Investing In Aggregate SELECTION MARKETS. Not Just Financial Capital Markets

How? Just keep doing what we've been doing, when we bother. What, exactly, you ask? Answer: practicing molecular, sexual & cultural recombination AND selection, of course. Everything else is just noise in the system.

Can we do it? Of course we can. Someone or something always does, eventually. Why not us?

Let me explain. Someone just wrote to me, saying that the Supreme Court shares blame for Wall Street’s (and Congress') drastic descent into pervasive fraud.

Yes, but the roots of Judicial corruption go back to politics of appellate appointments, which goes back to campaigning, which goes back to ethics & education ... which has it's own roots & control functions, in regional & local culture.

The best place to fix any outcome is at the prevention stage. Repairs are affordable only briefly, as stop-gap emergency efforts.

If you fix fundamentals, the fix soon sweeps through all symptoms, at all levels.

Yet without top-down support, it takes much martyrdom to slowly recruit momentum in whole aggregates. The bigger the aggregate, the more - & more protracted - the distributed, self-martyrdom.

If we're LUCKY, another Hoover-FDR or Marshall-Patton will come along & quickly, temporarily patch things up without our aggregate fully understanding how or why. Yet that would most likely be short term lucky & long term unlucky, because we just put ourselves at greater risk, while still not understanding how to manage mounting risks.

If we're not even short-term lucky? Then it's civil war, between classes, until our own governance is more permanently reconquered, and reshaped into less obsolete forms. Isn't that what the American Revolution was all about? Didn't the founders advise is to keep up continuous revolution, or at least continuous cultural evolution? There's nothing going on now that didn't occur in the lead-up to 1776, or to the Magna Carta, or to Athens first citizens revolt, 2300 years ago - or in any tribal council throughout the last 60,000 years.

The most fundamental change is the scale of our aggregate, which we are NOT handling well.

It's a pity that across the entire sub-discipline of exception-handling, we're loathe to handle our own aggregate growth as the most constant "exception" to be continuously handled! Go figure!

For our evolutionary path to extend, EVERYTHING has to undergo recombination and subsequent selection. Even literature majors eventually grasp that timeless reality.

What evolving, adapting cultures always need are rapid, enabling adaptations to SELECTION MARKETS. Not just capital markets.

What is a Selection Market? So far, our most common term for it is "evolution," but only because the process is so infrequently discussed.

What things are bartered, recombined & selected in Selection Markets? A widening range of disappearing, existing & emerging sub-components, components and super-aggregates of existing aggregates (e.g., colonial "states" transitioning to the United States of America, or, more pathetically so far, European States TRYING to transition to the United States of Europe).

Are capital markets robust enough to mediate the SELECTION already going on within ad hoc Selection Markets? Of course not. Just start listing for yourself the things which we normally don't (or, for some things, ever) try to list for sale or purchase on capital markets. For example, dynamic & intangible essentials, from trust, motivation, affinity (love) & spouses to understanding ... and on to generalized forms of return-on-coordination, like family, friendship, tribes & supra-tribal culture (aka, teamwork & solidarity & democracy).

Yet Selection-Markets for all those things DO exist, and exert a far more dominant effect on our personal, national and cultural outcomes than mere capital markets do.

So why aren't we more actively investing our human & social & cultural capital in improving what matters most, our real Selection Markets? We clearly possess the native intelligence, since we've been discussing the elements of Selection Markets since before recorded human history - just never quite pervasively enough to keep up with escalating demand, by right-sizing our selection efforts.*

Is that lag simply for lack of putting our heads together, and trying? In our recent feudalism/"economics" textbooks, "capitalists" demean historical natives for trading away lands & other resources for "blankets & beads," and yet here we are, hundreds of years later, trading our own aggregate future for our own trinkets. It's as though we've traded lazing about with a jug of wine & a loaf of bread .... for lazing about with designer drugs and video games.

Really, should not every discipline include practice in contributing to evolution of national strategy & net, cultural outcomes. ow to be relevant, not just specialized.

Most of us here in the USA may think that nothing's changed, but that just means that another aggregate less distracted with designer drugs & video games is about to loot our resources, en route to exploring insanely great new aggregate options, a future whole which will literally leave the sum of our personal options behind, in the dustbin of history.

Are we that easily distracted? So far, yes. We're raising yet another generation of students beaten into hoarding data and ignoring the changing context that applies meaning to data.

