil our stability without our participation.
And other people are frequently doing that to us. Increasingly, a
distant innovation attracts consumers so well that what we were employed
to produce is no longer needed, and our job goes. Our familiar store
goes out of business. An old familiar product or service isn't viable
and is no longer offered for us to buy. We get ticked off. How dare they!
"They" are distant creators, unknown to us and unknown to anyone we
personally know. They have been creatively committed. They have had
a lot of clever but unworkable ideas, and grieved for their lost
investments in those ideas. They have tried again and again and again.
Thousands of them. For years. And eventually, one or a few of them have
found a new, better set of ideas that seem to fit gracefully together.
They attract investors, and after some time, Ta Da! Creative destruction.
Hunter-gatherers ages ago were bothered by unstable migrations of game
and unstable weather. Farmers have always been bothered by unstable
weather. Townsfolk have been bothered by unstable communication and
trade. And forever, there have been distant creators -- but along the
silk road and along the shore trade, innovations usually took so long to
spread that innovation as a source of instability was nearly
imperceptible during the span of most people’s lifetimes.
Not anymore. Today, most people in the developed world and many in
less-wealthy places have to expect to change jobs, living quarters and
relationship networks several times within the span of a single
lifetime. It's unfair, it’s unjust, it's chaotic. We can appeal to a Big
Daddy religion if we believe in one. Or if we don't, then we can appeal
to a Big Momma state, if we believe in one.
Or maybe, if we and our neighbors have design skills, we can design some
kind of civic structure that would redistribute the happiness of those
benefited to the unhappier among us.
TOP
The fastest way to fix Social Security would be to acknowledge that
people live longer now, so we should earn our living for more years,
too. Do we have the courage to acknowledge this? Or will we protect
peoples’ tender feelings and pretend that we don’t know that Americans
live longer?
Americans are living longer in large part because of the larger and
better-trained workforce that develops new health care methods and
equipment. Living longer by these means costs human effort, and the
people making the efforts want to be paid for their risk-taking and
their persistence and their hours of work. Extending human life
therefore costs human effort -- it can't be "free" as if nature were
providing the benefits. Will we acknowledge that extending life is not a
"right," as though there were no human beings who have to be paid for
the work it entails? Can we acknowledge that human efforts in health
care must be limited somehow, and work out ways to ration it? Or will we
protect peoples' tender feelings and pretend there aren't limits?
Can we acknowledge that nobody knows why existence exists? Or will we
"respect" tender feelings and pretend that the fairy tales of Big Daddy
religion are not debilitating lies?
Can we acknowledge that humanoid apes can't entirely escape the
accidents of life in uncaring nature? Or will we cling to a fantasy
of a Big Mama state that would make life fair?
I’m sure you can think of other examples, probably better ones.
The point here, of course, is that acknowledging the obvious takes
courage. And if we don't screw up our courage and look at the human
condition with open eyes, we get stuck by holding tight.
Holding tight protects us from becoming sadder, and holding tight
prevents us from becoming wiser. Acknowledging unpleasant realities
frees us to try to create new openings for action.
Perhaps you’ve known a few people, as I have, who didn't deliver on some
simple little promise, yet failed to acknowledge their failure, thus
blocking any two-way conversation about how to improve the system or
process in which the person was set up to fail. Holding tight to the
pretense that nothing happened avoided a few moments of pain. But what
if it's part of a lifetime pattern of holding tight to a failure-prone
way of acting? For want of courageous acknowledgment, such a pattern
tends to isolate the person because cooperation with others is blocked.
In small things as in large, the most awkward acknowledgment is the most
effective way to open up a wealth of creative new possibilities. And
practice with courage in small things makes courageous acknowledgments
easier when the stakes are larger.
TOP
Newton famously acknowledged that he had stood on the shoulders of
giants. Accumulated knowledge, accumulated institutions, and accumulated
infrastructure make for yet more creation.
Lester Thurow in Building Wealth showed a whole pyramid of prior
investments, each built upon others and culminating in wealthy people in
a wealthy society. Thurow was not the first to suggest (not always with
a diagram) that a whole stack of accomplishments is needed to get ready
for high creativity. And our educational traditions clearly indicate
that it isn't effective to learn complex skills before accumulating the
more fundamental skills. Walk first before your run, and like that.
Accumulation of future creativity competes with immediate needs and
wishes for consumption. If you don't eat the seed corn, you can plant
next season's crop -- unless you starve first. Usually the tradeoff
isn't this dire, but accumulating for the future and then building upon
that accumulation isn't a given. It's worth thinking about what
circumstances help us do it.
If there are gangs of thugs wandering around looking for our
accumulations, we’ll be reluctant to save and will consume what we’ve
got. So reasonable law and order is necessary.
Longer time horizons for accumulations require longer-term security. If
the building of a solid business seems likely to make that business a
target for political confiscation, it isn't likely to get built. If a
long effort would be needed to search for a new invention, but patent
protection is uncertain, fewer potential investors will persist and do
the work.
In some times and places, people have been pessimistic about the
possibility that anything but immediate consumption made sense. If poor
kids see little evidence that education will open a path out of poverty,
they won't study -- and their parents won't sacrifice to offer them
their support to study. William Easterly in The Elusive Quest for
Growth lays out many necessary criteria, far too much to cover here.
Robert Solow of MIT is quoted on the book jacket as saying, "...the
hardest problem of all: how to get the poorest countries on a path of
sustained growth." I guess Solow's Nobel prize indicates that he knows
the hardest problem when he sees it.
I've suggested before that if we are to be effective in complex systems,
we’ll need some kind of systemic overview. If you care about "the
hardest problem" and you are willing to do some diagramming, I'd
recommend reading Easterly's book and then diagramming all of the items
you'll find in his last chapter of seven pages. Make it look like the
root system of a tree so that small bits that support or combine into
larger sources are displayed in those causal relationships. Use sticky
notes for each item so you can move them around as you refine your views
about which items are subsidiary contributors to which others.
It’s more fun to do this kind of work in a group. And how about
presenting your diagram to all of us some Sunday?
TOP
Inside every Economic Man there's an uneconomic child. Play the game of
business well, and you can have a high score in your wallet. On
weekends, you can sail your toy boat, etc.
I suppose economists focus on the Economic Man because they've become
economists at a stage when it was important to show that they were no
longer children. Who would get a PhD by studying the economic results of
playful engineers?
"At the margin" is a favorite phrase among economists. It means an
incentive makes no difference to nine tenths of the people, but those
teetering on the edge (at the margin) are influenced. Nine tenths of the
playful, inventive people of the world will play and invent just because
they like fooling around with the stuff. But one tenth could go either
way, and with a creative incentive we’d get more out of them. Incentives
lead to creating human value at the margin.
The bulk of what people do depends on their aptitudes and their
enculturations, and on the context in which life’s accidents place them.
But this bulk is inscrutable.
Incentives are important because they are scrutable, so that we have
opportunities to intervene and improve them.
A primary aptitude that comes with our genetic inheritance is for social
climbing. Everyone feels an urge to "get ahead" from time to time. But
we have a strange reticence about making our social climbing
discussable. It's like a guilty secret. And because it is usually
unacknowledged, it is often beyond our control -- it's part of our
disowned self, our "shadow" self.
The disowned self is vulnerable to being purposefully manipulated when
nobody is looking. So this is an exception to the rule that
inscrutability prohibits incentive. People have discovered that if you
give someone a better title, you won't need to give them a higher score
in their wallet. They'll flash their title instead of bragging about how
they scored.
And anyone who commands a big group of people shows up as a successful
social climber. Sexual opportunities are increased. Sycophants gather
around. Those less dominant generate internal stress, which is sometimes
debilitating if it is extreme.
It's hard to set up creative incentives more influential at the margin
than the social-climbing motive that is built in. Playful creators could
create more human value than they do, if the best dominators hadn't
out-scored them and stressed them. So it's worth trying, but it’s hard.
And it is so tempting to exploit the best dominators by giving them
a big title and a high score in their wallet, contingent on working 80
hours a week and leaving the spouse and toy boat moored far away.
Fortunately, some people don't get it or don't care, and we share the
wealth that their continued play makes possible.
TOP
We've created a social environment in which smoking is impolite.
And it has enriched health and reduced other costs of the habit.
Recycling is considered a civic duty, and landfills now last longer
before we have to tax ourselves to cap them and ship our trash
farther away.
We've got people bragging about their 50mpg hybrid cars, so we may be on
the way to making giant SUVs impolite.
Social pressure acts as both an incentive and a punishment -- it's both
carrot and stick. And for those activities that are as socially visible
as smoking, recycling, and driving are, social pressure can be more
effective than armed uniformed police. For the pressure could come from
anybody at any time.
Social pressure is far more flexible than laws because the citizens can
negotiate on the scene and make adjustments that fit the details of the
exact situation. The law is an ass, because one size fits all.
Neighbors can be subtler and smarter.
The mere possibility that someone nearby has a camcorder can inhibit
any crime that would be clear on video. The possibility that a "how
am I driving" hotline could receive a complaint can inhibit aggressive
driving by the drivers of marked vehicles.
Some of these examples involve new technology, and we should look for
ways to exploit new technologies for creative social pressuring. But
not all do -- often it just requires a bias toward action rather than
a bias toward passivity. Just walking around with a random piece of
trash you've picked up to dispose of can remind six passersby that
they too can take action.
Social pressure can go too far, and I’m not advocating that anyone
should be a social-climbing ninny, taking on a parental superiority.
Subtle and frequent pressure by many will work. One person going
to extremes won't.
To be gentle and frequent, we need to acquire habits and, for those of
us who don't form new habits quickly, we may need to install physical
reminders. (I used to have a tiny sign on my car dashboard that said,
"No Smoking Section, first 2 rows." Not all passengers saw it, but it
reminded me to speak up.)
