Guanxi, social capital, relationships, and health, wealth

INTRODUCTION

If we don't understand the nature of life, we can't possibly reason correctly about the "health" property of it, let alone reason about finding cost-effective interventions to improve or sustain it.

The nature of life is not obvious. I believe we have it all wrong, and as a direct consequence of this we have flawed personal behaviors, corporate behaviors, and a flawed national policy and system of "health care." Until this error is fixed, our efforts to improve "health" will simply fail in baffling ways.

Where did we go wrong?

THE OLD MODEL OF LIFE

Biology 101 teaches us, and we absorb deeply, this model:

1. LIMIT: All life is made of one or more biological cells.
2. LIMIT: Cells are blobs of protoplasm surrounded by distinct walls that clearly separate the inside from the outside. Only cells that touch each other in a more-or-less fixed shape can form "higher" life forms.
3. LIMIT: Although humans and "higher" organisms are both made of cells and have an independent life of their own, even larger colonies or collections of higher life forms cannot and do not form even "higher" life forms with a life of its own.
4. LIMIT: Life can only arise from other life and be "passed on".
   
5. LIMIT: The algebra of living things only includes division -- one living thing can divide to form two living things, but two or more living things don't re-assemble into one living thing. (A notable exception is sperm and egg, which are each separately alive and yet reassemble into a single life form.)
   
6. LIMIT: all life forms die.
   

Although every one of these rules or limits or statements has "exceptions", the model is treated as if it is "essentially correct" and not questioned very much. I will challenge it much more strongly right now, stepping on the toes of tradition and religious faith in the process.

I will propose a much more general model of life that reduces to the above model in the the special case of looking at biological life on the surface of the earth today.


MY NEW MODEL OF LIFE

1. All life is based on processes that have at least one closed feedback loop which is self-aware and self-protective. There is not limit to the special case of biology. A computer network, a family, a corporation, a culture, a nation all are "life-forms" with such loops. One very important class of living entity is called a "relationship" between people. Another class of living entity is the relationship between cells in "an organ" or "a body system", such as the heart or the circulatory system or the digestive system. These are independently alive.
2. A living entity has fuzzy edges which extend outwards, possibly across great distances with gaps in between, to anything else that forms part of its closed regulatory feedback loops.
3. Essentially all living entities are in the middle of a hierarchy of life, encompassing smaller life-forms below, and comprising parts of higher life-forms above, simultaneously. Each "level" has a "life" (closed feedback regulatory loop) of its own, and there are also some loops (lives) which span multiple levels.
4. Life can be created on-the-fly, systematically, on purpose. It is not that hard to create new life. We do it all the time. Various aspects of life can also be extinguished on the fly. It is not that hard to damage or kill life forms. A Life-form becomes "dead" when its primary closed loop no longer functions.
5. Any number of living things can combine, and often are already weekly combined, into larger life-forms with separate independent lives of their own.
6. There is no reason a life form has to die.

So what? WHAT DOES THAT CHANGE?

First, if we recognize that people, corporations, and nations are all linked together into a huge multi-level life form, then we realize that it is not possible to have one part of this "healthy" while another part of it is "unhealthy." We are, basically, all chained to each other and our fates our linked.

Corporations are life-forms, as are nations, but they are not "separate" entities from "people."

It is true, for example that there is a "personal economy" and a "corporate economy" that have separate lives and interests in the very short run, but it is also true but unrecognized that there is a longer-time-span linkage between the two so that destruction of the personal economy in an effort to improve the corporate economy is simply self-defeating and self-destructive.

This means that it is nonsensical for "Public Health" to see corporations as "an enemy". Any solution that deals with personal or family health will collapse if the local economy collapses. Jobs are as important as medicine for personal sustainable health.

Similarly, it makes no sense for corporations to try to build a vibrant economy on the backs of and at the expense of people and the environment -- because, ultimately, they ARE people and if the people or environment are destroyed, the corporate entities and economies will die off as well. It won't work for corporations to try to become computer-based and get rid of all people, for reasons I'll get to later.

Similarly, people do not have "clean edges" where there is "my" health and "your" health. Every day scientists find deeper ways in which the health of "your neighbors" and "your friends" and "your friends' friends" contribute to and often even determine "your" health and "your" behavior. A cell with damaged DNA can go on functioning if it is surrounded by healthy cells that it interacts with strongly. The same is true for people.

"Our" health is not somehow contained within the boundaries of our skin. Things can go wrong with our health that are outside that boundary, and things can go right with our health that are outside that boundary. This is a cruicial fact!

It has been shown that, for an 60 year old American, making a new friend has a stronger impact on their survival rate and than dealing with smoking, drinking, exercise, and nutrition. This should not come as a surprise, with the new model of biology and life.


WHAT ARE THE IMPLICATIONS FOR NATIONAL HEALTH CARE POLICY?


