Applied Intelligence…  

A Strategy in Pursuit of a Caribbean Renaissance

 

Introduction

 

Power, the highly sought-after functional mainstay of humanity’s existence throughout time, remains central to the pursuit of prosperity in any society.  Knowledge, capital, and technology are all ingredients to that pursuit and have consistently underwritten prosperity throughout time. And, as history shows, through evidence and analysis, those people, groups, nations that have focused on developing knowledge ecosystems facilitated by technology we're able to thrive exponentially over the very long term.  Today, the world is at a transitionary inflection point, a critical juncture, where many societies around the world are now faced with fundamental economic decisions, whereby new robust transcending technology, where access and utility of it, is becoming increasingly determinant to successful economic outcomes.

 

For the Black populations of the Caribbean, 400+ years of subjugation and dominance must come to an end, now; moving forward in self-determination and self-preservation must be the driving force for a prosperous future existence.

 

Europeans came with a strategic economic plan, for maximum profitability of their enterprises, and states, they took resources, enslaved for free labour, and increased their productivity and output.  Slaves were more valuable than gold because unlike gold the slave could continue to produce output for many years, at no cost. Any business or industry with no cost base will make enormous profits—slavery was all about economics. Barbados towards the latter part of the 17^th century was the richest producing colony for the British in the entire world.  The massive competitive advantages of free labour and natural resources are what built empires for the Spanish, English, French, spreading the wealth through trade and commerce to other European countries—wealth and power became exclusive only to the colonizers, and expanded down linearly—intergenerationally.  This grip on wealth and power manifested into an ecosystem of political power, status, and privilege, where up to today the legacies of those fundamental structures remain firmly in place, and in control of the global political economy.  

 

Therefore, through deliberate, purposeful, and strategic actions, Europeans/the West, managed to secure the lives of their great, great, great, greater, and greater grandchildren, through multigenerational wealth transfers. 

 

The trade and commerce created from the slave economy, colonialism, and imperialism in general, also financed Britain’s Industrial Revolution, translating into enormous modernization and wealth creation, through industry, trade, and commerce, while using the colonies free resources and labour—all symbolized by the building of castles, aristocratic classes, or societies as a show of extravagant wealth, a statement of power, privilege, and white supremacy. 

 

Nevertheless, there remains the same natural resources that Europeans were able to extract, exploit and build their empires through over the many centuries.  However, Black populations in the region have not been able to figure out how to economically organize, and use those existing resources strategically, enterprisingly, to move their societies forward to prosperity and relevance in the global community.  Through the independence period into the modern-day, the region remains stuck in its colonial mindset past; timid in creating its own empowerment structures. Afraid to stand up to academic development agencies, foreign development banks, and like institutions as the UN and IFC that essentially run their lives. Misguided investment development structures have only intensified the dependency culture, and reliance on Eurocentric ‘development’ discourse continues to dominate the region.

 

Economics is not a morality play, it’s a power play.  Do you expect the same people who have been systematically engineering Black people to the bottom rungs of global society for centuries, to suddenly have a change of heart?  Do you believe that they will give up their power and privilege, which they have worked cleverly and systematically for centuries to obtain?  

 

“…racism is not simply a function of individual attitudes, and it can’t be eradicated by changing hearts and minds. Racism is the social, legal, political and economic distinctions that mark and maintain unequal access and entry points to privacy, property, protection, prosperity, and personhood. It is embedded in structures, institutions and ideas, especially those about work, deservedness, representation, redistribution and even the proper role of government”

 

Dr. Debra Thompson

 

Black populations of the Caribbean must wake up and break free of the mental slavery mindset Europeans have so successfully applied to them.  What we must now seek to build is our power ecosystems within the global economy, and by learning from our own colonial history, grasping a non-emotional understanding of economic conflict and scarce resources. Be strategic and scientific in approach, with a realist perspective of the universe, build a playbook to compete and win in the new digital economy.

 

Time and time again, some in the Black community continue to lament about the past, about Africa, “when we were kings and queens,” going on about how we should think of ourselves as kings and queens today, as some type of motivator I imagine?  However, in the real world, kings and queens have lots of gold, cash, property, armies, and a state that pays for their upkeep—we don’t.  So, let’s keep it real, and stop living in a distractive fantasy, otherwise, your dreams will end exactly when you wake up.  

 

The real world has always been run by entrepreneurs, enterprise, industry, all underpinned by technology; however, the Caribbean relies mostly on academics and institutions with no skin in the game, for its economic guidance.  This runs counter to the evidence of how civilizations have developed and prospered since time immemorial.

 

Outcomes for the Caribbean has been a long-drawn-out hot mess of foreign academics and institutions, wannabe educated local elites disconnected with the ordinary people and everyday life. Just a continual vicious circle with all talk and no action—spouting off their ignorance through theoretical econometrics and ‘development’ discourse, instead of common sense and logic, clean data, and real empirical analysis.  This group of people, mainly economists, have had a grip on Caribbean development for over 50 years, which has debilitated the region.  

