The discussion of the UN’s Sustainable development Goals (SDG’s) focuses on the poor, and “Leaving No One Behind”. That overlooks that it’s most often the growth of the world economy that made older parts of the economy outmoded, and leaving whole communities behind as the world economy moves on to what’s more profitable. This discussion illustrates more of the detail, how innovative change like the “green revolution” thought to be for feeding the poor. It would quite predictably also leave more and more agricultural communities behind, …as everyone has increasingly seen in their own regions… like in my own home region of New York State, exhibiting common symptoms of being economically left behind you see around the world:
abandonment of rural communities
as farmers can’t afford sell to feed their own communities
the flight to cities with now skills to sell
the growing refugee and landless migrant populations
growing youth cultures with little to do but to get angry
or that are fighting over resources degraded by over use
And that’s only one of the kinds of distressed communities unable to keep up with the competition ans the most profitable invest their profits in becoming more profitable and more and more people can’t keep up.
1. & 2. A natural pattern of the growth systems is using profits to develop innovations that are more profitable, which of course also multiplies the disruption of the ways of life being displaced…, that we’ve called “externalities”, as if they didn’t matter, and don’t get counted. It leaves more an more communities behind at the limits though.
These all actively leave whole societies of suffering people behind in a way that is not reversible. It’s the real predictability of ever escalating competition causing all these uncounted impacts of how we invest money in growth for the wealthy, that undermining the sustainability traditional economies. That’s the real quandary here, it so very predictable. What DO development planners think about, not to ask who the latest innovation will put out of business. Well, to do real sustainable design, we’d need to add that question to the list, what will our “killer app” put out of business? It’s always a trade-off when you “create jobs” of any kind, that there will be jobs lost elsewhere with a very high probability.
Conceptually the lasting profitability option is fairly simple, gradual stabilizing of the whole system profit as the profitability of growth stops growing as fast, leading to a steady state creative living.
3. The Lasting Creative Spiral, so familiar in life, only requiring that investment not be compounded as growing innovations meet diminishing lasting returns.
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For the big picture of how we got the math wrong…
The economic impacts we don’t count turn out to be the great majority of disruptive earth and societal impacts we experience (seeImpactsUncounted ). They even have a name, the “externalities” incurred as liabilities of obtaining services by paying someone else to deliver the goods. So those are actually internal to the operating necessities for running a business, only external to the accounting we’ve been doing. Counting them is actually just ruled out for SD accounting, by a “stroke of a pen”, as effects that decision makers don’t feel responsible for, and have no direct control over. Those include impacts of financial decisions, for investing in disruptive innovations, also excluded from the discussion of impacts by the stroke of a pen.
Some impacts of finance are easily measured and some not, so to fully understand the problem takes sorting through what is accountable and what is not, develop different ways of assigning shares of responsibility. Certainly the ones that are measurable should be counted. They’re mostly counted globally, like soil and water depletion and lots of other things. They’re just not at present assigned to anyone’s responsibility. Doing so proportional to share of world GDP would be both scientifically correct and perfectly fair. So a study group would pick one or two such questions at a time to see what can be learned.
Another concern is how the continual compounding of profits forces everyone in the economy struggle to keep up with financial demands for ever increasing productivity and competition… what the phrase “the rat race” technically refers to. It’s why we all seem forced to to run ever faster to stay in one place. That’s of course not really sustainable, but very hard to know how to measure. Still, it’s a very real kind of suffering and accumulative culture change, and connected to the escalating competition in the economy that leaves ever more people and communities behind, a kind of “destructive creation”.
In figures 1 & 2 illustrate how regions are left behind, using the example of how once thriving agricultural communities of New York State collapsed, leaving long term economic damage behind. The question is where did the money go that once invested in productive farming in the region. The costs were left behind as the money fled to create the extractive industrial farming of the mid-west and elsewhere, mining water and fossil fuel resources very unsustainably, to grow corn, wheat and soy where it wouldn’t thrive naturally. Of course, much of this is only observable in hind sight and not really manageable, but the costs to society clearly also do escalate. That makes it imperative we take responsibility and do what’s right. The driver is making more profits, for investing in even more competitive businesses, using “disruptive innovation” that also leavea ever more others behind somewhere too.
For many decades people have more often called that effect of disruptive innovations “creative destruction”, accepting that to make more money and increase the economy’s products, you have to destroy the economy’s old ways of making products. The hard question is when to change from calling that “creative destruction” to calling it “destructive creation”. The programming of the economy to always grow that process seems to assure ever stiffer competition for everyone, all the time. It’s so constant we might just take it for granted,… but as a continual culture change for pushing everyone to face ever stiffer competition for how they live, it’s certainly not sustainable. As you push the limits then… it seems to naturally leave more and more people and environments behind, and be really more destructive than productive.
How that escalates is illustrated below, alongside the map of New York State, roughly showing the area of Central NY farming communities that vanished in the 50’s to 70’s, giving in to the competition from industrial farming. We could count the region’s lasting economic and cultural damages, perhaps. We can also see that the global corollary is of larger scale and seeming leaving more and more behind around the globe all the time. We can see it was no one’s political decision, nor is there anyone else at direct fault. We can see that kind of change is quite irreversible once it has happened. We’d only know if we counted it, and attributed the costs to our financial decisions to profit that way. As societal collapses are not reversible, we’d really need a more holistic way of measuring our impacts, to understand the costs of how we make money for our future.
