Productivity of complex adaptive systems

Summary

• CAS reflect the history of all the events of the 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 and their
  This page discusses the potential of the vast state space which supports the emergence of complex adaptive systems (CAS).  Kauffman describes the mechanism by which the system expands across the space. 
  
  environment 
• The relevent 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.   history is reviewed
  
• Chemical structures capture and preserve important recipes that allow agents to increase search/operational effectiveness and wealth & the system to be robust
  
• Environment matched to system strategy: Superorganism and beetle
  
• Cliodynamic models of historical agent networks allows a realistic assessment of productivity over a full network cycle 
• The models must be matched to the proximate environment 
• Internal failures of the agent network
• Existential threats to the agent network 

• Meta ideas that can be reused and recombined
  
• Isolated agents can be integrated into the current network during each growth phase, but cliodynamic assessments show agents are dropped again from the network during the decline phase of the cycle 
• Network effects and leverage of power drive productivity improvements. 
  

• Agent level productivity improvements of significance
• More time: Increased light, reduced moving & travelling, quicker & better eating, reduced rework, motivated & effective
  
• Weapons & armor
  
• Power available: Driving flows & actions in required direction
  
• Iterative theory & practice
  
• Infrastructure & tools: catalytic reduction in cost of repeated operations
  
• Agent level productivity improvements of limited effect
  

Introduction

• Productivity is the efficiency with which an agent's selected strategy converts the inputs to an action into the resulting outputs.  It is a complex capability of agents.  It will depend on the agent having: time, motivation, focus, appropriate skills; the coherence of the participating collaborators, and a beneficial environment including the contribution of: standardization of inputs and outputs, infrastructure and evolutionary amplifiers. 
  is the efficiency of transformation of inputs to outputs by 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 labor.  
• 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 supports productivity by encouraging geographies to focus on comparative advantage, as identified by David Ricardo. 
  

• Coordinate the agency needed to survive,
  
• Compete with other agents and
  
• Reproduce broadly into a distributed schematic pool to enhance robustness.  
  This web page reviews opportunities to find and capture new niches based on studying fitness landscapes using complex adaptive system (CAS) theory. 
  
  When a particular niche was entered and captured by selection of an effective recipe the agent obtained power over resources and energy that we equate in an economic context to increased 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.   . 

• Wealth encoded
  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. 
  
  memetic schemata are associated with particular niche characteristics.  Development of improved schemata reflects discovery, access and control of improved niches.  
• Leverage of fire, for: light, heat cooking; enabled individual and groups of humans to improve their chances of survival until they had reproduced successfully, by utilizing potential energy stored in the fire source material.  Fossil fuels are analogous, enhancing the development of global, industrial strategies.  
• Penetration of rich niches.  For humans this means a focus on the cognitive niche is Tooby & DeVore's theory that reflects a flexible competitive strategy, described by Steven Pinker, which leverages the power and flexibility of intelligence to defeat the capabilities of genetically evolved specialists focused on specific niches.  .  Rich sub-niches that sustainably support
  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. 
  
  superorganism investments have been important. 
• Coopting individuals into memetically coordinated superorganisms, supporting the production of valuable outputs. 
  
• Development of
  This page looks at schematic structures and their uses.  It discusses a number of examples:
  

  • Schematic ideas are recombined in creativity. 
  • Similarly designers take ideas and rules about materials and components and combine them. 
  • Schematic Recipes help to standardize operations. 
  • Modular components are combined into strategies for use in business plans and business models. 

  
  As a working example it presents part of the contents and schematic details from the Adaptive Web Framework (AWF)'s operational plan. 
  
  Finally it includes a section presenting our formal representation of schematic goals. 
  Each goal has a series of associated complex adaptive system (CAS) strategy strings. 
  These goals plus strings are detailed for various chess and business examples. 
  
  goal-supporting social technologies are defined by Beinhocker as methods and designs for organizing people in pursuit of a goal or goals. He views the three most significant social technologies as: markets, science, and democracy.  A war example is Fuller & Liddell Hart's theory of high-speed tank warfare, subsequently instantiated by Guderian as Blitzkrieg. 
  : Markets, Science, Democracy. 
  
• Continued searching for & use of enhanced memetic strategies.  Overtime strategies become uncompetitive & must be replaced.  
• Leverage of catalytic infrastructure that reduces the cost of performing an action. 
  

• Obtaining water was an arduous activity.  Pipes moved the water to the agent.  Taps enabled access, are very simple to use and achieve one purpose.  Together they supported a huge coherent capture of time.  
• Complex tasks can be performed effectively by a group of agents, but success requires careful:
  This page looks at schematic structures and their uses.  It discusses a number of examples:
  

  • Schematic ideas are recombined in creativity. 
  • Similarly designers take ideas and rules about materials and components and combine them. 
  • Schematic Recipes help to standardize operations. 
  • Modular components are combined into strategies for use in business plans and business models. 

  
  As a working example it presents part of the contents and schematic details from the Adaptive Web Framework (AWF)'s operational plan. 
  
  Finally it includes a section presenting our formal representation of schematic goals. 
  Each goal has a series of associated complex adaptive system (CAS) strategy strings. 
  These goals plus strings are detailed for various chess and business examples. 
  
  planning,
  The agents in complex adaptive systems (CAS) must model their environment to respond effectively to it.  Samuel modeling is described as an approach. 
  
  modelling (leveraging
  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. 
  
  
  evolved strategies), coordination, scheduling,
  Walter Shewhart's iterative development process is found in many complex adaptive systems (CAS).  The mechanism is reviewed and its value in coping with random events is explained. 
  
  practice; which demands control. 
  This page reviews the implications of selection, variation and heredity in a complex adaptive system (CAS).  The mechanism and its emergence are discussed. 
  
  Evolution demonstrates how this process can be performed using operon is an addressable control structure which is used in biological cells to control access to other regions of the DNA. 
  controlled
  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 plans to define the agent's next action. 
  
