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Sorry
I missed a couple days... someone installed (me) an overactive spam
filter..
Responding to Bill .............From
6/4/06 #1
> [PH] all absolutely correct, but we still
can't find peace as the
> sorcerer's apprentice. We've got to know when to cool it. > There are different definitions of "failure". You seem to take it that we're trying to grow until we explode. [PH] Not that we're trying to, but that we're pushing growth with a real contempt for the hazards, which amounts much the same thing. There's a global consensus growth policy, a master plan to change our lives and the Earth ever more rapidly, making ever bigger decisions ever faster, what they call "steady state". Assuming we succeed in the plan otherwise, the limit of growth is pushing the limits of decision making until we make enough mistakes for it to stop. It's a direct formula for disaster by unexpected causes, like the surprise that we're facing in global warming. Many would think of growing until it stops
pleasing.
I like a big car but I hate finding parking. I like a big house but I hate cleaning.I see us as growing, refining, culling. I don't see problems on the horizon as"failure" - I see them as more issues to deal with in normal progression. Nuclearwar between governments is less a problem, global warming is more of one. But if we run out of fossil fuels, global warming's not a problem. In any case, possibly half the world's population understands that fuel supply and global warming are important issues, which should be enough to get something useful happening. [PH] Sure, changing your mind about things as you go along is not necessarily any kind of *failure*. I'm more meaning 'failure' in the traditional sense of things you're trying to hold together, falling apart despite your best sincere efforts. If you're a teacher and your kids ask questions one at a time it's OK because you can answer them one at a time. If their rate of asking questions increases exponentially you'll have a hard time saying when the class went out of control or way, even though the actual point was where you failed to be able to respond to so many questions in rapid succession. Try it if you don't believe me. Other than that, I'm not convinced fast growth is a problem. I'm waiting for digital paper to make my books more portable (I'm halfway there, half my books are digital, but my laptop's too bulky). I'm looking forward to the next more usable wave of search engines, Web 2.0 features, mobile devices and electronics. Cheaper, better color printing - that would be good. Banking is solved, I have ATM's and on-line banking. Secure, honest digital voting with a paper trail - that will help. Faster, more modern trains would help (mag-lev in every pot?). Other than that, needs are basic, and little more rushed than those of 100 years ago. When I want to walk or go to the country, I go. When I want a city scene, I stay here. [PH] It's not a problem for the things we're paying attention to. Those are what it is responding to. The problem is with the things we're not attending to, from which we're distracted or took for granted but were wrong, or just didn't get the message, or that our limited world view prevents us from considering... >>
[PH] That's the magic of the serendipitous growth we've
had
>> at higher
wages. That stopped in 1970. Check the
charts.>> for the past 500 years, that putting people out of work by >> innovation has had an net effect of putting everyone to work >> > I've checked the charts - computer wages are rising even as > offshoring continues. > [PH] It's the average
wages I was thinking of. Women's
wages,
> though still lower than men's, have a mildly positive exponential > shape over the past 35 years, but real men's wages are virtually > flat. Of course an aggregate figure hides many stories, but .... So are men
subsidizing women in the workplace? Cool. Are more women
choosing to stay home in a return to 1960's norms? Are we prospering not through pay but through more lifestyle choices, better access to health care, more gadgets and information? I remember having about 1-2 pairs of shoes at a time in a middle class family. Now my kids have 8 or 9, though it's affordable (okay,a lot come from second hand shops, but that's wealth as well). Part of our
wealth went into security. I'm here in Prague, there's no
worry about Russian troopsfrom the east, and there's little need to worry about a general all-encompassing conflict.Any terrorist attack is pretty well assured to be small potatoes in the scheme of things - painfulfor those affected, but much less than an Indian Ocean tsunami in both intensity and duration.A Russian invasion or similar wouldn't have been. [PH] What's hardest to keep straight in social evolution is the
dynamics. Mostly the images we call up don't provide reliable
indicators of change. They're mostly one shot pictures of an evolving
system taken from shifting perspectives. I do agree with
many of your separate observations, though I wouldn't connect them the same
way. For one I don't think they eliminate the curious
phenomena of the splitting of the world in two with a shrinking middle and
expanding upper and lower. Among other things that means the
influence of money in decision making is continuing to grow exponentially and
the influence of people is not. That's only one of several ways in
which decision making (the critical homeostatic mechanism) appears to
be failing as an unexpected side effects of growth.
