Have YOU Ever Heard Of A Human Aggregate That Ran Out Of Fiat?

It's sad & amazing that the function of national group-brains is declining (and our aggregate species group-brain too) ... even as neuroscientists worldwide obsessively over-study the structure of individual primate brains, all the while oblivious to the structure of the group-brain emerging all around them. 

That brings new comedy to the term OCD. 

On what scale? You can easily argue that the phenotypic persistence displayed in Deep State institutions mediate SSOCD, or social-species obsessive-compulsive disorders.

Consider the following trains of thought.

Balance sheet recessions and democracy 

and 

A depressing report from Florence

From the Renaissance to depression, in 500 years. Two impressions forward, one depression back? Is that the best we can do?

Somewhere in our current culture, we've forgotten that the whole purpose of social species is to take on Desired Consensus Outcomes which are beyond the ambition of individual skill sets.

Too few follow such discussions.

Hence, those that do are largely ignored, as aberrations.

Too much of our public discourse has been on various collision courses, & have actually already collided, years ago, producing our ongoing, slow-motion train wreck.

The US is supposedly acting slightly more intelligently than Japan or the Euro-zone ... yet not much, as the confusion in the following article shows.

"Weak banks don’t lend, highly indebted consumers don’t spend, and businesses with poor prospects don’t invest."

Yet this same WSJ author comes out with the oxymoronic statement:

"But U.S. policy makers failed to forge agreements to rein in long-run deficits, ..."

Why? Because ...

[a deficit in fiat] "could be a problem should another crisis hit."

WTF? And edges COULD be a problem too, IF the earth were flat.

I swear. Too many people in diverse disciplines forget the simple method of algebraic substitution, as a sanity check. 

To spell it out for non-thinkers, we all say we've used fiat currency for 80+ years. Yet what does "fiat" mean? At will? Who's will? The public's? So fiat currency denominates net Public Initiative? The word "fiat" means initiative, and/or nerve? Similar to public confidence?

Have YOU ever heard of a human aggregate that ran out of fiat?

And if there's a deficit, what is it that we're trying to balance? The balance of Public Initiative vs personal hoarding? Inflation vs deflation? Stockpiling Future Options vs Trying to Hoard Current Fiat? People get lost in making lists of things to balance, often losing track of form vs function. At the end of the day, we do have a constant, orienting reference: balance what continues to be adaptive vs what becomes maladaptive.

Yet some other slow boarder, trying to catch the thinking train, opines that"monetary policy is limited when an economy slows down considerably and lacks confidence."

LOL! Let me try to translate & extend that to it's logical implications. Groups run out of confidence, & generate a deficit in nerve, which they must then borrow? Can't spend nerve they don't have? Sub-groups often run out of confidence. When they do, they borrow - or rather receive - more nerve from the larger aggregate. That's what defines a social species.

All this lack of sense makes you wonder how humans made it through the last 200K years, always running a perpetual "deficit" in nerve. Does no one get the joke?

Who have we been "borrowing" nerve from all these millennia? Accountants presuming an external source for every sink? Was double-entry bookkeeping a miracle or a curse? Or always both simultaneously?

That all this social noise occurs in the year 2014 is a sad testament to the fragility of homo sapien logic. Homo sapiens still can't see the culture (or social species) for the individual?

And, there's the parallel myth that "job creators" create jobs by hiring people - even though that is just one receiving step in a cycle. One businessperson hires only when they have requests from other buyers to sell more, so they hire to meet that demand. Businesspeople rarely hire just to stockpile inventory, i.e., with no sales in sight. Optimal asset stockpiling occurs as aggregate stockpiling Policy Options, as a growing Policy Space, which they explore by increasing the distributed options available to their grandchildren.

Somewhere upstream in the circle of consuming/buying ... if buyers/consumers [i.e., job creators] have no income, limited options, and constrained innovation, how are they supposed to create jobs (i.e., demand for products and services)?

Acquisition pulls economies. Only drug dealers push.

Ok, greedy lobbyists do too.

Can we just redefine NeoLiberal's as those who don't believe in social species? Rather like those that don't believe in a round Earth or a helio-centric solar system?

Until then, we may as well stamp the following on the business card of Homo Sapiens:

Have Options,

WON'T Explore Them.

MacroEconomics: The Simple PRACTICE Of Re-Orienting All Eyes Onto Emerging Aggregate Options.

Is it just rigorously managing the supply of transaction denomination units? DON'T MAKE ME LAUGH!

Every time I read some dimwit, orthodox macro-economics discourse, I still end up wondering what it is, exactly, that we're running out of.