Social pressure with a light touch creates social goods, and it's nearly
free. Conservatives, Libertarians, and Socialists can all cooperate and
participate without violating their principles. And who knows, we might
all find that we like each other.
TOP
Life is what happens while we're making other plans? If this is a joke,
it’s a painful joke. Our plans should enrich our lives. Our plans will
only be wasted if we make them without skills.
Consider all that you know about nature: your humanoid ape nature, and
the way you are situated in the larger natural scene. Make a diagram or
some other kind of visual display of all that. Consider all that you
know about culture, and the processes of enculturation. Draw a
process-flow diagram for the most important enculturating processes.
Consider all that you know about abstractions. Draw the matrix of
abstractions that I've offered you, or make your own visual display of
all the skilled ways that attention gets guided.
Make a diagram of a design process. Use Alex Osborn's diagram, use the
diagram I have offered you, or make up your own.
Set up a visual display where all of these can be seen with a sweeping
glance. That's the place to do some life-design. (If you have all of
this already stored in your mind’s eye, congratulations. Your
life-design office is portable.)
Now what are your design criteria? What values will you use to compare
your current trajectory with other clever proposals? Some of your values
come from your humanoid ape’s nature. It won’t work to try to plan as
though you are not a lover, not a caregiver, caregiver, not an
aggressor, not a social climber. You can regulate the expression of your
ape-nature, yes but you can’t realistically plan as though you can wipe
out your nature. Some of your values come from your ethical commitment.
Some of your values come out of personal and social relationships.
Okay, I know this way of thinking about life design is so foreign that
you are unlikely to follow my recipe exactly. Centuries from now, people
might get started this way early in life and practice the skills, so
that something like this will not feel so alien. But today, it’s too big
a stretch.
Nevertheless, if you see in my recipe what you've been missing, you
might buy some of the ingredients today. Pick out the one cheapest and
easiest ingredient, and at least acquire that.
A life unfolds in stages of awareness, and most people suddenly discover
a need to re-design. A life-design is like any other design in many
ways, and one of the ways is that designs become obsolete. If you detect
the beginnings of obsolescence early, there’s more time to create Plan B
while you are still being guided and supported every day by your
existing trajectory. But the entire process I've outlined above can be
accomplished all over again in less than 24 hours if it's an emergency.
Isn't living the richest life that you can worth this much work?
TOP
For human purposes, the hydrogen in ocean water and the carbon in
carbonate rock and earth’s capture of solar energy are without limit.
We have the knowledge to use solar energy to put that hydrogen together
with that carbon and make hydrocarbons. So how much ethical value is
there in fears of oil depletion?
Fear itself is an aversive inner experience. So how ethical can it be
to guide people’s attention as though we should feel impoverished and
fearful because "earth’s resources are finite"?
Fear mongering offers many career opportunities. Academics can sell
fear mongering books. Politicians can garner votes by first arousing
fears and then offering themselves as fearless leaders. Administrators
can profit by getting "non-profit" jobs where fearful donors will send
in the money for salaries. Journalists can get paid for endless stories
that point with alarm.
But all of this is obvious, and we continue to buy phony fears. Why?
What's the big attraction to those who dish the dirt?
Please recall that each of us lives in a humanoid ape’s body. And we
have a genetically-endowed potential for social climbing.
Now reflect on the difficulties of human creation. Most of our clever
proposals, if we examined them with some kind of visual overview such as
diagrams as systemic wholes, would prove unworkable or too expensive or
too coercive, etc. Worse yet, most people have never been trained for
design work, so dealing with extensive complexity is quite simply
unthinkable.
The modern world is made modern by those who can test their own
proposals with visual overviews, and quickly let them go to try
something else. But most of us aren't trained to use visual
abstractions, so we can't participate. This hurts.
And this kind of hurt can't be helped by aspirin. A palliative that does
work, however, is to get drunk together. Dishing the dirt gives us
a euphoric sense that we are socially superior to those who we assume must
be running the world. Salut!
Solving human problems creatively, actually improving conditions for
human life, requires sober reflection. And it requires an openness to
learning from people who have perspectives from differing life
experiences and differing ways of focusing. The people we've climbed all
over with disrespectful scorn are social climbers, too, and it will be
harder to cooperate with them.
I will turn next to the problems of redistributing wealth. For nature's
chaos disturbs everything humans do, so that wealth gets created
unjustly and unfairly. Ethical people want as much justice and fairness
as nature's chaos and human freedom allow. But I plead with you: please
stay sober. The topic of fairness is a prime setup for euphoric
nastiness. You'll need to use diagrams and really examine the
complexities. Keep it clean.
TOP
A long spell of dry parching of the plains isn't fair to Boise farmers.
A long spell of rain and chill isn't fair to Boston construction
workers. Nature doesn't care. Nature isn't fair.
Nature’s unfairness, however, depends on your situation. Clear sunny
weather helps car dealers in Boise sell their product. Wet chilly
weather in Boston helps retailers sell sweaters and umbrellas. "It's
an ill wind that blows nobody good" reminds us of our situation-dependent
relationship to natural unfairness.
Local and near-term natural unfairness is easiest to understand. Slower
processes and those beyond our horizon are harder to understand as
natural unfairness. The elevation of the Africa plate, for example,
forbids cheap long-distance trade because rivers are only navigable to
the edge of the plate. Remember the hog farmer and the shoemaker? If one
of them lives on one river in Africa and the other lives on a different
river, mutual enrichment by trading skins for boots is likely blocked by
two waterfalls near the ocean. China and western Europe, however, enjoy
rivers that flow gently to the sea. But who knew, before geologists
developed an overview, that Africans were hindered by nature’s tectonic
unfairness?
Unaware of natural maldistribution, people don't usually just
acknowledge ignorance. We fill the vacuum with an explanation. When
white people who enriched each other by trade encountered black people
who didn't, they could use social-climbing racism to explain the wealth
difference.
Luckier people usually find a way to claim that it isn't luck, it's
pluck. We made our own luck in some way. We are therefore socially
superior to the unluckier folks.
Unlucky people, however, are just as clever and just as eager for social
climbing. Africans, for example, can claim that Europeans victimized
them, thus gaining moral superiority over whites.
Writers of history and journalists can take advantage of all this
competition for social position by selling their stories. Sell stories
of bad behavior by victimizers to those hindered by natural injustice.
Everyone gains a euphoric social superiority. And it employs a lot of
writers.
It’s even good for the bystanders. We buy the stories, too. We join one
side or another and applaud or boo. It's fun and it's a lot easier than
becoming a climatologist or a geologist.
Meanwhile, natural maldistribution keeps shuffling the deck and giving
each person a random deal. Better or worse aptitudes, tall or short,
pretty or plain, birth order, birth location. Even if we could somehow
repeal nature's chaos long enough so that each person would seem to have
an exact equality at birth, the natural accidents of who meets whom, who
thinks what, whose local weather helps or hurts, etc., would soon
maldistribute wealth all over again.
Redistribution of wealth is our attempt to do the best that we can while
working upstream against all of this.
TOP
If human history had been fair, the industrial revolution would have
begun nowhere until it could have started everywhere.
We can ask, "Why did the Industrial Revolution begin in lowland
Scotland, and then spread to England, but not to the Scottish
Highlands?" And in asking "Why?" we can have two very different
mindsets. We can ask "Why?" and expect to diagram a complex web of
historical accidents. Or we can ask "Why?" and expect to hear how human
beings morally inferior to ourselves planned to have history turn out as
it has.
The second mindset allows non-diagrammers to sell their books.
The first mindset would plunge us into a web of interdependencies far
beyond what a sequence of acoustic utterance can cope with.
History is less than half of what happened because it is a story.
It's a linguistic sequence. But cultural evolution, like natural
evolution, cannot be effectively sequentialized. Nobody seriously
tries to study biology without making diagrams. Even Aristotle is
known to have diagrammed after dissections.
Technology didn't evolve through a series of historical accidents, but
rather through a network of historical accidents. Scottish coal and iron
were part of the network. Presbyterian commitment to universal literacy
was part of the network. Limits on the power of kings and nobles were
part of the network. Francis Hutcheson and the Moral Philosophers were
part of the network. Scots with visual imagination such as Watts,
McAdam, Hutton, and the Darwins, were part of the network.
The continuous papermaking process brought from France to England by one
of the Fourdrinier brothers was part of the network, as was Eberhard
Faber's solution to the problem of marking graphite marks on it (and the
new tree sap for erasing, named rubber for this important ability). For
the speedup of the visual intellect dubbed "revolution" is
quintessentially the correction of drawings to reduce the need to test
and scrap physical prototypes.
The industrial revolution still hasn't reached all humanity. Not its
benefits in material wealth. Still less its intellectual practice of
testing and correcting proposals with paper drawings. This is unfair.
But blaming the colonizers for this unfairness can never help us to
speed up the redistribution of intellect toward a universal reign of
design.
TOP
Once it’s big enough to roll downhill, a snowball will keep rolling and
growing. It'll grow as long as gravity propels it. Wealth is like that,
except that the hill never ends. Accumulated wealth accelerates
opportunity for more accumulation. Electrical engineers call it positive
feedback. Snowball mechanisms abound, and non-engineers now speak about
feedback.
Please note that nature's maldistribution, technology's maldistribution,
and snowball maldistribution are mindless. Nobody needs to plan them.
Thus quite often, there’s no person and no group of persons who should
be blamed.
Sociopaths should be blamed for their cruelty, and we sometimes enjoy
thinking and speaking as though mindless mechanisms of maldistribution
were all the actions of cruel sociopaths. This way, we can get drunk
together in our social-climbing euphoria.
