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We are products of complexity,
but our evolution has focused our
understanding on the situation of hunter gatherers on the
African savanna.
As humanity has become more powerful we can significantly impact
the systems we depend on. But we struggle to comprehend
them. So this web frame
explores significant real world complex
adaptive systems (CAS):
- Assumptions of randomness & equilibrium allowed the
wealthy & powerful to expand the size and leverage of
stock markets, by placing at risk the insurance and
retirement savings of the working class. The
assumptions are wrong but remain entrenched.
- The US nation was built
from two divergent political
views of: Jefferson and Hamilton. It also
reflects the development
of competing ancient ideas of Epicurus and
Cyril. But the collapse of Bretton Woods forced Wall
Street into a position of power, while the middle and
working class were abandoned by the elites. Housing
financed with cash from oil and derivative transactions
helped hide the shift.
- Most US health care is still
operating the way cars built in the 1940s did.
Geisinger is an example of better solution. But
transforming the whole network is a challenge. And
public health investment has proved far more
beneficial.
- Helping our children learn to be
effective adults is part of our humanity, but we have
created a robust but deeply flawed education system.
Better alternatives have emerged.
- Spoken language, reading and writing emerged allowing our
good ideas to
become a second genetic material.
- The emergence
of the global economy in the 1600s and its subsequent
development;
It explains how the examples relate to each other, why we all
have trouble effectively comprehending these systems and
explains how our inexperience with CAS can lead to catastrophe. It
outlines the items we see as key to the system and why.
Example systems frame |
Dietrich Dorner argues complex adaptive systems (CAS) are hard to understand and
manage. He provides examples of how this feature of these
systems can have disastrous consequences for their human
managers. Dorner suggests this is due to CAS properties
psychological impact on our otherwise successful mental
strategic toolkit. To prepare to more effectively manage
CAS, Dorner recommends use of:
- Effective iterative planning and
- Practice with complex scenario simulations; tools which he
reviews.
Complexity catastrophes |
E. O. Wilson reviews the effect of man on the natural world to
date and explains how the two systems can coexist most
effectively.
Adaptive ecology |
Barton Gellman details the strategies used by Vice President
Cheney to align the global system with his economics, defense, and
energy goals.
US vds alignment |
Kevin Kruse argues that from 1930 onwards the corporate elite
and the Republican party have developed and relentlessly
executed strategies to undermine Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal. Their
successful strategy used the credibility of conservative
religious leaders to:
- Demonstrate religious issues
with the New Deal.
- Integrate the corporate
elite and evangelicals.
- Use the power of corporate
advertising and Hollywood to reeducate the American
people to view the US as historically religious and
the New Deal and liberalism as anti-religious
socialism.
- Focus the message through evangelicals including Vereide and Graham.
- Centralize the strategy through President Eisenhower.
- Add religious elements to
mainstream American symbols: money, pledge;
- Push for prayer in
public school
- Push Congress to promote prayer
- Make elections more
about religious positions.
Following our summary of his arguments RSS frames them from the
perspective of complex adaptive system (CAS) theory.
Strategy is the art of the possible. But it also depends
on persistence.
Inventing Christian America |
Charles Ferguson argues that the US power structure has become
highly corrupt.
Ferguson identifies key events which contributed to the
transformation:
- Junk bonds,
- Derivative
deregulation,
- CMOs,
ABS and analyst fraud,
- Financial network deregulation,
- Financial network consolidation,
- Short term incentives
Subsequently the George W. Bush administration used the
situation to build
a global bubble, which Wall Street
leveraged. The bursting of the
bubble: managed
by the Bush Administration and Bernanke Federal Reserve;
was advantageous to some.
Ferguson concludes that the restructured and deregulated
financial services industry is damaging to
the American economy. And it is supported by powerful, incentive aligned academics.
He sees the result being a rigged system.
Ferguson offers his proposals
for change and offers hope that a charismatic young FDR will appear.
Following our summary of his arguments, RSS comments on them framed by
complex adaptive system (CAS)
theory. Once the constraints are removed from CAS
amplifiers, it becomes advantageous to leverage the increased flows. And it is often
relatively damaging not to participate. Corruption and parasitism can become
entrenched.
Financial WMD |
Matt Taibbi describes the phenotypic
alignment of the American justice system. The result
he explains relentlessly grinds the poor and undocumented into
resources to be constrained, consumed and ejected. Even as
it supports and aligns the financial infrastructure into a
potent weapon capable of targeting any company or nation to
extract profits and leave the victim deflated.
Taibbi uses five scenarios to provide a broad picture of the:
activities, crimes, policing, prosecutions, court processes,
prisons and deportation network. The scenarios are:
Undocumented people's neighborhoods, Poor neighborhoods, Welfare
recipients, Credit card debtors and Financial institutions.
Following our summary of his arguments, RSS comments on them framed by
complex adaptive system (CAS) theory. The alignment of the
justice system reflects a set of long term strategies and
responses to a powerful global arms race that the US leadership intends to
win.
Aligned justice |
Jonathan Powell describes how the government of, the former UK Prime Minister, Tony Blair,
actually operated. Powell was Blair's only chief of
staff.
Mechanics of power |
H. A. Hayek compares and contrasts collectivism and
libertarianism.
Libertarianism |
John Doerr argues that company leaders and their
organizations, hugely benefit from Andy Grove's OKRs.
He promotes strategies
that help OKR success: Focus,
Align, Track, Stretch; replaces yearly performance
reviews, and provides illustrative success
stories.
Doerr stresses Dov Seidman's
view that employees are adaptive and will
respond to what they see being measured. He asserts culturally supported OKRs/CFR processes will be transformative.
Following our summary of his arguments, RSS comments on them
framed by complex adaptive system (CAS) theory. Doerr's architecture
is tailored for the startups KPCB
invests in. It is a subset of the general case of schematic plans, genetic operators and Shewhart cycles that drive all
CAS. Doerr's approach limits support of learning and deemphasizes the
association to planning.
Startup PDCA |
David Bodanis illustrates how disruptive effects can take
hold. While the French revolution had many driving forces
including famine and
oppression the emergence of a new philosophical vision ensured
that thoughtful leaders
were constrained and conflicted in their responses to the
crisis.
Voltaire's disruptive network |
An epistatic meme suppressed for a thousand years reemerges
during the enlightenment.
It was a poem
encapsulating the ideas of Epicurus rediscovered by a
humanist book hunter.
Greenblatt describes the process of suppression and
reemergence. He argues that the rediscovery was the
foundation of the modern world.
Complex adaptive system (CAS) models of the memetic mechanisms
are discussed.
Constraining happiness |
Isaacson uses the historic development of the global cloud of
web services to explore Ada
Lovelace's ideas about thinking
machines and poetic
science. He highlights the value of computer
augmented human creativity and the need for liberal arts to
fulfill the process.
Complex adaptive system (CAS) models of agent networks and
collaboration are discussed.
Arts technology & intelligence |
Haikonen juxtaposes the philosophy and psychology of
consciousness with engineering practice to refine the debate on
the hard problem of consciousness. During the journey he
describes the architecture of a robot that highlights the
potential and challenges of associative neural
networks.
Complex adaptive system (CAS) theory is then used to illustrate the
additional requirements and constraints of self-assembling
evolved conscious animals. It will be seen that
Haikonen's neural
architecture, Smiley's Copycat
architecture and molecular biology's intracellular
architecture leverage the same associative properties.
Associatively integrated robots |
Good ideas are successful because they build upon prior
developments that have been successfully implemented.
Johnson demonstrates that they are phenotypic expressions of
memetic plans subject to the laws of complex adaptive systems (CAS).
Developing ideas |
A government sanctioned monopoly
supported the construction of a superorganism
American Telephone and
Telegraph
(AT&T). Within this Bell Labs was at the center of
three networks:
- The evolving global scientific
network.
- The Bell telephone network. And
- The military
industrial network deploying 'fire and missile
control' systems.
Bell Labs strategically leveraged each network to create an innovation
engine.
They monitored the opportunities to leverage the developing
ideas, reorganizing to replace incumbent
opposition and enable the creation and growth of new
ideas.
Once the monopoly was
dismantled, AT&T disrupted.
Complex adaptive system (CAS) models of the innovation mechanisms are
discussed.
Strategic innovation |
Roger Cohen's New York Times opinion about the implications of
BREXIT is summarized. His ideas are then framed by complex
adaptive system (CAS) theory and
reviewed.
BREXIT |
Scott Galloway argues that Apple, Amazon, Facebook and Google
are monopolists that
trade workers for technology. Monopolies that he argues
should be broken up to ensure the return of a middle
class.
Following our summary of his arguments, RSS comments on these arguments
assuming they relate to a complex adaptive system (CAS).
While Scott's issue is highly significant his analysis conflicts
with relevant CAS history and theory.
Monopoly job killers |
The IPO of Netscape is
defined as the key emergent event of
the New Economy by Michael Mandel. Following the summary
of Mandel's key points the complex adaptive system (CAS) aspects are highlighted.
New economy |
Bretton woods |
A key agent in the 1990 - 2008
housing expansion Countrywide is linked into the residential
mortgage value delivery system (VDS)
by Paul Muolo and Mathew Padilla. But they show the VDS
was full of amplifiers and control points. With no one
incented to apply the brakes the bubble grew and burst.
Following the summary of Muolo and Padilla's key points the
complex adaptive system (CAS)
aspects are highlighted.
Housing amplifiers |
Satyajit Das uses an Indonesian company's derivative trades to
introduce us to the workings of the international derivatives
system. Das describes the components of the value delivery
system and the key
transactions. He demonstrates how the system
interacted with emerging economies
expanding them, extracting profits and then moving on as the
induced bubbles burst. Following Das's key points the
complex adaptive system (CAS)
aspects are highlighted.
Derivative systems |
Johnson & Kwak argue that expanding the national debt
provides a hedge against unforeseen future problems, as long as
creditors are willing to continue lending. They illustrate
different approaches to managing the debt within the US over its history and of the
eighteenth century administrations of England and France.
The US embodies two different political and economic systems which
approach the national debt differently:
- Taxes to support a sinking
fund to ensure credit to leverage fiscal power in:
Wars, Pandemics, Trade disputes, Hurricanes, Social
programs; Starting with Hamilton,
Lincoln & Chase,
Wilson, FDR;
- Low taxes, limited infrastructure, with risk assumed by
individuals: Advocated by President's Jefferson & Madison,
Reagan,
George W. Bush (Gingrich);
Johnson & Kwak develop a model of what the US
government does. They argue that the conflicting
sinking fund and low tax approaches leaves the nation 'stuck in
the middle' with a future problem.
And they offer their list of 'first principles' to help
assess the best approach for moving from 2012 into the
future.
They conclude the question is still political. They hope
it can be resolved with an awareness of their detailed
explanations. They ask who is willing to
push all the coming risk onto individuals.
Following our summary of their arguments RSS frames them from the
perspective of complex adaptive system (CAS) theory.
Historically developing within the global cotton value delivery
system, key CAS features are highlighted.
National debt |
Robert Gordon argues that the inventions of the second
industrial revolution were the foundation for
American economic growth. Gordon shows how flows of people
into difficult rural America built a population base
which then took the opportunity to move on to urban settings: Houses, Food in supermarkets,
Clothes in
department stores;
that supported increasing productivity and standard of living.
The deployment of nationwide networks: Rail, Road, Utilities;
terminating in the urban housing and work places allowing the workers to
leverage time saving goods and services, which helped grow
the economy.
Gordon describes the concomitant transformation of:
- Communications
and advertising
- Credit
and finance
- Public
health and the health
care network
- Health insurance
- Education
- Social
and welfare services
Counter intuitively the constraints
introduced before and in the Great Depression and the demands of World War 2
provide the amplifiers that drive the inventions deeply and
fully into every aspect of the economy between 1940 and 1970
creating the exceptional growth and standard of living of post
war America.
Subsequently the
rate of growth was limited until the shift of women
into the workplace and the full networking of
voice and data supported the Internet and World Wide Web
completed the third industrial revolution, but the effects were
muted by the narrow reach of the technologies.
The development of Big Data, Robots,
and Artificial Intelligence may support additional growth,
but Gordon is unconvinced because of the collapse of
the middle class.
Following our summary of Gordon's book RSS frames his arguments from
the perspective of complex adaptive system (CAS) theory.
American growth |
Carl Menger argues that the market induced the emergence of
money based on the attractive features of precious metals.
He compares the potential for government edicts to create money
but sees them as lacking.
Following our summary of his arguments RSS frames his arguments from
the perspective of complex adaptive system (CAS) theory.
With two hundred years of additional knowledge we conclude that
precious metals are not as attractive as Menger asserts.
Government backed promissory notes are analogous to:
- Other evolved CAS forms of ubiquitous high energy
transaction intermediates and
- Schematic strategies that are proving optimal in
supporting survival and replication in the currently
accessible niches.
Emergence of money |
Eric Beinhocker sets out to answer a question Adam Smith
developed in the Wealth of Nations: what is wealth? To do
this he replaces traditional
economic theory, which is based on the assumption that an
economy is a system in
equilibrium, with complexity
economics in which the economy is modeled as a complex
adaptive system (CAS).
He introduces Sugerscape
to illustrate an economic CAS model in action. And then he
explains the major features of a CAS economy: Dynamics,
Agents, Networks, Emergence, and
Evolution.
Building on complexity economics Beinhocker reviews how evolution applies to
the economy to build wealth. He explains how design spaces
map strategies to instances of physical and
social
technologies. And he identifies the interactors and
selection mechanism of economic
evolution.
This allows Beinhocker to develop a new definition
of wealth.
In the rest of the book Beinhocker looks at the consequences of
adopting complexity economics for business and society: Strategy, Organization, Finance,
& Politics
& Policy.
Following our summary of his arguments, RSS explores his conclusions
and aligns Beinhocker's model of CAS with the CAS theory and evidence we
leverage.
Economic complexity |
Sven Beckert describes the historic transformation of the
growing, spinning, weaving, manufacture of cotton goods and
their trade over time. He describes the rise of a first global
commodity, its dependence on increasing: military power, returns for
the control points in the value delivery system(VDS), availability of land
and labor to work it including slaves.
He explains how cotton offered the opportunity for
industrialization further amplifying the productive capacity of
the VDS and the power of the control points. This VDS was quickly
copied. The increased capacity of the industrialized
cotton complex adaptive system (CAS) required more labor to
operate the machines. Beckert describes the innovative introduction of wages
and the ways found to
mobilize industrial labor.
Beckert describes the characteristics of the industrial cotton
CAS which made it flexible enough to become globally interconnected.
Slavery made the production system so cost effective that all
prior structures collapsed as they interconnected. So when
the US civil war
blocked access to the major production nodes in the
American Deep South the CAS began adapting.
Beckert describes the global
reconstruction that occurred and the resulting destruction of the traditional ways
of life in the global countryside. This colonial expansion
further enriched and empowered the 'western' nation
states. Beckert explains how other countries responded
by copying the colonial strategies and creating the
opportunities for future armed conflict among the original
colonialists and the new upstarts.
Completing the adaptive
shifts, Beckert describes the advocates for industrialization in
the colonized global south and how over time they joined
the global cotton CAS disrupting the early western manufacturing
nodes and creating the current global CAS
dominated by merchants like Wal-Mart
pulling goods through a network of clothing manufacturers,
spinning and weaving factories, and growers competing with each
other on cost.
Following our summary of Beckert's book, RSS comments from the
perspective of CAS theory. The transformation of
disconnected peasant farmers,
pastoral warriors and their lands into a supply chain for a
highly profitable industrial CAS required the development over
time: of military force, global transportation and communication
networks, perception and representation control networks, capital stores and flows,
models, rules, standards and markets; along with the support at
key points of: barriers, disruption, and infrastructure and
evolved amplifiers. The emergent
system demonstrates the powerful constraining influence of
extended phenotypic alignment.
Globalization from cotton |
The structure and problems of the US
health care network is described in terms of complex adaptive
system (CAS) theory.
The network:
- Is deeply embedded in the US nation state. It reflects the
conflict between two
opposing visions for the US: high tax with safety net
or low tax without. The emergence
of a parasitic elite supported by tax policy, further
constrains the choices available to improve the efficiency
and effectiveness of the network.
- The US is optimized to sell its citizens dangerous
levels of: salt,
sugar, cigarettes,
guns, light, cell phones, opioids,
costly education, global travel,
antibacterials, formula, foods including
endocrine disrupters;
- Accepting the US controlled global supply chain's
offered goods & services results in: debt, chronic stress,
amplified consumption and toxic excess, leading to obesity, addiction, driving instead of
walking, microbiome
collapse;
- Globalization connects disparate environments in a network. At the edges,
humans are drastically altering the biosphere. That
is reducing the proximate natural environment's
connectedness, and leaving its end-nodes disconnected and
far less diverse. This disconnects predators from
their prey, often resulting in local booms and busts that
transform the local parasite
network and their reservoir and amplifier
hosts. The situation is setup so that man is
introduced to spillover
from the local parasites' hosts. Occasionally, but
increasingly, the spillover results in humanity becoming
broadly infected. The evolved
specialization of the immune system
to the proximate environment during development
becomes undermined as the environment transforms.
- Is incented to focus on localized competition generating
massive & costly duplication of services within
physician based health care operations instead of proven
public health strategies. This process drives
increasing research & treatment complexity and promotes hope
for each new technological breakthrough.
- Is amplified by the legislatively structured separation
and indirection of service development,
provision, reimbursement and payment.
- Is impacted by the different political strategies for
managing the increasing
cost of health care for the demographic bulge of retirees.
- Is presented with acute
and chronic
problems to respond to. As currently setup the network
is tuned to handle acute problems. The interactions
with patients tend to be transactional.
- Includes a legislated health insurance infrastructure
which is:
- Costly and inefficient
- Structured around yearly
contracts which undermine long-term health goals and
strategies.
- Is supported by increasingly regulated HCIT
which offers to improve data sharing and quality but has
entrenched commercial EHR
products deep within the hospital systems.
- Is maintained, and kept in
alignment, by massive network
effects across the:
- Hospital platform
based
sub-networks connecting to
- Physician networks
- Health insurance networks - amplified by ACA
narrow network legislation
- Hospital clinical supply and food
production networks
- Medical school and academic research network and NIH
- Global
transportation network
- Public health networks
- Health care IT supply
network
Health care |
Deaton describes the wellbeing
of people around the world today. He explains the powerful benefit of public
health strategies and the effect of growth in
material wellbeing but also the corrosive effects of
aid.
Following our summary of Deaton's arguments RSS comments from the
perspective of complex adaptive system (CAS)
theory. The situation he describes is complex including
powerful amplifiers, alignment and incentives that overlap
broadly with other RSS summaries of adaptations of: The
biosphere, Politics, Economics,
Philosophy and Health care.
Improving wellbeing |
Donald Barlett and James Steele write about their investigations
of the major problems afflicting US
health care as of 2006.
Problems of US health care |
Glenn Steele & David Feinberg review the development of the
modern Geisinger healthcare business after its near collapse
following the abandoned merger with Penn State AMC. After an overview of the
business, they describe how a calamity
unfolding around them supported building a vision of a
better US health care network. And they explain:
- How they planned
out the transformation,
- Leveraging an effective
governance structure,
- Using a strategy
to gain buy in,
- Enabling
reengineering at the clinician patient
interface.
- Implementing the reengineering for acute, chronic
& hot
spot care; to help the patients and help the
physicians.
- Geisinger's leverage of biologics.
- Reengineering healing with ProvenExperience.
- Where Geisinger is headed next.
Following our summary of their arguments RSS comments on them. We
frame their ideas with complex adaptive system (CAS)
theory.
E2E insured quality care |
Robert Pearl explains the perspectives of a health care leader
and son who know that the current health care network interacts
with human behavior to induce a poorly performing system that
caused his father's death. But he is confident that these
problem perceptions can be changed. Once that occurs he
asserts the network will become more integrated, coordinated,
collaborative, better led, and empathetic to their
patients. The supporting technology infrastructure will be
made highly interoperable. All that will reduce medical
errors and make care more cost effective.
Following our summary of his arguments RSS comments on them. We
frame his ideas with complex adaptive system (CAS) theory
including synergistic examples of these systems in
operation. The health care network is built out of
emergent human agents. All agents must model the signals
they perceive to represent and respond to them. Pinker
explains how this occurs. Sapolsky explains why fear and
hierarchy are so significant. He includes details of Josh
Green's research on morality and death. Charles Ferguson
highlights the pernicious nature of financial incentives.
Bad medical models |
US healthcare is ripe for
disruption. Christensen, Grossman and Hwang argue that
technologies are emerging which will support low cost business
models that will undermine the current network. Applying
complex adaptive system (CAS)
theory to these arguments suggests that the current power hierarchy can effectively resist
these progressive forces.
Disrupting health care |
Atul Gawande writes about the opportunity for a thirty per cent
improvement in quality in medicine by organizing
to deploy as agent based teams using shared schematic
plans and distributed signalling or as he puts it the use of checklists.
With vivid examples from a variety of situations including construction, air crew support and global health care Gawande illustrates
the effects of
complexity and how to organize to cope with it.
Following the short review RSS
additionally relates Gawande's arguments to its models of
complex adaptive systems (CAS) positioning his discussion within
the network of US health care,
contrasting our view of complexity, comparing the forces shaping
his various examples and reviewing facets of complex
failures.
Complexity checklists |
Friedman and Martin leverage the lifelong data collected on
1,528 bright individuals selected by Dr. Lewis Terman
starting in 1921, to understand what aspects of the subjects'
lives significantly affected their longevity. Looking
broadly across each subject's: Personality,
Education, Parental impacts,
Energy
levels, Partnering,
Careers, Religion,
Social networks,
Gender, Impact from war and
trauma; Friedman and Martin are able to develop a set of model pathways,
which each individual could be seen to select and travel
along. Some paths led to the traveler having a long
life. Others were problematic. The models imply that
the US approach to health and
wellness should focus
more on supporting
the development and selection of beneficial pathways.
Following our summary of their arguments RSS comments from the
perspective of CAS theory. The pathways are most
applicable to bright individuals with the resources and support
necessary to make and leverage choices they make. Striving
to enter and follow a beneficial pathway seems sensible but may
be impossible for individuals trapped in a collapsing network,
starved of resources.
Promoting longevity |
Gawande uses his personal experience, analytic skills and lots
of stories of innovators to demonstrate better ways of coping
with aging and death. He introduces the lack of focus on
aging and death in traditional medicine. And goes on to
show how technology has amplified
this stress point. He illustrates the traditional possibility of the
independent self, living fully while aging with the
support of the extended family. Central
planning responded to the technological and societal changes
with poorly designed infrastructure and funding. But
Gawande then contrasts the power of
bottom up innovations created by experts responding to
their own family situations and belief
systems.
Gawande then explores in depth the challenges
that unfold currently as we age and become infirm.
He notes that the world is following the US path. As such it will
have to understand the dilemma of
integrating medical treatment and hospice
strategies. He notes that all parties
involved need courage to cope.
He proposes medicine must aim to assure
well being. At that point all doctors will practice
palliative care.
Complex adaptive system (CAS) models of agency, death,
evolution, cooperation and adaptations
to new technologies are discussed.
Agent death |
Sonia Shah reviews the millennia old (500,000 years) malarial arms race between Humanity, Anopheles
mosquitoes and Plasmodium. 250 - 500 million people are
infected each year with malaria and one million die.
Malaria |
Peter Medawar writes about key historic events in the evolution
of medical science.
Medical science events |
Using John Holland's theory of adaptation in complex
systems Baldwin and Clark propose an evolutionary theory of
design. They show how this can limit the interdependencies
that generate complexity
within systems. They do this through a focus on
modularity.
Modular designed systems |
Lou Gerstner describes the challenges he faced and the
strategies he used to successfully restructure the computer
company IBM.
Compartmented systems |
Grady Booch advocates an object oriented approach to computer
software design.
Object based systems |
Bertrand Meyer develops arguments, principles and strategies for
creating modular software. He concludes that abstract data
types and inheritence make object orientation a superior
methodology for software construction. Complex adaptive
system (CAS) theory suggests agents provide an alternative strategy
to the use of objects.
Software construction |
Tools and the businesses that produce them have evolved
dramatically. W Brian Arthur shows how this occurred.
Tools |
Matt Ridley demonstrates the creative effect of man on the
World. He highlights:
- A list of
preconditions resulting in
- Additional niche
capture & more free time
- Building a network
to interconnect memes processes & tools which
- Enabling inter-generational
transfers
- Innovations
that help reduce environmental stress even as they leverage fossil
fuels
Memetic trading networks |
E O. Wilson argues that campfire gatherings on the savanna supported
the emergence of human creativity. This resulted in man
building cultures and
later exploring them, and their creator, through the humanities. Wilson
identifies the transformative events, but he notes many of these
are presently ignored by the humanities. So he calls for a
change of approach.
He:
- Explores creativity:
how it emerged from the benefits of becoming an omnivore hunter-gatherer,
enabled by language & its catalysis of invention, through stories told in the
evening around the campfire. He notes the power of
fine art, but suggests music provides the most revealing
signature of aesthetic
surprise.