A line from one of the "Change" songs keeps coming back at that point too.

"I been around the world once or twice before,

and the answer ain't found in seeking more [stuff] ... I promise you that"

And there's an old Irish tribal proverb that also fits. "It is in the shelter of each other that the people live." Well Duh! That's what social species do, and in fact, all members of all ecologies.

So suddenly, once there are too many of us for our own wits to handle, we're no longer shelter to each other? Something doesn't add up here.

It must be our wits and behaviors, not our physical capabilities, or possessions that are degrading our median quality of life.

"When you change the way you look at things, the things you look at will [appear to] change."  Max Planck(?)

It's the scale, dummy? The more people we have, the bigger the tent we can hold up? Yet cultural tent design at one size does NOT scale, unchanged to provide cultural tent design at a different cultural scale.

"Much of the difficulty in reconciling scale-related axioms arises from CONFUSING MICRO-SCALE AND MACRO-SCALE INTER-RELATIONSHIPS." Max Planck

It's a mystery to me why we as a people struggle so much to see the superior value of more coordination, rather than more stuff.

We're so close!

How? Because almost everyone I meet already values their learned knowledge of how SOME relatively complex process works, and hence they don't sweat the ingredients. Ever seen a homemaker hoarding flour, or yeast, or salt, or ovens ... to ensure forever their capability to make bread? They know that that don't make no sense. Or mechanics trying to corner the market on nuts and bolts, for their retirement? No. They all grasp process scale, at least to some degree.

And yet we're still so far!

How? Because, to a person, those same people:

they just don't see our nation and electorate as just another process! 

They just haven't gotten used to seeing the bigger scale. It only takes practice, but they aren't getting enough of that practice yet.

Hence, they get sidetracked and completely swallowed up in hoarding, to gross excess, various ingredients that go into making "us" - a dynamic human culture that is much more than the sum of it's parts. For example, they all foolishly agree to hoard each other's transaction denomination units, for retirement - like athletes trying to hoard the "scorekeeping points" which their leagues create at will. 

Weepin' Jesus! Can't see dessert for all the Ding Dongs? Join the throng failing to recognize itself in the mirror.

It's astounding.

It's not the parts, dummy, it's the whole! Perhaps another addition to the books for dummies series might help.

Wholes, for Dummies! :)

Perhaps, but only if it was embedded in every year of our K-12 curriculum.

The backlog of stuff we already know about current human-culture recipes is so astoundingly large that it's either ignored or it actually gets in the way as institutional momentum or bureaucracy, as does our stockpile of ingredients.

Offer people a little bit of corn or butter, and they'll buy it all up. Give them unimaginable corn surpluses, or Butter Mountains, and they'll pay to have it hauled away for compost ..... and never examine the change in logic that accompanied the change in scale.

Every nomad understood this implicitly, 100,000 years ago. Say there are are 4 food sources, which appear at 4 times of the year, in 4 different places. First, ACTIVE nomads quickly find them all, and optimally use those resources. Is there enough for all, and excess? Always, but it required some travel.

You can picture that eventually, some lazy idiots started building fences around every new, transient resource discovered, in attempts to corner that market. Most would sit on it all year, trying not to starve between times it would blossom. Economic civil warfare began, along with leverage and enslavement. Local outcomes sometimes looked good to the dimwits withholding from the aggregate, rather than helping to keep the aggregate eye on aggregate options. Soon the net Output Gap was recognized, and it began to steadily grow.

The ongoing outcome? New layers of nomads eventually realize that their food source has become the people sitting behind the fences. Hence, the proverbial barbarian waiting at every misguided gate. Aggregate civil war escalated into unending civil war. Amazingly, aggregates grew despite themselves, but always slower than they could have. Sometimes MUCH slower, even briefly reversing the course of cultural evolution. Nevertheless, even our own genius idiots can't keep our resilient Middle Class down forever, no matter how hard they try.

This pattern continued until we witnessed the inevitable next link in that chain of idiocy.

Neo-Liberals attempting to build fences around distributed, public fiat, so they can sit on it.

BMHOTK! That's the final stage of "perfecting" the theory of idiocy, before it's tossed in the garbage bin, for good.

All our resources - including our denomination units - are all meaningless, without ability to see our emerging context.

"Those cultures are richest who can best explore emerging options soonest, with the least of their old baggage." That's my take.

Yes, countless superficial thinkers keep insisting on simple changes to our imagined cultural recipe - even though it's obvious that there cannot possibly be any isolated, simplistic solutions.

