Monday, November 26, 2012

You'd Think People Would Catch On .... That This Is Not Business As Usual

commentary by Roger Erickson

6m trapped in poverty: Poor earning Brits fail to cover cost of living
More than six [UK] million workers are not earning enough to drag their families above the breadline. And for the first time since records began, working families in poverty outnumber the 5.1 million jobless households in poverty.

Unlike in the USA, Cameron's UK administration forget to re-define official poverty levels downwards fast enough to keep 'em conveniently below median labor-class incomes.  If you want to stay ahead in a continuous race to the bottom, you need the finish line to fall faster than the contestants.

When will the 1% and their newly poverty stricken acolytes catch on? When they start suggesting euthanasia, and start running out of lower classes to keep their incomes and wealth levels above? Will that be before or after we all re-recognize that we'll either hang together, or hang en masse? What good are supposed honeypots if there are no ant "servants" to utilize and re-consume the group output that honeypots hoard? What good are even capitalist Central Planners who think that they can personally dole out Group Intelligence faster than the quality of distributed decision-making - even among those on the dole - can rise?

Forget Al Qada. The worst terrorist threat is always Uu Qanta, and it's staring out from your own mirror. The only way to kill that terrorist threat is to kill the notion that we can control, rather than simply unleash and enjoy, the quality of coordinated, distributed decision-making. Instead of seeing increasing gross liquidity as a deficit, call it by it's more appropriate name - "asset."

Note to Central Planners. There is no way to hoard and dole out Group Intelligence, Group Agility and Group Adaptive Rate. It's equivalent to hoarding group suicide. Good luck with that.

When will our mega tribe realize that they themselves are the prime asset, that currency is simply liquidity, and that anything hindering society-wide liquidity limits return on coordination - and hence our future options? Hopefully not after it's too late to avoid setting us back another generation. Hopefully at least slightly before then?

There is a better way.

We can't accelerate return on coordination without getting rid of all royalty and most royalties, forever. Every bit of personal initiative withheld and forgone (i.e., hoarded) forgoes some compounding return on coordination. The only way to optimize growth of any organization is to both grow the system AND keep the components adquately maintained. That's a 2-stage optimization task, neither neo-capitalism nor neo-socialism alone, but a dynamic function of both continuously summed. This is NOT difficult. Any 12 year old exposed to algebra can learn the core concept of return on scalable teamwork, aka return on coordination.

2 comments:

Ralph Musgrave said...

I’m all in favour of doing something about genuine poverty. Unfortunately the definition of poverty in the article linked to above is absurd - although it’s a very popular definition. The definition is anyone earning “less than 60% of the average income”.

So when the average family has ten cars and TV sets, a family with fewer than six of each is poor? And when the average family eats so much that that obesity is a serious nationwide health problem, a family that can only afford enough food to keep fit and healthy is poor?

Roger Erickson said...

Ralph,
How about we quit defining personal or family poverty in isolation, and instead track local/national poverty in terms of the Output Gap?