- Looks at the current limitations of the
humanities, as they have suffered through years of neglect.
- Reviews the evolutionary processes of heredity and
culture:
- Ultimate causes viewed
through art, & music
- The bedrock of:
- Ape senses and emotions,
- Creative arts, language, dance, song typically studied
by humanities,
&
- Exponential change in science and
technology.
- How the breakthrough from
our primate past occurred, powered by eating meat,
supporting: a bigger brain, expanded memory &
language.
- Accelerating changes now driven by genetic cultural coevolution.
- The impact on human nature.
- Considers our emotional attachment to the natural world: hunting, gardens; we are
destroying.
- Reviews our love of metaphor, archetypes,
exploration, irony, and
considers the potential for a third enlightenment,
supported by cooperative
action of humanities and science
Following our summary of his arguments RSS frames these from the
perspective of complex adaptive system (CAS) theory:
- The humanities are seen to be a functionalist framework
for representing the cultural CAS while
- Wilson's desire
to integrate the humanities and science gains support from
viewing the endeavor as a network of layered CAS.
Evening campfire rituals |
Brynjolfsson and McAfee explore the effects of Moore's law on the
economy. They argue it has generated exponential
growth. This has been due to innovation.
It has created a huge bounty of
additional wealth.
But the wealth is spread unevenly across
society. They look at the short and long term implications of
the innovation bounty and spread
and the possible future of
technology.
Following our summary of their arguments RSS comments from the
perspective of CAS theory.
Brilliant technologies |
Salman Khan argues that the evolved global education system is
inefficient and organized around constraining and corralling
students into accepting dubious ratings that lead to mundane
roles. He highlights a radical and already proven
alternative which offers effective self-paced deep learning
processes supported by technology and freed up attention of
teams of teachers. Building on his personal experience of
helping overcome the unjustified failing grade of a relative,
Khan:
- Iteratively learns how to teach: Starting with Nadia, Leveraging
short videos focused on content,
Converging on mastery,
With the help of
neuroscience, and filling
in dependent gaps; resulting in a different approach
to the mainstream method.
- Assesses the broken US education system: Set in its ways, Designed for the 1800s,
Inducing holes that
are hidden by tests, Tests
which ignore creativity.
The resulting teaching process is so inefficient it needs to
be supplemented with homework.
Instead teachers were encouraging their pupils to use his tools at home so
they could mentor them while they attended school, an
inversion that significantly improves the economics.
- Enters the real world: Builds a scalable service,
Working with a
real classroom, Trying stealth
learning, At Khan Academy full time, In the curriculum at
Los Altos, Supporting life-long
learning.
- Develops The One World Schoolhouse: Back to the future with
a one
room school, a robust
teaching team, and creativity enabled;
so with some catalysis
even the poorest can
become educated and earn credentials
for current jobs.
- Wishes he could also correct: Summer holidays, Transcript based
assessments, College
education;
- Concludes it is now possible to provide the infrastructure
for creativity to
emerge and to support risk taking.
Following our summary of his arguments RSS frames them from the
perspective of complex adaptive system (CAS) theory. Disruption is a powerful force for
change but if its force is used to support the current teachers
to adopt new processes can it overcome the extended phenotypic alignment and evolutionary amplifiers sustaining the
current educational network?
Education versus guilds |
Amy Chua and Jed Rubenfeld's New York Times opinion based on The
Triple Package is summarized. Their ideas are then framed
by CAS theory and reviewed.
What drives success |
Peter Turchin describes how major pre-industrial empires
developed due to effects of geographic boundaries constraining
the empires and their neighbors' interactions. Turchin
shows how the asymmetries of breeding rates and resource growth
rates results in dynamic cycles within cycles. After the
summary of Turchin's book complex adaptive system (CAS) theory
is used to augment Turchins findings.
Warrior groups |
Through the operation of three different food chains Michael
Pollan explores their relative merits. The application of
complex adaptive system (CAS)
theory highlights the value of evolutionary
testing of the food chain.
Natural systems |
E. O. Wilson & Bert Holldobler illustrate how bundled cooperative strategies can
take hold. Various social insects have developed
strategies which have allowed them to capture the most valuable
available niches. Like humans they invest in
specialization and cooperate to subdue larger, well equipped
competitors.
Insect superorganisms |
Computational
theory of the mind and evolutionary
psychology provide Steven Pinker with a framework on which
to develop his psychological arguments about the mind and its
relationship to the brain. Humans captured a cognitive niche by
natural selection 'building out'
specialized aspects of their bodies and brains resulting in a system of mental organs
we call the mind.
He garnishes and defends the framework with findings from
psychology regarding: The visual
system - an example of natural
selections solutions to the sensory challenges
of inverse
modeling of our
environment; Intensions - where
he highlights the challenges of hunter-gatherers -
making sense of the objects
they perceive and predicting what they imply and natural
selections powerful solutions; Emotions - which Pinker argues are
essential to human prioritizing and decision making; Relationships - natural selection's
strategies for coping with the most dangerous competitors, other
people. He helps us understand marriage, friendships and war.
These conclusions allow him to understand the development and
maintenance of higher callings: Art, Music, Literature, Humor,
Religion, & Philosophy; and develop a position on the meaning of life.
Complex adaptive system (CAS) modeling allows RSS to frame Pinker's arguments
within humanity's current situation, induced by powerful evolved
amplifiers: Globalization,
Cliodynamics, The green revolution
and resource
bottlenecks; melding his powerful predictions of the
drivers of human behavior with system wide constraints.
The implications are discussed.
Computationally adapted mind |
The stages of development of the human female, including how her brain changes and the
impacts of this on her 'reality' across a full life span:
conception, infantile
puberty, girlhood,
juvenile pause, adolescence, dating years, motherhood, post-menopause; are
described. Brizendine notes the significant difference in
how emotions are processed
by women compared to men.
Complex adaptive system (CAS) theory associates the stages with
the evolutionary under-pinning, psychological implications and
behavioral CAS.
Evolved female brain |
The complexity of behavior is explored through Sapolsky
developing scenarios of our best and worst behaviors across time
spans, and scientific subjects including: anthropology,
psychology, neuroscience, sociology. The rich network of adaptive flows he
outlines provides insights and highlight challenges for
scientific research on behavior.
Complex adaptive system (CAS) theory builds on Sapolsky's
details highlighting the strategies that evolution has captured
to successfully enter niches we now occupy.
CAS behavior |
Carlo Rovelli resolves the paradox of time.
Rovelli initially explains that low level physics does not
include time:
- A present that is common throughout the universe does not exist
- Events are only partially ordered. The present is
localized
- The difference between past and future is not foundational.
It occurs because of state that through our blurring appears
particular to us
- Time passes at different speeds dependent on where we are and how fast we travel
- Time's rhythms are due to
the gravitational field
- Our quantized physics shows neither
space nor time, just processes transforming physical
variables.
- Fundamentally there is no time. The basic equations
evolve together with events, not things
Then he
explains how in a physical world without time its perception can
emerge:
- Our familiar time emerges
- Our interaction with the world is partial, blurred,
quantum indeterminate
- The ignorance determines the existence of thermal time
and entropy that quantifies our uncertainty
- Directionality of time is real
but perspectival. The entropy of the world in
relation to us increases with our thermal time. The
growth of entropy distinguishes past from future: resulting in
traces and memories
- Each human is a
unified being because: we reflect the world, we
formed an image of a unified entity by
interacting with our kind, and because of the perspective
of memory
- The variable time: is one
of the variables of the gravitational field.
With our scale we don't
register quantum fluctuations, making space-time
appear determined. At our speed we don't perceive
differences in time of different clocks, so we experience
a single time: universal, uniform, ordered; which is
helpful to our decisions
Emergence of time |
Consciousness has confounded philosophers and scientists for
centuries. Now it is finally being characterized
scientifically. That required a transformation of
approach.
Realizing that consciousness was ill-defined neuroscientist
Stanislas Dehaene and others characterized and focused on conscious access.
In the book he outlines the limitations of previous
psychological dogma. Instead his use of subjective
assessments opened the
window to contrast totally unconscious
brain activity with those
including consciousness.
He describes the research methods. He explains the
contribution of new sensors and probes that allowed the
psychological findings to be correlated, and causally related to
specific neural activity.
He describes the theory of the brain he uses, the 'global neuronal
workspace' to position all the experimental details into a
whole.
He reviews how both theory and practice support diagnosis and
treatment of real world mental illnesses.
The implications of Dehaene's findings for subsequent
consciousness research are outlined.
Complex adaptive system (CAS) models of the brain's development and
operation introduce constraints which are discussed.
Conscious access |
Reading and writing present a conundrum. The reader's
brain contains neural networks tuned to reading. With
imaging a written word can be followed as it progresses from the
retina through a functional chain that asks: Are these letters?
What do they look like? Are they a word? What does it sound
like? How is it pronounced? What does it mean? Dehaene
explains the importance of
education in tuning the brain's networks for reading as
well as good strategies for teaching reading and countering dyslexia. But
he notes the reading
networks developed far too recently to have directly evolved.
And Dehaene asks why humans are unique in developing
reading and culture.
He explains the cultural
engineering that shaped writing to human vision and the exaptations and neuronal structures that
enable and constrain reading and culture.
Dehaene's arguments show how cellular, whole animal and cultural
complex adaptive system (CAS) are
related. We review his explanations in CAS terms and use
his insights to link cultural CAS that emerged based on reading
and writing with other levels of CAS from which they emerge.
Evolved reading |
Read Montague explores how brains make decisions. In
particular he explains how:
- Evolution can create indirect abstract models, such as the dopamine system, that
allow
- Life changing real-time
decisions to be made, and how
- Schematic structures provide
encodings of computable control
structures which operate through and on incomputable,
schematically encoded, physically active structures and
operationally associated production
functions.
Receptor indirection |
Daniel Goleman and Richard Davidson describe a scientific
investigation of meditation's
impact on the brain. They introduce
the book by describing their experiences with meditation,
science and the research establishment, their friendship, how
meditation is now used in two distinct ways: deep - leading to altered
traits & wide - that can reach the multitudes; which
the book reviews as it critiques the claims and research used to
back them up.
Goleman and Davidson describe meeting as Harvard psychology
graduate students, interested in consciousness, and how minds
work. They rebel against the behavioral orthodoxy, visit Asia and discover the Eastern
tradition of exploring and altering the mind.
Goleman had travelled to Sri Lanka to understand an Asian model
of the mind, which he presented to the undergraduates at
Harvard. Goleman and Davidson developed it into a shared vision of
consciousness. It took over twenty years for
scientific theory and experimental data to catch up and align
with this model. Much of the prior
experimental data had to be abandoned.
They introduce meditation's
impact on the amygdala
responding to pain and stress.
They look at the changes in:
- Stress
- Compassion
- Attention
- Self-awareness; and the
potential for use of mediation
in psychiatry.
And they warn of the occurrence of dark
nights.
They detail how scientists were able to study the brains of Tibetan meditation masters,
starting with Mingyur Rinpoche,
and detect meditation altering
traits.
Finally they discuss the potential
benefits of meditation and strategies to distribute it
broadly to a busy America.
Meditating neurons |
Tara Brach was worried from
a young age that there was something terribly wrong with
her: she like many others felt unworthy. She responded
by developing Radical
Acceptance. Brach then explains the steps in
applying it: pause,
greet what happens next with unconditional
friendliness; allowing us to:
- Initially attend to the sensations
of our body,
- Accept the
wanting self and discover its source of boundless
love.
- Welcome
fear with a widening
attention, accept the pain of death and become
free.
- Use adversity as a gateway to limitless compassion for ourselves
and others.
- Focus on
our basic goodness to counter Western culture turning anger, at being betrayed,
towards ourselves. Extend observing this goodness in
everyone. This enables the use of loving-kindness.
- Leverage
friendships to understand more about our shared nature
and strengthen Radical Acceptance.
- Realize our Buddha nature.
Complex adaptive system (CAS) theory describes the emergence of
the dualistic self and the tree of life linked by the genetic
code and machinery. It provides an analog of the Buddhist
presence.
Compassionate CAS |
The influence of childhood on behavior is significant.
Enneagrams define personality
types: Reformer, Helper, Achiever,
Individualist, Investigator, Loyalist, Enthusiast,
Challenger and Peacemaker; based on the impact of
childhood driven wounds.
The Enneagram becomes
a tool to enable interested people to transform from the
emotionally wounded base, hidden within
the armor of the type, to the liberated underlying essence.
Childhood leaves each of us with some environmentally specific Basic Fear. In response each
of us adopts an induced Basic Desire
of the type. But as we develop the inner observer, it will
support presence and
undermine the identification
that supports the armor of the type.
The Enneagram reveals three sets of relations about our type
armor:
- Triadic self
revealing: Instinctive,
feeling, thinking; childhood needs
that became significant wounds
- Social style
groupings: Assertive, compliant, withdrawn; strategies for
managing inner conflict
- Coping styles: Positive outlook, competency, reactive; strategies for
defending childhood wounds
Riso and Hudson augment the Enneagram with instinctual
distortions reflected in the interests of the variants.
The Enneagram also offers tools for understanding a person's level of development:
unhealthy, average, healthy,
liberation; including their
current center of gravity,
steriotypical social role,
wake-up call, leaden rule, red
flag, and direction
of integration and disintegration.
Complex adaptive system (CAS) theory associates the models
presented by the Enneagram with evolved behaviors and structures
in the mind: feelings, emotions, social behaviors, ideas; driven
by genetic and cultural evolution and the constraints of family
and social life. Emergent evolved amplifers can be
constrained by Riso and Hudson's awareness strategies.
Enneagram strategies |
Antonio Damasio argues
that ancient
& fundamental homeostatic processes,
built into
behaviors and updated by evolution
have resulted in the emergence
of nervous systems and feelings. These
feelings, representing the state of the viscera, and represented with general
systems supporting enteric
operation, are later ubiquitously
integrated into the 'images'
built by the minds of higher animals
including humans.
Damasio highlights the separate
development of the body frame in the building of
minds.
Damasio explains that this integration of feelings by minds
supports the development of subjectivity and consciousness. His chain of
emergence suggests the 'order of things.' He stresses the
end-to-end
integration of the organism which undermines dualism. And he reviews Chalmers
hard problem of consciousness.
Damasio reviews the emergence of cultures
and sees feelings, integrated with reason, as the judges of the
cultural creative process, linking culture to
homeostasis. He sees cultures as supporting the
development of tools
to improve our lives. But the results of the
creative process have added
stresses to our lives.
Following our summary of his arguments RSS frames his arguments from
the perspective of complex adaptive system (CAS) theory.
Each of the [super]organisms
discussed is a CAS reflecting the theory of such systems:
- Damasio's proposals about homeostasis routed signalling, aligns
well with CAS theory.
- Damasio's ideas on cultural stresses are elaborated by CAS
examples.
Emergence of feelings |
Robert Coram highlights the noble life of John Boyd. John
spent a lot of time alone
during his childhood.
He: excelled at swimming and was a lifeguard, enlisted in the
Army Air Corp while at school which rejected him for pilot
training, was part of the Japan occupation force where he swam;
so the US paid for him to attend University
of Iowa, where he: joined the Air Force Officers' training
corps, was accepted to be an Air Force pilot, and got engaged to
Mary Bruce.
Boyd trained at Nellis AFB to become a
combat ready pilot in
the Korean War.
While the US Air Force focused on
Strategic bombing, Boyd loved
dogfights. His exceptional tactical ability was
rewarded with becoming an instructor. Boyd created new
ways to think about dogfighting and beat all-comers
by using them in the F-100.
He was noticed and enabled by Spradling. As he trained, and defeated the top
pilots from around the US and allied base network, his
reputation spread. But he needed to get
nearer to the hot spring in Georgia, and when his move to
Tyndall AFB was blocked he used the AFIT to train in engineering at
Georgia tech. While preparing to move he documented his FWS training
and mentored Ronald Catton.
While there he first realized the
link between energy
and maneuverability.
At Eglin, in partnership with Tom Christie,
he developed tools to model the link. They developed
comparisons of US and Soviet aircraft which showed the US
aircraft performing poorly. Eventually General Sweeney
was briefed on
the theory and issues with the F-105, F-4, and F-111.
Sent to the Pentagon
to help save the F-X budget, Boyd joined forces with Pierre Sprey to
pressure procurement into designing and
building tactically exceptional aircraft: a CAS tank killer and a
lightweight maneuverable
fighter. The navy aligned with
Senators of states with navy bases, prepared to sink the
F-X and force the F-14 on
the Air Force. Boyd saved
the plane from the Navy and the budget from Congress, ensuring
the Air Force executive and its career focused hierarchy had the
freedom to compromise
on a budget expanding over-stuffed F-X (F-15). Boyd requested to
retire, in disgust.
Amid mounting hostility from the organizational hierarchy Boyd
and Sprey secretly
developed specifications for building prototype lightweight
fighters with General Dynamics: YF-16;
and Northrop: YF-17; and enabled by Everest Riccioni.
David Packard
announced a budget of $200 million for the services to spend on
prototypes. Pierre Sprey's friend Lyle Cameron picked a
short takeoff and landing transport aircraft and Boyd's lightweight fighter to
prototype.
Boyd was transferred to Thailand
as Vice Commander of Task
Force Alpha, inspector general and equal opportunity
training officer; roles in which he excelled. And he
started working on his analysis of creativity: Destruction
and Creation. But on completion of the tour Boyd was
apparently abandoned and sent to run
a dead end office at the Pentagon.
The power hierarchy moved to protect the F-15, but: Boyd,
Christie, Schlesinger,
and the Air Force chief of staff; kept the
lightweight fighter budgeted and aligned with Boyd's
requirements in a covert campaign. The Air Force
threw a phalanx of developers at the F-16, distorting Boyd's
concept. He accepted he had lost the fight and retired
from the Air Force.
Shifting to scholarship Boyd reflects on how rigidity must be destroyed to enable
creative new assemblies. He uses the idea to explain
the operational success of the YF16 and F-86 fighters, and then
highlights how the pilot can take advantage of their
infrastructure advantage with rapid decision making he
explains with the O-O-D-A Loop.
Boyd encouraged Chuck Spinney
to expose the systemic cost overruns
of the military procurement process. The military
hierarchy moved to undermine the
Spinney Report and understand the
nature of the reformers. Boyd acted as a progressive
mentor to Michael
Wyly, who taught the
Marine Corps about maneuver
warfare, and Jim Burton.
Finally, after the military hierarchy appears to have
beaten him, Boyd's ideas are tested during
the First Gulf War.
Following our summary of his main points, RSS frames the details from the
perspective of complex adaptive system (CAS) theory. Boyd was Darwinesque, placing the art of
air-to-air combat within a CAS framework.
Air warrior |
Alfred Nemeczek reveals the chaotic, stressful life of Vincent
van Gogh in Arles.
Nemeczek shows that Vincent was driven
to create, and successfully
invented new methods of representing feeling in paintings, and
especially portraits. Vincent
worked hard to allow artists like him-self
to innovate. But
Vincent failed in this goal, collapsing into psychosis.
Nemeczek also provides a brief history of
Vincent's life.
Following our summary of his main points, RSS frames the details from the
perspective of complex adaptive system (CAS) theory.
Vincent creates |
Reginald Dwight, better known as Elton John, writes a hilarious
memoir, full of anecdotal and sometimes morbid humor and gossip, which describes his
immediate family, upbringing, development as a singer
songwriter, stardom and its support for his problems, collapse
and eventual recovery.
Elton stresses the serendipitous nature
of his emergence as a musician. He describes
the contributions of his parents, Stanley & Sheila, mother's
sister, and her mother Ivy;
who formed his early
childhood proximate environment which prepared
him for a job in entertainment: he
developed his performance in the club circuits, setup a
commercial partnership with Bernie Taupin to write songs;
entering a network based around Dick James Music.
And he almost got married.
DJM focused Elton and Bernie's initial song writing
while they studied the songs they admired and Elton did session
work, tightening his performance skills and paying for the
food. A first album supported touring and the formation of
a band. A second one sent them to the US where Elton became an
overnight sensation. And during this period of time
Elton's testosterone
level ramped. Life changed
dramatically.
Stardom provided many rewards but there
were still life's problems to deal with. Elton was
befriended by his idol, John Lennon; he achieved new heights of
success but, sensitive to any hint of failure and fraud, suicidally disassociated.
His career crested, he struggled with loneliness and drugs, and
foresaw a fearful vision of his future, as fame caged him idly
in hotels between concerts. His hair abandoned him.
But he was saved by the challenge of
transforming the collapsed Watford football club. He
retired from touring which allowed him the time to reconstruct his life.
Empowered by success, supported by the removal of constraints,
Elton dominates - limiting feedback, doing whatever he
hopes will bring him happiness:
trying new options, expanding the range and increasing the
quantity of mind altering substances; eventually hitting John Reid and marrying
Renata.
He allows his drug use to enter the recording studio. Problems stress him. He is
frightened by a cancer
scare, AIDS, inspired by
Ryan White, angered by the
Sun, and saddened at
breaking Renata's heart. But he was there for Ryan White's
final days. And his lover Hugh Williams confronted Elton
about his string of addictions.
Elton finally agreed he had a problem.
He went to rehab, stopped hating himself,
gave up his current addictions, accepted the influence of a
higher force, and began admiring the everyday world and other
people.
It seemed the higher force was
supporting Elton's progress: he wrote the music for the
Lion King, met David Furnish who accepted Elton warts and all;
they both enjoyed a friendship with Gianni Versace; until Gianni
was murdered. Princess Diana
died soon after, and Elton performed at the funeral.
He toured with Billy Joel and aimed to do the same with Tina
Turner. While his new records sold well he found
himself in debt and terminated the management relationship
with John Reid
Enterprises.
Elton and Bernie improved their
situations: Elton started writing film scores, he helped
turn the film Billy Elliot into a musical, Bernie lobbied Elton
to improve the way they were making records, Elton and David
entered into a civil partnership, and Elton made a record with
his seminal influence: Leon
Russell.
Elton and David became parents of
two boys: Zachary and Elijah; using their sperm a surrogate
mother and network in California. They quietly get married
when the UK allows.
Elton's mum remains
difficult and cruel to him, but he is sad when she dies, and many
at the funeral recall her fun side with him. Being parents
increases the long-term
stresses on their lives, forcing them to adjust, so they can be there for their boys.
But Elton needs to go out with a bang!
And everyone helps.
Following our summary of his main points, RSS frames the details
of the creative process from the perspective of complex
adaptive system (CAS) theory.
My song |
Richard Feynman
outlines a series of amusing vignettes, as he reviews his life story.
Richard's personality
encouraged him to patiently
seek out fun: performing Shewhart cycles
with electricity, in his childhood laboratory, and aligning theory, and
practice through building and fixing radios.
Leonardo's life inspired him to try
innovation, which he
concluded was hard. He played
with the emotion
in communications, a skill
which he used later at
Caltech. And he made a game of avoiding following
orders at MIT. Working during
the holidays revealed the benefit of joining theory and
practice.
Feynman enrolled as a graduate
student at Princeton, where the successful
approach to science was just like his.
His approach was based on
patience and fun: he used his home lab and other tools for
qualitative exploration. Overtime he added experimental
techniques. He would test
the assertions in articles with amusing investigations;
with his mind aligned by
feelings of joy. Everyone at Princeton heard he would want to be hypnotized.
He was driven to compare the challenges of complex subjects being
taught at Princeton to his current pick. In his summer
recess he explored biology.
Gathering problems in challenging areas of science, and then picking one to solve, supported his
creativity. And his practical
orientation and situation when growing up in Far Rockaway,
supported his desire for choices
and adolescent dislike for purely intellectual and cultural
pursuits. Being mostly self-taught, he
developed different approaches to problems than the
standard strategies provided by mass education.
Richard saw his skill set as very different to that exhibited by his father. But are they very
different?
While Richard was at Princeton, America became concerned about
the implications of the European war. After a friend
enlisted he decided to dedicate his
summer holiday to helping the war effort. Feynman got involved in the
Manhattan Project, and went to Los Alamos where he
experienced constraints, applied by: the military, the
physics of the project, him on Niels
Bohr; but was
freed from them by Von
Neumann. The records & reports of the project
were kept in filing cabinets. Richard explored the weaknesses of
the locks and safes deployed to secure these
secrets. Just after the war he was called up by the draft
board for a medical but was rejected for being mentally
unfit.
After the war, Richard was asked to become a professor at Cornell.
He initially struggled in this role: Too young to match
expectations, stressed by the demands of his new job and his
recent experiences; until he adopted an approach that focused on
fun. He enjoyed knowing
about numbers: using, learning about them and the tools to
use them, and competing with others; to calculate, interpolate
and approximate a value the fastest.
Traveling to Buffalo in a light plane once a week to give a
physics lecture before flying back the next morning wasn't much
fun for Richard. So he used
the stipend to visit a bar after each lecture to meet
beautiful women. Richard liked bars and nightclubs, spending a summer in Albuquerque
frequenting one, and later
ones in Las Vegas, as he explored how to get the girls he
drank with to sleep with him.
