Is our world becoming too complex to manage? Can all societies supply the ingenuity they need to meet the challenges they face?
Is our world becoming too complex to manage? Can all societies supply the ingenuity they need to meet the challenges they face?
Must we in response to the challenges before us turn ourselves and our societies into analogues of panicky crews?
Must we become tightly integrated decision making unit hypecharged with adrenaline and fighting to stay on top of events?
Performance is powered by the effective use of financial, technological and human capital. Of the three, human capital is (proving to be) the most challenging to be secure, the most elusive to quantify and the most critical for success.
We must provide unrivaled breadth and depth of services to help our clients maximize the values of investments made in and by the people. We must differentiate ourselves by providing integrated human resources transformation technology and solutions to support administrative business improvement and change.
Clients seek services from a range of people with management issues.
Our strategic human resource solutions range from helping institutions align their policies and strategies to reign their service delivery models and architectures.
Ideas are the critical input in the production of more valuable human and non human capital.
But human capital is also the most important input in the production of new ideas while physical capital computers, telephones and laboratory equipment often help human capital: a trained person is still the key input in the process of trial and error, mentoring and innovation, experimentation, guessing, hypothesis formation, and articulation that ultimately generates a valuable new idea that could be communicated to others and used by them in any given economy, the flow of ideas leading to useful technologies is a direct result of investment in human capital (in education and research and development).
Technological Ingenuity Social Ingenuity
• Technical solutions like better grains and deeper wells
• Technical ideas, like manufacturing techniques industrial designs chemical formulae
• Better and faster communications tools
N.B/ space adjusting and resources converting techniques • Institutional solutions like special banks to give farmers credit or short-term arrangements to transfer food from productive to food-scarce regions
• Social ingenuity is supplied by people at all levels of society.
• Consists of ideas for solving various kings of collective action problems arise when groups of people/societies try to provide public goods, whose benefit every body shares. Social ingenuity keeps free riding to a minimum
The creative distraction of capitalism sustains a monopolistic competition because technological innovations are continually overthrown and replaced each turnover of technology creates an interval during which the innovation exploits its temporary dominance of the market.
It is a race in which there is no dominant ultimate winner but significant rewards go to whoever is in the lead. But ideas do not have to be new to be useful.
The practical ideas used to create reform and maintain institutional and social arrangements are just as important as technological ideas or perhaps even more important.
Though the two (social and technical ingenuity) are intimately connected but generally, social ingenuity is a pre-requisite to technical ingenuity.
We need social ingenuity to set up and maintain public and semi-public goods such as markets, funding agencies, education and research organizations and effective government.
Social ingenuity depends on a system of institutions that provide financial incentives to technological entrepreneurs and innovators, it aids regular contacts and communication among experts and it channels finances to those technological projects with the greatest prospects of success.
Society, therefore, needs ingenuity to get ingenuity, which means it is both an input and an out put of the economic system.
But most economic activities take place outside of factories. Ideas include the innumerable insights about packaging, marketing, distribution, inventory control, payment systems, information systems, transactions processing, and quality control and work motivations, which are all used in the creation of economic values in a modern economy.
Necessarily our prosperity is a function of both the natural resources available to us and the ingenuity we apply to those resources, some of which come in institutions and policies for resources management
In the real world, the quantities and characteristics of the natural resources available to us help determine how much and what types of social ingenuity in the form of institutions and policies we need to be prosperous.
Unfortunately, some economic optimists, while they emphasize institutions and policies, tend to deemphasize resources. Indeed, entrepreneurs are essential to this process; they exploit economic imbalances or opportunities in the economy disequilibriums caused by rapid technological, demographic or social changes or by natural resources scarcities…to create new ideas that promote growth.
Thus, ep (nr ip), where ep is economic prosperity, nr is natural resources available, and ip is the institutional policies applied.
Getting the prices right as economist say demands copious social ingenuity arrangements. Modern markets are a complicated and often fragile web of social arrangements.