Aunt Samantha says it's up to YOU to either start re-inventing American ingenuity, or jump ship with the other rats.

The only other choice is to head back where we came from, with the other Luddites, who never see either direction of causality coming down the pike.

* How to right-size selection efforts? The efforts involved in architecture, molecular biology & engineering in general are good examples. More is always different, and with more of anything, then some previously negligible inter-dependencies always become critically important, requiring feedback-triggered catalysts to separate tuned from un-tuned system-engines. In short, to invest in Selection Markets, invest in right-sizing aggregate regulation, neither too much, nor too little, but always just enough, just as needed and just in time to respond to changing context. This is a drop-dead fundamental corollary of all system logic. It's amazing that so many capitalists want their bodies and bankers to be agile, while simultaneously missing the overriding need to keep their aggregate culture agile.
  Not too long ago, this was simply called providing citizens with a "Liberal Education" - as in a broad education. That term has proven to be too amorphous. New terms are always needed, as tools helping aggregates self-recruit, in order to tune their growing selves with tempo adequate to the accelerating demands of context_times_"more."

How To Do More Than Just Carp Uselessly From The Sidelines?

Complaints are, after all, an admission of weakness, and an appeal to the admitted victor.

Yes, these types of policy statements are a significant problem, since they attempt to reverse the meaning of insult and reason.

"It's an insult to human reason and to the legitimacy of this institution to suggest that anyone other than the [Assad] regime carried out this [Sarin gas] attack [in Syria]."

Obama address to UN General Assembly, Sept 24, 2013

And it gets worse, now that Obama is roped into talking about the Ukraine.

Time to reassess context? Let's back up to find a point of consensus. We're each bystanders lost somewhere in a rapidly growing culture, wondering how to catalyze Cultural Growth vs terminal mistakes. If answers were easy to find, we wouldn't need to think so hard.

How would YOU best catalyze coordinated growth in a LARGE set of interdependent automata?

So what do we actually DO about this disorganized context we're in, stuck with increasingly inept bureaucracies?

First off, what's the key friction?

My first guess is that there are now too many layers of credibility and missing communication between political offices and the various subsegments or subclasses of an electorate now exceeding 320 million current/emerging voters.

Call it a problem in marketing or propaganda or lack of honesty ... the fact is that it's not currently possible for any politician to convince a majority of the electorate to swallow any one, simplistic story. Using present methods alone, that defines organizational breakdown, and growing incoherence. There a better way, and we have to select it.

Honesty obviously seems like the safest course, but apparently those currently at the top haven't been trained or selected well enough to sense that. Hence we're 

squandering the very strength of a democracy - the ability of the whole to use, better/faster/sooner, a BIGGER PROPORTION of what its distributed components collectively know!

Seriously. What's the wisest way to start or select a reform movement able to chart a survival course that veers away from our current warning signs?

We have some past examples, but they're just that, examples from a different context.

Well before the start of the American Revolution, distributed efforts called "Committees of Correspondence" spontaneously formed, in anticipation of replacing the bureaucracy of Royal dictatorship. That was followed, later on, by the centralized "Federalist Papers," to articulate one focused version of an idea that had already grown to near consensus. Formal political parties didn't even appear until after the Declaration, Revolution, Constitution, and George Washington's first 2 terms in office!

One modest goal at this time? Anticipate 

replacing our current political parties with a more open process that acknowledges, generates, samples and leverages far more distributed feedback ... faster.

Many of my economist friends harp on the vague concept of capitalism being dead. My best interpretation of what they're trying to say is that a strategy of over-reliance on accumulating Static Capital is no longer agile enough, and that steps to even further embrace Dynamic Capital (coordination skills) are long overdue. 

Hoard coordination skills, not static capital?

Yet promoting even such a simple concept doesn't look likely, using ONLY our present institutions. My gut feeling is that, as always, we need a few NEW institutions to rapidly promote growth of methods allowing a bigger Policy Space and more Policy Agility.

When we're continuously tuning complex systems, there's an inevitable string of milestone goals -

finding the next subtle, buried tuning step that unleashes the most additional system agility.

It's all about the indirect subtlety.

Any serious suggestions about the LEAST number of subtle, new institutions to launch? I know that's a lot to ponder, but please comment or write, AFTER sleeping on it awhile.

