Wow Keith, I can't decide whether you are a modern day Kierkegaard or John Locke. One issue where I don't think you hold water is on the efficiency of business organizations. Just because they are faster, take the information industry as an example, and more inventive, does not mean that they create structures that are permanent or even useful. They seem to be a perfect example of what is called a "trusel", something that everyone agrees to as being correct but that is essentially useless. (google Magnificent Academic Trusels) Kierkegaard said in the middle of war that had gone on for decades that no had the courage to fight a war. John Locke, on the other hand justified Hunting and Gathering in the so called New World as "wasted land." I've always contended on this list that the real Hunter Gatherers were European and the our people were and are by nature Gardeners and Foresters. A case in point being the Quapaw people who had their land ruined by the mining companies, refusing to leave but beginning a program that will cost millions (build a dam to create a wet land) and start a healing process on the land that will take hundreds of years. All this from a group that Europeans labeled "Hunter Gatherers." Instead they seem like Doctors of the Earth.
As for the efficiency of business consider that silicone valley has convinced the nation to do away with paper print in favor of the much faster more efficient computer memory. It matters not that a Magnetic pulse from the sun is coming and that they are defenseless. It has already happened on a small scale in Quebec. When the entire network is fried and that information is lost and the paper is not available, the cultural memory will have been sold out just as the music print was with the advent of Neue Musik and everyone forgot how to read the numes except in a simple literal unartistic, lower culture manner. Its happened before. It even happened recently on my own computer when a technician blew out the whole system with his ignorance. Thank you for this work. It is particularly illuminating. REH From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Keith Hudson Sent: Wednesday, September 08, 2010 5:14 AM To: RE-DESIGNING WORK, INCOME DISTRIBUTION, , EDUCATION Subject: [Futurework] The unimportance of Bob Diamond Power-grabs occur repeatedly throughout history. They are all motivated by the hunger for status, particularly by the male, but transfers of power express themselves at many different levels. They can be crudely obvious, such as two boxers fighting for a world championship, or they can be subtle, long-term and well-nigh invisible except to the historian who can look backwards with the benefit of hindsight. There was a time when power-grabs were only of one sort and took place in regular fashion. This was when we were a purely scavenger-gatherer-hunter species and lived in small groups. Every so often, maybe every 20 or 30 years at the most, the weakening leader of a group would be displaced by a younger male. In due course, when the new leader was older and less confident in his political grip, he would be nudged aside by another rising upstart. Today, because we live in much more complex times, several power-grabs can be going on simultaneously. They take place over different time-scales and apparently in different sectors so they're not equally visible. Indeed, for most people, going about their own business in their daily lives, the more significant power changes that are actually affecting them are not even visible at all. Despite the apparently important power changes that are mentioned in the media from time to time -- such as elections of politicians or leadership of big businesses -- the real ones are almost subterranean and take place over at least one whole generation. The accession of Bob Diamond to be the new boss of Barclays Bank, reported this morning, is not terribly important in the scheme of things. He may, or may not, be good for Barclays. Indeed, it is conceivable that he might take decisions in the coming months or years that might destroy it. On the other hand -- as I'm sure he wants to accomplish -- he might make Barclays Bank into the greatest and most profitable bank in the world. But whatever may happen to Barclays in particular, it won't affect the role of banking in the world as a whole. The fact is that banks -- investment banks, retail banks, regional banks, community banks -- are hugely important to everybody, even to the very poorest people. Furthermore, they are now vying with governments as important determinants in economic decision-making and direction. Which leads me directly to the theme of my thoughts this morning as I stumbled about making a pot of tea -- the two really important power changes that are now going on. We cannot really put a date on the birth of one of them because it's been going on for centuries. If I am forced to give a date I would suggest sometime between 1561 and 1626, the lifetime of Francis Bacon, the English philosopher, statesman, lawyer, jurist and author who also happened to be the first person who realized the importance of experimentation in science. Since then, science has become increasingly important and is increasingly informing all the big economic decisions of the present power-holders and aspirants. In due course -- perhaps a century from now -- scientists may come into their own nakedly. (Are we to welcome this or fear this? Who can say? Scientists have the same genes as our present power-holders and can be as wayward or as beneficent as anybody else.) The formal power-holders today are nation-state governments, consisting of