Richard reflects on various times when he made government
officials obey their parts of contracts: patent fees, limits on red tape;
Richard became frustrated with his life at Cornell, seeing more
things that interested him on the sunny west coast at Caltech. Both
institutions, and Chicago, offered him incentives to help his decision making,
but Richard began to find reevaluating the alternatives a waste
of time and he saw risks in
a really high salary, deciding he would move to Caltech
and stay there.
Richard is invited to attend a scientific symposium in
Japan. Each of the US attendees is asked to learn a little
Japanese. Richard takes lessons, persists, can converse
effectively, but stops when he
finds the cultural parts of the language conflict with his
individualism.
Richard was unhappy with his achievements in physics. He
felt: slower than his peers, not keeping up or understanding the
latest details, fearful that
he could not cope; as the community
worked to understand the laws of beta decay. But
Martin Block pushed him to question the troubling parity
premise. Encouraged by Oppenheimer the community focused
on parity and failures were discovered in a cascade of
reports. Richard attended a meeting where Lee & Yang
discussed a failure and a theory to explain it. Richard
felt terrified and could not understand what they said.
His sister pushed him to change his attitude: act like a student
having fun, read every
line and equation of their paper; he would understand it.
And he did, as well as developing additional insights about what
was happening and what still seemed conflicted. He
reported his ideas back to the community. After Richard
returned from Brazil he reviewed the confusion of facts with
Caltech's experimental physicists who made him aware of
Gell-mann abandoning another former premise of Beta decay.
Feynman realized his ideas were consistent: fully and simply
describing the details of beta decay. He had identified
the workings of a fundamental law. Years later he was awarded the Nobel
prize for physics. He was conflicted about the prize
and attending the ceremony, but eventually enjoyed the trip,
where he discussed cultural achievement with the Japanese
ambassador.
Richard was interested in the operation of the brain, modeling
it on a digital computer. He explored hallucinations and the reality of
experiences.
Richard lobbies for integrity
in science.
In aspects of his life that weren't focused directly on science,
Richard was quirky. He would tease those who asked for his
help: pushing bargains to their logical conclusion; insisting on everyone keeping to
their part of the agreement. And he paid no attention to the
logistical details of planning. He loved percussion,
playing: drums, bongos, baskets, tables, Frigideira; and became quite a success. He
eventually discovered art could be
fun, and tried to express his joy at the underlying
mathematical beauty of the physical world. He had a great
art teacher. But he discovered although he could
eventually draw well he did not understand art.
Many of the artists he met were fakers, and even the powerful,
who were interested in integrating art and science, did not
understand either subject. He found the situation was
similar in other complex adaptive systems: philosophy, religion and
economics; which he dabbled in for a while but found the
strategies of other people practicing the study of such subjects
made him angry and
disturbed, so he avoided participating in them. It seemed
ironic that he was eventually asked to help in bringing
culture to the physicists!
He discusses issues in teaching creative physics in Brazil. He gets
involved in the California public school text
book selection process which he concluded was totally
broken, but also reveals how his father
provided him with a vision of how our world works,
inspiring his interest in experimentation and physical
theory.
Following our summary of his main points, RSS reviews how his personality, family and cultural history supported
his creative development from the perspective of complex
adaptive system (CAS) theory.
Richard draws |
Desmond & Moore paint a picture of Charles Darwin's life,
expanded from his own highlights:
- His naughty
childhood,
- Wasted
schooldays,
- Apprenticeship with Grant,
- His extramural
activities at Cambridge, walks with Henslow,
life with FitzRoy on the
Beagle,
- His growing
love for science,
- London: geology, journal and Lyell.
- Moving from
Gower Street to Down and writing Origin and other
books.
- He reviewed his position on
religion: the long
dispute with Emma, his
slow collapse of belief
- damnation for unbelievers like his father and brother, inward conviction
being evolved and unreliable, regretting he had ignored his father's
advice; while describing Emma's side of the
argument. He felt happy with his decision to dedicate
his life to science. He closed by asserting after Self &
Cross-fertilization his strength will be
exhausted.
Following our summary of their main points, RSS frames the details from the
perspective of complex adaptive system (CAS) theory. Darwin placed
evolution within a CAS framework, and built a network of supporters whose
complementary skills helped drive the innovation.
Darwin emerges |
Richard Dawkin's explores how nature has created implementations
of designs, without any need for planning or design, through the
accumulation of small advantageous changes.
Accumulating small changes |
Russ Abbott explores the impact on science of epiphenomena and
the emergence of agents.
Autonomous emergence |
Terrence Deacon explores how constraints on dynamic flows can
induce emergent phenomena
which can do real work. He shows how these phenomena are
sustained. The mechanism enables
the development of Darwinian competition.
Constraint based phenomena |
|
|
Bretton Woods
Summary
Ed Conway argues that Bretton Woods produced a unique set of
rules and infrastructure for supporting the global economy is a human SuperOrganism complex adaptive system (CAS) which operates and controls trade flows within a rich niche. Economics models economies. Robert Gordon has described the evolution of the American economy. Like other CAS, economic flows are maintained far from equilibrium by: demand, financial flows and constraints, supply infrastructure constraints, political and military constraints; ensuring wealth, legislative control, legal contracts and power have significant leverage through evolved amplifiers. . It was
enabled by the experience of Keynes
and White during and after the First World War, their dislike of the Gold Standard,
the necessity of improving
the situation between the wars and the opportunity created
by the catastrophe of the Second
World War.
He describes how it was planned
and developed. How it
emerged from the summit.
And he shows how the opportunity inevitably allowed the US to replace the UK at the center of the global economy.
Like all plans there are
mistakes and Conway takes us through them and how the US is the United States of America. recovered the situation as
best it could.
And then Conway describes the period after
Bretton Woods collapsed. He explains what followed
and also compares the relative performance of the various
periods before during and after Bretton Woods.
Following our summary of his arguments RSS is Rob's Strategy Studio comments from the
perspective of Complex Adaptive System ( This page introduces the complex adaptive system (CAS) theory
frame. The theory provides an organizing framework that is
used by 'life.' It can be used to evaluate and rank models
that claim to describe our perceived reality. It catalogs
the laws and strategies which underpin the operation of systems
that are based on the interaction of emergent
agents. It highlights the
constraints that shape CAS and so predicts their form. A
proposal that does not conform is wrong.
John Holland's framework for representing complexity is
outlined. Links to other key aspects of CAS theory
discussed at the site are presented.
CAS)
theory. Conway's book illustrates the rule making and
infrastructure that together build an evolved amplifier.
He shows the strategies at play of agents that were for and
against the development is a phase during the operation of a CAS agent. It allows for schematic strategies to be iteratively blended with environmental signals to solve the logistical issues of migrating newly built and transformed sub-agents. That is needed to achieve the adult configuration of the agent and optimize it for the proximate environment. Smiley includes examples of the developmental phase agents required in an emergent CAS. In situations where parents invest in the growth and memetic learning of their offspring the schematic grab bag can support optimizations to develop models, structures and actions to construct an adept adult. In humans, adolescence leverages neural plasticity, elder sibling advice and adult coaching to help prepare the deploying neuronal network and body to successfully compete.
and deployment of the system. And The Summit provides a
key piece of the history of our global economic CAS.
The Summit
Bretton Woods, 1944
In Ed Conway's book 'The
Summit Bretton Woods, 1944' he argues that the decisions taken
at the Bretton Woods Summit on financial infrastructure is of
great significance:
- Two weeks into operation Overlord on Saturday July 22
1944, after Japan had just lost Thailand, the best economic is the study of trade between humans. Traditional Economics is based on an equilibrium model of the economic system. Traditional Economics includes: microeconomics, and macroeconomics. Marx developed an alternative static approach. Limitations of the equilibrium model have resulted in the development of: Keynes's dynamic General Theory of Employment Interest & Money, and Complexity Economics. Since trading depends on human behavior, economics has developed behavioral models including: behavioral economics.
minds met at
the Mount Washington
to replace the previous iteratively evolved jumbled
infrastructure that was failing to support global finance
and economic cooperation, stability and growth. It was
to include rules and agreements on:
- Exchange rate mechanisms
- Money flows between countries
- Central bank interest rates;
- It was to be driven via concrete plans developed in
advance by technical experts.
- It was a response to the problems seen between the wars:
- But there were also conflicting goals. And out of
necessity the teams were led by technical experts rather
than the political leaders now aims to develop plans and strategies which ensure effective coordination to improve the common good of the in-group. Pinker notes the evolved pressure of social rivalry associating power with leadership. Saposky observes the disconnect between power hierarchies and wisdom in apes. John Adair developed a modern leadership methodology based on the three-circles model.
.
- Bretton Woods resulted in the development is a phase during the operation of a CAS agent. It allows for schematic strategies to be iteratively blended with environmental signals to solve the logistical issues of migrating newly built and transformed sub-agents. That is needed to achieve the adult configuration of the agent and optimize it for the proximate environment. Smiley includes examples of the developmental phase agents required in an emergent CAS. In situations where parents invest in the growth and memetic learning of their offspring the schematic grab bag can support optimizations to develop models, structures and actions to construct an adept adult. In humans, adolescence leverages neural plasticity, elder sibling advice and adult coaching to help prepare the deploying neuronal network and body to successfully compete.
of
financial infrastructure and rules that worked: The IMF is the International Monetary Fund developed as part of the Bretton Woods agreements to provide liquidity to national gold denominated reserve banks at times of stress in the global financial network - a shortage of a particular currency which was inhibiting trade; in support of a broader Bretton Woods framework designed so as to ensure that currencies did not become misaligned with one another, and were a fair representation of what things were worth. The IMF removed the need for nations to depend on private loans from commercial banks, such as Britain's dependence on J. P. Morgan during the 1920s and 30s. The agreement required each Bretton Woods signatory to provide a capital investment or 'quota' into the fund which would subsequently correspond to the amount that the country could borrow from the fund in times of financial stress. The top four countries and their quotas were set by IMF architect, Harry Dexter White, to match FDR's priorities: - US - $2.9 billion, an amount the FDR administration could transfer from Exchange Stabilization Fund without any need to ask for Congress for funds.
- UK - $1.45 billion
- USSR - slightly less than UK quota
- China - less than USSR.
, World Bank was setup as part of the Bretton Woods agreements, as the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development, to repair and reconstruct Europe after the Second World War and as the World Bank continues to provide reconstruction and development resources for projects in developing economies. It includes: - International Finance Corporation
; but the
result functioned differently to the plan.
- By 1971
the rules had been totally abandoned. The effects of
the Vietnam War forced Richard Nixon to remove the peg
between the US Dollar and Gold. This introduced a time
of variable exchange rates and fiat money. The
controls on money flows between countries were also
removed. The result was to allow:
- Increasing wealth is schematically useful information and its equivalent, schematically useful energy, to paraphrase Beinhocker. It is useful because an agent has schematic strategies that can utilize the information or energy to extend or leverage control of the cognitive niche.
gap between rich and poor
- World
Charles Ferguson argues that the US power structure has become
highly corrupt.
Ferguson identifies key events which contributed to the
transformation:
- Junk bonds,
- Derivative
deregulation,
- CMOs,
ABS and analyst fraud,
- Financial network deregulation,
- Financial network consolidation,
- Short term incentives
Subsequently the George W. Bush administration used the
situation to build
a global bubble, which Wall Street
leveraged. The bursting of the
bubble: managed
by the Bush Administration and Bernanke Federal Reserve;
was advantageous to some.
Ferguson concludes that the restructured and deregulated
financial services industry is damaging to
the American economy. And it is supported by powerful, incentive aligned academics.
He sees the result being a rigged system.
Ferguson offers his proposals
for change and offers hope that a charismatic young FDR will appear.
Following our summary of his arguments, RSS comments on them framed by
complex adaptive system (CAS)
theory. Once the constraints are removed from CAS
amplifiers, it becomes advantageous to leverage the increased flows. And it is often
relatively damaging not to participate. Corruption and parasitism can become
entrenched.
dominated by the Satyajit Das uses an Indonesian company's derivative trades to
introduce us to the workings of the international derivatives
system. Das describes the components of the value delivery
system and the key
transactions. He demonstrates how the system
interacted with emerging economies
expanding them, extracting profits and then moving on as the
induced bubbles burst. Following Das's key points the
complex adaptive system (CAS)
aspects are highlighted.
private finance industry
- Huge imbalances between creditor and debtor nations
- As of 2016 after the weakening of Bretton Woods's capital is the sum total nonhuman assets that can be owned and exchanged on some market according to Piketty. Capital includes: real property, financial capital and professional capital. It is not immutable instead depending on the state of the society within which it exists. It can be owned by governments (public capital) and private individuals (private capital). controls and
the introduction of the euro currency:
The Mount
Washington
FDR is President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. He is notable for his contributions to the US CAS: - New Deal strategies including:
- Lend-lease which pushed the US and Japan into World War 2 and helped the US to become the world's predominant military power.
- Bretton Woods's agreement which economically constrained any politically driven collapse of the world economy after the war and helped the US to become the world's predominant economic power.
wanted a deal by late July
to discuss at the Democratic convention. His Treasury is the department of the treasury. It is a federal government executive department created by Act of Congress in 1789 to manage government revenue. The Secretary of the Treasury is a Cabinet officer. With monetary policy devolved to the Federal Reserve, treasury manages fiscal policy. To support funding of high cost investments: Disaster recovery, Wars, Famines; the treasury can issue debt instruments and manage the national debt. team selected New
Hampshire for the economic is the study of trade between humans. Traditional Economics is based on an equilibrium model of the economic system. Traditional Economics includes: microeconomics, and macroeconomics. Marx developed an alternative static approach. Limitations of the equilibrium model have resulted in the development of: Keynes's dynamic General Theory of Employment Interest & Money, and Complexity Economics. Since trading depends on human behavior, economics has developed behavioral models including: behavioral economics.
summit to get away from Virginia's summer heat and to obtain New
Hampshire Republican Charles Tobey's vote.
The Bitter Peace
Conway introduces John
Maynard Keynes, as a Bloomsbury Group member, old Etonian and
star lecturer at Kings College Cambridge.
He worked at the UK Treasury during World War 1, becoming an
advisor to the War Cabinet and part of High Society. He
was subsequently selected to negotiate the economic is the study of trade between humans. Traditional Economics is based on an equilibrium model of the economic system. Traditional Economics includes: microeconomics, and macroeconomics. Marx developed an alternative static approach. Limitations of the equilibrium model have resulted in the development of: Keynes's dynamic General Theory of Employment Interest & Money, and Complexity Economics. Since trading depends on human behavior, economics has developed behavioral models including: behavioral economics. settlement with
Germany at the Paris conference. Keynes visited
Ypres. He was disappointed that the conference missed the
opportunity to build a new foundation of economic
cooperation. Instead the British, French and Italian leaders now aims to develop plans and strategies which ensure effective coordination to improve the common good of the in-group. Pinker notes the evolved pressure of social rivalry associating power with leadership. Saposky observes the disconnect between power hierarchies and wisdom in apes. John Adair developed a modern leadership methodology based on the three-circles model. pushed Germany
to the point of collapse. President Wilson's 14 points
approach was not a plan, scheme or other help in setting a path
and making progress. The American delegates learned they
would need a plan next time. Keynes, always the reformer,
left in disgust is a universal human emotion. Pinker notes it has its own facial expression and is codified in food taboos. The mind must be associated with the proximate environment and parents minimize the risk for their omnivorous children by teaching them what foods to eat and what to avoid. The children's minds are initially receptive to trying all foods but their brains subsequently lock in on the foods they have experienced. These parental choices are affected by schematic influence on what has been beneficial. Adolescent's brain developments undermine these constraints enabling intergroup transfers. Disgust is modulated by the insula cortex which projects signals to the amygdala. Adult humans merge moral and physical disgust enabling metaphorical out grouping. feeling are subjective models: sad, glad, mad, scared, surprised, and compassionate; of the organism and its proximate environment, including ratings of situations signalled by broadly distributed chemicals and neural circuits. These feelings become highly salient inputs, evolutionarily associated, to higher level emotions encoded in neural circuits: amygdala, and insula. Deacon shows James' conception of feeling can build sentience. Damasio, similarly, asserts feelings reveal to the conscious mind the subjective status of life: good, bad, in between; within a higher organism. They especially indicate the affective situation within the old interior world of the viscera located in the abdomen, thorax and thick of the skin - so smiling makes one feel happy; but augmented with the reports from the situation of the new interior world of voluntary muscles. Repeated experiences build intermediate narratives, in the mind, which reduce the salience. Damasio concludes feelings relate closely and consistently with homeostasis, acting as its mental deputies once organisms developed 'nervous systems' about 600 million years ago, and building on the precursor regulatory devices supplied by evolution to social insects and prokaryotes and leveraging analogous dynamic constraints. Damasio suggests feelings contribute to the development of culture: - As motives for intellectual creation: prompting detection and diagnosis of homeostatic deficiencies, identifying desirable states worthy of creative effort.
- As monitors of the success and failure of cultural instruments and practices
- As participants in the negotiation of adjustments required by the cultural process over time
:
Before the
war the UK is the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. had been at the
center of a global
value delivery system. The initiation of the war
resulted in its collapse. London was the financial
system's hub but foreigners found they could not depend on the
banking system to help pay their bills. The situation
affected stock brokers and banks. A stock collapse
impacted Keynes's family finances. Conway explains that,
while it was not yet understood, the Gold Standard was a set of informal agreements between central banks: - To support operation of the global trade between nation states
- To convert their local currency to gold at an agreed conversion rate when asked. It was
- Based on David Hume's price specie flow theory. But in practice it suffered from a mismatch between:
- An economy's changing situation
- The rigid rules constraining central bankers and
- The limited quantity of gold. When America's economy expanded during the 1920s and gold flowed into the country, struggling European economies deflated to maintain currency parity with gold. Economists such as Keynes argued it was more sensible to manage economies by responding to their situation within the global network.
was
unravelling into a true credit crunch. London banks
refused to exchange sterling for gold. It was assumed the
war would be over quickly. Keynes and other economists is the study of trade between humans. Traditional Economics is based on an equilibrium model of the economic system. Traditional Economics includes: microeconomics, and macroeconomics. Marx developed an alternative static approach. Limitations of the equilibrium model have resulted in the development of: Keynes's dynamic General Theory of Employment Interest & Money, and Complexity Economics. Since trading depends on human behavior, economics has developed behavioral models including: behavioral economics. pushed for the
UK to return to the standard. But as the war dragged on
for four years the effects were devastating on the European
population and its infrastructure.
During 1917 President Wilson attempted to force the combatants
to reconcile. Through the Federal Reserve of 1913 was a response to a series of banking panics with the goal of responding effectively to stresses. It setup: - At least 8 and not more than 12 private regional Federal Reserve banks. Twelve were setup
- Federal Reserve Board with seven members to govern the system. The President appointed the seven, which must be confirmed by Congress. In 1935 the Board was renamed and restructured.
- Federal Advisory Committee with twelve members
- Single US currency - the Federal Reserve Note.
he encouraged US banks to cut back credit lines to foreign
borrowers inducing a sterling crisis. Britain was close
to bankruptcy is a legal status for an entity that cannot repay its creditor's loans. It holds creditor lawsuits in abeyance while the restructuring process proceeds to allow the entity to continue operations. It also has legal tools for forcing holdout creditors to accept repayments that are lower than the bond sale initially promised. when
German U-boat attacks pushed the US into the war and US credit
flows to Britain restarted. And a US Army was deployed to
France.
Once America entered the war Keynes work at the
Treasury shifted from staving off bankruptcy to ensuring the
flow of US is the United States of America. loans. But
while he was the sharpest of intellects he was ill-suited to
diplomacy. During this period Keynes realized that
policies have to be implemented which requires explaining them
to others in terms they can understand. His exceptional
ability as a writer and journalist helped here.
By the 1920s the US economy is a human SuperOrganism complex adaptive system (CAS) which operates and controls trade flows within a rich niche. Economics models economies. Robert Gordon has described the evolution of the American economy. Like other CAS, economic flows are maintained far from equilibrium by: demand, financial flows and constraints, supply infrastructure constraints, political and military constraints; ensuring wealth, legislative control, legal contracts and power have significant leverage through evolved amplifiers.
overtook the UK's with the dollar displacing sterling. And
America's GDP is: - Gross domestic product which measures the total of goods and services produced in a given year within the borders of a given country (output) according to Piketty. Gordon argues to include products produced in the home & market-purchased goods and services, following Becker's theory of time use. Gordon stresses innovation is the ultimate source of all growth in output per worker-hour. GDP growth per person is equal to the growth in labor productivity + growth in hours worked per person. GDP has many problems. Gordon concludes that between 1870 and 1940 all available measures GDP is hugely understated because:
- GDP is a poor measure of:
- Value & wealth
- Who gets what
- Global supply chains
- GDP excludes:
- Reduction in infant mortality between 1890 (22%) and 1950 (1%)
- Brightness & safety of electric light,
- Increased variety of food including refrigeration transported fresh meat and processed food
- Convenience and economies of scale of the department store and mail order catalog and resulting product price reductions
- Services by house makers
- Time & health gains from having flush toilets, integrated sewer networks; rather than having to physically remove effluent and cope with fecal-oral transmission
- Leisure
- Costs & benefits of different length work weeks
- Speed and flexibility of motor vehicles - which were not included in the CPI until 1935, after the transformation had occurred. And competition from improved foreign vehicles, while it provides purchaser/user with improved standard of living (less breakdowns, repairs, etc.) is measured as reduced domestic manufacture
- Coercion and corruption to obtain resources
- Consumption impact of finite resources: coal, oil;
- Destruction impact of loss of entire irreplaceable species
- GDP includes items that should be excluded:
- Cost of waste - cleaning up pollution (single use indestructible plastic bags), building prisons, commuting to work, and cars left parked most of the time; should be subtracted
- Guanine-di-phosphate is a nucleotide base.
was already
larger than the UKs.
Harry Dexter White served as an
army officer in France in World War 1 performing training but no
active combat. His parents were tsarists from
Lithuania. He adopted his best friend's name Dexter, to
differentiate himself from the many other Harry Whites.
During the 1920s the wealth gap
in the US is the United States of America. widened. Many people were living in
poverty. The US financial system was building a
bubble. The political
response was the progressive movement. White had
already volunteered to help the poor as a school boy and in 1919
he was drawn back into social justice work along with New Deal was FDR's political platform to help the poor, support the economy and reform the banking system. The architects included Henry Morgenthau, Harry Hopkins, and Frances Perkins, who leveraged Al Smith's social welfare reform program plan. The New Deal: - Included liberal legislation: Emergency Banking Relief Act, Banking Act, SSA, Securities Act, Securities Exchange Act, National Housing Act, NIRA, National Labor Relations Act, FLSA, RTAA, Wealth Tax Act;
- Used Presidential executive orders,
- Enhanced the role of federal government in promoting economic growth with programs supporting:
- Reformed trade policy with the RTAA.
- Blocked deflation by limiting economic competition with the NRA.
- Rural standard of living through electrification with the REA and TVA.
- Reduced unemployment with the WPA and CCC.
- Made taxation progressive through the Wealth Tax Act, capturing private wealth and allowing income to flow to the emergent middle class.
architect Harry
Hopkins and Morgenthau.
White supplemented his Salman Khan argues that the evolved global education system is
inefficient and organized around constraining and corralling
students into accepting dubious ratings that lead to mundane
roles. He highlights a radical and already proven
alternative which offers effective self-paced deep learning
processes supported by technology and freed up attention of
teams of teachers. Building on his personal experience of
helping overcome the unjustified failing grade of a relative,
Khan:
- Iteratively learns how to teach: Starting with Nadia, Leveraging
short videos focused on content,
Converging on mastery,
With the help of
neuroscience, and filling
in dependent gaps; resulting in a different approach
to the mainstream method.
- Assesses the broken US education system: Set in its ways, Designed for the 1800s,
Inducing holes that
are hidden by tests, Tests
which ignore creativity.
The resulting teaching process is so inefficient it needs to
be supplemented with homework.
Instead teachers were encouraging their pupils to use his tools at home so
they could mentor them while they attended school, an
inversion that significantly improves the economics.
- Enters the real world: Builds a scalable service,
Working with a
real classroom, Trying stealth
learning, At Khan Academy full time, In the curriculum at
Los Altos, Supporting life-long
learning.
- Develops The One World Schoolhouse: Back to the future with
a one
room school, a robust
teaching team, and creativity enabled;
so with some catalysis
even the poorest can
become educated and earn credentials
for current jobs.
- Wishes he could also correct: Summer holidays, Transcript based
assessments, College
education;
- Concludes it is now possible to provide the infrastructure
for creativity to
emerge and to support risk taking.
