Samo Burja's framing of institutions

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Papus79
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Samo Burja's framing of institutions

Post by Papus79 »

Curious as to whether anyone here has been following his work an ideas much?

He's probably known best for 'intellectual dark matter', ie. the idea that we're used to things just functioning in the background without knowing how they work or why, that it's dark to us from that perspective, but it still needs generational transfer which can fall through the cracks - and he's outlined situations in the past where technological decline of civilizations, or even cases in the last few decades in Silicon Valley, where generational knowledge transfer caused failed chip design and the like.

He's not an alarmist, has done a lot of research on collapse but his primary interest - one that I share - is understanding what the mechanics are and how one goes about either keeping many institutions and pathways of knowledge transfer alive and intact as possible or, if the game theory of certain groups or institutions has just gotten too malignant, focusing on crafting more durable things that can still be standing relatively unpolluted when they fall.

I think the civilizational life cycle, and the size of the current still arguable still global civilization, means that we're in real trouble if we let this thing go to weeds. Very few generations obviously want to inherit a pile of rubble and many people would be interested in preventing that from happening, but the trick is making sure continuity of knowledge at a many levels as possible works and also consider that game theory is a ball that's always up in the air, different institutions will be growing while others fail, different companies will be growing while others fail, and the trick is understanding which fulcrums flipped too far to one side or another put us in danger of either local or broader collapse and considering what active countermeasures we can put in place that not only help buffer us against those concerns but also in and of themselves offer utility, particularly in the way of positive-sum games.

An interview with him from a few days ago for anyone not familiar:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p-9siaiC9Gk
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HJCarden
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Re: Samo Burja's framing of institutions

Post by HJCarden »

Just watched the first 25 minutes of the interview, very interesting and seems very practical.

Similar experience I had with working at a moving company.
Moving is obviously a very labor intensive job, but a HUGE part of it is customer service. As I became more experienced in the company (and also on the shelf with an MCL injury) I was given the task of doing the 2 day training class for new movers, which mostly involved going through a slide show and showing the new guys how to not destroy people's furniture. One thing that I quickly realized was that the powerpoint slides, approved by Central HQ, left out so many details that I considered to be vitally important to doing a good move and delivering a good customer experience.

Case in point, the slides mentioned that we should't swear/talk about unsavory topics around customers. Simple, common sense, no issues there. However, no one ever got in trouble for swearing around the customers, not because we didn't, but because not everyone is a prude like that. HOWEVER, one of my friends got a red flag review (big no no), because he called the customer's dog a "yippy little bitch". He was shocked when he heard this, because he made sure to say this away from the customer and inside the box of the moving truck. However, his voice had travelled through the back of the truck, into the garage (which was attached to the lower level) and up the stairs for the hearing pleasure of the customer!

Anecdotally as well, I saw a tweet today that said something to the tune of "why can't we print more money we're the ones who decide how valuable it is" and I became physically aggressive at how stupid this suggestion was (not absolutely against non-monetary ideas, but as long as you're paying with paper inflation is a real thing).

It's very important, if you ask me, that the people who are able to make important decisions in any sort of organization are not the ones who would yell about yippy litte bitches or printing more money, or at least have made these mistakes and learned. Anyone can read from a "playbook" as Samo called it, but it takes a lot of social intelligence and box smarts to work even slightly outside those boundaries.
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Papus79
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Re: Samo Burja's framing of institutions

Post by Papus79 »

HJCarden wrote: December 10th, 2020, 8:10 pm Similar experience I had with working at a moving company.
Moving is obviously a very labor intensive job, but a HUGE part of it is customer service. As I became more experienced in the company (and also on the shelf with an MCL injury) I was given the task of doing the 2 day training class for new movers, which mostly involved going through a slide show and showing the new guys how to not destroy people's furniture. One thing that I quickly realized was that the powerpoint slides, approved by Central HQ, left out so many details that I considered to be vitally important to doing a good move and delivering a good customer experience.