"Urban Planning" is NOT Cultural Planning - Which Deserves A Far Richer Toolkit If We Are To Steer Our Cultural Growth More Productively

London street growth from 1786 to 2010.



From a study of physical infrastructure growth patterns.

This is an interesting map, of course, yet it misses the more important question of Cultural Planning, not just Urban Planning.

To steer our own, zooming growth of both population and citizen capabilities, it would sure be nice to have some visual maps of Cultural Organization. Not physical infrastructure maps, but maps of all the emerging inter-dependencies between all of our truly novel, emerging inventions.

Such "regulatory" maps or "Interactomes" are everywhere in the life sciences, but seem, perversely, to be largely banned from most policy and political practices (except where they are misused). With better, and more widely distributed Cultural Organization maps, our MiddleClass electorate might be less confused, distracted, divided and conquered by their own bevy of cultural parasites.

An interactome, with genes represented by text in boxes and interactions noted by lines between the genes.

We certainly need many more maps of Cultural Infrastructure, as a visual assessment tool.

Analogy?

Street growth & other changes in physical infrastructure represent the incidental noise broadcast by a growing culture, and do not map the inner infrastructure of the culture itself - at all.

In the 1830's, de Tocqueville supposedly noted with surprise - during his American travels - that US towns everywhere averaged ~6 civic organizations that literally everyone belonged to one or the other of (Farming networks weren't far behind, with their granges, co-ops, fellowships and various church-based and other initiatives). Participation in multiple such organizations served to bind the affinity & coordination, of communities, and both preserve and grow the agility and maneuverability of American populations.

European populations of the day had long since gotten used to remote, aristocrat "authorities" doing their thinking for them. Early American populations had to think for themselves, and thrived because of it. Not any more?

Many citizens have a vague sense that much of our Cultural Infrastructure declines as physical infrastructure grows - yet we lack visual feedback tools such as maps, to graphically convey that degradation of inter-dependency management so that we're more easily motivated to develop needed checks & balances. Without rapid, pervasive feedback and assessment methods, it becomes increasingly difficult to manage a culture that is both growing and diversifying rapidly.

As self-governance methods tends towards leaner, more brittle & less distributed "Central Planning," it is our quality of distributed decision-making that declines. In the process, the very nature of lean, Central Planning defeats it's avowed purpose, and steadily degrades the maneuverability of a democracy, and the agility of electorates.

We need culture maps and other assessment tools, to monitor and manage Cultural Infrastructure, not just physical infrastructure.

Surely some fledgling examples already exist? Are there any Cultural Infrastructure maps, similar to the street maps and bio-regulatory maps above?

Has anyone already visualized our Cultural Interactome? Or has that been banned by the Koch Brothers?

Why Do Management Consultants (& electorates) End Up Teaching (& accepting) The Opposite Of What They Practice?

As Walter Shewhart noted, 88 years ago, management consultants most often fail because they are hired BY executives, to help executives succeed, not BY aggregates, to make aggregates succeed. Walter formally touted the inherent advantage of controlling NET cultural process through dialectic or "context" modeling, rather than only the systemically unproductive ramblings of embarrassingly superficial "capitalist" ideologies. Walter Shewhart coined the phrase "process control" to define the ancient concept he advised us to spend far more time practicing and refining.

Not enough people listened to Shewhart. W.E. Deming spent most of his life simply trying to promote Shewhart's straightforward insights. Others from Toyota Corp to John Boyd applied Shewhart's concepts to specific industries and disciplines. Even today, however, not enough people listen to Shewhart's basic message.

As a result, simply to get paid, the typical management (executive) consultant ends up being dragged into over-training the ambition, grasp and ambition of a "leader" to think FOR their aggregate ... 

instead of ... 

getting transient_context delegates practice at the aggregate's greatest need and a delegated_leader's greatest value: constantly getting an aggregate more practice at running on auto-pilot, and not systemically failing the instant a supposed "leader" has a day of downtime (and isn't there to try to think FOR the aggregate).

And all the while, all of us - even (most) capitalists - admit that none of us is as smart as all of us.

You really couldn't make this up. It's all a cosmic joke on the entire Group-Intelligence of homo sapiens.