Professions of alarm about maldistributed wealth often occur against a
tacit agreement to assume sociopaths caused it. The facial muscles
betray euphoria, while the voice laments (Of course, some who fear
revealing their euphoria can conceal this). Professions of alarm are
easier than diagramming the actual cause and effect network,
prioritizing, and doing something concrete and specific about one of the
sources.
Maldistribution is widely distributed. This is mainly because mindless
mechanisms are widely distributed. So playing the view-with-alarm game
is cheap and available everywhere. But it's a mere trick, a game, a
drunken euphoria. Ethical people should have fun in our lives. But the
view-with-alarm game shouldn't take us out of ethical action and
passivate us.
And a hateful bonding can build up among viewwith- alarmers. We can
enlarge the game and extend it, if we identify a class who caused it --
those Other Bastards. The devils of the other political party, the
devils of the other religious persuasion, the devils of the other
ethnicity, etc. This hateful bonding has been identified by some as one
kind of "social capital." Andrea Perrault recommended a book called
Bowling Alone that distinguishes this kind of social capital from
another kind: bridging. Reaching out to see what others see that we are
blind to creates bridging social capital. But this takes courage,
because we know we will feel sadness if we see our own blindness.
Most humans, most of the time, are trustworthy. Pretending that the
good "people like us" are rare and special is a lie.
Lying reduces our competence for sober, ethical problem-solving. We need
accurate knowledge of the real world and real people. We shouldn't deny
that several percent of people are sociopaths, when we have dependable
scientific evidence that they're out there. But we need to also see the
mindless mechanisms. Let's not exaggerate the effects of people who can
be made to look like Other Bastards by those who’ve learned to pander to
our out-of-control social climbing. Let's stay sober and solve problems.
Let's not be news junkies.
TOP
Let's say we were serious "Humanists," meaning that we belong to the
entire human race, independent of regional or national affiliation.
We're in favor of the graduated Income Tax. So as global Humanists, we
decide to tax those who happen to live in the USA and Canada the same
way citizens of India and China are taxed, and so on for the
approximately 200 nations of the globe. Every person with above-average
income pays, and every person with income below our humanistic "poverty
line" gets paid out of this tax collection, a grand humanistic
redistribution of income. Can you imagine this?
We could phase in this change over a generation, so the shocks of
reduced wealth here and increased wealth there would be less disruptive
to the established world orders. There are two primary questions:
Should we? And could we?
The first question hinges on estimating the effect of the new wealth on
recipients in many different situations, on taxpayers in many different
situations, and the Global creation of wealth. Can we make a visual
overview of the global economic system that is comprehensive enough? Can
we assemble enough information about the psychological effect upon the
taxpayers, and estimate how their behavior will change as their rate of
taxation rises? Can we estimate the aggregate effect on the incentives
to work, the incentives to trade, and the incentives to create new
products and services and new technologies?
And who are "We" who will have the duty and the right to coerce the
taxpayers? Will "We" have guns and prisons to threaten the taxpayers
who'd rather not pay? How much police power will we need, and how will
we guard this honey-pot of power over human beings from the sociopathic
flies that the honey attracts? I think you can begin to sense that the
answer to the second question is likely to be: no, we couldn't do it.
And the big reason why we can't is that too many of us, despite our
caring for our fellow humans who are poorer, would reluctantly concede
that we shouldn't.
The reasons we shouldn't are numerous but perhaps a few stand out most
starkly. One concern surely has to be the huge increase in coercive
careers and the career interests that this will create. Many of us
think there are already too many guns and too many people in prisons.
Gun making corporations and prison building government agencies and
prison guard unions would all grow and exert their influence. When
we really think about it, coercion itself is a clear humanistic
negative.
Another big concern surely has to be the one that F. A. Hayek famously
pointed out: billions of independent thinkers process far more
information when acting for themselves than millions of bureaucrats
(with career interests different from recipients and taxpayers) can
process. Centralized redistribution can't cope with the human
complexities.
TOP
If poor people get social services without paying tax, and wealthy
people enjoy the same social services, and they do pay a tax, wealth
gets redistributed. But if you haven't conducted graphic and numerical
experiments, you might be surprised how it works.
For example, suppose the threshold for taxpaying is at $20K annual
income per adult, and everything over this threshold is taxed at 50%,
regardless of how high someone's income goes. Poor people pay a flat
rate of zero. Wealthier people are taxed at a flat rate of 50%.
Would you call this a flat tax?
You can draw a graph and examine what happens. Put the tax to be paid on
the vertical scale, from 0 to, say, $100,000. Use a scale with intervals
only half as large horizontally, so that the 50% tax rate is plotted as
a 45° slanted line, with its bottom end at the $20K annual income
mark.
What's the tax rate for someone earning $25K? It's not 50%! Fifty
percent of the $5K increment above $20K is $2.5K, so the tax rate on
that person's total annual income would be 10%, not 50%. What about
someone who makes $200K per year? Graph that case, and see what happens.
The increment above the $20K level is $180K, and 50% of that is a tax
bill for $90K. This is 45% of that person's income.
There's no need for "tax brackets." A simple hockey stick tax produces
a variable tax rate on annual income, varying from zero up to almost,
but not quite, the slope of the stick.
The taxes that people with incomes above $20K per year pay cover the
public services that all people can benefit from. Everyone benefits
from standardized weights and measures, and regulations on how food
is labeled, and pollution controls, and the policing of borders, and
the detection of criminals. Anyone can benefit from the cessation of
contagious diseases, taxpayer or not. You could think of many other
examples.
But if redistribution of wealth is this easy to engineer, why must the
system of taxation be so complex that it's called a tax "code" and you
need to hire an accountant to decode it?
If you've been reading my columns for a number of months, you can guess
that when I say "why" I mean: what would the whole cause-and-effect
network look like, if you mapped it all out?
Accountants and tax lawyers lobby Congress, and some of them even run
for office and get elected. People who have a career that would
evaporate if the system became simple will find ways to fight for
complexity. That's surely one of the main branches on the
cause-and-effect root system.
But there's a subtler and more pervasive reason I think. And it's
a reason that you can actually do something about. See, the citizens
don't do graphic and numerical experiments. The citizens don't even
get together and pore over cause-and-effect diagrams. The citizens
don't make process-flow diagrams, nor pore over those either. We're
blind. So we allow the blind to lead us.
TOP
Please recall now the hog farmer and the boot maker. They made each other
happier. Happiness is real. But extreme scientism can ignore the real
inner experience of real human beings. That's because science is
delimited by instrumentation. We have no instruments to see and measure
the inner wealth of inner experience. Since the existing boots and the
existing pigskins were not physically transformed in the trade, those
focused exclusively and dogmatically on measurable things see no
creation of human value out of nothing. It can seem as though somehow
the value of the boots and the pigskin would have to be equal before the
trade, and remain equal during and after the trade.
This blindness can have tragic consequences if there's someone in
between the hog farmer and the boot maker who sees opportunity and
facilitates a trade that otherwise wouldn't happen. Suppose a wandering
trader sees inside a hog farmer's barn and then fifty miles further on
sees all those unsold boots on the maker's shelves. Aha! See if the
boot maker would take a skin for a pair of boots. Travel back to the farm
and see if the farmer would take a pair of boots for two hog skins.
Travel back to the shop with one skin and the farmer's foot
measurements. Travel back to the farm with the boots and collect the
second pigskin. Trade the second skin for a new pair of shoes for
himself. Now the trader has a new pair of shoes, but observers may think
he did nothing. He didn't care for piglets and feed them and skin them
and tan the hides. He didn't cut and sew boots. Yet he too is richer.
The trader has been paying for meals during his travels. He may have
rented a horse or other means of easier, faster travel. Redistribution
of his wealth to the suppliers of transportation and food will cease if
the trader's profit is equated with theft and if as an enemy of the
people he is stopped from trading.
Our term for people who see opportunity and facilitate trades to enhance
the wealth of inner experience in buyer and seller is "entrepreneur."
Translated: "between-taker." There's no acknowledgement in this term of
any between-giving to suppliers of transportation and food. There's no
acknowledgement of any between-giving of improved inner experience in
the farmer or in the boot maker. Human value is both created and
redistributed, but the person who did that is called a "taker."
And what if the transportation and food ends up costing more than the
added value that the entrepreneur can between-take? If the net profit
turns out to be negative, some of the trader's previously saved-up
wealth got redistributed, too.
Envy of the stranger with new shoes can stimulate the
social-climbing instinct: Damn those parasites!
Or maybe we can do the job ourselves? We can pass laws that hinder
traders. And if we get mad and crazy enough with our drunken
social-climbing euphoria, we can confiscate and destroy their wealth.
If the trading strangers can be identified with a foreign ethnicity,
we can even subject the Gypsy, Jew, or Armenian trader to murder.
Thus endeth creation and redistribution by "between-takers."
TOP
Part 7D: Coerced vs. Voluntary
Redistribution - September 2007
There are three kinds of redistribution. The story of the hog
farmer, the bootmaker, and the entrepreneur illustrates the
accidental kind. The providers of food, lodging and transport
along a trade route can share in the profits from the trade,
without either the farmer or the tradesman or the entrepreneur
having any such intention. They could even be oblivious.
Since accidental redistribution does not fundamentally
require that the actors have a friendly disposition toward
recipients, it is possible to tell this story as though the
principal actors were all sociopaths. The accidental process is
easier to focus on if good intentions are ruled out. Adam Smith
famously expressed negative feelings toward business people, and
this may have worked as a teaching device. However we should not
be misled by a teaching device. Not all hog farmers nor all
bootmakers nor all entrepreneurs lack human kindness. In fact,
only a few percent of the population are unable to care about
their fellow human beings.
