Selfish Optimization and Tyranny

There is a relationship between corruption and tyranny. And what it is is "selfish optimization". Selfish optimization is when a system is optimized for the owners or the governors. This usually results in dysfunction, stove pipes, mis-allocation of resources, and both legal corruption and illegal corruption. It is also a manifestation of Tyranny as defined by John Locke who referred to the use of power for "private, separate advantage." Many of our problems come from selfishly optimized systems that are constituted with poor quality governments.

I've seen a lot of this in my IT work, but it is also a problem in the world around us at every level. Requirements gathering is essentially about setting the boundaries of a system. It's goals (finish line), and the capabilities needed to reach those goals. Bad requirements result in bad systems, but bad systems are usually the result of requirements that are poorly optimized, resulting in poorly functioning systems.

Selfish optimization is enabled by; excessive hierarchy -- giving those at the top of a totem pole too much power; Misallocation of ownership (or power over) resources which leads to excessive power over those resources and feeds back into even more misallocation and dysfunction as those with power deal with the consequences of their earlier misallocations and folks are pushed out of the system or oppressed by it.

Learning to Play together

Many conservatives argue that the principle that the best government is the least government. They rightly argue that direct democracy is only practical in small communities where the form of government is ad-hoc and people have no conflicts with neighbors. However, making government small enough to drown in a bathtub requires first creating a dictator who can be drowned there. Simple, abstract arguments are like a sheet of paper covered with vertical or horizontal lines. If the world were so simple all one would need to have integrity (to be integral) would be to color in the lines provided by the Ineffable, eternal, author. One color, one author, one sheet of paper, and the result not exactly exciting unless one pins a million dollar price tag to it and cons folks into thinking of it as abstract art.

The real world requires more creativity and vision. The ineffable one has provided a coloring book where sometimes we have to sometimes, collectively, draw our own lines and hope everyone agrees. But the difficulty is, we are all sharing the same coloring book, so no one person gets all the credit, and all authority is contingent on agreement, in the short run with the other humans present, and in the long run with that collective agreement we label with the term "God." The lines we draw on our four dimensional paper have to be drawn in coordination with others. Oppression is taking so much space on the paper that others can't draw anything. Tyranny is not letting others draw, or forcing them to draw ugly things using violence. We have to learn to play together. Success in this society requires both individual initiative, and the willingness and ability to play together.

This is because the lines that separate and join our destiny often intersect. If most of us would prefer a race track to getting to our goals, real life is more like a demolition derby -- the tracks intersect in ways that are inconvenient to everyone. Half a second divides success from failure because people often are in conflict over the crayons we need to draw our lives. "Competition" is our efforts to put a dress on Ares and call him Athena. We inherit from the Greeks a certain sophisticated hypocrisy. If we want a better world we have to work together.

In this world everyone needs the opportunity to be his or her best self. The world is like a mural, where we can find our own space if we are willing to give space to others. The wisdom of the right to property is about when to protect that right. and when a person must relinquish that right.

Property rights are like a highway. We all have them. We are supposed to stay 1-7 car lengths behind the cars ahead of us, and avoid crashing into others. When the world turns into a mish mash of crossing lines we have to respect the stop signs and know when to stop. Libertarianism errs when it becomes a mouthpiece for children who want to own all the crayons and force people to draw their arbitrary ideas -- or when they reject the teachers. Without communitarianism and mutual respect the world becomes a demolition derby. Without individual rights it becomes a mob and the mural becomes something dark and ugly, while the highway piles up with crashed and broken cars.

The Child of Spring

The child of spring,

bounces over pastures

dances with the birds,

smiles with the sun

The child of spring,

cries with the rain,

shivers in the morning dew,

and changes his diapers from brown to green.

The child of spring,

has hair of green grasses

Festooned with dew drops,

shimmering in the morning sun.

The Child of spring,

has shining blue eyes,

Where little birds dance and sing.

and one can enter into their dream.

I love the child of spring,

Fat with birth and rain,

Reborn from winters cold and ice

Green spring grows out of him.

Warmth out of pain.

Christopher H. Holte, written in 80's.

