Inverted Signals

In the inverted world, markets crash upwards. People have more sex and less children. They go to school longer and learn less. Police protect criminals and prosecute patriots. And so on. But why does this phenomena exist?

Institutions become inverted because they naturally demand to be local, but are turned inside out by the incentive structure of the global market.

We force markets to be global by jamming capital into profit-yielding incentive structures that ignore and ultimately, intentionally obscure their negative externalities.

By demanding increasing shareholder returns or improving KPI’s, the institution necessarily compromises on its original purpose, one step at a time, until it becomes completely inverted.

The inversion isn’t a bug, it’s a feature. It’s actually what they’re optimizing for. “But does it scale?” The ability to invert has become a condition for financing. No global institution can actually scale without doing more harm than good. They can only become more efficient at disguising their failures.

What many fail to see, is that the inversion is a signal from the market, and it is up to us to adjudicate the situation.

An inverted institution can only learn inverted lessons. It emits only inverted signals. It can’t be any other way. But it demands a response, and the response is justified.