Category Archives: Mail & Comment

Personal comments and letters that seem to capture an idea well

Computers taking over our jobs and our pay?

It’s making business choices by computer

that caused the rapid shift of earnings away from wages, toward profits,
in three big ways,  explaining the massive shift seen in the data.

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See also:
Robert Reich Feb 4 2015 article
in Salon
How even the “sharing economy” profits computers and sends labor backwards
and my long comment It’s computers programmed to maximize growing investor profits that naturally causes those effects.

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Preface: My last post on the dramatic declining share of wages in GDP since 1970 mostly discussed that remarkable change in behavior of the whole system in relation to how the numbing complexity of business would make computers better “wage earners”, shifting income from wage earners to investors. Complexity too great to follow what’s happening… ?? The graph here is a simpler version, showing the same dramatic shift in the disproportionate changes in wages and GDP since 1970.

This post is on how the same shift from wages to profits reduces demand for the products, “made for people” but for which neither business decision making tools nor investors have an appetite.  The economy visibly changed behavior.  It was coincident with computer decision making emerging as a leading tool of business, and the historic numbing complexity everyone has experienced (reflected in changing language use).

The third important way is a later realization.  Computers are overwhelmingly better at making deterministic predictions… but can’t be programmed to consider human values, so they’re omitted from the rules for what to optimize… Computers are even more likely to keep applying old values that no longer apply than humans too.   When resource prices go up, for example, the old standard investment models say “speed up”, while nature is signaling “slow down”.

It may seem there’s nothing more dispassionate and “neutral” than automated decision making, but that easily becomes purely ruthless too.  So it seems to create a “perfect storm” of misdirection to use computers to multiply their programs in a time of fundamental change in our world. If the model says “choice A = X profit” there’s no way to tell if a different story would be told had humans studied how ‘A’ applied in the current circumstance, so the model built without human values also omits any way to argue with it.

You can see one global effect of this naturally “inhuman” decision making of computer models in their universal penny shaving for profit.  That seems directly behind the ever stricter control of decisions, since computers were introduce, by the computer’s measure of value, “the bottom line”.  Before that, business people needed to think of the business as a whole, and not a single number, ruling almost every choice.  So it produces ever growing pressure to “make money” for the sake of money, whether making a bit less to invest in other values might be a better fiduciary choice.

– See also A decisive moment for Investing in Sustainability
– Below are recent comments on a 9/3 Business Insider article by Charles Smith The Future Of Work In Americasuggesting “Technology and the Web are destroying far more jobs than they create.”

Author’s Note: 2/16  – My work on this problem dates back to the 70’s really, and my developing methods for “whole system accounting”.  In simple terms “whole system” or “inclusive” accounting means you can’t keep “robbing Peter to pay Paul” without noticing. It comes from the customary methods of natural science, not used in economics.  Instead of using arbitrary accounting categories, one uses naturally defined partitions of the whole system to define your categories.  One is ultimately forced to get it right by there being lots of natural reasons you can’t keep “robbing Peter” (calling what’s unaccounted for ‘externalities’) without dire consequences.

Whole system accounting models force you to look at what you are leaving out of the model, by requiring the use of accounting categories that add up to the whole, partitions of the system.   That’s what natural science does to validate the data collection and produce “closed accounting” of the system in question.   Oddly so do business financial accounts, but just not economic accounts.   Using partitions of the whole for your accounting categories forces you to estimate how much is going uncounted.   The first discussions of complete economic economic models of that kind are my 1983 General Allocation Theory and 1985 Unconditional Positive feedback in the economic system in the SGSR proceedings for that year.

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1970 marked the sudden end of steadily growing US wages, as a sharply accelerating trend of growing economic inequity and loss or resilience began.

“Information overload” was a rapidly growing topic of conversation and
computers emerged as the premiere tool for driving business profit.

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Was that how humans began to be replaced by technology,
as things got too complex?

comment 1.