How do even supposed experts end up trapped in this way, teaching by default the very inverse of what they were forced, kicking and screaming, to practice, just in order to survive? In effect, we all make little compromises, accept lying to ourselves, and slowly become little Benedict Arnold's, just to avoid being cast aside, as aggregates lurch between continuous firefighting. As a consequence of endless firefighting mode, we tend to accept the myth that delegating management of EVERY succeeding context to a presumed "context-expert" or "process-owner" actually helps. It is NEVER that simple. If it were, the entire paradigm of social species would not work. Instead, we'd be dissociable machines, instead of incredibly densely_engineered works of social art.

Why do we persist in misunderstanding ourselves? Largely because we tend to over-focus on immediate (quarterly?) context, while missing the overwhelming truth, that ongoing reality transects multiple, transient contexts? We are all victims of our own, bad habit, distributed across individuals and aggregate. Is the Fallacy of Scale (or composition) always the chief failure that prevents aggregates of intelligent people from coalescing into a Group Intelligence greater than the sum of it's parts? Is sure seems to be, at least for now.

Yet simultaneously, we all readily admit that even war is too important to be left to the Generals!

In reality, every process is too important to be left to the presumed process owners. Again, you really couldn't make this up. We're playing a stupid joke on ourselves, and it never gets funny to the recipients. It's a chicken-and-egghead joke. Don't bother trying to explain it right now. Let's just leave it behind?

Once we accept lying about and ignoring the drifting conflict between local & aggregate habits - then the bad habit of over-delegating continuous control to presumed process owners (i.e., executives and managers) continues, decade after decade. All because "leaders" fail to practice discriminating the context from the local details? And all because aggregates ALLOW their "leaders" to fail them repeatedly, and simply carry on, voluntarily ceding ownership of their own context management to an endless string of "leaders," following an obsolete process.

And we STILL say that humans are intelligent?

The real heart of personnel system quandaries? Individuals always feel the conflict between personal ambitions and group ambitions.

The solution? Democracy methods.

Yes, I am NOT joking. We've formally known that for over 2300 years, and always knew it, because distributed democracy was always the human condition since the dawn of time. We only pretend to keep dabbling in the lie of delegated contingency management as a permanent solution, as the scale of our contingencies continue to grow.

To anyone familiar with biology, that cycle in social species translates to a quite familiar, ongoing transition in a balance between evolving physiological instincts and emerging cultural instincts. If you look for it, the transition is visible as a gradually changing, aggregate balance between individual and cultural habits.

1) unchecked expression of individual methods for hoarding static assets,

versus 

2) unleashed expression of distributed methods for hoarding of aggregate dynamic assets - namely coordination skills.

Our aggregate task, if we're going to maintain a viable nation-state, rather than simply a large, predatory mob? It's simple, really. Just do what James Madison advised. Keep re-developing faster/leaner/newer methods for dealing with constantly emerging factional frictions, FASTER than those unique factions and their unique frictions emerge in every new context (including the context of our own expanding numbers and/or capabilities).

Madison would undoubtedly be appalled that it's even necessary to re-invent this discussion today, 200+ years after he admonished us to never forget the lesson, and even wrote the lesson indelibly into the US Constitution!

If we don't have active methods for discovering, acknowledging, monitoring and ASSESSING every sort of faction and friction that arises, unpredictably, in our diversifying aggregate ... then we cannot even pretend to be exploring our options, or continuing to "make a more perfect union."

A Nation Bouncing Uselessly Between Alternating, "Stolen Narratives"

There are some startling and very troublesome allegations in the two reports below, forwarded in an email from Chuck Spinney.

These reports certainly fit the picture of a nation bouncing between alternating, "Stolen Narratives," continuously fed to a divided and conquered electorate. That's no way to run a Democracy. We can do better.

As Chuck Spinney (below) and others repeatedly note, both sides in the ideology wars leave outrageous national returns on the table, untouched, based on their fear and loathing of each other's positions. The left's & right's inability to pursue the additional, compounding return on coordination (as we did during WWII) is eroding and wasting most of the potential of the USA (and other countries too). If these opposing sets of obsessive, compulsive ideologues would just work honestly together, all would benefit, by more than either can currently imagine.

The only thing we have to fear, is fear of coordination?

At the end of the day, you have to ask the following questions. What part of Democracy and teamwork does our current electorate NOT understand? And why don't they? We should NOT be stocking our policy offices with these kinds of actors. We are better than this. Far better.