Preface: The 1964 SEC rules change seems clearly connected, but what really happened to so dramatically change the whole economy at the end of the 60s?? Figure 1 belowshows that something DID abruptly change the whole future of the US economy, in about 1970, causing a permanent great acceleration in societal inequality.Figure 2 below also clearly shows that the pattern of trading on the US stock market began to radically change in 1965, too. There’s also other evidence mentioned below on what happened. The Marketplace.org radio program 6/14/06 gave another part of the story for the evident sudden change in the relationship between Wall Street and Main Street. They said it was what Milton Friedman wrote in the NY Times in 1970:
The big change began with a professor. At the University of Chicago, economist Milton Friedman (who would later win the Nobel Prize) wrote this in the New York Times Magazine in 1970:
“There is one and only one social responsibility of business — to use its resources and engage in activities designed to increase its profits.” [and as it worked out, destabilize civilization in the process]
The coincidental magazine article almost fits the data…, but when did a single comment by an economist suddenly change the world? Never, of course. I think it had to have been deep changes in the rules of business, perhaps then formalized by the SEC, such as with its rule change of 1964. The suddenness of the break in 1970 indicates that considerable pent-up pressure was released all at once. The smoking gun is that the bottom 95% of household income levels suddenly went from growing together with the whole economy to splitting apart.
The result is a rather sudden reprogramming of the entire relationship between business and society, though. We were computerizing and trying to streamline everything, standardizing new business and stock market accounting methods, etc., so that would have to be how it all got connected, and went miles beyond what most people would have ever imagined; giving the ownership of business and all the money to a community that was only playing games of multiplying propfit with no other interest in heart.
The “bottom line” somehow merged with maximizing “shareholder value” for people whose interests seemed to be totally unconnected with real-life values of any kind, only percentages. Those changes would seem to have served anyone being paid in proportion to profits, shareholders, stock traders, executives… and to disadvantage everyone else. [1/1/2018, ed 2025]
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For those less familiar with my work, I study an evolutionary development form of physics, using explanatory principles to ask leading questions about how complex systems rapidly reorganize and change form, perhaps the most wonderful, frightening, and inexplicable thing nature does. The clue is that such changes are generally associated with rapidly expanding organizational designs during growth. Other scientific methods treat the shapes of these “curves of emergence” only as changes in numerical scale, thereby totally misrepresenting what is really happening, all by itself. Much can’t be explained, but what can be firmly predicted is that any growth process produces a crescendo of change, one that will upset its own process of change, forcing the system doing it and its design to change form. We should all learn to study that transition.
Earlier writing on it is below, leading up to the one thing to take a close look at, the details of how Shareholder Value apparently caused American civilization to splinter, becoming more and more oppressive to the makers of the economy.
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2016 forward:
In the figure below, the economy as a whole is shown continuing to grow as before, while the various levels of household income suddenly split apart.
Whatever the change, it would clearly be catastrophic for the resilience of wage-earning communities. The question remains: What kind of cultural change is exhibited in the data? Was it, as I’ve suggested, made possible and facilitated by the comprehensive SEC and Congressional revision of the stock exchange rules in 1964? Outwardly, the SEC’s purpose was to bring the markets into the modern world, to make it more convenient, secure, and efficient for ordinary people to invest and make money from a growing economy. The exact opposite happened, though.
How systems can change behavior rather suddenly, as we all know from personal relationships. There are always hidden variables and surprising effects from new connections, like building a bridge. Perhaps nothing much happens, or everything changes suddenly. Many other things were happening in the context as well, as seen in the real-time trading data (2), which showed a sudden change right after the rule change. and then took off in other directions as quite new behaviors in the NY Stock market were experimented with. There was an immediate wave of high-volume trading, unlike anything in the past, seemingly ushering in a culture of fast and high-volume trading as a new way of “playing the markets” that may have been intended, or may have been a big surprise, but certainly changed the world as a whole since.
It notably also included a redefining business value for the sake of the markets, as a single number, “the bottom line”, introducing the widespread use of the term to represent a new way of market-savvy for abstract valuations, ensuring trades would be made based more on market psychology than on the organizational value of and service to its contexts of what is being bought and sold, that appears to have been what produced the prior period of stable valuations of business relationships and communities.
If you consider how it might affect businesses, being graded every month as succeeding or failing, and having to constantly raise their finances against the “making the grade” set by market anticipation of businessvalue, it’s clear what a terrifying force it might become. That one little side-effect of the new rules might be 90% of the reason the markets causes all sectors of society to split apart and, led by very sloppy thinking about value and severly opressing the working word doing the rearl design and assembly of what the markes keep bouncing all around, this way and that, always pumping things up to be the firts things dumped the next season. It’s sure no way to run a family, and a family is what an economy physically is and behaves like it up to the year of 1970 when it splintered into bought and sold parts with no inherent value.CEOs and boardrooms across America would be compelled to make decisions that align with market expectations, regardless of the impact on their communities.
It seems some center of business thinking was discovering how much profit could be squeezed out of the economy if business was managed by computer for that purpose, you know, just thoughtlessly driven to maximize some equation, whatever it did or didn’t mean. Was that what created the pent-up pressure that the new rules for rapid trading allowed, as soon as it became possible? It would change business and investor decision-making, no longer managing the development of their cultures, just squeezing them harder and harder, much like school teachers forced to “teach to the test.”
As we know that drugs can raise performance till workers and families break down too, which investors would be unaware of. Teaching to the test simply hollows out the student’s education, doesn’t allow their interests in the world to be their guide. Driving American businesses to meet the numbers, to please Wall Street, would have the very same corrosive effect and be very costly. Driving stock price increases with continual forced “efficiency” and “productivity” gains naturally drains a system’s resilience, too, a kind of enslavement, and very real cause for resentment, and crumbling relationships that may be invisible till too late.
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The first versions of this study, in 2010:
My first notes on the subject date back to 2010. You can find lots of examples of complexity itself being a natural limit to growth, and I initially associated this change in how the economy worked with the rapidly emerging complexities of life. We all experience life as a growing struggle, an escalating “rat race” of new complications, and a constant search for simpler answers. Clear evidence is found in the sudden rise in use of the phrase “information overload”, from the late 60’s on. At the same time, there has been a slowing use of the word “complex”, which I think indicates the complexity of things stopped being of as much interest. Those issues are discussed in: Complexity too great to follow what’s happening… ??