Yet there is a strong tendency to disallow the benefits of
accidental redistribution. It's not easy to explain a consistent
churlishness toward the "trickle-down theory," as its detractors
name it. Calling it a "theory" is a rhetorical device, much as
is the fundamentalist labeling of evolution a "theory." And
perhaps the psychology could be similar. Perhaps we don't like
to acknowledge the role of accident. Whether in biology or in
human relations, we'd rather misguide attention as though
nothing good could ever happen without good intentions.
After ruling out the accidental kind of redistribution, we
are left with the other two kinds: coerced and voluntary. Heroic
government can redistribute wealth by taxing and spending. Or
heroic do-gooders can redistribute wealth by soliciting
voluntary donations and handing those out.
However, people are complex and have multiple motives.
Whether we examine farmers, bootmakers, entrepreneurs,
government officials, or do-gooders, we will find both selfish
motives and (except for sociopaths) a capability of kindly
motives. We can't know someone's motives by just looking at
their function or career. Government officials can be friendly,
dedicated public servants who also have a career interest in the
growth of their governmental institution. People with careers in
non-profit institutions can be friendly, dedicated do-gooders
while at the same time wanting their particular institution to
grow and be publicly recognized.
All three kinds of redistribution have their place, and each
has proponents who contend to enlarge the place of their
favorite kind. From the viewpoint of an architect or an
engineer, though, we could do better than contend. We could
design. Diagrams or drawings could help us consider many
different proposals for improving effectiveness and reducing the
human costs. Why must we contend so much, using the ancient
academic intellect of sequential language? Why not learn and use
design skills?
TOP
Part 7E: Distribution in Time -
October 2007
Even in nature, some animals
invest in building nests, hives, burrows, bowers, anthills,
beaver dams, and so on. Squirrels and other animals also bury
food for use in a later season. We humans have massively
extended our investments.
A food cache merely postpones the eating, but an anthill or a
beaver dam or a beehive transforms the animal's habitat. Some of
these structures can be handed down over generations.
Humans store up so many kinds of investments that we have a
vocabulary list implying various time frames that we plan for.
Drink your milk right now. Save some jam for tomorrow. Plan your
birthday party for next week. Save up for skis. Deposit in your
bank account for a car. Train yourself in the skills for a
better job. Speculate in stocks toward retirement. We distribute
almost every increment of our income into multiple consumption /
investment time frames. And we rarely refer to this process as a
redistribution of wealth.
An argument for not distributing our wealth to different times
arises in war: Live for tonight, for tomorrow you may die. And
even without war, some don't live as long as they expected.
Postponement always carries some risk that the self won't profit
from an investment, only heirs and assigns, or maybe thieves.
Every example I've listed above appears to be intentional. But
even the lowly earthworm enriches a farmer's soil, with no
generous intention. Humans provide many good side effects such
as funding someone else's mortgage loan by holding a bank
balance. We didn't intend that distribution, but there's a
system in place that aggregates bank balances into mortgages.
The system doesn't need our intentions, good or bad. It does a
stranger some good, very likely, and we needn't even know.
Financial capital can be accumulated every payday. Physical
capital, like building a garden or a deck on your house, might
take several weekends. "Human Capital," by which is generally
meant the brain tissue whose operation shows up as skills and
awareness, can take years of study and practice. "Social
Capital" is so slow to accumulate that economists have often
overlooked it. The Creation and Destruction of Social Capital,
by Gunnar and Gert Swendsen (Edward Elgar Publishing, 2004),
studies investments of this kind in Denmark and Poland over many
human generations.
People who don't use systemic diagrams can destroy accumulations
that occur in distributed systems without even knowing it.
Bowling Alone by Robert Putnam showed how this can happen, and
the Svendsen book builds on Putnam's and uses his concepts of
"bridging" and "bonding" social capital.
People who can visualize the slower and more complex networks of
redistribution can protect them better from accidental damage as
well as from anti-social destruction. You could accumulate a
little diagramming skill right now, if you'll invest...
TOP
Part 8:
Sadness and Injustice - November 2007
If human history was
fair, every person would be designerate. Every person would be
prepared to participate as architect or engineer of something
that will improve the human condition.
Sadly, perhaps only one percent of human beings are designerate
today. Everyone sees the improvements. Even in poor countries
people hear and see the wealth of airplanes and cars and cell
phones and video news, sports, and drama. Sadly, most everyone
is locked out of the design process by a lack of training. Even
the fundamental awareness that all of it is made possible by
drawings and diagrams is absent. The literate are relegated to
the grandstands, watching but not allowed to participate. The
illiterate are twice alienated: they aren't academically
trained, let alone trained in or even aware of the
post-academic visual intellect.
Sadness causes pain, and pain causes rage. Rage against unfair
outcomes can be harnessed by astute politicians. Misguide
attention away from the mindless mechanisms of maldistribution.
Point out some distinction that makes "us" different from "them"
and shift the blame from unfair nature, unfair history, and
unfair snowballing wealth onto "them." Express peoples' rage,
and make yourself their leader.
Outrage is joyful, for it makes us morally superior and
therefore socially superior to "them." The joyful warriors rise
up and call for Justice. Justice against "them" if they're
identifiable -- or if there is no clear "them," then call for
Social Justice.
"Social Justice" has no clear meaning, and its usefulness lies
in that very vagueness. Politicians know that to be followed,
you need only create and maintain the joyful social-climbing
rage. Keep people away from awareness of mindless mechanisms and
keep implying that some "them" somewhere did it to us.
The ancient goddess of justice holds a scale in one hand and a
sword in the other. She wears a blindfold to indicate that she
won't see gender, race, social distinction, or any potential
source of bias. And her sword shows that she's governmental: she
wields coercive enforcement of her decisions. We can bring our
outrage to her, and the blood will be on her sword, not on ours.
This dream of the big mama state, like the dream of the big
daddy religion, is a childish comfort. The big ones will take
care of the world and make it righteous. As if those mindless
mechanisms that spook our real lives never existed.
But the politicians and the priests of power have turned every
dream of Social Justice into a nightmare of coercion run amok.
Once the joy of social-climbing rage has been institutionalized,
the institutions of coercion get a life of their own. The big
ones of our dreams make way for the big ones of our nightmares.
Design skills might allow us to design around all of this, while
doing what realistically can be done about maldistribution and
ethical redistribution. I'll turn next month to institutional
design.
TOP
Part 9A: Preparing
for Institutional Design - December 2007
Designing an institution is much like designing anything else.
First, we need comprehensive criteria, so that we'll be prepared
to test our proposals. Then we need some kind of drawing or
diagram that represents the best current example of an existing
institution that
we'll compare proposals against. Finally, we need a process for
comparing the visual overview of each proposal against the
benchmark institution, so that every criterion will provide its
comparative evaluation.
It's necessary in any design work to have at least the following
four distinct kinds of criteria:
-
Criteria from the study of nature, so that we wouldn't
accept any proposal that nature prohibits
-
Criteria from knowledge of current technology, so we
wouldn't accept any proposal that current technology can't
support
-
Criteria from knowing how potential co-investors will choose
whether and how much to co-invest, so that we will screen
out any proposal that would fail to be realized and grow
-
Criteria from observing human beings in all of the relevant
contexts, so that we won't accept proposals that would fail
to satisfy the values and needs of the people it will
affect.
So far in this series, I've been laying the groundwork for both
gathering comprehensive criteria, and for testing proposals by
means of the intellectual method of architects and engineers.
I want to remind you here of some of the basics.
-
Nature is only partly predictable. There's an element of
chaos and unfairness in all natural processes, including the
biological and historical processes. Nature's unfairness
can't be repealed because it isn't human-made law. Every
institution must be designed to work despite nature's chaos.
-
Innovators keep enlarging the boundaries of technology.
However, the human psyche is currently beyond the boundary,
and appears destined to stay that way for many decades.
Institutions must be designed so that they can function
effectively even though inner happiness, inner pain, and
inner effort can only be judged by skilled observation and
without instrumentation — objective tests aren't available.
-
People don't invest their time, energy, or political capital
in any proposal that would require a substantial backward
step on any criterion. This is because the beneficiaries are
spread thin and can neither appreciate nor accumulate in a
powerful way the value of benefits to come, while those who
stand to lose anything will be acutely aware and will fight
fiercely to limit any loss.
-
Human wealth is created by three broad categories of work:
Hands-on physical work, the intellectual work of trading,
and the intellectual work of designing. Everyone sees and
appreciates hands-on work. But both kinds of intellectual
creation need careful protection, for they are fundamentally
not visible, and in the modern world they are greater
sources for increasing human wealth than anything done
physically.
I hope the above summary is daunting. It should be. When you see
how much is involved, I think it is obvious how incompetent our
lawmakers are and have always been. I don't demean honest effort
and sincere good intentions. Incompetence is sad, and not
something we should gloat about. It just means we need to take
on
challenges for which our modest design skills might suffice, and
expect to work hard and long.
TOP
Part 9B:
Choosing An Institution To Improve
-Janurary 2008
Designers have their greatest freedom and leverage when scanning
the environment to imagine what could be that is missing. And
when you've seen a variety of possibilities missing, it is
therefore of utmost importance to commit to the one project that
allows you the richest possibility for ethical creation.
Prioritizers in the industrial, green, medical, and quality
revolutions have developed some wisdom about prioritizing.
Innovators in all of these would probably agree that
quantitative estimates are essential. For if you cannot make at
least a crude quantitative estimate, how much can you claim to
really know and understand?
But this raises the question: what should you quantify? And
where several things beg to be quantified, how should you
combine your quantitative estimates so they'll point to one key
choice?
I've learned and used a process that I've heard attributed to
the Kepner & Tregoe consultancy. It uses three non-overlapping
assessments. And the quantitative assessments are multiplied,
not added, to derive a summarizing quantitative priority. By
using bigger
numbers to represent higher frequency, impact, and
controllability, and then multiplying the estimates, any option
that is low on any of these estimates will drop out.
Let's look in more detail at this process. Try frequency first.
