ShrinkWrapped

Simplifying Complexity

Studying complex systems and the failure of complex systems is fascinating in and of itself, but it has become a more serious discipline in the last few years and understanding how complex systems fail is increasingly relevant to our understanding of our increasingly complex world. 

Joseph Tainter takes the position that complex societies start to fail when the marginal returns on increased complexity in solving societal problems peaks and starts to diminish; it is all down hill from there.  More and more resources are devoted to shoring up a system that is becoming more and more inefficient in addressing the needs of the population. 

Two stories today bring up the issue of complexity and how it impacts problem solving.  Dinocrat links to articles discussing (some in) our society's singular devotion to controlling CO2 and the related desire to bring high speed rail to that tiny percent of Americans who desire it, subsidized by the far larger cohort who must fund it.  Go to his post for the links; there is little new here.  Environmentalists believe that we need to control CO2 and get people out of their cars in order to save the planet.  Dinocrat's comment is apt:

Long twilight struggle

Some ideas are merely bad; some ideas are spectacularly bad. Occasionally you can distinguish those that are spectacularly bad by the over-the-top way they are defended. Alas, there’s no way to change the minds of some people. The Copernicans didn’t change older minds as much as they waited for the believers in Ptolemy to fade from the scene.

In contrast, Galrahn posts a neat little article about a recent development in the struggle by Drug dealers to keep our demand for drugs satisfied:

Nacro Subs

This story in the Houston Chronicle on the captured narco submarine in Ecuador last year is an interesting read.

...

The article notes the submarine could submerge up to 50ft and make 20 knots for short periods of time on batteries. It is quite remarkable what can be built in the middle of a jungle these days.

On the surface there is little that connects these stories yet on a deeper level they tell us a great deal about the ways in which our Society may fail.  On the one hand we have a story about clever people using relatively modern technology, which has become quite user friendly as the information content of the technology has exponentially increased, to solve a difficult problem.  For a relatively low ROI, the Drug Cartels can move their product to America while maintaining the price point at a place where they can satisfy their customers while making themselves incredibly wealthy and powerful.  The United States in return will ramp up the complexity (and cost) of our response in an attempt to achieve the impossible, ie stopping drug abuse.

Consider next, the stories about CO2 and high speed rail.  Once again our society is devoting immense resources to solving insolvable problems.  Even if you accept the premise that human produced CO2 is causing Global warming, the ROI of controlling CO2 is negative.  In other words, we can spend immense amounts of money and in the end, effect the level of CO2 in the atmosphere minimally, more likely not at all.  Our resources devoted to combating CO2, at the current level of understanding of the problem and with current technology, is money flushed down the drain; it is a complete waste.  Likewise, since there are no rail lines in America outside of long haul freight trains that actually make money or even break even, the resources devoted to high speed rail (which few want to ride except as a novelty) are resources wasted with negligible returns.

One of the problems facing our society is that we have lost the ability to determine what kinds of problems are solvable versus the kinds that are not solvable.  We spend fortunes trying to erase the testing gap between White Americans and minority Americans yet for the last 100 years that gap has never changed.  We do not yet understand why the gap exists or how to change it (except by dumbing down the tests until they are meaningless) yet we persist in increasing the complexity of our efforts. 

Please note that it does not matter if you believe that AGW exists and is biome threatening or if you believe that the gap between white and minority success is caused by society's racism (or minority culture or their genetic constitution).  It does not matter if you believe that drug use is a terrible bane that should end.  The salient fact is that with our current technology and understanding of the problems, they are not solvable no matter what we do.

Perhaps Tainter's thesis needs to be amended.  Perhaps it is not simply that the marginal returns on investment in complexity decrease over time but that Societies go amiss when they lose the ability to distinguish those problems that are possible to solve versus those that have no current solution?

[NB: My oxymoronic title refers to the fact that Complexity always fails when we attempt to do the impossible.  If we do not first define the problem and understand its causes or approach it as a "trial and error" engineering problem and respond to changes we evoke or produce, we cannot hope that by simply increasing the complexity of our efforts we will produce a better outcome.]