Yet there is nevertheless always something simple that's missing. It's just too subtle for most people, but ONLY because we don't teach the obvious. In fact, we train people out of seeing the obvious!

To make things easier on ourselves, we just have to re-orient our orientation coordinates to see our own evolving culture in a simpler light. No context seems simple until a context-specific coordinate system is adopted.

To re-orient whole cultures faster means a higher Cultural Adaptive Rate - despite our numeric growth. We have to face the fact that we're not doing the simple things that will cause a phase-change in the structure and process of existing human culture.

What does it take to transition a cultural engine from low potential to achieving more of it's potential? Tuning? Based on feedback from expanding system instrumentation? Requiring expanding investment in ourselves? That means realizing that the return-on-coordination is the only revenue that can cover our expanding cost of coordination. The only other option is slow suicide.

What part of tuning is it that's missing the most? Mostly the action, more than the analysis?

Both experimentation and imagination are necessary, but not sufficient. We need both. So far, we're constraining ourselves with austerity habits and hoarding stuff that in reality is only useless baggage, and that is keeping us from exploring options that are even more exciting.

To keep adapting and surviving, a culture needs to keep the entire electorate's eye on the NEXT prize. The idiocy of trying to sequester and bury Public Initiative (fiat) in the ground and hoard it is just another form of suicide. To leverage the distributed fiat we have, we first have to keep enough of it distributed. Then we need ever newer methods for driving better/faster/wider appreciation of context, throughout our electorate, no matter how fast it grows.

Aggregate Methods drive Aggregate Results.
     Aggregate Results are measured against Aggregate Desired Outcomes.
          Aggregate Desired Outcomes drive Aggregate Methods.

Or, if you will, Aggregate Practice Makes Aggregate Perfect.

That's why I prefer Marriner Eccles' actual operations over all subsequently published theories. We can always learn more from experiment than theory alone.

Eccles & FDR practiced exploring options. Then, too many bookworms spent subsequent decades theorizing about what Marriner & Franklin once did, instead of just helping us stay on our Economy Bike, exploring newly emerging options - by rushing to see the aggregate outcome of DOING things!

What other field rides a bike once, then retreats to book-reading instead of aggregate group bike riding? My head is spinning, just thinking about the ironic lunacy of it all.

Can we just close down every economics department in the country, talk less, and get back to MORE action and less theorizing, while utilizing inter-connected OBT&E?

That is, get students - & the whole Middle Class - back on the damn aggregate bike, and just let 'em PRACTICE riding it? ASAP?

So what view of context is it, exactly, that we aren't enunciating clearly enough to ourselves and teaching to our children .. that would allow us to do far more for ourselves, and make life more fulfilling for more of us?

The only conclusion I come to is that we always need even more thorough distribution of all human feedback, derived from maintaining fully distributed, full human activity. 

First, feedback minus diverse experiments is useless theory. 

Second, given the limited bandwidth of human components, useful feedback comes down to adequate, systematic re-sampling, to assess external change, changing internal capabilities and potential for further internal change.

Everyone has a responsibility to broadcast key info to key receivers.

We all have a responsibility to also adequately sample the entire spectrum of human feedback.

Simultaneously, to do either, we also have a responsibility to ensure that diverse feedback is allowed to be both broadcast and reviewed, by all.

None of us can be as smart, or active, as all of us. It's not even close.

"Organization" means getting key info to key people in key positions in key institutions, within critical time windows. All that, or nothing.

A healthy brain is one that's been nurtured adequately, developed through practice, and trained to rapidly analyze all emerging data.

Similarly, a healthy Group Brain - a human culture - is one that's been nurtured adequately, developed through practice at group discourse, and gets adequate practice at rapidly analyzing the changing spectrums of internal/external data. Leveraging that full spectrum of data/actions is what defines our emerging cultural response options. That's how we'll survive the unpredictably changing contexts we must face.

We can look either direction up and down that axis: as component "neurons" looking at their shared Group Brain ... or as the Group Brain looking at how it trains its component neurons (our individual brains).

Then, of course, we need national practice at generating alternative aggregate responses, and comparing them to our Aggregate Desired Outcome.

Did I mention that we need formal processes for continually re-estimating Aggregate Desired Outcomes, honestly? Instead of trying to rely upon the disproven process of Central Planning by too few Neo-Liberal, capitalist "elites" instead of communists? Big Difference, right?

A group has a Group Brain only if all parts talk to one another. What good is a Democracy if we don't USE it?  System intelligence is actually held in an aggregate's Body of Discourse, and expressed in aggregate actions. The more aggregate agility, the better, and aggregate agility is defined as the outcome of aggregate practice - aka, the Quality (including tempo) of Distributed Decision Making.