• Groups of humans can simulate these evolutionary structures, but they will have to intuit strategic priorities in place of evolution's slow
  Plans change in complex adaptive systems (CAS) due to the action of genetic operations such as mutation, splitting and recombination.  The nature of the operations is described. 
  
  genetic operator based competitive, parallel search process.  Ignoring this process results in complexity catastrophe 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.  RSS sees catastrophe enabled by a lack of rigorous schematic planning within most developed human systems. 
  .  
• Evolution ensured that humans are aware of the risk of working with other non-familial humans.  Repeating situations support cooperation, with punishment for cheating on commitments.  When long term strategies benefit one group more than its symbiotic is a long term situation between two, or more, different agents where the resources of both are shared for mutual benefit.  Some of the relationships have built remarkable dependencies: Tremblaya's partnership with citrus mealybugs and bacterial DNA residing in the mealybug's genome, Aphids with species of secondary symbiont bacteria deployed sexually from a male aphid sperm reservoir and propagated asexually by female aphids only while their local diet induces a dependency.  If the power relations and opportunities change for the participants then they will adapt and the situation may transform into separation, predation or parasitism. 
  partners, the benefiting group risks inducing a
  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. 
  
  collapse of cohesion just when the partnership becomes essential. 
  
• Communicating with other agents is essential to
  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. 
  
  superorganism operation.  Telephone networks extend the distance and timeliness of speech.  Smart phones make the telephone network easily and highly accessible.  But while simple to use they are powerful, general tools diffusing purpose & focus.  
• Opioids are powerful pain relievers, but they are also the chemical rewards used by the dopamine network are categorized anatomically into three key types:
  • Ultra-short systems,
    
  • Intermediate length systems,
    
  • Long systems. 
    
  .  That leaves the users at risk of collapse of motivation, focus and coherence as they obsess about more opioids. 
  

• The development and operation of the Roman Republic and Empire:  
• The initial growth of the city of Rome in 509 BEC leveraged the acceptance of new citizens fleeing other nearby cities.  This ensured a continuous flow of troops to fight and overwhelm opponents. 
  
• The Republic leveraged military conquest to capture wealth & subjugate external threats, until the final proximate threat was removed by Scipio Africanus at Zama in BEC 202. 
  
• The removal of proximate threats undermined the symbiotic is a long term situation between two, or more, different agents where the resources of both are shared for mutual benefit.  Some of the relationships have built remarkable dependencies: Tremblaya's partnership with citrus mealybugs and bacterial DNA residing in the mealybug's genome, Aphids with species of secondary symbiont bacteria deployed sexually from a male aphid sperm reservoir and propagated asexually by female aphids only while their local diet induces a dependency.  If the power relations and opportunities change for the participants then they will adapt and the situation may transform into separation, predation or parasitism. 
  balance of power between aristocracy and people, supporting a civil war that saw Julius Caesar murdered in BEC 44 and the transition to a parasitic is a long term relationship between the parasite and its host where the resources of the host are utilized by the parasite without reciprocity.  Often parasites include schematic adaptations allowing the parasite to use the hosts modeling and control systems to divert resources to them.   empire, which slowly unraveled during the reduction phase of the cycle. 
  
• The emergence of the modern British monarchy in 1485, and its subsequent development, growth of its global empire and decline by 1918.  
• The development of the modern US networked state, that captured and leveraged: military architects and designs from Germany & the UK along with the former British global trading network; during, and just after, the Second World War:
• Development and deployment of a powerful military industrial complex that integrated the ideas and architects from Germany and the UK, with those already utilized domestically. 
  
• Specialization of operations supported development of key nodes: manufacturing line; amplified via
  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 effects of new
  This page reviews the catalytic impact of infrastructure on the expression of phenotypic effects by an agent.  The infrastructure reduces the cost the agent must pay to perform the selected action.  The catalysis is enhanced by positive returns. 
  
  infrastructure and networked dwellings. 
  
• Amplification ensured leverage of wealth, which supported power shifts starting in the 1970s detailed Paul Volcker's strategies for sustaining the US centric post Second World War economic network, once the US became a deficit generator & Bretton Woods could not be sustained.  Volcker's goal was to enable the US to use other country's surpluses to support the network's operation under US control, in place of the disappearing US dollar surplus.  The strategies included:
  • Push American interest rates up much higher than those of other linked economies, attracting global free capital to the US dollar. 
    
  • Ensure that Wall Street offered a more lucrative market for investors than London, Frankfurt, Tokyo, or Paris.  
  • Support US business that was impacted by this costly high interest rate environment by supporting the reduction of wage costs.  Once Volcker became chairman of the Federal Reserve in 1979, he executed the strategies. 
    
  to 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. 
  
  
  wealthy elite. 
  
• Disconnection and collapse of the
  This page reviews Christensen's disruption of a complex adaptive system (CAS).  The mechanism is discussed with examples from biology and business. 
  
  disrupted middle class.  

• From experience of the First World War and its aftermath - future American 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.  It:
  
  • 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;
    
  • 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. 
    
  leaders and architects formulated strategies they implemented during the 1930s - 1950s. 
  
• From experience of the New Deal -
  
• Future American Republican leaders and business men developed strategies to replace the New Deal
  H. A. Hayek compares and contrasts collectivism and libertarianism. 
  
  central planning problems they suffered from.  These were operationalized by Eisenhower & Reagan. 
  
• Future Third Way Democrats developed alternative strategies to LBJ is President Lyndon Baines Johnson.  's Great Society.  These culminated in operational deployment during the Clinton administration of 1993 to 2001. 
  

• Repeatable leverage of meta
  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). 
  
  ideas:
  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. 
  
  Constraints, Strategy, Use of fire,
  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, Agriculture, Language,
  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. 
  
  
  Reading, Libraries, Printing, Scientific knowledge, Programmed tools, infrastructure destruction with
  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. 
  
  wealth removal and subsequent rebuilding;
  
• 'One off' conversions of isolated
  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 in disconnected niches into
  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 connected niches supporting
  This page reviews the catalytic impact of infrastructure on the expression of phenotypic effects by an agent.  The infrastructure reduces the cost the agent must pay to perform the selected action.  The catalysis is enhanced by positive returns. 
  
  infrastructure amplified, job based, schematically wealthy agents:
  
• Native farmers cleared for deployment of slave plantations producing spices, sugar, tobacco, tea, cotton
  
• Destruction of rural communities, transfer to wage labor operating industrial plant with power: from water, coal/stream, oil/internal combustion & eventually electricity; ensuring far from equilibrium flows are sustained. 
  