Following our summary of his arguments RSS frames them from the
perspective of complex adaptive system (CAS) theory. Disruption is a powerful force for
change but if its force is used to support the current teachers
to adopt new processes can it overcome the extended phenotypic alignment and evolutionary amplifiers sustaining the
current educational network?
education
studying government at Columbia and then economics is the study of trade between humans. Traditional Economics is based on an equilibrium model of the economic system. Traditional Economics includes: microeconomics, and macroeconomics. Marx developed an alternative static approach. Limitations of the equilibrium model have resulted in the development of: Keynes's dynamic General Theory of Employment Interest & Money, and Complexity Economics. Since trading depends on human behavior, economics has developed behavioral models including: behavioral economics. at Stanford
where he was recognized as exceptional.
A short history of
Gold
The international economic is the study of trade between humans. Traditional Economics is based on an equilibrium model of the economic system. Traditional Economics includes: microeconomics, and macroeconomics. Marx developed an alternative static approach. Limitations of the equilibrium model have resulted in the development of: Keynes's dynamic General Theory of Employment Interest & Money, and Complexity Economics. Since trading depends on human behavior, economics has developed behavioral models including: behavioral economics.
system was based on gold was a set of informal agreements between central banks: - To support operation of the global trade between nation states
- To convert their local currency to gold at an agreed conversion rate when asked. It was
- Based on David Hume's price specie flow theory. But in practice it suffered from a mismatch between:
- An economy's changing situation
- The rigid rules constraining central bankers and
- The limited quantity of gold. When America's economy expanded during the 1920s and gold flowed into the country, struggling European economies deflated to maintain currency parity with gold. Economists such as Keynes argued it was more sensible to manage economies by responding to their situation within the global network.
.
But after World War 1 it could not cope. The Great War had
finished it off.
While a variety of metals had been used as currencies is legal tender which provides no interest payments to the holder. It is a central aspect of money and in CAS is an analog of a short term potential energy token such as the high energy phosphate bond of the base ATP. But the interaction of the geometric breeding and deaths of agents that perform actions and the linear increase in real resources, described by Turchin, results in the correspondence between energy and currency being complex and adaptive. historically
the UK is the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. 's use of gold and
centrality in world trade propelled the adoption of a gold standard was a set of informal agreements between central banks: - To support operation of the global trade between nation states
- To convert their local currency to gold at an agreed conversion rate when asked. It was
- Based on David Hume's price specie flow theory. But in practice it suffered from a mismatch between:
- An economy's changing situation
- The rigid rules constraining central bankers and
- The limited quantity of gold. When America's economy expanded during the 1920s and gold flowed into the country, struggling European economies deflated to maintain currency parity with gold. Economists such as Keynes argued it was more sensible to manage economies by responding to their situation within the global network.
.
But where the trading partners' economies is a human SuperOrganism complex adaptive system (CAS) which operates and controls trade flows within a rich niche. Economics models economies. Robert Gordon has described the evolution of the American economy. Like other CAS, economic flows are maintained far from equilibrium by: demand, financial flows and constraints, supply infrastructure constraints, political and military constraints; ensuring wealth, legislative control, legal contracts and power have significant leverage through evolved amplifiers. were weak the
deflationary pressures on pay and prices built resentment of the
standard. And central bankers often: Adjusted local
interest rates rather than moving gold from country to country,
Allowed more money to circulate than they had agreed; as the
rules required. It was difficult to match a country's
situation to its stock of gold.
It was only serendipitous discoveries of more gold that allowed
the metal to track the expansion of the world economy.
When gold was abandoned businesses found themselves in a
position of great uncertainty is when a factor is hard to measure because it is dependent on many interconnected agents and may be affected by infrastructure and evolved amplifiers. This is different from risk, although the two are deliberately conflated by ERISA. Keynes argued that most aspects of the future are uncertain, at best represented by ordinal probabilities, and often only by capricious hope for future innovation, fear inducing expectations of limited confidence, which evolutionary psychology implies is based on the demands of our hunter gatherer past. Deacon notes reduced uncertainty equates to information. from
the new floating exchange rates. However, brokers and
speculators including Keynes
made lots of money on currencies, shares and commodities.
Keynes was hit by the 1929 crash but recovered over the
1930s.
Economic consequences
The Peace of Versailles had disastrous consequences.
The UK is the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. had a terrible
1920s. There was 11% unemployment.
In the immediate aftermath of the Great War, with Britain still
off the Gold Standard was a set of informal agreements between central banks: - To support operation of the global trade between nation states
- To convert their local currency to gold at an agreed conversion rate when asked. It was
- Based on David Hume's price specie flow theory. But in practice it suffered from a mismatch between:
- An economy's changing situation
- The rigid rules constraining central bankers and
- The limited quantity of gold. When America's economy expanded during the 1920s and gold flowed into the country, struggling European economies deflated to maintain currency parity with gold. Economists such as Keynes argued it was more sensible to manage economies by responding to their situation within the global network.
,
the Bank of England and the Treasury engineered some inflation
to support the returning soldiers. Keynes was teaching at
Kings. His expertise was leveraged by the chancellor
Neville Chamberlin. But soon the government reversed
course raising interest rates to 7% to move the economy is a human SuperOrganism complex adaptive system (CAS) which operates and controls trade flows within a rich niche. Economics models economies. Robert Gordon has described the evolution of the American economy. Like other CAS, economic flows are maintained far from equilibrium by: demand, financial flows and constraints, supply infrastructure constraints, political and military constraints; ensuring wealth, legislative control, legal contracts and power have significant leverage through evolved amplifiers. in line with the
level of gold reserves so as to prepare for a return to
gold. The effect was to suck cash out of the economy and
generate terrible austerity. Keynes criticized the policy
arguing "The problem with the Gold Standard is it forces central
bankers to follow its rules instead of their economies."
Keynes asserted if all the countries followed the Gold Standard
there would be inflation in the US and deflation in the poorer
European economies.
In 1925 then Chancellor Winston Churchill, with poor advice from
the Bank of England and pressure from J.P.Morgan,
put the UK back on Gold. Churchill later admitted it was
the greatest mistake of his life.
Keynes wrote a tract on monetary reform in which he expressed
some of the key aspects of Keynesianism:
- Country should set economic policy for domestic reasons --
not the Gold Standard
- Deflation must be avoided at all costs
The US is the United States of America. had remained on
the Gold Standard throughout the Great War. Consequently
gold flowed into the country raising prices as Keynes had
foretold. Ignoring the rules of the standard the New York
Fed responded by constraining cash. Keynes noted that the
New York Fed was setting up a dollar standard masquerading as
gold.
Gold continued to flow into the US through the 1920s driving
inflation and an economic bubble which burst in 1929.
During the war France and Germany had both printed money to help
with funding. The result was both economies suffered from
inflation. The Peace agreement ensured the economies of
Germany and France were undermined:
White studied the French
Economy for his PhD dissertation. He concluded that 'hot
money' was a problem and should be constrained in both direction
and volume of flow. This became a central focus of Breton
Woods.
By 1932 The US boom had transformed into the Great Depression,
impacted by the 1929 crash and the 1931 failure of the huge
Austrian bank Credit Anstalt which was too big to fail and too
big to bail out. The Gold Standard helped the effects flow
around the world. Germany's economy had been expanding in
the late 1920s due to the inflow of American cash. The
1929 crash pulled this capital is the sum total nonhuman assets that can be owned and exchanged on some market according to Piketty. Capital includes: real property, financial capital and professional capital. It is not immutable instead depending on the state of the society within which it exists. It can be owned by governments (public capital) and private individuals (private capital).
out of Germany. Rather than print money Bruning allowed
the economy to deflate. The austerity polarized the people
and by 1932 the Nazi's were elected to power.
The UK was attacked by speculators. The treasury defended
the pound with a further austerity drive that was so severe the
British Navy went on strike. Having
expanded the vote to all males and so increased the influence of
labor Britain, and other European nations, had to abandon the
Gold Standard which the US considered a default on its war
debt.
In the US is the United States of America. the Gold Standard
then undermined bank rescues. Treasury is the department of the treasury. It is a federal government executive department created by Act of Congress in 1789 to manage government revenue. The Secretary of the Treasury is a Cabinet officer. With monetary policy devolved to the Federal Reserve, treasury manages fiscal policy. To support funding of high cost investments: Disaster recovery, Wars, Famines; the treasury can issue debt instruments and manage the national debt. Secretary Mellon
made the situation worse recommending the US liquidate:
- Labor
- Stock
- Stocks
- Farms emerged several times and various places, probably first around 11,000 years ago. It depends on and supports evolved amplifiers which introduce instability and problems with sustainability of the populations that depended on it, unlike the earlier hunting and gathering. Today the uncertainty can be hedged, although third world farmers' businesses are undermined by first world agricultural policy. J.R. McNeill explains the sustainability issue: "all farming is a struggle against the depletion of soil nutrients. Crops absorb nutrients; these are eaten by people or animals; then they spend shorter or longer periods of time in human or animal bodies, before returning to the soil. If these nutrients, in one manner or another, return to farmers' fields, then a nutrient cycle can last indefinitely. If they do not, then those fields gradually lose nutrient and over time produce less and less food - unless some intervention such as fertilizer counteracts the nutrient loss." However, McNeill notes three notable exceptions: Egypt until the Aswan High Dam, Southern China, Medieval Europe; "each ecologically successful over long periods of time." Their success resulted from trial and error and favorable circumstances.
- Real estate
White disagreed and proposed
some of Keynes's strategies
should be used by the President:
Conway notes White was also interested in looking at how the
Soviet economy was operating and expressed an interest in
understanding Gosplan was the central economic planning agency of the USSR. .
White took a temporary position at the Treasury is the department of the treasury. It is a federal government executive department created by Act of Congress in 1789 to manage government revenue. The Secretary of the Treasury is a Cabinet officer. With monetary policy devolved to the Federal Reserve, treasury manages fiscal policy. To support funding of high cost investments: Disaster recovery, Wars, Famines; the treasury can issue debt instruments and manage the national debt. where he rose
rapidly. FDR is President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. He is notable for his contributions to the US CAS: - New Deal strategies including:
- Lend-lease which pushed the US and Japan into World War 2 and helped the US to become the world's predominant military power.
- Bretton Woods's agreement which economically constrained any politically driven collapse of the world economy after the war and helped the US to become the world's predominant economic power.
's Treasury
Secretary, Morgenthau liked is an emotion which initiates and maintains an altruistic partnership. It is a willingness to offer someone a favor. It is directed to those who appear likely to return the favor.
White. Others thought him a self-serving snob and very
stubborn and became his enemies, leaving him totally dependent
on Morgenthau's backing.
FDR adopted Keynesian policies, but he found the man arrogant
and patronizing. He took the US off the gold standard in
1933. He ridiculed the gold standard indicating the US
would not go back onto it. Instead FDR set the value of
the dollar each morning over breakfast aiming to keep it low
relative to the pound. The result was a fiscal uses government revenue collection and spending to influence the economy. race to the
bottom which catalyzed the raising of trade barriers via the: Smoot-Hawley
act raised import duties on over 20,000 imported goods. It was signed into law by President Herbert Hoover in 1930. in the US and Sterling zone in the UK.
Keynes thought deeply about the failure of classical economic
theory to explain long lasting depressions. He replaced
the accepted theory -- "Say's
law asserts "A product is no sooner created, than it, from that instant, affords a market for other products to the full extent of its own value." And "As each of us can only purchase the productions of others with his own productions - as the value we can buy is equal to the value we can produce, the more men can produce, the more they will purchase." Since the value (benefit - cost) generated will depend on the cost of labor, this cost was assumed to be the only variable affecting the equilibrium. " that the cost of labor was the key variable and that
supply and demand otherwise operated an equilibrium -- with the
proposal, in The
General
Theory of Employment, Interest and Money is John Maynard Keynes's description of his theory of the dynamics of the economy. Skidelsky writes it is founded on his early studies of probability theory, which left Keynes to conclude economics must look at morals not physics, because: the human mind has no way to determine the currently unknowable future, to cope with uncertainty it becomes logical to use caprice (animal spirits) drifting between optimism and pessimism to pick, the selection is not well grounded and can be upset by trivial new data, learning is leveraged but the process is erratic changing ignorance and uncertainty only slowly, the decision making includes both expectations and confidence in the expectations. This analysis left Keynes: skeptical of econometrics: limited applicability, and easy to miss-apply; it disconnected investment strategy from net present values, and long-run productivity; undermining classical economics with its assumption that: demand and supply are rapidly and directly equilibrated by price (value) adjustments (Say's law), reaching a Pareto optimum. Instead Keynes suggested consumption was funded by wealth and employment generated income, leaving any free money to be: invested, saved or kept as cash; depending on the person's homeostatic confidence, and the inducements to save or invest. Additionally, Keynes realized that the global trade network was improving supply, transforming the environment from one of repeated clyodinamic induced scarcity to plenty, although it was held back by the anchor of gold. When people lost confidence they would reduce investment, expanding their savings or hording cash, and then companies would respond by: slowing production leading to layoffs - further reducing income, but only reluctantly and belatedly to price adjustments (Amazon's personalized pricing transforms this constraint); impeding demand and keeping employment below the Pareto optimum. Rather than allow the economy to shrink down to the level of current consumption or worse collapse, Keynes argued that government can expand investment and demand in these situations by: keeping money cheap, its own purchasing programs, reducing the cost of borrowing from the wealthy (liquidity preference) by increasing their confidence in getting returns from their investments through the positive expectations of government policy. Keynes saw that investment, being liquid, could be deployed on companies and infrastructure produced and deployed anywhere in the world decoupling growth from national jobs, so he pushed for capital flow constraints at Bretton Woods. Outsourcing of jobs similarly disconnects investment from local job creation. , that the key
variable was how much money people were willing to spend at any
particular time. He suggested in a depression people were
hording their money. In the US is the United States of America. ,
Harry Hopkins and Marriner Eckles accepted Keynes ideas and lobbied FDR is President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. He is notable for his contributions to the US CAS: - New Deal strategies including:
- Lend-lease which pushed the US and Japan into World War 2 and helped the US to become the world's predominant military power.
- Bretton Woods's agreement which economically constrained any politically driven collapse of the world economy after the war and helped the US to become the world's predominant economic power.
to abandon his balanced
budget strategy but Morgenthau was unconvinced. France,
following one of their own, Say, stuck with classical theory and
gold for as long as they could. In 1936 they finally
abandoned gold and came out of recession soon afterwards.
In 1937 Keynes was found to have IE is infective (bacterial) endocarditis. The infection of the endocardium -- heart inner lining -- or the heart valves causes inflammation and can be fatal.
and spent two years bed ridden. He struggled with it and
the treatments for the rest of his life.
After Hitler invaded Czechoslovakia, he had the BIS is the Bank for International Settlements based in Basel, Switzerland. It was initially setup to manage Germany's war reparations payments. transfer Czechoslovak gold
to Germany, with an ok from the Bank of England, to help pay for
the war effort. The US found out about the transfer.
In frustration they concluded that finance must be used to
subvert totalitarianism.
Lunatic Proposals
A Nazi international monetary system proposal, the financial
'new order', developed by economic is the study of trade between humans. Traditional Economics is based on an equilibrium model of the economic system. Traditional Economics includes: microeconomics, and macroeconomics. Marx developed an alternative static approach. Limitations of the equilibrium model have resulted in the development of: Keynes's dynamic General Theory of Employment Interest & Money, and Complexity Economics. Since trading depends on human behavior, economics has developed behavioral models including: behavioral economics.
minister Walter Funk was released in 1940. Conway jokes it
resembles the architecture of the EU is European Union, the 1992 Maastricht Council of Ministers meeting agreed evolution of the ECSC & CAP cartels to include: - A single market across the members' countries supporting the transformation of the ECSC. It maintained the CAP transfers assisting French farmers.
- A fixed currency 'snake' that allowed the ECSC to operate, binding the deutschmark to the other currencies of participating members: a mini Bretton Woods exchange rate mechanism; that became a single currency, the euro, managed by an independent ECB (based on the independent German Bundesbank); but tax gathering was allocated to the states whose leaders control the Council of Ministers and no effective mechanism was provided to reallocate revenues. This has left Germany with an advantage supported by the aggregate valuation of the euro and not having to flow tax revenues to the weaker economies of the south.
!
It included:
Harold Nicholson's UK Ministry of propaganda asked Keynes to lampoon the proposal
but Keynes liked most of the ideas. It:
It was the impetus for Keynes to formulate his own plan for post
war development is a phase during the operation of a CAS agent. It allows for schematic strategies to be iteratively blended with environmental signals to solve the logistical issues of migrating newly built and transformed sub-agents. That is needed to achieve the adult configuration of the agent and optimize it for the proximate environment. Smiley includes examples of the developmental phase agents required in an emergent CAS. In situations where parents invest in the growth and memetic learning of their offspring the schematic grab bag can support optimizations to develop models, structures and actions to construct an adept adult. In humans, adolescence leverages neural plasticity, elder sibling advice and adult coaching to help prepare the deploying neuronal network and body to successfully compete. of
the international monetary system. Ever since the
shattering of the Gold
Standard was a set of informal agreements between central banks: - To support operation of the global trade between nation states
- To convert their local currency to gold at an agreed conversion rate when asked. It was
- Based on David Hume's price specie flow theory. But in practice it suffered from a mismatch between:
- An economy's changing situation
- The rigid rules constraining central bankers and
- The limited quantity of gold. When America's economy expanded during the 1920s and gold flowed into the country, struggling European economies deflated to maintain currency parity with gold. Economists such as Keynes argued it was more sensible to manage economies by responding to their situation within the global network.
it was clear such a plan was needed to replace
the pre-war rules and regulations. All recent frameworks
had failed problematically. Keynes leveraged the
'new order' ideas but fixed the currencies to gold. His innovation is the economic realization of invention and combinatorial exaptation. Keynes noted it provided the unquantifiable beneficial possibility that limits fear of uncertainty. Innovation operates across all CAS, being supported by genetic and cultural means. Creativity provides the mutation and recombination genetic operators for the cultural process. While highly innovative, monopolies: AT&T, IBM; usually have limited economic reach, constraining productivity. This explains the use of regulation, or even its threat, that can check their power and drive the creations across the economy. was the
proposal of a 'European reconstruction fund' to help rebuild the
war ravaged economies is a human SuperOrganism complex adaptive system (CAS) which operates and controls trade flows within a rich niche. Economics models economies. Robert Gordon has described the evolution of the American economy. Like other CAS, economic flows are maintained far from equilibrium by: demand, financial flows and constraints, supply infrastructure constraints, political and military constraints; ensuring wealth, legislative control, legal contracts and power have significant leverage through evolved amplifiers. .
This would offset the starvation required by any
armistice.
White had independently
developed a similar proposal.
Germany's 1940 defeat of France and the UK is the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. resulted in Churchill
becoming prime minister and shifting the war effort from
financially limited to total deployment of resources, with the
presumption that the US is the United States of America. would
foot the bill. Given the political divisions in the US
that would prove impossible in the short term.
While the UK spiraled towards financial collapse FDR is President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. He is notable for his contributions to the US CAS: - New Deal strategies including:
- Lend-lease which pushed the US and Japan into World War 2 and helped the US to become the world's predominant military power.
- Bretton Woods's agreement which economically constrained any politically driven collapse of the world economy after the war and helped the US to become the world's predominant economic power.
worked to:
But, to the UK leadership now aims to develop plans and strategies which ensure effective coordination to improve the common good of the in-group. Pinker notes the evolved pressure of social rivalry associating power with leadership. Saposky observes the disconnect between power hierarchies and wisdom in apes. John Adair developed a modern leadership methodology based on the three-circles model. 's
dismay FDR then spent 1941 backing away from Lend-lease.
A German bomb killed Lord Josiah Stamp. Having already
worked with the US on the Dawes plan of 1924 was developed to resolve the crushing World War 1 reparations problem. It was proposed by the US Dawes Committee with UK negotiator Lord Stamp. It provided for an end to the Allied occupation of the Ruhr, and phased payments by Germany. The plan proved unworkable and was replaced in 1929 by the Young Plan. and
being liked is an emotion which initiates and maintains an altruistic partnership. It is a willingness to offer someone a favor. It is directed to those who appear likely to return the favor. and respected
there, he had been the UK's natural choice to be the financial
envoy to the US. Keynes replaced him at the Bank of
England and as the envoy. With the UK rapidly collapsing
it was urgent to get Lend-lease operative.
While his reputation and ideas were admired Keynes alienated all
the US leaders during his Lend-lease visit. Conway argues
this was in part because Keynes was used to the UK's ministerial
government, where a few private meetings can build agreement and
action around his economic arguments. He was unaware of
the constraints
and strategies required to operate the US government. And
then there was his personality describes the operation of the mind from the perspective of psychological models and tests based on them. Early 'Western' models of personality resulted in a simple segmentation noting the tension between: individual desires and group needs, and developing models and performing actions. Dualistic 'Eastern' philosophies promote the legitimacy of an essence which Riso & Hudson argue is hidden within a shell of personality types and is only reached by developing presence. The logic of a coherent essence is in conflict with the evolved nature of emotions outlined by Pinker. Terman's studies of personality identified types which Friedman and Martin link to healthy and unhealthy pathways. Current psychiatric models highlight at least five key aspects: - Extroversion-introversion - whether the person gains mental dynamism from socializing or retiring
- Neuroticism-stability - does a person worry or are they calm and self-satisfied
- Agreeableness-antagonism - is a person courteous & trusting or rude and suspicious
- Conscientiousness-un-directedness - is a person careful or careless
- Openness-non-openness - are they daring or conforming
!
This mixture alienated Secretary Morgenthau who had already
taken political risks for the UK is the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. .
Keynes discovered the Lend-lease agreement had a sting in its
tail: The US is the United States of America. was requiring a free trade
agreement. This would undermine Imperial Preference, the
trade barrier placed around the empire which was stopping the
dominions from realizing their UK is the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland.
sterling debts. Keynes
felt he must protect the post-war UK from speculators and a cash
collapse and thus resist free trade. But FDR is President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. He is notable for his contributions to the US CAS: - New Deal strategies including:
- Lend-lease which pushed the US and Japan into World War 2 and helped the US to become the world's predominant military power.
- Bretton Woods's agreement which economically constrained any politically driven collapse of the world economy after the war and helped the US to become the world's predominant economic power.
required it and it became
agreed as article VII of Lend-lease.
FDR, Morgenthau and White
then extended Lend-lease financial support to the Soviet
Union. The Japanese responded with the attack on Pearl
Harbor. The people of the US accepted they were at war
with Japan and Germany.
Bedlam 1941-44
After Pearl Harbor in Dec 1941 Morgenthau made White 'unofficially' an
assistant secretary. He asked White to consider the
potential of an international currency is legal tender which provides no interest payments to the holder. It is a central aspect of money and in CAS is an analog of a short term potential energy token such as the high energy phosphate bond of the base ATP. But the interaction of the geometric breeding and deaths of agents that perform actions and the linear increase in real resources, described by Turchin, results in the correspondence between energy and currency being complex and adaptive. . White
developed a post-war currency plan designed to secure the US is the United States of America. economic is the study of trade between humans. Traditional Economics is based on an equilibrium model of the economic system. Traditional Economics includes: microeconomics, and macroeconomics. Marx developed an alternative static approach. Limitations of the equilibrium model have resulted in the development of: Keynes's dynamic General Theory of Employment Interest & Money, and Complexity Economics. Since trading depends on human behavior, economics has developed behavioral models including: behavioral economics. rise and push
the UK is the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. further from the
center. He aimed to disband the Sterling zone, to replace
London as the key financial hub.
White's plan had two economic goals:
- Stabilize
foreign exchange rates - via a stabilization fund which
became White's main
focus.
- Setup an agency to rebuild the world economy is a human SuperOrganism complex adaptive system (CAS) which operates and controls trade flows within a rich niche. Economics models economies. Robert Gordon has described the evolution of the American economy. Like other CAS, economic flows are maintained far from equilibrium by: demand, financial flows and constraints, supply infrastructure constraints, political and military constraints; ensuring wealth, legislative control, legal contracts and power have significant leverage through evolved amplifiers.
after the
war. A bank to support reconstruction and
redevelopment.
White's plan had a clause allowing countries to levy tariffs on
a country whose currency is legal tender which provides no interest payments to the holder. It is a central aspect of money and in CAS is an analog of a short term potential energy token such as the high energy phosphate bond of the base ATP. But the interaction of the geometric breeding and deaths of agents that perform actions and the linear increase in real resources, described by Turchin, results in the correspondence between energy and currency being complex and adaptive.
became scarce. It became part of the IMF is the International Monetary Fund developed as part of the Bretton Woods agreements to provide liquidity to national gold denominated reserve banks at times of stress in the global financial network - a shortage of a particular currency which was inhibiting trade; in support of a broader Bretton Woods framework designed so as to ensure that currencies did not become misaligned with one another, and were a fair representation of what things were worth. The IMF removed the need for nations to depend on private loans from commercial banks, such as Britain's dependence on J. P. Morgan during the 1920s and 30s. The agreement required each Bretton Woods signatory to provide a capital investment or 'quota' into the fund which would subsequently correspond to the amount that the country could borrow from the fund in times of financial stress. The top four countries and their quotas were set by IMF architect, Harry Dexter White, to match FDR's priorities: - US - $2.9 billion, an amount the FDR administration could transfer from Exchange Stabilization Fund without any need to ask for Congress for funds.