I think it is evident that a set of interventions that improved interpersonal relationships ( life forms) would have more of a beneficial effect on our lives, morale, and "physical health" than most other interventions we can imagine (such as reduced drug costs or new insurance mechanisms.)

In other words, humans are part of a meta-biologicial ecosystem where the health of the relationship-entities sea that we swim in determines, effectively, the health of the protoplasm units we wear (our bodies.)

Similarly, in the business world, the sea of relationship-entities ("guanxi" or "social capital") is as important, or more important, than the individual roles and positions people have in determining the "health" of corporations and the regional and national economy.

Even on the departmental or work-team level, the relationship-sea, the ecology of life forms that occur "between" people is as important, or more important, than individual "skills and experience" in determining successful perception of direction and accomplishment of objectives.


CONCLUSIONS / RECOMMENDATIONS

Any strategy for personal health, corporate success, or a thriving national economy is doomed to failure unless it attends to the needs of the inter-entity life-form community as well.

"Relationships" are not just something that people "are" or "do" -- they are independent living entities that must be nurtured and which have their own "health care" needs and interests.

This is a much stronger mental model that can direct the attention and focus of policy in ways that will be much more successful at building a sustainable world than the old model.

Wade

Even more on "What's the point of Religion"

(above - picture of the road home, from this site. )

(third part of a series of posts) - I'm trying to reduce 8000 words to 250 here and still get to my answer to the New Scientist's question of "What's the point of Religion?" Maybe the shortest answer is simply in terms of bandwidth and signal theory. There are concepts that are larger than any individual human brain and don't fit in linear symbol string text, so what does the evolving planet use (a) to perceive those and (b) to store and persist those?

Again, I'm trying to explain a model for religion with terms that scientists would recognize.

So far I've mentioned concepts that Science has inherited without adequate scrutiny that need to be re-examined. One of these is the idea that humans are magically special and different from other natural phenomena, so that "social science" is somehow different from "the natural sciences".

Another idea left over from history is the idea that mankind is God's greatest creation, beyond which there has been and never will be any life in this universe that is greater. The term "God" has been removed from that thought by Science, but the rest persists -- in direct violation of the Cosmological Principle that asserts that here and now isn't special, and which, like Occhams razor, is one way to generate hypothesized models to test first.

So, let's break that constraint, which has no basis in either theory or fact. Let's start by assuming that Evolution is occurring on many levels simultaneously, whether that's easy for humans to grasp or to model or not. Further, let's assume that some of what's evolving is superior to human beings -- that humans are not evolution's endpoint, by a long, long way. We are not the top, and not the end-point. That's the Cosmological Principle. We are not at the middle of the universe - same principle.

OK, but then follow that logic, oh Scientists, and take it where it goes.

I'll assert without proof that there are important things that individual human brains are too small to grasp, period. The burden of proof is on the contrary assumption that the world is so simple that bright individual humans, in less than 100 years time, can even learn the terminology, let alone understand the concepts.

And, similarly, I'll assert that there are things that take 500 years of continuous observation to detect that, again, no individual human is going to ever "see".

If these were radio signals we wanted to pick up, with very low wavelengths and long time-constants (compared to human biological clocks, but not to the time scale of the Earth), we would go, OK, and build a receiver/detector that was very large and would remain in place for 500 years. No big deal, if our society was one that undertook such projects.

Generally, society is more short-term focused, as are individuals, so Evolution has instead created meta-beings, persisting structures that last hundreds or thousands of years, to do such sensing and observing and remembering and learning and storing of that kind of information that humans can not and will never personally grasp.

That's the kind of thing that "organized religion" may be good for. We have very few very-long-term structures on Earth, composed of humans, that could serve to pick up the long-wavelength information about this universe we might need to know. Nations are one other contender, but they are too fluid and come and go too quickly, and are focused on short-term issues. Large Global Corporations are perhaps a great long-term solution going forward, but we don't have globe-spanning corporations that go backwards a thousand years -- except these "organized religions".

It is a frustration of many that religion "changes so slowly" -- but, from a pure signal theory point of view, it takes precisely something that only changes slowly to detect and pick up the long-wavelength signals.

Are such signals there? Following Drake's Other Law, yes, surely they are.
Will we discover new, previously unsuspected phenomena if we look at those wavelengths over time? Again, by Drakes Other Law, yes, surely we will. (These "laws", like Occham's Razor, aren't proven, just helpful guidelines for where to dig first.)

Are there other similar phenomena we can use to do a sanity check that our thinking here is not totally off-base? Yes, read any book on large-scale phenomena and how large scale things are not simply larger versions of small-scale things. One example I recall was the amazement people who didn't know Drake's Law had when they built the first Supertankers and one day one of them, on a perfectly calm day with a flat sea, started moving and ripped apart its dock.