 

Like everything else in social science, things remain so until they are proven not so.  The very recent (October 2021) event of the Nobel prize in economics shared by David Card, Joshua Angrist, and Guido Imbens, has shined a bright light on a major problem in economics, and particularly development economic theory.  The “CREDIBILITY REVOLUTION” has transformed economics somewhat, but of course, and as usual, that transformation has not found its way to the Caribbean yet.  The old guard institutions and development banks that dominate would not enlighten the region, because it would be a threat to “the system,” their jobs at those institutions, and for the local elites who also draw handsome salaries from these institutions. Therefore, the job of this group is now one of self-preservation—protect their incomes by avoiding the objective truth and real change, all at the expense of local populations.

 

In brief, the credibility revolution exposes the messy real-world economics that has defied development economists’ attempts to establish causality.  David Card essentially won the Nobel prize for his work on how a rise in the minimum wage affects employment—how employment decisions are more complicated than straight economic textbook explanations—how many other influences always contribute to changes in employment.  The main point here is, that it all comes down to using real data instead of theory to get real answers instead of just posing more theoretical questions at nausea, mainly for the instant gratification of articles for peer review.  

 

This year’s prizewinners used “natural experiments” and empirical research to draw conclusions, however, this is still headed for major roadblocks in the application of helping real people, because these “natural experiments” essentially are still relatively in a “controlled environment,” and there are more variables necessary for the equation outside the defined parameters. So, not truly “natural” at all. Although more credible and useful from a research perspective, than the standard error-filled process we’ve been fed in the past.  Still, we must be conscious of using data, it’s not a magic bullet, and careless use of it in search of answers can also lead to the creation of more problems for people, errors in judgement, ineffective solutions, and a general disconnect from real people's lives.

 

Prof. David Card was honest in saying that his profession is too focused on theories versus realities: “I think partly it’s that most economists were from rich families, and never worked as teenagers, and haven’t had experience in real jobs in the market.  A huge number of economists have never actually done anything. They don’t have much contact with real-world situations.”  Lived experiences will always shape how you see the universe, what you accept, so being guided by those with no authentic perspective to real-world situations is counterproductive.

 

Card goes on to say: “I think that’s very depressing; I think that’s why I’m much less optimistic that scientific knowledge and research will change anything. They certainly won’t change anything in the near future.”  Card is being polite to his profession here, but essentially, he’s saying that economists are lazy, always “speculating about things,” arrogant, stuck in their highly restrictive theoretical universe, and not sophisticated enough to be useful to the real world. 

 

What is amazing is how people can be surprised by this, Robin Kaiser-Schatzlein/September 30, 2019, article: “The Tyranny of Economists” asks the question: “How can they be so wrong, so often, and yet still exert so much influence on government policy?”  Kaiser-Schatzlien nails the point that the science of economics is “politics for the technocrats and the well off.”  Economics reveals itself, for those who are paying attention, as “a moral and political science all to itself,” and doctrines simply aren’t coherent enough, so it needs explanation over and over again, becoming a vicious circle of useless noise that only fellow economists can mistake for a symphony.  Kaiser-Schatzlien points out that economists have a creepy secret...they don’t know how the real world works, so they use their PhD status in an effort not to be exposed—they’re always wrong—but have still managed to reduce humanity to a math problem.      

 

Nevertheless, Card’ Nobel prize work is helpful to development economics, and policymaking because it demonstrates the need for life-long learning, innovation, and uniqueness of the circumstances. So, let’s not waste it and push forward to illuminate the plight of the Caribbean people, and expose what the monster of the institutionalization of thinking, and 'development' discourse. What was once shrouded in darkness and corruption must be forced into the very bright light, to push economic development towards real-world situations, experiences, to offer practical solutions that work.

 

From where I sit, academics and ‘development’ agencies are simply extensions of “the system” itself, the status quo, western control of Caribbean psyche and economies to secure cheap commodities to keeping prices low at home, to turn those cheap commodities into high-value products via global trade and commerce.  Secondly, to maintain economically accessible vacation destinations by romanticizing the plantation-house era, a period marked by violence, servitude, and trauma.

 

It seems this credibility revolution has now set off a big upheaval in the field of development economics, so let’s take advantage of what our common sense has always told us anyway, let us rely on doing our own research, our work, our own critical thinking, and application of science and technology to our common economic benefit. Let’s lead ourselves.  We must call out developmental economics for what it is, the “emperor has no clothes” and so, we should not be afraid to criticize something or someone because of the perceived conventional wisdom around that domain.  Particularly when that profession is proven wrong consistently over 95% of the time.