I think the question is quite relevant, and in line with Nobel laureate Wassily Leontief’s 1983 warning that humans will go the way of the horse in the business of providing goods and services. What most people don’t know is that started dramatically in ~1970,

Indexing UN GDP (1880 to 2010) and US median wage levels (from 1948) at 1970 shows how they grew at the same rates before 1970, and then have been growing apart.  It shows the divergence between levels of wage incomes and wealth, a societal shift from earned incomes and wages, toward unearned income and finance.

It’s remarkably clear in the data, quite indelible as a “coincidence” between introducing computers for business use in ~1970 and the “the great divergence” of breaking American society apart with lagging earnings from employment and multiplying earnings from wealth. Why did it occur.   Following from my  2010 Complexity too great to follow what’s happening… ? one could explain it as cause by the numbing increase in the complexity of everything we do, affecting people but not the computers or the calculation of profits.   Looked at from a social view of ever faster increasing economic inequity… it looks more like people using computers to make money, robbing Peter to pay Paul and not counting it.

For those interested, here’s the same data without indexing the wage curves to GDP:

History US GDP with Percentiles of Median Wages approximately scaled as partitions of the whole

Continue reading Computers taking over our jobs and our pay?

Telling the whole stories of how things change

A crowd sourcing proposal.   Suggested to WNYC as a new form of news coverage

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From a natural history view, how the US news media reports on what’s happening of public importance is, well, entertainment news, that misses most of what’s actually happening and how it’s connected.  Even Public Radio mostly giving us six shows a day of talk about all the same things that “everyone” is talking about.  It tracks how the discussion is changing, but misses almost entirely how the world itself keeps complexly and dramatically changing by itself.

Germination and Nurture
Telling the Whole Story

Continue reading Telling the whole stories of how things change

Natural Whole Systems Thinking – philosophy & method on STW

To open a LinkedIn community discussion in “Systems Thinking World”, on the “whole systems approach” and scientific method I use, for discovering and understanding natural systems, I offered the following lead-in

Related theory pages:  1 Natural Pattern Languages,  2 ‘Big Data’ and the right to human understanding,  3 Global accounting of responsibilities for economic impacts,  4 Missing Principles of Ecological Thinking – in plans for the Earth,  5 Steering for the organizational Lagrange Point,  6 “The next big challenge” a biomimicry for a self-regulating financial commons,  7 General intro: Natural Systems & Synapse9,  8 Archive of early data analysis studies.  9 & other theory posts

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Could we study systems that invent their own theories?

We might study anything identifiable, and growth curves in time­-series data seem associated with some kind of growing system, developing from scratch. The usual difficulty discovering what’s going on inside them may be strong evidence that they’re organized and changing internally, not visible to or determined by their environments. If such individual systems exist, would they also have locations, external bounds of some kind, a beginning in time and an end?

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 7/24/12

54 comments

#1Jessie Henshaw • There are a few problems I’m trying to raise with this. One is the scientific difficulty of studying things you can point to, but can’t actually define. Science does better with “data” and numerical relationships, studying that as a ‘map’ for a more complex ‘territory’. Organizational change within individual natural systems isn’t readily mapped by “data”, though.

Is that one of the reasons there appear to be so many kinds of individual events and natural systems that display periods of essentially explosive creative organizational development, from storms to personal relationships, to social movements, disease outbreaks and swarms of new technologies, but science seems not to have yet identified that as a field of study?

12 days ago

#2 • Fabian Szulanski • What about agent based modeling? Would that be a point of departure for helping understand? Then some emergence, bifurcation and disorder could eventually appear.

12 days ago

#3 • Jessie Henshaw • @Fabian ­Well, that would be studying models for mathematical rules, not natural systems, wouldn’t it? To study natural physical systems, as if they were ABM’s, is more like what I’m suggesting.

Say you assume the natural world is like the big amazing computer the physicists postulate it actually is. Well then, we’re looking right at nature’s ABM without realizing it, and just need to discover it’s way of inventing things. We don’t have access to a “de­compiler” of nature’s source code, though, do we? What we see are systems that evolve new organization by changing everywhere at once, somehow. It makes it appear that nature is doing fresh programming, on many levels at once, with nearly every process and event she creates. Continue reading Natural Whole Systems Thinking – philosophy & method on STW

Steering for the organizational Lagrange Point

A discussion comment from a LinkedIn conversation on Systems Thinking World to clarify what “steering” means for complex systems and in response to a question (paraphrased).