Where to start? You want specifics? Just generate more activity, everywhere you look, at every scale, among all citizens. And then get 'em all practicing coordinating across existing and emerging scale. If we don't, what's left of our grandchildren will, if THEY'RE left.

How to best help shape aggregate success? NEVER tell an aggregate HOW to do things? Instead, help RECRUIT its members both to an enticing aggregate CHALLENGE, and then also to grant itself distributed PERMISSION to surprise all members with its distributed ingenuity?

There always seem to be endless discussions going on, about countless proposed ideas and suggestions, for all policies, not just fiscal and tax policies.

Perhaps there's no problem with that, except that there is not enough discussion? Also, there are not yet enough methods for convincing our aggregate to quickly test and assess enough of our present ideas?

So let's take another approach. Let's connect all such policy discussion to more ancient lessons, by trying to stand back and look at our situation from the outside in, as if some alien visitor were observing planet Earth & the USA.

"When you see a planet full of humans, digging themselves into a hole, and you offer to help ..... they'll invariably ask you to jump in and help them dig."

So of course it's no wonder that our SETI isn't succeeding yet. :)  Maybe ETI is waiting for us to grow up and express a "Saii" - the Search for Additional, Intra-Aggregate Intelligence?

Why would alien visitors abstain from any of our ongoing arguments? Maybe because they'd quickly recognize - or already be universally familiar with - a universal reference for evaluating our efforts?

What is that reference? The members of all aggregates VOLUNTARILY swap SOME local degrees of freedom, for SOME uniquely aggregate degrees of freedom, exactly because of the net BENEFIT of that exchange. That's what we call a SOCIAL species.

Recognizing, staging, linking & sequencing the (distributed) behavior of an aggregate, in order to take ADVANTAGE of that exchange is obviously quite complicated. It has to evolve by trial and error. We have tangible records of that occurring in seemingly countless species, and certainly also in the history of our own human, cultural aggregates.

Hence, at this time, maybe we need to something parallel to all of our discussion details, just to make our next decision. Why? When viewing any social species anywhere, or any aggregate anywhere ..... an overriding ratio always stands out, separating adaptive aggregate-signal from ongoing aggregate-noise. Maybe we're simply not allowing ourselves to see it?

If there is not a net, distributed gradient of detectable success vs failure, the components of all aggregates cannot and do not make that voluntary exchange in enough proportions to continue tuning the aggregation process. 

If a growing aggregate is not actively tuning itself to organize & aggregate on a greater scale - i.e., "TO MAKE A MORE PERFECT UNION" .... then it is, by definition, turning to inter-component competition instead, and wavering on the cusp of dissociation and dis-aggregation, instead of further aggregation.

Without a steady sequence of adequately enticing, aggregate challenges, it is mathematically improbable to even maintain, let alone improve aggregation, i.e., teamwork, aka "union".

The political process of all human cultures has always revolved around this fact.

Further, those humans involved in the politics of human culture have always HAD to employ an endless series of invented, often diversionary, challenges, in a desperate attempt to keep enough team members motivated. We've known this very clearly, ever since Themistocles tricked the citizens of Athens into investing public wealth on a bigger/better state navy - around ~483BC!

Today, however, it seems rather clear that the art of politics may have reached it's limit?

Adaptive politics is classically defined as the art of having supposedly gifted individuals attempt to trick an aggregate into adaptive, aggregate action sooner than it would have otherwise acted - or in other words, the pursuit of successful, Central Planning.

Yet we already know that Central Planning cannot scale as fast as aggregate demands. Hence, politics as is DOES NOT SCALE! Well Duh!

I only bother stating all this so indirectly so as to drive home the point that WE, as a growing aggregate, will ALWAYS face this task. How do we keep our changing team motivated, no matter how big, successful & complacent we get? That organizational task COMPOUNDS, as a function of both population numbers and citizen capabilities.

It always comes back to the mathematics of distributed motivation among the aggregate of citizens?

If there isn't a palpable distinction between more/less enticement (or survival/failure), then there is no net maintenance & growth of democracy - which we can call further aggregation of the binding ties of a social species? So far, we just connecting already well-known dots.

So it is always necessary to invent new methods for recruiting citizens to keep organizing, to continue making an even more perfect union, and to continue exploring novel opportunities to voluntarily swap less enticing local options, for more enticing aggregate options?

