381. Too shallow to grow?

Economic growth requires investment, in different forms of capital. That requires patience. The deeper the investment, the longer it will take to bear fruit, but the higher the yield will be. Shallow investment for quick returns stunts growth.

That is the gist of the argument in a lecture by Andrew Haldane[i].

he different forms of capital proposed here (not the same as those of Haldane) are: hardware (machinery, instruments, buildings, …), software, infrastructure (roads, pipelines, satellites, …), media, intellect (education, science), culture, institutions (rule of law), and social capital (trust, cohesion, security, …).

The present short-term orientation of investors, and under their pressure that of managers, reduces growth.

Pressures on education and research to produce quick returns do so as well.

Haldane argued that the invention of book printing  provided the basis for slow, methodical, deep thought, and the present shift to more pictorial, iconic forms of expression favours the quick, shallow, and impressionistic. The resulting decay and marginalization of the intellectual, dodging the deep, will slow growth.

It may be worse than that. When fast opinions replace slow arguments, emotion muscles out reason, twitter drowns discourse, and memories are short, there will be increasing waste due to mistakes and their repetition, in lack of memory, incoherence, randomness and noise. Society becomes a play of bumper cars on a fairground.

But can this be avoided? With the explosion of available information on the Internet, surfing the surface, picking up titbits here and there, in the form of images and icons, is perhaps a necessary survival tactic. Going deep no longer pays in the trade-off between effort and the attention and reward one earns. But that is a weak excuse. Look at the waste of time in endless cycling around in social networks, delving and serving up trivia. Boring into the depth is now boring, unexciting.

Stop grumbling, old man, one might say. Accept the new world or drop out. But that does not yet invalidate the argument that shallowness and speed of thought may inhibit growth.

But will that really be the case? In fact, technical progress is accelerating, with untold advances in robotics, in particular, looming soon, perhaps beyond the abilities of humans, bypassing them. Not to speak of other forms of artificial intelligence, genetic engineering, materials science and nanotechnology, virtual reality, and platform services (Facebook, Google, etc.)

Growth also depends crucially on entrepreneurship. While technological innovation does require some knowledge of technology, that need not be deep, and what counts more is daring, willingness to take risk.

Innovation may arise from a variety of contributions from people with different bits of knowledge and skill. The Internet offers limitless opportunities to search and connect things in the novel combinations, between things that were not connected before, which constitute innovation.

Much innovation now requires little capital, since it does not involve large installations for manufacturing, but small outlays in software, knowledge and skill. 

Under the present pace of innovation, speed may not be a hindrance, as Haldane suggests, but a condition for survival in markets.

The capital of hardware and software is exploding, in innovation, while social understanding, for effective politics, and social capital, are declining, accompanied by increasing economic inequality, insecurity of employment, and the erosion of trust, and intellectual capital is eroding in trivialization of thought and communication.

However, innovation does not necessarily suffer from the erosion of social capital. The innovators of Silicon Valley profess an extreme libertarian view of the economy. Their ideal is abolition of state intervention, in unfettered market dynamics. 

So, becoming increasingly moronic we may not be growing slower but faster.

The problem is not lack of growth but our inability to deal intellectually, socially and politically with accelerating growth. Technology trumps the humanities. How, for example,  to deal with limits to genetic engineering, erosion of social security and conditions of work, financial markets that do not allow themselves to be contained, and inequality of income and capital?  

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[i] Andrew G. Haldane, Growing, fast and slow,  Bank of England, University of East Anglia, 17-02-2015

380. Disappointments of illusory perfection

Democracy is a mess. Much criticism of it is understandable and justified, given the many inconsistencies, errors, jumbles, and major and minor injustices. It is often a procession of two steps ahead and one back. However, criticism overshoots when obsessed with the illusion of perfection, in consistent, rational, intelligent design. That is like demanding an elephant to leap like a leopard.

Democracy can work only in its imperfection. It is wrought from compromises between largely irreconcilable political ideologies, and that is how it should be. Ideals get lost in translation. This inevitably yields outcomes no one can reliably predict, and many will not like. The drive for perfection, without errors and inconsistencies, in rational design, can only be satisfied by dropping ideologies, which leads to an inscrutable technocracy, as has been happening in Europe, or by imposing a single master ideology, which leads to authoritarianism.

Criticism is crucial but can only contribute to imperfection on the move, in muddling through, ‘bricolage’, as Levi-Straus called it.

A first paradox is this. On the one hand democracies entail rival ideologies, but on the other hand one must allow for imperfections in their compromises, which requires a non-dogmatic adherence to one’s ideology.

