We've Cleverly Trapped Ourselves, Swaying Part-Way Between Nation And Individual? Or Is That Stupid ... Like a Fox?

Why?

1/2 way between team and lone wolf?
1/2 way between social-coordination and social-looting

It seems inaccurate to simply call humans eusocial. That's certainly not the whole truth.

Readers can select from endless examples, but here's one, arbitrary, example, below. If you don't like THIS example, please just choose another one, instead of getting entirely side tracked on the perfection of arbitrary examples. Our goal is adaptive generalization, not fixation on details always lagging emerging context.

The opening sentences in this investment advisory article don't even make sense .. unless?

Oil slips on U.S. stimulus outlook but supply worries support "... analysts said prices were unlikely to sustain that level as European refiners cut processing rates because of gains in oil costs stemming from supply-curbing unrest in OPEC members ..."

Unless there's collusion to keep local prices at some arbitrary target?

Isn't there always at least some collusion? The balance swings between official and private? Either way, it's hard to follow the semantics of this kind of reporting. What is the underlying message implied by such confused messaging?

The underlying message when trying to combine public fiscal policy of so-called nation-states with personal-investing advice .... is that the populations of all families, neighborhoods, tribes, nation-states are suspended half-way between pursuing return-on-coordination, and pursuing supposed personal gain at distributed expense?

Such habits don't persist for millions of years without solid reasons.

So why, indeed, do we seem to keep doing this? Are we really doing so purposefully, or is the perceived outcome of diverse, mixed messaging only a spurious happenstance? A shadow thrown off by one or more other, ongoing processes?

For example, could our continuously muddled outcome occur simply because it really is excruciatingly difficult to fully integrate an additional infusion of millions of people per year - into any nation or culture, anywhere?

In contrast, few physiological entities maintain continuous growth. Lobsters, as one of many examples, manage continuous growth right up to the point of any arbitrary cause of death. Yet they do so partly through relatively slow growth rates, and also by rigidly controlling the organizational state of the adult. Evolution in most complex physiologies is largely - though not exclusively - restricted to sexual recombination events. It's apparently too difficult and risky to continuously tinker very much with models once they come off the assembly line. Human and other social cultures, in contrast, undergo continuous cultural-embryology, cultural-ontogeny and cultural-phylogeny ... all simultaneously. Cultures, in contrast to individuals, fail to evolve and survive precisely when they DO try to rigidly control their organizational state.

It's a miracle we survive ourselves at all. How do we actually do it? Why don't we focus far more on those subtleties, instead of all the spurious details? When trying to at least intelligently discuss the size of government vs size of nation, it wouldn't hurt to refer to useful analogies?

Human cultures - as super-organisms, on a completely different scale from the cellular-cultures which we call lobsters - have not only kept up continuous population growth for millennia, they've also maintained an Adaptive Rate that - usually - exceeds population growth rates. The fact that population growth rates in large, advanced nation states - or even European Unions :) - slow as a function of both organizational state and sheer numbers suggests another aspect of human cultural growth. Namely, that the absolute number of evolving system components - each increasing it's degrees of freedom - matters more than rate of population growth rate alone. Once again, absolute magnitude matters, in this case, the absolute number of inter-dependencies to manage.

Adaptive management of a constantly growing list of inter-dependencies requires exquisite maintenance of social instrumentation to distribute required patterns of feedback data. It's that simple? Why do we discuss everything BUT that simple, primary fact in our idiotic media services?

We're left with a conundrum. Growth of an entity - nation, union or culture - is a function of net Adaptive Rate. We also know that net, national Adaptive Rate is described by the running output of a long, polynomial of factors, where personal-, discipline-specific, institutional- and public-policy features constitute the cultural "factors" in that polynomial. All the growing #s of factors in those growing lists are capable of varying dramatically and triggering unpredictable inter-dependency effects. In short, every single term in that - constantly lengthening - polynomial has complex co-factors that can vary independently, but which impose dependent consequences. The output range is certainly messy. Constant cleanup is the order of every day. Let's simplistically describe a mutating human culture this way, by summing NAR, Net Adaptive Rate, including p-personal, d-discipline, i-institutional, and pp-public-policy groupings.

NAR = F(j..n)[ fp(j..n) ~ fd(j..n) ~ fi(j..n) ~ fpp(j..n)] ... at least.

That certainly doesn't do reality justice, but it's enough to begin to get a very simple point across.

For a given nation to grow into a bigger, more agile, more capable entity, it is necessary that the degrees of freedom of any subset never grow beyond local tolerance limits imposed by systemic feedback. Exceeding such tolerance limits would simply degrade inter-dependencies with all other subsets, and thereby reduce the return on net coordination of the whole. That happens in human cultures and markets, as surely as dramatically increasing the power of only one or a few pistons in a V8 internal combustion engine quickly causes more harm than good to both engine and vehicle maintenance costs - maybe even to driver & pedestrians!