Isn't that why straw men arguments and false flag operations are so common in history? An adequate enemy always helps? Yet we're simply running out of them - in a tragecomedic sense - to the point that a melting pot is trying to convince itself that all contributors to the pot now harbor enemies. That process is degenerating to worldwide fratricide. Surely that pond is nearly all fished out, and we have to look elsewhere, just to keep feeding ourselves?

What will become of this growing population of humans? All prior examples of other social species either die out, stall or invade yet untapped niches. Sci-fi writers have explored this domain for decades - although a bit haphazardly.

Those social species that DO manage to aggregate on a larger scale, all seem to do so by an analogous process, regardless of the specific details. 

They permanently capture a new state of aggregation ONLY when they add something subtle to their aggregate-regeneration process. 

That "subtle something" is always some completely unpredictable pattern of distributed influences that somehow BIASES the entire aggregate to further aggregation, i.e., organization on a greater scale.

Absolutely nothing that an existing aggregate does guarantees this or makes it inevitable!

It only occurs as the result of increasingly distributed trial and error. However, the process actually seems to accelerate, since a growing aggregate always spawns it's own selection machinery as a function of the very diversity that it spawns. To select it's own next step, it needs only to stumble into also listening to the added parts of it's growing self. Simply hearing and using all of the constantly expanding feedback always seems to allow self selection.

Humans are already remarkably, FANTASTICALLY biased by physiological nature to aggregate and pursue return-on-coordination. 

Worldwide, we've resorted to actively trying to beat that innovative spirit out of kids, through "education," to the point that active tensions between our existing physiological and cultural biases are rising, worldwide. Our obvious options are piling up faster than our willingness to explore them!

It is NOT AT ALL CLEAR how to further grow our historic bias to further return-on-coordination!!!

a) endless warfare?
b) endless random political diversions, tricking us into lemming-like mass manias?
c) instilling a cultural bias, through subtle tweaks to our education system?

Perhaps we do NOT need to over-argue the details, other than to use them to orient to the big picture, and recognize our aggregate context.

We DO need new methods for adequately biasing our millions and billions of citizens to pursue return-on-coordination as a Desired Outcome that is more enticing than competitive dis-aggregation.

As always, methods drive results, but ONLY after net motivation or enticement is established.

In our case, that ALWAYS comes back to methods for increasing the distributed motivation of our existing aggregate.

We already have mathematical proof that our survival path requires methods for increasing our cultural bias to further return-on-coordination. You can look that proven premise up in the established literature of multiple disciplines.

UNFORTUNATELY, NOT ENOUGH CITIZENS KNOW THAT, and certainly haven't learned it early enough in life to help their aggregates fully leverage the potential impact. [Sadly, 40% or more are currently actively opposed to that conclusion, and are indoctrinating their children to do so as well. Hence, our union isn't as perfect as it once was.]

In summary, we are facing an aggregate tuning task, one that is conceptually rather simple in theory, and even in practice. 

Perhaps the greatest hurdle is our existing bias to RESIST being tuned by others.

Rather than trying to beat our aggregate self into submission ..... it might be easier to join our growing, aggregate self?

Hence, one - very old - suggestion is to task all teammates with equal responsibility for aggregate self tuning. No surprise there.

Historically, we've called that either tribal membership, or democracy. Whatever it's called, we now need to do it - EVEN MORE EFFICIENTLY - on an even bigger scale.

When will that happen? Perhaps exactly WHEN an adequate majority agree on it as a consensus goal? When we do have agreement, then all individuals can sit back and let their aggregate impress themselves with IT'S distributed ingenuity.

To paraphrase General Patton, 

"To help shape aggregate success, NEVER tell an aggregate HOW to do things? Instead, help RECRUIT it's members both TO a consensus Desired Outcome, and then also to ALLOW itself distributed permission to surprise all members with it's distributed ingenuity?"

Patton had the beginnings of a generalized idea, but he didn't extend it to a 2-stage optimization process for an entire national culture.

Methods for recruiting citizens to continuously select their own enticing, new, Desired Outcomes, worthy of their aggregate capabilities. 

Methods for recruiting citizens to allow themselves to succeed more through aggregate hoarding (of coordination skills as dynamic assets) vs individual hoarding (of crude static assets).

And, ultimately, to a 3-stage optimization process, adding one more step.

Methods for adding a developmental bias, so that all three steps become an ingrained habit.

These 3 steps conform pretty well to the steps in both Shewhart's PDSA cycle, and Boyd's altered, extrapolated version, the OODA loop, and also to the general tenets of OBT&E - or "Outcomes Based Training & Education."

Steering Aggregate Adjustments To Distributed Change: Developing A Faster/Leaner/Better Aggregate OODA Loop

For aggregates to persist, every distributed component process must change?