This is the first time people realized that the ocean waves "came that size". Waves with wavelengths of half a mile were treated by small ships as just "swells" or not even noticed at all. It took a ship that long to be rocked by a wave that long. In hindsight, we should have fully expected it, by the Cosmological Principle. There is no reason signals and waves around us should abruptly cut-off at the scale of human beings and only exist to one side of that point.

Throughout history, organized religions were the storehouse of "wisdom" - which was largely definable as simply long-wavelength knowledge -- something that it took 100 years to pick up and finally see for sure was there, because it sure wasn't visible or obvious locally to individuals. Then this long-term "wisdom" stuff had to be distilled into local operating rules, so that it was effectively possible for dumb, short-range humans to benefit from smart, long-range understanding. Organized, large-scale, thousands of humans over hundreds of years "religion" served, and still does serve, as that signal detector and transformer for us.

Well, maybe not for "us". Maybe, for Earth. Individual humans weren't very interested in having their short-term impulses controlled by long-term social wisdom a thousand years ago, and still aren't interested in that, not seeing the point, and not grasping how that works.

Today, our society rejects anything over 30 years old as being "irrelevant." Hmmm. We seem to be regressing, or asserting, implicitly, that there are no long-wavelength lessons we should be "learning from history". That is an unsupportable, and invalid Scientific hypothesis - that everything that matters to us is "news".

Surely yes news matters. So does "olds". All wavelengths matter, until proven otherwise.

Right now Earth is busily evolving social structures the size of Microsoft and Haliburton and GE and other globe-spanning corporations. We weren't asked permission for those, and those may be less "human creations" and more "natural evolution's creations." They are way larger than individuals, act like legal "persons", have civil and constitutional "rights", take actions, absorb energy, and are made up of DNA in complex arrangements and hierarchical structures. By all our textbook definitions, corporations are "alive."

The only reason we don't like to think of them as "alive" is the threat to our myth that humans are God's///blind-evolution's greatest creation. Well, not any more, apparently, by Science's own rules and laws and logic.

And, in point of fact, many humans have noted that, in the USA at least, an unspoken coup has taken place and Congress has a new mandate now, to make a nation "of corporations, by corporations, for corporations". The only "economy" that matters now and is reported in the press and Wall Street JOurnal is the corporate economy, than separated from human-level economy a few decades ago, and now are at odds. Good news for one is generally viewed as bad news for the other, although there is some "leakage" between the two.

But, as humans, we've already "lost" the planet, before we even knew there was a fight for control of it going on. A new species has arisen, Corporations, and it has taken over, and we, being fragmented and tiny-thinkers, either didn't see it, or can't see it if we try.

Still, Corporations should treasure Organized Long-Term Old Religions, because there is no other repository of long-term wisdom they can turn to for advice about what LIFE is like at that SCALE of organized activity. Or, like most teenagers, corporations can simply "Not see" what those old fogies around them are so bent out of shape about, and go off to rediscover the lessons of life the hard way, and wrap the family car around a tree as they find out that "oh, ice is slippery!"

Meanwhile, Scientists, you can go back to sleep, because this is happening without your assistance or brilliant assistance, and is already beyond your ability to model simplified versions of, let alone grasp. LIFE will evolve despite you.

It's magnificent to behold unfolding. Probably the same thing is happening on ten trillion other planets simultaneously, evolving and unfolding into a LIFE form shape so far beyond our ability to grasp we don't even have words to describe it.

We're still back here arguing about whether it is "genes" or "species" evolve, and not looking out the window or reading the paper where the answer is apparent. Right now, "corporations" are evolving and spreading and taking over the Earth's evolving re-structuring process.

It's a little uncomfortable where corporate life forms run unexpectedly into existing religious life-forms, as in the Mideast. Some clashes will occur, but there is no need for "survival of the fittest" -- because at the corporate level, "merger into a larger ONE" is also an option that battling tigers never had.

Already, new pathways to evolution are open, like that. The past is a poor guide to the future, in that regard. Darwin didn't even speculate on what shape evolution would take once corporation sized living entities had the ability to clone and merge and have tele-presence.

The good news, for religion, is that as corporations get to live longer, they will "grow up", as do humans, and begin to realize that some of that stuff their parents was spouting actually matters and applies to them: Things, dammit, have consequences. Who knew? Why didn't someone tell me!!??

So, global warming and the collapsing biosphere should be a wake-up call. Corporations can see, or could see, on scales humans never will, so they should start to grasp this, maybe faster than people can.

Well, if they can utilize their internal resources. If a corporation behaves like a huge exoskeleton for a few dudes at the top, it will be stuck and limited by human cognition. If it can accept "Theory Y" and open itself up to internal flow, it can get way past that binding constraint and evolve to something much smarter than the smartest human.

We better see if we can't catalyze that process. We can't "beat" corporations anymore, they already are here to stay. They don't have intrinsic "morality" at that scale, yet -- ie, they are too new to have absorbed long-term (> 1000 year) lessons about what works and what doesn't.

