I love the economic thinking and modeling of Simon Wardley ... he had an interesting summary recently about "the market" vs "the people" from a couple weeks ago:
Emphasis mine:
Emphasis mine:
That said, how well the approach works (i.e. its success) will influence the standing of the collective (i.e. the US itself) and its values. If the approach succeeds then the standing of the US will rise and this value of “market over people” will become twinned with success and embedded in the memory of everyone. If, however, the US fails to manage COVID-19 then its standing against China could fall and this value of market over people will become embedded as a failure in the memory of everyone.
The latter leads to darker paths unfortunately. From the map above, a collective’s success requires its value to diffuse and become accepted. There are many enablement systems in this process, one of which is propaganda. If this map is a reflection of reality then it is likely that if the US is failing then we will see increasing and more aggressive use of terms like “China virus”, “Wuhan virus” and other attempts to deflect the cause of failure rather than admission that the collective’s value was wrong.
The latter leads to darker paths unfortunately. From the map above, a collective’s success requires its value to diffuse and become accepted. There are many enablement systems in this process, one of which is propaganda. If this map is a reflection of reality then it is likely that if the US is failing then we will see increasing and more aggressive use of terms like “China virus”, “Wuhan virus” and other attempts to deflect the cause of failure rather than admission that the collective’s value was wrong.