Would it do your body much good if, say, your liver, turned into a SuperLiver, and tried to rapidly evolve into roles that randomly complicated the functions of the other, roughly 60 human organs, ~300 human cell types, and ~70-Trillion cells making up a functioning human physiology? Unlikely - but who's to say what our physiology will look like in another million years? In all likelihood the resulting physiological disorder triggered by your SuperLiver would seriously impair your behavior in the interim, or even kill you. With indirect help from other humans, you'd probably label your new SuperLiver as either a benign or cancerous tumor, kill or excise it, and go on a transplant waiting list to get a liver that could stay within SURVIVABLE, local Adaptive Rates.  By analogy, it's certainly relevant to ask whether the current, runaway asset-overgrowth by the 1% is killing the entire USA, not just the Middle Class.

Point is that it is excruciatingly difficult to select distributed tolerance limits that allow net adaptation. And, it is incredibly dangerous to pursue long-term projections based upon very limited samplings of full-system feedback! That should be obvious to citizens of the USA, but it obviously isn't!

How does your liver stay within tolerance limits that keep your body alive? How do all components in complex systems tie all local ambitions and rate of evolving degrees of freedom to systemic as well as local needs?

They do so by tying all local functions AND emerging interactions, to the entire spectrum of local-to-global feedback loops. Listen to all, and then practice ... knowing how to use some or all that data - when and as needed - to grow and protect the system you're a part of. Don't just grow your local wallet. The result of coordination is called evolution, and it's worked miraculously for billions of years. That is, it works when supposedly brilliant humans stoop to actually participating in the collective activity. Sound tedious? Of course. Yet it's certainly not difficult. That's the rub. To accelerate return on coordination, we need only be patiently selective.

Yes, adaptive evolution is actually quite simple to do with TEAM PRACTICE at distributed trial and error. In fact there's a very simplistic name for it. [Whole System] Outcomes-Based Training and Education - or just OBT&E for short.

OBT&E is simple to achieve via team practice - yet it is mathematically impossible to DESCRIBE via academic theory or rules. Why? Because the near-infinite lists of workable vs non-workable permutations of all possible degrees-of-freedom and actions that can be taken by say, either 70-trillion cells in a human body (at one scale) or ~320-Million citizens in a nation state, are far more rapidly selectable via ongoing feedback from ongoing trial and error than by predictive calculation! From the point of view of individuals, you might call the selection process the Traveling Entrepreneur Task.

The task is even more difficult for the sum of individuals making a human culture. No complex system can mirror and calculate all system data fast enough to execute Central Planning. That's a mathematical reality. The volume of data generated is an exponential function of our own actions. The adaptive solution is never calculable - despite what Luddite "Austrian Economists" hypothesize. It is, however, always SELECTABLE, and that's what evolutionary adaptive rate is all about. Evolution is the slow process of finding ways to tap feedback from more and more sources, so as to shield ourselves better and better from the constant effect of entropy. That's why many biologists have taken liberties with semantics & slang, to call evolution or auto-catalysis a "reverse-entropy" method. Given that agility, maybe it's even possible to fuse philosophy and actual science? Probably by abandoning the faux-religion of economics? A field that even bankers say is more trouble than it's worth.

The power of group selection, i.e., teamwork, is an age-old lesson that humans have ALWAYS known, since we evolved. We keep using teamwork because it slowly sinks for all new arrivals that we have zero net predictive power. What is it that we're all feverishly working towards? Whatever it is, it is ALWAYS far easier to cooperate on exploring those endless options, and quickly agree on whatever we can all most benefit from agreeing upon. What we are tempted to agree upon thereafter, appears to be related by some power function to the mass of what we can collectively sense and perceive, rarely including anything we can or should actually calculate with any significant precision. The group intelligence of a human culture is held in the body AND DISTRIBUTION PATTERN of it's group discourse. Similar to the function that a nervous system fills in a given physiology. The message is the same for individuals and whole cultures ... FEED YOUR BRAIN. That means both of them, your's, and your nation's. Feeding either in isolation won't help.

At the end of every day, it's again better to kick back with a cold beer & your feet up ... or at least have a clear path to doing so again, WITH addition of some capabilities that - last year - you or others convinced us that we were bored NOT having. Metalworking, steam engines, automobiles, telephones, big-screen tvs, internet, yada, yada. What's next, and - more importantly - why will we struggle to more systemically leverage it, vs clinging to poorly distributed allocation? Excessive personal hoarding of static assets causes us far more trouble than it is worth. There's no doubt that it holds us back.