How frequently does a particular institution affect human wealth
and well-being? Assign the institution a 3 for frequency if it
affects most people most every day. Assign it a 1 if it affects
only a few people, and it affects them only once a year or less.
Assign a 2 if it affects a big minority monthly or weekly. You
can see that these are going to be very crude estimates. And
occasionally it's necessary to select an
intermediate value because it is glaringly obvious that 3 is too
big and 2 is too small (or 2 is too big and 1 is too small).
Assess impact second. This is not a summary judgment, because
here you are going to explicitly ignore any estimate of
frequency and only focus on the impact the institution has when
and if there is an instance of its effect.
Third, assess the ability of the people making these estimates
to influence or control the design of the institution. You might
assign a 3 if this group owns and controls the institution
already, or if you know who does and you have confidence that
you can achieve definitive influence. You would assign a 1 if
the institution evolved over centuries with no specific owners,
and this group doing the prioritizing has little or no hope of
establishing effective control over its design.
Possibly you could invent a fourth dimension to evaluate. How
passionately do you care about each institution? You could
assign a 3 if you're willing to risk dissipating your life in an
effort to improve its design. I always make a bar-chart showing
the relative sizes
of the products of the quantitative assessments. The institution
with the biggest bar goes on the top, and the others are shown
in order of descending quantitative product. Worth trying?
TOP
Part 9C: Money as an Example Institution -
February 2008
I've written about
nature's poverty and nature's chaos. I've reminded you of a
wealth of human values. I've described the design process, with
emphasis on the new visual intellect used by architects and
engineers and other modern designers. I've reminded you about a
variety of humane creative involvements. I've explained how
entrepreneurs create human value out of no physical thing,
through their intellectual and social process. I've explicated
the mindless mechanisms of maldistribution and I've reviewed
various options for redistribution. But in all of this, I've
scarcely acknowledged the existence of money.
The frequency of our money involvement is high. The impact of
having a convenient way to save, store, and spend money is
great, as you can see if you will imagine a world in which all
exchanges would have to be done by physical barter or limited to
exchanges within established relationships. And our ability to
create institutions of money is ample, though I'll need to
provide examples so that you can see the ease with which a new
institution of money can be created at any time.
When I was a child, another child laid out a play village and
invited neighboring children to identify properties and play as
if adults. An adult behavior that we all knew of was buying and
selling. Caps from soda bottles were our play-money. Later I
emulated this idea in a play-village in my own backyard. My
father had a miniature mimeograph for making mailing labels, and
I printed a quantity of 5-bottlecap notes with that to expand
the money supply in my play village.
My college economics professor required us to read about the
creation of cigarettes-as-money in a World War II prison camp.
The authorities didn't institute this -- the prisoners did it.
Care packages would arrive sporadically and the demand for items
in the packages needed to be adjusted to the supply. Cigarettes
were included in some of the packages, and spontaneously people
began to use cigarettes as a general-purpose medium of exchange.
Food stamps, trading stamps, grocery ad coupons, frequent-flier
accounts, Charlie Cards on the Boston T: all are institutions of
stored-value for exchange. Ancient Romans had their coins, our
local aboriginals had wampum, and we have paper money, first
issued by private banks and now issued by the Federal Reserve
Bank of the U.S. Government.
I hope these examples are sufficient to demonstrate that money
has come in many flavors, adjusted to the tastes of the times
and the needs and desires of specific populations of people.
If you want to start a project to design the policies and rules
of a new Ethical Culture Currency, you can feel free to do so.
TOP
Part 9D: Competing Institutions- March
2008
We speak of law makers in
political office, but not of law designers. They still operate
like ancient lawgivers: talk and talk until it sounds pretty
good, then enact what's possible. Can you imagine a candidate
for office being asked in the typical meet-the-candidate event
to display some of her design drawings, so that voters can
assess design competency?
If we work toward universal
designeracy, in the 23rd century it could happen. But in the
meanwhile, what can be done?
In the absence of widespread
design skills, we fall back upon evolution. We have little
foresight, but we have 200 nations and thousands of smaller
jurisdictions within nations. Some jurisdictions and some
nations allow citizens to freely create new institutions and try
them out. If you want to propose a new institution of money in
the Boston area, for example, you can try out your Charlie Card
idea or you can try a new Ethical Society Currency. If people
will trust it, if it's convenient, if it's durable, if it
confers status, if it becomes popular, who knows? It may
out-compete an existing institution of money.
On the other hand, if it is easy
to counterfeit or if it's subject to debasing ("inflation"),
people will learn to distrust it and your new institution won't
grow and may even die.
If a new institution grows in one
jurisdiction, people elsewhere may learn about it and copy it.
Your successful model can act as an invading species elsewhere.
Copies and variants might propagate throughout the human race
within a century.
Institutions themselves evolve
within themselves. They may suffer a dulling of their senses,
becoming so out of touch with some of their stakeholders that
their viability withers. They may grow non-functional
regulations and office-holders and arcane structures that slow
and hinder them into an ever-shrinking niche until viability
ceases. The social-climbing within may waste their energies so
much that they are easy prey for younger, more vigorous
institutional competitors.
Evolution is terribly wasteful.
But lacking design skills, people can't test seen-as-a-whole
proposals against comprehensive criteria. We talk and talk until
it sounds pretty good, and then we enact what's possible, using
real human beings as our experimental animals and wasting huge
quantities of human hopes, time, and energy. If the institution
fails, it takes human potential down with it.
In the special case of
institutions with police powers, the human costs of
institutional failure can be catastrophic. One answer is to pit
local, state, and federal institutions against one another, and
within each level, to separate powers to inhibit the snowballing
of coercive powers everywhere. But it takes continual vigilance
to keep competition vigorous.
TOP
Part 9E: Design Within Institutions -
April 2008
I once asked an Architect who was serving on the Cambridge City
Council how much she was able to use drawings or diagrams there.
She recalled once during a meeting diagramming power structures
that she could image as they operated. She passed around what
she had learned in that comprehensive form. They laughed. They
missed a huge opportunity. Few people can shoot the rapids of a
Masters in Architecture at MIT. Ms. Born could have shown her
colleagues a lot more visual overviews, but they were not aware
of the power of visual intellect. Many "meetings" are
transformed into amazingly co-creative Meatings. Ridicule,
however, can keep the meat out and the tea party chatters in. It
may seem paradoxical to some if I say that short meetings are
usually a waste of time. It's not because long meetings are
necessarily better -- they're often even worse.
But if a meeting is short, usually it means there's a tight
agenda and a shared commitment to rush through it and adjourn.
People must rush because they are going to use the only acoustic
channel in the room to report sequentially. There's neither the
time nor is there a well-conceived method for co-creation. There
are no wall-sized displays that could allow shared and
simultaneous processing of the institution's processes, its
priorities, its progress, its challenges, its strengths and
weaknesses. There is no way for the people meeting to improve
the displays of their situation incrementally.
Have you visited an architectural office and spent some time
observing? You might sense intensity, but you probably won't
hear the shared acoustic channel being fully occupied. It might
even be quiet. People are "pouring over" drawings and possibly
also three dimensional models. They are looking for trouble.
Time and time again, they're finding it.
The troubles they find are not going to make it into concrete
and metal and glass. The troubles they find are not going to
waste the time and energy of hundreds of other people. They look
at an integrated whole of their proposal, and they find yet
another trouble. And they modify the display to show a possible
improvement. Then they look for trouble some more.
If you take a sweeping, gestalt glance around an architectural
design office, you are looking at an all-day Meating. Every day.
Imagine the speedup in human progress if our institutions knew
how to redesign themselves?
TOP
Part 9F: Institutionalized Trust - May
2008
Ethical people keep their word. The word that we keep is a
declaration, a request, or a promise. These are future-producing
words. We utter them to create a future that we hope will be
better. We hold to the word we gave, and alter the conditions of
our existence so as to make the conditions match up with our
word. Our declaration, request, or promise drives behavior.
We trust people to keep their word, because their word opens up
new possibilities for our own future. For example if you request
that I make a presentation at your meeting, and I promise to do
so on a particular date, we need to trust each other. I need to
trust that you wouldn't fail to set up the meeting, which would
waste the effort I'll put into preparation. You need to trust
that I won't fail to prepare and show up on time, which would
waste your preparations and those of the attendees.
Trust is a kind of wealth. People invest in giving and keeping
their word. The investment pays off in trust-supported combined
efforts. You can specialize in setting up the meeting, and I can
specialize in presenting. By allowing each of us to focus on
what we can do best, trust-supported cooperation allows each of
us to enjoy a wealthier community than if we had to act alone.
Trust is built through accumulated experience. Parents who make
ill-considered requests, words which they don't keep, have
children who are unresponsive to parental requests. Clubs which
adopt bylaws that they don't enforce have members who ignore the
bylaws. Legislatures that pass more laws than they can tax the
public to hire police to enforce, engender populations that
don't even read the lawbooks and who violate laws routinely.
When politicians promise the public money, they should make
preparations so as to be able to deliver on their promises. But
if the promise is made in our youth or middle years, and the
government largess is not due until we are old, political
careers will be evolving along with our own and the people who
made the promises won't be the politicians who must tax citizens
in the future to pay our future benefits. Or if an insurance
company takes our premiums today and promises that they'll be
able to pay us in retirement or in ill health, the same question
can arise. Who, exactly, is promising? And if different people
who are to be elected or hired later are to deliver on promises,
what accumulated experience allows us to trust these promises?
Public trust is a kind of public wealth. When people have had
long experience with trustworthy institutions, they can trust
institutions for future deliveries as promised. If they haven't,
they can't. Most institutions in the industrialized world have
been trustworthy most of the time. That's one of the key
enablers for wealthy societies: people are able to specialize in
what they each do best, and trust that the rest of the people,
including those in large institutions, can be trusted to deliver
on promises.