...
> It's
just odd that we're balancing the books by giving away assets
and
> not doing much to
stop it.
> I meant that I don't see it as having to do with complexity theory or technology growth, that it has more to do with politics in DC, and I don't really want to talk politics of that sort. [PH] That's
fine, I just note the trade deficit as an absolutely huge sudden structural
change that no one seems able to say or do anything about. We don't
seem to have any good idea of what it represents, and are silent in response, a
system phenomenon that I think is of considerable significance.
........ but most
humans are always in a big hurry,... How
that
> tendency translates into our having built a life support system > designed to change ever faster until we make enough mistakes to > stop it is very concretely traceable. It could, if anyone > wanted, be redesigned with some free market complex systems design > to work in new ways that would be both more creative and actually > sustainable. > > We get back to Al Gore's question. We've got the knowledge and a > clear mission with otherwise unacceptable consequences. Why does > that not provide us with the information we need? I think it's > partly that no one is yet saying we should also correct the > underlying. Investing for sustainability is not an investment > objective. First, Al's focused on 1 problem - good for him, but... [PH] but not just any problem. It's a special problem of economic development. The investment decisions of the last 100 years have led us to a showdown where we have to try to use government led by scientists to make major changes in our life support system. Our old design principle, every man for himself, failed to build a sustainable structure. I don't think we'll find the door unless we face that wall. It's only one of a torrent of similar failures on the path of making ever bigger changes to the earth ever faster, because with that plan there's physically no way we can see the consequences of what we're doing. It's not that *trying* to look at the consequences isn't good, It's just that you can be certain, following our practice of multiplying change, that such attempts will fail to reveal what the real consequences are. 1) If you're in the Congo, you've got more pressing problems than
global
warming - you havea war that's killed more than 3 million people in the last 6 years, rapes every day, literally backbreakingwork, extreme poverty, etc. Global warming also might help most of Africa's climate if it brings more rain, which it seems to be doing. And you might have little to change to effect Global Warming. [PH] The projections seem to say drought I think, but whatever, I think teaching them competence in managing their own affairs is tricky business, more likely to succeed by our demonstrating competence in our own. 2) If you're in Europe, Global Warming seems to be bringing more rain and more cold. Kind of odd,but seems to be not the most beneficial change for the economy (as well as people's comfort, including mine). But if you use mostly public transportation and recycle and pay $6/gallon of gas, what else are you supposed to do? [PH] The Gulf Stream slowed dramatically last year and stopped delivering as much equatorial heat to Europe. It's a predicted effect of global warming in some scenarios, but I haven't heard anyone saying that what's now happening follows any prediction. I heard an interesting comment from fishermen in the north sea that the huge funnels of cold water heading for the deep they used to see don't seem to be there, which would correspond directly to the cold water over warm water cause of the European climate shift now being observed. Some things do go beyond the point of no return you know. Once you're beyond the point of no return, there's no point anymore. 3) If you're in Indonesia, even though rising waters would be a big problem, earthquakes and tsunamis are more pressing, as well as economic development. [PH] I think they may be concerned with even more provincial matters than those, and that failing to think globally, about how the whole system fits together is just as big a mistake no matter how compelling your narrow interests may be. 4) If you're in China, you're spewing out gasses but you've got a mostly backwards undereducated poor population to deal with. Cut back on growth and you might easily get revolution, and not necessarily a pro-democracy everybody-happy-now one that leaves people more prosperous. And you already cut back on number of children. [PH] Just turning the steering wheel to your vehicle around one corner doesn't mean you won't immediately run into another corner, no, of course not. Just because that might happen is still not a good reason to give up and just run off the road. My general point is that when you accelerate change it brings about ever sharper corners to navigate. I'm also not sure why you place this at the investor's feet. That's only one part of the cycle. Who's the buyer? How about "sustainable buying"? If your liver were failing, you'd stop buying alcohol. A free market is not the only "institution". John Dunning notes that it's expensive to maintain a properfree market, and that there are structural and endemic problems in markets to deal with. Structuralproblems should be solved if possible, whereas endemic