It takes us far longer to learn the optimal uses for new tools and methods. Far longer than it takes to intially mis-use them.  As many have noted, net system progress tracks the transition from random application to Automatic Stabilizer function.

Our nation of ~320 million people is once again trying to arbitrarily over-expand the degrees of freedom of some small set of citizens (the tumor, some mix of Innocent Frauds & Outright Frauds), while drastically limiting the degrees of freedom of all the rest of our citizens - supposedly unexpectedly.

What is wrong with this picture?

There are 1001 ways to express HOW stupid it is. Let's have yearly student contests to re-describe the changing spectrum of those descriptions. We adults already have bigger issues to move on to.

More importantly, WHY are we doing this, repeatedly?

If nothing else, it's because we are NOT training our constant wave of new children to appreciate the evolving system they are a part of? While newcomers learn details about the disciplines, institutions and public they choose to participate in ... don't they also need to appreciate the overwhelming importance of evaluating whether or not local actions and even degrees of freedom at EVERY level are compatible with actions & degrees of freedom at all levels? "All levels" includes the WHOLE NATION that is supposed to be far greater than the sum of it's ever expanding number of parts.

Every member born into a social species faces first and foremost a colossal, monumental tuning task, and can help more than hinder ONLY if they appreciate the difference between being a wrench, lubricant or carefully selected catalyst thrown into the workings of an exquisite system. With that simple perspective always in mind, multi-level selection - in the form of distributed teamwork PRACTICE and FEEDBACK - can proceed as a matter of fact, even if unpredictably.  In practice, citizens can generate adequate group practice only if they guarantee everyone's basic needs, through Automatic Stabilizer functions. That simple truth describes the 1st step in achieving and maintaining an Agile Culture.

Our greatest focus should be on group SELECTION of the excruciatingly rare permutations of things which we can do to actually increase the Adaptive Rate of an already mind-numbingly complex and complicated human culture.

If that isn't a challenge worth going after, I don't know what is. It's a challenge that makes most local ambitions trivially boring. Why don't we make all students intimately aware of this reality, by age 10? That little effort would produce a sea-change in the adaptive rate of any culture that does it.

How could we keep citizens down in their ruts, after they've seen that great possibility? Why would we want to?

How To Avoid The Cyclical Trap Of Arbitrarily Constraining Real Growth In Order To Make Nominal Numbers Look "Good"

Warren Mosler has another useful missive, from his extended rabble-rousing tour of Italy, trying to explain existing currency operations to more people.

Yet we can't succeed only by further explanation of ANY tactics, strategies, policies or even goals - not even by explaining seemingly rarely understood currency operations.

Warren's incredible efforts are a necessary but not sufficient step. He can't save us from ourselves by himself, and needs help - actually, a lot of help - from diverse sources. The helper of our helper is ... our self-help?

Nonetheless, Warren's exposes of key fiat currency operations are pulling down a significant barrier and enabling all of us to more easily break through and see a larger, recurring pattern (arbitrarily described here in 7 steps).

The next key observation is that most economics discussions - no matter how erudite - are stuck on steps 1&2, & never even get to parts 3-7! Understanding currency operations may open a door, but it's involvement of everyone - and all disciplines - that will determine how quickly we explore what's available on the other side. To that note, Warren's dead on in saying that "the entire finance industry is more trouble than it's worth." We need to get beyond arbitrary finance and economics, and back to exploring our real options. If mismanaging fiscal operations is how we are arbitrarily constraining ourselves currently, then we have to address it. Yet we certainly can't stop there. The deeper problem is that we'll just find other, equally arbitrary methods for getting in our own way! Let's look into why, and how to avoid that.

To paraphrase Warren, how do we get a huge population to simply explore their endless options? Here's my candid suggestions, based on feedback from people in diverse disciplines.

7 steps to achieving Situational Awareness of our current dilemma in the USA.
Note that the first three are entirely circumstantial and unique to our times, while 4-7 represent more general principles applicable to unpredictable situations yet to appear.

1) Modern "fiat" currency = financial liquidity units first, and a stable store of only very temporary value (i.e., liquidity) only secondarily.
[In clumsy cultures, policy space & agility may be yoked to currencies pegged to static-values (commodities).
Cultures demanding increases in both policy space & policy agility will always require fully fiat currency, yoked only to dynamic-values such as Public Initiative. It's that simple.]

2) "Deficits" in fiat currency issuance are simply one zone in a time-variant plot of automatic liquidity maintenance. To be an agile culture, our net liquidity - i.e., our fiat currency supply - has to automatically track any and all swings in net economic activity, no matter how dramatic. Thereafter, our remaining job is to FOCUS on managing & regulating how we SELECT the targets and distribution of that increasingly dynamic liquidity pool. Don't conflate those two, distinct, processes.