We need as scientists and religious folks to accelerate that learning curve for corporate-scale entities somehow, because we're in the back seat of the family car the kids are about to wrap around some tree.

If someone has a great idea how to do that, let me know. I just trace all the wiring back and point to where the problem is.

Still, it's interesting. If you dig into it, the Toyota Production System and "lean" approach actually does spend a great deal of time removing the internal barriers inside a corporate structure to the flow of information, so that the "aperture synthesis" can take effect, making the whole organization a learning machine with a capacity far greater than "management".

That model seems to be extremely successful. So, maybe there's hope.



( a self-assembling tower crane from howstuffworks.com )

My public health buddies sometimes seem to want to disown me for being willing to hop into bed with corporations, instead of viewing them as the scourge of the earth and something to be fought off and destroyed in a noble losing battle.

I flip it around and say our job in public health (this weblog) is to figure out how to help corporate life forms SUCCEED beyond their wildest dreams, and learn to SEE better -- because they'll SEE the things we're trying to tell them on their own then. And that seems to be the only way to reach them, is through simulation models or real-life experiences that let them find this out for themselves.

I prefer simulators for learning about consequences and limits and to avoid plane crashes over practicing extreme maneuvers with a real plane. We need better long-term, long-wavelength LIFE simulators for corporations to learn from -- multiplayer games on a corporate level that, like the WHOPPER in the movie "War Games", will finally realize -- hmm, curious game, the only way to win "GLOBAL WAR" is not to play the game.

Corporations aren't Darwinian lower life forms that can only "win" or "lose" -- they can actually "merge". That's our way out of this mess. It's not a zero-sum game anymore.

And, corporations do not have to be "the BORG", life-sucking stultifying wretched places to suffer and "work". In fact, a corporation that squeezes individuality out of people is self-defeating, as it reduces the complexity of its own internal ecosystem, and makes itself dumb along some new axis, some new base you could have been covering for it.

So, "bright" corporations exult in "unity in diversity". It's a great model. It's the only good working model. It's not "Am I me OR am I a corporation employee?" In the optimal solution, you're BOTH simultaneously but not in the degenerate solution, in the multiplicative solution.
Each of those identities makes the OTHER identity richer and more satisfying.

That kind of corporation, one can imagine, will have way more success at "innovation" and have way higher morale than one without that feature.

The problem corporate CEO's struggle with is how to maintain "control" in an open-system and prevent it from simply descending into chaos once they stop "running things with a firm hand" from above. Like "angular momentum", the "forces" that emerge to take "control" in an open system are invisible and not at all intuitive to the human animal.

We've seen examples and know that it can work and does work, though. The trick is how to convert a dumb, dull, life-sucking corporate exo-body into a fit, thriving, exciting life-energy supplying exo-body. That's a win-win for the economy, for the workers, for the stockholders, and for everyone except a few top "officers" of the company who become less important in the greater scheme of things and can be expected to fight back against losing or not getting their $250,000,000 perks for their "leadership".

Again, here, the concept of "emergent leadership" needs to be fleshed out, so that even the employees know what it is they are asking for. It's not a question of changing WHO gets to sit in the "top seat" and "run the company." -- in open control, no ONE person runs the company. EVERYONE collectively, in a single unified emergent entity, runs the company.

That is NOT the same as everyone having a "vote" in corporate decisions. The difference is subtle but crucial. The difference is a herd of people versus a TEAM. Again, this is an area humans have little intuition on, and have a hard time seeing, except perhaps when they see a sports team or band "get it together" for a few moments and the experience is astoundingly rewarding -- we resonate to that frequency. We are hard-wired to LOVE that frequency and that experience. Employees who have ever been in a work situation where it "clicks" into a true TEAM never want to work anywhere else again.

But, most CEO's, even if they wanted to, don't know how to navigate from "HERE" to "THERE", so it does little good for stockholders to demand that they do so. The mental models we were taught in school don't even include the "THERE" I'm talking about.

So, let me whirl it by one more time on this way too long post. It's not the employees who run the company in this model, and it's not the CEO, and it's not labor, and it's not management, and it's not some sort of vote sharing between them. NO ONE ON AN INDIVIDUAL LEVEL is in charge. And EVERYONE ON AN INDIVIDUAL LEVEL is not in charge (chaos or Communism).
Nothing on an individual level is in charge. The "in charge" part is no longer located ANYWHERE on the "individual" level plane. The "in charge" part has moved up the hierarchy of being to the EMERGENT plane above the "individual level" that we crudely and vaguely try to tag with the word "team" or "synergy" or "emergent" without really grasping well.

The CORPORATION becomes a living being in its own right, above and beyond the living-ness of the individuals within it, and the CORPORATE-level BEING runs the company. That's the model. If you can't grab hold of and work with "emergence", this model makes no sense at all and keeps mis-resolving itself into chaos or communism or the Borg.