The Fatal Illness and Impending Death of Multiculturalism

Many ideas that have motivated men become doomed well before the opinion leaders notice the inevitability of their decline and death.  For example, in June, 2007 I suggested that Anthropogenic Global warming had already peaked as a political issue:

The Beginning of the End for "Global Warming"

The "Global Warming" catastrophe has not yet occurred (safely established as >40 years in the future) but the first signs of the Apocalypse are scheduled for the next several years, when the danger will supposedly become irreversible.  We are much too sophisticated to prematurely ridicule the alarmists* but it is safe to say that the "Global Warming" crisis as a poltical issue has already passed its peak; its political utility will end with the 2008 Presidential elections and it remains yet to be seen how influential it will be as an election issue. 

[*The ridicule that Al Gore, John Edwards, and other energy profligate AGW alarmists have been subject to has been achieved the old fashioned way: They earned it.]

There are several signs that we have passed the peak of the "Global Warming" inspired hysteria and unmistakable evidence that as a serious political issue, it will have diminishing effects as time goes on.

Three years on it is safe to say that the AGW alarmists are laying low and that their glorious plans to leverage AGW into an international quasi-governmental structure designed to redistribute wealth are moribund.  We will surely hear less and less about AGW as time goes on. 

It is now clear that another treasured liberal idea, Multiculturalism, has passed its peak.  Multiculturalism is dieing; the dagger to the heart of Multiculturalism is the European Debt Crisis, which at its core is a crisis of liberalism and multiculturalism.

 Liberalism is a workable political philosophy under two conditions:

1) The majority of a population is composed of industrious, hard working individuals willing to tolerate relatively high levels of taxation to support those less willing or able to earn a "decent" living.  As time goes on, the definition of "decent living" (in other manifestations, known as a living wage or an ever rising poverty level above which everyone deserves to live) rises.  Today, people living in "poverty" in the West do not worry about food or shelter; rather they worry (if they worry at all) about obesity (apparently caused by lack of access to fresh fruits and vegetables, if one is to believe various self appointed spokesmen), cable television and flat panel TV availability.  The ranks of the homeless are predominantly filled with people suffering from chronic Psychiatric problems, drug and alcohol abuse, and in small numbers, ideologically committed squatters.  (The latter are more common in Europe than America today.)

2) The economy is expanding.  With an expanding economy the cost of social welfare programs is absorbed by the productive with minimal discomfort.  Once a recession or slowdown occurs, the pain of paying the taxes required to support others' welfare becomes less tolerable.  If the slowdown becomes chronic, the always increasing needs of the "entitled" increasingly impinges upon the ability and willingness of the productive to maintain the social safety nets.

The European Debt Crisis represents a failure on both counts.  Its roots are in the Multicultural mindset that insists that all peoples and all cultures are equivalent.  Thus the Greek grasshoppers are assumed to be exactly as productive as the German ants.  Now that the Eurozone economies have slowed, along with much of the rest of the developed world, the needs of the entitled Greeks (soon to be followed by the Italians, Spanish, Portuguese, Irish, et al) are seriously impinging upon the Germans who are expected to pay the price to preserve the EU, a structure which embodies the fantasy of Multiculturalism.

All indications are that any recovery in Europe (and America) is likely to be anemic.  The boom times are over, at least until we get our financial houses in order, which could take many years especially if we continue to delay the day of reckoning.  With slow growing economies unable to painlessly maintain the welfare state from its excess abundance, the willingness of Culturally distinct populations to support Others will diminish.  The staggering loss in the recent regional elections by Angela Merkel's party is instructive.

The high water mark of Multiculturalism is behind us.  Non-assimilated populations who insist upon living off our largess or insist upon "biting the hand that feeds them" (in the case of homegrown Islamic terrorists) will find the larger population increasingly unwilling to indulge in the fiction that everyone's culture, even those that are manifestly less productive,  is perfectly and exactly equivalent.

