Out of control

Heard on NPR this morning that 60% of the movers and the shakers at Davos believe that central bankers can't control/manage the global economy anymore. Implication: it's too big, complex, and fast for these organizations to manage. This is a big shift in thinking that puts them in line with the global guerrilla thinking re: the decline of the nation-state, more frequent black swans, etc.

Comments

[catfish]

This must be *part* of the sentiment fueling Ron Paul's popularity, though his supporters don't articulate it. A preponderance of big, behemoth institutions sustaining themselves beyond their missions. A desire to pare down. (Not getting the black swan reference.)

[John Robb]

The Black Swan reference refers to more frequent shocks due to a lack of management.

[Charles Cameron (hipbone)]

QUOTE: A black swan is an outlier, an event that lies beyond the realm of normal expectations. Most people expect all swans to be white because that's what their experience tells them; a black swan is by definition a surprise. Nevertheless, people tend to concoct explanations for them after the fact, which makes them appear more predictable, and less random, than they are. Our minds are designed to retain, for efficient storage, past information that fits into a compressed narrative. This distortion, called the hindsight bias, prevents us from adequately learning from the past. UNQUOTE

LEARNING TO EXPECT THE UNEXPECTED [4.19.04]
By Nassim Nicholas Taleb

http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/taleb04/taleb_index.html

John first quoted Taleb on Black Swans in Global Guerrillas, I believe:

http://globalguerrillas.typepad.com/globalguerrillas/2004/04/was_911_a_black.html