For many years, the world’s policy-makers have deployed economics unable to safeguard us from natural (coronavirus) and manmade (financial arbitrage) debacles, leading Federal Reserve Bank Chief Paul Volcker and pension fund Chief Investment Officers to declare the practitioners of economics “useless.”
False positives
I agree with that sentiment for many reasons. No practice attempting to extrapolate hindsight can yield foresight to break the norm. And worse, economics is a practice systemically confounding consequence and cause, leading to grave depravity of reason. But the most disturbing impact of the false positives of economics is the denial of controversy, with a potent and truly impactful false negative.
The inability to discern between a false positive and a false negative in policy is analogous to diagnosing a patient with hypertension when the causal disease of cancer remains undiagnosed. Giving the patient pills to reduce blood pressure is the false-positive, ignoring the false-negative, long-overdue treatment to prevent imminent loss of life.
This, my friends, is the compounding anthropogenic cascade of unnecessary complexity in policy today. Grave multi-level depravity of reason, in the words of Nietzsche, stems from confounding consequence and cause.
Pseudo-Science
Thirty-seven countries, including the United States, are pouring 400 million euros into The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), an international organization employing some 1,500 economists aiming to build better policies for better lives.
In a trend of highly questionable merit and latent comeuppance of economists, the OECD appears to be painfully aware that its best economics practices -over the last sixty years- lack relevance and are in dire need of reinvention.
Nobly purporting to reinvent itself, OECD created a new unit called New Approaches to Economic Challenges (NAEC), headed by William Hynes. He, along with Gabriela Ramos on the progress of this unit, reports directly to Angel Gurria, the secretary-general of OECD.
The new unit’s name cleverly obfuscates that no external circumstances require the OECD to change, but the allegiance to the wrong religion of change should. I emphasize that point to highlight how even the name of the new OECD unit unapologetically confounds consequence with cause.
Lifeline
I spoke with William for nearly two hours in early 2019 to discuss the basic premise of my new operating-system for humanity. I offered then to come out to Paris to examine nature’s principles that must begin to drive human behavior; the offer was cut short by Trump’s budget cuts to OECD—a warning shot to the bow. Shortly after my explanation of systems thinking, perhaps coincidentally, it became a central theme of NAEC.
As I followed the progress and activities of NAEC, the focus of OECD appears to be on saving the practice of economics rather than improving humanity with the best methodology. The latter approach requires a different normalization, the lack thereof evidence of OECD again confounding consequence and cause. They appear to keep calling on the same academic figureheads, the supposed experts, attempting to reinvent the practice of economics with those promulgating it.
The significant problems we face cannot be solved at the same level of thinking we were at when we created them.
Albert Einstein
The burden of proof in economics remains with a practice of making extraordinary claims lacking extraordinary evidence to support those claims.
Morass
This week, I watched a video presentation in which charming William, an Adjunct Professor of International Economics at the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies and a Marie Curie Fellow at the London School of Economics, described three versions of economics on offer. The human consensus of member countries asked to ride yet another wave of remarkable solipsism, the old resold as new, doubling down on yet another nonexistent correlation to nature’s first-principles.
Don’t take refuge in the false security of consensus.
Christopher Hitchens
Resilience, dear William, comes from simplicity, not complexity. The clarity derived from the discovery and allegiance to the highest possible normalization of nature’s truth offers the proven resilience of 4.5 billion years of renewal on Earth. The proposed new system of economics, option three, as covered by William, waddling in even more manmade complexity purported to yield resilience.
The basic laws of the universe are simple.
Albert Einstein
The gist of William’s presentation descending further into the catacombs of greater-fool economics, confounding consequence and cause at every turn, designed to prolong the self-fulfilling prophecy of expert complexity from which membership fees can be derived.
Remodel Or Die
In how a caterpillar turns into a butterfly, the OECD must fundamentally remodel itself to follow a new normalization of nature’s truth. Assuming the organization wants to become the agent of a new norm of change, it must change to abide by how nature’s authoritarian rule dictates how humanity survives the test of time and deals with nature’s irrefutable change, called entropy.
We do need a global independent organization to protect and serve the interests of all members of the human race to support the innate plurality of humanity, crossing political spectrums, borders, and sovereignties. But such an organization will not ignite improvement to write home about with more downstream suboptimizations of a fortuitous past, with the old cunningly repackaged and resold as new.
Instead, human excellence must be gleaned from nature’s excellence, like so:
Humanity must begin to adhere to nature’s gameplay.
Reverse Atrophy, Not Entropy
New manmade manacles, like those of the OECD today, ignoring and subverting nature’s rule, are the ball-and-chain to human excellence and renewal.
The theory determines what can be discovered.
Albert Einstein
Promoting an endless stream of false inferences from consequence to cause, in violation of the asymmetry enforced by nature’s entropy, a membership of OECD today will, instead of yielding best practices, continue to cause well-funded institutionalized mediocrity and, because the theory determines what humanity can discover, a rapidly accelerating anthropogenic cascade.