If the Germans and the Greeks cannot find a way to assimilate, how can we expect people who are even more disparate to assimilate?  America has traditionally allowed anyone to join our club if they agreed to give up their old culture (not completely but in some essential parts.)  Those who desire only to transplant their old culture to a new setting will find themselves less and less welcome in the West.  As always the strongest backlash will occur in Europe, which has a long history of dealing with minorities in unpleasant ways.  In America we will be more circumspect and leave open the opportunity for anyone who wishes to assimilate and join us.  However, our derivatives of multiculturalism (Affirmative Action, Diversity) are going to fade from the scene one way or the other.  Either we will become a more meritocratic society or, I suspect as more likely, a parallel economy will continue to develop (see Resilient Communities) and the unproductive will be walled off, out of sight of the majority, behind (admittedly) leaky barriers. 

NB: The very liberal Roger Cohen agrees with me, though I doubt he appreciates what portends:

Europa! Europa!

No, the blame for the Greek mess lies much deeper: in allowing Greece into the euro in the euphoria of 2000 and then watering down the stability pact (deficits not to exceed 3 percent of national output) for France and Germany; in the current post-European German condition; and in the demise of any cohesive E.U. ambition as the British view of a loose trade pact rather than political union prevails.

Greece used to inflate away its inefficiency. It’s O.K. not to pay taxes if you can impose taxation in the form of devaluations. That became impossible with the euro, but the practices — of tax evasion and rampant corruption and 14 months’ salary — remained until the world woke up to the fact that Athens has a 13 percent deficit as well as a new E.U.-funded airport.

Europe now faces the choice Timothy Geithner faced in the United States over a year ago: costly containment or collapse. I don’t see a serious alternative to the $140 billion E.U. and International Monetary Fund Greek rescue; and an even bigger E.U. emergency funding facility should help shore up confidence. But the core problem — that the euro has bound vastly disparate nations in a halfway house where monetary and fiscal policy are not under unified direction — will fester.

It will fester in part because Germany has turned away from Europe. Merkel’s delaying tactics have been shameful, costly — and revealing. Solidarity of the European kind is now a dirty word in Germany (“The Greeks are stealing our money!” screams the Bild tabloid) when European solidarity was once Germany’s route out of post-war shame. There’s something a little obscene about Germans wagging a finger at all these Greeks who have crossed the road on a red light.

If solidarity goes, Europe goes. As Ivan Krastev, a visiting fellow at the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna, put it to me, “Without solidarity, how do you convince Poles that Germans are prepared to die for them?

The arrogance of those who have for so long insisted that ideology could trump culture is astounding.

Drop Out

[Update at end]

Previously:

Tune In, Turn On, Drop Out: Introduction

Tune in

Turn On

As per Timothy Leary:

'Drop out' suggested an elective, selective, graceful process of detachment from involuntary or unconscious commitments. 'Drop Out' meant self-reliance, a discovery of one's singularity, a commitment to mobility, choice, and change. Unhappily my explanations of this sequence of personal development were often misinterpreted to mean 'Get stoned and abandon all constructive activity'.

I would suggest that were Leary not to have been hallucinating at the time, the turn from "self-reliance" to "get stoned" would have been predictable.  Self-reliance is always more work than getting stoned and people, individually and in the aggregate, are always struggling to find the right balance between being productive and "abandon(ing) all constructive activity."  In addition, self-reliance has always been a nice idea in theory, but in practice, people coming of age in the 1960s were conspicuously ill prepared to be self reliant, while rejecting the "materialistic, bourgeois life" of their parents.  In reality, few people born into modern 20th century convenience and wealth (we are all Emperors and Kings by historical standards) have the requisite skill set to become truly self-reliant and in the 1960s the idea of self-reliant communities ("Hippie" communes on one extreme, Israeli Kibbutzim on the other) was still only operable at the long tail.  There exists the potential for this to change.

An accumulating mass of large, intractable problems have led many in the West to doubt the ability of our elites to either resolve or adequately manage the various crises facing us.  T. Greer has encapsulated a sense of a distant, incompetent elite, increasingly out of touch, which is fueling disquiet and motivating the still somewhat inchoate Tea Party movement: [HT: Zenpundit]

Americas Greatest Challenge--and Danger.

