Another thing not being asked yet seems 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.

missing from the professional “soul searching” is asking why making money has always so regularly created systemic risk

You simply can’t pop a bubble that isn’t under a lot of accumulated pressure, is the physics principle. There’s got to be a pump, with pressures not being relieved.

Ideally a cooperative self-regulation system should not create catastrophic risk at all, since all the parts are watching out to avoid risk, covering for each other, and being watched by regulators. That’s “self-regulation” process itself, that should eliminate the problem, then becomes a suspect in creating it.

Regulatory needs, that evidently no one sees apparently do in fact accumulate and cause the system to fail. What we’re simply not yet asking is what keeps pumping up the strains, and then would require new kinds of regulation we don’t see a need for.

That’s what allows our regulatory systems to fail.  Our cooperative plan somehow implies continually increasing regulation, of something we don’t see except as grand financial, regulatory, and business system failures.

It really looks as if the common goal of the whole economy, driving finance, commerce and our natural resources to all perform exponentially on a continual basis, would seem to drive itself to become unmanageable, naturally.

driving finance, commerce and our natural resources to all perform exponentially on a continual basis, would seem to drive itself to become unmanageable

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 that “good” is, “more good”.  “More good” leads us to solve our problems, and measure progress, in %’s.  That unavoidably becomes a greater problem in itself.

When “more good” changes from “relatively bigger” to “absolutely big” then many formerly trusted relationships between things change meaning.   Not noticing when “improvement” turns into “distortion” hides the points of transition from view.  That’s what lets the way we’re solving our problems end up creating ever greater problems.

I’ve detailed the economic issues, using a model dividing all money exchanges as going through three markets: finance, production, artifacts.   How the money passes between them thus makes a “three bubble economy” as the whole system is driven as an exponential bubble itself, all driven to burst as a hidden natural effect of our design for regulating its stability.

driven to burst as a hidden natural effect of our design for regulating its stability.

The disarray that seems to point to “anything but” systemic causes, itself follows from having an economy made of independently growing parts, all coming into conflict.

That our way of thinking naturally defines “more good” as unquestionable will be hard to change.  “More good” now really means multiplying conflicting interests in a world of limits, though.  The cure is to be more open to questioning what has been “unquestionable”.

That’s the last thing on the list people are prepared to or want to ask questions about, though.

Could it be due to our failing, so far, to discover some other monumental blind spot too? Is our being so ready to blame others for changes that are actually environmental a great failing, perhaps?

Do we need to add our greater ignorance of life to the list of possible causes, and how the way people constantly trust their “information” as being complete?   The first thing you find when looking honestly for causes is usually how very incomplete our both actual and potential information really are.

The first thing you find is how very incomplete our information really is.

Isn’t having very well organized systems that end in grand calamity something that happens repeatedly to human economies?  Doesn’t that itself prove we don’t know why it happens, and haven’t yet found a way to learn from the experience?

I think the search needs to go further than to blame common failings, and find the true flaws in how we all behave cooperatively.

don’t blame common failings, but the hidden flaws in how we behave cooperatively.