That is always obvious once said, so why does so much distributed friction persist, over the seemingly obvious?

In his most recent review of the historical negotiations leading up to launch of the European common currency, Bill Mitchell has dredged up a statement which, in hindsight, reveals amazing levels of mal-adaptive reasoning.

The avowed purpose of the euro currency was to "reduce the level of unemployment by fighting inflation."

It is truly amazing to see how that perspective has turned out, in our existing context. The implication, then and now, is that a slight majority of Central European Policymakers were and are STILL fixated on the mythical benefits of a gold-like, static currency standard. The entire monetary policy for the common currency has been one grand effort to peg their currency value to a contentiously derived figure which they presume is static, but which must in reality, dynamically float.

As a truly deranged consequence, Europe has embarked on a mad effort to stabilize an incidental metric, inflation, which is at heart, an indicator of the dynamic flow of adaptive value between the necessarily diverse forms of capital.

Think for a moment about the lunacy of Europe's grand strategy.

Do we bother stabilizing the net flow of water between oceans, rivers, lakes and tidal basins? Or do we simply navigate on all of them, as and when needed?

Do nations regulate, across their aggregate population, how many bodily resources flow between specific sub-classes of muscles, fat deposits, organs or other body tissue types?

And does the biological cell regulate the intrinsic "value" of a given ATP-molecule? Or does every cell only the adaptive impact of ATP, when used "wherever & whenever needed" in the cell?

Answer to all 3 questions: Surviving aggregates do NOT pursue maladaptive strategies for long.

They certainly do NOT do so during those spurts when we actually adapt and evolve. As an adaptive, aggregate response to aggregate context, we let the relative ratio of all instances of net resources "float." Independently, we then regulate, through our collective, distributed efforts, ONLY those net resources which can be commandeered and leveraged by citizens within each nation state.

In short, we act and survive as an aggregate of inter-dependent members, not as isolated individuals. The entire ideology of capitalism for the sake of capital is merely a method searching for a purpose.

By their own admission, the European founders embarked on their common currency to improve the AGGREGATE or general welfare of all citizens in all member countries. Yet their operations have been functionally orthogonal to their stated mission.  As a result, they have clearly degraded rather than improved general welfare, for tens of millions of their own citizens.

Are they only slow on the uptake, or is this a guaranteed consequence of the still divergent views of rentiers and coordinators?

It has been perennially argued and so far proven - since the first fiat currency unleashed quantum jumps in fiat policy space and policy agility - that there is no obligatory relation between unemployment and inflation.

The entire argument depends on the very definitions of both inflation and unemployment, which are rarely precisely defined in given arguments as context-dependent terms.

The presumed link between unemployment and inflation is only a straw man smokescreen raised by rentiers opposed to the very policy maneuverability that generates the higher return-on-coordination in the 1st place!

We can't see "our" aggregate causality for our distributed views!

Europeans, as well as we here in the USA are left with a simpler, stark proposition. We have no need for active "monetary policy" whatsoever?

Rather, we need an agile, automatic-stabilizer monetary policy, backed by agile fiscal policy?

Curiously, the latter view has been consistently espoused in evolving forms, from early colonialists, to Ben Franklin and Alexander Hamilton, and on to Abraham Lincoln's Greenback and eventually to our current fiat currency regime, crafted largely under the guidance of Marriner Eccles and FDR.

Why is anyone surprised? That has always been the way in which all "social" aggregates have maneuvered to survive and thrive, throughout the entire history of all aggregates, not just biological ones.

The logic of social species simply expresses the timeless logic of aggregates. What we call social aggregates are merely those which display seemingly greater LOCAL degrees of freedom (at least on planet Earth, where we're still confined).

The constant, aggregate logic is to guarantee that the aggregate survives in a Natural Selection Market, by allowing all of the aggregate's component members to seek aggregate benefit .... by freely trading SOME local degrees of freedom, in return for net-adaptive access to SOME aggregate degrees of freedom.

Aggregate success obviously tracks the QUALITY of distributed decision-making.

In evolutionary terms, it is quite easy to maintain net profitability in that pool of trades - but only when people actually use ALL of their heads, not just some, and not just their weapons.

Our dominant social friction seems to be over fair - i.e., adaptive - distribution of (or access to) our aggregate benefits. Every time we generate more new resources than anyone previously imagined ... we stop and fight over dividing up the spoils.

Instead of absorbing the biggest lesson. That we generate more than we can imagine ... again ... if we'd only not pause to fight over past successes!