So can you describe how “small changes at a location in a system alters the direction of the whole,” discussing the theory, certainly, but also examples because this dense country boy sometimes has trouble wrapping his mind around abstractions.

 

Yes, it would help to think of “steering point” as referring to a potential for controlling the direction of something, unless also speaking of someone or thing using it to steer something. They might also be like Lagrange Points in space, where due to a balance of forces it’s easier to turn.

For natural systems there’s a particularly large variety of situations where “small change” has “big influence”.  It would include all the temporary positive “feedbacks”.  You might as well just start listing them at the beginning.  There was the “big bang”.  We didn’t directly observe it but from all appearances it was produced by a process that multiplied from small beginnings, and really really blew up.  That original chain of events was very small and had big results!
Kaboom

That ANY event in nature implicitly starts with its own “big bang” of a sort is one of the curious direct implications of the continuity principle.   The proof is that it would violate energy conservation for energy uses to start without developing, requiring an individual burst of energy uses and the development of the processes doing it for every event.

True, you often don’t notice them, but with a little experience you can find them most places, like in a keystroke.  Any keystroke begins with a brief multiplying cascade of focused energy releases to move your finger, “kaboom” is how it would sound if you stretch out the time scale and have a volume control on the energy surge moving your finger.   It’s the attack of the “ka…” sound at the beginning of that word (same use of “attack” as in music), that refers to the explosive growth period if the local self-organizing system that releases the directed energy. Continue reading Steering for the organizational Lagrange Point

“Wasteful Splendor” Astoundingly expensive arts and crafts

We keep leaving unaddressed that political will is just not enough
to overrule the power of money.

It’s in the interests of money to change course, to use profits to offer services to the commons rather than exploit it till it fails.

Even spending on astoundingly expensive arts an crafts, like “building pyramids” to ourselves, may not be an ideal service to the economy and the earth, but is a far better one than investing profits to multiply demands on it.   It would generate earned income, which would then relieve debt.   It would keep profits from being used to extract ever growing unearned income, for ever growing inequity and debt.

Political will won’t have a chance otherwise

Posted to Climate Code Red 7/20/12

Yes, there’s a very solid case to be made to “do something”.  We’ve also been fooling ourselves from the start about political will being able to overtake and control the behavior of money.  Because for the past 40 years even discussing that subject has been avoided…,  now if we don’t face the need for a more comprehensive approach our efforts are clearly doomed to fail.

There’s also a readily visible, but somehow counter-intuitive, strategy that works for lots of businesses large and small, and for self-organizing systems throughout nature.  It’s for “the bosses” to recognize the system needs them to change roles, and become “service provider in chief” rather than “exploiter  in chief” for the system to survive and thrive.   A CEO of a large corporation or the managing partner of most professional corporations,  needs to be the lead service provider to their network of resources, not an authoritarian ruler demanding ever growing profits.

How to apply that same principle to the economy as a whole is for the financial fund owners (retirees, NGO’s, governments & the super rich) to use their profits to heal the earth, managing their funds like endowments.   Some already do, and that just needs to become universal.  That reverses the traditional practice using profits to multiply your exploitation of the earth for more.

Rearming a rag tag gang with guns that shoot straight…

On the Systems Thinking World, Helene and others had been discussing the sustainability strategy now called “circular economy” aka “cradle to cradle”.  That is a name change I was unfamiliar with that threw me off guard at first.   In theory, the economy would be “decoupled” from depleting non-renewable resources if they were 100% recycled.   That vision and intent are great.  It needs to respond to the past great failures of the same purpose, though, how “sustainability” was turned back into “business as usual”(BAU), to become a strategy for maximizing growth.   Continue reading “Wasteful Splendor” Astoundingly expensive arts and crafts

Why ‘reality’ doesn’t work as a concept!

