> Positive feedback, unless it triggers some countervailing negative
> feedback mechanism, leads inevitably to runaway.
And:
> 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.
It's probably that the rich and powerful who are in control want too much and
expect too much. In one of his books (forget which) Thomas Homer-Dixon cites
this as having been the primary reason for the collapse of Rome. The wealth
producers of Rome simply couldn't produce enough to support the vast apparatus
that was needed to hold the empire together at maximum expansion. The collapse
of the Soviet Union is another example. The operation of the
planning/producing system was enormously costly and the costs kept growing.
Then along came events like the Afghan war, and the economy simply couldn't
produce enough to afford that on top of a worsening domestic productive system.
Collapse was inevitable.
What about the US? One reads about the enormous and growing gap between the 1%
and the 99% and increasingly between the 0.1? percent and 99.9% One also reads
about the enormous fiscal and private debt. And, like ancient Rome, the US has
huge foreign commitments which are bound to keep growing given the rise of
wealth and power in parts of the world that are no longer that dependent on or
friendly to Americans. One can see a collapse coming, not necessarily a sudden
one but a prolonged downward gyration toward a far less wealthy and probably
chaotic bottom. I don't think the 1% will care very much. They will have
taken their wealth to some safe haven, perhaps in the Caribbean or, if
necessary, to some island way down in the south Atlantic.
Ed
----- Original Message -----
From: "Mike Spencer" <[email protected]>
To: <[email protected]>
Sent: Saturday, March 16, 2013 11:28 AM
Subject: [Futurework] Hijacking democracy
>
> 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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