In practice, we're in a constant fight over whether to actively waste new assets by uselessly hoarding them, or to adaptively leverage any and all assets, while exploring our newly emerging aggregate options. It's a question of stopping in the middle of an evolutionary path, or never stopping, and to instead always keep going.

Managing that friction is where the demand for real thinking comes in. In practice, our kids always go on, as we slowly stop. The real question is whether we're going to try to limit the options our offspring have access to.

This is actually astounding. It tells us a lot about our actual context, and our own impact on our own outcomes. Humans have come this far, and yet we cannot mediate juvenile frictions that arise among our own citizens, who are members of our own country? Ancient tribal customs worked these methods out perfectly, tens of thousands of years ago. Are we only confused, distracted and self-conquered by our own, growing numbers? So that we're not even leveraging what we've ALWAYS known?

Yes. Emphatically yes. As always, we have met the enemy, and they is us.

The only question is what we're going to do about it. 

What new methods will we invent to redirect emerging resources away from the next emerging battle with ourselves?

Our current primary social friction seems to be largely between just two of our arbitrarily defined, sociological "personality-types" - rentiers and laborers - which are analogous to biological cell types. To further our embarrassment, rentiers and laborers are clearly mutual symbionts, neither able to exist without the other. They are only virtually defined as different, yet act too stupidly to intelligently leverage their own return-on-coordination. Go figure!

With only cursory examination, the perennially under-regulated rentier outlook is exposed for what it is. A intellectually lazy, parasitic approach that mindlessly seeks to HAVE it's culture, and EAT MOST OF IT too (or at least hoard it).

Rent seeking is simply a non-adaptive approach not yet adequately regulated by the diverse co-owners within the same aggregate. The best & most common defense for the rentier fraud is "Why didn't you stop me?"

Meanwhile, with similarly cursory examination, the perennially under-organized laborer outlook is simultaneously exposed for what it is as well - the same intellectual laziness, expressed only slightly differently. A overly passive approach that works harder at avoiding rather than fulfilling the responsibilities of co-owning it's own aggregate.

By both methods, an intellectually lazy aggregate and it's options remain parted!

You could NOT make this up, or anticipate such an outcome for such a large culture of the supposedly most intelligent species ever to walk this planet. Certainly not after 10,000 years of rapidly evolving, human cultural history.

Our reality is that laborers are always trying to give away their aggregate ownership responsibilities, and rentiers are always trying to minimize the intellectual work they must perform in order to accept all those aggregate benefits, and keep them coming. As John Boyd famously said, their default goal of the rentiers is to just "don’t interrupt the money flow, add to it."

Is it any surprise that many people conclude that democracy won't work, even though it obviously can, has, and will again, in fits and spurts? Democracy is just another word for an agile aggregate, capable of maneuver context management. Democracy, when it does work, depends on an adequate quality of distributed decision-making, rather than the fallbac, of lazily TRYING to rely upon the transient crutch of Central Planning. No matter what the form, Central Planning always fails, since it can never scale planning as fast as aggregate options expand. It's only a matter of when, not if.

You also couldn't make up this escalation of useless parlour talk about whether democracy works, but you can predict it's inevitability, unless we better educate and better train our own personnel. Aggregates ARE what aggregates practice, no matter how smart their members are before they initiate "team" or aggregate practice.

Evolving methods drive evolving results. Until our evolving education and training methods more closely chase our evolving demand for faster/leaner/better coordination, we won't maintain an evolving democracy. We won't be able to explore, or controllably manage, our continually expanding options.

What part of Duh! are we NOT teaching our children? All of the details, and NONE of the context?

There is a better way. If we focus on coordination skills first, we'll ALWAYS be able to muster whatever adaptive rate, form and direction we need, when the hour strikes.

Things won't improve until labor, in aggregate, calmly and purposefully acts more like an aggregate owner, and until rentiers simultaneously, in aggregate, calmly and gracefully accept the overwhelming return-on-coordination among all co-owners. Until then, our Aggregate Adaptive Rate will continue to lag and our Output Gap will only increase. This is an aggregate organizational task, not a conflict to be won. To make things easier on everyone, we need "a more perfect union" - NOT disorganized squabbling.

One example conclusion follows from this expose.

The concept of keeping a "land-use-tax" obligation in balance with a "labor-tax" is only a crude beginning to a more general social-organization method. The range of so-called "Intellectual Properties" has now extended far beyond mere land itself, and the divisive rentier-vs-laborer competition now rages over every new niche that citizens invade via coordination.

