18: Slipping the DISC: State of The Portal and Chapter 2020: Difference between revisions

===Embedded Growth Obligations (EGOs)===

Now in the story that has this major through-line that we've been following, the next thing that happens that's really important is a guy named [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Derek_J._de_Solla_Price Derek de Solla Price] starts to calculate that science is on an exponential trajectory, and rather than thinking that that's a great thing. He starts to understand that anything on an exponential trajectory can't really go on, because it's going to burn itself out. And if science is the original seed corn if you will of technology and technology of economics, then effectively what's going to happen in science is going to percolate through a chain through technology and into the economy with a potential stagnation coming. Now, he started to arrive at these ideas, I think, at Yale in the late 1950s.

It was not well understood what he was talking about—and still I'm always shocked that the book [https://www.amazon.com/Science-Since-Babylon-Derek-deSolla/dp/0300017987 Science Since Babylon], which he wrote, and which discusses this issue, is so much less well-known than say [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Kuhn Thomas Kuhn]'s [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Structure_of_Scientific_Revolutions The Structure of Scientific Revolutions]. For some reason, this is so dispiriting to so many people that we actually don't discuss it.

Studying this work led to the idea of talking about EGOs, that is, Embedded Growth Obligations. Now, Embedded Growth Obligations are the way in which institutions plan their future predicated on legacies of growth. And since the period between the end of World War II in 1945 and the early 70s had such an unusually beautiful growth regime, many of our institutions became predicated upon low-variance technology-led, stable, broadly distributed growth. Now, this is a world we have not seen in an organic way since the early 1970s, and yet, because it was embedded in our institutions, what we have is a world in which the expectation is still present in the form of an embedded growth obligation. That is, the pension plans, the corporate ladders, are all still built very much around a world that has long since vanished.

We have effectively become a Growth Cargo Cult. That is, once upon a time, planes used to land in the Pacific, let's say, during World War II, and Indigenous people looked at the air strips and the behavior of the air traffic controllers, and they've been mimicking those behaviors in the years since as ritual, but the planes no longer land. Well, in large measure, our institutions are built for a world in which growth doesn't happen in the same way anymore.

All right, what then happened was that a different structure, which I have termed the Gated Institutional Narrative came to become repurposed. Now the Gated Institutional Narrative is like an exchange—a financial exchange, if you will, except it's an exchange of information and ideas. And in order to actually participate in this particular special conversation, you need to have a seat on the exchange, that is, you need to write for an important paper, like the Wall Street Journal, or you need to be a senator or a congressman so that you can gain access to the news media, or you need to be sitting at a news desk.

In any of these situations, whether you're a professor, or a reporter, or a politician, if you can gain a seat inside of the Gated Institutional Narrative, you can attempt to converse with other people with in that particular conversation. The rest of us do not really have the same level or kind of access to this highly rarefied discussion, and I've previously compared this to what we would term a "promotion" inside of the world of professional wrestling. It's an agreed-upon structure in which people often agree to simulate dispute, rather than actually have disputes, because somebody could get some really seriously injured, but they're in fact working together to produce an engaging and regular product for mass consumption. The problem with this Gated Institutional Narrative is that, in general, it doesn't contain the most important ideas, and that is where the gating function comes in.