Then in 2012 I realized 1970 was also when computers started being used to manage business complexity, as the first “killer app” of computing really. The global effects would include giving business management a growing information advantage over others, telling them what can be cut and remain profitable, and making business financial analysis based purely on numbers rather than judgement, and somewhat incontestable, as discussed in: Computers taking over our jobs and our pay?
These preliminary studies still seem valid, but fairly incomplete. They didn’t really explain why the change occurred in 1970, or why so sharply. That is what the SEC rules change of 1964 now helps to provide. It appears that the implied “fitness function” of business was redefined to advantage the stock markets and executives, and hollow out the economy for everyone else, in effect violating all of Isaac Asimov’s laws of robotics, as the first big thing we thought of doing with automation.
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The Rules That Wrecked the Economy
It takes a little time to explain the evidence, here showing the long record of US GDP growing by leaps and bounds for 120 years. Overlaid are Household income levels, scaled to equal GDP in 1970, so their proportional changes are displayed. Household incomes are seen moving all together, all changing in proportion to GDP…. from the 1940’s to 1970, but then start to dramatically fall behind. It shows the economy completely stopped “lifting all boats” in 1970, completely disproving the endlessly promoted business lobby idea that how to cure for the “malaise” was to give the rich more (nearly all) of the money.
Households suffered from having to manage the ever-faster-growing complexity of life, but without the growing resources or time to figure it out. It might not have been intentional, maybe just blind, but these trends do seem to literally display 40 years of US households being increasingly devalued, cheated out of the economic value they created, even as investors were cheated too, by businesses being driven to develop unsustainably, only becoming a great public issue now.
US GDP growth & US Income Levels falling behind, Incomes are scaled to 1970 GDP to compare rates, following GDP growth to 1970, then lagging and splitting apart. (This is the Original Version)
The 2025 update: A global tragedy caused by Milton Freedman and the Republican Game Changers persuading the SEC to give shareholders ALL the money.. Well naturally, they’re supposed to be the ones who know what to do with it… RIGHT??
The next figure shows the behavior of the stock market at the time when the SEC rules bringing “efficiency” to fast trading and market manipulation by traders, a 14-year record of NYSE trading frequency beginning in 1960. You can clearly see how the strongly patterned trading followed immediately after the rules were implemented, marking a dramatic change from the previous, sleepy manner of trading. You might also be curious about the 40 year record, from 1960 to 2000.
A 14 year record of NYSE trading frequency showing a dramatic change right after the new 1964 SEC trading rules were adopted.
When you see a genuine behavior change like how the trading volume suggests a “sleepy” market from 1960 to 1965 followed by a market of manic movements thereafter, it means people have really changed what they’re doing. I’m not completely sure how well my hypotheses about that behavior change will hold up, what it was and what effect it had. I have a rather good record on a number of other things, though, so I think they’re at least rather close.
I would love to have help exploring more deeply how the culture change involved took place. The SEC’s annual report mentions a number of meetings that may have been involved, and obtaining those notes could be very valuable. The documents I found most useful so far are a 30 pg excerpt from the SEC Annual Report of 1964 and a NY Times article reporting demand for “the bottom line.” The latter interestingly reports on the woes of bankers, as if not sure of how businesses define their values, as an argument for reducing the value of businesses to a single number in a quarterly report. I think that way of redefining the value of businesses shows a clear “spin” favoring the fast-trading culture that is about to emerge. It quite neglected the possible effect on the lasting values of businesses, and the devaluation of the people doing the work, which Wall Street thinking seems to have resulted in.
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Work to be done includes
updating the data from original sources
more detailed study of the 1964 SEC rules and their adoption, amendments, and “side agreements”.
studying why the rules were a pivotal “breaking point” for a rapid large scale culture change in how American businesses are managed and how the new style trading cause business practice to change
No doubt, there would be grand-scale malfeasance discovered, and perhaps prosecutable criminality as well. As what happened is really culture-wide, I think finding criminality would depend on when the original meaning of “fiduciary duty” was lost, which would be the basis of requiring financial managers to act in the interest of the people they make decisions for. The main crime seems to be a self-destructive culture change, causing the markets to lose all sense of proportion, and the working classes being disenfranchised. Well, we thought we could get used to it, and now it seems we can’t.
The ideal policy would be to guide people to understanding their own errors and learn how to follow a new path. New York City, like all the “money centers”, is directly implicated in needing to find a new way to make money, for example. For 50 years, money centers have depended on maximizing the extraction of wealth, not securing the future of wealth, and so have relied on promoting disruptive innovations with no heed to what was disrupted… No fury seems adequate to express the stupidity of that. What it does indeed come down to is finding that those money centers will shortly “be out of a job” unless they become as creative at helping to put the world back together as they were at ripping it apart.
Added work to do includes:
further studying the very special problems of societal manias…. as that is what we see here. What sort of “policy” can one have for societies taking the wrong path, having wandered SO far from creating a world to live in that can last.
If you think of money as physical energy, money being what we use to release our use of it, you can think of the global economy as a rocket ship. The problem, of course, is that our culture has settled on operating civilization in a way that resembles a rocket ship, programmed to accelerate and never land. Our main societal “business plan” is to multiply our energy use, investing to accelerate our fuel consumption as fast as humanly possible, forever. Of course, to achieve that, some money and energy are reserved for keeping people somewhat happy, but if the policy is aimed at maximizing growth rates, every other purpose is at least secondary, if not altogether irrelevant to decision-makers, the heart of the crisis.
