When Knowledge Use Is Limited, "All Good Things Must Pass"

...Yes, thankfully, only eventually. Civilizations generally prosper for a quite a while before the Taxman wins out. And, the prosperous good times generally last long enough, that to see the real connections between redistribution patterns alongside limitations in knowledge use is an "inconvenience" to the status quo. If we could condense the idea of economics to the thought of a small village where a few locals have a locked money (skills) chest which is mostly brought out for special occasions and bragging rights, i.e. honorary healing perhaps, it becomes easier to see how eventually no one really gets healed anymore. And that's healing in a direct sense...let alone the healing that needs to happen between disciplines where sickness generally occurs in a body's connecting points. Much of economic life is like that as well.

Better than any science fiction novels, which provide better opportunities for retreat and reaction than real offense (yes I'm diehard non fiction), are the countries which show - how in fact - good things do eventually pass. Being the oldest by ten years, one might say my brother was lucky in any number of respects, for he had a chance to learn not to do what I generally learned from doing...yep, the hard way. (By the same token I inadvertently tend to make people grateful for what they have...) And so Greece is like the "older sister" that my country would do well to learn from (HT Marginal Revolution), in terms of safeguarding what we still have even in the face of inevitable change.

By no means do I mean any literal translation. For one thing, many in the U.S. do not have the same kind of close association with agriculture - on any number of levels - which people in Europe have, and thus job market hopefuls here are highly dependent on the knowledge based skills they still hope to tap into, in the 21st century. What encourages me, as to the above link, is knowing that not every intelligent individual in Greece has "left the premises". And by no means should anyone leave their knowledge skills unused, just because one's nation is finally falling down in the job of supporting said skills. It's mostly a matter of thinking about knowledge skills use differently. Plus, anyone who has been keeping up with these posts knows I'll be "hunting" for further rationale as to starting from the same vantage point, in terms of knowledge use, because I believe a whole new world of potential is opened up by doing so.

However, it's not so much the healthcare angle I wanted to touch on here as the educational angle, which is also a continuation from an earlier post. Even though the monetary valuations of teachers are not so limiting (for economic access) as some skills sets, we are nonetheless running into limitations problems as to actual ability for students to hope for teaching positions, even with a PhD. As for new educators still capable of being "folded in", monetary rewards are no longer as reliable, given the associate positions which are the most commonly available in the present. And in the humanities, fewer students than ever major in these areas for fear of not finding work afterward.

Communities have the capacity to stabilize education and make it far more relevant (especially in economic terms), but I want to address some important underlying questions which don't always make into the discussion. First, how do we not only preserve, but also expand those aspects of education which hold such meaning for educators, students and peer to peer participants at individual levels? Social settings matter, although not necessarily in the forms we tend to utilize now. Much about the settings we think of as "holding" education need to be reconfigured into wider definitions of both form and space, especially in that some of the more public settings involving large groups need to move towards special occasion and other spontaneous gatherings.

What really matters is getting away from sterile routines where knowledge is taught with little immediate purpose or larger connection, something a charter or private school could be equally as guilty of as any public school. (Jonathan Finegold's quote of the week seems appropriate here.) While it will always makes sense to bring individuals together in similar timelines, they need to be able to easily adjust for individual circumstances, and ongoing activities which do not necessarily involve entire groups. Just the same, the process of reestablishing community trust at local levels, also means making much of the environmental redefinition of both work and education activity as public in orientation as possible.

A second question: how to further integrate local efforts into a collective societal level? Not just in the sense of coordinating both ongoing education and work with the use of our own time sets, but making this activity renewal a way to actually solve larger issues that today's institutions grapple with mostly in their protected domains. Somehow, we can evolve the idea of education back into the idea of ongoing community economic activity of all kinds: therefore not just in the limited sense of apprenticeship connections with business, by any means.

The school experience is quite important for anyone, even those of us who didn't necessarily feel like a central element in the process, perhaps! Rather than abolition of schools in community (which only hurts them further), the idea is to make them more open, informal and casual in broader orientation, while somewhat more formal and specific in individual orientation and work/activity related contexts. In other words, break apart the silos so the real work of life can once again take place  amongst the grounds that exist between them. By so doing, the arbitrary timelines of graduations and consequent social exclusions those graduations imply, can also fall away. Which would also mean the ability for all members of community to remain in combined processes of coordinated work and related education at any point in their lifetimes.

