Ray, < Community pot lucks to sing Kumbaya?> LOL. Hey, that sounds like a good time.
<The notion that regulations won't work, and that the political process can't produce meaningful change defies history's lessons.>
Whoa, hold on. I hardly agree with the republican/libertarian summary rejection of all things regulatory. (Frequently supported by little more than (what appears to be) their inner child whining ‘I want to do my own thing because I LIKE doing my own thing’.) OTOH, I do believe there are meaningful limits to regulatory effectiveness. (And having spent the last 18 years employed as a regulator, I’ve seen some of those limits first hand.)
I read a few years ago an argument that regulatory systems work effectively for something like 30-40 year (a generation?) until they reached a point where the regulated community co-opts the system. More than a little truth in that position (imo). But more significantly, I question the ability of a regulatory approach to deal with endlessly increasing levels of complexity. What is the central feature of industrialization and globalization? Increased levels of specialization. Which lead to an increased need for regulation to mediate the interactions between specialists. (The alternative being a self-sufficient homestead where there is no need for anyone to oversee food safety, worker safety, medical care, etc, etc because it’s all provided internally. And the impacts to the commons are likely to be small and localized if only because the scale of any industry is small.)
Do we not reach a point with increasing specialization where the regulatory approach starts to fail? Here is something that suggests this possibility because of the constraints imposed by complexity on problem solving:
“A recurring constraint faced by previous societies has been complexity in problem solving. It is a constraint that is usually unrecognized in contemporary economic analyses. For the past 12,000 years human societies have seemed almost inexorably to grow more complex. For the most part this has been successful: complexity confers advantages, and one of the reasons for our success as a species has been our ability to 'Increase rapidly the complexity of our behavior (Tainter 1992, 1995b). Yet complexity can also be detrimental to sustainability. Since our approach to resolving our problems has been to develop the most complex society and economy of human history, it is important to understand how previous societies fared when they pursued analogous strategies…The development of complexity is thus an economic process: complexity levies costs and yields benefits. It is an investment, and it gives a variable return. Complexity can be both beneficial and detrimental. Its destructive potential is evident in historical cases where increased expenditures on socioeconomic complexity reached diminishing returns, and ultimately, in some instances, negative returns (Tainter 1988, 1994b). This outcome emerges from the normal economic process: simple, inexpensive solutions are adopted before more complex, expensive ones. Thus, as human populations have increased, hunting and gathering has given way to increasingly intensive agriculture, and to industrialized food production that consumes more energy than it produces (Clark and Haswell 1966; Cohen 1977; Hall et al. 1992). Minerals and energy production move consistently from easily accessible, inexpensively exploited reserves to ones that are costlier to find, extract, process, and distribute. Socioeconomic organization has evolved from egalitarian reciprocity, short-term leadership, and generalized roles to complex hierarchies with increasing specialization.
The graph in Figure 4.1 is based on these arguments. As a society increases in complexity, it expands investment in such things as resource production, information processing, administration, and defense. The benefit/cost curve for these expenditures may at first increase favorably, as the most simple, general, and inexpensive solutions are adopted (a phase not shown on this chart). Yet as a society encounters new stresses, and inexpensive solutions no longer suffice, its evolution proceeds in a more costly direction. Ultimately a growing society reaches a point where continued investment in complexity yields higher returns, but at a declining marginal rate. At a point such as B1, C1 on this chart a society has entered the phase where it starts to become vulnerable to collapse. [2]… Two things make a society liable to collapse at this point. First new emergencies impinge on a people who are investing in a strategy that yields less and less marginal return. As such a society becomes economically weakened it has fewer reserves with which to counter major adversities. A crisis that the society might have survived in its earlier days now becomes insurmountable.
Second, diminishing returns make complexity less attractive and breed disaffection. As taxes and other costs rise and there are fewer benefits at the local level, more and more people are attracted by the idea of being independent. The society "decomposes" as people pursue their immediate needs rather than the long-term goals of the leadership. [3]
As such a society evolves along the marginal return curve beyond B2, C2, it crosses a continuum of points, such as B1, C3, where costs are increasing, but the benefits have actually declined to those previously available at a lower level of complexity. This is a realm of negative returns to investment in complexity. A society at such a point would find that, upon collapsing, its return on investment in complexity would noticeably rise. A society in this condition is extremely vulnerable to collapse….Bureaucratic regulation itself generates further complexity and costs. As regulations are issued and taxes established, those who are regulated or taxed seek loopholes and lawmakers strive to close these. A competitive spiral of loophole discovery and closure unfolds, with complexity continuously increasing (Olson 1982). In these days when the cost of government lacks political support, such a strategy is unsustainable.”
dieoff.com
And one last point (while I’m up here on my anti-regulatory soap box), is my personal argument that much regulation is little more than a façade – the false appearance that society is balancing individual/community rights versus those of the corporation. With the reality being that the fatally weakened regulations provide cover for the corporation to state, ‘we’re doing nothing wrong – we are in compliance with all the rules you have established for us’ (despite the fact that the regulations fail to achieve the purpose for which they were originally established).
<It is time we take back America for Americans.> Uh, Ray, hate to break the news to you (g) but to be successful (using a political approach) you’re going to need a majority. Which reminds one of that famous exchange:
“Senator, you have the vote of every thinking person! - Anonymous to Adlai E. Stevenson
That's not enough, madam. We need a majority! - Adlai E. Stevenson, in reply “
Ok, so you suggested in a previous post that you’re willing to accept an end-justifies-the-means approach of fighting the demagogues of the right with your those of your own to trick the emotionally driven masses into your ideological camp. Maybe you can. But did anything fundamentally change with a lefter-leaning clinton in power?
John |
