Punishing politicians

Note: this was posted in 1997 to an early internet experiment.
For more, please see my page The Hyperforum on Sustainability.

The ideas in the paper you link to are certainly interesting and deserve thought.

A note, though. You say, “Similarly, if voters know these consequences of actions, we expect them to punish politicians who ignore the future consequences of their actions.” We always say and think this, but it’s simply not, couldn’t be, true very often.

The problem is that that there are too many issues about which the voters are trying to punish the politicians. For example,

(Unhealthy) capitalists and slugs

Note: this was posted in 1997 to an early internet experiment.
For more, please see my page The Hyperforum on Sustainability.

Beautifully put!

I think of these insatiable capitalists in the same way I do about the slugs that infest my garden. I will put out a bean seedling, with just its two starter leaves. The slugs will come and eat the two leaves, killing the plant.

What I would like to say to them, if they were rational, is “Look, if you just let the plant grow it would soon have lots of regular leaves, much bigger. Further, I’m not actually interested in the leaves, but in the beans: the leaves are only a means to an end for me. If you would just come back in a month or two, I could give you perhaps 5 large leaves per day, with little detriment to my bean production.”

Unfortunately, they’re not rational.

Well said

Note: this was posted in 1997 to an early internet experiment.
For more, please see my page The Hyperforum on Sustainability.

Great comments!

“It is time for someone to step forward and point out that the two views that Bruce describes are not mutually exclusive.” The two extreme positions are obviously impossible. Anyone who thinks that markets are free might do well, on the next occasion when Hertz car rental asks $13 per day for collision damage waiver, to ask himself whether Hertz’s competitors offer a better deal. (The car rental firms are well aware of the fact that if they all do it they all get richer, in the aggregate and individually, than they would if they undercut eachother. The ability of a lean and hungry new player to capture market share by offering the customer a less outrageous arrangement is limited by other factors. No explicit collusion is required. This situation has persisted stably for a few decades.) On the other hand, the economic history of the Soviet Union illustrates the value of centralized, top-down regulation.

The point is that markets have many mechanisms, at least temporary ones, of a number of different kinds.

Local viability and long-term self destruction

Note: this was posted in 1997 to an early internet experiment.
For more, please see my page The Hyperforum on Sustainability.

When you say that “Unrestrained competitive markets in laissez-faire political system are good at efficiency and innovation, but bad at achieving distributive equity and environmental quality,” aren’t you saying that they inevitably self-destruct? Are distributive equity and environmental quality simply extraneous details or are they intrinsic to the long term viability of the markets?

Thu, 27 Feb 1997 16:58:59 GMT

For more, please see The Hyperforum on Sustainability.

Update: Taken out of context, this note must seem like a complete non sequitur. However, in the background of the discussion then, the following thought was obvious to me. Right after the War (please don’t ask, “Which war?”), when I was young, the Japanese flooded the US market with inexpensive manufactured goods. However, the later result was that the Japanese standard of living had increased to a difficult point where they could no longer afford their own labor and had to import from poorer countries. In turn, those poorer countries grew richer and were forced to import from other countries still. When I wrote this in 1997 this sequence had continued for several iterations and

Democracy is not just a town meeting but a structured artifact

Note: this was posted in 1997 to an early internet experiment.
For more, please see my page The Hyperforum on Sustainability.

Thanks for the examples and amplification. Another example, classic in its ambiguity, is the seniority system that used to be so much stronger in the US Congress. Since congressman and senators from agrarian and (also for a different reason) southern states were more likely to get re-elected, their constituents came to possess disproportionate ability to veto. This produced, and produces, in different times and in different contexts, outcomes that were either reactionary obstructionism, or a legitimate mechanism for rural citizens to ensure that they were factored into solutions, or both.

John Ruskin: “You must either make a tool of the creature, or a man of him”

Self Portrait
by John Ruskin

John Ruskin had some typically heterodox thoughts on perfection that go well beyond the usual — and often excellent — thought that “the perfect is the enemy of the good.”

. . . no good work whatever can be perfect, and the demand for perfection is always a sign of a misunderstanding of the ends of art. This for two reasons, both based on everlasting laws. The first, that no great man ever stops working till he has reached his point of failure; that is to say, his mind is always far in advance of his powers of execution. . . . The second reason is, that imperfection is in some sort essential to all that we know of life. It is the sign of life in a mortal body, that is to say, of a state of progress and change.