This century, for the first time in the history of the Earth, we finally have the computer power we need to model "emergence". This is just crucial. This is "where it is at". This is our escape route from the mess we've made of this planet and the forces we've already set into motion that are coming back to haunt us.

This isn't "kum bay yah" touchy feely stuff. You watch a great sports team (like Michigan CAN too be, someday!) and it's no "accident" when they win. They "have it together."

That's what we need to aspire to, as families, communities, corporations, nations, and the planet - to "have our act together", to get to that overarching UNITY that embraces and loves DIVERSITY instead of suffocating it, because it spins out into a higher dimension where that unity becomes possible.

We know this can work. Our human bodies are living proof that ten trillion cells can form one "body" and each have a life better than what they had before.

99.9 percent of us WIN in that strategy, and the few people at the top might think they've lost millions of dollars (or billions, or trillions), but money ain't much good if the planet implodes, guys. You can't spend it anywhere if everyone else is dead.

The total value of stored wealth goes to ZERO if everyone else dies, regardless what number of dollars or gold bars it is made up of. Wealth is, at its core, access to future social resources and if there isn't a future society, that adds up to zero.

The way to maximize wealth from here, or rich people, is to maximize the future society that you now own a piece of. Think long-term. You can't even spend a trillion dollars short term anyway. "Emergent unity above diversity" is the only key that's been shown to work here.

We don't NEED TO take each other's stuff, because the pie CAN stop shrinking and start growing again, through emergent Life.

Mathematically, this is a relationship thing. The "inner product" of two vectors a and b is written and computed as magnitude of a times magnitude of B times the "cosine" of the angle between them (their relationship to each other.).

For "real" angles, the cosine function varies between zero and one, so the best you can ever end up with that product equaling is when the two are perfectly aligned, and you get a value of a times b.

For other angles, mistakenly called "imaginary" and related to that strange thing the square root of minus one, cosine is not bounded, and can grow without limit. Any two things, with the right relationship, if you move into that dimension, can have a product larger than any number you'd like it to be. And a company formed of people oriented like that can have a value larger than any number you'd like it to be. It's all about getting relationships off the "real plane" and to having a component in this other dimension, which is very real as well, but a little harder to point to from here, except by example. It's emergent. It's synergism.

It's simply a "complex exponential", as is any simple growth curve. That's pretty solid ground. It's a pure feedback equation where growth is proportional to size already, with the "complex" additional part adding the zing. That's what we need more of. More zing. The curve is a pretty helix-shape, which is kind of interesting - and, like a "screw", by twisting it THIS way, it moves THAT way at right angles to the way you are twisting it. That's important, because we don't have other tools to make the work piece move in that other dimension.

And, you can crank it out like you can a bridge, through solid engineering, once you get the right math understood correctly. We finally have the computer power to solve those equations. There is hope.

Wade

math reference links:

The beautiful exponential spiral - see the bottom left graph in the section


4-D projections halfway down the page and also pictures of the complex "sine" curve showing that it does head off to infinity and is no longer trapped between zero and one.




complex exponential dynamics (fractals)

Complex exponential map (not instantly helpful but animated and pretty).

Complex exponential - Nice interactive live graphics from MIT's open-courseware

Self-assembling tower crane:

http://science.howstuffworks.com/tower-crane4.htm

Does ill-gotten gain produce wealth?

We know our eyes don't show us everything. The world around us is filled with WiFi radio waves, cosmic rays, infrared rays, all sorts of things we cannot see. We only perceive a very narrow part of the spectrum.

So, for the rest, we need to figure out how to tell what's there, and how to tell whether we are right or not. It's easy to make mistakes when you can't see what you're doing.

If "things" are hard to see and get right, "events" are even harder, and "causation" is harder still.

For "causation" we have to not only see two different things correctly, but also see the relationship between them correctly.

Now, we run into a second limit of human sight -- we can see most clearly when things are near us, and less clearly when things are farther away.

In fact, as the same "thing" gets farther away from us, it appears to get "smaller" to our eyes, in many senses. And, worse, the number of things at that distance just keeps on going up.

So, maybe there are 3 things going on right here, close up, highly visible. There may be 10 things going on over the space of a week with our friends or the stock market, somewhat farther away, and less visible. There may be 6 billion people on this planet, 6 billion lives and God knows how many relationships, farther away yet and so invisible we tend to forget about them. All that distant stuff becomes a big blur.

This kind of perception is great when the problems we face tend to be local as well, such as a snake on the ground or some berries that may be good to eat. But some important things are not local, and, as a species, in general, humans are pretty bad at managing those. "Out of sight, out of mind" is a good summary. First, they are far away, and we're dying close up, so they can be put off -- we figure, if we don't survive the short run, the long-run doesn't matter -- which is true.

Second, perversely, we tend to ignore distant events because there are so many of them. Our little brains get quickly overwhelmed, which is locally fatal. We miss the snake, or drive off the road while worrying about next year.