No democracy can succeed by pursuing an absolutist fight to determine whether two random, arbitrary, and opposing views are right or wrong. In a changing world, they both are, always. It's only a matter of time. Survival lies only in cooperatively exploring all emerging options, and discovering what no one could expect or predict. If the unexpected is discovered sooner rather than later, the net returns are unimaginable. That's easy, if we just let it happen.

To counterbalance the current view of the GOP-only as synonymous with the MICC, I've also listed links to 2 critical reviews of the Carter & Clinton administrations, indicating two equal but different flaws in what can, again, be described as over-simplistic, stolen narratives, this time from the Democratic Party (either dealing naively with the MICC or Wall St. - a FICC* - or in turn, being captured by them). 

We could go all the way back to LBJ and Vietnam, or Eisenhower as the first to warn against an overly influential MICC. However, instead of choosing sides in a pointless, political civil war, let's move on to something better, by abandoning the 2-gang, .. er .. "party" political system. The 2-party approach to contingency management is an obvious failure. Instead of a 2-channel approach to public discourse, we need faster/better/leaner ways to use all available channels.

Roger Erickson, Jan, 2014

***

Chuck Spinney (email commentary quoted here) speaks with considerable authority on DoD policy issues. [Jan 11, 2014]

"Gareth Porter and Robert Parry, two of our finest investigating reporter/historians deserve kudos for placing the self-serving nature of the [recent] Gates' memoir in a proper perspective.

Readers should bear in mind that the soap-opera-like gaming of Obama into acquiescing to the fatally flawed plan for a surge in Afghanistan surge in 2009, described accurately by Porter and Parry below, was clearly obvious well before Obama made his decision to cave into the pressure exerted by Gates, Clinton, and the Generals and their neo-con allies in Congress. 

To be sure, Obama was also feebly playing the game by leaking differences of opinion to the press -- but his was an amateurish operation by an inexperienced malleable politician and his pissant staffers. Those on the other side were pros in manipulating the wholly owned subsidiaries in the press. Predictably, as explained [in the articles listed] below, the brass hats won in 2009, notwithstanding a well publicized last ditch effort to stop the madness executed by Ambassador (and former General) Karl Eikenberry. 

Now, with the publication of his memoir, Gates is attempting to administer the coup the de grace on the dawn of a mid-term election -- which shaping to be a bad one for a hapless President and the Democrats ... and this is just an opening shot. Benjamin Netanyahu, with the help of many Democrats as well as Republicans, has another exceeding dangerous caper waiting in the wings (more on that later)." 

Herewith are Porter's and Parry's reports. 

Gates Conceals Real Story of ‘Gaming’ Obama on Afghan War

Robert Gates Double-Crosses Obama

***

And here are counterpoint reports, lest anyone think we're following anything other than ping pong policy narratives.

The Trusteeship Presidency: Jimmy Carter and the United States Congress

The Great American Stickup: How Reagan Republicans and Clinton Democrats Enriched Wall Street While Mugging Main Street

A Presidency in Peril: The Inside Story of Obama's Promise, Wall Street's Power, and the Struggle to Control our Economic Future

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military%E2%80%93industrial_complex

* FICC, Financial, Industrial, Congressional Complex

Reviewing "Game Tape" of Human Cultural Development, Before And After Designing New Plays To Try Out

Reader Magpie commented at a previous MNE post that "it is _OUR_ opinion that really matters." Well, supposedly. In a democracy anyway.

Yet that is true ONLY if we, the Middle Class, makes our consensus opinion matter. Without expression of consensus opinion, we can't generate cultural evolution. Seems obvious.

So how and why is it, you ask, in this day & age, that we are still discussing the obvious, rather than acting on it? It's a long story, and you have to know your history to get a big enough perspective on things to matter. Please imagine you were on the moon, viewing the Earth, and could repeatedly review the tape of the the last 100K years of homo sapiens cultural development.

That "game tape" would be very interesting.

For now, let's jump over most individual details, and note that one group organizational response to population growth PLUS situational challenges is to trust & delegate to discipline-specific talents. Consult endless anthropology literature for background.

Among other things, this leads to various TEMPORARY chiefs, including War Chiefs, cultural phenomena which were managed very well by tribal methods honed over +60K years.

However, once net population growth makes tribal groups bump into one another constantly, a typical response is to go to a permanent war standing, with elevation of War Chiefs to perpetual "Strong Men" rulers & factions - and eventually to some crude, gang-related hacks called aristocracy.