The curiosity that “reality” doesn’t make sense as a concept (as it can’t be represented in the mind) becomes more sensible in natural language terms at least. You can then ask what makes reality work so well as a process.  … Comments from a LinkedIn discussion group “UN call for revolutionary thinking [for] economic survival..6/24/12

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1.       Struggling to get scientists to discuss natural self-organizing systems6/24/12

Jessie Henshaw @L –  It could help to notice how you restated my saying “They [scientists] tend to go direct from data to models without studying [the] complex working processes the subject came from or operates with.”    To me, your response displays the basic problem I’m describing.

I’ve spent years with large and small scientific communities trying to get them to let me demonstrate a way to study the instrumental processes of individual complex systems, helping expose how they develop and change.  After 30 years of that, making steady advances all along myself… I still feel about as stumped as before about how to share them.

A sign of the problem is in how you restate my complaint, changing the subject.   Your restatement of it was “her generalization that scientists in general leap from data to models without regard to systems”, saying that has not been your experience.

You changed the phrase “without studying [the] complex working processes the subject came from or operates with” to the phrase “without regard to systems”. That rephrasing shifts the subject from phenomena of nature (in their own form), to system models (as concepts for nature) defined within the researcher’s own framework of explanations. That’s my complaint!

Continue reading Why ‘reality’ doesn’t work as a concept!

a Female, and a Male form of physics?

Peter Heffron had liked my idea for how our economy could imitate the natural means for a growth system to transform to become stable, in explaining my comment that “I think removing the growth orientation from “sustainability” might be a lot easier than adding its “getting the parts to work together” aspect into “degrowth” (further discussed fyi).  I then showed him the very simple world model demonstrating the biomimicry for how a profit seeking economy (rather than growth obsessed one) could smoothly change strategies in mid-stream to achieve it.

He suggested I show it in a full scale world model, a big task, and I asked if he knew anyone with who might be interested in inserting my biomimicry concept into their model. He replied in a surprising way, as if I might not have heard of my own field of science essentially, so I felt I needed to go back to basics in my reply.    I think it ends up being a nice statement, of what’s going on here, as a struggle to reconnect our theories with the natural world humans are struggling to find how to become part of again.

Women mostly don’t lose the basic ability to connect with nature, easily using words as being defined by the things of nature they refer to.   It’s men who get frustrated by that, and rely, to a point of complete preoccupation sometimes, on defining words as abstractions made from other abstractions, struggling to rationalize an abstract world in their heads. That difference is a large part too, of what distinguishes my new form of physics for studying the forms of nature in their own terms, going back and forth with the traditional physics for representing nature as abstract theories, connecting the two ways of thinking that all my work has been about for the last ~35 years…

Continue reading a Female, and a Male form of physics?

Adopt natural system principles to keep economies profitable at their limits

The collection of “Hacks” for the Long Term Capitalism Challenge offered byHarvard Business Review, McKinsey and MIX, for the M-Prize for Management Innovation now has this proposal from me…

Please leave comments for reviewers on The official competition entry at the MIX site (here too is fine for conversation).  If you request information I’ll respond as I did for Bill Rees, and post it if it’s OK with you.

It’s a nice new version of the long series of proposals for using natural economies as models for better ways to organize ours, a kind of systems biomimicry.

General References: (added proposal references at the end)

  1. For closely related world system biomimicry see “News of the Commons
  2. To introduce systems ecology “Self-organization as “niche making
  3. I got very good detailed questions on the MIX proposal from Bill Rees, and posted my responses as Questions from Bill Rees.
  4. For an introduction to the physics and general systems theory of natural open systems, see Natural Systems Thinking

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The Summary

A good goal for growth would be to end at a stable peak of vitality providing a sound capital endowment for life on earth.  That would be better than ending at a peak of exhaustion, like other “tower of Babel” societies of the past such as Rome and the Mayans.

It can also be thought of as a change of “ism’s”.

It would also represent a change in form for our economic system, while still being the very same economy with the same people and rights, and reliance on creative innovation funded by investors.   By giving profits an end purpose, of caring for things rather than just for multiplying profits, it woud give the whole economy a very different purpose.    So, it can also be thought of as a change of “ism’s”. Continue reading Adopt natural system principles to keep economies profitable at their limits

What’s good for Conservation?