Still, when planning, we need to consider both local and distant events, because, in the long run, many things that seem far off now have a habit of suddenly being upon us. Suddenly, the final exam is here, or the term paper is due, or our mortgage payment is out of our "grace period" and is going to go up by $500/month. Suddenly the kids are grown and gone.

So, we need some basic simple rules to use here and now that will protect us in the long run, because trying to think about the long-run hurts and isn't easy to do and is often wrong anyway.

Many rules like that were distilled into the Book of Proverbs in the Christian Bible Old Testament, any many of those came from Egypt before that. They are worth reading and considering. This is a case where "the olds" may be more interesting than "the news."

As with all wisdom, some days the same words make more sense than other days, so we need to revisit them frequently and ask - "Now, from here, today, can I see something here that can help me?"

Here's one, from the Book of Proverbs, Chapter 10, verse 2, from a website BibleBrowser.com that has 20 other translations, including the Hebrew. This is part of the Judaic, Christian, and Islamic writings as well.

Ill-gotten gains do not profit, But righteousness delivers from death. (Proverbs 10:2)

For now, let's just look at the first part of that: "Ill-gotten gains do not profit."

This verse says something that is pretty important, if it's true -- First it says that there are two kinds of "gain", those that are well-gotten and those that are ill-gotten. By gain I believe this would include financial return, as well as outcomes of political maneuvers, military maneuvers, office politics, treatment of your neighbors, treatment on a larger scale of other countries, etc.

The verse asserts that the benefit of such "gains" depends on how they are obtained. It asserts that, even if the events that got you this "gain" is far away from here and now, it is still connected and still affects the benefit of having such a "gain."

Is that true?

Well, it certainly flies in the face of what we usually assume today. Let's simply look at cash, money. We assume a dollar is a dollar, and there is no difference between a dollar that was obtained by fraud or a dollar that was earned honestly. We assume that the origin of us having this dollar "goes away", and , being far away, no longer matters.

The verse in Proverbs I quoted differs, and says that assumption is wrong. It says that "blood money", money we got through bad actions such as theft or fraud, will turn out not to profit us after all, even though it "looks the same" as good money and is counted the same by our bank or phone company, that accept it as payment.

Besides, the form of this "gain" has been laundered, changed, altered many times, and it has passed through many hands, so even if the original dollar, say, was contaminated and "had the cooties", the electronic figure in our on-line checking account has surely separated us from such contamination, right?

Well, the verse says no, wrong. The verse doesn't say that changing the format of the "gain" makes this effect go away. It says that bad gains will result in bad things happening to you, and isn't worth doing, or worse, is actually a net loss to you.

Hmm. Well, first, things can't stay "connected" over a long distance, can they? Actually, they can. Physics tells us that a pair of particles can be "quantum entangled" so that, even if they are taken to opposite ends of the universe, they are still "connected" and if you change one by measuring it, say, that it instantly changes the other. So, there's at least one instance where distance in space is not a barrier to connection.

Well, still - we don't have to believe something just because some old book says it, do we? No, we don -- but we might consider thinking about believing it if someone had more current, solid, reliable data and evidence that such a principle is true.

Generally, physics doesn't suggest "physical laws" that relate physical things to human actions or intentions. That doesn't mean there can't be such laws, only that this isn't the sort of thing a physicist would ever be able to get a grant to study. This isn't "physics" but is something else, akin to both physics and commerce.

So, reflecting on this question, is there any other evidence that piling up fraudulent profits ends up being a bad idea? Maybe, rephrased, "Does crime pay, or not?"

It is clear that "ill" actions, can yield "gain", often immense "gain": ranging from theft to fraud to pillaging whole countries to making billions as merchants of death ( tobacco, heroin, etc.)

The question on the table, suggested but not proven by this old text, is whether such "gain" behaves differently over time than "gain" resulting from some more honest, socially beneficial wealth-building activity.

Are fortunes made through criminal activity less "stable", or less "valuable" to their possessors than fortunes made through hard honest work? Or not only less valuable, but of zero value, or, worse, of negative value?

Should we envy those those who pull off amazing con-jobs and sell drugs and "get rich"? Obviously, some get very rich. The question is, do they simultaneously get poor in some other way, so that, overall, net, it was a lousy life-choice and a poor business decision?

Given that many people and corporations and even nations are attempting to amass fortunes in this way, by ripping off other people, this is a big question. If nothing else, maybe we want to avoid owning stock in such companies, or not stand too near such people, waiting for lightning to strike or something? Hmm.

Oh, notice by the way that this verse I'm thinking about doesn't say money is bad, or wealth is bad, or profit is bad, or commerce is bad. It implies that profit is good, actually, and is a warning that someone long ago put there, trying to share what they saw as hard-won wisdom, telling us who seek profit that we should stay away from "ill-gotten gain", which , by implication, may look very attractive but turn out not to be in the end.