––John Ruskin; The Stones of Venice (II, chapter 6)

In the same book, The Stones of Venice, he makes a different ethical point when he says,

Did I miss the point? Do we need to change? Or What?

Note: this was posted in 1997 to an early internet experiment.
For more, please see my page The Hyperforum on Sustainability.

As I reread your note and my response in the cold light of morning, it seems to me I was quite dense. The crux is your remark, “these are the attributes of those Californian infant-terribles we all love to hate.”

The reason we hate them is that they seem to slash and burn everything in sight merely for their private profit. But maybe that’s our problem: we need to “completely [change] our notions of how to do business”? Right now, after the infant-terribles pass, the rest of us are jobless. Could we construct a world in which this activity was nondestructive? A world in which everyone’s lide had continuity, but was vastly more efficient? (Do we have a choice?)

Is that what will come? or will we have BPR?

Note: this was posted in 1997 to an early internet experiment.
For more, please see my page The Hyperforum on Sustainability.

You certainly gave me a good installment on what I asked for. But, of course, you raise some questions. “Let’s talk about what is really important: money, and how you make it . . .” (It’s nice to have friends with a sense of humor.) Hammer and Champy, in the first chapter of their book “Reengineering the Corporation,” try to sell the necessity of reengineering by describing much the same pressures that you do. Their discussion, somewhat sentimental in comparison with your William Cameron Menzies approach, identifies the components of the problem as customers, competition, and change.

Hammer and Champy’s answer seems to share at least some features with yours, “Now the kind of mentality required . . .” The short version of their answer is reengineering: “the fundamental rethinking and radical redesign of business processes to achieve dramatic improvements in critical contemporary measures of performance, such as cost, quality, and speed.”

Democracies, Jeffersonian and otherwise

Note: this was posted in 1997 to an early internet
experiment. For more of my posts, please see
The Hyperforum on Sustainability.

I have found several of Bruce’s contributions moving in their somewhat elegiac but yet unwavering belief in democracy. Democracy is an important topic for us as we try to figure out what role governments play in sustainability. For example, Dale has recently stated a belief that the future of free markets “is inextricably linked to the development of more and more widespread democratic process.”

Bruce has mentioned “Jeffersonian Democracy.” I am no historian or political scientist, but I’d like to probe this notion a bit with the object, as in many of my notes, of provoking someone better informed to respond.

As I recall it, Jefferson’s notion of democracy was one suited to the plantation owners and yeoman farmers of Virginia in the late 1700s, and perhaps to us today as well. It certainly involved an absolute minimum of government. In part, for example, the idea was that any revenue spending by the government would inevitably be followed by revenue collection by the government and therefore by a need for the yeoman farmers to have cash money to pay the revenue collectors. The transition from barter and subsistence farming to a cash economy on any large scale would transform these people from the independence of their lives. Jefferson, and the later Madison, consistently opposed government projects of any kind.

The political picture then was so unlike ours now that reading about these people disrupts our ideas about “left” and “right.” Many of Jefferson’s positions, taken out of context, sound like the Republican freshmen of the last Congress. It was the “conservative” Hamilton who believed in government on a scale that prefigured the New Deal. It’s all enough to make one believe in the necessity of evaluating issues on their merits rather than simply following one’s party.

A role for information technology

Note: this was posted in 1997 to an early internet
experiment. For more of my posts, please see
The Hyperforum on Sustainability.

One point of an earlier entry was to argue that the importance of the role of information technology is that it could potentially provide basic infrastructure to meet the call for “the ability of a society to see patterns in a whole (in the one case, across the population, and, in the other case, across time) and then to be able to knit together policies that were effective over a diverse range of goals.”

One could imagine a forum like the present one but with the ability to present analytic tools intermingled with text. A user could develop analyses: live scenarios in which mechanisms would have to be explicitly introduced and their consequences would be consistently applied. Such live analyses could be shared with and extended by others collaboratively until the community had a sense that the problem was reasonably understood and that the proposed solutions would meet the range of goals.

The idea would be that it ought to be a function of intelligent beings to use their intelligence to make tools for replacing conflict with solutions in which everybody wins at least something.

Sat, 22 Feb 1997 02:31:34 GMT

For more, please see
The Hyperforum on Sustainability.

Reasons for the Haves to address the problems of the Have-nots

Note: this was posted in 1997 to an early internet
experiment. For more of my posts, please see
The Hyperforum on Sustainability.

