EclecticLip

My brother forwarded me this article in the Financial Times recently.  Superficially about the fall of Rome and other civilizations, as chronicled by Joseph Tainter’s Collapse of Complex Societies, it links back to the fact that the complexity of the financial sector has increased far faster than the balance of the economy — the “real” economy.

The example of diminishing returns on increased complexity may also be observed in that the financial sector’s robustness in the recent past has relied on leverage, basically meaning that to make their money, they had to bet increasingly more. 

In this sense, complexity is a crippling strength — because it’s useful and produces great results at first, it continues to be turned to, even when the incremental benefits diminish and even dissipate away.  But because it once produced great results, there’s little impetus to try other ideas…

__(’Read the rest of this entry »’)

(posted Oct 9) 

As this article (a longer preview is available here) from the Boston Globe points out, urban planners in some American cities are trying to figure out how to retrench – often because a declining population and economic hardship have shrunk the tax base. 

This WSJ article here — subtitled “asphalt is replaced by cheaper grave; back to the stone age” (my emphasis) — describes how some states have deliberately moved back to gravel roads. 

To my knowledge, the same hasn’t happened in Canada, perhaps because severe income inequality hasn’t spurred a generation of plutocrat-friendly legislation… yet.  (Income inequality tends to make the impoverished vote conservative — perhaps out of a sense that an “other” is keeping them from breaking into the “haves” class?) 

This seems vaguely analogous to the Byzantine Empire’s decision during the Macedonian Revival, to keep its borders manageable and not overextend itself.  It must’ve been tempting for the Emperors to keep more modest borders than were achieved under the dynamic duo of Justinian and Belisarius, but they were ultimately better off for it. 

Right now, cities and states are having to retrench their infrastructure — a more realistic scenario under their current constraints, which must nevertheless be gnashingly frustrating for all parties involved.  Just as it must’ve been for the Macedonian Emperors…

According to Wiki, Rorschach tests (inkblot tests) are used by some psychologists to:

“examine a person’s personality characteristics and emotional functioning”.

Given the diversity of opinion religious texts can engender, I wonder if these might also qualify.  Literalist Christians (”fundamentalists”) certainly derive different meaning from the Bible than progressive Christians (”liberals”) — on account of each group focusing on different portions of the scripture.  No doubt the same phenomenon occurs in other faiths.  And one can probably draw considerable inferences on a person’s tendencies, based on the category they fit in…

Have been musing recently whether deliberate currency devaluation can be considered a “tragedy of the commons” situation.  In this case, the “commons” is the value of the unit of currency.

I don’t the analogy works perfectly, but it does seem to fit the theme that when times get tough, goverments which are loathe to cut back on spending rely instead on currency devaluation.  This creates a temporary competitive advantage — until the currency is debased enough to lose any meaningful value.

Admittedly, there are often reasons for not overtly cutting back on government spending, which we in the global north take for granted: Roman Emperors, for example, tended to die suddenly if they lost the support of the military.  And cutting social spending can cause extraordinary misery… so the slow bleeding of a currency gradually losing its value, may seem more palatable.  Especially if the diminished value of savings (primarily a concern of the wealthy) is countered by the arrival of new jobs, in light of the country’s newly-cheapened labour (primarily a concern of everyone else).

The use of the herbicide Roundup… has resulted in weeds being genetically selected… for tolerance to Roundup.  A definite case of “cripping strength”, or biological blowback.

As they say in environmental circles, “mother nature always bats last”.

This doesn’t negate the fact that pesticides and herbicides can provide positive value in agriculture — but it may illustrate that for crop yield improvements to be long-term, they need to work with the realities of biology, instead of trying to fight it.  Sort of like how aikido is purported to use the attacker’s momentum against them — whereas in a tug-of-war, you need to create the most momentum.

In The Responsibility Virus (volume 20 of the book club reading list) Roger Martin discusses the tendency of Boards of Directors to become powerless yes-men, when faced with a domineering CEO.  This is in contrast to their intended role as wise greybeards, advisors or even coaches who keep the Chief Executive on the sraight and narrow.

This seems vaguely analogous to what happened to the Roman Senate as their Empire declined; instead of keeping the Emperor in check, they had to curry favour for fear of their personal safety (and probably family fortune, too: I imagine more than one Senator got his possessions confiscated).

It would be interesting to know whether the advisory influence of large corporations’ Boards of Directors tends to be weaker at firms where the CEO is paid more.  The Wall St. Journal recently carried an article reaffirming that power corrupts; in their context, as people gain power, they act more like jerks.  Transposing this lesson historically, maybe if Marc Antony had won, Caligula would’ve ended up as a very polite cobbler…

Much has been made of emergence recently — how complex systems develop / exhibit behaviours based on the interaction of simpler individual components.  An example might be how extraordinarily complex economies can develop, through the interaction of thousands or millions of individual “agents” in an economy, buying or selling as per their individual whims.

It occurred to me that the phases of nature (solid, liquid, gas, plasma — or “earth”, “water”, air”, “fire” for any Aristotelian holdouts) are themselves emergent phenomena. 

