Vision – Action – Leadership 2011 Conference
Jul11
on July 11, 2012
at 10:10 am
Below is a video from the 2011 International Conference Vision, Action and Leadership, hosted by Aaron Wissner. The conference used the Delphi method was used to draw upon some commonalities and differences around the interpretation of the current financial crisis from panel members, including Tom Greco, Steve Keen and Nichole Foss. This finishing group interview shares an interesting perspective on the outcomes of this conferencing technique.
Discussion (13) ¬
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/ultimate-krugman-take-down
There’s been lots of vision, but almost no action. The Occupy movement was an attempt to kick start action, but it unfortunately has mostly dissipated due to the fact that its outrage got too caught up in economics and partisan political views on the same.
We absolutely must draw from something deeper. Even deeper than the philosophy of economics and money themselves. We need to wed the power of BOTH human spirituality AND the true economic self interests of individuals. And we need to do this before chaos and stress make some witches kitchen of egotism and nihilism the spirituality of choice like it was last century.
If anyone has a better spiritual canon to offer up than faith as in confidence, Hope, Love and a sense of Grace….by all means communicate it.
Steve’s presentation to this group prior to the panel is worth a look. Probably the least rushed, yet concise presentation on his modeling.
The way the complexity is built by incorporating more agents in the simulation shows the value of models to aid comprehension of multi-variable systems.
on how greece could exit the euro by redominating bank accounts, asset prices and placing restrictions on capital flight. this is a real question for people in the eurozone e.g. i’ve heard in ireland too. sorry to use greek example, substitute for any euro zone country of choice
how would this work on assets in greece owned by people outside greece juristiction ? e.g. if a french person living in france owns bonds or a house in greece, can hte greek govt redominate that asset ? I guess they could if the regulations governing trade of that asset mean the trade has to happen within greek juristiction.. on the ohter hand this is a kind of expropriation (your asset was worth x now it’s worth y) and presumably there are international rules protecting international investors against such things ?
then the second case; if i’m a greek living in greece and I have a bank account in germany. would the greek govt control be able to touch my assets located abroad ? could that govt force me to repatriate the assets I hold in another jurisdiction ? on what legal basis ? if so it would make sense to make such asset acquisitions in secret from current govt oversight so that it’s an effective hedge against future circumstances.
@Warren Raftshol
This debate, just like professional wrestling, is indeed great entertainment, but one should not mistake it for a true contest. For the simple fact is that both Pedro Schwartz and Krugman are on the same team, the creditor-class team, and in both of their ideologies debt is placed on a pedestal and deemed sacrosanct.
To characterize someone like Krugman—-a neoclassicist masquerading in Keynesian drag—-as a “Keynesian” requires quite a leap into fantasyland. (For a great discussion on how characteropaths take benign ideologies and corrupt them for their own disordered purposes there’s the book by the Polish psychologist Andrew M. Lobaczewski, Political Ponerology.) In fact, Krugman does such an outrageous impersonation of a Keynesian that he reminds me of “The Drag Queen of the Century,” Harris Glenn Milstead, aka Divine, who can be seen in action here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZK_4ILe2Iq4
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yM7ZyOXjLLA
On the other side of this entertaining debate of wrong vs. wrong, error vs. error is Pedro Schwartz. I’ve always admired the errudition with which Hannah Arendt took down the pathological ideologies peddled by schools of “thought” like the Austrian School:
@Steve Keen
Two points:
1) US policymakers have promulgated laws which are 180 degrees from your proposed “jubilee shares.”
Specifically, the tax code has been rewritten over the past 80 years to favor “the Warren Buffet thing.” Speculative income is given favorable tax treatment over dividend income in two ways:
a) Speculative income (share appreciation) is realized as capital gains and dividend income is realized as regular income. Capital gains are taxed at a much lower rate than regular income.
b) Tax on dividend income is levied in the current year, whereas tax on speculative income (share appreciation) is not levied until the shares are sold, so when shares are eventually sold and taxes paid (corporate taxes have been reduced to the point where they pay few taxes in the interim) the tax bite is less burdensome because it has been reduced due to the time value of money.