- UK - $1.45 billion
- USSR - slightly less than UK quota
- China - less than USSR.
articles but, Conway notes,
has never been used.
White proposed to Morgenthau a conference to agree on the
implementation with all the allied governments.
But the US Treasury is the department of the treasury. It is a federal government executive department created by Act of Congress in 1789 to manage government revenue. The Secretary of the Treasury is a Cabinet officer. With monetary policy devolved to the Federal Reserve, treasury manages fiscal policy. To support funding of high cost investments: Disaster recovery, Wars, Famines; the treasury can issue debt instruments and manage the national debt. was
struggling to limit the State
Department's competitive proposals to meet with the allies and
formulate a politically driven 'peace conference.'
The UK is the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. ministers responded to
Lend-lease included a preliminary agreement and the act. - Agreement included 8 articles:
- The US agreed to supply defense articles services and information as the President authorizes.
- The UK will contribute to the defense of the US providing such articles it is in a position to supply.
- This resulted in the transfer of a cavity magnetron, the designs of the VT fuze and Whittle jet engine and the description of the feasibility of the A bomb. As well as designs of rockets, superchargers, gyroscopic gunsights, submarine detection devices, self-sealing fuel tanks and plastic explosives.
- UK can not transfer title of the goods and services without permission of the President.
- Patent protected articles and information will be paid by the UK government when requested to do so by the President.
- At the end of the emergency the UK government will return articles and information that has not been destroyed or used as requested by the President.
- In assessing the articles to be returned the US will take into account articles already transferred to the US and accepted/acknowledged by the President.
- The final benefits provided by the UK to the US in return for the aid will include:
- No burden to commerce between the two countries
- Promotion of mutually advantageous economic relations
- Betterment of world-wide economic relations
- Elimination of all forms of discriminatory treatment in international commerce
- Reduction of tariffs and other trade barriers.
- Conversations to be held to determine in the light of governing economic conditions, the best means of attaining the objectives.
- Agreement to take effect immediately.
- Act to Promote the Defense of the United States, of March 1941 which superseded the neutrality acts.
article
VII. So Keynes
initiated work on a plan for a post-war international currency
framework, but based on a debtor's perspective. The This page discusses the benefits of bringing agents and resources to the
dynamically best connected region of a complex adaptive system (CAS).
centralization of academic talent in
the treasury during the war encouraged the development of a
variety of ground breaking plans:
- Mead and Robbins White Paper on Employment
- Beveridge's plan for a Welfare State
Keynes's plan looked to fix the Gold Standard was a set of informal agreements between central banks: - To support operation of the global trade between nation states
- To convert their local currency to gold at an agreed conversion rate when asked. It was
- Based on David Hume's price specie flow theory. But in practice it suffered from a mismatch between:
- An economy's changing situation
- The rigid rules constraining central bankers and
- The limited quantity of gold. When America's economy expanded during the 1920s and gold flowed into the country, struggling European economies deflated to maintain currency parity with gold. Economists such as Keynes argued it was more sensible to manage economies by responding to their situation within the global network.
s:
- Compulsory adjustments for debtor nations
- Voluntary adjustments for creditor nations
Keynes developed two proposals:
- A decoy proposal which made adjustments compulsory for
both creditor and debtor based on barter. Every
country had to develop bilateral agreements with all trading
partners ensuring compensating trade flows. The Bank
of England liked this strategy since it protected the
sterling zone.
- The real proposal of a
clearing union. This included:
Feedback from the UK is the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. treasury
team in the US is the United States of America. was that Keynes
real plan would not be attractive to the Americans.
Congress does not like is an emotion which initiates and maintains an altruistic partnership. It is a willingness to offer someone a favor. It is directed to those who appear likely to return the favor.
super national structures, creditor penalties or powerful
central banks.
Conway notes that both the White
and Keynes plans contained common goals of:
It was imperative to the UK, as a major debtor coming out of the
war, to ensure the existence of a framework that would pull the
UK out of collapse. They assumed that agreeing a plan in
private with the US would be the best way to achieve this
goal. They hoped to leverage Keynes plan in joint
discussions to achieve this goal.
Keynes and White reviewed each other's plans in the summer of
1942 and realized there was quite a lot in common:
Keynes was critical of White's using gold with an
amplifier. He advocated for the
clearing union. But he was relieved to see White
move the UK's "blocked
balances" over to the fund.
Surprisingly the UK leadership now aims to develop plans and strategies which ensure effective coordination to improve the common good of the in-group. Pinker notes the evolved pressure of social rivalry associating power with leadership. Saposky observes the disconnect between power hierarchies and wisdom in apes. John Adair developed a modern leadership methodology based on the three-circles model.
rejected this offer and then subsequently struggled with
repaying these debts to the dominions.
The US wanted limited liability on extending US credit and was
frustrated that Keynes plan provided few constraints on any
country except the US.
The meeting of White and Keynes identified the main differences:
- Fund's size - which was too small according to
Keynes. The US agreed to double its size.
- Countries were required to invest upfront which would be
difficult for the UK.
- Exchange rate changes were controlled by the US which the
UK feared.
When the two plans were leaked to the public the US position
became "adopt White's plan or there will be no plan." The
UK had little choice since the dominions liked White's plan as
well. So the UK decided to push for:
- More power to the members of the fund
- Reducing the amount of gold that had to be given to the
fund
- An international currency. White could not see any
viable currency but gold backed dollars.
- A meeting between the UK and US in Washington in the
autumn of 1943 to leverage the pragmatism of war time to
gain agreement to an economically valid plan - with workable
solutions to the initial goals.
Snake Bite Party
FDR is President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. He is notable for his contributions to the US CAS: - New Deal strategies including:
- Lend-lease which pushed the US and Japan into World War 2 and helped the US to become the world's predominant military power.
- Bretton Woods's agreement which economically constrained any politically driven collapse of the world economy after the war and helped the US to become the world's predominant economic power.
reelection planning
resulted in two goals for White:
- Deal must be sealed by the Democratic convention
- Deal must not look like a fait-a-comp-lit to the
participants or Congress.
White concluded he must get the economic is the study of trade between humans. Traditional Economics is based on an equilibrium model of the economic system. Traditional Economics includes: microeconomics, and macroeconomics. Marx developed an alternative static approach. Limitations of the equilibrium model have resulted in the development of: Keynes's dynamic General Theory of Employment Interest & Money, and Complexity Economics. Since trading depends on human behavior, economics has developed behavioral models including: behavioral economics. essentials
agreed prior to the main meeting. He would leave the
question of IMF is the International Monetary Fund developed as part of the Bretton Woods agreements to provide liquidity to national gold denominated reserve banks at times of stress in the global financial network - a shortage of a particular currency which was inhibiting trade; in support of a broader Bretton Woods framework designed so as to ensure that currencies did not become misaligned with one another, and were a fair representation of what things were worth. The IMF removed the need for nations to depend on private loans from commercial banks, such as Britain's dependence on J. P. Morgan during the 1920s and 30s. The agreement required each Bretton Woods signatory to provide a capital investment or 'quota' into the fund which would subsequently correspond to the amount that the country could borrow from the fund in times of financial stress. The top four countries and their quotas were set by IMF architect, Harry Dexter White, to match FDR's priorities: - US - $2.9 billion, an amount the FDR administration could transfer from Exchange Stabilization Fund without any need to ask for Congress for funds.
- UK - $1.45 billion
- USSR - slightly less than UK quota
- China - less than USSR.
quotas for
the main Bretton Woods Summit.
White proposed to have a pre-summit to agree the economic
essentials. In effect that:
On the trip over to Atlantic City for the Bretton Woods
pre-meeting Keynes and his
team developed an alternative 'boat draft' of White's plan for
the Fund. And Keynes developed a proposal for the World Bank was setup as part of the Bretton Woods agreements, as the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development, to repair and reconstruct Europe after the Second World War and as the World Bank continues to provide reconstruction and development resources for projects in developing economies. It includes: - International Finance Corporation
to ensure
recovery funding for Europe. The difficulty with building
this proposal was that the team was all economists not
bankers.
Babel on Wheels June 1944
White's aim was to keep the US
government leaders now aims to develop plans and strategies which ensure effective coordination to improve the common good of the in-group. Pinker notes the evolved pressure of social rivalry associating power with leadership. Saposky observes the disconnect between power hierarchies and wisdom in apes. John Adair developed a modern leadership methodology based on the three-circles model.
away from the Atlantic City pre-meeting so that he could
guarantee to achieve FDR is President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. He is notable for his contributions to the US CAS: - New Deal strategies including:
- Lend-lease which pushed the US and Japan into World War 2 and helped the US to become the world's predominant military power.
- Bretton Woods's agreement which economically constrained any politically driven collapse of the world economy after the war and helped the US to become the world's predominant economic power.
's goal 1 by agreeing a sound economic is the study of trade between humans. Traditional Economics is based on an equilibrium model of the economic system. Traditional Economics includes: microeconomics, and macroeconomics. Marx developed an alternative static approach. Limitations of the equilibrium model have resulted in the development of: Keynes's dynamic General Theory of Employment Interest & Money, and Complexity Economics. Since trading depends on human behavior, economics has developed behavioral models including: behavioral economics. framework with
the British. As the pre-summit progressed this strategy
backfired when Morgenthau becoming panicked that he did not know
what he was going to be asked to sign.
At Atlantic City White kept his overall plan to his closest
confidants such as Edward Bernstein, but his full team were
allocated discrete aspects and trained how to manage them since
White would be preoccupied in chairing the summit:
White had his lawyers alter the economic wording so that its
goals and constraints were obtuse. His aim was to ensure
that there was wiggle room for the fund managers to cope with
any circumstance. Keynes
called the language "Cherokee" but White ensured it stayed in
the plan for the fund.
The US is the United States of America. rejected the UK is the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. 's "boat draft" IMF is the International Monetary Fund developed as part of the Bretton Woods agreements to provide liquidity to national gold denominated reserve banks at times of stress in the global financial network - a shortage of a particular currency which was inhibiting trade; in support of a broader Bretton Woods framework designed so as to ensure that currencies did not become misaligned with one another, and were a fair representation of what things were worth. The IMF removed the need for nations to depend on private loans from commercial banks, such as Britain's dependence on J. P. Morgan during the 1920s and 30s. The agreement required each Bretton Woods signatory to provide a capital investment or 'quota' into the fund which would subsequently correspond to the amount that the country could borrow from the fund in times of financial stress. The top four countries and their quotas were set by IMF architect, Harry Dexter White, to match FDR's priorities: - US - $2.9 billion, an amount the FDR administration could transfer from Exchange Stabilization Fund without any need to ask for Congress for funds.
- UK - $1.45 billion
- USSR - slightly less than UK quota
- China - less than USSR.
changes. The UK was
hamstrung by the dominions acceptance of the US positions.
The US allowed some leeway with the World Bank was setup as part of the Bretton Woods agreements, as the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development, to repair and reconstruct Europe after the Second World War and as the World Bank continues to provide reconstruction and development resources for projects in developing economies. It includes: - International Finance Corporation
where Keynes
wanted to allow delayed payments for capital is the sum total nonhuman assets that can be owned and exchanged on some market according to Piketty. Capital includes: real property, financial capital and professional capital. It is not immutable instead depending on the state of the society within which it exists. It can be owned by governments (public capital) and private individuals (private capital). and which the US
appeared to be using to trade its potential for redevelopment of
debtor and undeveloped nations to gain votes for the US IMF is the International Monetary Fund developed as part of the Bretton Woods agreements to provide liquidity to national gold denominated reserve banks at times of stress in the global financial network - a shortage of a particular currency which was inhibiting trade; in support of a broader Bretton Woods framework designed so as to ensure that currencies did not become misaligned with one another, and were a fair representation of what things were worth. The IMF removed the need for nations to depend on private loans from commercial banks, such as Britain's dependence on J. P. Morgan during the 1920s and 30s. The agreement required each Bretton Woods signatory to provide a capital investment or 'quota' into the fund which would subsequently correspond to the amount that the country could borrow from the fund in times of financial stress. The top four countries and their quotas were set by IMF architect, Harry Dexter White, to match FDR's priorities: - US - $2.9 billion, an amount the FDR administration could transfer from Exchange Stabilization Fund without any need to ask for Congress for funds.
- UK - $1.45 billion
- USSR - slightly less than UK quota
- China - less than USSR.
proposals.
The Summit: week one
White's goal for the Bretton Woods's summit
was to agree a plan that all attendee's would sign-up to.
He ran his team through a The page describes the SWOT
process. That includes:
- The classification
of each event into strength weakness opportunity and
threat.
- The clustering
process for grouping the classified events into goals.
- How the clusters
can support planning and execution.
Operational SWOT matrices and clusters from the Adaptive Web
Framework (AWF) are included as examples.
SWOT of
each of their opponents regarding the fund is the International Monetary Fund developed as part of the Bretton Woods agreements to provide liquidity to national gold denominated reserve banks at times of stress in the global financial network - a shortage of a particular currency which was inhibiting trade; in support of a broader Bretton Woods framework designed so as to ensure that currencies did not become misaligned with one another, and were a fair representation of what things were worth. The IMF removed the need for nations to depend on private loans from commercial banks, such as Britain's dependence on J. P. Morgan during the 1920s and 30s. The agreement required each Bretton Woods signatory to provide a capital investment or 'quota' into the fund which would subsequently correspond to the amount that the country could borrow from the fund in times of financial stress. The top four countries and their quotas were set by IMF architect, Harry Dexter White, to match FDR's priorities: - US - $2.9 billion, an amount the FDR administration could transfer from Exchange Stabilization Fund without any need to ask for Congress for funds.
- UK - $1.45 billion
- USSR - slightly less than UK quota
- China - less than USSR.
's quotas:
- China would demand to be fourth
- France will require 5th place but so will India
- Latin American countries were important to the US is the United States of America. since they could backstop
any contested US vote at Bretton Woods.
White had organized the summit around three commissions.
The two main commissions were meant to run for a week
each. However it soon became clear that to meet FDR is President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. He is notable for his contributions to the US CAS: - New Deal strategies including:
- Lend-lease which pushed the US and Japan into World War 2 and helped the US to become the world's predominant military power.
- Bretton Woods's agreement which economically constrained any politically driven collapse of the world economy after the war and helped the US to become the world's predominant economic power.
's deadlines the three would
have to run in parallel:
- The IMF is the International Monetary Fund developed as part of the Bretton Woods agreements to provide liquidity to national gold denominated reserve banks at times of stress in the global financial network - a shortage of a particular currency which was inhibiting trade; in support of a broader Bretton Woods framework designed so as to ensure that currencies did not become misaligned with one another, and were a fair representation of what things were worth. The IMF removed the need for nations to depend on private loans from commercial banks, such as Britain's dependence on J. P. Morgan during the 1920s and 30s. The agreement required each Bretton Woods signatory to provide a capital investment or 'quota' into the fund which would subsequently correspond to the amount that the country could borrow from the fund in times of financial stress. The top four countries and their quotas were set by IMF architect, Harry Dexter White, to match FDR's priorities:
- US - $2.9 billion, an amount the FDR administration could transfer from Exchange Stabilization Fund without any need to ask for Congress for funds.
- UK - $1.45 billion
- USSR - slightly less than UK quota
- China - less than USSR.
commission. White chaired this commission. It
had four main committees:
- Quotas. The French were livid with their
allocation. White had an additional $800 million for
sweetening the disappointed but it took a promise from
Morgenthau, that the French would become one of the five
directors of the IMF to calm Mendes France. The USSR is the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. was given a larger
quota than their economy is a human SuperOrganism complex adaptive system (CAS) which operates and controls trade flows within a rich niche. Economics models economies. Robert Gordon has described the evolution of the American economy. Like other CAS, economic flows are maintained far from equilibrium by: demand, financial flows and constraints, supply infrastructure constraints, political and military constraints; ensuring wealth, legislative control, legal contracts and power have significant leverage through evolved amplifiers.
currently justified. This was in-line with FDR's
view of their future importance and his desire to
partner with both them and the Chinese. But whatever
the US is the United States of America. offered, the USSR
demanded more! Was the USSR being secretly coached
by White?
- How the fund would operate
- How it would be managed
- Legal status is a publically accepted, signal that one possesses assets: wealth, beauty, talent, expertise, access & trust of powerful people; to be able to help others.
and
form. There was also a standing committee that would
sweep up loose ends later on each day.
- The World Bank was setup as part of the Bretton Woods agreements, as the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development, to repair and reconstruct Europe after the Second World War and as the World Bank continues to provide reconstruction and development resources for projects in developing economies. It includes:
- International Finance Corporation
commission. Keynes
chaired this commission. The pressure soon undermined
his already weakened heart is infective (bacterial) endocarditis. The infection of the endocardium -- heart inner lining -- or the heart valves causes inflammation and can be fatal. .
- Other means of international financial cooperation.
This was used to catch problems that White and Keynes wished
to avoid: Silver, Future of the BIS is the Bank for International Settlements based in Basel, Switzerland. It was initially setup to manage Germany's war reparations payments. .
- The Latin Americans being useful to the US position were
able to obtain an IMF clause from White allowing
"coconuts, or silver" to be used as collatoral by the
IMF. But the clause has never been executed.
The 'blocked
Sterling balances' were soon raised during the meetings of
'week one' by the Indians and Egyptians. Robbins responded
that the blocked balances were a private matter between His
Majesty's government and the dominions and should not be raised
at the summit. Conway notes that a summit on the future
world financial system would seem the perfect place to raise
this issue but the dominions were cowed into submission.
Conway continues that it was never-the-less a clear indicator of
the shift in power between the US, the UK and the UK's
dominions.
The Summit: week two
The discussions on the World
Bank was setup as part of the Bretton Woods agreements, as the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development, to repair and reconstruct Europe after the Second World War and as the World Bank continues to provide reconstruction and development resources for projects in developing economies. It includes: - International Finance Corporation
helped support White's
plan by providing attractive facilities to keep countries
interested and offset the unattractive discipline the IMF is the International Monetary Fund developed as part of the Bretton Woods agreements to provide liquidity to national gold denominated reserve banks at times of stress in the global financial network - a shortage of a particular currency which was inhibiting trade; in support of a broader Bretton Woods framework designed so as to ensure that currencies did not become misaligned with one another, and were a fair representation of what things were worth. The IMF removed the need for nations to depend on private loans from commercial banks, such as Britain's dependence on J. P. Morgan during the 1920s and 30s. The agreement required each Bretton Woods signatory to provide a capital investment or 'quota' into the fund which would subsequently correspond to the amount that the country could borrow from the fund in times of financial stress. The top four countries and their quotas were set by IMF architect, Harry Dexter White, to match FDR's priorities: - US - $2.9 billion, an amount the FDR administration could transfer from Exchange Stabilization Fund without any need to ask for Congress for funds.
- UK - $1.45 billion
- USSR - slightly less than UK quota
- China - less than USSR.
would clearly impose.
White provided the World Bank with $10 billion to help with
redevelopment.
Through his writing of the draft and chairing of the commission
Keynes was able to transform
the World Bank from this one time pot of money to an amplifier
of private investment through making the World Bank function as
a guarantor of the private funds. Keynes was perplexed
that the US is the United States of America. continued to refer
to this infrastructure as a bank.
With Keynes busy chairing commission 2, his economist is the study of trade between humans. Traditional Economics is based on an equilibrium model of the economic system. Traditional Economics includes: microeconomics, and macroeconomics. Marx developed an alternative static approach. Limitations of the equilibrium model have resulted in the development of: Keynes's dynamic General Theory of Employment Interest & Money, and Complexity Economics. Since trading depends on human behavior, economics has developed behavioral models including: behavioral economics. colleague,
Dennis Robertson was left to participate on commission 1.
For political reasons the US had avoided associating the global
currency is legal tender which provides no interest payments to the holder. It is a central aspect of money and in CAS is an analog of a short term potential energy token such as the high energy phosphate bond of the base ATP. But the interaction of the geometric breeding and deaths of agents that perform actions and the linear increase in real resources, described by Turchin, results in the correspondence between energy and currency being complex and adaptive. with the dollar
in the Bretton Woods's drafts. Robertson
proposed explicitly stating that the dollar be tied to
gold. Keynes did not
discover this update to the IMF is the International Monetary Fund developed as part of the Bretton Woods agreements to provide liquidity to national gold denominated reserve banks at times of stress in the global financial network - a shortage of a particular currency which was inhibiting trade; in support of a broader Bretton Woods framework designed so as to ensure that currencies did not become misaligned with one another, and were a fair representation of what things were worth. The IMF removed the need for nations to depend on private loans from commercial banks, such as Britain's dependence on J. P. Morgan during the 1920s and 30s. The agreement required each Bretton Woods signatory to provide a capital investment or 'quota' into the fund which would subsequently correspond to the amount that the country could borrow from the fund in times of financial stress. The top four countries and their quotas were set by IMF architect, Harry Dexter White, to match FDR's priorities: - US - $2.9 billion, an amount the FDR administration could transfer from Exchange Stabilization Fund without any need to ask for Congress for funds.
- UK - $1.45 billion
- USSR - slightly less than UK quota
- China - less than USSR.
plans until after the conference. He never forgave
Robertson. The IMF eventually added SDR is Special Drawing Right, a global reserve asset used by the IMF. SDRs can be freely exchanged for usable currencies. The SDR is associated with the current value of a basket of currencies. In 1969 this basket included: US dollars, euros, Japanese yen and pound sterling. In Oct 2016 the renminbi will be added to the basket. s in line with Keynes's
thinking. Robertson's initial tie of the dollar to gold
pushed the pound from the center of global currency is legal tender which provides no interest payments to the holder. It is a central aspect of money and in CAS is an analog of a short term potential energy token such as the high energy phosphate bond of the base ATP. But the interaction of the geometric breeding and deaths of agents that perform actions and the linear increase in real resources, described by Turchin, results in the correspondence between energy and currency being complex and adaptive.
trades. Eventually in the 1970s it destroyed the
Bretton Woods agreement when President Nixon could not defend
the dollar against the trade deficit with Europe and Euro-dollar
to gold speculation.
The UK is the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. did manage to weaken
the IMF constraints to protect the pound from the 'blocked balances'
for a few years:
- A five year transition was added to IMF membership.
- Countries were allowed some leeway to devalue without IMF
constraints. But these changes undermined the
goals of the Bretton Woods agreement.
Latin America used its leverage
with the US to extend the charter of the World Bank was setup as part of the Bretton Woods agreements, as the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development, to repair and reconstruct Europe after the Second World War and as the World Bank continues to provide reconstruction and development resources for projects in developing economies. It includes: - International Finance Corporation
and their
position:
The Summit: week three
White proposed IMF is the International Monetary Fund developed as part of the Bretton Woods agreements to provide liquidity to national gold denominated reserve banks at times of stress in the global financial network - a shortage of a particular currency which was inhibiting trade; in support of a broader Bretton Woods framework designed so as to ensure that currencies did not become misaligned with one another, and were a fair representation of what things were worth. The IMF removed the need for nations to depend on private loans from commercial banks, such as Britain's dependence on J. P. Morgan during the 1920s and 30s. The agreement required each Bretton Woods signatory to provide a capital investment or 'quota' into the fund which would subsequently correspond to the amount that the country could borrow from the fund in times of financial stress. The top four countries and their quotas were set by IMF architect, Harry Dexter White, to match FDR's priorities: - US - $2.9 billion, an amount the FDR administration could transfer from Exchange Stabilization Fund without any need to ask for Congress for funds.
- UK - $1.45 billion
- USSR - slightly less than UK quota
- China - less than USSR.
wording that would
guarantee to destroy the BIS is the Bank for International Settlements based in Basel, Switzerland. It was initially setup to manage Germany's war reparations payments.
'IMF membership is incompatible with BIS membership'.
Conway comments:
Keynes responded in anger is an emotion which protects a person who has been cheated by a supposed friend. When the exploitation of the altruism is discovered, Steven Pinker explains, the result is a drive for moralistic aggression to hurt the cheater. Anger is mostly experienced as a rapid wave that then quickly dissipates. When it is repressed, for example by a strong moral sense (superego), it can sustain, inducing long term stress. to the BIS
wording. He rushed to Morgenthau and expressed his
concerns but became seriously ill. White responded by
changing the wording to 'the liquidation of the [BIS] at the
earliest possible moment.' Keynes joked that this would be
'not very early.'
White included IMF language that placed its headquarters in New
York. Conway explains the US is the United States of America.
was intent on resting away financial leadership now aims to develop plans and strategies which ensure effective coordination to improve the common good of the in-group. Pinker notes the evolved pressure of social rivalry associating power with leadership. Saposky observes the disconnect between power hierarchies and wisdom in apes. John Adair developed a modern leadership methodology based on the three-circles model. from London
to New York. Keynes was powerless to stop this with the
presence of Latin American votes to push through any US
position.