• During
  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. 
  
  
  1870 to 1970 American growth: leveraging infrastructure collapse of Europe and rebuilding of Germany, Japan. 
  
• During the 1980 to 2008 Chinese growth: US is the United States of America.   financial network generating 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). 
  & profit from infrastructure and manufacturing company build-out in China.  But each of these 'one off' conversions can be seen to be part of a broader CAS cliodynamic cycle which will subsequently disconnect surplus agents during the reduction phase of the cycle. 
  

• The Green Revolution refers to a set of social technologies: new methods of cultivation; initially used in Mexico during the 1950s to 1970s and then deployed globally, during the 1970s, that increased agricultural production worldwide, and acted as a political constraint on famine and Communism.  It was sponsored by Mexico, the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations, with leadership from Norman Borlaug and it built on the work of geneticist, Nazareno Strampelli.  The improved production leveraged the development of:
  • High yielding varieties of wheat and rice based on:
  • High rates of nitrogen metabolism (cross breading, genetic engineering) allowing high yield when combined with
    
  • Strong short stems to resist bending and
    
  • Supplied with
    
  • Chemical fertilizers, and agro-chemicals
  • Irrigation
    
  • Disease resistance based on cell level breeding and genetic engineering
    
  based on innovations is the economic realization of invention and combinatorial exaptation. 
  from the 1930s - 1940s, has expanded worldwide agricultural production allowing a billion people to avoid starvation.  
• Wal-Mart's
  
• Big box stores, leveraged the interstate highway network to broadly connect shoppers with low cost goods. 
  
• Computer coordinated global supply chain further reduced costs. 
  
• Amazon's e-commerce offering allows busy individuals to reduce the time requirement and cost of shopping. 
  

• Turing (machine, a machine specified by mathematician Alan Turing which is the blueprint for the electronic programmable computer.  It consists of an infinite tape on which symbols can be written.  A movable read/write tape head which can move about the tape and write on or read symbols from the tape.  A set of rules that tell the head what to do next. 
  ) & Shannon, Claude Shannon was a key figure in information theory and computation.  He developed an electronic circuit using Boolean algebra which simplified the design and operation of a digital computer system enabling architectures such as Von Neumann's to become practical.  He also developed the mathematical models of information transfer which support information entropy. 
  showed that computer programs are highly flexible, general purpose algorithms.  But initially the opportunity was constrained by deployment and access challenges. 
  
• 1980 computing solutions were architected by corporations.  IBM had monopoly control of the 360 & 370 architectures and ensured that adding non-IBM technologies was costly, difficult and risky.  Terminals, once available, were also proprietary and incompatible so, adding other computing solutions required access to additional terminal space.  IBM's networking technology, culminating in implementations of SNA is IBM's system network architecture which specified the formats, protocols and architecture of their layered computer data network. 
  , was also controlled by the corporation and was architected, by design, to limit 3rd party leverage. 
  
• The potential of anti-trust actions, against AT&T and IBM, drove the Unix OS and PC into an open market. 
  
• The experience of high cost and low flexibility of IBM's former monopoly is a power relation within:
  
  • A state in which a group has enough power to enforce its will on other citizens.  If this is a central authority with a cohesive military, it can overpower other warlords and stabilize the society. 
    
  • An economy in which one business has enough share in a market segment to control margins to its advantage.  An economic monopoly can be broadly beneficial: AT&T monopoly, US patent monopoly rights;
    
  power resulted in their customers demanding standardized components: POSIX is portable operating system interface specified by the IEEE. 
  ; and network technologies: ISO/OSI (OSI), a set of communications interconnection standards defined by the International Standards Organization (ISO) global standards body.  OSI competed unsuccessfully with the IETF's TCP/IP.  The basic seven layer 'model' of OSI is still influential.  , X series, IEEE is the institute of electrical and electronic engineers. 
  , IETF, the internet engineering task force controls the processes that manage the architecture of the internet.  .  Over time, like Hoover's standardization of the assembly line parts, this generated plug-and-play
  To benefit from shifts in the environment agents must be flexible.  Being sensitive to environmental signals agents who adjust strategic priorities can constrain their competitors. 
  
  flexibility and
  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 effects for computing components. 
  
• This page describes the consequences of the asymmetries caused by business model differences between Apple, Google and Microsoft.  This presents a highly visible demonstration of the effects of sexual selection and disruption. 
  The surprising success of the iPhone undermined well developed strategies that had previously been considered successful.  Google's response to the classical Apple strategies is described.  The subsequent disruptive effects on Microsoft's business model are reviewed. 
  
  Smart phones encourage incessant texting and talking with friends.  The phones are far easier to use, suggesting improved productivity is the efficiency with which an agent's selected strategy converts the inputs to an action into the resulting outputs.  It is a complex capability of agents.  It will depend on the agent having: time, motivation, focus, appropriate skills; the coherence of the participating collaborators, and a beneficial environment including the contribution of: standardization of inputs and outputs, infrastructure and evolutionary amplifiers. 
  but the activities are casual and often conflict with strategic activities: Developing a coherent plan, Learning, Concentrating on an argument, Checking on effectiveness of an action; as experienced by Geisinger. 
  
• Newspapers initially provided a controlled mechanism to educate and coordinate the citizens, using the Associated Press control point.  Talk radio and cable news provided channels for
  Flows of different kinds are essential to the operation of complex adaptive systems (CAS). 
  Example flows are outlined.  Constraints on flows support the emergence of the systems.  Examples of constraints are discussed. 
  
  flows of alternative conflicting
  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. 
  
  memes.  Instead of freeing up time to focus on a productive activity, social media encourages multi-tasking across various interesting social networking activities of limited productive value.  
• Broadcast message based discussions are enabled, but the breadth of the discussion can easily get out of hand, demanding time to review and understand responses.  
• It still isn't possible to catch and respond instantly to every signal.  As the amount of traffic expands the time spent managing 'message tag' expands. 
  