The American Republic is no longer governed by the people. The rule of the people has been replaced by an oligarchy of well meaning elites. Not limited by professional divides, these men occupy the vaulted halls of business, media, politics, and academia; they are united in only their unshakable faith in their own beneficence. Entirely sure of their ability to cast a society better than that which already exists, these elites are uncomfortable with democratic accountability or financial liability, and constantly seek opportunities to free themselves from both. This desire to be free from the censure of their countrymen easily translates into a bunker mentality that views individual empowerment, decentralization, and meritocracy as assaults on their power and influence. Unabated social stratification, the erection of barriers to political and economic participation, and the implementation of incomprehensible, unreasonable, and ultimately self-serving regulations are the consequences of this paternalistic culture.

Living lives that are isolated from their fellow citizens, the identity of the elite is formed along lines of privilege and class, not ties of community and country. Unsurprisingly, the oligarchy of good intentions has difficulty demarcating the divide between special and national interests. Nor can they be expected to construct sustainable solutions to the problems faced by the nation; a ruling class who has made a lifestyle of shifting blame is not an instrument suited to complete such tasks.

The people have no desire to govern America's Republic. [All emphases in the original.]

Read the entire article for some interesting statistics and discussion.

John Robb has been at the forefront of those who argue that many of our current crises, from the sovereign debt to international crime to Islamic terror are reflections of a hollowing out of the nation state as our technology and globalization erodes national sovereignty.  (This is an denominational data point for those who support securing the borders and addressing illegal immigration; John Robb might hold that we are already too late to rescue our sovereignty; the Tea Party protesters presumably would not agree.)

THE DECLINE OF THE WEST

Most analysts (at least the ones that are worth reading) contend that the sovereign default crisis (Greece, Portugal, Spain, etc.) in the EU is about the collapse of a system that created monetary union without a political union.  It isn't.  That's actually a narrow, parochial view.  Instead, the current sovereign debt crisis is about something much more interesting:  it's another battle in a war for dominance between "our" integrated, impersonal global economic system and traditional nation-states.  At issue is whether a nation-state serves the interests of the governed or it serves the interests of a global economic system.

Who's winning?  The global economic system, of course.  The 2008 financial crisis, the first real battle of this war (as opposed to the early losses in skirmishes in Russia, Argentina, the Balkans, etc.), generated a very decisive outcome.  It was a resounding defeat for nation-states.*   The current crisis in the EU will almost certainly end with the same results.

The entire post is worth reading in full.  He is not sanguine about the prospects of the nation state and suggests that our future is bleak:

When this war ends, and it won't be long, the global economic and financial system will be the victor.  Once that occurs, the nation-states of the West will join those of the global south as hollow states: mere shells of states that serve only to enforce the interests of the global economic system.  ...  The clear and unambiguous message to every citizen of the West will be:  

You are on your own.  You are in direct competition with everyone else in the world, and your success or failure is something you alone control.  

For those that think that this will bring about a surge of peaceful economic vigor, you will be wrong.  It will fragment society and lead to perpetual stagnation/depression, endemic violence/corruption, and squalor.  

John Robb overstates the case, but those who continue to be dependent on the state will have very little recourse but to accept the gradual erosion of their security and wealth, punctuated by moments of terror and precipitous declines in welfare.  This is inevitable; it is math, not fiction.  At the same time, conditions are ripening for truly robust, Resilient Communities to become realistic options for the 20% who are able to act.  (For more on the 80/20 rule, see In Every Generation.]

It is possible to imagine a future 20-40 years from now in which the price of manufactured goods and food moves toward zero.  With mature molecular engineering and highly efficient energy sources (fuel cells that run on water and sunlight, for example)  untold wealth will be available to all.  The economy of the mid to late 21st century is very likely going to be an economy of abundance.  In fact part of our difficulty in lowering unemployment in the next few years will rest upon the decreasing need for human intervention in manufacturing processes.  Robots are effectively replacing manufacturing workers (and food producers) and a large cohort of humanity lacks the requisite mental skills and abilities to take part in an information economy.  These trends will accelerate.

Getting from now to then is going to be a bumpy ride, filled with uncertainty and a rapidly escalating series of systemic shocks.  If our institutions adapt quickly and adequately, we will succeed at muddling through until that time that our debt becomes a minor nuisance rather than a debilitating handicap. 