USSR is the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. continued to demand more
concessions: especially from the World Bank was setup as part of the Bretton Woods agreements, as the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development, to repair and reconstruct Europe after the Second World War and as the World Bank continues to provide reconstruction and development resources for projects in developing economies. It includes: - International Finance Corporation
. They
were allowed control over their exchange rate for example.
And their request for a 0.5% concession when a country was
partly occupied was granted. In the main the US paid for
the cost of these shifts.
All participants signed off on the Bretton Woods agreement at
the end of week three.
Unmitigated Evil
There was an immediate campaign in the US is the United States of America. to destroy the Bretton Woods
agreement. It was the focus of the ABA is the: - American Bankers Association.
- American Board of Anesthesiology.
, supported by the New York
Federal Reserve of 1913 was a response to a series of banking panics with the goal of responding effectively to stresses. It setup: - At least 8 and not more than 12 private regional Federal Reserve banks. Twelve were setup
- Federal Reserve Board with seven members to govern the system. The President appointed the seven, which must be confirmed by Congress. In 1935 the Board was renamed and restructured.
- Federal Advisory Committee with twelve members
- Single US currency - the Federal Reserve Note.
.
Prior to the summit they offered the UK is the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. $3 billion if it would not
back Bretton Woods. Keynes
said no to the gambit. Having expected the summit to
collapse, the ABA scrambled to warn Congress of the dangers of
the agreement. The administration went on a defensive
publicity tour. However, the public was disinterested and
the House and Senate passed the agreement into law.
After Bretton Woods was signed Keynes knew he must get more
finances to stave off UK collapse:
Even before that occurred Keynes was asked by the UK to go back
to the US and beg for more financing but the situation became
suddenly more difficult:
Starvation Corner
Execution of the allied war plan destroyed infrastructure across
Europe. And the US is the United States of America. was
still blocking exports. By the end of the war all this
ensured:
- Shortages for the disconnected groups of:
- Stress is a multi-faceted condition reflecting high cortisol levels. Dr. Robert Sapolsky's studies of baboons indicate that stress helps build readiness for fight or flight. As these actions occur the levels of cortisol return to the baseline rate. A stressor is anything that disrupts the regular homeostatic balance. The stress response is the array of neural and endocrine changes that occur to respond effectively to the crisis and reestablish homeostasis.
- The short term response to the stressor
- activates the amygdala which: Stimulates the brain stem resulting in inhibition of the parasympathetic nervous system and activation of the sympathetic nervous system with the hormones epinephrine and norepinephrine deployed around the body, Activates the PVN which generates a cascade resulting in glucocorticoid secretion to: get energy to the muscles with increased blood pressure for a powerful response. The brain's acuity and cognition are stimulated. The immune system is stimulated with beta-endorphin and repair activities curtail. In order for the body to destroy bacteria in wounds, pro-inflammatory cytokines increase blood flow to the area. The induced inflammation signals the brain to activate the insula and through it the ACC. But when the stressor is
- long term: loneliness, debt; and no action is necessary, or possible, long term damage ensues. Damage from such stress may only occur in specific situations: Nuclear families coping with parents moving in. Sustained stress provides an evolved amplifier of a position of dominance and status. It is a strategy in female aggression used to limit reproductive competition. Sustained stress:
- Stops the frontal cortex from ensuring we do the harder thing, instead substituting amplification of the individual's propensity for risk-taking and impairing risk assessment!
- Activates the integration between the thalamus and amygdala.
- Acts differently on the amygdala in comparison to the frontal cortex and hippocampus: Stress strengthens the integration between the Amygdala and the hippocampus, making the hippocampus fearful.
- BLA & BNST respond with increased BDNF levels and expanded dendrites persistently increasing anxiety and fear conditioning.
- Makes it easier to learn a fear association and to consolidate it into long-term memory. Sustained stress makes it harder to unlearn fear by making the prefrontal cortex inhibit the BLA from learning to break the fear association and weakening the prefrontal cortex's hold over the amygdala. And glucocorticoids decrease activation of the medial prefrontal cortex during processing of emotional faces. Accuracy of assessing emotions from faces suffers. A terrified rat generating lots of glucocorticoids will cause dendrites in the hippocampus to atrophy but when it generates the same amount from excitement of running on a wheel the dendrites expand. The activation of the amygdala seems to determine how the hippocampus responds.
- Depletes the nucleus accumbens of dopamine biasing rats toward social subordination and biasing humans toward depression.
- Disrupts working memory by amplifying norepinephrine signalling in the prefrontal cortex and amygdala to prefrontal cortex signalling until they become destructive. It also desynchronizes activation in different frontal lobe regions impacting shifting of attention.
- Increases the risk of autoimmune disease (Jan 2017)
- During depression, stress inhibits dopamine signalling.
- Strategies for stress reduction include: Mindfulness.
for the
survivors of the 36 million European dead which included:
- 1 in 5 Poles
- 1 in 11 Russians
- 1 in 12 Greeks
- 1 in 15 Germans
- 1 in 77 French
- 1 in 125 British
- The UK is the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. had only 3 or 4
years to solve its economic is the study of trade between humans. Traditional Economics is based on an equilibrium model of the economic system. Traditional Economics includes: microeconomics, and macroeconomics. Marx developed an alternative static approach. Limitations of the equilibrium model have resulted in the development of: Keynes's dynamic General Theory of Employment Interest & Money, and Complexity Economics. Since trading depends on human behavior, economics has developed behavioral models including: behavioral economics.
problems or it would collapse. But the newly elected
Labour government was not trusted and distrust are evolved responses to sham emotions. During a friendship where no sham emotions have been detected trust will build up.
by the US leadership now aims to develop plans and strategies which ensure effective coordination to improve the common good of the in-group. Pinker notes the evolved pressure of social rivalry associating power with leadership. Saposky observes the disconnect between power hierarchies and wisdom in apes. John Adair developed a modern leadership methodology based on the three-circles model.
and most US citizens did not wish to give more loans to the
UK.
FDR is President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. He is notable for his contributions to the US CAS: - New Deal strategies including:
- Lend-lease which pushed the US and Japan into World War 2 and helped the US to become the world's predominant military power.
- Bretton Woods's agreement which economically constrained any politically driven collapse of the world economy after the war and helped the US to become the world's predominant economic power.
's death shifted policy to
President Truman who replaced Morgenthau, as Treasury is the department of the treasury. It is a federal government executive department created by Act of Congress in 1789 to manage government revenue. The Secretary of the Treasury is a Cabinet officer. With monetary policy devolved to the Federal Reserve, treasury manages fiscal policy. To support funding of high cost investments: Disaster recovery, Wars, Famines; the treasury can issue debt instruments and manage the national debt. Secretary, with
Vinson. Vinson did not value White or Keynes. Truman proposed
terminating Lend-lease included a preliminary agreement and the act. - Agreement included 8 articles:
- The US agreed to supply defense articles services and information as the President authorizes.
- The UK will contribute to the defense of the US providing such articles it is in a position to supply.
- This resulted in the transfer of a cavity magnetron, the designs of the VT fuze and Whittle jet engine and the description of the feasibility of the A bomb. As well as designs of rockets, superchargers, gyroscopic gunsights, submarine detection devices, self-sealing fuel tanks and plastic explosives.
- UK can not transfer title of the goods and services without permission of the President.
- Patent protected articles and information will be paid by the UK government when requested to do so by the President.
- At the end of the emergency the UK government will return articles and information that has not been destroyed or used as requested by the President.
- In assessing the articles to be returned the US will take into account articles already transferred to the US and accepted/acknowledged by the President.
- The final benefits provided by the UK to the US in return for the aid will include:
- No burden to commerce between the two countries
- Promotion of mutually advantageous economic relations
- Betterment of world-wide economic relations
- Elimination of all forms of discriminatory treatment in international commerce
- Reduction of tariffs and other trade barriers.
- Conversations to be held to determine in the light of governing economic conditions, the best means of attaining the objectives.
- Agreement to take effect immediately.
- Act to Promote the Defense of the United States, of March 1941 which superseded the neutrality acts.
and while Vinson was happy to stage this process the
administrator - Crowley cut the financing off abruptly which was
an immediate issue to UK and USSR and had long
term catastrophic is a dramatic breakdown in the operation of a CAS that results in general failure. Dorner in the logic of failure, sees the Chernobyl nuclear disaster as illustrative: typical human strategies were incorrectly applied by experienced operators, because they were overconfident and incorrectly modeled the current and immediate future state of the reactor. Beinhocker asserts positive effects generated in a large inter-connected network induce negative effects at other points in the network. Booch argues that increasing system complexity can overwhelm human designers, inducing catastrophe in software development. He recommends adopting object oriented hierarchy and modularity to limit complexity. But many CAS networks include huge number of agents, responding to internal and external signals, and effectively executing evolved, distributed schematic plans. Eventual loss of control, as in the case of cancers, is notable and highlights the effective agency of the more regular situation. Human developed systems suffer from complexity catastrophe. Democratic processes slowly search for representatives who will solve problems for the citizens, but Diamond in Collapse explains that democracy has struggled to cope with the tragedy of the commons. Cliodynamic cycles operate over multiple lifetimes leaving humans prone to fall into the traps that caught their grandparents. Evolved amplifiers support bubbles incenting dangerous deregulation, and encouraging broad participation, even though the rules ensure additional wealth accumulates to the legislative elite and aristocracy, who safely ignore moral hazard. Parasites undermine the detection of problems. RSS sees catastrophe enabled by a lack of rigorous schematic planning within most developed human systems.
effects on Bretton Woods and the United Nations
operations.
The UK is the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. quickly became the most
indebted country in the world. Still Keynes noted that this huge
debt was an advantage in negotiations. And the UK decided
to hold the Bretton Woods ratification hostage to obtain an
American loan. Keynes argued there could be three paths
taken by the UK leadership now aims to develop plans and strategies which ensure effective coordination to improve the common good of the in-group. Pinker notes the evolved pressure of social rivalry associating power with leadership. Saposky observes the disconnect between power hierarchies and wisdom in apes. John Adair developed a modern leadership methodology based on the three-circles model. :
- Austerity - retreat into a Sterling area which Keynes
dismissed as isolation from the World economy is a human SuperOrganism complex adaptive system (CAS) which operates and controls trade flows within a rich niche. Economics models economies. Robert Gordon has described the evolution of the American economy. Like other CAS, economic flows are maintained far from equilibrium by: demand, financial flows and constraints, supply infrastructure constraints, political and military constraints; ensuring wealth, legislative control, legal contracts and power have significant leverage through evolved amplifiers.
and dependent
on the cooperation of the dominions which was highly
unlikely.
- Temptation - Accepting a large costly loan from the US is the United States of America. .
- Justice - Keynes preferred option of demanding a gift of
$3 billion from the US and then leveraging a very low
interest loan of $5 billion justified by the heavy impact of
war on the UK and a promise to accelerate the implementation
of free trade within a year. Once again
this illustrated Keynes
misunderstanding
of the US political process. And the politically
savvy Chancellor Dalton was happy to leave the
responsibility for failure with Keynes.
In the subsequent meeting with the US Treasury is the department of the treasury. It is a federal government executive department created by Act of Congress in 1789 to manage government revenue. The Secretary of the Treasury is a Cabinet officer. With monetary policy devolved to the Federal Reserve, treasury manages fiscal policy. To support funding of high cost investments: Disaster recovery, Wars, Famines; the treasury can issue debt instruments and manage the national debt. Secretary Vinson
the initial US is the United States of America. offer equated
to the 'temptation' path that the Cabinet had already
rejected. And after White's
input Vinson reduced the loan from $5 billion to $3.5
billion.
Eventually the US is the United States of America. fixed on an offer of $3.75
billion with 2% interest to be paid off by 2006 and full pound
inter-convertibility one year after the start of the loan!
Prime Minister Attlee accepted the offer, abandoned the policing
of the Empire and used the loan to:
Onward Christian
Soldiers
While the Soviet economists is the study of trade between humans. Traditional Economics is based on an equilibrium model of the economic system. Traditional Economics includes: microeconomics, and macroeconomics. Marx developed an alternative static approach. Limitations of the equilibrium model have resulted in the development of: Keynes's dynamic General Theory of Employment Interest & Money, and Complexity Economics. Since trading depends on human behavior, economics has developed behavioral models including: behavioral economics.
were positive about joining Bretton Woods, Molotov and Stalin
were dubious. Similarly to
the UK, with the abrupt termination of Lend-lease included a preliminary agreement and the act. - Agreement included 8 articles:
- The US agreed to supply defense articles services and information as the President authorizes.
- The UK will contribute to the defense of the US providing such articles it is in a position to supply.
- This resulted in the transfer of a cavity magnetron, the designs of the VT fuze and Whittle jet engine and the description of the feasibility of the A bomb. As well as designs of rockets, superchargers, gyroscopic gunsights, submarine detection devices, self-sealing fuel tanks and plastic explosives.
- UK can not transfer title of the goods and services without permission of the President.
- Patent protected articles and information will be paid by the UK government when requested to do so by the President.
- At the end of the emergency the UK government will return articles and information that has not been destroyed or used as requested by the President.
- In assessing the articles to be returned the US will take into account articles already transferred to the US and accepted/acknowledged by the President.
- The final benefits provided by the UK to the US in return for the aid will include:
- No burden to commerce between the two countries
- Promotion of mutually advantageous economic relations
- Betterment of world-wide economic relations
- Elimination of all forms of discriminatory treatment in international commerce
- Reduction of tariffs and other trade barriers.
- Conversations to be held to determine in the light of governing economic conditions, the best means of attaining the objectives.
- Agreement to take effect immediately.
- Act to Promote the Defense of the United States, of March 1941 which superseded the neutrality acts.
the USSR is the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. needed a $10 billion US is the United States of America. loan and watched in
frustration as the UK is the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. and
France were given loans. Stalin shifted the Soviet Bretton
Woods operations to Gosplan was the central economic planning agency of the USSR.
which had always opposed the agreement.
US charge d'affaires George Keenan's conclusions cemented the
rupture with the USSR, recommending the US use containment and
threat with the USSR instead of FDR is President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. He is notable for his contributions to the US CAS: - New Deal strategies including:
- Lend-lease which pushed the US and Japan into World War 2 and helped the US to become the world's predominant military power.
- Bretton Woods's agreement which economically constrained any politically driven collapse of the world economy after the war and helped the US to become the world's predominant economic power.
's
policy of collaboration and alliance.
Treasury is the department of the treasury. It is a federal government executive department created by Act of Congress in 1789 to manage government revenue. The Secretary of the Treasury is a Cabinet officer. With monetary policy devolved to the Federal Reserve, treasury manages fiscal policy. To support funding of high cost investments: Disaster recovery, Wars, Famines; the treasury can issue debt instruments and manage the national debt. Secretary Vinson
hosted the Atlanta Georgia based Bretton Woods signing
celebration but the USSR didn't attend. The meeting
reflected a transformed situation:
- Vinson had purged the 'New
Deal was FDR's political platform to help the poor, support the economy and reform the banking system. The architects included Henry Morgenthau, Harry Hopkins, and Frances Perkins, who leveraged Al Smith's social welfare reform program plan. The New Deal:
- Included liberal legislation: Emergency Banking Relief Act, Banking Act, SSA, Securities Act, Securities Exchange Act, National Housing Act, NIRA, National Labor Relations Act, FLSA, RTAA, Wealth Tax Act;
- Used Presidential executive orders,
- Enhanced the role of federal government in promoting economic growth with programs supporting:
- Reformed trade policy with the RTAA.
- Blocked deflation by limiting economic competition with the NRA.
- Rural standard of living through electrification with the REA and TVA.
- Reduced unemployment with the WPA and CCC.
- Made taxation progressive through the Wealth Tax Act, capturing private wealth and allowing income to flow to the emergent middle class.
' contingent from the treasury and had pushed White into limbo. And
White was being investigated by the FBI is Federal Bureau of Investigation. as a Soviet spy.
So it was unlikely Vinson would have proposed White for the
lead position at the IMF is the International Monetary Fund developed as part of the Bretton Woods agreements to provide liquidity to national gold denominated reserve banks at times of stress in the global financial network - a shortage of a particular currency which was inhibiting trade; in support of a broader Bretton Woods framework designed so as to ensure that currencies did not become misaligned with one another, and were a fair representation of what things were worth. The IMF removed the need for nations to depend on private loans from commercial banks, such as Britain's dependence on J. P. Morgan during the 1920s and 30s. The agreement required each Bretton Woods signatory to provide a capital investment or 'quota' into the fund which would subsequently correspond to the amount that the country could borrow from the fund in times of financial stress. The top four countries and their quotas were set by IMF architect, Harry Dexter White, to match FDR's priorities: - US - $2.9 billion, an amount the FDR administration could transfer from Exchange Stabilization Fund without any need to ask for Congress for funds.
- UK - $1.45 billion
- USSR - slightly less than UK quota
- China - less than USSR.
.
Indeed
- Vinson had listened to the ABA is the:
- American Bankers Association.
- American Board of Anesthesiology.
arguments and viewed the IMF as flawed. He made
Belgian Camille Gutt the first managing director. He
and the ABA were more interested in parochial leverage of
the World Bank was setup as part of the Bretton Woods agreements, as the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development, to repair and reconstruct Europe after the Second World War and as the World Bank continues to provide reconstruction and development resources for projects in developing economies. It includes: - International Finance Corporation
and
he made financier Eugene Mayer its first president.
- Vinson insisted on paying the directors of the new
organizations very high salaries. This helped ensure
the potential set of candidates would back his
positions.
- The US was judged a tyrant forcing through its desires and
demonstrating its power.
- Keynes was disappointed
with Vinson's direction for Bretton Woods. The stress is a multi-faceted condition reflecting high cortisol levels. Dr. Robert Sapolsky's studies of baboons indicate that stress helps build readiness for fight or flight. As these actions occur the levels of cortisol return to the baseline rate. A stressor is anything that disrupts the regular homeostatic balance. The stress response is the array of neural and endocrine changes that occur to respond effectively to the crisis and reestablish homeostasis.
- The short term response to the stressor
- activates the amygdala which: Stimulates the brain stem resulting in inhibition of the parasympathetic nervous system and activation of the sympathetic nervous system with the hormones epinephrine and norepinephrine deployed around the body, Activates the PVN which generates a cascade resulting in glucocorticoid secretion to: get energy to the muscles with increased blood pressure for a powerful response. The brain's acuity and cognition are stimulated. The immune system is stimulated with beta-endorphin and repair activities curtail. In order for the body to destroy bacteria in wounds, pro-inflammatory cytokines increase blood flow to the area. The induced inflammation signals the brain to activate the insula and through it the ACC. But when the stressor is
- long term: loneliness, debt; and no action is necessary, or possible, long term damage ensues. Damage from such stress may only occur in specific situations: Nuclear families coping with parents moving in. Sustained stress provides an evolved amplifier of a position of dominance and status. It is a strategy in female aggression used to limit reproductive competition. Sustained stress:
- Stops the frontal cortex from ensuring we do the harder thing, instead substituting amplification of the individual's propensity for risk-taking and impairing risk assessment!
- Activates the integration between the thalamus and amygdala.
- Acts differently on the amygdala in comparison to the frontal cortex and hippocampus: Stress strengthens the integration between the Amygdala and the hippocampus, making the hippocampus fearful.
- BLA & BNST respond with increased BDNF levels and expanded dendrites persistently increasing anxiety and fear conditioning.
- Makes it easier to learn a fear association and to consolidate it into long-term memory. Sustained stress makes it harder to unlearn fear by making the prefrontal cortex inhibit the BLA from learning to break the fear association and weakening the prefrontal cortex's hold over the amygdala. And glucocorticoids decrease activation of the medial prefrontal cortex during processing of emotional faces. Accuracy of assessing emotions from faces suffers. A terrified rat generating lots of glucocorticoids will cause dendrites in the hippocampus to atrophy but when it generates the same amount from excitement of running on a wheel the dendrites expand. The activation of the amygdala seems to determine how the hippocampus responds.
- Depletes the nucleus accumbens of dopamine biasing rats toward social subordination and biasing humans toward depression.
- Disrupts working memory by amplifying norepinephrine signalling in the prefrontal cortex and amygdala to prefrontal cortex signalling until they become destructive. It also desynchronizes activation in different frontal lobe regions impacting shifting of attention.
- Increases the risk of autoimmune disease (Jan 2017)
- During depression, stress inhibits dopamine signalling.
- Strategies for stress reduction include: Mindfulness.
of his arguments
with Vinson initiated a series of heart attacks is an AMI. It can induce cardiac arrest. Blocking the formation of clots with platelet aggregation inhibitors, can help with treating and avoiding AMI. Risk factors include: taking NSAID pain killers (May 2017). There is uncertainty about why AMI occur. Alternative hypotheses include: - Plaques started to gather in the coronary arteries and grew until no blood flow was possible. If this is true it makes sense to preventatively treat the buildup with angioplasty.
- Plaques form anywhere in the body due to atherosclerosis and then break up and get lodged in the coronary artery and start to clot. If this is true it makes sense to preventatively limit the buildup of plaques with drugs like statins or PCSK9 inhibitors.
which resulted in his death in 1946 once he was back at home
in Tilton.
The US did indeed use the IMF and World Bank to advance its
policy agenda. And the infrastructure was not working
effectively. White was shocked when:
- A prospective loan from the World Bank to Poland was
vetoed by the US.
- The institutions were running out of money. Vinson's
high salaries consumed 65% of the budget. White left
the Truman administration.
The Bretton Woods infrastructure did not perform as expected by
Keynes and White. White watched in dismay. In his
personal notes he developed proposed fixes for the problems he
identified:
The global situation became increasingly desperate with:
- Europe falling towards another depression
- Civil wars in China, Greece and Palestine. The IMF
had few resources to help.
The Truman administration responded by following the Truman
Doctrine of active intervention to inhibit the spread of
communism. Secretary of State George Marshall
announced a plan to finance the collapsing economies is a human SuperOrganism complex adaptive system (CAS) which operates and controls trade flows within a rich niche. Economics models economies. Robert Gordon has described the evolution of the American economy. Like other CAS, economic flows are maintained far from equilibrium by: demand, financial flows and constraints, supply infrastructure constraints, political and military constraints; ensuring wealth, legislative control, legal contracts and power have significant leverage through evolved amplifiers. that were at risk
of adopting communism. Finally this Keynesian response started to
turn the situation around.
White was called to testify before a Congressional
committee. While he defended his position he was stressed is a multi-faceted condition reflecting high cortisol levels. Dr. Robert Sapolsky's studies of baboons indicate that stress helps build readiness for fight or flight. As these actions occur the levels of cortisol return to the baseline rate. A stressor is anything that disrupts the regular homeostatic balance. The stress response is the array of neural and endocrine changes that occur to respond effectively to the crisis and reestablish homeostasis. - The short term response to the stressor
- activates the amygdala which: Stimulates the brain stem resulting in inhibition of the parasympathetic nervous system and activation of the sympathetic nervous system with the hormones epinephrine and norepinephrine deployed around the body, Activates the PVN which generates a cascade resulting in glucocorticoid secretion to: get energy to the muscles with increased blood pressure for a powerful response. The brain's acuity and cognition are stimulated. The immune system is stimulated with beta-endorphin and repair activities curtail. In order for the body to destroy bacteria in wounds, pro-inflammatory cytokines increase blood flow to the area. The induced inflammation signals the brain to activate the insula and through it the ACC. But when the stressor is
- long term: loneliness, debt; and no action is necessary, or possible, long term damage ensues. Damage from such stress may only occur in specific situations: Nuclear families coping with parents moving in. Sustained stress provides an evolved amplifier of a position of dominance and status. It is a strategy in female aggression used to limit reproductive competition. Sustained stress:
- Stops the frontal cortex from ensuring we do the harder thing, instead substituting amplification of the individual's propensity for risk-taking and impairing risk assessment!
- Activates the integration between the thalamus and amygdala.
- Acts differently on the amygdala in comparison to the frontal cortex and hippocampus: Stress strengthens the integration between the Amygdala and the hippocampus, making the hippocampus fearful.
- BLA & BNST respond with increased BDNF levels and expanded dendrites persistently increasing anxiety and fear conditioning.
- Makes it easier to learn a fear association and to consolidate it into long-term memory. Sustained stress makes it harder to unlearn fear by making the prefrontal cortex inhibit the BLA from learning to break the fear association and weakening the prefrontal cortex's hold over the amygdala. And glucocorticoids decrease activation of the medial prefrontal cortex during processing of emotional faces. Accuracy of assessing emotions from faces suffers. A terrified rat generating lots of glucocorticoids will cause dendrites in the hippocampus to atrophy but when it generates the same amount from excitement of running on a wheel the dendrites expand. The activation of the amygdala seems to determine how the hippocampus responds.
- Depletes the nucleus accumbens of dopamine biasing rats toward social subordination and biasing humans toward depression.
- Disrupts working memory by amplifying norepinephrine signalling in the prefrontal cortex and amygdala to prefrontal cortex signalling until they become destructive. It also desynchronizes activation in different frontal lobe regions impacting shifting of attention.
