A Patriots Manifest June 04 2008
William White
What must be true of all persistent social activities?
They must reward their participants so they continue to participate.
More members must be recruited to replace those who leave the activity or die.
Economics and political science tend to neglect these simple points because they have been solved twice: once based on individual selection during the enlightenment and then again based on group selection after Darwin. So here’s one aspect of our ignorance:
If either individual or group selection and declining marginal returns is universally true then massive unemployment for extended periods of time is avoidable at low or no cost and this has been proven.
The avoidance of such great depressions has involved higher costs than such great depressions. Killing the unemployed worked for Stalin. Inflation and imperialism worked for Germany in the 20th century and many other countries at other times. However those are very high cost solutions.
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Obviously something is seriously wrong with the political/economic model and here are the candidates:
Kin selective behavior differs from both individual and group selection models.
There is significant increasing marginal returns otherwise there would be no economic growth.
Cultural (mimetic) selection is very poorly understood.
Epigenomic adaptation is in its infancy but adaptive on-off switches for genes are already driving biologists nuts. That these adaptations can span generations complicates everything.
Mathematical models that differ significantly from what most of us were taught in school such as compounding rounding error (Chaos) preventing predictions is already complicating the global warming debate. That no trendline in weather can be shown to have meaning is upsetting.
I’m going to deal with the last one first and a bit of the third. If you are dealing with 5 things like the above and you know each one within +/- 1% you know their interactions within +/-5% don’t you, or do you? Well since 1% is 0.5%- 1.49% then with rounding error try +2.5- 7.7 %/-7.3- 2.5%. If uncertainty about the size of the margin of error +/- 2.5% vs. +7.7/-7.3% at a range of 10 is equal to the calculated margin error then the learning curve is going to be a bit steep. Worse yet investors are going to hedge against probable errors being incorporated into law. This is already done with the Hicks-Hanson model of the economy used to figure out what sort of economic regulations to write. Hedge funds and investment bankers hire politicians and economists to explain what the congress and fed are going to do vs. what they should do. If it looks like the bureaucracy is doing the right thing then there is a look around for wildcards that can be safely and inexpensively hedged within the margin of error of outcomes. This is where it gets interesting.
Using a 2 dimensional graph to locate a point in 5 space (6 space with trendlines) does not work, that requires 10 graphs and loads of computer memory. More importantly politicians are not elected on the basis of being good topologists and this branch of math is topology. Legislation has error limits tacked on based on political not economic criteria and those economic errors multiply. This creates both predictable and unpredictable political cycles while changing how people respond to government actions.
The larger and some of the smaller welfare states have both secessionist movement and/or anti-immigrant problems. (Japan and the US have so far been exceptions they also are not welfare states in the sense that Britain, Spain or France are.) Marital instability and a less than replacement birthrate are also major problems. A growing consensus that this welfare cure is worse than the disease does not mean that anybody has a clue as to the minimum body bag exit strategy. So where is the debate about exit strategies? If I knew I wouldn’t be asking, that question is not rhetorical. To point out one possibility should Job Corps training be combined with emigration assistance? No one has come up with a way of answering that question that I am aware of. I will come back to this but this is a major problem.
Socio-biology and selection is a fact of life and death not a political option
Politics is a continuation of war by other means
Calling congress a parliament of whores insults the morals and principle of crack whores
The views expressed by William White are his and his alone and may not be the views expressed by A Patriots Manifest. Thank you .... Michael Roller...