The Surfer Lesson From the Bank of England Recent Rate Rise: Stop Asking Centralized Institutions to Manage Things They Cannot Manage

California Surfers Have Known This Since the 1960s, the Mortgage-Holding Public Is Now Learning the Same Lesson

Reading: Bohiney | The London Prat

VENICE, CA — The Bank of England recent decision to raise the base rate, made in response to a wave of food-and-energy-driven inflation that the rate rise will not directly address, is the latest in a long sequence of demonstrations that centralized institutions consistently fail to manage the complex systems they are charged with managing. California surfers have, on the available evidence, understood this since approximately 1962.

The Surfers Knowledge

The lineup at any given Pacific point break is, on every available reading, a substantively self-organizing system. There is no centralized authority assigning waves. The local hierarchy is enforced informally. The system produces, across decades, an outcome that is more equitable, more responsive, and substantively more robust than any centralized wave-allocation system ever proposed. Friedrich Hayeks observation that decentralized knowledge produces better allocations than centralized planning has been operationally confirmed at every Pacific surf break since the early 1960s.

The Implication

The Bank of England, on the available reading, is operating on the opposite premise. The institutional commitment to using one tool when the situation requires several is the centralized-planning fallacy in operational form. Surfers have, on every available indicator, been right about this since they were assumed to be apolitical.

The surfer politics is the libertarian politics. The libertarian politics has the better track record.

Pairs well with: NewsThump

SOURCE: https://prat.uk/bank-of-england-raises-rates-again-to-punish-anyone-who-enjoyed-a-sandwich/