Reasoning about "impact on your soul" or "Heaven or Hell" is not very popular today, so we'll skip that line of thought. So, it comes down to this question:

Aside from such things that cannot be measured by science or commerce, are there things that can be measured by science or commerce that tell us "ill gotten gains " behave differently than "well-gotten gains?'

What exactly would we look for?

Here I want to bring in a board game called "Go", although the same thing is true for other games such as chess. At one time I was the organizer of the Cornell Go Club, which had several hundred members, about 30 very active, who played this game, and I learned a lot about it. Go was required knowledge of all Samuai soldiers in ancient Japan, and I actually advocated that Cornell's Johnson School of Management, where I was teaching, should include it as part of their MBA training. (That's a Go board from Wikipedia pictured at the top of this post.)

The game is one important way to gain insight into thinking and strategy that we can expect Asians, particularly Japanese and Chinese to use to compete with the US. There aren't very many such ways, so this is important.

One thing I found is that it was essentially always possible to defeat MBA students with a very simple strategy -- keep on trading them visible material short-run gain for longer-term much more valuable "position on the board." So, the MBA's would happily capture army after army, winning battle after battle, until suddenly they realized that they had lost the war. This seemed to be bait that such fish would always take.

The game Go teaches one patience and a long-range strategy. The aim of a good player is to "win by one point". Trying to win by more is overly-adventuresome, and requires taking risks that are not warranted. A balance is required between short-range, short-term tactics and long-range, long-term strategy -- but in the end, assuming one survives the middle, it is only the long-term value of each move, seen in hindsight from there, that matters.

So that may be an example where "foolishly-gotten short-range gain that you had to trade position for doesn't profit you in the end."

This is still not yet "ill-gotten gain", the topic of this post, but is getting closer, and the reflection on the proverb is uncovering some useful wisdom, whether the proverb is "right" or not.

So, let's remove that component and try to be more explicit and narrow in the hypothesis we're trying to test. Rephrased, we have two quesitons:

• Is there something hidden set into motion by socially-destructive gain that comes back to haunt the person or company that carried out that destructive action?
• If so, is it something that would also haunt other people downstream who got paid this money for goods or services or as a stock dividend?

There's no point in looking at the second part of that if the first isn't true, so let's focus on the first part. It seems safe to assume that such an effect was considered "hidden" by the writer of the proverb, because if it was obvious, they wouldn't need to go out of their way to write it down for their children to learn, nor preserve the thought over 3000 years.

Well, we know human vision is flimsy and has trouble seeing hidden connections between things, so we can't rule this out just because it is hidden and not obvious. Doesn't prove it, just doesn't rule it out.

And questions of "mechanisms" in my book can come later. First, blind to mechanisms, we can look and see if there is some effect. Then we can spend the energy to worry about mechanisms or pathways, and before then it's not justified. This seems scientifically valid to me. Besides, "That can't be true because I can't think of how it could happen!" has been used against every breakthrough in science, and doesn't prove anything.

First, we need careful, empirical, observational field-work to simply go see what is out there that needs explaining. In Toyota's "Lean" lexicon, this is Genchi Genbutsu -- actually going down and seeing for oneself instead of assuming you can see well from the executive suite or analyst's windowless cubicle.

I guess this comes down to the core question of theology and of this post:

Do your socially-destructive actions have bad consequences for you, even if you pull off a "clean getaway" and no one sees what you did?

People today seem think that, since the "God did it" mechanism is "dead" that all the social phenomena that mechanism explained can also be thrown away. "Allie Allie in-free!" as the child's game goes.

Two notes - first, I'm looking, as always, at "scale-invariant" rules , so the "you" in that question could be a person, or any larger entity that has "intent" such as a corporation or nation. Maybe this is relevant for cells and atoms, but that's a little obscure from here. (And I'm assuming intent matters, not just inadvertent (oopsie!) accidental, incidental, or "collateral damage", although that's not proven either.)

Do destructive actions have hidden bad consequences that make the visible benefits of them irrelevant or misleading?

OK, how would we test that hypothesis? Well, even though we have to look for cases that disprove it, we can start by asking if there's any case that comes to mind that agrees with it -- or else we should abandon this effort right here. The writer had something in mind, probably a lot of somethings distilled into this advice, so we should be able to think of something.

(to be continued...)

More on foreclosures - from the Baltimore Sun

The Baltimore Sun had a top front page story this morning
AT-RISK LOANS RISING IN STATE (in caps in the original)
by Jamie Smith Hopkins - 6/14/07

Here's some highlights

Geographic and socioeconomic distribution:

Rates in the suburbs are rising faster than in Baltimore, with defaults of pricey suburban homes, condo-conversion projects and even an undeveloped section of a new-home community in Harford County - which went back to the lenders at an auction this week.... loan problems are particularly focused in a handful of states, ones with persistent job losses - Ohio, Indiana and Michigan - and ones that had a lot of real estate speculation, including California and Florida.