A second paradox is this. On the one hand democracies require transparency of motives, but often ideals are paraded as reasons while in fact the reasons lie in electoral concerns. Policies must sell to voters, to ensure the next electoral victory, but this must be hidden in ideological rhetoric.

Ideologies that win in the tug of democracy can produce uninformed, wrongheaded decisions that go foul, producing economic hardship or even horrors of war, but this must be hidden in a twisting of historical facts.

In organization science there is the notion of ‘espoused theory’ and ‘theory in use’. The first is the ideological lore, the second what actually happens to serve hidden interests. There is something similar in politics: espoused policy and policy in use.

Take, for an illustration, the recent financial crisis in Greece. The then minister of economic affairs, Yanis Varoufakis, rationally argued, quite correctly, that a substantial part of the Greek debt had to be cancelled in order to give Greece some basis for economic growth, needed to repay any debt. The IMF agreed with him, but the Eurogroup of EU finance ministers did not. In the corridors, Varoufakis was told he was right but should not push his argument and should conform.  

Conform to what? A rational reason for the EU was to set an example to prevent other countries for also hiving off their debt onto the citizens of the EU. After all, that is also what the banks had done, and efforts were now made to prevent that in the future as well. Was that the real reason? The result was that not the Greek banks were saved but the Banks in Germany and the Netherlands that held the claims on the Greek banks. Was that the result from pressure from those banks? Perhaps.

I suspect that the real reason rather was fear of the rising populist sentiment in the Netherlands and Germany ‘not to give away any more money to the lazy Greeks’. This is devious and dishonest, and highly unjust to the Greek population that bore the  hardship of the consequences. Yet, there is political purpose involved beyond electoral self-interest. Emerging populism had to be pacified to avoid the disaster of it taking over.      

This illustrates how different rationalities and expediencies may be in conflict that cannot be resolved to the benefit of all.   

The point now is that this is happening all the time. It is too easy to simply blame it on ‘conspiracies of the elite’ dedicated to their own advantage. There is that too, no doubt, but the main problem is that of ‘system tragedy’. This gives no reason to give up criticism, but that criticism must see through the imperfection of the system to be effective, to make the imperfection move, knowing that perfection is unattainable. The task of critics and the media is, I think, to see through the espoused policies and expose the policies in use, and bring those out into the open for debate.

Another illustration is the refugee crisis in the Middle East. It has been claimed, correctly I think, that a major cause of it was Western military intervention in Iraq and Syria, which were secular countries, tolerating different faiths (though with tensions between Sunni and Shiite muslims). The interventions led to wars, and the emergence of ISIS, which yielded calamitous numbers of deaths and floods of refugees. Religious tolerance disappeared (and the rift between Sunni and Shiite deepened). True, but what is the implication? Does this yield an argument for more absorption of refugees by western countries? It does, and it might even be feasible, but the political reality, here again, is the populist disgust of refugees. Even Angela Merkel had to renege on her exceptionally courageous aim for unlimited entry.

In financial markets consumers are told that success in the past yield no guarantee for the future. In politics failures in the past yield no guarantee for redress in the future. Instead, the blame is covered up. Criticism is needed to prevent this and bring it into the open, to move imperfection, for lessons to be learned, and to achieve the best possible redress. Moral arguments of responsibility will not win the day, but they may limit the losses. 

The only consolation there is, is that the alternative of an authoritarian regime is even worse. Democracy is imperfection on the move. An authoritarian regime is imperfection dug in.  

379. In interaction ambiguity shrinks

I think that in present times one should try to have an ontology that also covers the wondrous world of quantum physics. What am I up against there? I am not sure. There are several interpretations of quantum theory that have long been at odds with each other, and still are, with fundamentally different implications, each difficult to accept. This is not the place to discuss all that. Can I connect my ontology to any of those interpretations?

The central feature of that ontology, adopted from Graham Harman[i] and Tristan Garcia[ii], is that objects of all kinds, including both material and abstract objects, have an inside (what is in it) and an outside (what it is in), and that they arise, change or vanish in interaction with objects in their environment. They cannot exist without that interaction. 

 do find something like that in the “Copenhagen interpretation” of quantum physics that has been the dominant interpretation for a long time. This concerns the duality of an elementary particle (electron, photon), as being both particle an wave, or “cloud” of probabilities of locations where the particle might be.

In the “Broglie-Bohm interpretation” particle and wave exist at the same time, but in the Copenhagen interpretation there is only a cloud, until it “collapses” into a single location, where the particle appears, upon interaction with an observer-measurer, or, more generally, another system. 

In the “Everett interpretation”, interaction does not yield collapse but, on the contrary, an combination of the waves of the interactors into a larger wave, which expands on and on in series of interactions, growing into a wave encompassing the whole world, resulting in an infinity of possible worlds, each with its own superwave.  