That's one of the downsides with separated management - their connection to reality on the ground can be touch and go.
HJCarden wrote: December 10th, 2020, 8:10 pmAnecdotally as well, I saw a tweet today that said something to the tune of "why can't we print more money we're the ones who decide how valuable it is" and I became physically aggressive at how stupid this suggestion was (not absolutely against non-monetary ideas, but as long as you're paying with paper inflation is a real thing).
One of the few economists I really enjoy listening to is Mark Blyth, and he gets fairly deep into the weeds on modern monetary policy fairly often. The trick with printing more money, we've done it - especially right after the 2008 crisis, is it better be for a very good cause as it's a backdoor tax on savers, and to your intuition it approximates value but it has a degree or flex and if you blow that approximation sky high then the faith in that fiat currency goes. As far as societal solutions to poverty and increased precariousness of work (like the gig economy) Mark's argued for a sovereign wealth fund in the US and said that a lot of people can see the need for it, it's just been a problem of political will. Hopefully Covid and all the economic effects of that might stir more interest.
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HJCarden
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Re: Samo Burja's framing of institutions

Post by HJCarden »

Papus79 wrote: December 10th, 2020, 8:36 pm
HJCarden wrote: December 10th, 2020, 8:10 pm Similar experience I had with working at a moving company.
Moving is obviously a very labor intensive job, but a HUGE part of it is customer service. As I became more experienced in the company (and also on the shelf with an MCL injury) I was given the task of doing the 2 day training class for new movers, which mostly involved going through a slide show and showing the new guys how to not destroy people's furniture. One thing that I quickly realized was that the powerpoint slides, approved by Central HQ, left out so many details that I considered to be vitally important to doing a good move and delivering a good customer experience.

That's one of the downsides with separated management - their connection to reality on the ground can be touch and go.
HJCarden wrote: December 10th, 2020, 8:10 pmAnecdotally as well, I saw a tweet today that said something to the tune of "why can't we print more money we're the ones who decide how valuable it is" and I became physically aggressive at how stupid this suggestion was (not absolutely against non-monetary ideas, but as long as you're paying with paper inflation is a real thing).
One of the few economists I really enjoy listening to is Mark Blyth, and he gets fairly deep into the weeds on modern monetary policy fairly often. The trick with printing more money, we've done it - especially right after the 2008 crisis, is it better be for a very good cause as it's a backdoor tax on savers, and to your intuition it approximates value but it has a degree or flex and if you blow that approximation sky high then the faith in that fiat currency goes. As far as societal solutions to poverty and increased precariousness of work (like the gig economy) Mark's argued for a sovereign wealth fund in the US and said that a lot of people can see the need for it, it's just been a problem of political will. Hopefully Covid and all the economic effects of that might stir more interest.
What do you think this sovereign wealth fund should look like? Access, funding, so on?
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Re: Samo Burja's framing of institutions

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HJCarden wrote: December 10th, 2020, 9:16 pm What do you think this sovereign wealth fund should look like? Access, funding, so on?
Admittedly the idea is a bit new to me, I have a rather instinctive sense of what people are calling the 'fourth industrial revolution' which I worry, as jobs become lower paying and more precarious, puts us at increasing hazard for some very desperate populism - of the sort that could land us a Pinochet rather than a Trump if things continue on the same trajectory. A lot of Andrew Yang's observations made sense in relation to the work force headed toward increase obsolescence (bringing the jobs back from overseas won't necessarily open as many positions for humans as one might hope) and we've really treated the work world as our workfare/welfare system which is now in such a phase transition that it's going to become increasingly punishing to those in it for little more reason than that they were born at the wrong time in history.

Mark's ideas seems to be for said sovereign wealth fund to gain funding by doing things like buying distressed equities during crises, deal out the bonds at a premium, and then get value back from the equities and sell them back to the market as they recover. I'd be okay with some of what Yang was suggesting, ie. things similar to a VAT concept that would tax a lot of the big tech companies, or have a proportional tax for automated positions (although that could get squishy to argue with enough restructuring), mainly the goal would be to find the sweet spot between funding said wealth fund and taxing in ways that manage to get the money but in the least onerous ways that can be managed.

