With market capitalist principles abandoned in all but name, the Neoliberal Ascendancy was replaced by a Post-Capitalist Expediency (PCE), whose aim is the maintenance of the status quo, including its greatly widened inequalities, by all available means.
It’s as though, for want of a non-controversial term, a Giant Invisible Controlling Hand were keeping us fixated on the false proxy of GDP. (and who benefits from the world being described that way?, I hear Seth Godin whispering).
So here seems to be a real-world collective phenomenon to maybe put things on a more positive footing. Can PCT offer anything to add to, or indeed subtract from, Morgan’s (or similar) analysis that might help us better understand and interpret our global (and local) economic predicaments and problems?
Yes, I think PCT can provide a better understanding of economics than what has been provided by most academic economists. I tried my hand at providing a start to a PCT approach to macro-economics in this paper (copied from my book MORE MIND READINGS). Of course, it describes a way oversimplified model of the economy. But I think it gives a better picture of what an economy is about than than does conventional approaches. The latter – even Morgan’s nice analysis – see an economy as a wealth producer, and the more wealth an economy produces, the better. (Indeed, there was a recent article in the NY Times complaining about the emphasis on wealth production in business schools.
My view, based on PCT, is that an economy is a wealth controller, where an aggregate of individual contollers who are simultaneously producers and consumers of wealth. This point of view emphasizes the fact that the individuals who make up the aggregate – the economy – are acting to produce wealth (output) in order to provide for what they want and need to consume (input). So I like to say that an economy is control writ large.
The nice thing about this view is that it emphasizes the fact that an economy exists to provide wealth to the individuals that make it up. So, to the extent that all individuals in the aggregate are not getting their wants and needs pretty well met, the economy is not working (controlling) well, regardless of how much wealth it is producing.
Some people, like this wonderful guy, get this even without PCT. By the way, this video shows the problem of a theory-only approach to doing science, an approach that is a particular problem in academic economics (and even in some segments of the PCT community).
@bnhpct, I’d begun to worry about Rick. It had been some time since we last saw him, so it is a relief to find him here, and in such fine form.
@rsmarken, I was particularly taken with your warning about the purely theoretical approach to science, which you note persists even in parts of the PCT community. It is a warning worth repeating.
John has raised hard questions here, following Tim Morgan: physical limits on resources, the carrying capacity of the environment, and how a system can hold a proxy such as GDP to its reference with great precision while the substrate it stands for is quietly used up. To answer that the economy is simply control on a large scale, and that people control for their needs and so produce wealth, has the great merit of being true. Whether it also answers John’s question, I leave to John.
The question itself is a PCT question, and a sharp one:
A control loop defends its perception, not the world.
If the perceptual function tracks the wrong thing, the loop will hold it to reference faithfully, and the better it controls, the less anyone notices.
That is, as it happens, the problem my own paper is built around.
I would not draw you away from the repair of world capitalism. But should a quiet moment come, I have just opened a thread in Research › AI:
It is a modest thing beside the global economic order: a two-level perceptual control loop around language models, with eight hypotheses registered in advance, each with the result that would count against it, and the whole tested by the Test for the Controlled Variable. H8 is step 8 of the Test, blocking the sensing, carried out with frozen and replayed measurement packets.
Knowing how firmly you oppose the purely theoretical approach, I would value your view on two practical points:
whether step 8 survives the move to an engineered system;
the feedback-functions thread, where thirty lines of Python are still waiting for the equations of the disturbance model you have in mind.
I see you have also asked for thoughts on the birds in Keys to Bird Survival? Intrinsic references, loudness control, sequence perception: a fine set of questions, and too good to answer in passing. Once I have put my own modest trifles in order, I’ll come over and try. Birds, at least, keep their references where we can hear them.
No hurry on any of it. The world economy comes first.
Thanks Rick. For now I’d just add to your preliminary sketch:
A PCT approach to “wealth” would surely, to my mind, include reference to the concept of degrees of freedom - to pick up what seems an incredibly important point from the recent discussion.
When I first read this paper a couple of months ago, it struck me that I hadn’t noticed the concept mentioned much recently. (Warren et al’s Rethinking Secondary Mental Health Care being a notable exception) (and admittedly I skim read a lot)
This concept seems right up there with respect vs. arbitrary control in terms of importance in the overall “vision” of PCT as I currently see it.
In my own relatively broke state, “finding degrees of freedom under constraints” is central to my home economics.
Gerat point! I agree. And money is a nice, simple measure of the degrees of freedom you possesss and can use to control for the perceptions you want, like healthcare, education, a nice place to live and (why not?) a vacation in Hawaii. When I was growing up *in hte wake of our greatest president, FDR, all those things were readily available to my middle class, single earner household. Now the degrees of freedom that could be used by millions of people to do those thingare being hoarded by a few billionaires and a trillionaire. Bye Bye miss American midde class.
A very long delay since I started this reply. Lots going on.
“Our global (and local) economic predicaments and problems” are very complex to model. PCT still has training wheels on for modeling collective control. We still need to move from modeling conflict (arm wrestling) to simple forms of individual perceptual control which require environmental means of controllin which themselves are collectively controlled, like putting a hold on a book which someone else has checked out at your local public library, or all the participants involved in the course of you controlling your perception of using the subway to get yourself from a starting place to a destination.
The chapters by Martin Taylor and by Kent McClelland in The Interdisciplinary Handbook of Perceptual Control Theory: Living control systems IV (the first volume of the handbook) open and organize the conceptual framework, and the chapter by Ted Cloak presents an anthropological perspective with references to his excellent materials on his website. On his website, his classic piece on the technology of the wood-spoked wheel documents collective control through generation-spanning time.
The first three volumes of Martin Taylor’s Powers of Perceptual Control were presented at the conference. Physical and informatic constraints which no system can evade have consequences for how complex systems change. Martin sometimes overextended the application of these principles. This is somewhat like the misapplication of population statistics to anything other than the measured population. Application of population statistics to individuals is egregious, most egregious if they are not in that population in which the statistical measures were made. It is unfortunately the modus operandi of insurance companies and, gallingly, of my primary care physician even when individual test data are given to him. But I digress. Martin identifies universal constraints (on a par with thermodynamics) and mathematically characterized properties of systems (such as the mathematics of tensegrity, of crumpling, and of folding) which may open principled ways to organize ourselves socially which increase the degrees of freedom with which we live together in a shared environment.
Directing social change was Zellig Harris’s title for the book which was published posthumously as The transformation of capitalist society. This was a summation of collaborative work with people in many fields, such as Freeman Dyson and Seymour Melman, Paul Mattick, and Max Zorn, from the late 1940s up through the 1990s. A core idea is that capitalism has been less a rising tide than an advancing wave front which has left many areas of social reality high and dry, ignored or abandoned because they are insufficiently profitable; that in these areas people can experience ways of enabling and refining collective control among ourselves; and that here a more humane successor to capitalism is germinating, just as capitalism arose in the midst of feudalism in areas which the dominant social arrangements ignored, neglected, or delegated to folks who were considered socially inferior but useful.
Thanks Bruce, that’s helpful - I still hope to reach a productive accommodation of views! I don’t have Martin’s LCS IV chapter, but I have re-opened my paperback copy of Volume One of his Powers of Perceptual Control. (pdf available from livingcontrolsystems.com ). Will the other volumes be made available at some stage? Is there anywhere in particular you think he overreaches?