Now, in terms of my ontology, would the cloud-particle duality constitute the inside of that object? The interesting point here is that it is interaction with an outside system that changes the state of the object. That is particularly interesting to me since I have spent half my life in studying interaction between people.

I can see a possible connection with the Copenhagen interpretation with its cloud collapse, in language, concerning universals. Consider the notion of “chair”. It can denote (refer to) a specific chair, without ambiguity. But that is only one of many specific chairs that constitute the “particulars” of the universal. Thus, the meaning of the universal is indeterminate until it collapses into a specific denotation in a specific sentence in a specific action context. It is in interaction with other words, in a sentence, according to grammar and syntax, that universals are disambiguated, that the cloud of meaning collapses.

I would not know how this cloud could be seen as a wave. But then, in a lecture posted on YouTube, Carlo Rovelli claimed that in quantum physics the wave does not really exist either, but is no more than a way of coding past interactions.

Concerning universals, that makes sense. In my treatment of universals, in this blog, I proposed that the particulars are not merely contained in the universal, and do not “derive from it”, as some kind of “reflection” of a Platonic “ideal object”, but on the contrary feed, constitute the cloud of possible denotations, developed from interaction between people in using the word. So here also, instead of the cloud being a wave, it is a deposit of earlier interactions. I used the example, in a newspaper, with a picture of a man using a stuffed cow for a chair, and so this became an additional possibility for denotation, in the cloud. Walking past a pasture with cows, one might then point at one and say: “look what a beautiful chair”. 

There still remains ambiguity, now concerning the sentence as a whole, in differences of interpretation and understanding between people. They also take part in the interaction.   Understanding of quantum theory and language both seem to labour under what earlier I called an “object bias”. The objects involved (elementary particles, words) are seen in terms of objects moving in Newtonian time and space, but they are not like that. Earlier, I used the example of “chair”. A particular chair does not change colour or drop it legs when moved from one room to another, but the universal “chair” does change its meaning from one sentence to another. 

Is this of any use? The notion of wave collapse from quantum theory triggered the idea of a cloud of meaning for universals, and of disambiguation, shrinking the cloud to a specific denotation, as a result of interaction, between words in a sentence and participants in discourse. I leave it to the reader to find this interesting or not. 

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[i] Graham Harman, 2018, Object-oriented ontology, Penguin.

[ii] Tristan Garcia, 2014, Form and object, Edinburgh University Press.

378. The good life: is it enough?

In this blog I have argued for acceptance, even enjoyment, of imperfection, while keeping it moving, in development of the self, without God or a hereafter, other than what one leaves behind after ones death. I argued for a good life in contributing to that hereafter, accepting that it is enough and can be a joy if in the process one makes the best possible use of one’s talents. Of course, this depends on conditions. For people in disasters of war there may be no access to a good life.

Is that really enough?

Dostoyevsky proposed that without God humans fall into a moral abyss. 

It is claimed that without a God people grasp at some superstition to replace it. Some other absolute, universal and unchanging, Žižek’s object-a, perhaps, dressed up and veiled in ideology.

In neo-liberal ideology, the market is the substitute missionary superstition, held to apply always and everywhere.

Or a scientist’s Platonic ideal of objective truth, the dream of reason.

So, is there some hidden superstition in my view of ‘imperfection on the move’. Or is it not really adequate for satisfying the human craving for significance?

As discussed in his blog, my answer to Dostoyevsky is as follows: I propose debatable ethics, an Aristotelian virtue ethics, with commitment to phronesis, practical wisdom. With the virtues of being reasonable, courage, moderation, and justice, mastering the art of trust.

My answer to Plato is truth as warranted assertibility: the exercise of logic, search and respect for facts, and practical workability.

My answer to liberalism is that yes, we need markets, but they are imperfect and have moral limits, require restraint by regulation, and a test against virtues.

One may hope that after death the movement of imperfection continues, in new ways, conducted by new generations. One needs hope not in a passive sense of waiting to see, but in an active sense of having a goal, seeing ways to achieve them, and confidence in one’s ability to do so. This needs courage, to face the uncertainties involved.

So, without a God, I do maintain the Christian virtues of faith, hope and love in the form of what Gabriel Marcel called ‘brotherhood’, and love in the form of philia.

In ‘being in the world’, the individual forms itself in interaction with that world. For imperfection to be on the move, one should grasp the opportunity of opposition by others, to escape from one’s prejudices. That requires empathy, the ability to understand the position of others and what moves them.

It requires openness to surprise, the willingness and ability, the resilience, to absorb disappointments.