But here's a design problem for you: what criteria (please
include all four kinds) must an institutional design satisfy if
its promises are to be trustworthy over half a lifetime?
TOP
Part 9G: Instituted Markets - June 2008
Any trader acting alone can perform the intellectual work of
trade. Could party A trade profitably with party B? No? Then
what about A trading with C? No? Then what about A with D? B
with C? B with D? Try, fail, try, fail, repeat. It's
intellectual work. It's a search with imagination, testing many,
many pairings until one particular trade appears workable.
Eventually, perhaps the trader sees that party S, the shoemaker,
and party P, the pig farmer, are in a position to trade with
profit to both, and the trader can see a plan by which the
effort and risk for the trader is likely to be well rewarded by
a share in the profits. The shoemaker will have leather, the
farmer will have new boots, and the difference in their valuing
of boots and skins is so great that the trader might walk away
from the deal with a new pair of shoes.
But if each trader had to examine the situation of A, B, C, and
onward through P and Q and R and S each time before finding a
profitable opportunity, not much trading will happen. Suppose
the shoemaker, or the pig farmer, or the trader, or even some
fourth party who is merely a bystander, is a creative
intellectual who has a different idea. Suppose some searcher
with imagination broadens the categories of an observed trade
and generalizes the situation. Are there a lot of leather
workers near here? Are there a lot of animal farmers near here?
What if all of them were invited to come together on the first
Tuesday of each month? What if this imaginative person
institutes a leather market for the whole region?
I rehearse this story for you in tedious and fundamental detail
for an ethical purpose. I want you to see the creation of a
market as a human intellectual accomplishment. For too often, I
hear people speak churlishly of "The Market" as though speaking
of an evil demon.
Markets are instituted by humans. Humans decide that the first
Tuesday of each month we'll trade leather at this place and
during these hours. To set up agreements and to build the trust
to develop an enriching market is a human achievement. Good
people can disagree about which rules and policies will serve to
maximize the human benefits and minimize the human costs.
Whether it's leather we're trading or used cars or corporation
stock, we may believe the market should be improved to serve
human values better. If we have design skills and we do the
intellectual work of design, we could institute a better market.
Greed, fear, envy, and social climbing are within the genetic
endowment of every humanoid ape. In dealing with markets, these
natural potentials create tensions. But let's not blame clever
human institutions for the tensions that humanoid apes feel.
We cannot change the genetic endowment. We can, however, improve
the design of human institutions. We should not be talking
ourselves out of the benefits to humans that will cease if we
talk ourselves out of markets. Our ethical challenges with
regard to markets are much like those with regard to any human
institution. Use it as ethically as we can, for now. For later,
design improvements.
TOP
Part 9H: Instituted Published Prices -
September 2008
British
Quaker shopkeepers got uneasy about haggling. Its purpose is to
find a middle ground between one party getting most of the
profit and the other party getting little. Skilled and
experienced hagglers explore the territory around a possible
target price, sensing each others' limits at which the profit
would be too unequal to permit a trade. They find by experiment
a middling price at which neither side will feel excessively
victimized. But people differ in skills and experience. Some are
intensely fearful of being "taken" and find the process quite
repugnant. And a very weak haggler does get taken advantage of
sometimes. A group of Quakers decided there was too much evil in
the process and though they expected to suffer financially, they
decided to set fixed, no-haggle prices and display them.
These
fixed-price merchants prospered, because a lot of customers
experienced so much less tension when buying at published prices
without haggling. And they could even send a child to buy. The
Quaker businesses got a lot more of the available trade.
Haggling
is still practiced in many of the world's markets. And several
other innovations have been designed to find a price by
experiment that is agreeable to both sides, many of them
identified as one or another kind of "auction." But published
no-haggle prices keep winning converts today for the same
reasons that those old Quaker customers wanted them.
Instituting published prices also permitted a further
innovation: shopping by mail-order. Neither haggling nor
auctions work with the time delays of physically delivered mail
(though both are workable using electronic communications,
because of its short time delays).
When a
"third party" will pay, it's also possible to trade with no
haggling, no auctioning, and no published prices. This is our
current situation with the prepayment of small medical expenses.
Small expenses are not accurately described as covered by
risk-sharing "insurance." Annual dental polishing and the like
are not calamities that only happen to a few -- the payer is
merely getting a routine pre-payment and routinely passing it
through. Instituting payment by 3rd parties tends to conceal
relative costs from consumers. Price comparisons are blocked.
People tend to consume services as though they were a free gift.
Yet what's consumed is created by human investment and human
work.
Published prices, especially when the publishing is very public,
assist not only consumers but also producers. Watching public
prices rise or fall (or stay constant) helps potential producers
get into production, or it can give the relatively high-cost
producers the data they need to decide to cease un-needed work.
Published prices used this way are sometimes called "signals."
Pricing
signals are vitally important in matching changing needs and
desires accurately with changing opportunities to produce.
Concealment or “regulating” of prices interferes with efficient
and efficiency enhancing decisions by both consumer and
producer. Published prices are a civic good. “Regulated” or
concealed prices inhibit strangers from cooperating efficiently
in maximizing material wealth.
TOP
Part 10A:
Time Delay in Markets - October 2008
When markets, money, and monetary prices got well established,
some people began to foresee a science of economics. Pricing
signals would lead to investment calculations. Calculating
investors would optimize their investments. Rationality might be
instituted in the affairs of wealth creation and trading.
Unfortunately, reducing cooperation among humans to mathematics
reduces the human situation to absurdity. For one thing, science
is delimited by instrumentation. But instruments to measure the
inner experience of human evaluation don't exist. Haggling,
auctions, and the tensions of mistrust are symptomatic of the
impossibility of knowing how to trade rationally.
A second barrier to rational economics is innovation. Designers
create new human wealth by learning to work material objects
into new, more valuable forms without using up anything
physical. In the vernacular, innovation is a "free lunch." But
mathematics can't compute, if the input is zero for a non-zero
output.
Fortunately, there are a few aspects of wealth creation that
mathematics can help with. One of these is the cyclic behavior
of human investments. A diagram of a feedback loop that shows
time delay
explicitly can lead to useful understandings.
Anyone who has actually worked on a pig farm would include
breeding time, gestation time, growing time, and leather-tanning
time in mathematically modeling a farmer's response to rising
price-signals in markets for pork and bacon and shoe leather.
Anyone who has actually participated in a shoe making business
would include inventory cycle time, design time, manufacturing
time, and marketing time in mathematically modeling a response
to the fickle fashions of footwear. But most economists never
have participated in running any business in their career from
first grade to the PhD. Hence the timeless blunder of "Efficient
Market Theory" hasn't totally died out.
This theory is timeless in that it assumes that it takes no time
for producers, traders, and consumers to respond to signals.
Market "clearing" is modeled as though instantaneous. Modeling
is done as
though there was no possibility of momentum building up over
time, with oscillations producing overshoots of supply and
overshoots of undersupply.
This theory, if applied to a pendulum clock, would predict that
the pendulum would always point straight down, even after the
clock (or the pendulum) is jiggled around. Everyone with wide
experience in the real world would recognize that this theory
has got to be flawed, even though most observers would lack the
knowledge from Electrical Engineering to draw the diagram and
show mathematically why nominally self-correcting systems with
time delay tend to oscillate spontaneously.
Large systems of interdependent oscillators can have multiple
resonance periods. Some of the resonance periods can be about as
long as the total duration of a typical human life. People born
at the bottom of such a long investment-cycle build a model of
the world in their mind that differs fundamentally from the
model of the world built by those born at the top. And both can
mis-attribute mechanical swings to intentional humans.
TOP
Part 10B:
Stablizing Jumpy Markets - November 2008
Jay Forrester in his book Industrial Dynamics (MIT Press 1961)
used his knowledge from Electrical Engineering to show why there
are disturbing oscillations in our wealth-creating systems and
he also showed what to do to reduce the oscillations. Simply
reduce the time delays.
The argument for doing this is a bit complex. Engineers know
(from studying feedback diagrams with explicit time delays) that
oscillatory tendencies depend not just on the loop delay, but
also on the "gain" around the loop. Forrester argued from
observing human behavior that people who know their information
is old news will react more strongly to it, than if they are
getting their pricing signals and other information promptly.
Reacting strongly equates to "gain" in the feedback loop. By
reducing time delay, both the loop delay and also the loop gain
will be reduced together. It's a profoundly useful insight.
You don't need to be an engineer to benefit from this insight.
You can participate in improving the design of human systems by
just using Forrester's prescription: when in doubt, always
reduce time delays.
But Forrester also observed that people will find it difficult
to follow this advice. He called it "counterintuitive." People
too easily conflate quickness with over-reaction. Say to someone
that you don't want to be jumpy, and they'll tell you to be calm
and placid — they'll tell you to ignore small signals. But
ignoring small signals is the exact opposite of the right
policy. The right policy is: DO react and VERY PROMPTLY to every
little teeny-weeny signal. And in knowing that it's tiny, your
tiny reaction won't be a big jumpy leap of faith. Just a
steady-eddy stream of continual tiny corrections is what works.
Watch a skilled car driver, and that's what you'll see. Prompt
AND very slight corrections keeps the car centered in its lane.
It's intuitive for experienced drivers and indeed unconscious as
well. And it's the way stable market systems work: thousands of
participants alertly reacting to every tiny signal. Prompt; and
in being prompt, willing to be slight.
Unemployment insurance is another good example. One person gets
laid off; one person gets a one week stipend. One laid-off
person gets hired; one person's insurance stipend promptly
ceases. Legislative changes to the economic incentives are a bad
example. A year of wrangling, followed by a stimulus package
that's too big and jerky, and which will often take effect when
the tide has already turned, so that it's actually strengthening
the next half-cycle of the oscillation.
