SHIP OF FAIL: How do we right capsized institutions we thought would NEVER go under?

Since the loss of manufacturing jobs, manual labour jobs, engineering jobs, indeed most jobs that required people to mine, make, build and repair things, all we have left is the service industry. Now it seems that if you can't do much there, you become a manager, you go into marketing, consultancy, PR, and you immediately find the very small section of people who really are productive, and really know useful things, threatening.

So managers and other service non-jobs end up in power, yet have little or nothing to do with workers and producers, and end up living in this purely abstract, value-limited world. When messy real life intrudes, no-one's able to cope. Calamity ensues, again and again.

Until we learn to properly value the producers and doers in this world - say farmers, teachers, engineers, train drivers, doctors, nurses, scientists, builders, plumbers and so on - we're stuck.

Actually when it comes to solving problems with our society & by extension our policitcal institutions, what we need to do is to start with education, and the one theme that should be taught from the very beginning is; Enlightened Self-Interest

If we could get a society where this was the primary personality trait a lot of our problems would start to solve themselves as the idea of personal profit to the exclusion of all else wouldnt be the overriding drive which it currently appears to be

A quibble

"The participants in those events clearly could not tell right from wrong. "

They knew (both the looters on the streets and the ones in office), they just don't care, and not just about right or wrong either.

So many people don't care anymore, that, even those of us that still care in the choices of our own actions, lean more and more to the sentiment captured by Mr Flugennock above.

As Robert the Architec says:

"Can we fix it?"

"Not a bloody chance!"

We need a country with a highly educated population and a healthy economy, that doesn't want anything to do with the Thatcherite rubbish that all the big three parties spout.

And in a couple of weeks time we may have one. Just not in England.

Rewarding Failure...

...leads to more rewarding failure. If an institution or business fails, then so be it. Demand will prod Supply into replacing it. Or not. The people shouldn't be picking winners in the marketplace via taxes administered by people who have no experience in the matter.

Decentralization of power is the key to survival, not 5 Year Plans.

Sport osa similar discussions...

...with US centric viel, due to writer's home country but still people around the world participate in discussions... See 'the archdruid report' - there is sort of similar but different viestiä of there things...

"was carried out personally by Richard Feynman"

Feynman's own essay on the subject is quite clear that he was tipped off by someone else and merely provided the media presence necessary to put the evidence into the public domain. I'll stick my neck out here and say he'd be a little upset at the way popular culture has deified him. He enjoyed the limelight, but he'd have hated the thought that personalities might be bigger than either evidence or a decent bit of research by a competent nobody.

Call Up

Would the author of this article and all commentards with up votes only, please proceed to senior political office forthwith. Thank you.

Has anyone noticed

how much larger the disasters are getting? How long before we have "the big one" which wipes out life as we know it? Genetic engineering of crops causing famine, large hadron collider "rebooting" the universe, icelandic volcano starting a new ice age. The Emmerich Brothers are the new Nostrodamuses!

Simple reason why risk is ignored

Those who make the decision to accept the risk reap the reward when things go their way, but don't face the consequences when things go wrong.

That's what happened with the financial crisis, that's what happened with the Space Shuttle, that's how the Iraq war happened. It is a very common problem that has no simple solution.

The final conclusion

"Perhaps instead of being told what to do, we have to work it out for ourselves on an individual basis?"

But isn't that how we got into this mess in the first place? Lots of people doing what they thought was best… with the result that people good at seeing and fixing problems became plumbers and engineers, people good at caring became health workers, and people good at parasitising became Captains of Industry and the Government?

I saw an episode of The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. He floated the idea during the last financial crash, that instead of bailing out the banks etc ... The govt should have guaranteed everyone's savings & bought up any debt & just let the institutions fail. I suspect they would have spent the same amount of cash.

If the manglement & share holders get burned by bad business practices they will start demanding better ones.

As for oil ... Been reading lately about molten salt thorium reactors; If the hype is to be believed, they may supply the energy our technological & mobile society requires. An interesting idea is to look at the amount of energy available per head of population, historically as that energy supply has gotten larger & cheaper societies flourish

There seems to be a large amount of Armageddonism going around lately (might just be my perspective) not sure it's entirely warranted. We have problems to be sure, but nothing that we shouldn't be able to solve. We are the thinking ape after all :)

a (semi)modest proposal

if i have to pick one item that could put the human race on the road to solving many of its problems it has to be education . . . by "education" i mean a good, mandatory, public education system . . . well and evenly funded across every city and town . . . reality-based with absolutely no political or religious bias injected into any subject . . . of the best quality that can be had.

too much funding (in the US at least) is being siphoned-off to support private schools, charter schools and home schooling . . . none of which should receive any public funding . . . many argue that public schools are inadequate to teach their gifted children and this is often presently true . . . in a good system there would be resources and funds available for the gifted as well as those needing extra help (this could also take some of the sting out of attending "special class") . . . some argue that teachers are "too liberal" . . . too bad! . . . others argue that the sciences are taught without reference to their particular belief system . . . even more too bad!

i've heard some say that they should be allowed to send their children to a private school as long as they are willing to pay for it themselves . . . i don't think so . . . i've observed that a major function of private schools is largely for the status of having attended . . . the other reason seems to be that the child will associate with "the right kind of people" . . . this usually means "the people who can help the kid get something" like that management gig with the "right" corporation and not have to associate with the riff-raff . . . i also think that it is much better to meet people from every part of the economic/political/religious spectrum . . . it helps civilize the little brats.

imagine one generation, just one, who can grow up being taught things like enlightened self-interest, civics that includes civic responsibility (like voting) and logical and critical thinking . . . a generation that grows up knowing that there are "others" out there that aren't all that different from themselves . . . we will have essentially won the battle against ignorance and reformed our political systems in one swell foop.

