Ernie: Not sure how relevant this observation is, but some civilizations endure for millennia. Really hard to know what it means that classic Chinese civilization lasted until the era of Sun Yat Sen, or that Egyptian civilization remained mostly intact until the Romans, or no later than Byzantium, or Mesopotamia until the rise of Islam. Not to mention India, Ethiopia, or Andean "Indian" civilization. But in all these cases, and more, we are talking about really long periods of time. In some cases we know about markets, especially Mesopotamia, with trade missions to foreign countries, records of ( primitive ) banking transactions, etc, etc. Also know that the economy was "mixed" and featured a good deal of gvt intervention, which, like the market itself, could be all for the good, or a mess Flexibility, seems to me, was the key to success --viz adaptability, creative impulse reinforced by religious values. These days we cannot require religious values of anyone, but we still need some equivalent, about which, Adam Smith was right. Markets, if they are to perform as advertised, need a solid grounding in useful social values. Especially since markets, also like gvts, will always need to confront externalities, natural disasters, social unrest, effects of war, epidemics, you name it. And not excluding good externalities like impact of a new technology or social invention. So, while this shows my bias of long standing, the war that matters most is the war over values. Billy ============================================================ In a message dated 4/20/2010 2:27:17 P.M. Pacific Daylight Time, [email protected] writes:
HI Billy, On Apr 20, 2010, at 2:04 PM, [email protected] wrote: > I will say it again, which I think you agree with, that when it comes > to free speech, libertarians are the gold standard. But when it comes to > rationality in politics, they simply can't be taken seriously. Or, more clinically, > simply can't be taken seriously except in specific cases where we have > rational markets and social costs are controlled for. What's worrisome to me is that not that the libertarians are wrong (everyone is, sometimes :-), but that nobody else may be *right*. The most sobering insight of systems theory is that systems become more adaptable by becoming *less* energetically stable. For example, a human being needs a very specific environment to survive compared to a bacteria. Similarly, societies built only on subsistence farming can last unchanged for thousands of years, whereas civilizations typically only endure for hundreds. In other words, the very complexity that helps us to do more makes us more complex, and thus vulnerable to a whole different class of problems. This is the terrifying thought: markets may well be irrational, but they are probably the least irrational thing we can create, and anything we create to supervise them will ultimately become more irrational. In other words, we have two choices: a) Live with a system of periodic boom and bust as the market system naturally destroys and recreates itself (which, correct me if I'm wrong, happened periodically with great severity in all industrial economies up to and including the Great Depression). b) Create ancillary systems that "dampen out" those cycles, but which *themselves* are susceptible to larger (and ultimately more devastating) cycles. There is no third option. That is, even if we are sufficiently brilliant to create an optimal philosophical scheme that is designed to keep the market and politics from destroying each other, all we are doing is setting up a new system that when *it* fails (as it eventually will), will lead to an ultimately even more devastating outcome. But, what are we to do? You can't really go backwards; no sane human (at least one with a family) really wants to make ourselves more susceptible to random external events by living in more primitive circumstances. Even the Amish don't shun modern medicine. And contrary to the libertarian dreams, we can't really freeze development at a certain stage. We can and should make regulation smarter and leaner, but we can't go back to the pre-New-Deal America, unless we execute a dramatically non-libertarian edict to simultaneously shrink all companies, social organizations, and even educational institutions back to their previous tiny size. Otherwise, whatever modern-scale institutions left would end up filling the void. Like it or not, we live in a complex world, and complex governance (for all its flaws) is the only thing that can handle it. So the only choice left is to go forward, as wisely as we can, yet knowing that our successes will ultimately become our own downfall. Frankly, the Amish may be the best role models -- by being extremely picky about how much complexity they adopt, they can at least minimize the negative impact on their own human capacity; and they'd probably be the most viable communities if the whole modern economy up and died! -- Ernie P. P.S. Thinking Chris may have made a wise choice in moving to Montana... P.P.S. Sorry for the depressing email on a Tuesday, but if we're going to chastise others for the failure of their systems, we should at least be honest about the fate of our own _______________________________________________ Centroids mailing list: [email protected] http://radicalcentrism.com/mailman/listinfo/centroids_radicalcentrism.com Archives at http://radicalcentrism.org/pipermail/centroids_radicalcentrism.com/
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