"What's the connection with Stockman's piece? It's complicated. I've said before that I think we're in the process of hitting a complexity catastrophe. Things in general now have so many moving parts, each of which with affects many or all of the others in some way that no planned act can have a predictable likelihood of producing any particular outcome. In that context, more or less random acts have a good a prognosis as planned and calculated one."
Agree. And yet in the midst of this complexity decisions still have to be taken at both the private and public level. At a different level it is not unlike diagnosing and treating an illness: Many approaches are possible but one still must be chosen. Even doing nothing can be considered to be an approach. At the national and international financial level the choices and possible outcomes are viewed through different ideological prisms. Stockman's is one. Arthur -----Original Message----- From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Mike Spencer Sent: Wednesday, April 03, 2013 2:56 AM To: [email protected] Subject: [Futurework] Re: State-Wrecked: Corruption of Capitalism in America Late response to the Stockman article Arthur posted: I don't have any useful understanding of finance, banking, the money supply or the nature and implications of national debt. So I don't really understand the context in which Stockman makes his numerous bald-faced assertions about what's happened since FDR and can't apply the usual bogon detectors. For example, I don't have a clue what this: This dynamic reinforced the Reaganite shibboleth that "deficits don't matter" and the fact that nearly $5 trillion of the nation's $12 trillion in "publicly held" debt is actually sequestered in the vaults of central banks. really means, either literally or in practical, quotidian terms. Generally, it seems as though he's loaded for bear and shooting in all directions at anything that moves. This, on the other hand and despite the rhetoric that precedes it, makes some sense: Instead of moderation, what's at hand is a Great Deformation, arising from a rogue central bank that has abetted the Wall Street casino, crucified savers on a cross of zero interest rates and fueled a global commodity bubble that erodes Main Street living standards through rising food and energy prices - a form of inflation that the Fed fecklessly disregards in calculating inflation. These policies have brought America to an end-stage metastasis. The way out would be so radical it can't happen. So far, so good. It would necessitate a sweeping divorce of the state and the market economy. It would require a renunciation of crony capitalism and its first cousin: Keynesian economics in all its forms. The state would need to get out of the business of imperial hubris, economic uplift and social insurance and shift its focus to managing and financing an effective, affordable, means-tested safety net. It would also require purging the corrosive financialization that has turned the economy into a giant casino since the 1970s. This would mean putting the great Wall Street banks out in the cold to compete as at-risk free enterprises, without access to cheap Fed loans or deposit insurance. Banks would be able to take deposits and make commercial loans, but be banned from trading, underwriting and money management in all its forms. Wait! That would, indeed, mean no bailouts for bankers shingled out onto the fog but it would, more generally, mean to let the Free Markets alone to sort everything out. I can almost hear him genuflect. He wants to reverse the growing fascist unification of business, finance and government but he's still a True Believer that "free markets" solve everything except, well, you know, that "safety net" stuff for people who can prove to The Welfare that they're poor, celibate, crippled, unemployable and/or whatever. What could go wrong? It's a recurring thought that we have a new feudalism. [1] To get a job, real full-time employment, is to sign on as one of the manorial lord's serfs, peasants, servants or, if you're lucky, knights. The only real violation of your enfeoffment is failure of loyalty, not now punished by the lash or the gallows but by "redundancy" and perhaps, if it's relevant, blackballing. The piece on the Atlanta school cheating scandal that Mike G. posted is a case in point. ...the district attorney, said that under Dr. Hall's leadership, there was "a single-minded purpose, and that is to cheat." "She is a full participant in that conspiracy," he said. "Without her, this conspiracy could not have taken place, particularly in the degree it took place." .... For years there had been reports of widespread cheating in Atlanta, but Dr. Hall was feared by teachers and principals, and few dared to speak out. "Principals and teachers were frequently told by Beverly Hall and her subordinates that excuses for not meeting targets would not be tolerated," the indictment said. .... Dr. Hall was known to rule by fear. She gave principals three years to meet their testing goals. Few did; in her decade as superintendent, she replaced 90 percent of the principals. Not all of those "implicat[ed] 178 teachers and principals - including 82 who confessed to cheating" were conniving sleazebags. They just didn't want to be cast into the outer darkness of unemployment and possible bad reference. Yes, there's always been an undercurrent of bullying, sleaze, thuggery and threat in the workplace, whether blue collar or very elegant white collar. But as recently as 50 years ago -- certainly a hundred years ago -- there were adequate, even very good alternatives to enfeoffed employment with a bureaucratized institutional lord. I once worked for an auto dealership which, I learned within a few months, cheated customers, set