The number of homes in the foreclosure process in Ohio, Indiana and Michigan is so high that together the three states account for about 20 percent of all U.S. foreclosures. Ohio tops the country, its share of homes in the foreclosure process more than six times Maryland's. [ note - this is big-3 auto industry downsizing effect]

Trend:

I think there is a clear indication that the number of foreclosures is only going to increase," said Phillip R. Robinson, executive director of Civil Justice Inc., a Baltimore legal-help group. "The concern that I have as a public-interest advocate is, what do we do to help people in that pipeline save their home ... and how do we prevent people from getting into inappropriate loans?" [ emphasis added]

Root cause and solutions:

Now, I find it interesting that the "solutions" to this problem all seem to involve some kind of governmental legal or policy action.

One "solution" in Maryland and elsewhere is to use taxpayer money to bail out those in trouble and, well, reward those who got this whole thing rolling in the first place which, one might think, would only reinforce that behavior in the future. ("unintended consequence"?)

The state said this week it has commitments for $100 million to refinance Maryland homeowners from such ARMs into fixed-rate mortgages so borrowers aren't overwhelmed. "We're going to stand up ... to protect that building block of wealth for the middle class that is homeownership," Gov. Martin O'Malley said as he announced the initiative.

Another "solution" involves "going after" those people who oversold these loans in the first place, people who say in self defense "why blame us?" Congressmen are threatening to change which agency "regulates" such loans if much stronger rules are not put in place to "bring this under control." [ Hmm... sounds like a regulatory feedback process to me...]

What is, to me, conspicuously absent from those solutions is raising the effective economic IQ of the people who fell for this very bad idea in the first place.

Trying to "regulate" this once it's at full throttle is like trying to control the flow of smoke with huge billboards, instead of putting out the fire.



We keep trying to come up with "foolproof" ways to, well, make life safe for fools. It's very expensive, and it doesn't work very well, if at all. It also results in being a real pain for those who were responsible in the first place, who end up bearing the costs for those who were irresponsible.

But the irresponsible claim immunity on account of stupidity. "The car was going so fast that there was nothing I could do to stop on the ice! It's not my fault!"

Right. And media feed this concept. I bounce off the walls every time I see headlines like "ice causes pileup on freeway" or "fog causes 27 car crash - 5 dead."

In aviation, there is no such thing as a crash caused by "bad weather." There is "a decision to continue operations into weather beyond the skill and experience of the pilot." This gets back to people. To us.

In my mind, that's what needs to be fixed. We need to overcome collective stupidity and greed, by changing the story, and working together, and trying to have a group IQ that is at least as large as the largest individual IQ among us, if not larger.

That used to be one of the points of civilization, literature, history, science, and government.
We've abandoned that in favor of downstream damage-control efforts, the same way our health care system focuses money on heroic repair instead of prevention.

Curious. Why do we do that?

------- post script

I wanted to clarify one point. I'm not saying that people as individuals are stupid, but that the way we're interacting and interconnected (or not) is what's stupid and what's broken.

This is why understanding that basic concept about "systems" is so critical, or we can't even begin to see "where" this is broken. The problem isn't with what's between our ears, because humans are pretty smart animals. The problem is at a different "level".

There are "levels" and each one has properties that are mostly independent in the short run from other levels. I'm talking about a "systems" problem in that the way otherwise-smart people INTERACT and INTERCONNECT is what's broken here.

And therefore, that's what needs to be "fixed."

This is not a problem that just affects "dumb" people, or that has anything to do with native intelligence. This happens to doctors, scientists, airline pilots, CEO's. There's even a book called "Why do smart people do dumb things?"or some similar title. Individuals can make just a little indent to try to keep order around themselves, and this can be totally undone by a larger tilt to the playing field on a neighborhood or cultural level.

In the short run, "gangs" or groups of teenagers go off and do things that are incredibly stupid that are almost incomprehensible and that no single one of them would have done if left to himself. There's a "group effect." It can be for the good, or for the bad - it's neutral.




(Picture from my post on The Toyota Way viewed as feedback control).

For high-reliabilty, critical operations, like an Intensive Care Unit, or an aircraft cockpit,
or a nuclear reactor control room, literature shows that you can't get the results you need unless both levels are engaged and working well - the individual level and the group / team level. Individuals aren't strong enough to manage alone, regardless how bright they are.

Bryan Sextan presented data that 74% of commercial airline accidents happened on the very first day a new team of people was formed out of people that used to be on other teams. The pilots are still 20,000 hour professionals, but the "TEAM" has not yet gelled, and that leave a gap between levels that the accident can leak through.

(See my clever cartoons on accidents leaking through "swiss cheese" that's not well interconnected here in "The road to Error" ).

Loose people are like "dust in the wind" and can be blown anywhere. Interconnected people are like mountains and can defy the wind.

In that metaphor, I'm less interested in "reimbursing the dust" than I am in understanding why the mountain has turned to dust, and whether that is reversible, and if so, how and when can we start?