Really the goal isn't to punish markets, they're how we find ways to do things less expensively often (with caveats obviously if you get cartels or abuse of patent systems), mainly it's to shift the situation away from setting a stage where all facets of life increasingly become a socio-economic arms race of the sort where 'If you haven't figured out that life is a war you've already lost'. The goal would be a capitalism that serves the people more so than sorting the people into 'fit' and 'misfit' buckets and dictating to us quite so much how we live. I think of my parents in particular, my dad is silent generation, my mom is a first year boomer, they both grew up with a capitalism very different than what I grew up with - that is it was the 1945 to 1980 Keynesian regime where it seemed very true to many people that if you worked hard and did the right things life worked out. If you fan out and go to other extremes - unregulated capitalism really just kicks off arms races that either turn the culture into trained mercenaries or crash and burn the economy and society eventually because the arms races aren't reigned in by government. The trouble with too much socialization is a different game theory problem but it's effectively that it's in one's interest to defect and do as little as possible. I'm still not sure about Yang's UBI, I've heard good arguments both ways and you couldn't have a more simple structure but I still ask the question of how we'd fund it, and I don't think it's how we'd want to use a sovereign wealth fund.


So what do I think would be the best objectives for a sovereign wealth fund? I think the primary, general, focus of it should be rebuilding the social capital that we've lost in the last thirty or forty years. I could see the fund having branches of operation it supports such as vocational programs that help match talent with positions and give high quality hands-on training, focus on having work pools for people who are in gig economies where said agencies will keep bringing the jobs if the employees are doing well and - as a goal of the wealth fund that I mentioned at the top, have a role in making sure that the employers who sign up to work with them are treating their workers fairly.

Another idea for utilizing a sovereign wealth fund, and more directly to social capital, would be funding all of the 'nice to have' things. For example, in response to all of the 'defund the police' calls this summer (patently insane IMHO) some people suggested that a better alternative would to have parallel services, such as more mental health professionals and social workers, to offload policing responsibilities and create layers of support for communities where there could be more help for individuals and possibly even more pre-legal arbitration methods.

The last thing I'd put on that wish list bucket, again thinking of lost and damaged social capital, more youth groups, more student leadership organizations, more basic 'cultivation of character and teamwork' type of activities, really for it to provide the Yin that the private sector, by it's very 'dog eats dog' competitive nature, can't provide.
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Re: Samo Burja's framing of institutions

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Mark talking a little bit more about that concept in an interview transcript:
https://www.marketplace.org/2020/06/24/ ... alth-fund/
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Re: Samo Burja's framing of institutions

Post by HJCarden »

Papus79 wrote: December 10th, 2020, 10:20 pm
HJCarden wrote: December 10th, 2020, 9:16 pm What do you think this sovereign wealth fund should look like? Access, funding, so on?
Admittedly the idea is a bit new to me, I have a rather instinctive sense of what people are calling the 'fourth industrial revolution' which I worry, as jobs become lower paying and more precarious, puts us at increasing hazard for some very desperate populism - of the sort that could land us a Pinochet rather than a Trump if things continue on the same trajectory. A lot of Andrew Yang's observations made sense in relation to the work force headed toward increase obsolescence (bringing the jobs back from overseas won't necessarily open as many positions for humans as one might hope) and we've really treated the work world as our workfare/welfare system which is now in such a phase transition that it's going to become increasingly punishing to those in it for little more reason than that they were born at the wrong time in history.

Mark's ideas seems to be for said sovereign wealth fund to gain funding by doing things like buying distressed equities during crises, deal out the bonds at a premium, and then get value back from the equities and sell them back to the market as they recover. I'd be okay with some of what Yang was suggesting, ie. things similar to a VAT concept that would tax a lot of the big tech companies, or have a proportional tax for automated positions (although that could get squishy to argue with enough restructuring), mainly the goal would be to find the sweet spot between funding said wealth fund and taxing in ways that manage to get the money but in the least onerous ways that can be managed.