• As the amount of communication signals expands, time is snatched from other uses including relaxation and rest which increases fatigue includes the impact of hard thinking by the frontal cortex.  As the frontal lobe works to enforce its willpower it becomes difficult for the body to deliver on its metabolic demands.  As the frontal lobe weakens the overall effect is for an individual to become more aggressive, less charitable, less honest.  The lack of metabolic resources acts as an interoceptive signal to the frontal cortex. 
  . 
  
• Easily used general communications technologies are leveraged to do more faster, instead of developing and enhancing
  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. 
  
  schematically controlled
  Agents use sensors to detect events in their environment.  This page reviews how these events become signals associated with beneficial responses in a complex adaptive system (CAS).  CAS signals emerge from the Darwinian information model.  Signals can indicate decision summaries and level of uncertainty. 
  
  signaling
  Flows of different kinds are essential to the operation of complex adaptive systems (CAS). 
  Example flows are outlined.  Constraints on flows support the emergence of the systems.  Examples of constraints are discussed. 
  
  flows to
  Walter Shewhart's iterative development process is found in many complex adaptive systems (CAS).  The mechanism is reviewed and its value in coping with random events is explained. 
  
  iteratively become more effective.  
• Demotivation from the apparent loss of control from constant requests for action.  

• Learn additional applicable memetic schemata.  This is the essence of effective education and training.  Darwin and Leonardo da Vinci integrated additional observations and discoveries into their personal, iteratively improving, sets of memetic recipes, organized in a common place, a format of note book where multiple areas of interest were recorded, described, cross referenced, and iteratively developed over a period of time.  Steven Johnson explains how the idea of a common place book inspired Tim Berners-Lee's design for the world-wide-web.  Walter Isaacson notes Leonardo da Vinci's use of a 'zibaldone' or common place book.  Charles Darwin also used the format in his note books. 
  format.  Vannevar Bush was a professor of engineering -- dean of the MIT School of Engineering, a founder while a student of Raytheon and the top science administrator to President F.D. Roosevelt.  He developed the Differential Analyzer, encouraged Claude Shannon to study genetics, promoted the education-industrial-military complex arguing university and industrial labs should be contracted to develop government research and set the vision of the World Wide Web with his Atlantic article 'As We May Think' outlining the memex. 
  & Robert Millikan demonstrate how brokering ideas from academic networks can support formation of
  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). 
  
  good ideas.  Learning is undermined when:
  
• 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 strategies are misaligned with the newly accessible niches
  
• 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 structures aren't broadly replicated is Richard Dawkin's name for the genotype since it has the evolutionary goal of surviving long enough to reproduce its schematic plan effectively.  The action of genetic operators means that the results of successful reproduction may be different to the parental genotypes and phenotypes (Dawkin's vehicle). 
  and distributed to the next generation, as in the case of Leonardo. 
  
• Education policies discourage effective meme driven adaptability and
  To benefit from shifts in the environment agents must be flexible.  Being sensitive to environmental signals agents who adjust strategic priorities can constrain their competitors. 
  
  flexibility.  
• The cost of education:
  
• Constrains the flows of agents through the network,
  
• Traps lower performers in debt or
  
• Drives them to collapse and
  
• Teaches the agents to reject and fear the framework
  
• Purchase (lease) and utilize
  Tools and the businesses that produce them have evolved dramatically.  W Brian Arthur shows how this occurred.
  
  tools: Aircraft, Air conditioners, Cars, Computers, Cookers, Irons, Fridge-Freezers, Plumbing, Toilets, Telephones; supported by network connected infrastructure, infrastructure often made accessible and easily utilized through the network connected home, to
  
• gain even more time or
  
• Apply their
  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 strategies to act more effectively. 
  
• Genetic schemata are gathered 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, and executed in an
  This page describes the adaptive web framework (AWF) Smiley agent progamming infrastructure's codelet based Copycat grouping operation. 
  The requirements needed for a group to complete are described. 
  The association of group completion with a Slipnet defined operon is described.  Either actions or signals result from the association. 
  How a generated signal is transported to the nucleus of the cell and matched with an operon is described. 
  A match with an operon can result in deployment of a schematic string to the original Workspace.  But eventually the deployed string will be destroyed. 
  Smiley infrastructure amplification of the group completion operation is introduced.  This includes facilities to inhibit crowding out of offspring. 
  A test file awfart04 is included. 
  The group codelet and supporting functions are included. 
  
  operon enabled cascade in response to internal and external signals, is an emergent capability which is used by cooperating agents to support coordination & rival agents to support control and dominance.  In eukaryotic cells signalling is used extensively.  A signal interacts with the exposed region of a receptor molecule inducing it to change shape to an activated form.  Chains of enzymes interact with the activated receptor relaying, amplifying and responding to the signal to change the state of the cell.  Many of the signalling pathways pass through the nuclear membrane and interact with the DNA to change its state.  Enzymes sensitive to the changes induced in the DNA then start to operate generating actions including sending further signals.  Cell signalling is reviewed by Helmreich.  Signalling is a fundamental aspect of CAS theory and is discussed from the abstract CAS perspective in signals and sensors.  In AWF the eukaryotic signalling architecture has been abstracted in a codelet based implementation.  To be credible signals must be hard to fake.  To be effective they must be easily detected by the target recipient.  To be efficient they are low cost to produce and destroy. 
  . 
  
• Memetic schemata are indirectly associated with agency.  They can be made subject to operon based constraints and
  Plans change in complex adaptive systems (CAS) due to the action of genetic operations such as mutation, splitting and recombination.  The nature of the operations is described. 
  
  evolutionary operators, but often these aspects are ignored by organizations are goal directed, boundary-maintaining, and socially constructed systems of human activity, argues University of North Carolina sociologist Howard Aldrich. 
  .  This failure is observed as complexity catastrophe 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.  RSS sees catastrophe enabled by a lack of rigorous schematic planning within most developed human systems. 
  .  
• Iterative improvement using
  Walter Shewhart's iterative development process is found in many complex adaptive systems (CAS).  The mechanism is reviewed and its value in coping with random events is explained. 
  