3) What initiates and dictates the cascade of organizational growth? All of our SELECTED national patterns of fiscal injection, liquidity distribution, and demand leakages will ALWAYS track, not dictate, our selection of national goals - including both QUALITY and TEMPO of that selection process.

4) Without steady introduction of worthy challenges, ANY institutional structure - such as our current one, which Warren describes in depth - regresses into a distributed competition to hoard unspent liquidity.
Without national purpose, we can't grow as a nation. It's that simple.

5) To smooth out the supposed business cycle, we need fiat motivation and fiat goals just as much as we need fiat currency? If outside demands aren't imposed, how do we counter our own tendency to regress, and keep evolving? Barring outside demand, we must create our own aggregate demand, and not just the little ones imposed by regressive capitalism, but really big ones supplied by the compounding return on collective capitalism - i.e., coordinated capitalism. To accurately name our chief cultural method, call it what it is, outcomes based collective capitalism - where all forms of capital, dynamic as well as static, are co-developed in unison, including coordination. To do that, requires preparation. To prepare, we must actively manage the rate & quality of the methods we use to generate our national imagination & drive. We made primary education mandatory, but we haven't yet made it mandatory to improve primary education fast enough! Like fiat currency, education must also be fiat, and AUTOMATICALLY TRACK ongoing outcomes. An informed electorate is the fallback method we're stuck with, when it comes time to invent our own goals (we either find outlets for new levels and patterns of consumption, or we degrade to consuming one another).

6) Methods have to flow bottom-up, but selection of organizational goals has to flow top down - as the response to ALL bottom-up feedback. Organization is just recursive coordination in response to feedback, analysis, probe and experience. Without strategy, diverse tactics of our subgroups and individuals eventually get in their own way, and descend to to gridlock. Further, without policy, our diverse strategies also produce gridlock. Similarly, without goals, policies grow into gridlock. Finally, diverse goals eventually bump and also produce political gridlock. Then what's the solution? What is beyond goals? It takes concerted imagination to construct the next HIERARCHICAL step, a newly DESIRED OUTCOME STATE big enough to encompass all existing goals. The very concept of evolution is that it is outcomes based.  If there's no challenge, supplied by circumstance or imagination, then there's no way to drive further organizational evolution. Once yet another outcome state is visualized by enough people, it's only a matter of recycling old tactics to newly standardized, automated tools, and bumping everything else down an organizational level, so that we can collectively reach even higher.

7) Yet without improved national DISCERNMENT, we as a people will never see these cycles coming, nor protect ourselves from falling into nationwide funks where we limit our growth just in order to make completely fiat accounting numbers look good. National depressions only happen when we take our collective eyes off the next real, emerging prize or option. If we're not actively exploring, we'll be late to see surprises coming from unexpected directions. If we're late seeing it, it's tougher to get out of the way of the next truck coming down the road - or the next collective outcome option.
This ain't rocket science. It's just continuing to have a big enough proportion of people see the big and growing picture. Since our situations are NOT in equilibrium, it's deadly to let our policy space & policy agility stall. When there are enough uninformed inmates to take over the cockpit and start flying blind, toying with stall speed will, sooner or later, prove to be fatal.

Analogy: network exercise, or "exercised" systems.
Individual mood follows behavior.

(Literally no one can remain depressed during serious exercise.  Our physiological processes have ranges allowing them to all rise to levels serving as adequate checks and balances on one another. You just have to know how and when to trigger them all, to re-gear yourself for any circumstance.)

National mood follows goal-directed behavior?
(Limit aggregate activity ==> limit & skew liquidity ==> degrade innovation ==> depress quality of distributed decision-making. As Warren points out, there's no economic situation we can't handle by adjusting available policy tools WITH ENOUGH AGILITY! Policy agility - and awareness of our existing policy space - is our chief limitation, not our available policy tools. That and willingness to utilize that policy space, of course. That's where innocent and/or other fraud comes in.)

Conclusion on causality flow? Numero Uno, pick a desired outcome, any big enough outcome, to initiate mobilization (national mood) ... and then keep selecting even better outcomes ... forever. Everything else - every aspect of an evolving culture - automatically falls into place as incidental to achieving our endlessly emerging, desired outcomes.

And don't stop doing Numero Uno! Otherwise, no amount of theoretical details or tactical responses will restart the stalled cycle of net cultural evolution.  We cannot do this by further explanation alone, of ANY tactics, strategies, policies or even goals. We can succeed ONLY by enabling a threshold proportion of the citizenry to co-envision the next Outcome big enough to satisfy and exceed all our existing goals - and making sure they're always pre-prepared with enough audacity to go for it. If we just do that, we'll ALWAYS amaze ourselves with our own ingenuity.  It takes national practice at Outcomes Based Training and Education. It's that simple.