So here’s the question: how do we change course when changing course is nowhere in the plan? Do we shove the drivers out of the vehicle? Do we hope to explain to them the use of the gas peddle, steering, and brakes? There may be equivalents in the rocket ship already, but the driver seems utterly unaware of these concepts. It’s a lot to explain, and a lot to learn,
collecting our understanding of real scope of the problem
The ancient legal principle of “fiduciary duty” is a fundamental principle of professional practice, requiring professionals to act in the best interests of those they serve, and is another example of selective redefinition for managing money. There is probably a clear history of successive misleading revisions, with a legal paper trail to follow on how it came to be turned on its head to serve mainly the self-interests of traders, who were paid for their extraction of short-term profits, rather than serving the interests of the people whose money they traded. I appears that legal opinion now holds it to actually be prohibited for traders to consider anything other than short-term financial returns as the interests of investors, even though no one is served by that except traders and CEO’s who are paid in % of short-term earnings. That is the complete opposite of the original intent, of course. So the redefinition of “fiduciary” seems to have come from cultural blinders like those that produced the SEC rules of 1964, too.
Another, even clearer example I’ve noticed, I also spent a lot of time thoroughly documenting. It’s how all manner of scientific principles are being willfully ignored in managing the world survival project called “sustainability”.
One certainly can’t fault anyone stumbling through this confusing time, making sincere efforts to learn about how our very complex world can come to work again. We’re in a period of unprecedented permanent change in who we are, not planned by anyone, it seems. That said, there are also large systematic errors one can find in the efforts people are making, related to the persistent distorting influence of money. We should have noticed long ago that it was an abstraction stripped of all context.
One very consequential case is in efforts to reduce environmental impacts that businesses are responsible for, using widely circulated, very unscientific rules for counting them. The standard for environmental accounting instructs people to measure the global impacts of their use of the economy by what they record locally. What is shocking is how that “slipped by” so many world institutions and professional communities.
People seem to be just told to never count the impacts of using money, even though that’s the main thing causing all our global impacts. If you’re not allowed to count the impacts of money, it limits your view to your local boundary of observations. So, sustainable cities don’t count the resources consumed from outside the city! Isn’t that so strange??
The same applies to national measures of sustainability, outside its national borders. I’ve been publishing and writing extensively on this topic, and tying it all together in my UN proposal for a scientific method to steer world sustainable development, a World SDG. It starts out very simple, learning to do the math right first, and leading to giving people a full understanding of what our money pays for.
I’ve also studied fairly deeply how all these confusions could arise. Is there something wrong with our minds if our effort to hold onto reality is so fraught with difficulty? What would allow the meanings of important words to unexpectedly change, largely unnoticed? The line between words that are and are not prone to radical change lies between the words we derive from experience, such as those defined by things we can point to, and those we receive from other people based on abstractions, wholly detached from nature.
Most old words directly refer to natural patterns of life and our own experience of them. That way, we cannot lose their root meanings as new variations on their added meanings accumulate over time. The problem is with words defined conceptually, social agreements, and things like the economy that we can’t really observe, and so only understand abstractly. Being unable to distinguish between terms of conceptual thinking and terms for natural experience seems to be the problem. We seem to trust whatever usage of any kind is current in our personal circles. So going between money worlds, or personal, social, professional, or religious communities. too, the same words may suddenly change meaning to conform with that circle’s conversation. That’s socially important at times, but is that EVER a confusing way to think about a world spinning out of control! People may create new abstract meanings for convenience that can then drift widely from one group to the next, meaning different things at every stop, the variation and disconnection to never be noticed.
That inability to distinguish between natural and conceptual meanings seems to spill over as part of all our problems. We rely on natural and scientific language for grounding our ideas of patterns in nature, but we’re at risk if we can’t check such wandering meanings with their natural roots. At present, though, the scientific meanings of natural designs and the natural meaning of scientific ones is only appreciated by a few and are rarely being taught, in much the way those presently disconnected subjects and discussed only in disconnected places, our scientific thinking limited to the classroom, lab, or office, and the meaning of our integrated life experiuences at home or with friends.
Maybe we’d learn more if we made jokes about how impossible it is to frame each in the terms of the other. Then we might learn to see what’s really being distorted.
That’s more or less what I’ve done, collected some things I see how to tie back to nature any time I like, to double check, and help show where work is needed to get the story straight! ;-)
Short version Voted a Top Comment on the Forbes article
“The Stock Market And Bernie Sanders Agree — Break Up The Banks” , a more full story follows.
The reality of the matter is as embarrassing as it could be. If you trace it all back to origins… it’s our very own greed causing the whole mess, our demanding that Wall Street produce ever faster growing **unearned income** for our investments.
That’s what is now backfiring on us as the serious scientists all always said it would. The earth is not an infinite honey pot… is the big problem our not so big hearts and minds have in grasping the consequences of our own choices. We simply failed to notice the consequences, or listen to those saying “beware of what you ask for”.
The truth is WE became “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice”* and now we are dealing with having turned the planet into our Fantasia. The truth is that if we “Break Up the Banks” the financial system we designed to grow unearned income will just keep multiplying the disruptions the scientists always pointed to it causing! Are there options?? Well find someone honest who studies it perhaps…
Sorcerer’s Apprentice http://goo.gl/Zu69yD
(If this YouTube copy is inaccessible sometimes you may need to find another copy or just recall the heroic tragedy of it all, from the last time you saw it.)
Day after the NY Primary 2016:
In New York State yesterday there seemed to be a lot of answers, but we can all see more questions too. Neither Trump nor Sanders are offering practical ways of doing it, but clearly raised a huge chorus of “throw the bums out”, without actually identifying “who the bums are” as part of the questions left hanging. To the surprise of many Trump’s win was so persuasive it seems to almost legitimize his candidacy. To the surprise of many as well, Sanders overall persuasively lost to Hillary Clinton, and only had persuasive wins in conservative upstate areas. In ultra-liberal New York City, his claim to ultra-liberal leadership found really very few neighborhoods persuaded. New York is the kind of place that needs no persuasion at all on the legitimacy of his issues, but found his manner and inability to say what he’d actually do, and relying on a constant stream what had to be called rather misogynist digs.. caused him to lose legitimacy.
