Thinking About Technocracy

I am convinced that we need a combination of technocratic agendas and participative processes to replace what is now a clear set of failures in so-called representative democracy.

Europe is the leader now.  Re-public offers an excellent report on nascent processes there.

I noticed that Michel at P2P was carrying another article by re-public today.  It’s become essential reading for me…excellent and thoughtful.  Real cutting edge stuff…not warmed over news summary.

NAPA has put together a nice project on collaboration in government.  You can find out how to register and see the content beginnings here.

The award winning EU interactive government facility is found here.

HT FutureGov / Dominic Campbell

 First 100 Days: Harness the genie of citizen engagement Reuters Blog: The Great Debate Feb. 10, 2009

If Obama really wants to change America, he should hold digital brainstorms for all Americans, and he should make sure the young people — the Net Geners who have grown up digital — are involved, says Don Tapscott, author and chairman of the think tank nGenera Insight….

More here…

Here…at the original green.

Here…

There is no evidence that controlling large amounts of currency leads to any sort of efficiency.  None.

Instead we get gold sinks and silly wastes of carbon and energy resources.  So, why not cap wealth?  I’d be interested in pointers to any argument that suggests some very liberal and probably excessive cap on wealth (let’s say $25 million US dollars) would lead to inefficiencies for individuals.  There are more than enough able persons to collaborate on investments and to grow averages.

So, why not have a global cap on individual wealth? Who would it hurt? Or, more relevantly, how would it hurt us all?

Three possible groupings of outcomes emerge from the general circumstances I wrote on in the last post. 

1. The means to handle the complexity and the associated breakdowns are found within the existing governance paradigms and the system continues to expand.  My shorthand for this outcome is “conventional wisdom rules.” 
2. The system collapses and systematic debilities result.  Shorthand: doomsday.
3. Arrangements of global governance with clearly established criteria for boundary conditions are established in those areas where threats are high.  Shorthand: technocracy.

Money governs by demanding that certain operations of institutions to fit within the essentials of stability, value and trust of money.  Banks are the most obvious example of institutions which have their operations (theoretically) controlled by money, but virtually every institution is governed by acting within the parameters set forward by money–and the institutions, in turn, seek to control the nature and qualities of the supply of money available to them and to others.   

Then what about systems where values are volatile and difficult to forecast for whatever reason?  Such circumstances make the provision of long-term relationships more risky, and these long-term arrangements are essential to a system of Governance by Means of Money.  In particular, money must be invested so as to maintain value and to create value.  These investments require increasingly large and typically long-term commitments measured over years and the associated forecasts of stability and consistency unless risks should become too great.   

When risks increase, complexity tends to increase as well as more and more provisions are set in place to protect those who are trying to minimize the variability of forecasts against their hopes and plans.  Complex systems are inherently difficult to keep stable because unusual stresses can arise from unpredictable sources “hidden” by the complexity.  Engineers, ecologists and physiologists have long known about such issues and studied them at length.  More recently, Nicholas Nassim Taleb has introduced the term “black swan” to represent this notion of the unpredictability of complex systems.  It seems to me, as an aside, that Taleb’s long-shot, the finding of actual black swans in Australia, doesn’t illustrate very well what he was getting at in his wonderful book.  The point is made, however, that things can come at us that are a total surprise.  They almost certainly will do so when systems are very complex.

We have moved to a substantially more global economy than in the past because technology has allowed it from jet airliners to standardized business education to global telecommunications networks.  Goods, services and ideas flow rapidly and several types of institutions attempt to span borders with their operations.  This has led to some degree of standardization, but it has also undoubtedly resulted in increased complexity, as well. 

In turn, money moves rapidly in sort of a super-layer of actions tied to some larger governance institutions, but most governance cannot play in these games because the political walls of a different age prevent easy capacity to assure stability and growth when capital moves rapidly.  No one redrew the borders when the financial world shrank. 

The market response to this is to call for either minimal governance or to argue for local governance that is world-leading.  Just as half of all doctors graduate in the bottom 50% of their class, surely not all governance will be world leading.  Some governance structures are likely to achieve lasting advantages and that leads the others to be increasingly unstable and of low growth.  To assure stability, governments (as part of larger governance structures) invest in ways that attempt to mitigate risk to their own populations.  Again, complexity is added to the soup.  Where governance is minimized, it is difficult to maintain stability against the tides of complexity.  At some level, some set of rules and institutions must be trusted to assure stability and value.  But how?  

In theory, opportunity should allow for the movement of money to those places that offer opportunities.  This works rarely without very strong governance structures in support.  Thus, institutions are grown and theoretically enable the stability to achieve growth in local places.  Unfortunately, more institutions means more complexity and more resolution of conflicts between institutions at various levels of function.  Action becomes difficult; coordinated action is all but impossible across numerous governance institutions.  In part this is due to the fact that the incentives to maintain local control are just too great.  In short, people like to cheat to their own advantages, so they fragment their institutions. 

The result is usually reform processes that take years to hammer out.  If anyone balks, the process can collapse.  So the needed stability is fundamentally undermined.  Without clear understanding of threats that demands coordinated action, the inherent complexity is more likely to grow than it is to be smoothed.  It is difficult to scale capitalism across dozens if not hundreds of governance frameworks.  No one can control, understand or logically invest in such structures for long with any great success.  As such, crises occur that become cascading sets of threats in their own right.

Clearly the global framework of Governance by Means of Money has a range of nested feedback loops tending toward threats and problems.

So what now?  Now we also introduce the idea of system-wide catastrophic threats outside the scope of any one framework of governance.   These are threats that cannot necessarily be managed inside any one system of governance by means of money.  The result is fear…combined with an inability to act.  And this leads to yet further feedback loops of uncertainty and instability.

It takes very little argument to persuade that money is a means governance.  It settles who commands resources, who has certain liberties, and who can take certain actions.  Looking back over the last few thousand years, we have lived in an Age of Money as Means of Governance.   So why would this Age come to an end?

Money as a means of governance requires several social facts to be in place:

1. Money users must trust that the money used has value to obtain desired things.

2. Money can be “owned” and stored.

3. Money must have a certain rarity. 

The art and science of acting in the Age of Money as a Means of Governance is essentially the field of economics.  The field assumes that most actions are governed by money or value-related considerations and these considerations can be discreetly analyzed based on predicted rational (or irrational) operations.

I think we then look to problems with economics as a way to determine why and how the Age of Money as a Means of Governance begins to end.  What are the plausible issues with money? 

First, there is rarity.  If the production of money cannot be controlled, it is of declining value.  Money systems where value declines at a certain pace are like dishes that leak.  Their function is denigrated by the rate of decline.   People who worry about “fiat” money are particularly obsessed with this issue.  

Second there is storage.  Storage requires safety which implies insurance, time value/interest rates and all that entails.  Ownership of course leads to estates, probates, bankruptcies, etc. 

Third is trust.  Can I get the safety, permanance, continuity, stability, etc. that I want for the currency I store at some point in the future?  This issue is the prime motivator of governance in our Age. 

So we need to consider, are these items under threat?