The Tea Party movement is populated by, among others, people who have traditionally been as self-reliant as current technology allows.  In other words, these are people who actually produce tangible goods and increase value (as opposed to so much of our current elite who produce nothing more than content free verbal arcana of no particular import.  Spend some time perusing David Thompson's site to get a sense of the aridity of modern academic productions.  Or consider these examples of what passes for sophisticated academic thought at our finest Universities.)  If the tea Parties are able to rein in government and enable the American to do what they do best, which is to invent new ways of doing things more efficiently and create entirely new industries along the way, we may yet be able to negotiate the next few years with a minimum of disruption.  If, despite all of our efforts,t he United States continues down the road to a failing European model welfare state, many Americans will begin to Drop Out, although in ways that Timothy Leary would have trouble recognizing.  The early signs are there: parents increasingly taking their children out of failing schools for Charter Schools and home schooling.  This has always been available to the wealthy but is becoming much more available to the middle class.  At the moment, the local food movement is small and available to the wealthy, but as farming becomes yet another industry amenable to IT, local farming will become far more productive (ie, cheaper) and food availability will no longer be hostage to functioning just in time networks.  (It is also likely that animal proteins will eventually be grown in vats rather than on the hoof, which will obviate many dietary and ethical issues.) 

The three things that have always limited Resiliency have been the cost of energy, poorly distributed  expertise and capacity for manufacturing, and the availability of food.  Desktop fabricators are already allowing the glimpse of a new manufacturing base in which machined parts become available to anyone or any community with a fabricator and an Internet connection.  Solar cells and fuel cells are slowly approaching a break even point with regards to price and efficiency.  Small, highly efficient gardening techniques (farm in a box kits?) are becoming practical alternatives for anyone or any community with open space and sunlight.  In practical terms, this means that a small community will be able to manufacture the basics, support their energy demands, and feed themselves even if their are chaotic disruptions to the supply chain.  In fact, several such disruptions are all it would take for such movements toward Resilient Communities to explode. 

As long as the national government does a minimally competent job in maintaining our security and wealth, few will make the move to a Resilient Communities ethic.  However, another 9/11, an escalating series of terror attacks, gasoline at $5 a gallon and other unpredictable shocks to the system will change the current equation for the intrepid 20% and we are finally at that moment in history that Dropping Out does not mean subsistence living but in fact can be amenable to a high tech lifestyle.

Update: Joe Katzman reminds us today of a likely candidate to lend an urgent impetus to the Resilient Communities idea:

What's Killing Afghanistan's Poppies?

Because something certainly seems to be doing so. My personal guess, shared by a friend of mine, is pleospora papaveracea, a fungus that attacks poppies, but leaves other plants alone.

...

The fungus is found in India, Nepal, and Pakistan, so it could be natural. Especially given the Taliban's kick-up of cross-border people flows who handle poppies on both side of the border.

On the other hand, it could also be introduced; the American strategy does indeed seem to quietly revolve around sitting on the poppy growers in Helmland, per Staretgy Page's "This Is The Plan". ...

But how would we know?

...

Something to contemplate, as we face a religion for whom suicide-murder attacks on civilians have become, among many, the highest moral example.

Read the whole thing.

Turn On

Previously:

Tune In, Turn On, Drop Out: Introduction

Tune in

According to Timothy Leary, Turn On meant to

go within to activate your neural and genetic equipment. Become sensitive to the many and various levels of consciousness and the specific triggers that engage them. Drugs were one way to accomplish this end.

In my reinterpretation of his famous slogan, to Turn On means something completely different.  In our quintessentially American way, Turning On means that Americans are becoming actively engaged with their governance in ways that have not been seen since the 1960s.  The difference is that in the 1960s, most of the protesters were fairly narrow minded in their objections tot he various "evils" of Amerika and the vast majority of the counter-culture was primarily focused on personal hedonism.  The attacks against the constraints of bourgeois middle class American mores were essentially expressions of the desire to have access to "drugs, sex and rock & roll."  Only the most ideologically committed, Leftists of all stripes, were interested in actually doing the work involved in changing society.  The rest of us simply went on with our lives (often after a fascinating sojourn through the counter-culture) and/or entered into the ranks of those who actually maintain our functioning society.  The committed ideologues found their way into politics and education with the goal of moving the country to the Left. 

