Parallel to the previous sentence with how almost all institutions work today from the local school board to the largest corporations based on the empiricist model. Small groups of those holding power initiate ad hoc objectives that are planned and directed by a professional class, and then carried out by technicians and workers, where the results of the process are empirically examined and fed back to the top in order to prove the validity of the original objectives. The small power group makes corrections to create slightly more informed objectives, which in turn are then passed down to the professional class, and so on and so forth in a never ending loop.
Let me stress the ubiquitous nature of this hierarchical paradigm in both modern times and historically. Every business, government agency, organization, and church that I have observed works like this. For students of history, the parallels should be obvious: Today's CEO, management, and workers equal king, aristocracy, and peasants of times past. The same has come to be true of president, congress, and people, unfortunately.
This kind of system of system is great for those on top but is terrible for everyone else (including professionals and management), especially in complex, technological, modern society.
The empiricist system is fraught with problems everywhere. It takes huge amounts of capital to do things this way because the hierarchy is constantly having to rearrange or replace capital (including human capital, as they think of it) in each iteration of the loop to achieve the objectives. Most people in the chain of command have no real input or decision making ability, and the larger and more complex the system becomes, the less well it works because of imperfect knowledge and lack of creativity of those planning and directing the system. Inevitably, as the system grows and failures increase, the planners increase data gathering, often at each stage of the process, to try to figure out what is going wrong. As experience has shown me, almost inevitably, the problems have to do with aspects of the jobs of those down the chain of command of which the planners have no idea.
Of course, if there were no chain of command, and if people all along the process had equitable authority, and if decisions were made (deduced) democratically by a truly representative body of equal owners, then these problems would not happen ab initio and new creative solutions from everyone could be implemented.
I have noticed over the years de facto planning increasingly is falling to the technicians and workers because traditional professions are being rendered obsolete by technology and because the complexity of processes is beyond the comprehension of small groups people. Most professionals today within institutions, even considering minor privileges, do not have rights and are expendable just like the workers.
For complex systems to work, decision making ability, and therefore power, has to rest equitably among the people: this should be self-evident. What force is so powerful that it overrides what should be patently obvious?
Empiricist Cognition and Capitalism
Enlightenment thinkers have never really understood capitalism and how it militates against the core goals of liberalism itself. Listening to even the foremost economists and their explanations, to my ears, is more akin to divining partially informed mysticism or art than surmising any kind of firm rational understanding of how capitalism actually works. The same is true of the legions of pundits on TV and their explanations of market and Fed chair psychology on any given day.
Current liberal economic theory, just like seemingly everything else in modernity, depends on centuries of empirical knowledge interpreted through complex mathematical equations to explain some subset of conditions and then calling those equations law.
All of us are brainwashed from an early age in this country to believe that wealth inequality is caused by individual merit, differential ability, and some luck. In the empiricist worldview, this is objective fact based on centuries of evidence and "critical thinking". Also, practically everyone from fifth grade and above believes that wealth is distributed normally even if they do not necessarily understand what a normal distribution is. These are powerful prejudices facilitated by the meritocracy, the media, the government, and corporations. I go as far as calling it dogma because it is because it's based on empiricism rather than rational thought and it also happens to be totally wrong.
Just to show how different these modes of thinking are, let me recount how I created a model economy back in 2003. First of all, I treated the economy as a closed physical (i.e., numerical) system at any instant of time, so that at any particular moment there was finite amount of wealth and some distribution of wealth among a finite number of entities.
Second I jettisoned the notion of merit and differential ability as being the cause of wealth inequality. This should be easy to do since even a cursory examination of wealth distributions shows nothing normally distributed whatsoever. If wealth were really based on differential ability, the inverse cumulative normal distribution or something close to it could describe wealth distributions. Instead, real distributions are extremely highly skewed and no known distributions adequately describe them.
So to create my model economy did I go through tomes of empirical evidence and measure hundreds or thousands of variables to create some giant set of mathematical equations to explain everything? Did I parse through a hundred economics books searching for definitions of obscure technical language, financial instruments, and supposed economic law? Did I gather together tens of thousands of people and try to monitor their economic activity in order to infer what was going on? No way. I carefully chose a few key variables and made a few key assumptions a priori, and then used the power of computer technology (computer science is a misnomer) to help me deduce wealth distributions. It did not cost a million dollars for me to do this, nor did it require not require teams of researchers. All it required was some creativity, some innate knowledge, some intuition, programming skills, successive chains of deduction, some trial and error, and computer technology.
Granted, I did use a little empiricism to create the model - maybe 10%, but great majority of thinking used was creative and deductive rather than analytic and inductive (i.e., the way our society works to this day).
Long ago the empiricists were forced to admit that some knowledge is innate in the form of mathematics, yet the deductive process I used for the model was not mathematical per se. There just are not sufficient mathematical identities to deal with building, decimating, sorting, rotating, reversing, indexing, and transposing arrays of numbers.
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