And one step further beyond that? Once advanced methods for organizing democracy are developed, people simply DO NOT NEED aristocracy, and the strong-man mentality retreats into military roles, to which responsibility can be delegated on an as-needed basis.

Where does this quick glimpse leave us now?

We've scaled up democracy methods quite a bit in preceding centuries. Now we're bumping into entirely new levels of organizational demand. Population size has outrun our old methods for adequately organizing democracy. We need some bigger changes in group methods, and the group stress of being forced to look for them is showing.


Hence, as expected, we're seeing the last gasp of an aristocracy phenotype and habit, trying to re-establish it's "need," by imagining constant threats, and actively denigrating past, present and emerging democratic institutions as too slow, and hence [supposedly] unworkable.

We've seen this all before, in various model systems. First the "Luddites" laugh at progress, then they try to outlaw it, then they try to kill it. Then the Luddites always lose out to evolution.

Our greatest need is not to argue with Luddites. More to the point, we need more suggestions, more experiments, and exploration of more options. That's how we progress through the 4, cyclic stages of Luddite grieving. It's the cycle of cultural life.


For cultural adaptive rate to stay the same ... every Luddite has to be stood upon, not argued with.

Has It Happened? Is This A Call For A Dictator? "Temporary" Of Course!

Two recent articles seem to have passed under the radar screen of most mass media in the USA. Yet they're the kind of "calls to action" that Wall St. financiers can get behind. Like the early support from foreign investors for, say, Mao, Tojo, Hitler, Stalin and Lenin, just to name a few. We could add a long list of smaller actors too, from Pinochet to Quisling, all supported by "business interests" interested more in business than in the general welfare of the people of their respective countries.

Should we worry about the following calls for action? Should we at least discuss them widely, and ensure that more than just the input from "investors" is represented? What is - for us - different this time is that it is the USA itself that is the target of the latest call to action and "intervention."

You can read these articles for yourself.

Strengthen the Presidency?

The Decay of American Political Institutions

David Brooks and FRANCIS FUKUYAMA seem to be in agreement that we have a problem.

“So we have a problem.”

Do we, though? Or are we the problem?

If it's us, then making one of us a temporary dictator seems to be grasping at straws.

James Madison and the other Framers of the US Constitution thought long and hard about what had been written about the fall of all prior republics and democracies. They foresaw what we're now facing, called it "factionalism" and said that the best way to forestall it's development was to form a more unique form of government than had come before, one with MORE, not fewer, checks and balances.

Fukuyama calls that a "vetocracy." Greater minds, 200 years ago, called it what it was precisely intended to be, institutional checks and balances.

In addition, the framers of the Constitution also explicitly cautioned us that it will always be the character of our people, not the peculiar form of our government institutions that get us through national challenges.

So my suggestion would be to revise the character of our people first, and be more selective about whom we send as representatives to our national Congress ... before we consider weakening the checks and balances that got us this far.

If Ben Franklin were here today, he might scoff at calls for more power, and repeat his famous "table talk" about shaving something from all planks in order to join the parts together into a enduring piece of furniture. He might then go on to ridicule calls for a sledgehammer to smash the furniture, if one faction felt it was taking too long to produce something in their narrow interest.

It'll take a bigger intellect with a more reasoned argument than calls for unlimited emergency powers to make me acquiesce to temporary dictatorships, one faction at a time. That sounds more like a return to the old thinking that held sway before the US Constitution was written, when government of the people, by the people and for the people hadn't yet taken hold, and the ancient device of despots calling for more power was recognized as leading to national insanity.

Fukuyama argues that "We need stronger mechanisms to force collective decisions." Surely he jests? By definition, a collective decision is not one that is forced. As Walter Shewhart and W.E. Deming lamented for decades, an ounce of prevention and preparation speed the quality, not just the tempo, of distributed decision-making - far more than any attempt to repair the process after the development of the actors.

If dictatorships were so valuable, surely the USMC would also be calling for them on the battlefield, rather than going the opposite direction, and also acknowledging the enduring superiority of improving the quality (including tempo) of distributed decision-making. That kind of quality comes only from preparing and developing the character of the people involved, not in trying to force unqualified people through chattle-chutes of imaginary quality. The path that Brooks and Fukuyama dream of has led only to collective disaster, albeit temporary gain for individual looters.

