This was really driven home during a dinner conversation in the past week with people who work at ‘global’ companies that do a lot of metrics, rely heavily on logistics, and have to adapt to new business conditions in real-time.

It’s almost as if the conversation out of DC is from some other universe; and the idea that Congress can twiddle its thumbs on this sequester, or on that showdown… well, who has the time or patience for that silliness anymore?

The economics arguments that make the most sense to me are those of Nick Haneaur and Eric Liu (“The Gardens of Democracy”), and it appears that Hanaeur’s involvement with Amazon.com lends credence and insight to his arguments that an economy is a complex, adaptive system — and that we need to pay far more attention to networks, and to feedback loops.

Microprocessors lie at the heart of this economic activity. Yet D.C blathers on about The Federal Debt, as if that’s the biggest economic problem that we face: it’s not. Not by a factor of about 30,000,000,000.

Meanwhile, over in the UK, in what I view as one of the most brilliant interviews that I have ever read, former Bank of England governor David Potter offered an important statistic:

Over the last twenty years, one hundred million Chinese may have been added to world manufacturing as low-cost labour (The Economist, 29 July 2010). In the same period, some thirty billion microprocessors have been added to automate much of what we do, and many have automated the processes and machines that make the bulk of manufactured goods across most industries. It is the productivity gains from the automation of manufacturing that has delivered such a plenitude of goods at such low cost.

http://www.opendemocracy.net/ourkingdom/david-potter/lets-welcome-enmity-of-bankers

Since the time that Alan Simpson first arrived in DC around 1980, over 30,000,000,000 microprocessors began to drive the global economy. I think it’s reasonable to say that the ‘owners’ got most of the economic gains of the productivity that resulted.

I don’t see DC, nor the Fed, articulating the implications of 30 billion microprocessors driving the global economy.

Given the speed of change, I’m increasingly skeptical that policy processes can keep up with underlying, structural shifts in commerce and industrial production. Perhaps Simson-Bowles is Exhibit 101 in how far the real economy is beginning to separate and diverge from the policy processes of D.C. Very discouraging.

There are forces behind folks like Simpson, who fear an increase in FICA for employers, who are concerned about a higher ceiling on Soc Sec. contributions, who wish that Medicare money went into profit insurance companies, and who generally oppose any public ownership or direction, even if their proposals make most people miserable.

Is it too much education that makes some of us analyze these stances, looking for good, where it doesn’t exist? You don’t have to be sincere to spout an opinion, nor honest to recommend a program. Many folks are bought and paid for – by money, by fear, by the desire to please the persons “above” them. Every totalitarian regime and every royal court had its jesters, its lackeys, its sad hangers on – all enjoying life while the world crumbled around them.

The WH should regard a campaign to lower Soc Sec benefits and raise the Medicare age as an assault on the public, not as some wise suggestion from the advocates of a new gilded age.

. . . Pants on fire.
http://maddowblog.msnbc.com/_news/2013/02/20/17031205-to-lower-the-deficit-dont-cut-taxes