Ed wrote:
> The richer rich and the poorer poor, and never the twain shall meet
> -- not in the US anyway.
>
> http://www.alternet.org/economy/new-study-finds-wealthy-are-different-us?&paging=off
No one ever seems to mention that this is a classic case of positive
feedback, a concept we've had at hand (and the catastrophic
consequences of which we've known about) at least since Norbert Wiener.
Negative feedback has been understood for centuries and the classic
iconic example is the centrifugal governor seen on old steam engines.
In biological systems, it's what makes biology stable enough to
survive and propagate and occurs at many points at the molecular
level. It is arguably what keeps climate as stable as it has been
for a few millennia.
Positive feedback, unless it triggers some countervailing negative
feedback mechanism, leads inevitably to runaway. If global warming
leads to melting of tundral or marine methane hydrate, then as Pete
observed,
pv> ...with global warming, clathrates are likely to start
pv> spontaneously dissolving, throwing huge amounts of methane into
pv> the air with its huge boost to greenhouse effect.
That's a positive feedback effect leading, at least potentially, to
runaway.
The accumulation of great wealth and the attendant power it typically
confers is, in the absence of countervailing effects, a case of
positive feedback.
>From the article Ed cited:
"When politics gets thus hijacked," write Acemoglu and Robinson,
"inequality of opportunity follows, for the hijackers will use
their power to gain special treatment for their businesses and
tilt the playing field in their favor and against their
competitors."
With the field so tilted, those at the top continue to grab a
greater share of income, and more political clout, which leads to
the vast majority of us losing not only an opportunity to climb
the economic ladder, but also our collective voice. The "best
bulwark" against this vicious cycle, according to the authors, is
to make sure "that those whose rights and interests will be
trampled on have a say and can prevent it."
That's what we've done traditionally. I'm weak on history but I think
numerous ancient societies (as well as those less ancient, of the sort
that we cavalierly call "primitive") have had social imperatives,
often religious ones back by supernatural sanctions, that imposed
duties on those who accumulated great wealth, duties that typically
reduced their great wealth. Sacrifice, tithes, potlatch inter alia.
More recently, we've had graduated income tax, luxury tax,
pre-Citizens United restraint of political funding etc. All of these
disparate traditions and measures emerged from circumstances of
relative political or social equality or at least notional
equitability. [1]
As the article mentions,
Historically, prosperous societies tend to fall apart under the
burden of widening inequality. But gaping disparities in wealth
and income are rarely the cause of their unraveling, at least not
directly. It's the nexus between economic and political inequality
that ultimately tears at the social fabric of a nation.
With that nexus increasingly obstructing the erection of a "best
bulwark" to which the authors allude, perhaps we should deviate from
the traditional approach of detecting paths to imbalanced wealth and
power and simply erecting hurdles and speed bumps on them.
Maybe we should look to ways that those who enjoy a deficit of
political or financial power in conventional terms can engender
negative feedback mechanisms. We already have some of those, of
course. Thieves and fraudsters target property of the wealthy,
reducing the imbalance. Robbers target the wealthy in person,
reducing motivation to be wealthy. But the wealthy have been prompt to
impose severe disincentives for participating in such negative feedback
schemes.
What might we do, what viral meme might we create and disseminate,
that would eventuate in a mechanism of negative feedback on wealth
accumulation? A mechanism that is distributed (because that prevents
effective retaliation or suppression [2]), motivated and effective?
How do we DDOS [2] the upper strata of the wild-FIRE [3] with some
contagion that causes each gain above some threshold to trigger a loss
greater than the gain?
It is a dogma of the right that any restraint on greed will lead to
collapse or at least to an Ayn Randian secession of the (putatively)
great and wise. But a centrifugal governor doesn't make a steam
engine *stop*, y'know. It just diverts steam from the cylinders at
some speed threshold such that the whole shebang doesn't fly apart.
If a direct confrontation or regulation is a governor-type mechanism
that is now no longer implementable, what distributed one might serve
the same purpose?
FWIW,
- Mike
[1] Alright, that's a bare-faced assertion, offered without support,
for the sake of rhetoric. Argument and analysis will, IMHO,
substantially modify but not contradict it.
[2] Compare DDOS, Distributed Denial Of Service, attacks on a computer
system by entraining hundreds or thousands of widely distributed
computers to send a few packets each to the target host. Defense
is problematic for the victim because of the distributed nature of
the attack.
[3] Finance, insurance and real estate, the support base for runaway
power.
--
Michael Spencer Nova Scotia, Canada .~.
/V\
[email protected] /( )\
http://home.tallships.ca/mspencer/ ^^-^^
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