Unfortunately, the legislative jerk is highly publicized and it
might be a big populist votegetter.
TOP
Part 10C:
Jumpy Big-Investment Markets - January 2009
Building a house or building a new business currently takes a
long time. Building a mine or building a port for liquefied
natural gas takes even longer. Thus we can experience boom and
bust cycles in houses or in Internet companies, and even longer
and larger boom and bust cycles in raw materials and in energy
facilities.
The swings in these giant pendulums of investment are so slow
that few observers see them as continuing waves in an ocean.
It's as if each of us was only at the ocean beach for five or
ten seconds. Each crashing wave looks unique.
Nobody now alive remembers the California gold rush, the boom
and bust in railroad building, or the boom and bust in foreign
exploration and colonization. And because each big wave is
colored differently by its different content, repeating waves of
big investments appear distinct.
Each giant wave leaves behind it on human shores a residue of
accumulated wealth. And each wave also hurts the victims of the
change that it entailed. People can simultaneously enjoy the
residual wealth and complain about the victimizations.
Today it's possible to discern big waves of investment in
bio-technology, in wind farms, and in flat panel displays. Solar
panels and lithium batteries aren't far behind. I think I see a
wave beyond that of farming the oceans. Perhaps in the far
distance we can see the first ripples of a wave forming that
will actually be made of water -- desalinized sea water that
will eventually wash over the world's deserts and make them
livable.
The principal market where these big investments are traded is
labeled somewhat cryptically the stock market. Pieces of the
world's startup businesses are defined in much the same way that
a child can print money denominated in bottle caps. Shares in
declining businesses are sold for lower prices as perceptions of
the future wealth-generating prospects turn pessimistic.
Attention, and the eagerness to buy in, turn to the next Big
Thing.
Stock speculators are a lot like surfers -- to get the best ride
they have to be in just the right place at the right time. Too
early, and the wave isn't doing enough yet, and won't for a
while. Too late or in the wrong place, and an impressive wave
gets away before you can ride it. And of
course, you want to get out before the crash!
Those who get the best ride ascribe it to skill, while those who
miss the wave or get crunched in a crash ascribe it to luck. But
nobody can really say for sure how much is luck and how much is
skill. Sudden reversals of fortune can occur, radically altering
these assessments.
I think the design of stock markets can be improved. But you'd
need real design skills, ambition, knowledge, and perseverance.
Allocating human investments to a big wave of wealth-creation is
already a major ethical
accomplishment. The ratio of benefits to costs is already pretty
good. Can you design an improvement?
TOP
Part 10D:
Face to Face Unfairness - February 2009
Face-to-face traders can never know the degree to which the
other party profits. The instrumentation to measure another
person's inner experience does not exist. In trading with those
who can be seen as "other" we might not care about their inner
experience. We can be greedy for a bargain.
Some traders are good at concealing their inner states, but
others are not such talented actors. Good actors can succeed at
poker or contract bridge more easily than those less talented.
And if we have ethical commitments against fully concealing our
inner experience, it hurts our chances. But, we don't play
self-concealment games fullout with young children -- we might
even use self revelation to teach children how such games are
successfully played. This can be preparation not only for play
but also for serious, greedy bargaining.
The source of trading profits is the differing evaluations by
differing human beings. There's nothing immoral about differing.
A pig farmer with piles of tanned hides in her barn is situated
differently from a shoemaker with a low inventory of leather.
Differing careers result in differing evaluations of the good or
a service. Different situations make our valuations differ.
And it isn't only physically different work -- mentally
different work also makes our evaluations differ. Moreover, some
work is visibly physical, while other work has little or no
visible sweat and grunting muscular effort to reveal it, only
the inner experience of struggle, doubt, risk, sadness, and
failure.
Some have tried to sidestep the difficulties posed by the lack
of instrumentation for measuring inner experience. The "labor
theory of value" is like the "operant conditioning" theory of
psychology, pretending that if we can't measure it with current
technology then it doesn't exist. These ways of misdirecting
attention could be seen as a religious faith -- call it
Scientism.
Scientistic faith obscures the reason why traders feel tension.
Scientistic faith has promised people that planners could end
the tension that people feel whenever they buy and sell. By
getting rid of markets we'll obviate the tension of wondering
how much of the available profit the other party is getting.
But trading, in that it creates human value out of nothing, is a
major contributor to the accumulation of human wealth. Attempts
to create societies which function without markets have blocked
this route to
accumulated wealth. When the smoke clears, and people compare
accumulations of physical wealth side by side, scientistic faith
is seen to have been a disaster.
Material wealth is not the only wealth. Freedom from tension has
human value. To avoid experiencing the fear that one will be or
has been "taken" there are some who would be willing to live in
relative poverty of the material kind. But most people seem to
think that this is a bad deal. What if, instead, we redesign our
economy to facilitate friendships between traders? What if we
design situations that create and maintain trust? Could better
designs allow both material wealth creation and relatively
little fear of unfairness?
TOP
Part 10E:
Professional Unfairness - April 2009
A trader who trades the same thing every day can have advantages
over someone who engages in that particular kind of trade very
seldom. This isn't a big problem among business people - people
who are both professional traders in the same kind of goods or
services. Experienced animal farmers and experienced leather
workers get to know how to haggle about the price of hog skin.
Frequent traders can become known to each other as persons. They
are no longer "other" and will develop the option to trade only
with trustworthy counterparties, persons who will have an
ethical commitment to try to split the profits roughly in half.
Professional business people even work together sometimes to
improve the market so that there's greater total profit, and
lower costs in making transactions. Trading in a web of such
trust relationships can be personally enjoyable. My long time
employer, Digital Equipment Corporation, was known for many
years as a "good" business in this sense.
But it can be a problem for someone who has seldom or never been
in the market for "x" to trade with a professional who trades
"x" every day. Knowing that they will not likely ever again
trade with each other, they have little incentive (and in some
cases little opportunity) to know each other as persons, as
friends, as people who should be able to trust one another not
to be greedy for a bargain.
One way to try to compensate for professional unfairness has
been for the occasional buyers or occasional sellers to form an
association which will bargain for all of them. A buyer's co-op
might be able to buy drugs or a seller's union might be able to
sell labor, for better terms than an individual could get when
trading alone.
But while such combinations of interest can change the way the
profits from trade get divided, they don't address the basic
ethical conundrum. Inner experience is still not being measured.
Unless the two sides are represented by people who know each
other as persons and not the "other", both sides may try to play
their business like a poker game. Both sides may now have a
chance to "take" instead of "be taken." But the basic ethical
conundrum was to try to avoid victimizations of any persons by
any other persons. Without ethical selfrestraint, the co-op or
the union might become the professionally unfair game-player.
Moreover, in modern economies there are rarely only two parties
who are strongly affected by unethical battlers. Buying co-ops
may get together with governments to victimize producers.
Employee unions may get together with governments to victimize
individual buyers of the goods or services that an embattled
industry had grown to sell to. Or big co-ops (or big unions) may
form alliances with other co-ops (or other unions) and come to
dominate a big section of the economy.
Fundamentally, we are getting tangled up here with bigness. One
on one, persons tend to get acquainted over time and no longer
would deal with each other merely as the "other." Five at a time
or even twenty at a time, people of good will can restrain
themselves from playing business as a game. But huge
organizations are less likely to know each other as persons, and
sociopathic leaders will enjoy getting them to demonize
the "other."
TOP
Part 11A:
Benefits and Banes of Bigness - May 2009
Big humanistic opportunities attract us to projects that can
only be attained with big organizations. It took big water
wheels, big steam engines, big mines, big railroads, big canals,
big factories -- the list could go on -- to give us the
industrial revolution. No mom-and-pop organization, and no
collections of little organizations loosely coordinated, could
have made possible our big bridges, big jet planes, and big
internet.
Big nations can have big markets, so that traders with big value
differences can trade with big profit due to those differences.
If I've got coal here and you've got iron ore there, we might
create the "iron age" together, but not if a national boundary
inhibits our cooperation and trade. But to have a big nation
requires a relatively big government to hold its borders, set
common standards for weights and measures, and make laws that
are applied uniformly enough to make national trade possible.
A phenomenon that is sometimes called the network effect also
pulls for bigness. A newspaper could be valuable to its readers
even though only a small minority reads it. A telephone network
however gets a major part of its value from having most people
connected by one big network. A set of small minority networks
would produce far less human value, because many of the others
we'd want to talk with would be isolated on different networks.
A further pull for bigness occurs when the physical distance
between people accounts for the predominant cost. Electrical or
gas or water distribution services, or sewer drainage or even
garbage collection services would be more expensive if only a
few geographically scattered subscribers pay.
Imagine having six natural gas pipeline networks or six cable TV
networks running down the street where you live. Networks of
this kind are sometimes called "natural monopolies" because the
human costs of one big enterprise are so much lower than the
human costs of installing many competing networks to cover the
same physical territory.
Finally I'll mention also economies of scale that aren't due to
any of the above. A big insurance company can share the costs of
rare tragedies better than a small insurance company, because
the chaotic occurrences being insured for can be smoothed out
better when there's a big pool of the insured. Big hospitals can
employ narrower specialists, who would be idle too much of the
time if they worked in a small hospital with too few cases
coming in of the kind the specialist is especially valuable for.
Similarly big banks, big law firms, and big taxi companies can
have the versatility to respond to unusual needs without the
extra human costs of switching between suppliers. These motives
for bigness could be summarized as statistical benefits. Large
numbers of rare events are cheaper to deal with, and are more
likely to be expertly dealt with, than small numbers; and the
probabilities favor bigness.
So bigness is here to stay!
However, bigness not only deals with complexity, but bigness
also engenders complexity. This is a major reason why anyone who
wants to participate in improving the human condition today must
have design skills. You need to be competent with big networks
of interdependency.