To balance labor-taxes, a more general "Intellectual-Property-Use Tax" is clearly called for, to provide measured incentives for both random invention AND aggregate leverage (redistribution) of aggregate skills AND actual production. It always boils down to aggregate agility in regulating adaptive tolerance limits on all new methods employed of, for and by the host aggregate. Call it social responsibility or whatever you want, just get on with it quickly, so that our culture can move on, just as quickly. Aggregate tempo and maneuverability always matters, more than anything else.

Many other adaptive conclusions will soon be obvious to rentier/laborer enclaves, once they start working together, not just negotiating periodically.

Our next, adequate, and distributed solution this week ...... is always better than a supposedly perfect, Centrally Planned one, in some fanciful future.

Clearly, to guarantee that an organized citizenry can always QUICKLY consume all new resources and leverage every new option that it collectively produces, there has to be fiat or on-demand equivalency between labor and all other forms of capital. The ultimate logic of any social species is to provide rapid translation between all local forms of intrinsic capital, so that all capital translations are SPEEDILY valued and denominated per a FLOATING, aggregate-adaptive-rate scale.

The immediate benefit for us is to NOT impair the quality of our distributed decision-making, by judging decisions according to any subjugate, distracting and overly narrow metric which is too divorced from aggregate context.

In other words, just avoid any and all instances of Central Planning, where decisions for many are attempted BY too few, wielding a fraction of the aggregate feedback and knowledge which is too small.

Our constantly emerging aggregate benefit?

Just adjust more aggregate decisions, sooner. That's how all aggregates stay closer to their unpredictable, aggregate adaptive paths.

How do aggregates do that? By ever more frequent and continuous substitution of inexpensive prevention for the overwhelming cost of expensive repairs.

In practice, that means constantly inventing new social instrumentation methods, so that quicker, distributed decision-making benefit from earlier feedback from MORE of our aggregate. The alternative is slow, less distributed decision-making, more divorced from early & full aggregate feedback.

In this way, the aggregate adaptive value of all "markets" is entirely tied to them being equally open to real-time feedback from all citizens. If not fully open to all, in real-time, then market operations instantly veer towards more random purposes which are, by statistical definition, less adaptive for the aggregate. Again, it is only a question of when, not if.

May be state this in even more general, and therefore even more adaptive terms?

In our present tax system, EVERY form of capital transfer should be regulated by the entire range of aggregate feedback, through one, constant "Capital-Use-Tax" rate. That one tax rate should hold for all definable forms of capital leased from the aggregate.

How could this help? First, we could get rid of our currently arbitrary hodge-podge of labor-use taxes and/or land-use taxes and/or other IP-use taxes. Second, unless every voice is heard and valued, the aggregate impact of unpredictably emerging inter-dependencies cannot be detected and managed through cheap, early prevention. Instead, management is less successfully attempted through late and more costly repair alone.

Finally, any transient deviance from a uniform, "Capital-Use" tax rate would also be more clearly seen by all as an interim expression of flexible, not permanent, policy.

Now we're back to a simple, parlour-talk issue. Why is democracy always superior in the long run? 

Simply because all the rights and responsibilities implied by citizenship act as highly agile, distributed checks and balances. That's how we KEEP the cardinal rule of social species, that all national assets are in reality leased from the aggregate, and not owned independent from it, in opposition to aggregate Adaptive Rate.
One immediate consequence is the need to regulate inter-aggregate trade. Clearly, the currently promoted definition of "free" trade is a myth and oxymoron. Today's perversion of "free trade" only means that non-labor forms of capital movement are NOT taxed, while labor-capital is selectively taxed. The illogical reason for that aggregate policy is self-evident, as well as self-defeating for for both labor and rentiers alike.

Every form of trade, foreign or domestic, can be allowed ONLY after it's current and emerging adaptive value is evaluated by the full range of democratic feedback. For aggregate agility, however, no single, isolated action should be instantaneously prohibited in practice. Rather, to guarantee aggregate survival, the growth or expansion of all volume trades and/or trade agreements must soon be vetted and constantly reviewed through aggregate feedback.

Without constant deference to democratic feedback as our most reliable assessment method, we cannot claim to be pursuing aggregate adaptive rate as our Adaptive Path.

And if we as a people are not going to continuously pursue our best estimated adaptive path for the USA, why bother with any other charade whatsoever?

If we're going to pursue democracy for the return-on-coordination, surely we should pursue rapid coordination everywhere, or not bother doing so anywhere at all?

To continue co-organizing our own aggregate growth and distributed capabilities, we need that principle of Adaptive Fairness as our constant, orienting reference, while using it as the Desired Outcome which we are always chasing.

Lacking such a reference, we're left without a map, wondering which way our growing aggregate should go.