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Today, I am very happy to discover more leading intellectual energy applied to these urgently pragmatic and timely matters. By way of preface, I’d like to first share a few preliminary observations from a morning radio program that I hope will further help to humanize the technical and operational requirements inherent to architectures for Capitalism++. The purpose will become more clear when we later introduce the relevance of “economic mechanisms in their social context.” This morning on KQED Forum, 10-year veteran network engineers were told that they were right to consider “mowing lawns” or “retooling” for new “relevant” skills. When did IT expertise become irrelevant to Web 5.0 or whatever the marketers call it next? Added insult was piled on to injury by virtue of the hasty ambivalence conveyed through both content and tenor of the remarks when one bold listener called in with sufficient bravery to share his success at becoming healthy thanks to treatment for some version of bipolar disorder. This is a spectrum of affliction that plagues many of the best and brightest in the field, but which is still shunned and hushed with plague-like ignorance and fear. The caller could in all likelihood be healthier than the modal norm for his cohort, due in no small part to the all too rare enlightened self-knowledge that often leads to successful treatment and oft-consequent “better than baseline” emotional health outcomes. Instead, the caller will most likely continue to fall victim to increasing career ostracization in recompense for such conscientious and objectivity lucid behavior. Getting emotionally healthy is arguably the only prudent healthcare decision that is, in effect, still the functional equivalent of a sociological — and certainly professional — crime. Hence, try as I may, I simply can not believe that these highly respectable public voices can mete out such outmoded advice with a straight face. While the foregoing biases against the obvious benefits of improved emotional health may be arguably absurd on a number of post information-age levels; added to this morning’s program was the persistent denial of the obvious rampant ageism which is increasingly undeniable in a rapidly consolidating labor market. Much of the double speak surrounding this matter borders on the intellectually abject. These are tech jobs for which highly motivated 50 year-olds are ideally and superiorly qualified in every way, with many even willing to accept sometimes grotesquely depressed wages. But the message from authoritative voices for the status quo of lifelong wage slavery is, “you’ve accrued too much market value by virtue of your strong moral character, diligence, and hard earned cross-disciplinary experience; so go do something for which you lack such accrued value.” This Blame the Victim “retooling” message is part and parcel of the timeless and implicit wage slavery mantra encoded into such utterly bankrupt cliches as “overqualified.” Such tired, cheap, amateur Jedi mind tricks may have worked on illiterate railroad workers and dam builders, but they just ain’t gonna’ cut it for today’s displaced and fully self-aware engineers, MBA’s, doctors, and lawyers. Nope, you’re just not going to weasel and waffle out of this one, Mssrs. Forbes & Kudlow. Against the backdrop of many other such socioeconomic realities, and with typical intellectual incisiveness, Dr. Ben Goertzel cuts to the heart of the systems side of such matters as they pertain to retooling our economic system, captured briefly in the following excerpts. Please read the full post for his complete and accurate context. [T]he recent crisis could be viewed as a failure of the rational-actor model — and a validation of the need to view socioeconomic systems as complex self-organizing systems, involving psychological, sociological and economic dynamics all tangled together … a need that will only increase as technology advances and makes it harder and harder for even smart rational-minded people to approximate rational economic judgments. As a semi-aside: In terms of traditional economists, I’d say Galbraith’s perspective probably accounts for this crisis best. He was always skeptical of over-mathematical approaches, and stressed the need to look at economic mechanisms in their social context. [T]he novel problem that we have here (added on top of the usual human problems of dishonesty, corruption, and so forth) may be that, in a world that is increasingly complex (with financial instruments defined by advanced mathematics, for example), being a rational economic actor is too difficult for almost anybody. The rational-actor assumption fails for a lot of reasons, as many economists have documented in the last few decades … but this analysis of the current financial crisis suggests that as technology advances, it is going to fail worse and worse. The economy is, in some senses, becoming fantastically more and more efficient (at producing more and more interesting configurations of matter and mind given less and less usage of human and material resources) … but it’s doing so via complex, self-organizing dynamics … not via libertarian-style, rational-actor-based free-market dynamics.

File under, “more WHY’S of Capitalism++” and why Basic Income.

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