I read The Unaccountability Machine by Dan Davies on the train yesterday and wow. Attempted summary: society is in crisis because our current systems of governance and feedback are unable to hear the signal that is the vast majority of people screaming, "My life is intolerable." This signal gets routed into any channel available: Brexit referendum, far-right parties, protests against masks or wind turbines or housing - anything to signal rebellion
The author structures this using the theory of cybernetics, approximately that there are a series of systems that regulate each other at higher and higher levels, using feedback that reduces complex information into simpler signals. When too much signal is lost or the regulating system is too simple to manage a more complex system, the system goes awry. Capitalism and markets are effective simplifiers in that everything has a price, a fungible easily compared signal. This has many downsides
He argues quite convincingly that one of the types of systems that regulate business, System 3, or "what to do here-and-now" is running amok with little input from System 4, "what to do in the future," which is pretty hard to argue with. The current financial system, shaped by private equity and leveraged buyouts, forces most companies to behave as if they must make a huge debt payment this month or else face extinction. Which matches exactly what we see: Google devouring search for AI, etc.
He also argues for not attempting to understand the inner workings of systems but to observe their behavior (a key element of cybernetics) and suggesting we may have to give up on explaining why things happen or holding individual people accountable for things they neither control nor understand. "Accountability sinks" are a useful concept: the customer service agent who can do nothing to help yet must receive the signal from the customer that something is wrong
Much of this is represented in the catch phrase of cybernetics:
"The Purpose of the System is What It Does"
If you try to look inside the system, you will see a lot of people who think their job is about producing petroleum products. On the outside, you will see an entire industry hell-bent on making the earth unlivable. This is the result of the overall economic system that focuses on this quarter's share price to the exclusion of nearly all else.
Another interesting point is that the system outsources the bad stuff to individual humans because they have no way to communicate back to the system that things are bad. This brings me back to the discussion of funding open source maintenance at #OW2con. Software engineers in general are burned out because we have to do jobs that require maintenance work but are not allowed to do maintenance work on company time because of the short-sighted quarter-at-a-time planning horizon of business
But the maintenance work must be done or we will lose our jobs, one way or another. So the software engineers with internal motivation and the ability to work unpaid end up doing the maintenance work - in addition to a full time job. The system has succeeded in blocking the signal that would prevent the focus on generating short-term profits by forcing the negatives onto individual humans. This, but for the entirety of humanity - and that's the polycrisis
Hopefully this analysis makes it really clear why "why don't people just individually suddenly decide to do the 'right thing'" is never never the answer, in open source funding or supporting the arts or fighting climate change...
One specific recommendation from The Unaccountability Machine is very simple: if a company does a leveraged buyout of another company (buys the company with a little of their own money and puts a lot of debt on the company to pay the rest) then the buyer should have to guarantee the purchased company's debts - no more limited liability for you. This is one element of Elizabeth Warren's plan to rein in private equity - and the only one Davies thinks is necessary for that
A general problem is wealth concentration, and there are many solutions to that, starting from the nicest one (a global wealth tax) to runaway inflation to massive destruction of capital to guillotines and assassinations and wars. It's been nice to see that a global wealth tax has recently become thinkable in many circles. But ultimately no one really knows what will emerge from the polycrisis
Wealth concentration is an inherent property of a capitalistic system.
The wealthier participant in a transaction has an inherent advantage in risk-tolerance and greater ability to hold out for a better deal. This leads to a positive feedback loop of wealth accumulation and concentration.
To make capitalism sustainable requires coupling it with sufficient downward wealth redistribution. Progressive taxation and UBI are the most obvious approaches.
@weaselx86@Npars01 I also managed to read Piketty, whose point can be summarized as "whenever the rate of return on capital is higher than the growth rate of the entire economy, wealth will accumulate to the owners of capital." He then goes on to show that a global wealth tax is the most effective way to achieve downward redistribution