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ECONOMIC GROWTH: if there was a single phenomenon that could be characterized as “emergent”, this would be it.

Dave Snowden posted something about purpose (or was it strategy? in many ways it doesn’t really matter) being an emergent process rather than a north star. The point being that you can’t beam whatever makes orgs work directly into people’s minds.

On the other, more visible side of things, Rory Sutherland is making a killing out of tightly edited minute-long lectures delivering invariably the same lesson — that value is contextual and relational. The implication is that I can’t sit on my computer and decide to “create value”. (It’s far from an original idea, but it *is* getting some long due airtime)

And yet: economic growth as generally understood is precisely value-creation power. Thus my classic refrain (guaranteed to break the ice at parties) that macroeconomics is primum inter pares among systems theories: it deals with very gross causal levers — such as purchasing power and investment — which, under the best circumstances, should set the stage for “value-creating” emergent loops.

The surface ambiguity of macroeconomic data is something like a (yes, Kantian) sublime expression of an ineffable underlying world of human behavior.

This idea of the sublime brings us back to Snowden’s north star, which in economics gets called “development”. The word itself is ghostlike: as if material prosperity was currently “enveloped” — like candy that needs to be carefully unwrapped to be separated from its plastic enclosure as it is retrieved. Everything that’s naive, mistaken or corrupt about “development policy” stems from this north star-like metaphor disguised as a problem statement. But there’s no single problem statement that can be abstracted from social reality and forcefully identified with “development”. Yes, high income inequality is also rhizome.

But this isn’t just about third-world government foibles: “value generation” is everywhere ensconced — in talking points, startup decks and resumes, but also in how people think of what they should be doing. Thus the solution-in-search-of-a-problem syndrome (which is ultimately also the heart of development policy): once you’ve created value, you just have to find someone in enough “pain”. Concepts have consequences.

(This was inspired by a couple of LinkedIn posts and thereafter posted on LinkedIn. But it’s way too erudite for the medium.)