E-M8 Entrepreneurial Management for Eternal Mission

I typically begin my Economics classes with the duscussions of four assumptions that we make in order to study basic economics: Scarcity of resources, ratioanlity, good information and low transaction costs. It is clear that all of these assumptions are at best only sometimes correct. In information economy, scarcity is a meaningless concept. Often there is no point of trading off this for that, we can have both, thus leading us to the world of abundance. In this world influence of the givers, rather than cash of the receivers is the key currency.
Rationality and well informed decision making, while both are in accurate, they are self rewarding and thus at least in a macro sense, they generally work out. Of course, perceptions can shape reality, so questioning the fringes of economics that deal with the exceptions is ripe with opportunity.
Yet, the most fascinating one to me, has been the assumtion of low transaction costs. In last few years we have seen technological transaction costs plumet, only to be replaced with regulatory costs increasing. Every time we add regulations that reduce transparency, we increase the transaction costs and hurt the economy. I am not against regulations, I am only against regulations that make things less transparent. We seem to be getting lots of those coming down the pike and that is unfortunate.
The traditional cry has been to reduce regulation altogether, but that goes against the societal trends that are as old as Arestotle and Maciavelli. So, the only other solution is to build in some clarity and anticomplexity mechanism in to the government’s rule making process. I would love a requirement that in order for the laws to take effect, each senator must hold a public townhall meeting where they have to explain the law to all those who chose to be present. But even that would only reduce the number of bad laws. What we need is a way to increase a number of good, transparent laws.
To accomplish this goal, we must first create a metric system that would be able to monitor all aspects of our society and help our elected officials focus their attention on root cause problems, such as societal fear that has paralyzed this country and is destroying the health and wealth of our great nation.

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