So nearly all agree the bums need to be thrown out, but “who the bums are” remains unanswered, and largely undiscussed too, The Trump campaign colorfully claims the intention to disregard all the rules to “get the raccoons out of the basement”, and with no strategy but public outrage, sweep away the broken Republican party and Washington DC political establishments. Sanders imagines that some executive order breaking up the banks and popular demand for relieving very real and widespread despair will remove all the barriers to doing that.
I’ve studies these problems in great detail for many years, and have in fact been expecting to have to somehow claim to have predicted this kind of grand societal collision with itself from the first time I caught a glimpse of the real problem. My observations are only a little more detailed and focused on locating who has a choice, who actually is “at fault” in that sense, as the natural disaster at the end of capitalism has been has been long predicted for what I see as all the wrong reasons for centuries.
That real problem is that “Wall Street” is the name given to the practices of the financial traders who trade everyone’s investment funds, and so… “Wall Street” actually already works for us, and doing precisely what we ask it to do. There’s just something profoundly confused about what we ask it to do. We ask it to manage the use of our idle savings to produce profits to add to our savings, and so multiply in scale without end except for letting the trader take a share of the spoils, Of course the bargain is that multiplying your profit taking from your world with no exception eventually destroys your world, invisible only if you don’t look.
I don’t know quite why Goethe did not sharply identify that ultimately seductive bargain with the Devil when writing Faust. That play is apparently his morality tale about what happens when making that bargain. He was, though, enough more clear in depicting it in his balladic poem Der Zauberlehrling, that Walt Disney used as the basis of his ever popular animated film Fantasia, and very pointed fable “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice”.
Our hero, Mickey Mouse, steals a look at the sorcerer’s book of secrets and immaturely calls upon its magic to command his broom to carry the heavy water of his chores, so he can sleep all day. As he awakes he finds the magical broom can’t be stopped, as Micky doesn’t know what spell to cast for that, and is flooding the whole house and castle, and so MUST be stopped. Then like people feel today, Micky picks up his ax to do in the boom for good…, but finds in chopping up the one it only multiplies magical brooms and the rising flood turns into a great torrent.
As Mickey sleeps his magic brooms multiply, and his effort to chop them up has the opposite effect, not knowing the magic to make them stop.
The failure of Mickey’s strategy would, of course, be repeated if Sanders’ grand gesture calling for “breaking up the banks” were to actually be applied. The various banks that have now grown overwhelmingly big, magically carrying our water so we can accomplish ever more without work, will all just continue expand, as long as we ask them to use our savings as before. You would just get more banks accumulating more disparity in the wealth of the world. Whether the phrase “break up the banks” refers to dividing up the banks into smaller ones, or separating their savings and investing functions, it wouldn’t alter a bit the basic service they are being asked to provide us as investors. They’d still be using our idle money to multiply, in some magical way, so we can be showered with fruits without labor, and left with the puzzle of why that can’t keep working.
Investors may or may not feel “wet”, but if you look around the world, everyone else does look rather soaked! It’s a quandary that we’ll have to resolve, why the secrets of creating wealth were apparently not shared by our process of enjoying wealth. So what’s clear, at least, is we now have a new job. It’s not one that Wall Street asked for, perhaps, but that they can’t refuse as they work for us. It’s to break with the Faustian bargain we made with ourselves, and perhaps stumbling some also stumble without regrets so much as anticipation, get about the work of showing the world another side of what we can do with our genius.
Here we don’t find ourselves without a plan of action, is what’s different from the many calls to protest, though the plan may need repeated adjustment and improvement in various ways. It’s ironically not like Bernie’s plan to “not take Wall Street’s money” either. It’s indeed to “take Wall Street’s money” we belatedly realize, because Wall Street is in fact just managing our money for us, and we just need to as for the right thing. That’s the real way to break our bargain with the Devil, that we do seem to be at a great historical point of rejecting. We can take our knowledge of wealth with us too, but only if we learn the other tricks needed to leave the earth whole and to share.
The following is written for circulation in the “data science” research communities, on some advances in scientific methods of system recognition I’d like to share. It starts with mention of the very nice 9 year old work published by Google on “Detecting Influenza Epidemics using search engine query data” taken from a letter to that paper’s authors. Take the reference to be to your own work, though, as it involves system recognition either in life or exposed by streams of incoming data.
empirical evidence of systemization
I expect a lot of new work has followed your seminal paper on detecting epidemics as natural systems.
But are there people starting to focus on more general “system recognition”,
studying “shapes of data” that expose “design patterns” for the systems producing it?
Any individual “epidemic” is a bit like a fire running it’s course, and sometimes innovating the way it spreads. That change in focus directs attention to how epidemics operate as emergent growth systems, with sometimes shifting designs that may be important and discoverable, if you ask the right questions. You sometimes hear doctors talking about them that way. In most fields there may be no one thinking like doctors, even though in a changing world it really would apply to any kind of naturally changing system.
Turning the focus to the systems helps one discover transformations taking place, exposed in data of all sorts. One technique allows data curves to be made differentiable, without distortion. That lets you display evidence of underlying systems perhaps entering periods of convergence, divergence or oscillation, for example, prompting questions about what evidence would confirm it or hint at how and why.
Focusing on “the system” uses “data” as a “proxy” for the systems producing it, like using a differentiable “data equation” to closely examine a system’s natural behavior. In the past we would have substituted a statistic or an equation instead. By prompting better questions that way it makes data more meaningful, whether you find answers right away or not. I think over the years I’ve made quite a lot of progress, with new methods and recognized data signatures for recurrent patterns, and would like to find how to share it with IT, and collaborate on some research.
Where it came from is very briefly summarized with a few links below. Another quick overview is in 16 recent Tweets that got a lot of attention this past weekend, collected as an overview of concepts for reading living systems with bigdata.