- Increases the risk of autoimmune disease (Jan 2017)
- During depression, stress inhibits dopamine signalling.
- Strategies for stress reduction include: Mindfulness.
at the hounding he
received from Congressman Richard Nixon and subsequently
suffered a series of heart attacks resulting in his death in
1948.
The Bretton Woods
System
A UK is the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. capital is the sum total nonhuman assets that can be owned and exchanged on some market according to Piketty. Capital includes: real property, financial capital and professional capital. It is not immutable instead depending on the state of the society within which it exists. It can be owned by governments (public capital) and private individuals (private capital). reserve crisis in
1947 was stimulated by the enacting of sterling convertibility.
$6 billion per year of currency is legal tender which provides no interest payments to the holder. It is a central aspect of money and in CAS is an analog of a short term potential energy token such as the high energy phosphate bond of the base ATP. But the interaction of the geometric breeding and deaths of agents that perform actions and the linear increase in real resources, described by Turchin, results in the correspondence between energy and currency being complex and adaptive.
gushed out of the UK. The US loan was rapidly
exhausted. Bretton Woods had to be transformed. UK
Chancellor Dalton cancelled convertibility and followed up with
a special budget full of austerity measures and then
resigned. The Labour Party became stuck with a reputation
for economic is the study of trade between humans. Traditional Economics is based on an equilibrium model of the economic system. Traditional Economics includes: microeconomics, and macroeconomics. Marx developed an alternative static approach. Limitations of the equilibrium model have resulted in the development of: Keynes's dynamic General Theory of Employment Interest & Money, and Complexity Economics. Since trading depends on human behavior, economics has developed behavioral models including: behavioral economics.
mismanagement.
Investors escalated the problem pulling money from: France,
Italy and Germany. By 1948 France devalued.
Even with the Marshall Plan loans Europe had to devalue against
the dollar. The UK devalued by one third. And the
process had been totally disorganized.
Then in 1950 the Suez crisis encouraged the UK to overspend on
its military response. The US is the United States of America.
eventually stepped in to bail the UK out again.
The UK devalued once again in 1967.
The 1947 collapse showed Keynes
and White to be very
optimistic in their thinking:
- White's quotas were far too small. And none of the
European economies is a human SuperOrganism complex adaptive system (CAS) which operates and controls trade flows within a rich niche. Economics models economies. Robert Gordon has described the evolution of the American economy. Like other CAS, economic flows are maintained far from equilibrium by: demand, financial flows and constraints, supply infrastructure constraints, political and military constraints; ensuring wealth, legislative control, legal contracts and power have significant leverage through evolved amplifiers.
could afford to invoke the IMF is the International Monetary Fund developed as part of the Bretton Woods agreements to provide liquidity to national gold denominated reserve banks at times of stress in the global financial network - a shortage of a particular currency which was inhibiting trade; in support of a broader Bretton Woods framework designed so as to ensure that currencies did not become misaligned with one another, and were a fair representation of what things were worth. The IMF removed the need for nations to depend on private loans from commercial banks, such as Britain's dependence on J. P. Morgan during the 1920s and 30s. The agreement required each Bretton Woods signatory to provide a capital investment or 'quota' into the fund which would subsequently correspond to the amount that the country could borrow from the fund in times of financial stress. The top four countries and their quotas were set by IMF architect, Harry Dexter White, to match FDR's priorities: - US - $2.9 billion, an amount the FDR administration could transfer from Exchange Stabilization Fund without any need to ask for Congress for funds.
- UK - $1.45 billion
- USSR - slightly less than UK quota
- China - less than USSR.
.
And having seen the effect on the UK none wanted to
either.
- The US was inflating but the quota agreements were for
fixed amounts so these were getting smaller in terms of
purchasing power.
- Eventually in 1950 the IMF tried to expand quotas
50%. But World trade had doubled and countries
resisted paying in the extra quota.
- By 1961 the IMF introduced GAB is general agreements to borrow. These allowed the rich nations, the G7, to lend their currencies to a struggling nation through the IMF, rather than use quotas.
contracts to ensure availability of extra capital.
The impression left on Europe's leaders now aims to develop plans and strategies which ensure effective coordination to improve the common good of the in-group. Pinker notes the evolved pressure of social rivalry associating power with leadership. Saposky observes the disconnect between power hierarchies and wisdom in apes. John Adair developed a modern leadership methodology based on the three-circles model. of the 1947 UK
devaluation inhibited further use of the IMF facilities.
Western Europe setup the
European Payments Union which instituted barriers to capital is the sum total nonhuman assets that can be owned and exchanged on some market according to Piketty. Capital includes: real property, financial capital and professional capital. It is not immutable instead depending on the state of the society within which it exists. It can be owned by governments (public capital) and private individuals (private capital). movements in and
out of Europe. The US is the United States of America.
oriented by the Truman Doctrine backed the move. Indeed it
used the Marshall Plan infrastructure (ECA is economic cooperation administration which was a US government agency set up in 1948 to administer the Marshall Plan. and OEEC is the organisation for European economic co-operation. It emerged from the Marshall Plan, being setup to supervise the distribution of aid based on the following principles: - Promote co-operation between participating countries and their national production programmes for the reconstruction of Europe.
- Develop intra-European trade by reducing tariffs and other barriers to the expansion of trade.
- Study the feasibility of creating a customes union or free trade area.
- Study multi-lateralisation of payments, and
- Achieve conditions for better utilization of labor. It was superceded in 1961 by the OECD.
) to encourage the development is a phase during the operation of a CAS agent. It allows for schematic strategies to be iteratively blended with environmental signals to solve the logistical issues of migrating newly built and transformed sub-agents. That is needed to achieve the adult configuration of the agent and optimize it for the proximate environment. Smiley includes examples of the developmental phase agents required in an emergent CAS. In situations where parents invest in the growth and memetic learning of their offspring the schematic grab bag can support optimizations to develop models, structures and actions to construct an adept adult. In humans, adolescence leverages neural plasticity, elder sibling advice and adult coaching to help prepare the deploying neuronal network and body to successfully compete. of welfare
states. It was not until 1961 that the countries were in
compliance with the IMF agreements.
FDR is President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. He is notable for his contributions to the US CAS: - New Deal strategies including:
- Lend-lease which pushed the US and Japan into World War 2 and helped the US to become the world's predominant military power.
- Bretton Woods's agreement which economically constrained any politically driven collapse of the world economy after the war and helped the US to become the world's predominant economic power.
's broad vision of global
infrastructure had included the United Nations and a global
trade infrastructure. But the trade infrastructure
withered until 1995 with the emergence of the WTO is the World Trade Organization. .
After the unexpected sudden ending of the Marshall Plan the IMF is the International Monetary Fund developed as part of the Bretton Woods agreements to provide liquidity to national gold denominated reserve banks at times of stress in the global financial network - a shortage of a particular currency which was inhibiting trade; in support of a broader Bretton Woods framework designed so as to ensure that currencies did not become misaligned with one another, and were a fair representation of what things were worth. The IMF removed the need for nations to depend on private loans from commercial banks, such as Britain's dependence on J. P. Morgan during the 1920s and 30s. The agreement required each Bretton Woods signatory to provide a capital investment or 'quota' into the fund which would subsequently correspond to the amount that the country could borrow from the fund in times of financial stress. The top four countries and their quotas were set by IMF architect, Harry Dexter White, to match FDR's priorities: - US - $2.9 billion, an amount the FDR administration could transfer from Exchange Stabilization Fund without any need to ask for Congress for funds.
- UK - $1.45 billion
- USSR - slightly less than UK quota
- China - less than USSR.
and World Bank was setup as part of the Bretton Woods agreements, as the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development, to repair and reconstruct Europe after the Second World War and as the World Bank continues to provide reconstruction and development resources for projects in developing economies. It includes: - International Finance Corporation
started to be
used as initially envisioned. The European Payments Union
was wound up and the European Community was initiated at the
treaty of Rome in 1957.
As the European and
Japanese economies is a human SuperOrganism complex adaptive system (CAS) which operates and controls trade flows within a rich niche. Economics models economies. Robert Gordon has described the evolution of the American economy. Like other CAS, economic flows are maintained far from equilibrium by: demand, financial flows and constraints, supply infrastructure constraints, political and military constraints; ensuring wealth, legislative control, legal contracts and power have significant leverage through evolved amplifiers.
started to flourish the dollar shortage ended. Prior
devaluations had made the expanding and low cost Europe an
attractive target for American investors. Germany and
Japan's high value export strategies initiated a long period of
trade surplus with the US is the United States of America. .
By 1969 the US share of economic output had dropped from 35 to
27%.
The dollar
gold equivalence written in to Bretton Woods now became a
terminal problem for the US led system:
- Countries purchased dollars to bolster their foreign
exchange reserves. This encouraged the printing of
more dollars than there was gold at the Bretton Woods peg of
$35.
- Kennedy
(1961-63) and LBJ is President Lyndon Baines Johnson. social
programs (1963-69) and Vietnam War spending encouraged
printing of ever more dollars.
- The IMF is the International Monetary Fund developed as part of the Bretton Woods agreements to provide liquidity to national gold denominated reserve banks at times of stress in the global financial network - a shortage of a particular currency which was inhibiting trade; in support of a broader Bretton Woods framework designed so as to ensure that currencies did not become misaligned with one another, and were a fair representation of what things were worth. The IMF removed the need for nations to depend on private loans from commercial banks, such as Britain's dependence on J. P. Morgan during the 1920s and 30s. The agreement required each Bretton Woods signatory to provide a capital investment or 'quota' into the fund which would subsequently correspond to the amount that the country could borrow from the fund in times of financial stress. The top four countries and their quotas were set by IMF architect, Harry Dexter White, to match FDR's priorities:
- US - $2.9 billion, an amount the FDR administration could transfer from Exchange Stabilization Fund without any need to ask for Congress for funds.
- UK - $1.45 billion
- USSR - slightly less than UK quota
- China - less than USSR.
acted to offset
the risk of over dependence on the dollar with the 1964
agreement to allow SDR is Special Drawing Right, a global reserve asset used by the IMF. SDRs can be freely exchanged for usable currencies. The SDR is associated with the current value of a basket of currencies. In 1969 this basket included: US dollars, euros, Japanese yen and pound sterling. In Oct 2016 the renminbi will be added to the basket. s.
But the deployment was too slow to save the dollar from
trouble.
- The US is the United States of America. was experiencing
7% inflation as Nixon became president in 1969.
Volcker warned him he had two years to save the
dollar.
- Capital is the sum total nonhuman assets that can be owned and exchanged on some market according to Piketty. Capital includes: real property, financial capital and professional capital. It is not immutable instead depending on the state of the society within which it exists. It can be owned by governments (public capital) and private individuals (private capital). controls had
been undermined with countries obtaining dollars from
London's Eurodollar market. This allowed investor's
money to flow away from the US.
- Nixon, Treasury is the department of the treasury. It is a federal government executive department created by Act of Congress in 1789 to manage government revenue. The Secretary of the Treasury is a Cabinet officer. With monetary policy devolved to the Federal Reserve, treasury manages fiscal policy. To support funding of high cost investments: Disaster recovery, Wars, Famines; the treasury can issue debt instruments and manage the national debt.
Secretary Connally and Volcker aimed to strike back at what
they saw as an attack on America.
- Volcker led a working group to assess an effective
dollar gold peg. But Volcker concluded there was an
imminent dollar crisis. He suggested:
- Devaluing the dollar 15%
- Suspending convertibility with gold.
- Germany allowed the deutschmark to float. The Swiss,
Dutch, Belgians and Austrians followed. The UK is the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. and France were planning
to convert dollars to gold.
- Nixon moved:
- The Europeans announced they would remove their dollar
pegs. Bretton Woods was over.
Epilogue
The end of Bretton Woods allowed a resurgence of the Satyajit Das uses an Indonesian company's derivative trades to
introduce us to the workings of the international derivatives
system. Das describes the components of the value delivery
system and the key
transactions. He demonstrates how the system
interacted with emerging economies
expanding them, extracting profits and then moving on as the
induced bubbles burst. Following Das's key points the
complex adaptive system (CAS)
aspects are highlighted.
international finance industry which
leveraged the effects of floating currencies is legal tender which provides no interest payments to the holder. It is a central aspect of money and in CAS is an analog of a short term potential energy token such as the high energy phosphate bond of the base ATP. But the interaction of the geometric breeding and deaths of agents that perform actions and the linear increase in real resources, described by Turchin, results in the correspondence between energy and currency being complex and adaptive. to capture huge
profits. The foreign exchange market is still
growing. The
US is the United States of America. responded to the resurgence
of London's financial center by repealing Glass-Steagall Banking Act of 1933 prohibits commercial banks from engaging in the investment business. ,
giving the industry a further boost to become 8% of American economic is the study of trade between humans. Traditional Economics is based on an equilibrium model of the economic system. Traditional Economics includes: microeconomics, and macroeconomics. Marx developed an alternative static approach. Limitations of the equilibrium model have resulted in the development of: Keynes's dynamic General Theory of Employment Interest & Money, and Complexity Economics. Since trading depends on human behavior, economics has developed behavioral models including: behavioral economics. output as the Charles Ferguson argues that the US power structure has become
highly corrupt.
Ferguson identifies key events which contributed to the
transformation:
- Junk bonds,
- Derivative
deregulation,
- CMOs,
ABS and analyst fraud,
- Financial network deregulation,
- Financial network consolidation,
- Short term incentives
Subsequently the George W. Bush administration used the
situation to build
a global bubble, which Wall Street
leveraged. The bursting of the
bubble: managed
by the Bush Administration and Bernanke Federal Reserve;
was advantageous to some.
Ferguson concludes that the restructured and deregulated
financial services industry is damaging to
the American economy. And it is supported by powerful, incentive aligned academics.
He sees the result being a rigged system.
Ferguson offers his proposals
for change and offers hope that a charismatic young FDR will appear.
Following our summary of his arguments, RSS comments on them framed by
complex adaptive system (CAS)
theory. Once the constraints are removed from CAS
amplifiers, it becomes advantageous to leverage the increased flows. And it is often
relatively damaging not to participate. Corruption and parasitism can become
entrenched.
US financial infrastructure re-integrated.
But Conway notes that the Bretton Woods period from 1948 to the
early 1970s reflected a period of unusual strength in the world
economy is a human SuperOrganism complex adaptive system (CAS) which operates and controls trade flows within a rich niche. Economics models economies. Robert Gordon has described the evolution of the American economy. Like other CAS, economic flows are maintained far from equilibrium by: demand, financial flows and constraints, supply infrastructure constraints, political and military constraints; ensuring wealth, legislative control, legal contracts and power have significant leverage through evolved amplifiers. . He frames
the point via a Bank of England study:
- World economic growth never rivalled
- Global GDP is:
- Gross domestic product which measures the total of goods and services produced in a given year within the borders of a given country (output) according to Piketty. Gordon argues to include products produced in the home & market-purchased goods and services, following Becker's theory of time use. Gordon stresses innovation is the ultimate source of all growth in output per worker-hour. GDP growth per person is equal to the growth in labor productivity + growth in hours worked per person. GDP has many problems. Gordon concludes that between 1870 and 1940 all available measures GDP is hugely understated because:
- GDP is a poor measure of:
- Value & wealth
- Who gets what
- Global supply chains
- GDP excludes:
- Reduction in infant mortality between 1890 (22%) and 1950 (1%)
- Brightness & safety of electric light,
- Increased variety of food including refrigeration transported fresh meat and processed food
- Convenience and economies of scale of the department store and mail order catalog and resulting product price reductions
- Services by house makers
- Time & health gains from having flush toilets, integrated sewer networks; rather than having to physically remove effluent and cope with fecal-oral transmission
- Leisure
- Costs & benefits of different length work weeks
- Speed and flexibility of motor vehicles - which were not included in the CPI until 1935, after the transformation had occurred. And competition from improved foreign vehicles, while it provides purchaser/user with improved standard of living (less breakdowns, repairs, etc.) is measured as reduced domestic manufacture
- Coercion and corruption to obtain resources
- Consumption impact of finite resources: coal, oil;
- Destruction impact of loss of entire irreplaceable species
- GDP includes items that should be excluded:
- Cost of waste - cleaning up pollution (single use indestructible plastic bags), building prisons, commuting to work, and cars left parked most of the time; should be subtracted
- Guanine-di-phosphate is a nucleotide base.
> 2.8%
- No global down turn
- Imbalances of current accounts were 3* smaller than during
gold standard and smaller than more recent period.
And social gains
occurred too:
Bretton Woods was a success in spite of the limitations designed
into it:
The demise of Bretton Woods allowed floating exchange rates to
occur. Currencies is legal tender which provides no interest payments to the holder. It is a central aspect of money and in CAS is an analog of a short term potential energy token such as the high energy phosphate bond of the base ATP. But the interaction of the geometric breeding and deaths of agents that perform actions and the linear increase in real resources, described by Turchin, results in the correspondence between energy and currency being complex and adaptive.
became worth what people thought they were worth! Free market
economists including Milton Freedman had been advocating this
move for some time. The economics is the study of trade between humans. Traditional Economics is based on an equilibrium model of the economic system. Traditional Economics includes: microeconomics, and macroeconomics. Marx developed an alternative static approach. Limitations of the equilibrium model have resulted in the development of: Keynes's dynamic General Theory of Employment Interest & Money, and Complexity Economics. Since trading depends on human behavior, economics has developed behavioral models including: behavioral economics. changed:
- Economies that used Keynesian
spending no longer had the anti-inflation anchor of
gold. The spending resulted in both troubling
inflation and stagnant output.
- A variety of alternative models were tried to help manage
the international money flows:
- Monetarism - by the US and UK; the UK still had more
failures and requested an IMF is the International Monetary Fund developed as part of the Bretton Woods agreements to provide liquidity to national gold denominated reserve banks at times of stress in the global financial network - a shortage of a particular currency which was inhibiting trade; in support of a broader Bretton Woods framework designed so as to ensure that currencies did not become misaligned with one another, and were a fair representation of what things were worth. The IMF removed the need for nations to depend on private loans from commercial banks, such as Britain's dependence on J. P. Morgan during the 1920s and 30s. The agreement required each Bretton Woods signatory to provide a capital investment or 'quota' into the fund which would subsequently correspond to the amount that the country could borrow from the fund in times of financial stress. The top four countries and their quotas were set by IMF architect, Harry Dexter White, to match FDR's priorities:
- US - $2.9 billion, an amount the FDR administration could transfer from Exchange Stabilization Fund without any need to ask for Congress for funds.
- UK - $1.45 billion
- USSR - slightly less than UK quota
- China - less than USSR.
bailout in 1976. The Bundesbank promoted monetarism
in 1974, which was subsequently adopted by the Thatcher
government in 1979.
- Currency boards
- Exchange rate mechanisms - Europe locked their
currencies together in a 'snake is a fixed exchange rate mechanism which locks a set of currencies together. It enables free flow of goods across the nations participating in the snake. Examples include Bretton Woods and the ERM. To operate over time it must:
- Include a ratchet that allows currency flows from supplier to deficit nations, and forgives excessive debt burden, and thus
- Allows trade to occur freely using the trader's currency.
' that
was called European Monetary Snake, ERM is the European exchange rate mechanism. It was a monetary snake within the EMS to enable free trade of ECSC goods. But it did not provide any ratchet to release the back pressure that builds up as goods flow from suppliers to deficit nations and currencies flow in reverse. and eventually
developed into the single euro currency union. By
the 1990s the UK had moved to join the ERM, in effect
locking its economy with the German. But the two
economies differ in strategy and operation and with no hot
money capital flow controls George Soros and other
investors pulled money from the UK. Under massive
attack the UK along with Italy crashed out of the ERM and
floated their currencies.
- Inflation targeting - was subsequently adopted by the
central banks. The UK also freed its central bank
from political control. However, in the 2008 crisis
inflation targeting provided no help.
Countries
across the globe opened up their economies is a human SuperOrganism complex adaptive system (CAS) which operates and controls trade flows within a rich niche. Economics models economies. Robert Gordon has described the evolution of the American economy. Like other CAS, economic flows are maintained far from equilibrium by: demand, financial flows and constraints, supply infrastructure constraints, political and military constraints; ensuring wealth, legislative control, legal contracts and power have significant leverage through evolved amplifiers. to Matt Ridley demonstrates the creative effect of man on the
World. He highlights:
- A list of
preconditions resulting in
- Additional niche
capture & more free time
- Building a network
to interconnect memes processes & tools which
- Enabling inter-generational
transfers
- Innovations
that help reduce environmental stress even as they leverage fossil
fuels
trade and capital is the sum total nonhuman assets that can be owned and exchanged on some market according to Piketty. Capital includes: real property, financial capital and professional capital. It is not immutable instead depending on the state of the society within which it exists. It can be owned by governments (public capital) and private individuals (private capital). flows in a way not
seen since the early 20th century:
- The IMF is the International Monetary Fund developed as part of the Bretton Woods agreements to provide liquidity to national gold denominated reserve banks at times of stress in the global financial network - a shortage of a particular currency which was inhibiting trade; in support of a broader Bretton Woods framework designed so as to ensure that currencies did not become misaligned with one another, and were a fair representation of what things were worth. The IMF removed the need for nations to depend on private loans from commercial banks, such as Britain's dependence on J. P. Morgan during the 1920s and 30s. The agreement required each Bretton Woods signatory to provide a capital investment or 'quota' into the fund which would subsequently correspond to the amount that the country could borrow from the fund in times of financial stress. The top four countries and their quotas were set by IMF architect, Harry Dexter White, to match FDR's priorities:
- US - $2.9 billion, an amount the FDR administration could transfer from Exchange Stabilization Fund without any need to ask for Congress for funds.
- UK - $1.45 billion
- USSR - slightly less than UK quota
- China - less than USSR.
was catalytic, an infrastructure amplifier. in this
extension of the US is the United States of America.
centered financial network. Without its role as
regulator of the Bretton Woods agreements the IMF
transformed itself into an economic consultant and adviser
with the power to bailout struggling countries.
- And the collapse of communism made capitalism appear
worth trying.
- The IMF advocated the Washington Consensus:
- Liberalize the economy
- Open borders to trade
- Cut public spending
- Through the 1990s developing countries took the
advice. But then
Satyajit Das uses an Indonesian company's derivative trades to
introduce us to the workings of the international derivatives
system. Das describes the components of the value delivery
system and the key
transactions. He demonstrates how the system
interacted with emerging economies
expanding them, extracting profits and then moving on as the
induced bubbles burst. Following Das's key points the
complex adaptive system (CAS)
aspects are highlighted.
Asian countries suffered financial
crises and needed IMF is the International Monetary Fund developed as part of the Bretton Woods agreements to provide liquidity to national gold denominated reserve banks at times of stress in the global financial network - a shortage of a particular currency which was inhibiting trade; in support of a broader Bretton Woods framework designed so as to ensure that currencies did not become misaligned with one another, and were a fair representation of what things were worth. The IMF removed the need for nations to depend on private loans from commercial banks, such as Britain's dependence on J. P. Morgan during the 1920s and 30s. The agreement required each Bretton Woods signatory to provide a capital investment or 'quota' into the fund which would subsequently correspond to the amount that the country could borrow from the fund in times of financial stress. The top four countries and their quotas were set by IMF architect, Harry Dexter White, to match FDR's priorities: - US - $2.9 billion, an amount the FDR administration could transfer from Exchange Stabilization Fund without any need to ask for Congress for funds.
- UK - $1.45 billion
- USSR - slightly less than UK quota
- China - less than USSR.
bailouts including harsh conditions and increased levels of
poverty. Conway argues that this led the neighbors of
these countries to avoid the IMF prescriptions and build
local protections.
- The Chinese banked the dollars they earned. The
volumes involved eventually affected the operation of the
global system.
- The US is the United States of America. could issue
lots of debt at low rates certain that the Chinese would
buy.
- The Chinese could sell cheap goods keeping inflation low
across its customer base in the developed and developing
world.
- But without the Bretton Woods constraints the trade
imbalances grew to enormous proportions. In the US
and UK is the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. liabilities
grew. US debt quadrupled from 1998 to 2008.
China, Japan and Germany's savings increased
massively.
- The result
was lots of hot money searching for the highest rates of
return. A monetary bubble was induced.
Eventually in 2007 the interbank lending markets froze and
by 2008 Lehman
Brothers collapsed.
- By 2009 the currency is legal tender which provides no interest payments to the holder. It is a central aspect of money and in CAS is an analog of a short term potential energy token such as the high energy phosphate bond of the base ATP. But the interaction of the geometric breeding and deaths of agents that perform actions and the linear increase in real resources, described by Turchin, results in the correspondence between energy and currency being complex and adaptive.
crisis had undermined the Euro zone is the group of countries within the EU that use the euro currency. Economic decisions regarding the euro are centralized through the Eurogroup. .
