Integration and Death
There is one parameter by which I judge how far the business space has managed to decay at any given moment. It is the percentage of profit that a mid-scale enterprise allocates to dividend payments.
When everything is sound and honest, this percentage is supposed to be small and stable. The lion's share of the money should flow back into the business. In the case of innovative technological revolutions, the share of profit going to dividends should drop sharply, since mastering new technologies requires additional funds.
Lately, however, the percentage of profit going to dividends is rising everywhere. This means that corporate money, in growing volumes, is leaving the business and going into someone's personal pockets.
Why do the top managers of large companies need such a steadily increasing outflow of funds? On the one hand, high dividend payments will attract new investors. If a company receives a steady, stable inflow of investment, the product it makes eventually ceases to be its main source of income. Needless to say, such a situation is unfavorable for investment in production.
On the other hand, it is quite likely that the largest shareholders thank the companies' top managers, in one way or another, for their solicitude.
Recursive financial flows running from shareholders to top managers and back are a good example of the dangerous, toxic ties that increase the fragility of the whole system.
Can a rapid growth in complexity really be so dangerous? At this point you might recall that the world holds a colossal multitude of objects possessing extremely high and ceaselessly growing complexity. These are human brains. How is it that the system inside our heads keeps raising its level of structural complexity, yet does not collapse?
The answer is simple. The system inside our heads collapses all the time. People fall mentally ill, get hooked on drugs, fixate on the meaningless, sacrifice themselves to any old thing, simply do away with themselves.
But there are many people. There are eight billion of them. People exist in competitive relations with one another. The collapse of some brains, in that case, is an ordinary manifestation of natural selection.
The world's political-economic system, by contrast, strains fiercely toward integrity and monolithic unity. That is, the world badly wants to stop being a multitude of separate economies. It strives to become one big economy.
Human culture has taken a path once indignantly rejected by biological evolution. People are trying to create a gigantic quasi-organism. Something like the Ocean of Solaris.
Such an organism will be mortal and singular. If it dies as a result of a fatal internal error or external aggression, all its "organs" will die too.
A singular quasi-organism dies only once, and its death is the nearer and the more inevitable the higher its complexity.