Really the goal isn't to punish markets, they're how we find ways to do things less expensively often (with caveats obviously if you get cartels or abuse of patent systems), mainly it's to shift the situation away from setting a stage where all facets of life increasingly become a socio-economic arms race of the sort where 'If you haven't figured out that life is a war you've already lost'. The goal would be a capitalism that serves the people more so than sorting the people into 'fit' and 'misfit' buckets and dictating to us quite so much how we live. I think of my parents in particular, my dad is silent generation, my mom is a first year boomer, they both grew up with a capitalism very different than what I grew up with - that is it was the 1945 to 1980 Keynesian regime where it seemed very true to many people that if you worked hard and did the right things life worked out. If you fan out and go to other extremes - unregulated capitalism really just kicks off arms races that either turn the culture into trained mercenaries or crash and burn the economy and society eventually because the arms races aren't reigned in by government. The trouble with too much socialization is a different game theory problem but it's effectively that it's in one's interest to defect and do as little as possible. I'm still not sure about Yang's UBI, I've heard good arguments both ways and you couldn't have a more simple structure but I still ask the question of how we'd fund it, and I don't think it's how we'd want to use a sovereign wealth fund.


So what do I think would be the best objectives for a sovereign wealth fund? I think the primary, general, focus of it should be rebuilding the social capital that we've lost in the last thirty or forty years. I could see the fund having branches of operation it supports such as vocational programs that help match talent with positions and give high quality hands-on training, focus on having work pools for people who are in gig economies where said agencies will keep bringing the jobs if the employees are doing well and - as a goal of the wealth fund that I mentioned at the top, have a role in making sure that the employers who sign up to work with them are treating their workers fairly.

Another idea for utilizing a sovereign wealth fund, and more directly to social capital, would be funding all of the 'nice to have' things. For example, in response to all of the 'defund the police' calls this summer (patently insane IMHO) some people suggested that a better alternative would to have parallel services, such as more mental health professionals and social workers, to offload policing responsibilities and create layers of support for communities where there could be more help for individuals and possibly even more pre-legal arbitration methods.

The last thing I'd put on that wish list bucket, again thinking of lost and damaged social capital, more youth groups, more student leadership organizations, more basic 'cultivation of character and teamwork' type of activities, really for it to provide the Yin that the private sector, by it's very 'dog eats dog' competitive nature, can't provide.
Thanks for all of that, very detailed response! The idea that jobs and how we need to view the economy is changing I think is almost irrefutable at this point, but my issue is that it seems to be ignoring the slow slow march of time. Even with how fast the internet is and how instant our world is, we're still gonna need people who can dig ditches for the time being. The political problem with this, I believe, is that theres a very big part of the population who's lives arent pulling towards that current yet, and they rightly believe that currently is antithetical to what they've experienced as true in their lives (Keynes and your parents as you were saying). Theres a lot of people who won't get on board with things that assume this idea of the 4th industrial revolution because it truly wont happen in their lifetimes.

This sovereign wealth fund seems to be a good idea, and I agree with many of your other points on your wishlist. I'm a huge proponent of youth groups and the such that let kids be kids. I attribute a lot of my positive character development to my time spent in the Boy Scouts, during which a lot of it we were just running through the woods hitting each other with sticks. Of course there were life lessons sprinkled in, but I believe that the character development of the youth is best done by letting kids be kids with each other, and being given opportunities to grow up in an uncomfortable but controlled setting. And, in that organization there was a huge emphasis on passing down that intellectual dark matter. There of course was a scout handbook, but I really learned how to build a fire when we were sitting in negative degree weather, tired and cold and hungry.

As for the defund the police arguments, I agree as well that they are quite foolish in their aims, but I believe that at their core they can have a healthy message, if the main message is to hold our public servants accountable, as we are the ones who write their paychecks and put some of them into office. Too many other things to go into here, but thats my biggest non-emotionally driven takeaway.
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