TOP
Part 11B:
Big Kludge-Towers - September 2009
In my part
of the engineering world, there's a useful concept that goes by
the name "Kluge-tower." I don't know the origin of the term. But
I and others have found it so useful on so many occasions.
Ethical people everywhere will, I think, benefit from being able
to recognize the phenomenon and having it named.
"Kluge-tower" names the phenomenon that could also be called
prosaic design. In prose, each word usually has a single meaning
or names a single referent. Puns are different. A pun is a word
used to mean two different things simultaneously. It's also
called a double entendre, French for two-intentions.
Eifel towers and office towers are not Klugetowers. Airport
control towers and high-voltage transmission towers are not
Kluge-towers because they are not prosaic. They are full of
double-entendres. Each component in these towers has both a
structural and an esthetic purpose. Designers poring over their
sketches and drawings have looked for opportunities to produce
both of these human values with each one part or aspect of the
design. Many erasures and re-tries later, "good" design may
emerge from all of the trials and failures and re-tries.
Good architecture serves many masters. An assembly hall for
example must serve acoustic purposes, visual-esthetic purposes,
and escape-in-case-of-fire purposes. Simultaneously, seating
comfort and air-quality comfort and see-the-performer values
must all be satisfied by one and the same design. There's a
network of interdependencies among all of these human values.
Investors have to like it enough to pay to have it built. Users
have to like it enough to want to perform, or to attend the
performances.
Case-law is a Kluge-tower, because nobody architected the laws
as a whole. Courts decided cases, further cases were influenced
by citing previous decisions, and a useful tradition grew from
the collection of all of the prior decisions. Layer upon layer,
we have a wealth of wisdom laid down. But you need assistance
from a lawyer and legal researchers to make effective use of it.
You can't just punch an elevator button for floor 6 and find
your way to room 603. Navigation is horribly costly. Nobody can
predict with certainty how a case will come out.
Lawmakers sometimes take up the difficult task of regularizing a
Kluge-tower of accumulated case law. But we don't elect our
lawmakers based on any assessment of their architectural skills.
Consequently, few of them have the architectural intellect --
few of them could even have it occur to their minds that a
sketch or a drawing of the whole could be useful. And our
legislative assemblies have not been designed by architects who
expected that lawmakers would need to behave like architects.
Architects and engineers use drafting boards, big computer
screen displays, three-dimensional models, and wall-size arrays
of details-in-the-whole drawings. Lawmakers don't. So inherited
case-law, Kluge-towers, morph into other Klugetowers. The new
Kluge-tower might work a bit better. But who can tell, without
the design process that would have been needed to test all of
the competing legislative proposals? It's an ugly, costly,
inhumane, incompetent mess. And it's not that way because anyone
wanted it to turn out that way.
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Part 11C:
Big Kludge-Collusions - December 2009
Kluge-Tower laws,
and the kluge-tower regulations that they mandate, and the
kluge-tower bureaucracies that administer and enforce the
regulations, all stack up against citizens as individuals. If
you need to navigate, you're in a fog.
Big companies, however, can afford to invest in navigation aids.
Big unions, big co-ops, and big non-profits can too.
Big teams of lawyers can help navigate. And organizations big
enough to hire lobbyists can even create some of the proposed
regulations that they will later want to navigate. Those who
create the maze are best prepared to navigate the maze.
Individuals and smaller organizations are disadvantaged. You can
see this, for example, in campaign finance reforms." Big
political parties don't mind burdening small parties with
complex regulations. If the small party, the small union, the
small business, the small non-profit can't get the mandated
filings submitted in the mandated form by the mandated
deadlines, so much the better for competing biggies.
Car drivers and ship captains have maps and charts. But there
are no maps or charts for navigating kluge-towers of
administrative complexity. I can suggest several reasons why
there aren't. I've pointed out already that big organizations
would rather keep competitors in a fog. Here are some other
barriers:
-
Embarrassment: flow-diagrams or other maps of complex
processes would put incompetent design on display.
-
Cost: even the people working within these systems don't
fully understand them, so they'd have to stop working in
their locality and spend weeks to study and map the region.
-
Public
complacency: most of us have never seen such a map, so that
we don't imagine the benefits of demanding that each new law
or regulation must be displayed in its regional context
using a visual flow-diagram, map, etc.
Hernando de Soto
famously diagrammed a few of the regulatory kluge-towers in
Peru. He made the navigation problems obvious, and got some
improvements. You can study some of his diagrams in his books,
The Mystery of Capital and The Other Path.
Would you ever consider diagramming the process of filling out a
1040 tax form? Or mapping some other kluge-tower process of your
acquaintance?
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Part 11D:
Impoverished Fantasy - January 2010
A trader may think:
Could A trade profitably with B? This demands fantasy skills. A
designer thinks: could a shape like this fit with the other
shapes I have in mind? This is fantasy. Someone thinking of
starting a business has to think through all of the parts and
aspects of the business, its founding and its development. This
is fantasy. It is intellectual exploring, performed in the hope
of a payoff but with no guarantee.
Fantasy is mental. It's not visible from outside. Often there is
little or no documentation that would evidence this work. If an
economist or a politician or a journalist - or a citizen - is to
know about and understand this work, you need to dream about it.
But in the world of academic study, teachers demand evidence.
Identify your sources, marshal your data, and propound your
argument with every step supported logically by your facts.
"It does not follow" is a critique common to evidence-based
reasoning. But there's an assumption there, as though there is
something in evidence that could be followed. What if we're to
study the mental explorations of trade, design, and business
development? What if we're to study academically the creation of
human wealth out of nothing, by risky and persistent fantasy
work? Could an economist earn a PhD by doing that?
A school child who has already developed excellent fantasy
skills will tend to frustrate a teacher's attempts to control
where the child's attention is focused. If the teacher can
present something so compelling, and in such a compelling way,
that it's even more fascinating than the child's own fantasy,
the child will eagerly focus where the teacher directs. But this
isn't easy for any teacher. What is easier is to brand the child
deficient --especially since strong fantasy skills will produce
no clear data that academics can readily measure. Brand a child
with "Attention Deficit Disorder" and warn the parents that
their child's academic prospects are dim. Such a child, for
example, would certainly not be a prime candidate for ever
earning a doctorate. Such people don't become professors.
Nor do such people often become accomplished lawyers. It's
unlikely that such people participate as legislators, creating
cleverly simple laws and regulations -- the kind of
user-friendly laws and regulations that would not be a nightmare
for traders, designers, and business developers to navigate.
Politically, if you tend to focus on the risks and rewards of
trading, designing, and business leading you're probably going
to see what conservatives and libertarians see. If you are
someone who made it through the academic filters, you are more
likely to focus on the unfair outcomes of those inscrutable
creations, and you'll see what socialists and liberals see.
Could impoverished fantasy make you blind about economics?
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Part 11E:
The Tower-Overpowered - February 2010
Whether officially
branded "ADD" or not, there are people who can't navigate a
kluge-tower of laws and regulations. If they try to climb an
impossible tower, they'll be defeated. Many of them are smart
enough not to try.
Some are wealthy enough to hire a tax accountant to fill out
their 1040 tax documents or to defend them in a lawsuit. Many
will sign a document without reading and understanding the "fine
print" obligations they're getting themselves bound by, but will
have an advisor read all of that and explain the relevant
aspects of it in plain language.
Some, whether out of poverty or annoyance or both, will strictly
limit their contact with kluge towers by choosing a short-form
tax option, doing business without written agreements, and even
flouting regulations that seem intended to be inscrutable.
When an idiot-robot turns the light red when you can see there's
nobody else present who wants to use the intersection, the time
and fuel wasted will not show up in any database. Similarly,
when "the law is an ass" the time and the productive opportunity
wasted won't show up in any database. Academics have actually
estimated the dead-weight drag of accountants figuring complex
taxes when a simple tax would have produced very similar
results, but the individuals who lose a tiny bit of their human
lives here and there are hard to organize into a politically
effective influence. We might dissipate a tenth of our entire
waking life (equivalent to dying several years early) and never
raise the kind of outcry that murdering everybody at age 70
would surely raise. We're nibbled and nicked, but we remain
passive.
Similarly, a business never founded leaves no evidence of the
missed opportunity - the people who would have had a job and
people who would have benefited from its services know nothing
of the wealth that could have been created but was not. It would
take too much imagination.
And in any case, to whom would we complain? Kluge-towers are
created by well-meaning and intelligent people. Whose fault is
it if they lack design skills?
You could maybe blame the people, like myself, who do have
design skills but who have never bothered to communicate about
them and invite our fellows to become designerate. Until I
joined the Ethical Society of Boston I never saw this as my
obligation. I'm a "visual intellectual" and most people are
mainly auditory. I've now put forth the effort to develop a line
of patter that may help some people to become designerate - but
could anyone else share my vision of Universal Designeracy?
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From Member: Marvin Miller - May 2005
The word "value" used in economics has more than one meaning. One of its
meanings is use-value, or utility. Another is exchange-value, or wealth.
The two are related, since if something had no utility, no one would
exchange anything for it. But they are different. Exchange-value is
quantitative and measurable; utility isn't.
If you were hungry and had a big sandwich, the first bite you took would be
very useful. After you had eaten enough to make you full, another bite,
if you had to eat it, would have negative utility for you. Before you ate
any, all bites were identical.
If person A had more of good or service a than (s)he wanted, and likewise
for B and b, then an exchange of some of A’s a for an amount of B’s b
having equal exchange-value might enhance utility for both A and B,
without creating any additional exchange value. Our economy isn't a barter
economy; it's a money economy. The exchange-value of anything is measured
by its price in money. Ads that tell you you’re getting a $50 value for
only $19.95 are lies. If you can get it for $19.95, its exchange-value
is $19.95.
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