All the sordid details of this history can be found in this report:
“Present Law And Historical Overview Of The Federal Tax System”
The Joint Committee on Taxation, Congress of the United States
https://www.jct.gov/publications.html?func=startdown&id=3719
2) The ugly spectre of military coups and other anti-democratic movements and political violence is quite real. The sentiment that Keynes expressed in The Economic Consequences of the Peace was probably nowhere more concisely articulated than by Charles Dickens when in A Tale of Two Cities he wrote:
I thought it was particularly interesting to note the dress, body posture, and mannerisms of the participants.
Nicole Foss was in her own right knowledgeable of her field, Steve K was particularly at ease it seemed. Thomas Greco really didn’t contriibute much of anything of substance at all. Adam was bit of a xxxxxx in his basic understanding. The apparent value of the process seems close to nil. I have to wonder why Greco was there at all other than as a stand-in. He proclaims community and libertarianism incessantly, claims to have a degree in business, and basically written one book with several titles apparently as a marketing intent. He is essentially a low, low level Bernake for the “popular” level of economics. I was hoping that Greco would over reach, but mostly he seemed incoherent.
I stopped listening at the half way point. It was awful.
Yes, the moderator appeared to be stuck in molasses and with Steve stretching and playing with his hair (an understandable reaction and was actually the polite way of not yawning or looking at his watch). We don’t need derivative opinions, mere theory or idle acquiescence in the slow motion economic train wreck creating the neo-feudalist future…….we need ACTION.
We need a BOTH/AND awakening and mobilization of individuals. Fuck the economists, politicians, pundits et al. They don’t count. Everybody else and their children and grandchildren do. Its tiresome. Reduce/eliminate the current debt quickly and prevent it from out growing income in perpetuity. That is the message. That is what is in the interest of everyone. The wealthy and powerful are individuals also. They will see the truthfulness of this when the urgent but ethical mass movement we need makes that clear.
http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com/2012/07/notes-from-steve-keen-on-lending.html
If allowed and I am able to, I’d like to take part in your and Mish’s debate. One comment to make from Mish’s post to start:
“Savings accounts have no reserve requirements. Effectively, money that people think is in their checking accounts is not really there at all. In fact, it has been lent out multiple times over.”
The way the accounting people have explained it to me is that medium of exchange from checking accounts, savings accounts, and CD’s are NOT lent out.
I found it interesting, that you mention a technique like Delphi to possibly improve the outcomes of a conference. It reminds me to a guy in Switzerland, Fredmund Malik. He is professor of economics and the owner of Malik Management.
Together with others he developed a method, called Syntegration, for a better functioning of organizations. I will not go into details how a syntegration works. But it’s widely a certain communication method, based on cybernetic principles, that leads to a better communication and though to a better exchange of knowledge between the companies staff. Remarkable about Syntegration is also, that even for large companies of several thousand workers the process never takes more than 3-4 days to find a roadmap to boost efficiency by 100, 200, 300 percent (I know this sounds odd and I do not belong to his company).
This alone wouldn’t be so extraordinary, there are probably several techniques out there to improve management. But since Maliks efforts of his life work all go around a better functioning of organizations, his company is starting to get more and more jobs from municipalities and even states. Recently he became his biggest mandate to “syntegrate” the largest Austrian State Niederöstereich.
Maliks conviction is that the most important factor for failing societies of today is the missing of modern “tools” for decision making. He believes that the process of decision making is hopelessly antiquated. Like trying to build a rocket with stone age tools. We sit together in endless chatter, permeated by hierarchy and rhetoric, with very thin outcomes. So he focuses on the development of intellectual tools and tries to get them used in the political process. And he seems to have first successes.
He just came back from a week in Greece, not for holiday, having talks with members of the government on the level of ministers there. He thinks that the restart of the country with new methods of thinking is nowhere so high as in Greece. But anyway he doesn’t make to much hope. You can read a lot more about all that on his companies homepage. There is also a Blog, unfortunately it’s in german, but parts are translated in english.
http://www.malik-management.com/en