I hope to find research groups I can contribute to. If you’re interested you might look at my consulting resume too. If you have questions and want to talk by phone or Skype please just email a suggested time.
Working with BigData, especially learning how to read the designs and behavioral patterns of the earth’s natural systems, its living cultures of all kinds, and to sense our roles in them, opens up a tremendous new field of understanding. It of course also opens up very new kinds of perspectives to puzzle over, both offering to show us new paths and making it clear various reasons to question what we’ve been doing.
This series of Tweets came out in a group somehow, mostly in this sequence today, seeming to build a framework of interconnecting points, like tent stakes and poles maybe, a design for hosting ways to do it. ……Jessie
What we talk about becomes society’s reality, so we can read #BigData for what’s happening #following_all_cultures and #resources_on_earth.
And what may matter most in #BigData is going from reading abstract patterns to reading naturally occurring ones. http://synapse9.com/jlhCRes.pdf
Then add the magic of learning to read the patterns #BigData reveals, as exposing the designs of the natural systems producing it.
Reading #BigData for natural patterns shows you even the best data doesn’t show what systems are producing it.
No degree in #data_science will neglect pattern recognition for understanding the natural systems creating the data.http://www.synapse9.com/pub/2015_PURPLSOC-JLHfinalpub.pdf
If our world #economy is causing trouble for the #earth, why do we think it helps to speed it up? #Get_real_people!
Escher
Are @google, @IBM or other #BigData #research teams learning how to read design patterns of natural systems?? http://synapse9.com/jlhCRes.pdf
To start reading natural systems in #bigdata look for cultures made individually, clustering or growing from seeds.
from PURPLSOC 2016 http://www.synapse9.com/pub/2015_PURPLSOC-JLHfinalpub.pdf
Then follow recognizing nature’s cultures with learning from them, going back and forth between models
from PURPLSOC 2016 http://www.synapse9.com/pub/2015_PURPLSOC-JLHfinalpub.pdf
When reading #bigdata for behaviors of cultures also note contradictions in the news, like #jobs_going_to_Mexico and #refugees_escaping_too.
#BigData exposes surprising whole system views too, #professionals managing systems of growing inequity, disruptive change and impacts too.
#BigData reveals living cultures: business, economic, social, biological or ecological, etc. all either: homeless, home seeking or enjoying.
As you see their forms you realize two things:1) our world is very #alive and 2) most #bigdata is too “big”, making you look for other views
To read #bigdata as views of shifting cultures, alone or together, pushes a #whole_system_view for units of measure. http://synapse9.com/signals/2014/02/26/whats-scope-4-and-why-all-the-tiers/
A #whole_system_view, like #studying_the_camera not what’s in its view, is how to start seeing ourselves in the data!http://www.synapse9.com/jlhpub.htm#ns
Sixteen Tweets on reading our world in #BigData, it’s many moving parts, units of measure & big recognitions required.
ed note: One tweet, that became #11, was rephrased and put in a more logical location a few hours after the first posting.
ed note: The current discussion of the core dilemma of capitalism, as a limitless system for creating growing wealth, is in terms of the crises we now face caused by it, producing socially disruptive innovation and growing financial inequity. Those include 1) threats of rapidly growing social inequity, 2) unsustainable national and private debt, 3) disruptive scales of job loss from globalization and automation, 4) demands for unachievable ever faster and ever more complex learning and change , 5) the rapid depletion of earth’s resources, 6) disruption of the climate and earth’s ecologies, and of course 7) increasing international conflicts between conflicting economic interests, and of course, 8) growing risks of grand scale financial collapses due to failing promises, as a kind of general list. It’s quite a list. There’s been a very long debate but mostly scattered in pieces and hidden from view. That’s both because the primary culprit is our whole way of life, naturally hard to talk about, and what to do with “money” .
The design of our economic system that defines “capitalism” is very simple. It’s “the use of investment profits to build up investments”. That’s it. Why such a simple practice has a hold on us is that it promises both society and individuals ever faster growing profits without growing work. Of course that tends to end up badly, having been much too good to be true from the start. The equally simple design of all natural systems is that “any system needs to build up to get started, and then stop building up to continue”. The two definitions conflict. Keynes and Boulding foresaw that the two would come to blows, once the economic system had built up and needed to stop building up to continue. They saw capitalism could become like a natural system and can change only if investors spend their profits. The sense of it is that investors would “pay it forward” so their profits would take care of the future rather that keep “paying it back” so old money could take ever more from the future. It would let our economic system first build up, and then stop building up, to be able to continue, with no guarantees but as a possible path forward. It’s all too simple as a design problem, as how all enduring natural systems develop and needs the social principle to make sense. The dilemma is completely unsolvable as a financial problem within capitalism, though, challenging our whole way of life as a rather immediate concern. jlh 3/14/16
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The intensification of work for concentrating wealth and profits. – Click – to see QuarksDaily article on how this process drains our world.
_____________
from a 21st century view……
Your question is, do we all use our profits to extract increasing pay back from others,
building up an ever growing drain on what makes our world profitable?
______
Or do we pay our profits forward to assure our world remains healthy
to grow our own ideals, our families, our communities and our world,
treating profits as a gift to what matters?
______________
J.M. Keynes and Ken Boulding were early and mid 20th century “whole system thinkers”. They were true geniuses, struggling for words to convey how complex systems with all independent parts work as a whole somehow. It’s truly the profound puzzle of nature, how illogical it is that all the independent parts of systems would act as if they were all coordinated. They didn’t stop at just looking for simple rules of prediction having no idea where they came from or when they might change. They also looked for and found elementally simple organizing principles of design, for how the parts of market economies coordinated with each other as whole systems and what drove them, central principles they weren’t able to communicate and that have yet to be appreciated at all. From their views they did each say that:
the world economy would soon bankrupt itself by over-investment,
as a natural limit to unlimited financial growth,
due to the central driving financial practice of compound investment
Each was also a expansive thinker with their own ways of speaking about broad principles, so they are hard to read too. It’s only by learning to think about the economy as a whole system, with all its parts working together, and distributing its surpluses and shortages throughout all its connections, that you can piece together from their writings the common finger prints for the above simple principle as what they were clearly saying.
