Re: Understanding the Occupy Movementf

Posted by Owen Densmore on Jan 22, 2012; 4:02pm
URL: http://friam.383.s1.nabble.com/Understanding-the-Occupy-Movementf-tp7210588p7213649.html

Thanks Eric, shed very useful light, both the distinction between 99 & Occupy, and the surprising work by Bar-Yam.  I hope robustness is a compelling argument to politicians, it certainly should be.

The recent success of the populist response to SOPA and PIPA gives one some hope that we can steer our ship of state at least on very particular and concrete issues, at least.  I was absolutely astounded that both of my senators and my representative in congress were for them both.

   -- Owen

On Sat, Jan 21, 2012 at 7:16 AM, Eric Smith <[hidden email]> wrote:

Jochen, hi,

For a while I have shown the sense to stay quiet, but let me try to address this one a little, because I can send a file that has some technical papers which I think address some of these points.

It seems to me that the 99%/1% paradigm and Occupy are targeted at slightly different things, though they have become natural traveling companions, and the two are now generally associated (probably also in the minds of the participants for the most part).  It seems that the 99/1 paradigm is targeted at social inequality, and addresses the question of what kind of society we want to create. That seems to be the main question you address in your post.  If I understand correctly, Occupy, with its particular focus on Wall Street at the beginning, was targeted at the influence of corporate power in corrupting the legal system, at all levels from law-making, to day-to-day regulatory operations, to law enforcement.  I think this is a somewhat different question, in that it addresses the major de facto difference between the society we claim to have committed to in the political system, and the actual working of that system.  I choose to narrow the focus of Occupy in my own mind -- probably more than it is actually narrowed in the minds of many who participate -- for the sake of highlighting this distinction, because I think the two questions are addressed to some extent differently.  The distinction I am making also follows an official position taken by Yaneer Bar-Yam of NECSI, in the attached rtf (which hopefully the list curator will permit to forward)
.  I have looked at some of the articles referenced here, but it would take a more careful analysis of method than I have made the effort (or probably have the expertise) to perform, in order to know how tight the conclusions are.

There are so many topics in Friam history that touch on this question (how institutional frameworks function, what it really means to aspire to a form of culture through our choice of formal institutional commitments, and how close to the aspiration we ever get with the ever-fragile machinery), from the importance of incomplete markets to making much of microeconomic theory, and "micro-foundations of macroeconomics" irrelevant, to the question of the autonomy of thought from environment, that I see questions related to this constantly on the list.  It is also related to interests of my own, which have to do with the relation of individuality (both developmental and evolutionary) in relation to ecology, and to error-correction in hierarchical complex systems, and the limits to what kinds of function can actually be maintained robustly.  It seems to me that almost all the high-level abstractions about the intervention of power in markets and politics can be nearly deconstructed, they are so hard to think clearly about, but that these are excellent questions to pursue.

Somebody several weeks ago (this time I'll have the sense not to use the name I think I remember, in case I have it wrong again) commented that Occupy seemed false because the participants wear clothes, eat food, communicate with consumer electronics, and live in tents, produced by the industrial economy, and therefore they lack the consistency of Ghandi's followers who made their own salt and wore khadi.  That apparent distinction might be self-contained if the claim were actually that corporate function is the enemy (and if one could factor out differences in population, access to land and coastline, the fact that you can go naked in most of India most of the year without freezing, the huge differences across continent and across time, making it much more difficult for all but a fraction of people to find a space to survive outside the industrial economy and the land and assets owned through it in the US today, etc.) but the question becomes trickier if one takes the position that the productive activities of corporations are not deemed bad per se, but that their circumventing the regulatory apparatus that is supposed to provide stability is regarded as the main problem.  (Of course, either of these could be the target, depending on which set of problems we are discussing.  The ecological economists, including Herman Daly and followers, would indeed say that many forms of production are themselves the problem, but I think that is a different thread from the one you have raised, at least on a first pass.)  My sense, that the timing of the financial collapses, and the many demonstrations of corruption by banks and bankers, which were not really pursued to the extent that they could have been, and suggested the tip of a much larger iceberg, as the trigger for the start of Occupy, would support the distinction I draw here.

I hope that Bar-Yam et al.'s quantitative analysis, if not my own post-processing of them, are useful in some way.

All best,

Eric









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============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org