 

Often the PhDs can only think within their theoretical training and is often useless in solving real-world problems.  So “Applied Intelligence… a Strategy…” is an effort to show how real-world quantitative thinking, actions, backed by scientific approaches and rigour is the optimal path forward to solving complex and unique “Caribbean Problems,” without paternalistic hand-holding.  

 

There is firm research that shows that you get better problem-solving results from non-specialists, i.e., non-academics.  Science writer David Epstein demonstrates this in his book “Range…Why Generalists Triumph In A Specialized World,” which shows us that the most efficient path to success, in any domain, is away from reliance on specialist guidance. He dispels the notion that only people that have racked up thousands of hours studying are the best ones to listen to—Range proves how untrue that is—specialization is the exception, not the rule. Epstein’s research also shows that in most fields—especially those that are complex and unpredictable—generalists, not specialists, are primed to excel. Generalists are not restrictive in thinking, and can juggle many interests and concepts, are more creative, more agile, and can connect the dots faster and better than the specialist can. Range shows that being proactive, rigorous, and engrossing can cultivate growth where massive inefficiency once dominated. 

 

Those who can cross domains rather than being drowned in single domain knowledge are more effective at solving problems, specifically because they are exposed to more variables and real situations—they become both knowledgeable and wise. For example, Epstein shows how “experts” operate in silos, while generalists will rely more on data, artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) to master the learning of skills necessary for the task or problem in front of them.  

 

The academics on the other hand only have one playbook—theory, with no real-world application. Generalists can focus their time where needed, using data and AI to connect the relevant and useful insights to the human condition—with enormous speed and accuracy. They embrace diverse and unique experiences and always keep an open mind.  This approach of disruption, science, self-leadership, personal responsibility, and confidence is the prime recipe for the Caribbean Region to thrive in the 21^st century—applied intelligence for a Caribbean Renaissance movement.         

 

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The region remains at the lower-income end of the global economic value curve/supply chain, and the universe rewards those who can create real value, not those who seek aid and charity to continue with a mediocre, if not, a miserable existence.  In the global political economy, if you’re not creating value, profit, you’re simply not valued and society treats you as such—a harsh reality, but still the objective truth. 

 

To change one’s circumstance, one must first understand or see the world for what it is, then develop a strategy to compete effectively within it.  There is no alternative reality, no alternative universe, no one is coming to save you.  Your time in this world is minuscule, don’t waste it fiddling in ignorance of the universe, focus instead on how to jump onto the global wealth curve, get your piece of the action, secure your happiness. Forget about any moral thoughts of “changing the world,” that’s a waste of time, and energy, a big distraction; concentrate instead on changing your very own existence. Put your mask on first!

 

Yesterday I was clever, so I wanted to change the world. Today I am wise, so I am changing myself.

 

— Rumi

 

By recalibrating yourself, your quantum success frequencies will resonate in the universe, impacting your family, friends, those around you, your community, and ultimately the greater Black populations. Power networks will form organically.  This is the fundamental economic bottom-up approach that has been working forever, not the top-down approaches academics with no skin in the game are wrongly filling people’s heads with.  Your success frequency will intensify, creating a natural quantum growth function, drawing in others.  But note, none of this is possible without real capital in the game—no capital, no chance. You still won’t change the world, but you will better yourself, and the lives of others around you. This will lead to confident and continued aggressive expansion of mindset and actions, growing exponentially over time, passing down wealth and opportunity multi-generationally—that’s what it’s all about in the final analysis.  What do you think slavery and colonialism were about? 

 

 

Knowledge acquisition is central to economic growth, so how do we efficiently use knowledge to effectively leverage and brand our intellect, resources, traditions, culture, and values, natural competitive advantages, for economic gains and power?  We need to build a regional economy and society with dignity, that is entrepreneurial, that can compete globally, feed itself, but first, we must change the way we think. Come to terms with the hard objective truths about the roles we have played in our current situation. Be accountable and responsible about “us,” before we look to others—only “us” can change our circumstances.   

 

Decisions based on knowledge, intelligence gathering, deliberate actions, are all holistically central to realizing rewarding future outcomes.  Focused thinking will be the genesis of a true Caribbean Renaissance movement.  Still, we must be hard realists about the world, adapt to the new digital economy, and think and behave relevant to the times with the purposeful pursuit of prosperity and power—write our own story. We must work with sophistication and applied intelligence to dismantle the enduring legacy systems of the past, particularly those that remain in our subconscious minds.  Create new structures to support the setting of new winning conditions.  Awaken with a “fierce urgency of now,” to a higher state of consciousness and the hard objective truths.

 

It is important to remember that we are not products of our circumstances but products of the decisions we make; so, in the end, we must clearly understand that our future is not determined by our past experiences or traumas, instead, it’s determined by the decisions we make in the now.  So, the history of our future rests firmly in the decisions we make in the present.