Tyranny is also bad process

When one attends classes at the Project Management Institute (PMI) one sees process diagrams for project management everywhere. The principles of governing a project, it turns out, are pretty much the same whether the project is a government project, a household project, or any short term endeavor with a start date and an end date. Similarly a program office has more complex processes, and these process interface with project management, but the basic processes of program management are the same whether one is looking at a small program or a large one.  The reality is that the same thing is true with governing bodies of sentient beings.  The processes of democracy either embody principles of good government, which means good governing processes, or they don’t. 

Unfortunately, the optimization of governing processes depends on who the nominal and real stakeholders are, and so many governing institutions are optimized for a small subset of their stakeholders – and this is not only almost a definition and source of corruption but is also bad process.  Bad process fails because it drives system failure.  Systems not optimized for the well-being of the system – which implies the well-being of all the stakeholders are dysfunctional by design.  They also are tyranny as defined by John Locke:

199. “As usurpation is the exercise of power which another hath a right to, so tyranny is the exercise of power beyond right, which nobody can have a right to; and this is making use of the power any one has in his hands, not for the good of those who are under it, but for his own private, separate advantage. When the governor, however entitled, makes not the law, but his will, the rule, and his commands and actions are not directed to the preservation of the properties of his people, but the satisfaction of his own ambition, revenge, covetousness, or any other irregular passion."[1]

Maximizing the general welfare and preventing “private, separate advantage” and the resulting reign of “ambition, revenge, covetousness…” is about tyranny, but it also is about bad process.  The virtues of good process outweigh the expediency of tyranny, and this will become readily apparent to anyone who thinks about it a while. So let us architect governmental processes that will allow us to recognize and fix systemic tyranny and generally improve the function of our government.

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[1] http://holtesthoughts.blogspot.com/2012/08/definitions-related-to-democratic.html
Note: source is John Locke's Two Treatises on Government.

Legislative Advisory

In the old series "Lucy", she goes into a small town hotel where the owner is the doorman, mayor, and ultimately cop, judge and sheriff. The results are funny on TV but disastrous in real life, when folks are allowed to go outside their swimlanes.

We've made our executive way too powerful. On this score the far right is almost right -- though they have no problem with such power when they are in power. The once powerful Congress has delegated much of it's power to the executive in such a way that it is more an obstacle and nuisance sometimes than a constructive part of the legislative process. Our legislators, especially but not exclusively the Senate, are both too powerful and too disconnected from their constituencies to be effective legislator. Our powerful interests like this because it makes it easier to buy influence through campaign bribes, but it not only is bad and corrupt government but bad process. Our general legislators depend on staffers who often work for the companies they plan to go too after doing their time in government, and they write legislation that always is highly influenced by, and sometimes directly comes from, the corporations and interests they are supposed to regulate.

The root of corruption doesn't come from the mere fact of corporate interest in government. That is natural. A system or commons develop when folks divide up property so that people can specialize and do what they do best. Corruption comes from folks trying to "swim" outside their proper swimlane. Just because someone is good at one thing doesn't automatically mean they are competent at another. Worse the resulting conflict of interest can mean they are automatically going to be incompetent at the things that are outside the swimlane where their natural ability lies.

Too de-conflict these functions we would be best off if we setup institutions that involve the citizenry. What do AARP, NRA and other modern membership corporations have in common? The members have very little legislative power and very little say in the government of the organization that "represents" them. Thus the NRA is famous for being more about the companies that manufacture arms than about gun owners, and the AARP is sometimes accused of being in cahoots with insurance companies and others doing business with or through them. What we need are formal "Legislative Advisory" organizations that represent their members, are organized as "advisory" legislatures, and can do the work presently done by staffers --but would do it in a nationally integrated fashion from bottom up (Village, Town, City and County level on up). Their leaders would be elected, their memberships would meet in Assembly at the local level and as representatives at top levels. Groups like the AARP, Medical Associations, Unions etc.... organized this way would be powerful. And their recommendations for law and regulation would become law easier.

And we need a juridical function in most of our executive functions. But that is for another post.

Discussion:

The Japanese used to have layers of administration. They had an Emperor, who often was a front-man for an older "retired Emperor" who held more power than he did. And then they had a Shogun who was out-front and supposed to defend the country from invaders, but who in many cases had a front man himself and operated from behind a screen (often literally). In practice all these people would be conspiring to put the power completely in their own hands in many cases. But looking at it from a process point of view, there are good reasons to separate the roles. No man can safely (to the system) be both judge jury and executioner. This is the principle behind separation of powers. The Emperor was acting as Judge, or magistrate over the country as a whole. In the case of the imperial court he was both President and Supreme Court justice equivalent. The Younger person was usually given some part of that, often the judicial function. The Shogun had the executive function; and often the elder Shogun would act as executive judge, while the younger was the actual executive. This may seem byzantine, but the purpose was integral. It had integrity. As usual people in charge are the first ones to subvert their own roles so I'm not suggesting in any way we imitate the Bakufu or the Imperial Court. But what I suggesting is that separating the government into Executive, legislature and judiciary is not enough to enforce good government. On the contrary, we've given way too much power to the President.