  Shewhart cycles finds or
  Plans change in complex adaptive systems (CAS) due to the action of genetic operations such as mutation, splitting and recombination.  The nature of the operations is described. 
  
  builds more effective schematic strategies, as seen for memes during the Second World War manufacturing improvements
  
• Human agents' motivation to act varies depending on:
  
• Agency - Frontal cortex of the cerebral cortex is at the front of the brain.  It includes the: prefrontal cortex, motor cortex.  Sapolsky asserts it makes you do the harder thing when it's the right thing to do.  The frontal cortex supports working memory to sustain focus on a task.  It also coordinates the strategic actions necessary to achieve success.  It provides impulse control, regulation of emotion, and willpower.  The prefrontal cortex maintains focus by deprioritizing currently irrelevant streams of information.  The frontal cortex tracks rules.  Over a lifetime that builds into a costly activity.  Once it tires responses become less prosocial.  But practice shifts operation of tasks to the cerebellum.  The frontal cortex signals the tegmentum and accumbens with the conclusions of its expectancy/discrepancy calculations.  The frontal lobe provides executive function, considering bits of information, assessing patterns and then prioritizing the strategies.  The frontal lobe is the most recent part of the brain to evolve and involves a disproportionate percentage of primate-unique genes in its development and operation.  It does not complete development until the mid-20s.  It includes spindle neurons.  It is easily damaged.  Sapolsky (Nauta) notes that its ventromedial prefrontal cortex is a quasi-member of the limbic system. 
  takes hard thoughtful decisions based on dopamine driven motivation. 
  
• Emotions are low level agents distributed across the brain and body which associate, via the amygdala and rich club hubs, important environmental signals with encoded high speed sensors, and distributed programs of action to model: predict, prioritize guidance signals, select and respond effectively, coherently and rapidly to the initial signal.  The majority of emotion centered brain regions interface to the midbrain through the hypothalamus.  The most accessible signs of emotions are the hard to control and universal facial expressions.  Emotions provide prioritization for conscious access given that an animal has only one body, but possibly many cells, with which to achieve its highest level goals.  Because of this emotions clash with group goals and are disparaged by the powerful.  Evolutionary psychology argues evolution shaped human emotions during the long period of hunter-gatherer existence in the African savanna.  Human emotions are universal and include: Anger, Appreciation of natural beauty, Disgust, Fear, Gratitude, Grief, Guilt, Happiness, Honor, Jealousy, Liking, Love, Rage, Romantic love, Lust for revenge, Passion, Sadness, Self-control, Shame, Sympathy, Surprise; and the sham emotions and distrust induced by reciprocal altruism.   - Allow rapid prioritization of decisions based on signals from the proximate environment
  
• Perceptions - When agents conclude they are capable of achieving a valued objective they increase focus & determination 
• Leadership aims to develop plans and strategies which ensure effective coordination to improve the common good of the in-group.  John Adair developed a leadership methodology based on the three-circles model. 
  
  
• Agents differ in the schemata they contain: Culture, Personality differs in at least five key ways:
  • Extroversion-introversion - whether the person gains energy 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
    
  types, Keirsey, Myers-Briggs and Aristotle have noted a personality segmentation reflecting individual/group orientation and theory/practice orientation.  Keirsey named the four segments: Rational (i, t), Idealist (g, t), Guardian (g, p) and Artisan (i, p).  Geoffrey Moore's chasm crossing strategy can be seen to leverage this personality segmentation.  .  
• Collectivists have achieved strategic advantage from use of
  This presentation reviews just-in-time manufacturing with analysis based on complex adaptive system (CAS) theory. 
  
  JIT & Hoshin - Hoshin (direction) Kanri (management) is a planning process which was popularized by Professor Kaoru Ishikawa which helped align goals and objectives across an organization.  It argues:
  1. Focus on a few breakthrough ideas.  As a method to focus an organization on lean management it can be used to drive cost cutting.  However, if the measures are poor the results can undermine the operation of an effective system, as at Laguna Honda Hospital.  
     
  2. Cascade of goals and strategies is developed by top down and bottom up discussions allowing detail to be added along with alignment and buy in.  In Japan, lifelong employment supported this process.  The individual focused merit ratings used in Western management practice undermines the process in Deming's view (deadly disease 3). 
     
  3. The goals, strategies and success measures should be rigorously documented.  In the original paper and fax processes in Japan each goal, its strategies, measures and resources were documented in a planning table.  The whole activity became coordinated by a house of quality.  In AWF the planning table is replaced by a bullet point infinite labelled goal in the execution schematic plan with a structured status block allowing easy visualization of the goal network. 
     
  4. Regular review process based on a Shewhart cycle.  
  strategies within total quality management.  Hoshin specifically aligns all goals and strategies to the over-arching vision and mission.  Geisinger, and subsequently Kaiser, adopted this lean management is the application of the Toyota quality improvement process.  This focuses on:
  
  • Removing the seven critical wastes:
  1. Excessive motion
  2. Waiting time
  3. Over production
  4. Unnecessary processing time
  5. Defects
  6. Excessive resources
  7. Unnecessary/ineffective handoffs
  • The result should be improved processes and outcomes, reduced cost and increasing patient and staff satisfaction. 
    
  • It is typical to use metric collection and analysis to understand where the issues are and if they are being corrected.  
  strategy in health care.  But this approach will not significantly alter health care network productivity until it is broadly deployed.  Creating broad deployment is a strategy of the ACA is the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act amended by the Health Care and Education Reconciliation Act of 2010 (Obama care).  In part it is designed to make the health care system costs grow slower.  It aims to do this by: increasing competition between insurers and providers, offering free preventative services to limit the development of serious illnesses, constraining patients' use of expensive services, constraining the growth of payments to Medicare providers and piloting new ways for PCPs to manage patient care to keep patients away from costly E.D.s.  It funds these changes with increased taxes on the wealthy.  It follows an architecture developed by Heritage Action's Butler, Moffit, Haislmaier extended by White House OMB health policy advisor Ezekiel Emanuel & architect Jeanne Lambrew.  The Obama administration drafting team included: Bob Kocher; allowing it to integrate ideas from: Dartmouth Institute's Elliot Fischer (ACO).  The ACA did not include a Medicare buy in (May 2016).  The law includes:
  • Alterations, in title I, to how health care is paid for and who is covered.  This has been altered to ensure
    
  • Americans with preexisting conditions get health insurance cover - buttressed by mandating community rating and
    
  • That they are constrained by the individual mandate to have insurance but the requirement was supported by subsidies for the poor (those with incomes between 100 & 400% of the federal poverty line).  
  • Children, allowed to, stay on their parents insurance until 26 years of age. 
    