ones should be fixed only if the costs offixing are less than the cost of the problem. An externality like global warming is an endemic problem,but the issue with fixing it is that you incur costs in other areas. The solution is non-obvious and painfuleven if the problem is pressing. Sometimes the government should step in, sometimes not. [PH] Yea, and really smart money is on the real sustainable future. Without knowing it the consensus of investors for a hundred years was to build an unsustainable future. The really really curious part is that one of the unsustainable practices is building wealth by reinvesting earnings to make change and profit grow exponentially. As long as we do that we'll surely build things for which we fail to understand the consequences. We're stuck. What are the market costs and market gains of
Sarbanes-Oxley? What are
the costs vs. gains on the new hazardous substance law (RHoS) that's now in place in the EU? Was that the right thing todo for an economy that's been plagued with slow growth? How many jobs will be lost, how manyproducts will be denied, how will that decrease competitiveness and lifestyle - these are the real questionsthat have to be answered in formulating policy. [PH] And the complexities of continually accelerating development are throwing issues at governments and their consultants that were never dreamed of before and for which they have no track record of being able to respond to. .............Responding to Bill From 6/4/06
#2
>>> There's a good
amount of growth these days based on trying to
>>> improve efficiency, workflow, best practices, processes, etc. Part of the quality >>> movement is about gains made in eliminating waste and eliminating reviews, and >>> instead having quality as an up-front and intrinsic effort. >>> [PH] That's good and bad. Refinement is wonderful in itself >>> in lots of ways, but it's inherently a diminishing return >>> endeavor, like polishing. You do the easy gains first and >>> then successively smaller gains take increasing work. >>> >> Wow, that's a pretty low expectation for efficiency and quality. >> In some ways it sounds like the complaints about Total Quality Management from the Six Sigma >> crowd - that the former focused on the easy gains in a localized area >> (technical only, say), while ignoring the organizational needs as a whole. So you might >> have a spruced up assembly line that runs really well but the organization needs >> a better sales force. Combine this with an approach that gets IT focused on business >> processes with enterprise systems, improved supply chain, better mobile access to > sales support
in
>> the field, better customer ability to configure and order... >> [PH] Well our scenarios are different. You seem to be describing >> a constant resource being used to enable growth produced >> by creating emergent levels of reorganization. I was assuming >> that the difference between growth (positive exponent increase) >> and refinement (negative exponent increase) was clear and you seem >> to be using good English in a way that makes it unclear which >> we're talking about. My description was meant for the later. >> >I think the growth and refinement are very closely coupled in many >processes. China's spewing out steel. Will it grow till it stops? or refine, target >new markets, find new uses, cut costs, leverage the technology and factories onto something else? >I'd bet the latter. Most innovation is incremental, not disruptive, but >both types are useful - 2 products can look almost identical, but one flies off the >shelf and one stays. I can't be sure that refinement means negative exponent increase >unless you're defining the two tautologically - that refinements are >negative exponent increases. Otherwise, a refinement can possibly lead to exponential >growth with little to no extra effort. [PH] yes, essentially defining it differently. My use of
the term is to refer to processes leading to the perfection on one emergent form
rather than to the creative leap-froging from one
emergent form to another. The latter is what I gather your
sense to be. My usage is tied to a scientific method.
I'm using the terms to help refer to the general phase sequence of rapid
evolution that any natural system displays, positive exponent increase (growth),
negative exponent increase (refinement), positive exponent decrease (collapse),
negative exponent decrease (decay). Mostly my attaching a
special scientific meaning to these common English terms helps, but with
your usage my use sounds confused.
Traditional business development used to proceed from start-up to
cash-cow by growth and then refinement. More modern practice is
to use the cash-cow phase as a seed bed for new start-up's, like you're
suggesting. When you look at almost any consistent measure for any
business over time you see the organizational development phases and can
recognize the dynamics associated with the structural progressions throughout
its history. The same is true for constituent and encompassing
systems.
Growth gives birth to things. That's its job.
Whatever it gives birth to, growth always gives up its own structure in doing
so. That's an absolute (assuming a relatively agreeable
understanding of the terms of course...).
Regards,
Phil
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