The only trickle down I see, are them marking my feet

A few thoughts and observations about Trickle down

When we hear folks talking about economic ideas, we have to understand that there are two kinds of misleading ideas out there. There are narrowly defined policy ideas that make economic sense in those narrow scenarios that they describe. And there are broad assertion about economics that are just put out to try to sell folks invisible cloth. Some areas of thought; Friedman's monetary ideas, other economists core ideas, even some of Marx's ideas, belong to the former category. Even if you disagree entirely with the general philosophy, some of the ideas are intriguing and true. And studying them is worth doing, especially if you disagree, because we all should learn to think critically. Being able to see both sides of every issue is important not only to lawyers and sophists, but also to those seeking genuine wisdom. I can't battle the abstract of "dogmaticism" if I myself hold dogmas and never challenge them. Ideas have to be examined and compared. Most good ideas make sense in their context, and understanding that context helps one to discard the nonsense. Can't get caught off guard by truth if one agrees.

But the other kind of stuff, is just invisible cloth. Trickle down is in that pile of steaming excretia. It is the notion that if tax and policy policies favor the rich somehow we'll all be better off. This sale goes back to the early 20'th century when many blue collar workers, or more often salesmen, who had no chance of "rising" were convinced by Horatio Alger stories to believe that they would one day be rich if they supported laissez faire policies and invested in the stock market. The grifters in the stock market stole their money and many of them were forced to ride the rails looking for a place where they could make their riches; but this "temporarily embarrassed millionaire" notion has never vanished among us Americans. It is why folks who ought to know better support such policies, even when the other folks are sharing nonsense arguments for why they should.

Again, at the core of trickle down is a truth. The King, because he has concentrated power has a vastly (geometrically in respect to his wealth or power alone) power to do good or evil, over an ordinary person. So loan your money to a rich person and, in theory, you'll get a better return than you'd get loaning it to someone poor. Except that history, and experience shows that that is not usually, actually in fact, the case.

Reality: Investors risk "Other People's Money", Not their own.

In actually, officers of any enterprise prefer to risk other people's money rather then their own. Kings held the crown jewels as a trust, and when they bankrupted themselves, they bankrupted their people. The only difference between some Wall Street investors and Bernie Maddoff is that Bernie guaranteed his investors a rate of return and that blocked him from being able to invest in actual risky ventures and reduced him to paying back his investors out of new investment and creating a ponzi scheme as a result.

Examine dozens of investors, companies, etc.... and their whole purpose is not reducing risk it is transfering risk. They will risk your money, pocket your fees, pocket any profits, and deduct any losses from your balance sheet. The results of investing in some stock funds or other Wall Street Instruments may be the same as with a Ponzi Scheme, but the Ponzi scheme was illegal, and the folks investing lost money on Wall Street are still working out in the open. A case can be made that it might be better to go back to keeping our money in mattresses, but then it would never do any work. At the core of the economic system we have has to be trust. Investors should not be risking other people's money while running "heads I win, tails you lose" games. There are a lot of folks who should be cooling their heels with Bernie. The idea of trickle down is related to the idea that if we invest in risky stocks we'll wind up with a giant retirement nest egg. Maybe, if the game isn't rigged as it was in 2000, or 2006 (and periodically since 1790). Sure, it trickles down, what is left.

And the investors will tell you while they are selling things to you that they are mavens who know so much more than you do. And when your money goes south and disappears, they'll say "you should have known better." The risk is on you.

Trickle Down Tax Policy is really transfering risks and costs.

Similarly, trickle down tax policy is part of a whole series of effects of naked aggression, legal bribery, extortion, and corrupt influence; that reflect more the power of sophistry and rhetoric, than credible policy.

