What Does It Measure?

Isaac Newton said science measures causes unknown. He could measure the effects of gravity, but could not identify exactly what it is.

Today we identify gravity as an electromagnetic force, but we still speculate as to what causes it. We can create an electromagnetic field with dynamic, physical processes, but that does not mean that gravity is being caused, just accumulated and re-presented.

Risk, like gravity, is a weak force that accumulates, and distributes, with capital. Like gravity, when risk is critically overaccumulated, the capital collapses under its own weight. It is the charge of political-economic analysts to know when that critical mass (the gamma-risk proportion) has been achieved, and how to avert crises if not prevent them. Of course, that means having the tools to measure the extent of the risk.

Newton and Leibniz invented the calculus to measure causes unknown, and today it is also used to quantify and manage the extent of the risk. If you are a military analyst, for example, looking to predict the probability of political-economic crises that results in civil disorder, you need to know how financial engineers "make the market."

How the market is made (the modeling used) determines the probable extent and timing of the risk, as well as the probable indicators and timing of stability. This is all a fuction of signals intelligence that the military is currently engaged and that our modern-day federalists are looking to operationalize with the threat of international terrorism. Beware of this trend!

What is being politically measured with the signals being detected is timing correlated with rhetorical pitch and policy action, mobilizing the use of military assets in support of domestic policy that increases the gamma risk. Understand that this does not mean direct use of military assets to enforce a policy agenda, like the bonus march during the recession that followed WWI, but indirectly.

While analysts were warning of the elements put in process to accumulate the risk into the Great Recession, for example, we were distracted with the war on terror. That legacy lives and can easily result in the Great-Great Recession without the attention of The People focused on public policy that deconsolidates the risk.

Terrorism that exports from Eastern monarchies forces The People's attention into achieving military security. Economic policy then gravitates to a high level of instability. It becomes a high-risk/reward environment that will, for example, support the risk premium for a barrel of oil (which includes a weak dollar) which, in turn, supports the crisis proportion and the need for elite authority to politically manage the risk over The People.

The Tea Party caucus will ally with the federalists to support what Jefferson called counter-revolutionary, "monocratic" tendencies. It will be hard for the caucus not to be captured by the gravitas of accumulated political power. It will be much more difficult for The People to keep the caucus on course to alleviate the immediate source of our insecurity by realizing what the budget deficit really measures is the detriment caused by the Republican economic agenda, forcing us into the Great Recession.

Republicans would like to convince us that risk analysis measures causes unknown. We can measure the effects of risk, but cannot, without speculating, identify exactly what the source of it is despite their agenda having clearly accumulated risk into the crisis proportion that we now suffer.

We've gone from tragedy to farce which, if you are a federalist, means it is time to ensure the civil order from the top down in priority. Federalists will be reminding us, meanwhile, that our founders ensured a heritage of civilian authority over military assets to protect the sovereign (The People) from abuse of power and from threats to liberty both foreign and domestic.

When military assets are employed to manage the risk directly or indirectly, what is the extent of the risk being measured?