There have been three posts on Dot Earth on a strategic change taken by some leading conservation advocates, led by Peter Kareiva, chief scientist of the Nature Conservancy. His view presented in Peter Kareiva, an Inconvenient Environmentalist is that environmental conservation is meeting less success due to “doom and gloom” advocacy, that turns business and the public off, and it would be more productive to work cooperatively with business.

That view is criticized by others in Critic of Conservation Efforts Gets Critiqued April 10, 2012 and then defended by Kareiva in “Another Round…Conservation on a Human-Shaped Planet” (April 11, 2012). My short comment (below) seems to clarify the real issue, and got six “thumbs up” to date.

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Just ignoring the deep conflict between conservation and business purposes, because it’s good for the business of conservation, doesn’t make the problem go away.

It’s very curious.  This is Kareiva’s second round of explaining his approach to being more cooperative with business.  I understand a lot of why that is good for conservation, as a business itself.  He still leaves out the big contradiction of that for the environment, though.

Businesses around the world are indeed now trying to learn how to avoid environmental liabilities of all kinds.  They’re now hiring teams of in-house consultants to guide their sustainability policies and practices to do that. Their purpose has not changed yet, however.  Their purpose is to sustain their growing rates of profit, not the earth.  Their impact reductions inherently involve only slowing the rate of accelerating increase in using resources and the environment.

Maximum rates of growing profits simply never come from reducing or even stabilizing business impacts.   I do actually applaud his engagement with business but it needs to be a far more open and honest effort to educate, still.  Nothing has really changed.  Just ignoring the deep conflict between conservation and business purposes, because it’s good for the business of conservation, doesn’t make the problem go away.

  • Jessie Henshaw
  • way uptown

Cancers or Endowments

In Continuing the Conversation on Resilience John Fullerton offered a provocative summary and invited more comments on the subject that started with examples found from Bill Reese and Donnella Meadows of resilience as “a Double Edged Sword”, like either social or biological diseases that change to become resistant to treatment.   My comment on it got to be 1000 words…, so I just posted the introduction there, and continue it here, where I also can edit it if needed.

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Hmmm…. I think I both agree and disagree with all three, Geoff, Dave and Ted. I’m sure they’d point out problems with how I fit the various issues together, the way I draw the bigger picture too, of course.

The reality we’re looking for will need crucial parts contributed from many different perspectives, as no one sees what a complex society needs to work by themselves. Given our particular dilemma, critical success-or-failure issues still seem to dominate though.  I myself have witnessed several decades of everyone’s seeming helplessness, in devising an escape from the converging crises many people have seen coming, and are now occurring.

It’s very odd, indeed, that human society is very actively destroying its own planet, in the name of its own self-interest. What we need is something more like an endowment, that builds up, to then sustain things rather than ever grander schemes for expanding our demands on the earth, like a cancer.  That kind of “progress” threatens both our host as well as ourselves, making us a fragile organism on an ill-advised quest, to “consume it all”.

We need to break away from how nature starts everything new, with a plan for becoming infinite.

Seeing it’s not going to work, we could conceptually just, “give that up”.  Still we’d have to see how to do it, and evidently don’t.   The situation is complicated by our needing to respond in the interests of our whole society, in a society organized around seeking self-interest.   The threat seems to come from what most benefits individuals at the expense of society, that we institutionalized over the centuries, and is only now becoming a mortal threat to the whole.  To survive, society more than individuals needs to break away from how nature starts up everything new, with a plan for becoming infinite.

Endowment is growth that then enriches its environment

Our solutions for instability are now for the first time ever, pushing the earth itself to the limit of instability.

The problem that we have repeatedly tried to solve it, but also repeatedly haven’t, has itself been an amazingly resilient problem.  We think we’re so smart, but this one has been stumping us for a long time.  The “solutions” to economic instability our culture of experts offers, again and again, are intended to bring lasting prosperity, but keep becoming very unstable themselves.  They’re now also for the first time ever pushing the earth itself to the limit of instability in many ways at once too.

Continue reading Cancers or Endowments