[Few would question that the President's friend, Bill Ayers, qualifies as part of the Left; the jury remains out on how committed a Leftist Barack Obama is, but it is clear that he has at the very least been infused with sympathy for the Left and is doing his best to move the country as far Left as possible during his time in Washington.]

In many ways the 1960s radicals on the Left have succeeded; they have become the Establishment.  One need only consider the progress of our Media, Academia, and the Democratic Party to appreciate how liberal ideas and overtly Left-wing ideas have become incorporated into the weltanschauung of those establishment structures.  This means that rebelling against the man, speaking truth to power, and all the other slogans that the 1960s protesters once took as their own, are now being used against their interests. 

They once chanted "2...4...6...8, Organize and Smash the State."  Now they are the State! 

Even as the Liberal blogosphere attacks the Conservative blogosphere for "epistemic closure" it is hard to miss that the Left side of the political divide is much more concerned with political/ideological litmus tests than the Right, with its mix of Social Conservatives, Economic Conservatives, and Libertarian Conservatives (among whom are included many people who once were members of the counter-culture when it was more Libertarian than the Statist Establishment it has turned into.)

It is the Tea Party movement that has picked up the mantel of change from an increasingly reactionary and sclerotic Establishment. 

[Interestingly, often the same people who accuse the Conservatives of "epistemic closure" also accuse the tea Party Movement of incoherence and lack of policy proposals.  What makes the tea Party Movement so large and multifarious is that it is composed of a great many people who appreciate that we cannot continue to spend money we don't have while promising ever more goodies to people who now expect to be taken care of by government in perpetuity; see Greece for real time examples of what we face down the road.]

Americans have Turned On in large numbers.  They have organized, with the hope of, not smashing the State, but slimming it down and curbing its voracious appetites.  Professor Reynolds describes what is going on in our communities, organizing that is terrifying the Establishment:

Tea Party movement likely to have unglamorous but effective future

But rallies without follow-through are just rallies. And the Tea Party movement is now following through with the grunt work of politics: Organizing precincts, waging primary battles, registering voters, and compiling mailing lists.

None of this stuff sounds exciting. It doesn't look exciting, either. At my blog, InstaPundit, people e-mail me pictures from organizing meetings. The pictures aren't visually interesting -- they generally show a lot of people sitting on folding chairs in a meeting room somewhere. But when I post them, I always get mail from readers who are excited to see this sort of thing going on.

And, really, why shouldn't they be excited? This is democracy in action. If we're not excited about that, what should we be excited about?

The next two election cycles are going to be of the utmost importance.  If we do not reverse the trends toward an all-encompassing and ever-growing State, our freedoms will become increasingly fragile.  Yet, electoral failure would not mean the end of the line for the Tea Party Movement.  Failure in November, 2010 or failure to redirect the ship of state following a Republican victory at the polls (either because too many Establishment Republicans remain too ready to belly up to the trough or because the President is able to forestall change) will lead to the next great dynamic in America, as a growing movement of people, descended from those pioneers who in the past pulled up stakes and effectively Dropped Out, will themselves Drop Out, but in ways only dimly imagined at this point. 

My further speculations will appear in a future post, describing what it might look like after we Tune In and Turn On, and, finally, decide to Drop Out.

Tune in

The commenters who weighted in on Tune In, Turn On, Drop Out: Introduction all had interesting things to say.  They added some important detail and depth to my introduction to the topic.  However, I hope to throw them a curve ball or two, starting today.  To repeat:

I suspect that during the next decade, the twenty-teens, "Tune In, Turn On, Drop Out" will acquire new meanings that would have confounded the early proselytizers of psychedelia. 

Illuminating what Tune In, Turn On, Drop Out: Introduction meant in 1966 is not my goal here; what it might mean going forward is.

