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Strategies & Market Trends : The coming US dollar crisis -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: maceng2 who wrote (64307)	8/26/2020 7:52:00 AM
From: maceng2	Respond to of 71409

It might be time to rebel against the machine when Boris & co have RED. Here is some convincing proof that the UK gone "BIG BROTHER" .... FASCIST... Commie USSR SOVIET !!! Farewell Whitehall, hello Red Square? On Gove and the ‘privilege of public service’ 12 comments \| 40 shares Estimated reading time: 10 minutes <<snippet>> Soviet mathematicians discovered that optimal planning was mathematically impossible because once you introduced an iota of dynamism or complexity to the models the possibility of mathematical coherence collapsed and with it any possibility of discovering what was ‘optimal’. Further theoretical iterations, mathematical formulations or higher computing power made no difference because the problem was in the basic interpretation of the systemic reality as ‘closed’ i.e. as characterised by event regularities and predetermined laws of behaviour. As the economist and mathematician Tony Lawson has pointed out, the use of mathematics as such brings with it a closed-system ontology of the political economy. Mathematics as a mode of reasoning rests on the use of regularities of the form ‘ whenever event or state of affairs x, then event or state of affairs, y‘, and hence it necessarily involves a purely functional analysis. Closed-system thinking in turn presupposes an ontology of isolated atoms. By an atom, Lawson doesn’t mean something small, but something that, if triggered, has its own separate, independent, and invariable effect, whatever the context. If that describes you then splendid: this plan should fill you with joy. Gove talks a lot about how important it is to have innovation and deep expertise in the system, but the fetish for mathematics as an instrument for prediction in human affairs is toxic for both. Moreover, if the fate of Cabinet Secretary Mark Sedwill is anything to go by and criticism of these proposals is regarded as heresy, then the main impact of this upheaval will be to strip the civil service of competence and what remains of its already shattered morale, another historically consistent move. The Communist Party’s tendency to purge informed criticism built avoidable ignorance into the system and contributed to its ultimate overthrow. A closed-system ontology of government is a profound category error. As philosophers of knowledge will point out we live with inalienable sources of radical uncertainty. The first is epistemological uncertainty: the fact that there is no Archimedean point where we can stand to observe and understand the entire universe of causal mechanisms that lead us to a given situation. Second, ontological indeterminacy: the fact that every time someone has a new idea or there is emergent novelty in complex systems, the past becomes a less informative shadow of the future. This is the human condition. Examples of radical uncertainty problems that currently confront the state are the timing and magnitude of climate change tipping points and COVID-19. Thus, a theory based on past observations of regularities won’t hack it. It seems that neither Gove nor Cummings understand the distinction between calculable risk and radical uncertainty. Whatever they do after politics they should not go into insurance. The Global Financial Crisis was a devastating proof that state agencies and corporations are inescapably run by people who operate with less than complete information: that is to say, people who live in a social as distinct from a machine world. Indeed, they are people who typically spend their working lives trying to reconcile a complex, frequently conflicting and ever-changing set of socio-economic needs and interests. Hence it simply will not wash to say of these Soviet lessons ‘but that was then, and this is now’. The Soviets tried to solve optimisation of a closed-system mathematically within almost entirely centrally planned economy under a system of totalitarian control and they failed; how much more will Cummings fail in the dynamic complex world of the democratic capitalist political economy? And how much personal data is the government going to share with unaccountable technology companies in the process? Far from being new, these proposals are arguably the logical end point of the New Public Management reforms begun by Margaret Thatcher in 1979 and continued in barely mitigated form by New Labour. The fact is the affinities between the economic libertarianism of the last forty years and Leninism are rooted in their common dependence on a closed-system, machine model of the political economy. The neoclassical economics on which neoliberalism depends is unique in the history of economic ideas precisely for its dependence on mathematics. It is this shared dependence on a closed system theorising that explains why, when it comes to the mechanics of government, Soviet central planning and neoliberalism justify a near identical methodology of output planning, quantification, forecasting and target setting: techniques that only make sense in a closed-system, machine ‘world’. In terms of historical parallels therefore, this means that the Conservative government has just reached the period where it despairs of the increasingly crude output planning employed since Thatcher and its rigidifying effects on administration and prays, like the Soviets in the 1960s, that mathematics will open an intellectual escape hatch out of the almighty systemic mess its doctrinaire predecessors have already induced. The Privilege of Public Service opens with a quote from Antonio Gramsci, but it is Lenin who haunts this project, opposed by Gramsci insofar as he insisted on reading Marx as a determinist. I wait with awful fascination the moment when the parliamentary Conservative Party realises it is about to squander the last vestige of its practical Burkean heritage to become a re-enactment society for the most bureaucratic regime in human history only now with more blatant financial corruption. <</end snippet>> I would say "Hire that guy" -G- blogs.lse.ac.uk