Conway argues that one single cause for the 2008 recession is
unlikely. He notes:
Bretton Woods allowed politicians to constrain member
countries. But
there has been little in the way of an equivalent control
framework since. Conway notes the:
- Plaza
accord of 1985 when the Group of 5: France, West
Germany, Japan, US is the United States of America. and UK is the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. ; intervened in the currency is legal tender which provides no interest payments to the holder. It is a central aspect of money and in CAS is an analog of a short term potential energy token such as the high energy phosphate bond of the base ATP. But the interaction of the geometric breeding and deaths of agents that perform actions and the linear increase in real resources, described by Turchin, results in the correspondence between energy and currency being complex and adaptive.
markets.
- 2008 IMF is the International Monetary Fund developed as part of the Bretton Woods agreements to provide liquidity to national gold denominated reserve banks at times of stress in the global financial network - a shortage of a particular currency which was inhibiting trade; in support of a broader Bretton Woods framework designed so as to ensure that currencies did not become misaligned with one another, and were a fair representation of what things were worth. The IMF removed the need for nations to depend on private loans from commercial banks, such as Britain's dependence on J. P. Morgan during the 1920s and 30s. The agreement required each Bretton Woods signatory to provide a capital investment or 'quota' into the fund which would subsequently correspond to the amount that the country could borrow from the fund in times of financial stress. The top four countries and their quotas were set by IMF architect, Harry Dexter White, to match FDR's priorities:
- US - $2.9 billion, an amount the FDR administration could transfer from Exchange Stabilization Fund without any need to ask for Congress for funds.
- UK - $1.45 billion
- USSR - slightly less than UK quota
- China - less than USSR.
meeting -
agreed to rescue the banking system
- 2009 Group of 20 (G20) advanced economies is a human SuperOrganism complex adaptive system (CAS) which operates and controls trade flows within a rich niche. Economics models economies. Robert Gordon has described the evolution of the American economy. Like other CAS, economic flows are maintained far from equilibrium by: demand, financial flows and constraints, supply infrastructure constraints, political and military constraints; ensuring wealth, legislative control, legal contracts and power have significant leverage through evolved amplifiers.
Summit -
committed to pump money into their economies. But he
suggests these summits are typically too late and the
response is misplaced.
Conway asks why this problem has not been dealt with. It
has been suggested that today:
- There is no vision of the form Keynes
supplied.
- No one wants to suffer the potential turmoil that could be
unleashed.
He sees the US and China as key because: China is still building
up surplus dollars - now $17 trillion; so China does not want
the US to default, devalue or inflate. The US budget deficit is still
growing and there are huge household debts. This is why
Paul Volcker says the US is no longer viewed as all
powerful.
Conway reviews the present contributions of the IMF and World Bank was setup as part of the Bretton Woods agreements, as the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development, to repair and reconstruct Europe after the Second World War and as the World Bank continues to provide reconstruction and development resources for projects in developing economies. It includes: - International Finance Corporation
. He
notes the IMF made its largest loans ever during the Euro crisis
to Greece, Portugal and Ireland. Still it seems odd that
the world's richest nations were obtaining loans from the
developing world!
Previously the IMF had helped developing countries establish
their central banks. But later in the 1980s and 1990s both
the IMF and World Bank were seen pushing US policy.
Leaving the broader global community wondering why they should
back the World Bank or the IMF. Instead they are likely to
build defenses closer to home.
Volcker argues that any new equivalent to Bretton Woods must be
more distributed and built from the bottom up by each country
making its domestic economy robust and then cooperating with
each other.
Oliver Blanchard argues that there must be some entity are, according to Abbott, a class including people, families, corporations, hurricanes. They implement abstract designs and are demarcatable by their reduced entropy relative to their components. Rovelli notes entities are a collection of relations and events, but memory and our continuous process of anticipation, organizes the series of quantized interactions we perceive into an illusion of permanent objects flowing from past to future. Abbott identifies two types of entity: - At equilibrium entities,
- Autonomous entities, which can control how they are affected by outside forces;
that backstops the
liquidity of central banks. But Conway notes that in the
2008 crisis the central banks worked in cooperation using their
network of swap lines are agreements between central banks to swap currencies so that they can provide required currencies to a partner bank needing additional currency. For example a swap line provides access to additional currency when the partner is suffering a liquidity crisis. .
Blanchard argues for more capital is the sum total nonhuman assets that can be owned and exchanged on some market according to Piketty. Capital includes: real property, financial capital and professional capital. It is not immutable instead depending on the state of the society within which it exists. It can be owned by governments (public capital) and private individuals (private capital).
controls since he felt much of the investor activity prior to
2008 was counterproductive. Still Blanchard believes the
global infrastructure is too complicated for there to be a big
vision. Instead he says to advance step-by-step.
Conway argues
that history has shown fixed exchange rates are
problematic. As such the euro is anathema:
Conway accepts that Bretton Woods was a failed concept but it
performed better than any equivalent before or after it.
And he says it was limited in scope, imperfect and short
lived. It would be very difficult to setup without another
catastrophe. And its designers have lost some credibility:
This page introduces the complex adaptive system (CAS) theory
frame. The theory provides an organizing framework that is
used by 'life.' It can be used to evaluate and rank models
that claim to describe our perceived reality. It catalogs
the laws and strategies which underpin the operation of systems
that are based on the interaction of emergent
agents. It highlights the
constraints that shape CAS and so predicts their form. A
proposal that does not conform is wrong.
John Holland's framework for representing complexity is
outlined. Links to other key aspects of CAS theory
discussed at the site are presented.
CAS theory models an economy is a human SuperOrganism complex adaptive system (CAS) which operates and controls trade flows within a rich niche. Economics models economies. Robert Gordon has described the evolution of the American economy. Like other CAS, economic flows are maintained far from equilibrium by: demand, financial flows and constraints, supply infrastructure constraints, political and military constraints; ensuring wealth, legislative control, legal contracts and power have significant leverage through evolved amplifiers. as a network of Plans are interpreted and implemented by agents. This page
discusses the properties of agents in a complex adaptive system
(CAS).
It then presents examples of agents in different CAS. The
examples include a computer program where modeling and actions
are performed by software agents. These software agents
are aggregates.
The participation of agents in flows is introduced and some
implications of this are outlined.
agents. Framing Bretton Woods
with CAS models:
- Conway's list of key
rules and agreements obscures a key requirement.
A necessary aspect of Bretton Woods was to recirculate
surpluses to the supplier countries as debt or capital is the sum total nonhuman assets that can be owned and exchanged on some market according to Piketty. Capital includes: real property, financial capital and professional capital. It is not immutable instead depending on the state of the society within which it exists. It can be owned by governments (public capital) and private individuals (private capital). when necessary
(Marshall Plan). This ratchet like mechanism is
analogous to Deacon's
autogenesis
sustaining the far from equilibrium reduced local entropy of
the CAS. The process provides power to the creditors
and allows the value system to continue operating. It
can be performed with the IMF is the International Monetary Fund developed as part of the Bretton Woods agreements to provide liquidity to national gold denominated reserve banks at times of stress in the global financial network - a shortage of a particular currency which was inhibiting trade; in support of a broader Bretton Woods framework designed so as to ensure that currencies did not become misaligned with one another, and were a fair representation of what things were worth. The IMF removed the need for nations to depend on private loans from commercial banks, such as Britain's dependence on J. P. Morgan during the 1920s and 30s. The agreement required each Bretton Woods signatory to provide a capital investment or 'quota' into the fund which would subsequently correspond to the amount that the country could borrow from the fund in times of financial stress. The top four countries and their quotas were set by IMF architect, Harry Dexter White, to match FDR's priorities:
- US - $2.9 billion, an amount the FDR administration could transfer from Exchange Stabilization Fund without any need to ask for Congress for funds.
- UK - $1.45 billion
- USSR - slightly less than UK quota
- China - less than USSR.
and the World Bank was setup as part of the Bretton Woods agreements, as the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development, to repair and reconstruct Europe after the Second World War and as the World Bank continues to provide reconstruction and development resources for projects in developing economies. It includes: - International Finance Corporation
but the point is that the requirement
is essential to escape collapse (May
2016, June
2016, Feb
2019).
- The 20th century
UK economy had emerged from the generalization of the
Sven Beckert describes the historic transformation of the
growing, spinning, weaving, manufacture of cotton goods and
their trade over time. He describes the rise of a first global
commodity, its dependence on increasing: military power, returns for
the control points in the value delivery system(VDS), availability of land
and labor to work it including slaves.
He explains how cotton offered the opportunity for
industrialization further amplifying the productive capacity of
the VDS and the power of the control points. This VDS was quickly
copied. The increased capacity of the industrialized
cotton complex adaptive system (CAS) required more labor to
operate the machines. Beckert describes the innovative introduction of wages
and the ways found to
mobilize industrial labor.
Beckert describes the characteristics of the industrial cotton
CAS which made it flexible enough to become globally interconnected.
Slavery made the production system so cost effective that all
prior structures collapsed as they interconnected. So when
the US civil war
blocked access to the major production nodes in the
American Deep South the CAS began adapting.
Beckert describes the global
reconstruction that occurred and the resulting destruction of the traditional ways
of life in the global countryside. This colonial expansion
further enriched and empowered the 'western' nation
states. Beckert explains how other countries responded
by copying the colonial strategies and creating the
opportunities for future armed conflict among the original
colonialists and the new upstarts.
Completing the adaptive
shifts, Beckert describes the advocates for industrialization in
the colonized global south and how over time they joined
the global cotton CAS disrupting the early western manufacturing
nodes and creating the current global CAS
dominated by merchants like Wal-Mart
pulling goods through a network of clothing manufacturers,
spinning and weaving factories, and growers competing with each
other on cost.
Following our summary of Beckert's book, RSS comments from the
perspective of CAS theory. The transformation of
disconnected peasant farmers,
pastoral warriors and their lands into a supply chain for a
highly profitable industrial CAS required the development over
time: of military force, global transportation and communication
networks, perception and representation control networks, capital stores and flows,
models, rules, standards and markets; along with the support at
key points of: barriers, disruption, and infrastructure and
evolved amplifiers. The emergent
system demonstrates the powerful constraining influence of
extended phenotypic alignment.
global cotton This page reviews the strategy of setting up an arms race. At its
core this strategy depends on being able to alter, or take
advantage of an alteration in, the genome
or equivalent. The situation is illustrated with examples
from biology, high tech and politics.
evolved amplifier to other
goods. The reorganization
of the UK population into factory labor induced the
legislators to extend the vote to these workers.
Empowered the workers expanded their pay and allowed
other nations to compete.
- Keynes idea of
people hording money in depressions can be seen as
symptomatic of inducing a CAS collapse. The system and
the network of agents, from which it emerges, must be
maintained far from equilibrium to keep entropy's local
effects minimized and the agents operating. The
depression places a barrier - feedback to every agent that
they will spend less if they wait for prices to reduce
further - starving the system of available
energy.
- Skidelsky
asserts Keynes
experience of personal losses and his observations of public
policy, led him to see private and company savings flowing
to the stock market, helped by a speculative bubble, rather
than investment. Subsequent reduced demand for primary
products left a glut that drove down prices. Without
real assets being deployed to reflect the rise in stocks the
bubble would burst eventually but the Federal Reserve
encouraged this with an interest rate increase from 3.5% to
5%, in line with the Austrian School theory of Hayek, Mises
and Friedman. Keynes argued
to reduce rates, seeing the problem as people fearfully
hording cash as they observed prices fall and the stock
market crash. The informed and connected wealthy is schematically useful information and its equivalent, schematically useful energy, to paraphrase Beinhocker. It is useful because an agent has schematic strategies that can utilize the information or energy to extend or leverage control of the cognitive niche. , like Keynes,
could
Satyajit Das uses an Indonesian company's derivative trades to
introduce us to the workings of the international derivatives
system. Das describes the components of the value delivery
system and the key
transactions. He demonstrates how the system
interacted with emerging economies
expanding them, extracting profits and then moving on as the
induced bubbles burst. Following Das's key points the
complex adaptive system (CAS)
aspects are highlighted.
benefit from Hayek's
strategy, but Keynes's
idealism led him to stick with his The agents in complex adaptive
systems (CAS) must model their
environment to respond effectively to it. Evolution's
schematic operators and Samuel
modeling together support the indirect recording of past
successes and their strategic use by the current agent to learn
how to succeed in the proximate environment.
model.
- Keynes's clearing union
provides the economic is the study of trade between humans. Traditional Economics is based on an equilibrium model of the economic system. Traditional Economics includes: microeconomics, and macroeconomics. Marx developed an alternative static approach. Limitations of the equilibrium model have resulted in the development of: Keynes's dynamic General Theory of Employment Interest & Money, and Complexity Economics. Since trading depends on human behavior, economics has developed behavioral models including: behavioral economics.
This page discusses the effect of the network on the agents participating in a complex
adaptive system (CAS). Small
world and scale free networks are considered.
network with the ratchet that
CAS need to operate.
- Keynes's assumption
that investment in a positive environment would result in
increased job growth is undermined by job outsourcing and
capital flowing to foreign markets. Bretton Woods constrained capital flows,
until Nixon abandoned the constraints.
- The UK
parliamentary system assumed by Keynes to apply in the US is the United States of America. is an
This page discusses the mechanisms and effects of emergence
underpinning any complex adaptive system (CAS). Physical forces and
constraints follow the rules of complexity. They generate
phenomena and support the indirect emergence of epiphenomena.
Flows of epiphenomena interact in events which support the
emergence of equilibrium and autonomous
entities. Autonomous entities enable evolution
to operate broadening the adjacent possible.
Key research is reviewed.
emergent This page discusses the interdependence of perception and
representation in a complex adaptive system (CAS). Hofstadter
and Mitchell's research with Copycat is
reviewed. The bridging of a node from a network of 'well
known' percepts to a new representational instance is discussed
as it occurs in biochemistry, in consciousness and
abstractly.
perception,
representation and control structure which requires
ministers to be selected from the elected members of the
house of commons and the members of the house of
lords. The ministers make law and policy and execute
it through the civil service. The constraints come
from the: Electorate, Party, Members of parliament.
The Jonathan Powell describes how the government of, the former UK Prime Minister, Tony Blair,
actually operated. Powell was Blair's only chief of
staff.
process is described by Jonathan
Powell. In contrast the US government separates
the development of laws, the execution of policy and the
constitutional and legal framework in which they operate and
requires Barton Gellman details the strategies used by Vice President
Cheney to align the global system with his economics, defense, and
energy goals.
strategies influencing each
branch to make things happen as described by Barton
Gellman.
- The penetration
of the Imperial Preference
Barriers are particular types of constraints on flows. They can enforce
separation of a network of agents allowing evolution to build
diversity. Examples of different types of barriers: physical
barriers, chemical
molecules can form membranes, probability based,
cell membranes can include controllable
channels, eukaryotes
leverage membranes, symbiosis, human emotions, chess, business; and
their effects are described.
barriers
and subsequent This page reviews Christensen's disruption
of a complex adaptive system (CAS).
The mechanism is discussed with examples from biology and
business.
disruption of the
UK is the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. economic network by the
US is the United States of America. while obvious to Keynes
was inevitable once the UK's military lead was lost and the
UK economy is a human SuperOrganism complex adaptive system (CAS) which operates and controls trade flows within a rich niche. Economics models economies. Robert Gordon has described the evolution of the American economy. Like other CAS, economic flows are maintained far from equilibrium by: demand, financial flows and constraints, supply infrastructure constraints, political and military constraints; ensuring wealth, legislative control, legal contracts and power have significant leverage through evolved amplifiers. had
collapsed during the first world war. The slew of
technologies and centralized governmental organizations
required by that war provided the US, Germany and Japan with
superior weapons including carrier based aircraft, and
battle tanks around which they developed transformational
military strategies leveraged in the Second World War.
The UK's historic legacy and inter-war, self-inflicted
economic bind left it unable or unwilling to leverage
even its own strategic ideas.
- Keynes transformation of
the World Bank plan created an
This page reviews the strategy of setting up an arms race. At its
core this strategy depends on being able to alter, or take
advantage of an alteration in, the genome
or equivalent. The situation is illustrated with examples
from biology, high tech and politics.
evolved
amplifier with the Bretton Woods agreement providing
the Plans emerge in complex adaptive
systems (CAS) to provide the
instructions that agents use to
perform actions. The component architecture and structure
of the plans is reviewed.
schematic plan, and the
offer of leveraged investment generating the reinforcing
benefits to the private lender and hopefully the
recipient.
- CAS
Plans are interpreted and implemented by agents. This page
discusses the properties of agents in a complex adaptive system
(CAS).
It then presents examples of agents in different CAS. The
examples include a computer program where modeling and actions
are performed by software agents. These software agents
are aggregates.
The participation of agents in flows is introduced and some
implications of this are outlined.
agents leverage The agents in complex adaptive
systems (CAS) must model their
environment to respond effectively to it. Evolution's
schematic operators and Samuel
modeling together support the indirect recording of past
successes and their strategic use by the current agent to learn
how to succeed in the proximate environment.
models selected by This page reviews the implications of selection, variation and
heredity in a complex adaptive system (CAS).
The mechanism and its emergence are
discussed.
evolution or associated with local
experience by learning. Hence expertise in economics
will not translate into other fields that need different This page discusses the interdependence of perception and
representation in a complex adaptive system (CAS). Hofstadter
and Mitchell's research with Copycat is
reviewed. The bridging of a node from a network of 'well
known' percepts to a new representational instance is discussed
as it occurs in biochemistry, in consciousness and
abstractly.
perceptions and representations.
Keynes
repeated political naivety should have been assumed
and managed by the UK leadership now aims to develop plans and strategies which ensure effective coordination to improve the common good of the in-group. Pinker notes the evolved pressure of social rivalry associating power with leadership. Saposky observes the disconnect between power hierarchies and wisdom in apes. John Adair developed a modern leadership methodology based on the three-circles model. .
- The initiation of US
This page reviews Christensen's disruption
of a complex adaptive system (CAS).
The mechanism is discussed with examples from biology and
business.
network
disruption by the strategically
'differentiated' economies of Japan and Germany
exacerbated the This page reviews the inhibiting effect of the value delivery system on the
expression of new phenotypic
effects within an agent.
strategically
miss-aligned spending on War
and low investment regions of the US economy. As
a superorganism is a wealthy autonomous entity needing and controlling the richest niches in the proximate environment, that emerges from the bundled cooperation of schematically aligned agents. The term is based on the social insect model, used by: ants, termites, and bees; and identified by Holldobler & E.O. Wilson. These genetically identical insect superorganisms cooperatively limit their reproduction to align with the resources available in the niche. Wilson asserts these insects all developed nests to which they returned to raise their offspring, and when the nest sites were of limited capacity some family members responded by focusing on defending the nest and foraging while their mother became an egg laying queen, enabled by "a single genetic change which silenced the brain's program for dispersal and prevents the mother and her offspring from dispersing to create new nests," Wilson explains. He adds climate control of the nest and disease resistance, just like the human immune system, demand individually focused diversity. So the queen's genome consists of low variety alleles for the extended phenotypic 'robot' worker caste agents and their organization - queen and workers competing as one, with other colonies and individual insects - and other parts which are high where the genome includes significant diversity. For humans it is an evolved cultural strategy used when the environment is supportive, but it is dependent on our imperfect cognitive assessment of kinship as well as group selection driven emotions: other-condemning, other-praising, other-suffering and self-conscious; and group oriented pressures to conform and remain: religions. And the adjacent possible must be recreated and modeled culturally through the emergence of processes such as democracy. It depends on inter-agent signalling. In both insects and humans it allows specialization, and encourages operations and flows that are tightly controlled, limiting waste, leveraging parallel activity, supporting coherence. Superorganisms reflect cliodynamic flows. A superorganism has a development and operational phase. As additional agents are coopted into the superorganism they align, participate in supply and demand activities and so contribute to the evolutionary amplification. Damasio notes that prokaryotes, in rich environments, can similarly operate in a symbiotic fashion expressing cultural behaviors.
the US
- Must capture outsize profits from the most productive
regions of its global network to sustain its relatively
low strategic efficiency. Without this reinvestment
the middle class market within the US will shrink,
analogously to what occurred in the UK throughout the 20th
century.
- Still can't ignore the constraints of its states
intertwined economic strategies. Hence the
importance to the US of the TPP is the Trans Pacific Partnership, a twelve country, Pacific regional, trade deal between: Australia, Brunei, Canada, Chile, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore, United States, Vietnam; The U.S. aims to use the agreement to constrain competition from China. The initial 12 countries account for more than a quarter of global seafood trade and a quarter of the World's timber and pulp production. Five of the nations are among the World's most biologically diverse. The TPP includes:
- Patents and copyrights chapters.
- State-owned businesses chapter.
- Investor-state dispute settlement chapter which enforces extrajudicial tribunals for arbitrating disputes. The tribunals give investors legal recourse if a government changes policies in ways that hurt the value of their investments.
- An environmental chapter that covers illegal wildlife trafficking, forestry management, overfishing and marine protection. Environmentally destructive subsidies, such as cheap fuel for illegal fishing boats and subsidies for boat building in overfished waters are banned. The chapter enforces Cites with economic sanctions and disallows trade in wildlife taken illegally from a country.
- Requirements that member countries strengthen port inspections and document checks.
- Requirements that a country in the agreement take action if they discover contraband that has been harvested illegally, even if the product is not illegal in that country.
.
- The US
response to London's financial success was
described by Matt
Taibbi and RSS provides a CAS analysis.
- Social gains have
been
Deaton describes the wellbeing
of people around the world today. He explains the powerful benefit of public
health strategies and the effect of growth in
material wellbeing but also the corrosive effects of
aid.
Following our summary of Deaton's arguments RSS comments from the
perspective of complex adaptive system (CAS)
theory. The situation he describes is complex including
powerful amplifiers, alignment and incentives that overlap
broadly with other RSS summaries of adaptations of: The
biosphere, Politics, Economics,
Philosophy and Health care.
discussed in depth by Deaton.
The CAS
framing and assessment of his arguments views the
global network as This page reviews the inhibiting effect of the value delivery system on the
expression of new phenotypic
effects within an agent.
phenotypically
aligned and This page reviews Christensen's disruption
of a complex adaptive system (CAS).
The mechanism is discussed with examples from biology and
business.
disrupted and
suggests an escalating Machiavellian
struggle complicates Deaton's conclusion of social
progress.
- The Asian
financial crises were engineered by western financial
architects
Satyajit Das uses an Indonesian company's derivative trades to
introduce us to the workings of the international derivatives
system. Das describes the components of the value delivery
system and the key
transactions. He demonstrates how the system
interacted with emerging economies
expanding them, extracting profits and then moving on as the
induced bubbles burst. Following Das's key points the
complex adaptive system (CAS)
aspects are highlighted.
as described by Satyajit
Das.
- The US sub-prime housing crisis enabled by the
low cost debt provided by the Chinese transformed into
high rate debt targeted by hot money
A key agent in the 1990 - 2008
housing expansion Countrywide is linked into the residential
mortgage value delivery system (VDS)
by Paul Muolo and Mathew Padilla. But they show the VDS
was full of amplifiers and control points. With no one
incented to apply the brakes the bubble grew and burst.
Following the summary of Muolo and Padilla's key points the
complex adaptive system (CAS)
aspects are highlighted.
is
described by Muolo
& Padilla.
- For RSS the Plaza accord
was where the US
first demonstrated the use of global
Charles Ferguson argues that the US power structure has become
highly corrupt.
Ferguson identifies key events which contributed to the
transformation:
- Junk bonds,
- Derivative
deregulation,
- CMOs,
ABS and analyst fraud,
- Financial network deregulation,
- Financial network consolidation,
- Short term incentives
Subsequently the George W. Bush administration used the
situation to build
a global bubble, which Wall Street
leveraged. The bursting of the
bubble: managed
by the Bush Administration and Bernanke Federal Reserve;
was advantageous to some.
Ferguson concludes that the restructured and deregulated
financial services industry is damaging to
the American economy. And it is supported by powerful, incentive aligned academics.
He sees the result being a rigged system.
Ferguson offers his proposals
for change and offers hope that a charismatic young FDR will appear.
Following our summary of his arguments, RSS comments on them framed by
complex adaptive system (CAS)
theory. Once the constraints are removed from CAS
amplifiers, it becomes advantageous to leverage the increased flows. And it is often
relatively damaging not to participate. Corruption and parasitism can become
entrenched.
financial WMD; to
push the Japanese economy into a depression it has yet
to escape from.
Conway's revealing book shows how global monetary power
transferred from Great Britain to the US is the United States of America. after the First World
War. The shape of the financial infrastructure designed
and built in response to the aftermath of the 1914 to 1918 war
still influences today's global economic This page introduces the complex adaptive system (CAS) theory
frame. The theory provides an organizing framework that is
used by 'life.' It can be used to evaluate and rank models
that claim to describe our perceived reality. It catalogs
the laws and strategies which underpin the operation of systems
that are based on the interaction of emergent
agents. It highlights the
constraints that shape CAS and so predicts their form. A
proposal that does not conform is wrong.
John Holland's framework for representing complexity is
outlined. Links to other key aspects of CAS theory
discussed at the site are presented.
CAS.
.
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