  • Medicare solvency improvements. 
    
  • Medicaid expansion, in title II: to poor with incomes below 138% of the federal poverty line; an expansion which was subsequently constrained by the Supreme Court's ruling making expansion an optional state government decision. 
    
  • Hospital Readmissions Reduction Program (HRRP) which was enforced by CMS mandated rules finalized in 2011 and effected starting Oct 2012.  
  • Medical home models.  
  • Community transformation grants support the transformation of low income stressed neighborhoods to improve their lifestyles and health. 
    
  • Qualifications for ACOs.  Organizations must:
    
  • Establish a formal legal structure with shared governance which allows the ACO to distribute shared savings payments to participating providers and suppliers. 
    
  • Participate in the MSSP for three or more years. 
    
  • Have a management structure. 
    
  • Have clinical and administrative systems. 
    
  • Include enough PCPs to care for Medicare FFS patient population (> 5000) assigned to the ACO. 
    
  • Be accountable for the quality and cost of care provided to the Medicare FFS patient population. 
    
  • Have defined processes to promote: Evidence-based medicine, Patient-centeredness, Quality reporting, Cost management, Coordination of care; 
  • Demonstrate it meets HHS patent-centeredness criteria including use of patient and caregiver assessments and individualized care plans.  
  • CMMI Medicare payment experimentation.  
  • Requirements that pharmaceutical companies must report payments made to physicians (Sunshine Act). 
    
  • A requirement that chain restaurants must report calorie counts on their menus. 
    
  and MACRA is Medicare Access and CHIP Reauthorization Act of 2015 is designed to encourage physicians to move to FFV and to link Medicare payment to quality & value.  It alters the way Medicare pays for part B physician services encouraging physicians and other ECs to conform to one of two value based payment schemes: Advanced APMs (where the EC can become a QP) or MIPS.  MACRA does not apply to hospitals which have their own meaningful use.  MACRA is designed to promote transformation and includes: Data reporting by ECs, New practice models, Changing clinical standards, and Physician evaluations; with hundreds of millions of dollars in penalties and bonuses.  It authorizes CMS to develop and deploy new rules.  It provides for PCPs in PCMHs to qualify as advanced APMs via a special lower risk pathway.  It replaced the problematic physician SGR formula. 
  . 
  
• Individualists, adopting these 'agile' strategies, have adapted them to fit: Atlassian's Jira. 
  

• Bretton Woods:
  
• Constrained the movement of 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). 
  . 
• Had localized manufacturing, which GDP modeled well. 
  
• Struggled with trade imbalances which required central bank currency transfers
  
• Post Bretton Woods globalized manufacturing and free allocation and movement of capital
  
• Allowed bankers to allocate capital where it would provide maximum returns,
  
• Starved high salary regions with legacy infrastructure that was uncompetitive
  
• Low wage immigrants are beneficial during the cliodynamic cycle 'growth' phase, but when the superorganism is in the 'decline' phase it will be sheding agents. 
  
• Reduced power of national unions
  
• Globalized businesses would still be highly productive and profitable, even as they disintermediated is the shift of operations from one network provider to another lower cost connected network provider.  The first network provider leverages the cost benefits of the shift to increase its profitability but becomes disrupted.  The lower cost network provider gains revenue flows, expertise and increases its active agents.  Over time this disruptive shift will leave the higher cost network as a highly profitable shell, but the agents that performed the operations that migrated to the low cost network will be ejected from the network.  For a company that may imply the costs of layoffs.  For a state the ejected workers imply increased cost impacts and reduced revenue potential which the state are trading off for improved operating efficiency. 
  . 
  
• GDP would be a poor model of the globalized operations.  Chinese labor might lower the cost of production, and improve the profitability of a US based company assembling in China, shipping and then finishing near the growing target market, but GDP would shrink.  And unemployment in areas with disintermediated operations would rise.  Improved competitiveness from lower costs would undermine local competition increasing unemployment in target markets. 
  

• This page reviews the inhibiting effect of the value delivery system on the expression of new phenotypic effects within an agent. 
  
  Extended phenotypic alignment 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 - where each participant in the network, including the financiers, will hold each other in position and demand current actions, undermining flexibility.  Business cycles, induced and enhanced by
  This page reviews the catalytic impact of infrastructure on the expression of phenotypic effects by an agent.  The infrastructure reduces the cost the agent must pay to perform the selected action.  The catalysis is enhanced by positive returns. 
  
  infrastructure and
  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 amplifiers, can be lengthened and strengthened through alignment, until the powerful down-cycle could induce collapse.  As such a situation became damaging in 2008, the fear of financial failure, encouraged the government to
  
• Ignore moral hazard involves responding to a generalized problem by rewarding those who caused the problem. 
  
  • In health care it includes the over use of subsidized treatments and medicines.  
  • For the US economy it includes using tax revenue to underwrite the losses induced by the reckless behavior of financiers and the politicians and regulators who enabled them. 
    
  , reinforcing the lesson that: the US is the United States of 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. 
  
  
  aristocracy" can benefit hugely from its profligate behavior with little personal risk, is an assessment of the likelihood of an independent problem occurring.  It can be assigned an accurate probability since it is independent of other variables in the system.  As such it is different from uncertainty. 
  . 
  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. 
  
  
  Deficits have become a strategy to limit public spending and shift public 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 power to the wealthy. 
  
• The cyclic nature of CAS operations ensures that productivity will experience cyclic headwinds.  Without continued expansion of the working population base these can exert a long term impact.  Gordon identifies such trends causing sustained headwinds in the current US economy. 
  
• 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. 
  
