Quicksketch: No Guiderails on the Balance Beam

The economy is retracting, automation made you redundant but just when you were facing the hobo life you land a job at a Soy Sauce company. 

You are a "batch controller" in the Quality Assurance department and you are being trained on the job by Mark. He walks you up to a vat, instructs you to get a clean teaspoon, taste the batch of soy sauce and Mark tells you "Yeah. This batch is too salty, so you need to add a little water." and then he pours water in. 

Now this analogy is flawed because this job and process almost certainly doesn't exist, but I'll press on. 

You think "Sweet. Easy peasy. Saltiness is bad. Just add water." so Mark leaves you to it, and you go around adding water to every batch to ensure they aren't salty.

Your error is an easy fix in this analogy. When Mark checks in to see how you are going, he tastes some of the batches and remarks "Oh! No, I'm sorry. These are two watery what we need to do in this case is reduce them, evaporate some of the excess water until the flavour is right." and Mark gives you a patient smile while he turns the gas or whatever up.

By the end of the first day, you have adjusted your schema to understand that the job is not as simple as "just add water" but in fact you need to train your palette to recognize what adjustments need to be made.

Above is Monty Python's Dennis Moore sketch, a period-sketch for that era of highway banditry. If you can't be bothered watching it, here are the bones: Dennis Moore is a silly bandit that robs flowers from the rich to give to the poor. The poor point out to Dennis Moore that flowers aren't really helpful, and ask him to steal something they can use. Dennis Moore takes note and starts robbing the rich of their wealth and giving it to the poor, then paradoxically, he crosses a threshold where he is now stealing from the poor and giving to the rich having totally redistributed the wealth.

The sketch may seem ridiculous, but the mid-to-late 70s were a period where labour unions were so strong that capital went on strike. The incidence of stagflation is what lead to the Neoliberalism of the Reagan-Thatcher 80s. At the moment, the working class is too weak against the asset owning class, but the point is, it's not as simple as just add regulation it may not seem like it, but capital needs to be able to collect a risk premium to have any incentive to invest. That's the cliff-notes version of what began to happen in the 70s. You had scarce labour supply meaning if a company grew it's revenues by 4% the workforce could strike until it had secured a 4% pay rise. At some point, the people investing in the firms were like "what's the point of building a firm that employs people when I can just park my money in a government bond and earn a risk free 3%?"

This issue of calibration is what is so frustrating for me, trying to find people to stimulate me intellectually. Many people are capable of identifying real problems, but then posit oversimplified solutions, likely because of what Stephen Fry said at the beginning of the current culture war era on Dave Rubin's show: "People want things to be simple but they aren't."

A job is much less stressful if all problems are identical, and the solution is something you can just add more of until it is fixed. There are many that can point to the excesses of the left or the right, both of which are just plain radical and generally trying to implement old ideas with disastrous track records whether it is Marxist Utopias or Theocratic Orthodoxies, there are fewer who don't then prescribe leaning hard against the guard rail on the left or the right.

Those guard rails don't exist. There's nothing you can figure out today, that will absolve you of needing to recalibrate tomorrow. The fundamental nature of the Universe we live in, is that it's dynamic. Circumstances are changing.

I'm sorry, but you can't just do. You are also going to have to think.