back odometers on used cars, sold cars with known defects that would fail catastrophically in a short time. So I quit. But I had a new job waiting with a small biz shop -- 6 employees and owner works -- before I was out the door. Even then, of course, it was harder than that if one had a carefully strategized career plan in a white-collar trade. But today I think it's no longer easy for anybody to get along even half-well unless they're enfeoffed to an institutional employer. What's the connection with Stockman's piece? It's complicated. I've said before that I think we're in the process of hitting a complexity catastrophe. Things in general now have so many moving parts, each of which with affects many or all of the others in some way that no planned act can have a predictable likelihood of producing any particular outcome. In that context, more or less random acts have a good a prognosis as planned and calculated one. In that context, one has to exclude as much as possible from the strategy planning. In implementation, one has to "externalize" everything not in the plan. In science, this is routine: make a theoretical model, exclude from the experiment, insofar as possible, all effects not in the model. Works fine with known limitations on what you learn from the experiment. In society, that means treating everybody and every thing not part of your organization as, variously, an potential enemy, a potential victim, a potential ally to be trusted only under the rubrics offered by Sun Tsu or Ideyoshi Tokugawa, as a statistic or just as biomass. It amounts to a sort of bureaucratized warlord posture. Ideology is one avenue to this end. If it's not the lord's will, it's a breach of loyalty. If it's not in the scripture, it's sin. If it contradicts the canon of Mao or Lenin or Friedman, it's evil. In "The Education of David Stockman" [2], William Greider wrote: "How The World Works." It was a favorite phrase of Stockman's, frequently invoked in conversation to indicate a coherent view of things, an ideology that was whole and consistent. Stockman took ideology seriously, and this distinguished him from other bright, ambitious politicians who were content to deal with public questions one at a time, without imposing a consistent philosophical framework upon them. Trouble is, we're way past when ideology can a be sufficient Procrustean bed to address complexity. [3] According to Greider, "We've got to figure out a way to make John Anderson's question fit into a plausible policy path over the next three years," Stockman said."...."The whole thing is premised on faith," Stockman explained. "On a belief about how the world works." Greider's piece is an interesting one but the squib relevant here is this: "None of us really understands what's going on with all these numbers," Stockman confessed at one point. "You've got so many different budgets out and so many different baselines and such complexity now in the interactive parts of the budget between policy action and the economic environment and all the internal mysteries of the budget, and there are a lot of them. People are getting from A to B and it's not clear how they are getting there. It's not clear how we got there and it's not clear how Jones is going to get there." These "internal mysteries" of the budget process were not dwelt upon by either side, for there was no point in confusing the clear lines of political debate with a much deeper and unanswerable question: Does anyone truly understand, much less control, the dynamics of the federal budget intertwined with the mysteries of the national economy? Stockman pondered this question occasionally, but since there was no obvious remedy, no intellectual construct available that would make sense of this anarchical universe, he was compelled to shrug at the mystery and move ahead. "I'm beginning to believe that history is a lot shakier than I ever thought it was," he said, in a reflective moment. "In other words, I think there are more random elements, less determinism and more discretion, in the course of history than I ever believed before. Because I can see it." And that's the motivation to join up with a powerful warlord, no matter that he (of she or it) wants you to cheat or to treat people unfairly or maybe just kill them. A warlord (or corporate employer) can define everyone off his manor or outside of the camp or fortress as enemy or victim and, with some hard bureaucratic work and luck, reduce complexity *inside* the camp enough that things proceed more or less predictably. Do we have to recreate the 16th century of warring (now corporate) states to ensure that properly enfeoffed subjects are protected and leave everybody else out there as pagans and "wild men" and barbarians? Ho hum. It took me two hours to type all that. I hope somebody finds it at least mildly entertaining. - Mike [1] Yes, I know that "feudalism" is a deprecated term among academic historians and the like; that it's ill-define; that the nature and details of what we cavalierly call "feudalism" differed from place to place and century to century; that Japan, say, in the warring states period was very different from 13 c. England and so on. Allow me some rhetorical space here, okay? [2] http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1981/12/the-education-of-david-s tockman/305760/?single_page=true [3] Kurosawa's movie Kagemusha is an absorbing tale of how ideology can be a tool to deal with complexity. But that's set in the 16th century. _______________________________________________ Futurework mailing list [email protected] https://lists.uwaterloo.ca/mailman/listinfo/futurework _______________________________________________ Futurework mailing list [email protected] https://lists.uwaterloo.ca/mailman/listinfo/futurework
