There’s been a real “soul searching” discussion within Harvard Business School about it’s responsibility in having trained many of the people whose business practices got the world into our present still worsening economic crisis, and it was reported today on NPR. It seems they have discovered they should teach business leaders to take some responsibility, not just make as much money as humanly possible and push the risks on others… That’s great if you believe it, and if you think it is even possible for people making money not to want to push their risk on others, and that is not being asked yet as far as I can tell.
Another thing not being asked yet is even more telling. Still clearly missing from the public eye, and the professional soul searching all around, is the question of why our economic system produces catastrophic systemic risk at all. You simply can’t pop a bubble that isn’t under a lot of accumulating pressure, is the physics principle. There’s got to be a pump, with pressures that are not relieved.
Ideally a cooperative self-regulation system should not create catastrophic risk at all, since all the parts are watching out for and covering for each other, except for sources of increasing regulatory needs that one sees at all. That’s the one big risk not covered by a cooperative self-regulation, and regulatory needs no one saw apparently did in fact accumulate and cause the system to fail. What we’re simply not yet asking is what keeps pumping up the needs, and requiring new kinds of regulation we are unaware of till the regulatory system fails. The implied economic plan today is to continually increase our regulation of all of commerce and nature, exponentially in fact, as if that would somehow not naturally become unmanageable itself.
I have been studying these systematically increasing pressures on our learning response systems as a source of natural unmanageability for 30 years. The growing pressure of complex learning tasks connect the burdens of regulation for troubled populations, uninformed governments and societies, new technologies, threatened environments, economic dislocations, unavailable science, and how all they interact. Call it the “connected manageability problem”. What I identified is a common “expert error” wrapped up in our shared concept of what “good” is, “more good”. “More good” leads us to solve our problems in ways that creates greater problems. When “more good” changes from “relatively bigger” to “absolutely big” many formerly trusted relationships between things suddenly change. No noticing that we solve our problems in ways that make greater problems. That’s the problem.
I’ve detailed the economic issues, in having a “three bubble economy” with all driven to burst as part of our design for prosperity Concept$.htm. It’s a direct consequence of living in a world with independent growing parts, now coming into conflict. The other main reason the problem exists, though, is that it is caused by something our way of thinking defines as unquestionable, “more good”. “More good” now really means multiplying conflicting interests in a world of limits. The cure is questioning but that’s the last thing on the list people are prepared to or want to ask questions about. All signs point to our having a great hidden problem though, like the evidence that a genuinely cooperative world life support system is now failing dramatically at the very peak of its success.
Could it be due to our failing, so far, to discover a monumental blind spot? Is blaming our usual failings of being selfish and less than diligent really be enough to meet the inexplicable nature of it? Do we need to add our greater ignorance of live to the list of possible causes? Isn’t having very well organized systems that end in grand calamity the one things that happens repeatedly to human economies proving that we don’t know why and can’t yet learn from the experience? I think the search needs to go further than to blame common failings, and find the truly hidden one.