  
  Aristocratic control of legislative meme development and deployment, augmented by parasitism is a long term relationship between the parasite and its host where the resources of the host are utilized by the parasite without reciprocity.  Often parasites include schematic adaptations allowing the parasite to use the hosts modeling and control systems to divert resources to them.   and extended phenotypic alignment, maintains a high cost, inefficient, predatory
  The complexity and problems of the US Health 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.  The emergence of a parasitic elite 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, guns, light, cell phones, opioids, global travel, antibacterials, formula, foods including endocrine disrupters;
    
  • Accepting the US supply chains offered goods & services results in: debt, stress, amplified consumption and toxic excess, leading to obesity, addiction, driving instead of walking, microbiome collapse;
    
  • 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. 
    
  healthcare sub-network. 
  
• Lack of external threat changes the power relations between aristocracy & people, allowing internal conflict and
  This page discusses the mechanisms and effects of emergence underpinning any complex adaptive system (CAS).  Key research is reviewed. 
  
  emergence of a prince as occurred in ancient Rome. 
  
• This page reviews Christensen's disruption of a complex adaptive system (CAS).  The mechanism is discussed with examples from biology and business. 
  
  Disruption or contragrade dynamic constraints between: prince, aristocracy, & people - where
  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. 
  
  undermining of coherence may leave the superorganism vulnerable to external threats 
• Constraints on deployment of additional networked housing, due to land-use regulation or capital constraints, removes access to
  This page reviews the catalytic impact of infrastructure on the expression of phenotypic effects by an agent.  The infrastructure reduces the cost the agent must pay to perform the selected action.  The catalysis is enhanced by positive returns. 
  
  infrastructure amplifiers and so undermines the productivity of additional workers including immigrants. 
  
• Trade barriers between sub-networks in the global economy can limit disruption of one sub-network by another.  When the US was disrupting the UK's global network, the US benefitted from low barriers, while the UK would benefit from barriers protecting the Sterling zone.  With China now disrupting the US centric network, free trade is advantageous to China.  
• Free flowing capital will seek the highest returns, avoiding areas of low return and driving these towards collapse: Puerto Rico;
  

• The historic strategy views these differentiated phenotypes as ubiquitous and disposable.  As their wealth & value collapses they are to be discarded with as little additional investment as possible. 
  
• At the other extreme, reflected in the ideas of
  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? 
  
  
  Salman Khan & Muhammad Yunus, developing agents should have been setup with sufficient schematic alternatives to allow them to adapt and remain valuable and valued. 

• Environmental change including weather
• Hurricanes, flooding & earthquakes
  
• Schematic loss of control, including: revolt, civil war, and cancer is the out-of-control growth of cells, which have stopped obeying their cooperative schematic planning and signalling infrastructure.  It results from compounded: oncogene, tumor suppressor, DNA caretaker; mutations in the DNA.  In 2010 one third of Americans are likely to die of cancer.  Cell division rates did not predict likelihood of cancer.  Viral infections are associated.  Radiation and carcinogen exposure are associated.  Lifestyle impacts the likelihood of cancer occurring: Drinking alcohol to excess, lack of exercise, Obesity, Smoking, More sun than your evolved melanin protection level; all significantly increase the risk of cancer occurring (Jul 2016).  .  
• Schematic prioritization not aligned with environment:
• US decision under Madison, to avoid the use of a sinking fund is a mechanism to repay funds borrowed through a bond issue.  Periodically the issuer makes payments to a trustee who retires part of the issue by purchasing the bonds on the open market. 
  , left the nation unable to fund a military response when he declared war on Great Britain.  
• Typically powerful military capabilities require significant economic investment.  Kennedy described how this requirement undermined prior great powers.  The reserve status of the US dollar has supported this investment by the US, but if the debt load appears unsustainable other nations may abandon the dollar. 
  
• War and external domination including parasitism is a long term relationship between the parasite and its host where the resources of the host are utilized by the parasite without reciprocity.  Often parasites include schematic adaptations allowing the parasite to use the hosts modeling and control systems to divert resources to them.  :
  
• Preparations and response to war is seen from early in eukaryote, a relatively large multi-component cell type from which yeast and multi-celled plants and animals, including humans, is constructed.  It contains modules including a nucleus and production functions such as mitochondria. 
  history with the development of teeth, shells, nails, poison stingers etc.  Superorganisms such as ants include schematic strategies to specialize certain individuals for investment with these weapons. 
  
• Relationships between symbiants is a long term situation between two, or more, different agents where the resources of both are shared for mutual benefit.  Some of the relationships have built remarkable dependencies: Tremblaya's partnership with citrus mealybugs and bacterial DNA residing in the mealybug's genome, Aphids with species of secondary symbiont bacteria deployed sexually from a male aphid sperm reservoir and propagated asexually by female aphids only while their local diet induces a dependency.  If the power relations and opportunities change for the participants then they will adapt and the situation may transform into separation, predation or parasitism. 
  can collapse to parasitism when power shifts.  
• Ignoring or dismissing the power and impact of weapons and war, in economic models, facilitates confusion, misjudgments, misallocations and 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.  
  
• Ability to alter the environment so much that it undermines the CAS, while not understanding the implications & consequences of the powerful actions we can perform
  
• System collapse and the tragedy of the commons reflects the lack of incentive for individuals to cooperate to sustain a common good when there is no immediate disincentive, even when over time the result will be collapse of the resource base sustaining the group.  Josh Greene notes the issue is how to jump-start and maintain cooperation.  Sapolsky notes evolution has solved this problem by leveraging bootstrapping processes and helping groups to discourage individuals being selfish.  Institutions: religion, nationalism, ethnic pride, team spirit; provide green-beard markers to support this process. 
  .  The continuous advance of climate change illustrates the powerful Malthusian, Thomas Robert Malthus was an English cleric and scholar.  He described the geometrical expansion of populations supported by sufficient resources and the population's subsequent collapse as the land used to grow the resources became fully deployed. 
  impact of exponential increases in human population on the
  E. O. Wilson reviews the effect of man on the natural world to date and explains how the two systems can coexist most effectively. 
  
  global commons. 
  

