[ExI] AIG Bail out

[Damien Broderick]

At 05:32 PM 9/21/2008 +1000, Stathis wrote:

>I don't understand
>why you seem to think that it is *necessarily* a bad idea. It's like
>claiming that natural selection can never be improved upon by medicine
>or engineering, and that even to try would invite disaster.

The difference is presumably that natural selection is entirely 
mindless, while the theory behind an agoric market (or whatever it's 
to be called) is that all the actors are intelligent, somewhat 
informed agents whose choices are at once diversified and when summed 
still open to reasoned responses in a subtle and fluent process of 
feedbacks. While top-down central controls place far too much 
executive manipulatory power in the paws of a small fallible 
backscratching cabal sharing a narrow ideology and far too little information.

This need not mean, I'd have thought, that in a representative 
democracy the elected deputies might not, for example, place severe 
constraints on mindless computerized trading than is easily trapped 
into positive feedback disaster, not to mention placing equally 
savage constraints on corporate monoliths that specifically block the 
action of those many agents whose distributed crowd/cloud wisdom is 
supposed to be tapped by the market.

But I'm an Australian and don't understand these things.

Damien Broderick