I had some extra help with it, though. I learned of Keynes’ work on the natural limits of finance from speaking with Ken, having gotten a chance to ask him in person, if he knew of any economists who had studied the limits of compound investment as a natural limit to growth. I had asked Ken about it in 1983, and was able to understand what he said on the subject, because I had been searching for a few years already for anyone else who had discovered the principle, that growth systems, if not interfered with, would naturally upset their own conditions for growth. It’s a completely invariant natural principle. Continue reading Did Keynes & Boulding both really say that?→
We talk about making connections…
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . but what is it that actually “connects”?
Making Connections in life mysteriously needs to start and finish, and then perhaps establish a long sustained or a short relationship. Often we don’t see quite what’s happening till it’s either all over, or has really begun to noticeably develop and notice the rapid rates of change.
Sometimes we have an ‘inkling’ that something is changing at the very beginning, before anything really observable is apparent, as if becoming aware of the ‘germination’ of the whole event with an initially very slow building of a “new pattern”. It may be that intuiting “something changed” is experienced a bit like “feeling a change in the force” . We may imagine foresight for things that don’t develop, of course, and learn to just be watchful and not jump to conclusions, but wait till a real pattern of proportional scales of accumulation are evident. That’s ‘the pattern’ of systemic transformation.
What is perhaps the best indicator is always the “building process”, that as the illustration indicates is very much the same accelerating then decelerating accumulation of working parts. It’s *not* a numerical process, but if you notice the scales of change changing scale it can help you locate what is really working.
The illustration is of course also about the connections between the natural system processes of building, and the learning processes of building, and the holistic design processes of building, that I hope to get to see emerging as a “connection”! The PURPLSOC meeting “Elements” and PLoP meeting “Mining Living Quality” papers on “Guiding patterns of Naturally Occurring Design“, are full of these stories, maybe too much to enjoy all at once till you get a feel for this unusual way of approaching the study of “how things work”.
You might try a novel way of reading, other than beginning to end. One I often use with new books on unfamiliar topics is just “picking a few sentences at random” to see if they go anywhere for me, or trying the discussion topics at the end of sections or the whole work. Today I’m writing this post to take a break from the long task of doing the final edit of the main papers, seeing a need to have ‘something’ new on RNS, having noticed some scratch notes for the illustration made a couple weeks ago I thought would be fun to work on.
…. The distinct possibility is that, for the first time:
Science might soon be able to study all the objects of nature, in their innate form
not just the models we make based on what data is available…
______________________
In-depth Pattern Language Research
“Guiding patterns of naturally occurring design”
1) For PURPLSOC 2015: on “Elements” (final for publication)
2) For PLoP 2015: on “Mining living quality” (meeting draft)
______________________
To recognize
Individual organizations, Complex natural designs, Emergent forms of naturally occurring design,
Evolving organization & behavior of complex whole systems,
Discovering more and more of the hidden interior designs of lively whole systems…
One way of introducing the “what” and “how” comes from a “pattern language approach” to the science of “naturally occurring systems”, presented in a paper for PURPLSOC:
Pattern Language becoming a general language of object oriented thinking and design in all fields.
Guiding Patterns of Naturally Occurring Design: Elements
that I presented at the July 3-5 PURPLSOC pattern language research meeting in Krems Austria. It was in a group of papers on pattern language as a general science; with papers by Helene Finidori, Helmut Leitner,Takashi Iba Et. All.; Christian Aspalter & Reinhard Bauer. (links to follow)
As an approach to working with natural systems “Guiding Patterns of Naturally Occurring Design: Elements” seems unprecedented in using a fully scientific method for focusing on the “objects of nature”, using a pattern language approach to identify working complex relationships of natural designs, in their natural contexts, with nothing “held equal” or represented with models, a practical way to relate to the “things themselves”, as “known unknowns”.
The key is not to avoid data and models. It’s not to rely to heavily on them. It’s to just never use them to represent natural systems, but only to help you discover why naturally occurring systems and their complex designs are of real interest, and doing things quite different from theory. It turns out that Christopher Alexander’s pattern language, as a structured language for discussing holistic solutions, as designs for recurrent problems, has now evolved to let it jump from one profession to another. So, if the branches remain connected to the root… it seems to make a good foundation for building a new language of science, one that doesn’t replace nature with the abstractions of boundless theory.
The paper is a “sampler” of explorations of the topic, including an advanced “starter kit” of methods, terminology and examples, for how to use the patterns of natural design to guide efforts at intentional design and integrate with our world of natural systems. It introduces a way of recognizing natural designs as ‘objects’ in nature, with their own individual boundaries, allowing separate discussion about what goes on inside and outside, and using pattern language (not abstract models) to make verifiable sense of it. Identifying a boundary is what permits considering what goes in and out, and open up the use a traditional use of terms of physics and economics, for understanding the thermodynamics and the coupling between energy budgets and financial budgets, etc. for natural systems. Based on that, it would appear to make a true “object oriented science” a practical possibility.
The original paper introducing this from a traditional biophysical scientific point of view, as “Whole Systems Energy Assessment” (5). That paper can perhaps now be understood if interpreted from a pattern language viewpoint, as showing that shares of GDP measure shares of global impacts of delivering GDP… The economic system does appear to work as a whole, and the effort to validate that seems to successfully result in a far more accurate, and far more actionable, measure the impacts of our choices than efforts to directly trace economic impacts can produce.