Fukuyama goes on to mention multiple points of personal frustration, in a manner reminiscent of all people who have yearned for simple dictatorships. He wraps it all up with what is itself a peculiar claim.

"Whatever the reasons, the American state has always been weaker and less capable than its European or Asian counterparts."

Personally, I predict that that particular statement will produce more surprise, laughter and outright indignation than agreement from Americans. If not, then I truly don't know my country.

Predictably, Fukuyama then trots out the bogeyman of regulation, both it's absolute magnitude, various distributions, and methods of development. Having built several premises, i.e., that there IS a problem, that said problem is embedded in our very institutions, he now asks credible readers to wrap those presumptions around what "everybody knows," i.e., that there's too much regulation. Of Wall St, presumably?

At this point, I sincerely do hope that most credible readers are, indeed, laughing. Yet what Fukuyama is toying with is not a laughing matter. Tojo would have approved of his underlying message, even if he chafed at the slow, political correctness of it's delivery. If nothing else, you have to credit Brooks and Fukuyama for working so hard at what is, at heart, an incredibly simple and ancient message. "Give us the Goddamn Power! NOW!"

Finally, Fukuyama unravels his own case by making the mistake of exposing a simpler solution to his entire thesis.

"Thus, conflicts that in Sweden or Japan would be solved through quiet consultations between interested parties through the bureaucracy, are fought out through formal litigation in the American court system."

Fine. Delegate more of the tactics and strategies that now masquerade in Congress as National Policy, and get Congress, SCOTUS and the POTUS the heck out of tactics, and back in matters of true policy, national goals and Desired Outcomes for the nation ... where they belong.

For that, you don't need a dictator. Shoot. You don't even have to strengthen the Presidency. Just improve the quality of distributed decision-making, by investing more in the character development of all citizens? What a concept! Again, Fukuyama shoots his own argument in the foot, by overdeveloping it's lopsided armaments.

[PS: Note that Fukayama conveniently does NOT review all the failures of every other form of government worldwide, during the time course of the events he laments in the USA. Japan? Right. Nothing has happened in the last 70 years of THEIR government's history. His oratorical arguments lack the barest of required statistical controls. His arguments wouldn't receive any attention at all in any scientific debate. Indeed, they receive attention only for the dangers they present to an electorate challenged with responsibility for reasoned and logical discourse.]

Nevertheless, Fukuyama drones on and on about various cases, each time imaging tactical issues that he's presumably conditioned readers to see a Strengthened POTUS as the solution to. He even mentions the current mess of financial regulation, but not how elegantly the same issue - and effective responses - were developed back in the 1930s. We didn't bother strengthening the Presidency back then. Why now?

While it's unstated, the underlying, fantastical premise is that the ONLY rational solution for a Congress filled with micro-managers is to have a POTUS free to veto each and every inappropriately micro-managed Congressional gambit?

That's not the way the Framers of the Constitution saw it. Even though Fukuyama's essay mentions and discards James Madison's comments, there is nothing of substance in Fukuyama's essay that wasn't more fully developed by James Madison et al, first in the Virginia Plan, then in the Congressional Convention leading to the actual signing of the Constitution, and on to it's initial amendments. [Madison's actual notes on this process are fascinating, and little read by our 320 million citizens of today.]

The solution that the Framers saw as a better way, was to maintain the quality of the American electorate, and charge THEM with preventing the development of an incompetent class of politicians in all three branches of the newly designed government.

I see no further use in belaboring all the remaining points Fukuyama or Brooks trot out in their call to action. Rather, I'll close with a simple point.

The easiest way to form a vetocracy of the type they fear, is to populate ANY form of government with irresponsible people unfit for the task at hand.

Rather than trying to create a fool-proof formula for protecting ourselves from the Idiocracy they fear, isn't the simpler, and more scalable solution to instead invest in the quality of people we send as representatives to any form of government? And to do that by developing an electorate capable of selecting better quality representatives for themselves.

No Child Left Behind? How about no Democracy left behind, by leaving no citizens behind?

Personally, I don't see any other way. If Fukayama and Brooks are right, then we could engineer institutions so idiot proof that we could populate them with the proverbial 500 monkeys with typewriters, and then just sit back to wait for the guaranteed results.

There is a better way.

"Knowledge will forever govern ignorance: And a people who mean to be their own Governors, must arm themselves with the power which knowledge gives."
- James Madison to W. T. Barry, 1822