One of the greater paradoxes of late is the implied need to let go of the greater hopes for our own  efforts, which were supposed to be so important in the first place. And the fact that we believed our own abilities important enough to invest in, should tell us that what we deem vital is indeed important to others as well. There are ways to make that knowing matter, for all who believe it is worth the time to invest in knowledge - whether by money, or by the use of our own time and dedication. When nations can not realistically support their citizens efforts, by no means should a nation's cities and individuals be crippled because of the lack of resolve on the part of their power holders for economic progress.

Who Remembers the Source of Dysfunction?

...For the source is quite visual indeed, and my counselor pointed out the mobile hanging in the corner of her office,  more than twenty years ago. She set it into motion, and the brightly colored pieces circled around one another in a myriad of ways. Then she reached for it again, stopped the motion, and the pieces slowly settled into place. "This is what happens to a family whenever each member takes certain roles for granted, and assumes they cannot be changed", my new friend told me. "Eventually, the family members forget how to act otherwise".

Back then, the idea of dysfunctional behavior created quite a stir, and it didn't take long for the concept to move well beyond family definitions and into the public at large. However, something must have gotten lost in translation, and that something was also missing from the definitions I found in Google search, Wikipedia and the pocket American Heritage dictionary in the office. Of course the standard "Not operating normally or properly" tended to be mentioned first, along with "deviations from the norms" and somewhat dated mentions of co-dependent behavior which can nonetheless apply. There were plenty of definitions as to how dysfunction might appear or manifest, but not a potential "why" in sight! Interestingly enough, the definition of dysfunctional bureaucracy was not among these, although group systems were mentioned and that's certainly close enough.

So now I consider myself fortunate indeed for the example of the mobile, the first time I was introduced to this expression. Somehow, it's not hard to imagine Adam Smith smiling in agreement as to the motion itself. In terms of one's body, freedom of spontaneous movement is certainly a definition of health. So it is that the marketplace can be equivalent, at least when both public and private interests don't  reach out to stop the moving parts of the mobile. Smith certainly understood the civilizing and positive effects of spontaneous and ongoing activity, which he was able to observe around him and also in his travels. Just the image of internal flexibilities in one's mind can be powerful protection against the demoralizing effects of individuals and systems which try to lock us into  highly specific roles. How, then, did this powerful aspect of dysfunctional relationships become lost in translation?

Years ago, a writer told me of her day job in a government office, "It feels just like high school, with the same kinds of relationships, as if one was frozen in time". While this was a strong individual who had the tenacity to rise above the fray, the job nonetheless took its toll on her.  Her creativity and spontaneity was to be reserved for the long awaited evening hours, when she could become the person she wanted to be. How did so many of the same individuals who value these traits make the mistake, over time, of removing them from their own workplaces? Likewise, how do so many who clearly value free markets nonetheless take actions which routinely make those markets less free?

Whenever the mobile gets stopped, one's aspirations can be frozen with it, even if only for a limited time frame. Besides the personal aspects of dysfunction already described, markets become rigid, hoarding becomes evident as money gets stashed away into hiding places, or a house may become so full of things that one can scarcely even move around to use the space as it was originally intended. Every time someone gains the ability to touch the mobile in order to secure a long term "regular" gain, the colorful floating pieces become immobilized in their turn and slowly stop. In conversation, one mistakenly gets the idea that savings as "freezing" liquidity in place is a rational safety measure in uncertain economic times, but locking the money away as in Hume's chest is only more uncertainty, not less. All too often when liquidity is lost, it does not come back with the same strength and vitality which people imagine it can. Velocity is like the circulation in one's bloodstream, in that it needs to maintain at least a relative degree of constancy.

This is also why a nominal targeting rule could go far in the present, to regain the confidence of a public which believes recent economic gains could just as easily be lost. When markets hear of Bernanke "tapering off" recent QE, it's as though we are being told the way back to "health" is to put one's body into a suboptimal state! The frame of reference has itself become the problem, as no one knows whether the mobile will be stopped or allowed to keep moving. NGDPLT has the capacity to provide confidence that liquidity would be able to freely circulate in ways no longer possible with interest rate targeting, which only jerks circulation first one way, and then the other. Let's keep the moving parts free.