For the translation of these and related natural system principles to the language of Alexander’s “pattern language” for defining “object oriented” principles of holistic design see the 2015 “Guiding patterns of naturally occurring design” papers for PURPLSOC (Pursuit of Pattern Language for Societal Change) (Jul 5 2015) (1) and PLoP (Pattern Language of Programming)(Oct 23 2015) (2) and related slides and supplementary materials (3). Also in the directory is a YouTube video link to the first 15 minutes of the slide narration, for the July 5 presentation of ‘Elements’, salvaged from a cell phone recording (4).
Need to update & add notes and discussion on both conferences….
It was reallyexciting to be part of, and to watch this new way of thinking emerge, PL as a whole system language for “designs of services” to balance and support
the traditional view of science as a whole system language for “defined controls“
For understanding the emergence of new forms of organization in nature, the study of theoretical models seems not to be yielding the kind of useful understanding we so critically need now. What I introduce is a”dual paradigm view”, to address the dilemma, a better technique for learning from nature directly. Computer models are fine for testing theory, but need to be used differently to help us follow the continuities of nature. There is a very big conceptual hurdle, getting mathematicians to study the patterns of nature directly… The physics based method I developed, using models of probability to help locate individual developmental continuities offers a direct way to address the problem Pines raises. It could genuinely offer complexity science a better way to study their actual subject, and couple their theories to actively occurring emergent processes and events. Among other discussions of it on RNS Journal:
Emergence is what we see from cosmic events to the flocking of birds…
David Pines makes a very intelligent assessment, saying in part “The central task of theoretical physics in our time is no longer to write down the ultimate equations, but rather to catalogue and understand emergent behavior in its many guises, including potentially life itself.”
I was one of those who figured out why that would become necessary back in the 1970’s. The behavior of complex systems of equations that permit true emergence will not be knowable from the equations. It’s not just their complexity, but that their emergent properties are emergent and dependent of histories of development rather than being formulaic.
I have also been writing papers and corresponding on the problem very widely since then, and really wondering why I was so unable to get systems thinkers, from any established research community to join me, in studying the commonalities of individual emergent systems. I started with air currents, that generally develop quite complex organization quickly with no apparent organizational input, behave very surprisingly, and seem individually unique.
I actually developed a fairly efficient scheme for studying any kind or scale of emergent system, using the simple device of starting with the question: “How did it begin”. What starting with that question does is immediately shift the focus of interest to considering systems as “energy events”, that you consider as a whole in looking for how they developed. That approach also directs you to look for the event’s naturally defined spatial and duration boundaries, which are highly useful too.
In addition to being fairly productive as research approach, it also made it easy to skirt lots of spurious questions, like “how to define the system”. With that approach your task is finding how the subject defines itself, still looking for a pattern language of structural and design elements to work with, within and around the system, confirming what you think you find.
What I finally arrived at in the 90’s was that the equations of energy conservation implied a series of special requirements as natural bounds for any emerging use of energy. I was thinking that the issue was how nature uses discontinuous parts to design continuous uses of energy, and in working with the equations noticed that the notation for the conservation laws were either integrals or derivatives of each other.
Then one afternoon I just extrapolated an infinite series of conservation laws to define a general law of continuity, and integrated it to find the polynomial expansion describing the boundary conditions for any energy use to begin. It was a regular non-convergent expression, a surprising confirmation of Robert Rosen’s interest in non-converging expressions for describing life, and became very useful as what to look for in locating emergent processes to understand how they worked. I circulated the proof for discussion many times, submitted it for publication a few times and wrote numerous introductions, the following the most recent:
…and the laws that move you from maximizing power to maximizing resilience.
Like many young college women Kepler awoke that morning with other things on her mind than the project she had planned for the day. She had been dreaming about how she loved her drawers of personal things, in colorful piles, neatly rolled, in little bags and folded, each in its own style and fit together. Maybe she would become a “collector”, she thought, they gave her such a thrill. How nature was “quite a collector” too fascinated her too, creating all the natural world’s very special arrangements, with everything having it’s own individual home, utterly improbable in such number and variety, and so highly organized and grouped with fitting parts everywhere.
She’d also been told that lots of scientists thought nature’s patterns came from a natural law of energy, that everything sought to maximize its power, which honestly, just made her wrinkle her forehead… She did not know, of course, but thought there was something hidden in the magic of how things in nature so often yielded to each other, an obvious secret to how things come to fit so closely. So she quietly thought perhaps that seemed at least or was perhaps even more important.
What she had planned to do that day was use her old graphic calculator from high school, to do an experiment in rewriting the history of the economy, laughing as she said it that way. Could you show an economy as being responsive, seeking to get along, rather than just getting more and more aggressive in looking for, in the end, how to get in ever bigger trouble? What would it be like, she wondered, if people could be responsive as a rule. The idea had come up in reading that the climate change scientists, the IPCC, had said we needed to reduce world CO2 production to half what it was in 2010. It was only recently in fact that the world economy had been below that, and now everyone was saying we had to go back but probably couldn’t. She felt she had all the facts, though.
So she had the idea to just…
– totally redraw the history of ever growing CO2 – to show mankind as being responsive to the approach of climate change
She didn’t get it to work till quite late that night, but it worked! What she had of course been thinking about, and felt that anyone who mattered constantly worried about behind every other subject, was the strange continual way the human society was so energetically trying to destroy its own future. The evidence could not be more clear, with the ever faster consumption of everything useful on earth, that an economy maximizing its growth unavoidably does. Anyone can plainly see that happening, as climate change keeps accelerating faster than expected. Everyone hears about the ever increasing loss of natural species from disrupting ever more natural habitats too, and the impossible debts nations have accumulated making their decision making impossible, and so many other disturbing things.
It wasn’t a “debate” to her. It also wasn’t her “cause” either. She also did not really see it as her job to change other people’s minds. It was just something she personally needed to know, about her own life, and whether it could be meaningful. Continue reading Kepler→
New systems science, how to care for natural uncontrolled systems in context