• Distribute widely many copies of germ-line, a master copy of the schematic structures is maintained for reproduction of offspring.  There will also be somatic copies which are modified by the operational agents so that they can represent their current state.  
  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. 
  
  schemata and
  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, of our own and other beneficial species, to reduce the likelihood of total collapse and loss of, or inability to access, the germ-line.  
• Protect the germ-line and reproduce sexually through a
  This page reviews the implications of reproduction initially generating a single child cell.  The mechanism and resulting strategic options are discussed. 
  
  single cell developmental bottleneck to limit the impact of somatic, Schematic structures which are used to support the operation of the agent.  They are modified as the agent's state changes unlike the germ-line schemata.   cancers and parasites
  
• Sexual reproduction strategies ranging from pair-bonding have similar body size, coloration and musculature.  Sapolsky's list of pair-bonding primates includes: marmosets, tamarins, owl monkeys, gibbons; as well as swans, jackals, beavers, prairie voles.  Selection has supported evolved capture of minimally aggressive strategies that do not depend on fighting muscle:
  • All males reproduce a few times. 
    
  • Males invest in parenting of the children - if he thinks they are his.  That is costly so they are choosy about which females to mate with and may pair-bond.  
  • Females look for mates whose behavior is: stable, affiliative; and who have good parenting skills.  Pair-bonding male birds are seen to display parenting skills during courtship. 
    
  • Females compete aggressively with one another to gain access to an attractive male.  And they use cuckolding strategies to gain access to great genes and parenting skills. 
    
  to tournament have asymmetric sizes, and musculature.  Males may be much bigger and more muscular than females and have conspicuous facial markings.  Sapolsky's tournament primates include: baboons, mandrills, rhesus monkeys, vervets, and chimps.  And he additionally lists gazelles, lions, sheep, peacocks, & elephant seals.  Selection has supported evolved capture of fighting skills and display.  Such males:
  
  • Use aggressive conflict to obtain high dominance rankings.  
  • A small percentage of high rank males do all the mating.  They will mate with any female anytime.  So they have evolved to invest in larger testes and higher sperm counts. 
    
  • Males do no investment in parenting of their children.  
  • Females look for signals of good genes.  This encourages sexual selection of signals of male health, status and dominance.  
  • Females don't compete with each other since they will all breed with the high rank males. 
    
  relationships.  Humans utilize diverse diets and compete for varied niches so the whole spectrum of reproductive strategies are necessary and thus retained.  Marriage is a strategy used by human males to limit the ability of high 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. 
  individuals to build harems of cooperating females. 
  
• Ensure diversity from sexual mixing, by adolescent in humans supports the transition from a juvenile configuration, dependent on parents and structured to learn & logistically transform, to adult optimized to the proximate environment.  And it is staged encouraging the adolescents to escape the hierarchy they grew up in and enter other groups where they may bring in: fresh ideas, risk taking; and alter the existing hierarchy: Steve Jobs & Steve Wozniak, Bill Gates & Paul Allen.  It marks the beginning of Piaget's formal operational stage of cognitive development.  The limbic, autonomic and hormone networks are already deployed and functioning effectively.  The frontal cortex has to be pruned: winning neurons move to their final highly connected positions, and are myelinated over time.  The rest dissolve.  So the frontal lobe does not obtain its adult configuration and networked integration until the mid-twenties when prefrontal cortex control becomes optimal.  The evolutionarily oldest areas of the frontal cortex mature first.  The PFC must be iteratively customized by experience to do the right thing as an adult.  Adolescents:
  • Don't detect irony effectively.  They depend on the DMPFC to do this, unlike adults who leverage the fusiform face area.  
  • Regulate emotions with the ventral striatum while the prefrontal cortex is still being setup.  Dopamine projection density and signalling increase from the ventral tegmentum catalyzing increased interest in dopamine based rewards.  Novelty seeking allows for creative exploration which was necessary to move beyond the familial pack.  Criticisms do not get incorporated into learning models by adolescents leaving their risk assessments very poor.  The target of the dopamine networks, the adolescent accumbens, responds to rewards like a gyrating top - hugely to large rewards, and negatively to small rewards.  Eventually as the frontal regions increase in contribution there are steady improvements in: working memory, flexible rule use, executive organization and task shifting.  And adolescents start to see other people's perspective. 
    
  • Drive the cellular transformations with post-pubescent high levels of testosterone in males, and high but fluctuating estrogen & progesterone levels in females.  Blood flow to the frontal cortex is also diverted on occasion to the groin.  
  • Peer pressure is exceptionally influential in adolescents.  Admired peer comments reduce vmPFC activity and enhance ventral striatal activity.  Adults modulate the mental impact of socially mean treatment: the initial activation of the PAG, anterior cingulate, amygdala, insula cortex; which generate feelings of pain, anger, and disgust, with the VLPFC but that does not occur in adolescents.  
  • Feel empathy intensely, supported by their rampant emotions, interest in novelty, ego.  But feeling the pain of others can induce self-oriented avoidance of the situations. 
    
  specific behaviors, inserting young outsiders and their leadership ideas, into an otherwise
  This page reviews the inhibiting effect of the value delivery system on the expression of new phenotypic effects within an agent. 
  
  stable hierarchy. 
  
• Store wealth that can be used to support agents attempting to rectify the situation
  
• Retain control of
  
• Vital resources 
• Farm bill and CAP is the common agricultural policy of the EU.  It was initially setup in 1962, following the framework in the 1957 treaty of Rome, supporting French farmers within the European Economic Community. 
  support this for food production
  
• Significant nodes and flows in the network
  
• Setup three layer stable hierarchies, allowing low cost domination through induced military dependency, to maintain flows of critical resources from network integrated nations. 
  

• Growth is the solution: 
  
• 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. 
  
  Incomplete Nature explains how CAS can emerge via a ratchet to temporarily undermine entropy.  
• 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. 
  
  War & Peace & War demonstrates how nation states utilize this ratchet.  For CAS, growth is a transient. 
  
• 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 is always good:
  
• 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. 
    
  is an appropriate measure of success in the, post
  Ed Conway argues that Bretton Woods produced a unique set of rules and infrastructure for supporting the global economy.  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 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 comments from the perspective of Complex Adaptive System (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 and deployment of the system.  And The Summit provides a key piece of the history of our global economic CAS. 
  
  
  Bretton Woods, global economy: 
• Global supply chains make the 'domestic' focus of GDP unhelpful.  
• 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). 
  is no longer constrained by Bretton Woods economic requirements. 
  

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