politicians, usually closely backed up by a more meritocratic bureaucracy. Indeed, a case could be well made that the latter are much the more powerful of the two. Nation-states have also been a long time in the making, notably from the Treaty of Westphalia (1648) when European kings, princes and potentates finally succeeded in taking back power from the Medieval Church (the latter being a reminder that power institutions often take a long time to die). Nation-states started rising to their present zemith of power during the 19th century when a powerful bow wave of the new middle-classes, impelled by industrialization, challenged and then took over the political power of the land-owning aristocracy and its minions. As byproducts of industrialization, new terrifying weapons of war such as the light horse-drawn artillery gun or the Maxim machine gun enable the first nation-states in the field (as it were!) to colonize vast chunks of the world and wage war on one another. Nationalistic wars started in earnest about a century ago -- the Great War of 1914-1918, for example -- but have largely petered out now, except against weak countries, because even the greatest nation-states, such as America, can't afford it. All the advanced governments are technically bankrupt. They can only pretend to be "in" power because they still have command over the money printing-press. But it is very doubtful indeed -- even with lashings of inflated money in the years to come -- whether their tax-payers will ever be able to rescue them and restore them to their former position. The truth of the matter is that nation-states are not only unable to wage full-scale war any longer, they are no longer in charge of their economies. When they heaved out gold as the world currency slightly less than a century ago and took over the printing of currency they also thought that they were in charge of their economies. And so they were in a rather negative ramshackle way, jerking about from one war to another or one economic recession to another. But now, with the effectiveness of weapons of war out of the way -- too expensive and/or too dreadful to be used on a massive scale -- other products of science and development are coming to the fore. Automation in the factories and digitalization of currencies are shifting economic decisions away from government and into big business and banks. Increasingly, they decide what they want to do and where they want to do it. Increasingly -- though they would not want to describe their activities in this way -- they are playing ducks and drakes with governments. Governments with field guns and customs posts are now giving way to huge business and banking organizations which are rather more shaped like world-wide spider webs than territorial blobs as they maximise their efficiency in producing goods and services and, at the same time, also seek the affection and support of consumers. Business and banks don't always succeed, of course. They're liable to be fallible just like politicians and bureaucrats but, unlike them, the less efficient of them go bankrupt -- really, legally and permanently so. This didn't necessarily happen to all distressed businesses during the last -- the present -- credit crunch. European and American governments rescued some large multinationals and some international banks which happened to employ lots of their electorates. They did this by printing money, euphemistically called Quantitative Easing, and sliding it into business balance sheets. They may even try to do so again if we have a double-dip in the remainder of this year. But whether they do or they don't they're really onto a loser because electorates are increasingly distrusting them and investors are avoiding buying their bonds. Meanwhile, even during the present recession, many large businesses and banks are doing very well, thank you. Even some countries, such as India and China, which are not yet full graduates of the advanced nation-state university, are doing moderately well. Governments, as repositories of justice, will always be needed, of course, but future historians will probably regard the 2008/9 period as the critical threshold in the transfer of political power from nation-state governments to bodies which are entirely different in the way they organize themselves. Typically, a large business has no more than about four levels of management. Information flows up and control flows down much more readily than in nation-states where, typically, information and control has to be conveyed through at least 20 bureaucratic levels between politicians and ordinary folk (and often between competitive bureaucratic silos within the government). No wonder information becomes increasingly filtered or misinterpreted on its way up. No wonder control has so many opportunities to become impractical on its way downwards and even counter-productive when it finally arrives. In truth, multinational organizations despite their size are much nearer to the simpler power structure of the hunter-gatherer tribe than nation-states. In due course, scientists might be able to flatten the organisational structure of multinationals even further. That is probably a century away yet but, given the rapid growth of the evolutionary sciences within science as a whole, we will have a chance sometime in the future of actually shaping our organizations so that they are more in line with the way our behavioural genes have evolved for at least 150,000 to 200,000 years and, in many respects for several million years before that. Keith Keith Hudson, Saltford, England
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