HUMINT: Contagious Behavior

humint ^ | 20 Jan 2007 | humint

[humint]

The best economic theory of the day suggests human behavior is contagious. It follows logically that what the article "IRAQ's NATURAL STATE" says about human nature is that "empowering figures" build self sustaining societies whereas "power consolidators" slowly descend into hell, taking every body else with them. The idea that Iraqis will reject violence sooner if more of them have jobs is a legitimate argument only if those jobs are sourced from free market investment. The entire country needs some version of Milton Freidman's Negative Income Tax. If on the other hand, tribal chieftains and theocratic oligarchs are put in control of the country's natural recourses (the only viable revenue stream based on international trade and investment at this time) the country will continue to decay. No matter how many jobs that policy would create, the country would still descend into an even worse hell than now because no faction would be happy until they control all of Iraq’s resources.

I don't want to second guess any American law maker decisions (I'm probably the only one) but U.S. investment in Iraq should be from the ground up... Indeed, the entire Middle East should be looked at from that perspective. The root cause of the hell we see today in the Middle East is because oil revenue prop up the toughest power consolidators in the region. Iraq's future, and many secondary and tertiary futures, are dependent on empowering populations, not elites. That's how societal transitions are made from:

1. Primitive
2. Limited Access
3. Open Access

Macro and micro social dysfunction usually begins when elites start to think they matter far more than the population that authorizes their elitism. American geopolitical stability and prosperity, along this logic, can be found in our aggregate worship of everyday underdogs who become heroes by being themselves. Do Europeans do that? Not really. Instead they find themselves admiring Americans and realize that their society is far less likely to reward real heroism, they curse America for revealing their own social dysfunction. The same is true of the Middle East who are simply the economic bastard children of the U.S. or Europe anyway. Should we be surprised about the cost of social change in Iraq - or Europe...? No, not really, unless we seek a policy of empowerment. Empowerment policies are the least expensive and most effective, so I say "BOLLOCKS" to the expensive policy of dividing Iraq's natural resources between competing elites. Patriarchal fascists have no intention of empowering their populations. They'd rather go down fighting in an exchange of nuclear weapons than lose their grip on power. What then do we do to save ourselves from them? We must save the fascist's societal children - their sons, daughters, wives, brothers, sisters, mothers and fathers... We have to empower them to overcome their social dysfunction in order to save ourselves. Any other approach is delaying the inevitable WMD dual between - Limited Access and Open Access societies.

[humint]

http://pda.physorg.com/lofi-news-fluctuations-price-scale_11164.html While analyzing stock-price fluctuations based on critical dynamics and phase transitions, physicists from the University of Tokyo (Kiyono et al.) have observed some surprising behavior preceding market crashes. During the year before black Monday, the team found that the probability of large price fluctuations increased unexpectedly (“non-Gaussian” behavior), as if approaching a critical point signifying a major change. At the critical point – or day of the crash – an abrupt phase transition did indeed occur as the probability model changed from being scale dependent to scale invariant. Scale invariance, which in this case meant that the prices no longer depended on the time scale, is characteristic behavior observed at a critical point.