An astonishing range of institutions, laws, regulations and rights are required to make up this web including laws governing contracts, price rigging, credit, and the excessive concentration of capital limits in particular capitals, or corporate liability, regulatory regimes for stock and bond markets, stable banking systems, predictable and unrestrained fiscal policies; strong; and incorrupt judicial systems to enforce contracts and agreements among levels of government permeating the movement of labour and capital.
Such arrangements don’t materialize on their own. They are put in place by governments which are the essential suppliers of the social ingenuity in the form of good economic institutions and policies that undergird markets.
Governments also provide other key supports to markets, including skilled civil services, public education, well regulated transportation, communication and energy infrastructure and relatively balanced distribution of wealth.
But government must be strong and competent to successfully provide all these institutions, policies and other market supports.
Indeed, setting up a vigorous market, demands accurate intelligence, inventiveness, active agencies, and sophisticated responsiveness to a changing economic reality.
However, while economists do accept that certain institutions and policies are vital to well functioning market, they are less keen to acknowledge the control role of government in setting up and running the needed institutions and devising and implementing the needed policies.
Instead they imply that the relationship between government and the market is essentially antagonistic or mutually exclusive; more intervention by government means a less efficient market and as a result, less wealth; less intervention by government means a better functioning markets and more wealth.
But the reality is not so simple. The relationship between government and the market is decidedly symbiotic: government creates the intricate conditions for the riving markets; while markets create the wealth that (when taxed) strengthen government.
Globally, the most sophisticated and vigorous markets don’t operate in zones that government has completely evacuated or where its intervention is minimal.
Even in the most laissez-faire capitalist economies, markets float on a sea of complex institutions; regulations and government interventions.
Government is important, and differences in government competence and capability in the kinds of institutions and policies that prevail in an economy, help explain why some societies are rich and others are poor.
Yet , economic theories have generally not identified government as an important determinant of growth.
Poor countries can and indeed do grow faster than rich ones, bit only if conditions are right: a number of factors have to be favorable, including rates of population rates, stocks of human capital and government economic policies in particular, government is acknowledged to be important, but its role is largely left unexplored.
The distaste of government by economists based on a deeply held assumption that it is the antithesis of the market leaves many unwilling to analyze thoroughly its often constructive role.
Yet this role deserves much more attention. National boundaries mark the borders of public policies and institutions that are not only different, but in some cases better and in others worse.
Those countries with the best policies and institutions achieve most of their potential, while other countries achieve only a tinny fraction of their potential income.
Poor countries have economic institutions and policies that provide the wrong structure of incentives.
The structure of a country’s economic incentives depends not only on what economic policies are chosen in each period, but also on the long run or institutional arrangements: on the legal systems that enforce contracts and protect property rights and on political structures, constitutional provisions, and the extent of special interest lobbies and cartels.
If economic institutions are key, then so is government; and if government is key then so are the political and social forces that shape how government works.
The evaluation of economic institutions and policies is effected by factors far outside the conventional domain of economists, such as the balance of social power among groups the level of government and business corruption or the extent of anti-foreign investment.
Such factor fundamentally determine whether a society can realize the full economic potential inherent in the capital, labour natural inherent, and the economically useful ideas ingenuity available to it.
If a society is riven with internal conflicts, debilitated by corruption, or paranoid about foreign investment, it will be for poor than it should be.
What economists quite often think could be reduced to members, mechanism; equilibriums would .turn out to be vague, path dependent, non-linear and socially and culturally complex.
We need those new ideas that tell us how to reconfigure the rock, soil, wood, water and air around us into the miraculous things that serve our needs.
However, these are a consequence not just of economic but also of social factors, like political struggles that shape market institutions and policies.
Modern markets are without doubt, an important part of the solution to the ingenuity supply problems faced by both rich and poor societies, but they are intricate, fine-termed and vulnerable to the vagaries of politics, social conditions, and struggles for power.
Our governments must be competent, strong and ingenious if we are to set them up and get them working right across the citizenry space.