Engineering evolution into nonbiological systems
A. The Problem
Biological evolution confers advantage. Failure to evolve usually confers the reverse.
Nonbiological systems, such as corporations, economies and governments, are the same.
Corporations that fail to evolve risk being overtaken by those evolving greater advantages. This has become such an obvious dynamic elaboration would be redundant.
Governments and economies are a far less obvious dynamic, yet they are even more important.
Why do some governments and economies evolve while others remain static? As always, national psychology and culture are determinative.
Elaboration here is illustrative. China and the USA are good examples.
China’s current government evolved from a standard Communist Central Committee Command Economy — nimble in decision making yet ineffective in providing necessary good and services. It then evolved quickly into a Communist Capitalist hybrid and its GDP soared. It retained the nimble decision-making attributes and combined them with capitalist structures.
In the roughly third of a century since that evolution, China’s GDP went from roughly a fifteenth of the USA GDP to roughly two thirds to three quarters of USA GDP. If compared by Purchasing Power Parity, China’s GDP is now very similar to USA GDP. With China’s GDP growth averaging about 6 percent, the size of their economy will triple every two decades.
The USA’s government evolved from a British and German colonial culture ruled by the British Empire. A group of seditious tax evading ungrateful mostly slave owners decided they could cut their taxes by fomenting revolution and inviting foreign armies onto the soil of the Empire to aid their cause. This, of course, caused the authorities to express themselves in unpleasant ways, much as they would express themselves today if you tried the same thing. The result was a distrust of authority and, after the revolutionaries were successful, thanks to a feckless parliament and the later distractions of insane French generals, the revolutionaries enshrined their distrust in a wonderful constitution — which provided the checks and balances that generally keep the government from going completely off the rails.
The problem with a government designed to do nothing, or at least, do something with great difficulty, is that it is not nimble. It does not anticipate trends and issues and deal with them decisively. It cannot evolve easily.
Hence we have a situation of decades of declining GDP growth, decades of stagnant wages for most workers, declining life expectancy for some segments of the population and fertility rates below replacement — the citizens are literally dying off and the government is unresponsive. With our current GDP growth rates of about 2.5 percent, the economy will only grow about sixty percent in the next two decades.
Evolution needs to be engineered into the USA system. Not all evolution is good, but it is better to try things and, if they fail, adjust, instead of doing nothing.
B. An Approach to a Solution
The structure of the USA government is not going to change. It is too ingrained, beloved and relatively functional. Therefore, if you want to engineer evolution, you must add to the structure.
Nonbiological system evolution is not directly engineered. It is a result of a fortuitous combination of opportunity and wisdom. Deng Xiaoping had the opportunity and the wisdom. Wisdom cannot be explicitly engineered but opportunity can. Wisdom must be hoped for.
To implement a mechanism that increases the potential of advantageous organizational evolution, it might be as easy as having regular constitutional conventions with the power to change any law and propose any constitution changes, to be ratified by the states.
Such conventions might have one person chosen from each 100000 citizens; be chosen by the governor of each state; be a high level educator in government or economics and not involved directly in politics. They could be held every 12 years with proposals circulated for the first ten, then the representatives chosen who would discuss them for the next 23 months and finally vote on the last month.
Such an additional structure would not guarantee organizational evolution but it would, by increasing the opportunity for it, increase the probability of it.
The Congress would have to lay out the protocols and powers of the conventions. It might be reticent due to fears of a loss of power. This would be wrong because any law change implemented by a Constitutional Convention could be reversed by Congress. Proposed changes to the Constitution would still have to be ratified by the States. There is no infringement on the power of Congress.
Congress may also be unwilling to implement regular constitutional conventions because the USA is still engorged with perceptions of its innate superiority. When the day comes that China has three carrier battle groups for every one of ours, three stealth aircraft for every one of ours, three times as many missiles and three times as many foreign bases, Americans, being the competitive sort, may become more open minded.
C. The Summary
Nonbiological systems must evolve or be outcompeted. The most important nonbiological systems that must evolve are governmental and economic systems. To accomplish this, the ability and emphasis to evolve must be engineered into the mechanism. Evolution must be promoted as a goal.