The participants have brought up several reasons for the Haves to address the problems of the Have-nots.

• Ethics. Mark argued that “. . . in rich countries the population, or at least a significant part of it has a set of values that would recognize the injustice of a fortress world . . .”
• Prudence. Several participants have noted that inequality often results in political instability and potential social violence by the Have-nots, and that this is dangerous to the haves and expensive to combat.
• Unsustainability. In a previous comment, I tried to argue that a world in which some elements were poor is a world that is poor as a whole. The Have-nots are a drain on the Haves, in numerous covert ways that have nothing to do with resentment from the Have-nots but are intrinsic to the economics of the situation. The Haves would be better off to implement considered plans to improve the health of the world as a whole, and of themselves indirectly. Holistic thinking is not just altruism: it leads to everyone being better off.

I found parts of Allen’s post hard to understand. Why would either environmentally friendly policies or policies oriented towards long-term sustainability result in convergence between Haves and Have-nots? I would have thought that, if anything, the causality would be in the reverse direction. More likely, I would have thought that the prerequisite to either would be the ability of a society to see patterns in a whole (in the one case, across the population, and, in the other case, across time) and then to be able to knit together policies that were effective over a diverse range of goals.

Sat, 22 Feb 1997 02:10:45 GMT

For more, please see
The Hyperforum on Sustainability.

Self-sustainability of markets

Note: this was posted in 1997 to an early internet
experiment. For more of my posts, please see
The Hyperforum on Sustainability.

I would like to agree with you and Rob about the link between markets and democracy. We need to explore the nature of this link further.

The draft synthesis poses the following dilemma.

Is the Present unprecedented and thus requires policy-driven political intervation on a large scale and of high near-term costs to avoid global disaster by 2050? Or can incremental evolution of technologies, market mechanisms and decentralized forms of governance lead the world into a more robust economic, political, and environmental future if left relatively unfettered.

The answer, as they doubtless expect us to say, is “None of the above, at least in the forms mentioned.” As you clearly point out, “Left to themselves, markets do not seem to stay free . . . ” On the other hand, the futility of top-down, policy-driven political intervention to artificially maintain desired conditions seems obvious.

Kai Wright’s “Drifting Toward Love”

Book Review

Kai Wright,
Drifting Toward Love: Black, Brown, Gay,
and Coming of Age on the Streets of New York
Beacon Press, Boston, 2008
ISBN 978-0-8070-7968-3

This is an important book.

Why would I — a dead, white male, a baby boomer — say that about a book from a culture so totally different?

Because when I was a teenager, growing up gay in a white slum in Buffalo, the Stonewall Riots were some 10 years off in the future and inaccessible to me — and, anyway, they were unthinkable. I drifted, lost, making bad choices and acting destructively — of myself and of others.

Kai Wright writes about black and brown kids today in Brooklyn. You might think they’d have a big advantage — with one of the most vibrant, openly gay cultures in the world right next to them in Manhattan, only a subway ride away. But in their social reality, the white, liberated gay culture might as well be on the other side of the world for all the good it would do them in terms of providing scenarios they can choose from. It’s as inaccessible to them now, for a different reason, as it was to me then.

Scenarios that are more articulate about their underlying mechanisms

Note: this was posted in 1997 to an early internet
experiment. For more of my posts, please see
The Hyperforum on Sustainability.

I also would like to add to these pleas for more specifics: more articulateness about underlying mechanisms. For two reasons.

Reason 1: There are doubtless too many mechanisms involved, and too many higher order interactions among these mechanisms, to have any chance of writing a scenario whose value is that it correctly predicts the global trajectory of the world to its state in 2050, and a fortiori not one whose correctness we can rely on now. The value of the scenarios and of the group discussion is that we might hope to come to understand the mechanisms and some of their low order interactions, with a view to being able to act more rationally in present circumstances — to locally change the trajectory towards one with better long term outcome.

Reason 2: If underlying mechanisms are not articulated (i.e. if the dicussion has no temporary rules) it is too easy to shift from talking about what does happen to talking about what we feel urgently needs to happen. Unfortunately, there is little hope of bringing about what needs to be if we don’t accurately understand what is and how it works. Having a worthy destination won’t enable you to drive at night with the lights out.

Thu, 13 Feb 1997 20:26:39 GMT

For more, please see
The Hyperforum on Sustainability.