If everyone is a temporarly embarrassed millionaire than I guess it might make sense to let the wealthy not pay their fair share of taxes, and to acquire more and more wealth. After all, a fair society floats all boats, and if the factory owner (nowadays usually industry owner) has immense wealth, that ought to trickle down to workers, traders, salesmen, and the guy at the corner store. No, that doesn't happen. On the contrary, wealth beyond a certain point is simply power. Power to buy influence, to buy followers, to buy allegience. It becomes a get out of jail card. And as with investors, it becomes about transfering risk. Think they can't afford to make their factories safe at Wallmart? It would cost them pennies on the dollars of their profits. Risk transfered to you and me means a sense of security and power for those in the offices.

It would be fairly easy to graph this using Maslowe's hierarchy of needs. The rest of us spend money fairly efficiently. It goes from us to banks, creditors, energy providers, stores, restaurants, and each other. The wealthy spend more than we do, but their entertainment needs to up arithmetically with their income, but their income goes up geometrically. A person making a million dollars might spend 10's of thousands of dollars on entertainment, but a person making tens of millions dollars will probably not be spending much more. On food, the curve will top out at even a lower rate. My income is close to the rate at which it makes no difference in how I spend for food at my current income level over a higher level. I might eat fewer meals at expensive restaurants, but I probably wouldn't eat many even if I were incredibly wealthy. The wealthy don't have a life-style difference that grows more costly at the same rate their wealth increases. That is why they insist on capping Social Security.

No, after that living wage, and then wealthy life-style premium, everything else becomes power and security oriented. It may be invested, but it won't be spent, on average. For every generous person giving away millions you find billionares giving away maybe a million; and mostly for quid pro quo.

No it doesn't Trickle Down, Joe

And finally it is worse than them simply not spending money when you let them keep more. They still spend money, but that money becomes more and more aimed at increasing their wealth and power. They invest investor money to corner the Silver Market (The Hunt brothers), or setup schemes to protect their nest eggs by creating derivative bets and making their own investors take the risk for those going bad. In this last swindle bubble, they actually set it up so that the risk fell on the taxpayer. In past times the wealthy tended to gamble their money away.

In the 1700's, Scottish Nobles, for instance, would gamble away land, that ideally shouldn't have been their personal property anyway, as the tenants on that property had been their for centuries and the nobles had essentially converted their trust as rulers into simple property thanks to the holes in "enlightenment" thinking. In order to make their gambling debts back, (or simply monetize their holdings) they'd wind up evicting their tenants and converting the property to raising sheep or industry. The wealthy come to own property simply because they have money, and with time, they come to own more and more property (as is happening here) until they own everything. Then people start getting evicted from property because they tend to be irresponsibility with those trusts.

Trickle Down or Oligarchy?

Our current generation of super-wealth is following that time worn track. Ceasar's triumvirate included people who got their wealth and power through the revolving door of business and government. Crassus for instance acquired huge holdings of lands by running the Roman fire-department. Caesar inherited the political machine of the Marius family. Crassus of the Sulla faction. And Pompeii represented the "new men" trying to horn their way into "old wealth." They initially were representatives of rival plutocrats, but eventually there were only three, and after that only one. Wealth comes to buy power, and power to buy wealth. Eventually these three came. And then there was one.

Anyway, it doesn't trickle down, but it can destroy our Republic.

Note, I've been so busy with a deadline my imagination hasn't been able to track to blogging, and a lot of ideas I was planning to blog on got side-tracked.

The Market is not a person

A market is a place. Talking about the market one might as well be talking about the streets, the parks, a waste dump. It's not "the market" that sets the prices for things, or the market that moves up and down. It is human policy and human behavior. It may be legitimate to use the phrase as a short cut to saying that "the majority of investors bid up prices today," or employers calculate that they will make a certain amount of money if they pay such and such a price. Theorists like to say that economic formulas indicate that marginal supply = marginal demand at the equilibrium price. But that is abstraction. It is a logical error to confuse abstractions with persons. In the real world equilibrium are at best transitory and the only time a system is at rest is when the system is dead. Markets are a place. The players in a market are playing in a system of human relations, in which markets are one abstract element. The market doesn't decide anything. The people in that market, acting as members, in context of power and possession, do. Essentially they are collective entities

Thus Market government can be oligarchy, monarchy, republican or it can even be almost democratic. Governments are power constrained. Those who claim that "the market" is a being that determines prices is either a liar, a shill, or expressing his theology about who God is for him/her.