An individual molecule can’t be solid or liquid: these stuctures require the coming-together of a bunch of molecules, either into a lattice structure (solid) or a continuous-but-not-as-ordered one (liquid). 

Gases consist of molecules floating about freely (unbonded and unconstrained to each other) but if you only had a single molecule in a vacuum… there would be a distinct lack of other atoms by which to assess which phase it belongs to.

And since plasmas are gases where some fraction of molecules are ionically charged… i imagine you need a multiple number of molecules to assess whether they could be termed a plasma or not.  (If a lone molecule was present, and it was charged, one would presumably call it an ion, not a plasma.)

I’ll check in with a physics professor on this topic.  Hopefully I’m correct. 

We read The Human Side of Enterprise recently, wherein Douglas McGregor (that’s McGregor, not MacArthur!) contained the wisdom nugget that:

“management gets the labour relations it deserves”.

I doubt McGregor coined the expression — it’s the kind of pithy phrase that floats around for years before being credited to a famous person — but it rings no less true. 

The general theme is a karmic one: if management mistreats labour, labour will eventually form a feisty union.  And contrarily, if management treats its employees well, union relations will tend to be amicable (if there even is a union).  Furthermore, while trust and respect grow slowly over time (like pearls!), bad memories have a way of lingering for a very. long. time.

In that context, I wonder if management in the West is still paying for the bad karma it earned during the Industrial Revolution.  If the explosion of industrial wealth was shared more equitably, or barons weren’t so slow to improve working conditions / recognize workers’ rights, perhaps labour unions wouldn’t've become so militantly anti-management.  Heck, maybe Marx and Engels wouldn’t've even been inspired to write their little pamphlet!

I’m perfectly unfamiliar with labour relations / extent of union militancy in other countries, but it would shock me if the Nordic economies (or Japan, with its fairly egalitarian corporate pay scales) have similarly confrontative labour relations.  After all, it’s difficult to have a class struggle if the different “classes” of employees (management, labour) enjoy reasonably equitable pay, and decent working conditions.  And I’d expect that economies with a heritage in the British Industrial Revolution tradition (US, UK, Canada, Australia) would have more confrontative unions.  After all, those union traditions would’ve been born in a desperate context of obscene wealth and even-more-obscene squalor.

So it would seem reasonable to consider militant unions a form of karma — a carryover from the bad ol’ days (correction: the very bad old days) of the Anglo economic tradition, when owners really should’ve cared more about their employees.  And given how long it can take for bad karma to dissipate, I imagine confrontational labour relations will be a feature of industry in these cultures, for a long time to come.

(Originally written August 4; posted Sept 5)

We used tar-sands oil aplenty on our Rockies trip, despoiling what’s left of the nature we motored about to see (most gasoline on the West Coast comes from Alberta — happy driving!).  The “tour de sightseeing” from Banff to Jasper was notable in that we met the same fellow tourists at every scenic viewpoint and pullout.  There were so many of her fellow countrymen around that when Aya asked people to take photos, she went straight to Japanese. 

We soon learned not to pull over in the hopes of spotting wildlife, unless at least two other vehicles had already done so — not unlike how a Venus Flytrap won’t close unless two of its trigger hairs are touched in quick succession.

A high point was getting a photo of this mother mountain goat and kid, from just across the highway.  Off-camera, papa goat looked on, perhaps wondering if our car was a Chevrolet.  (Louis Chevrolet’s last name was a corruption of “Chevre Lait”, or “goat’s milk”.)  But alas, it was a rental Sentra, tricked out with a/c, iPod connector, remote entry and power windows.  Features which have coincidentally become must-haves for our next vehicle. 

(Part 1 is here.) 

- - - - - -

We came back from Toy Story 3 today — a great movie, with a dense, well-plotted storyline.  (It’s amazing what happens when you invest your money in the writers, instead of star actors!  A lesson HBO clearly learned, long ago…)  Haven’t seen the latest Shrek instalment, but that’s not material to the current web post.

One of the wonderful things about ancient mythology is how storytellers would (often) amalgamate past traditions into their current narratives.  The most obvious example in the West, is how the writers of the Christian Gospel of Matthew linked everything they recorded Jesus doing, to passages the Hebrew Bible — what Christians refer to as the “Old Testament”.  (Out of respect for the Jewish tradition, I’ll be referring to them as the Hebrew Bible.)  Virgil also meshed his Aeneid to Homer’s Iliad, by linking Aeneas to Troy.

In the East, the Ashtavakra Gita linked itself to the Ramayana by adopting as its eponymous protagonist, a relatively minor character from that epic.  Doubtless, there are innumerable other examples.

- - - - - -

Now, the Toy Story and Shrek franchises are really interesting in that they also build on pre-existing platforms; namely, classic toys and fairy tales respectively.  As such, they’re almost like modern “remixes” of earlier cultural traditions.  And like other “adaptive refreshings” of cultural traditions, they’re doing it in today’s dominant genre, the movie.

(images from Wikipedia)