In other news, Biden shut down pipelines, and is now dumping oil from the US strategic reserve, because $5 gasoline turns out to be bad politics. Same idea, bang-bang control.
We need to elect a PID controller for president
The Law of Unintended Consequences.
John
Yeah, we learned a lot about that from 2016 to 2020. Wow!
Certainly people who make policy decisions and "expert" economists and sociologists should have some feel for control theory. They like to slam big knobs rail-to-rail.
I wonder if China will swing from forced birth rate minimization (which included forced abortions) to forced fertility.
Yes. Systems tend to natural equilibrium; mess with that at peril.
It's funny to see politicians pushing, essentially, on summing points.
I ran across an article awhile back that said China has 30 million more men of marriage age than women of marriage age. That leaves a lot of room for mischief. Suppose even half those guys are battle casualties.
In this case it seems like everyone else is doing it, too. The actuator/servo control theory-amenable model of societal state seems like a tough row to hoe.
I know a gentleman who's an economist that's published some papers on international trade dynamics, supply sources and sinks, etc. I admit I don't really understand a word of them and they're very math-heavy.
But my impression is he feels like he's doing his job when he comes to some novel conclusion about some small facet of international trade that's in opposition to "conventional wisdom" and feels there's sufficient math and data to "prove" it to some standard, not attempt to find a solution to all economic problems.
I don't know but I have heard secondhand that there are basically two types of PRC-citizen college student in the US, the type that hears about Tienanmen square for the first time at age 22, shrugs, and asks directions to the nearest Starbucks, and the type that's scared shitless every time they go on the Internet.
Revolution seems a long ways off.
Whether anyone who matters actually reads them is a different question.
The US has more single women than men, but the prospects for American men age 18 - 39 are not great, almost every major US city has significantly more single men than women in that demographic, some by almost two times.
It really only starts getting better for single (well, likely divorced at least once by that point) men once they get into their 50s.
On a sunny day (Tue, 23 Nov 2021 07:05:30 -0800) it happened snipped-for-privacy@highlandsniptechnology.com wrote in snipped-for-privacy@4ax.com:
The system in China is defect by default. Add to that an ego-tripping leader who wants himself to be seen as some God.
Personally I do believe in bottom up China is an example of 'top down' without the top having a clue about how it works. Look at their housing disaster for example:
There does not seem to be feedback from the people to correct the 'party line' if needed. If you read up on Mr Xi in wikipedia
And any one man band can fail spectacularly
And then there is HongKong Taiwan
US is now sanctioning Russia's Northstream gas pipeline to Europe AGAIN. That hits EVERY European. US is bringing high end weapons to Ukraine. Like Bil Clignon US wants war in Europe. Being a major weapon dealer US want war everywhere,
Yes. Macroeconomics is mostly theoretical math.
Someone asked "If you're an economist, how come you ain't rich?"
Yep, a macroeconomist specializing in foreign trade is definitely the wrong person to ask like, what stocks to buy or whatever. He doesn't have that much better idea than anyone else and claims that economists tend to be more risk-averse than many investors probably should be, anyway.
Useless observation. The systems that are hard to manage are often called chaotic, and the most visible ones are big.
Famously, war is one of those systems; 'plans are useless, but planning is indispensable' was Eisenhower's take on the situation. He got that right. Public planning, unlike military planning, gets wide discussion with the public, so bad decisions (like prohibition of alcohol in the US) get lots of press and that's political poison.
So, we should support politicians doing planning, AND shouldn't blame bigness, or chaos, when our plans go awry. They will, we have to expect. And, like with atmospheric carbon, we'll have to re-plan, because...
"planning is indespensable"
In general, no. If they are trying to control a process that they don't understand - which is the usual case - they make things worse.
Besides, most politicians' motivation isn't the general good, it's power and money for their tribe.
In John Larkin's ever-so-expert opinion.
Not exactly. Politicians have to get the attention of the public, and tiny incremental adjustments don't do that.
Tell that to lemmings and mice. Their populations boom in good years then starve back to normal.
John Larkin gets amused by a lot of stuff he doesn't understand. He has much too high an opinion of his own expertise to realise that he ought to be puzzled, rather than supercilious.
That's a 'yes', then, as I see it. By 'support politicians doing planning' I intended to support WITH real understanding, perhaps from the halls of academia, or from potato farmers, and use the understanding of (usually) non-political experts rather than the posturings of... another Karl Rove or Roger Stone.
The right advisers will give good advice. That's useful, though some chaos is still to be expected. Al Gore showed us how politicians can do useful planning, when he shepherded the Internet into existence. He didn't do that all himself, he got good support for the tech bits.
The Internet isn't completely controlled and understood, but it IS useful.
. . . but objectives are unclear . . .
RL
It's useful because it isn't controlled.
“that government is best which governs least”
Oh, but cooperative networking is impossible if you rely on IBM for SNA, Banyan for Vines, and half a hundred other proprietary solutions. That's how I recall the early days of Usenet, Bitnet, Arpanet, DECnet etc.: it was uncooperative until government action occurred.
There's no heavy-handed government misfeasance on display here, is there? So why is that aphorism about 'governs least' anything but random? Maybe if there's another entity that would do some task better, we'd be able to state a preference? In practical matters, we ALWAYS have some governing principles to be arranged, and... the generic term 'government' always applies.
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