[yes, i dream . . . but i dream big!]

The simple, bare truth is that bad practices are profitable.

The corollary is that our whole society is setup to view profit as the ultimate good and therefore anything that increases profit is desirable and anything that jeopordises it must be stamped out.

As a company/industry, all you have to do is complain that those (e.g.) minimum wage regulations/penalty rates/working hour restrictions are hurting your business and if only they were gone it'd be better for everyone. You'll have a swathe of politicians clamouring to 'cut the red tape' that is 'stifling industry' and 'hurting the economy'.

It's okay - workers will actually be better off this way because the businesses will now magically thrive which means that they will end up hiring more staff and paying them better! Aren't 'market forces' great!

All you have to do is look at the various financial instruments available to professional investors. It's obscene. The idea of public companies is to generate investment in the company, providing funds for the company to grow and as reward, provide the investors with a share of the profits.

Instead, what we have now is whole industries (ours is a big one) run, essentially by 'Wall Street', laying off thousands of staff because their profits weren't big enough. How did we get to the point where a PROFITABLE company is more-or-less forced to drop productive staff members simply because some bunch of analysts essentially made an incorrect prediction about how muchprofit that company would make.

How have we gotten here? Where trades are carried out with such blinding speed that shares and options and all manner of synthetic instruments change hands so fast that atomic clocks are needed to make sure it all happens in a timely fashion and where someone who has worked out how to get a signal 3ms faster than someone else can reap huge profits with ultra-fast, algorithm controlled trading.

Those people aren't truly investing money in companies or growth or even the economy as a whole - they are making use of cold maths and intricate algorithms to jump of any mis-pricings and none of it benefits the wider community. It certainly doesn't contribute any stability.

Any why is nothing done?

Because bad practices are profitable.

I thank the authour for this article - it is well written, like all his pieces.

(but . . .)

But, like many others, he seems think that politicians "mould themselves to what the public appears to want".

Not so. They merely morph their faces and words to accord with what their focus groups and pollsters tell them the public wants. Sure, they will throw money at this or that initiative and talk about getting tough on something or other but they aren't in any hurry to go about reforming the banking system or anything quite so hard.

The certainly aren't going to do anything that risks the injections of money from all the various mega-powerful industry lobby groups.

The first step in any of this, therefore, is to severely regulate such funding.

Remember, that to even get to the point of running for any election, you've got to have made your deals already, both to private interests and party power-brokers (who have their own interests).

Recommendation

The Blunders of Our Government, by Anthony King and Ivor Crewe.

Nothing new here

This is not an essay. I suppose that the next instalment could tie the large number of disparate strands together neatly into a coherent conclusion, but frankly I doubt it.

Spending the first five paragraphs telling us how it's important not to just rant and complain about things, and then spend the whole of the rest of the piece doing just that doesn't help, but what really sinks this is the lack of focus. We have...

- NASA tried to cover up after the Challenger disaster

- Ships should have more safety features

- Rioters and politicians are both bad

- We have an underclass

- The Church is hypocritical

- News corp is in bed with the government

- The Beeb turned a blink eye to child abuse

- Economists know nothing

- There will be more financial crises

- To much greed can ruin a good thing

- IBM sold stuff to the Nazis (indirectly)

- The British state wasn't nice to Alan Turing

- The British railway network isn't redundant enough

It all sounds like someone in the pub half way through their third pint after a bad day. And as the author himself says, "one can actually keep going like this, but after a while it becomes tedious".

The only thing that ties all this together, as far as I can tell, are the following claims:

- Organisations serve their own interests first and foremost

- Organisations and individuals are bad at risk assessment

- Organisational change is difficult

- Whistleblowing is dangerous and often ineffective

This is supposed to be new, the defining feature of a "new age", no less. Sorry, but none of this is new. This is standard organisation theory, the study of organisations and bureaucracies and their many disfunctions, and there's a large literature going back at least to the mid-20th century on all this.

Here's hoping that the proposed cure is more interesting than the diagnosis.

Railway risk

Various inland lines that could have been put into service had been closed and taken up by people who were unable to assess risk

No, they were closed and taken up by people who realised that there was no sense in keeping a railway line open in order to provide a diversionary route which has been closed once, for a few weeks in fifty years.

I guess what all this dissertation boils down to is that perhaps there's a reason no other animal on the planet has our level of what we call "civilisation": because in the end, it's unsustainable. It's an unahppy medium because it requires a level of trust that (a) deludes ourselves, (b) opens us up to betrayal, or (c) more likely, both at the same time.

Put it this way. Machiavelli had a point. Government by one may have its faults, but when it comes to action, nothing's quicker to react (government by committee is terrible at anything short of an existential threat, and then it runs the risk of overreacting), plus since everyone knows who to blame, the Sword of Damocles helps remind the autocrat to keep things running.

At the same time, a frequent thing we keep seeing is the idea of things becoming too big to manage. Try as we might, economies of scale can only go so far; physics increasingly gets in the way. But at the same time, so many people become involved that there's the problem of collateral damage (that's part of the "too big to fail" problem: let it fail and innocent lives are at risk--lots of them, meaning massive political consequences).

I'm going to stop before I ramble too much, but to close I think we're on the brink of something big: whatever it is it's going to be nasty, and collateral damage is going to be a given, and no amount of preparation is likely going to help when it finally comes down. If your number's up, all you can do is put your head between your legs and kiss you arse goodbye. Thing is, as the losses mount, trust in the government weakens, and once that reaches the tipping point...