International Regulatory Rivalry in Open Economies: The Impact of Deregulation on the US and UK Financial Markets
It helps to understand our frequent opponent's oft-shared paradigm. "If hot money evading taxes in other countries is looking for a haven ... WE HAVE TO COMPETE TO RETAIN EQUAL ACCESS TO THAT STOCK OF CAPITAL."
We do? There are so many naive assumptions implicit in this claim that it's useful to just skip over all of them for now, and summarize a response. Many of the people taking this narrow view on financial deregulation, in isolation, are depressingly ignorant of the basic realities of system-operations. They seem universally unfamiliar with the hierarchy of sustainable returns in complex systems, or with the principles of systemic resiliency.
In fact, it's rare to find people outside specific sciences, the military or industrial statistics who are comfortable discussing return-on-coordination as the highest return - by far - in any complex system.
Clearly, one of our problems is that policy discussions have atrophied dramatically in recent decades - and are dominated by increasingly narrow outlooks.
Any ecologist, system scientist or control-engineer would say that the combination of fewer control channels and growing degrees of freedom in a system ... means growing instability, and danger of collapse. The Soviet Union and failure of Central Planning comes to mind. That same lesson was documented while building the Pyramids, if not before, and it was reiterated in detail during development of the steam engine. Yet despite those and countless other ancient illustrations, the concept of a feedback/instability ratio is still a disputed topic of discovery in economic and other forms of national policy? IN A SUPPOSED DEMOCRACY? Who are we fooling, and why?
Given our ability to produce systemic lunacy on this scale, the only question is "how" we're managing to produce this unstable operational state, so we can stop propagating it!
My first thought goes to our systemic education processes. We're churning out growing numbers of people dedicated to increasing specialization in increasingly fragmented specialties ... exactly as we're noticing declining ability to muster net Situational Awareness in our aggregate. Plus, we're also witnessing declining group policy agility. Hello! Anybody home in there?
This ain't rocket science. If we want to own our democracy and our fate, we have to have distributed members acting like owners of their democracy, not just their isolated specialties.
Meanwhile, as we ponder how to stop increasing dissociation in our next generation, we must also look for shortcuts to catalyze even a bit more coordination among our existing electorate.
Interdisciplinary coordination platforms, anyone? Do we have a National Situational Awareness app for students 10 and above? Is there a whole spectrum of such "SA" apps? Minimally one for every category in the NAISC database? Plus another one every day, for all the new professions we're spawning, not to mention all the subcategories among and between all existing and emerging professions? (Actually, we do - it's called the human brain, and the group-brain. We simply aren't challenging ourselves to use either type, at least not very well.)
Do we really need all those apps? Yes, we do. Here's an example why.
There are roughly 300 cell types and minimally 60 "organs" making up the human body and it's functional physiology. Yet to make a functional "person" requires countless hormones, metabolic indicators and cell-surface receptors - not to mention all the inter-connecting regulatory feedback loops connecting all receptors, neurotransmitters, hormones, cellular activities and organ activities.
The point is that THERE ARE FAR MORE PHYSIOLOGY COORDINATION "APPS" THAN THERE ARE SYSTEM COMPONENTS.
Anyone even remotely familiar with network concepts understands that there are more connections than components in any organized system.
With a little more thought, you next realize that there are more connection-adjusting feedback loops than there are connections ... yada, yada. Every complex system is a near-infinitely nested "stack" of subcomponents and their sub-connections, including all the methods and sub-methods for coordinating all the sub-connections at every sub-level.
What does that imply for human political economics? If we want a national culture to be anywhere as agile and accomplished as our individual physiologies are, we need a HELLUVA lot more, real-time, data-exchange apps, and they must be far leaner/faster/better than ANYTHING which we now possess.
Newspapers? Please. Don't embarrass yourself. Journalists? Bloggers? Aggregators? Ok, we at least have the rudiments of the ancient principle. How's this? Every bit of data you hear is USELESS, absolutely useless, if not accompanied by the full context or data-spectrum it is but a part of. Cue Walter Shewhart, circa 1926: "Data is meaningless without context."
Are we there yet? :) It always helps our mood to aggressively label a joke as a joke.
Face it. Aggregating news or opinions is a tactic.
Accurately conveying changing context - in real time - is a goal we as aggregates are just beginning to aim for. The payoff if we reach it is unimaginable. Let's just say that none of us is as smart as all of us. The USA - as a collective - is only as smart as our coordinating apps allow it to be. Until then, we're just an uncoordinated mob trying to stop acting like one, and desperately trying to coordinate as fast as our numbers are increasing. We're only treading water, and we're actually sinking a bit low, gasping for air, and beginning to choke on our own, disconnected components. Call it a regression into class and clan war.
Does the USA policy apparatus know what the USA collectively knows? :) :) :)
Sorry to close on another joke, but it's an honest necessity.
[To be fair, do ANY grandparents know the sum of what their grandchildren know?]
At least we now have some goals articulated, which our kids can have fun aiming for. If you know kids, you know that all we have to do is tell 'em what can't be done yet, then let them have fun actually doing it. Please tell 'em something more challenging than hoarding static capital in some other country, or trying to attract someone else's static capital here. Turn their eyes to a far larger prize, our own, dynamic capital, waiting to be accessed ... through coordination.
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