The following excerpt from LaRouche’s 2000 paper “On the Becomming Death of Systems Analysis” is featured as an appendix in the main feature of the Patriot #8: British Dictatorship or the American System Part 2 – editor of the Patriot
“On the day on which, existing money goes out of existence, as in Weimar Germany 1923, but this time more or less world-wide, what do the existing accountants do?
If we are to recover from the social effects of the currently onrushing disintegration of the present world financial and monetary systems, radically new methods of cost accounting will be required for private enterprises, as also for governmental and related kinds of institutions. The previously used, linear, “connect the dots” tactics, of both financial accounting and of systems analysis, must be abandoned, and replaced. A new standard must be adopted, for cost-accounting, budgetary, tariff, taxation policies, national-income estimations, and related practices.
The pivotal question of all competent cost accounting, is: What causes an increase in the net physical value of the productive powers of labor? For a moment, put aside calculations made in terms of nominal, that is to say financial, prices. Think solely in terms of physical contents of market-baskets of goods and services; measure inputs, as costs (inputs), and as outputs, in those physical terms. Instead of the common practice, of simply comparing ratios of prices of nominal inputs and outputs, seek to define the processes which determine a succession of changes in ratios of physical outputs to physical inputs. As measured in those terms, which increases, or decreases, in specific qualities of expenditure for infrastructure, production and distribution of product, and of which kinds of products, have neither beneficial, nor detrimental impact upon the functionally determined rate of net physical output, as the latter may be measured per capita of both total labor-force and population, and per square kilometer of a nation’s, or region’s surface-area?
Competent answers to those questions, lie outside the domain of a cost accounting based upon financial analysis, and outside the tyranny of those recently popular, pseudo-scientific hoaxes known as the “systems analysis” of the late John von Neumann and the statistical “information theory” of the late Professor Norbert Wiener. In the circumstances defined by the present crisis, we can no longer tolerate those faulty practices, which have been generally accepted standards of professional and related practice for much too long.”
Download the full article The Becoming Death of Systems Analysis published in the March 31, 2000 issue of Executive Intelligence review at www.larouchepub.com/lar/2000/lar_systems_analysis_2713.html
Also, see LaRouche’s 1981 paper: Systems Analysis is White Collar Genocide also available on http://www.larouchepub.com
For an introductory lecture by LaRouche to his 1984 Publication So You Wish to Learn All About Economics, refer to The Power of Labor