Timothy Leary meant for people to Tune In their inner world, to turn away from a corrupt and dehumanizing reality.  For him, this would be the first step for becoming enlightened.  In contemporary America, Tuning In means something very different.  It means gaining increased access to the actual events and trends that underpin what used to be known as "news" but in reality was a fabrication of a small, select group of powerful men and women who had control over access to news and the narrative in which the news was embedded.  Until fairly recently there was almost no way for most people to actually Tune In to what was controlling their lives.  This has begun to change in a way that qualifies as that over-used term, a paradigm shift.

Americans began to Tune In in large numbers only over the last 10 years.  The explosive, exponential growth of the Internet and blogosphere fed a thirst for information that is potentially transformative.  It is awe inspiring to realize that it was only 12 years ago that The Drudge Report exploded into most people's consciousness with a story about a blue dress.  Since that time, we have increasingly Tuned In to what is being done in our name and with our country.  And what we see is disturbing.  Our elites have shown themselves to be self-serving, ineffectual (beyond their extractive abilities), hypocritical, arrogant, and far more ignorant than we might once have realized (not withstanding William F. Buckley's famous comment about the Boston Phone Book.)

Porphyrogenitus, writing at Winds of Change, has it just about right: [All emphases mine: SW]

The Governments Have Learned from their Mistakes

The trouble is, as sagacious as people like Kevin Drum are when compared to simple-minded people like Jonah Goldberg, these guardians of the main currents of enlightened opinion fail to think beyond stage one: Why is it that bankers won't learn from their mistakes? What incentive structures have been put in place or, as importantly, what has been demolished, so as to discourage them from learning from their mistakes?

Demolished might be too strong a word. Decayed, dissolved, deteriorated might all be better descriptions, as in a building not well maintained, as with much of our public infrastructure (oh, but shovel-ready will fix this as well!)

Here is the question they dislike most, as it reflects a shocking lack of faith in our ability to solve public problems through collective action: Have the institutions they favor demonstrated a better capacity for learning from their mistakes than the ones they mock? If not, why not?

Are California or Michigan or New York &tc doing better learning from their mistakes than Goldman Sachs is? Are they really? We mock the idea that bankers are, but is it a fair mockery? Or the gaunt, chilling laugh of those who are practically undead themselves?

Have the PIIGS learned from their mistakes? Really now, have they? Is there at least as much at stake here as there is in even the biggest "too big to fail" bank or corporation?

Those who think the problem was embedded in a previous Administration or one side of the aisle need to free their minds as well. The reassuring myth that it is all caused by having the wrong sort of people in government, and now we've got the right sort of master-minds involved; those who believe in government and have faith in its capacity to solve all problems, is one they may want to reconsider, and take a more historical view. If they can open their mind to untainted history.

I might take issue with his characterization of Jonah Goldberg, but in essence he is expressing his frustration with our elites, public and private.  There are a lot of people, on both sides of the political divide, who still believe that their side is right and the other side is wrong.  For those who are paying attention, it is becoming clear that both "sides" have failed for similar reasons; they have insisted on centralization of decision making without realizing that they lack the expertise to do the jobs they imagine they have been selected to do, and even when they have some expertise, lack adequate information upon which to make informed decisions.  The impossibility of incorporating adequate information is not new; markets work because they do a far better job of summing information than any small groups of elites could possibly do, even theoretically.  The problem of arrogant and ignorant elites being unaware of their limitations (which I see as much worse on the Left but hardly exclusive to the Left) is becoming unmistakable to people who now see much more of what was once withheld "for their own good."

[An analogy: I work with people four times a week.  A good argument can be made that I know them as well as anyone can, yet I also have the humility to recognize that I can never know enough about a person to predict with certainty what will work best for them.  I do not offer advice or tell them what to do because they will have to live with the consequences and only they can take responsibility for their actions as adults and free agents.  If I do not think it wise to make decisions for people who I know so well, how can I countenance unknown, distant people making decisions for all of us?]

Our markets failed in the banking crisis principally because the incestuous relationship between big business and government led to dangerous risk taking by the well connected, government intervention that distorted the market place, and ultimately a misunderstanding and miscalculation of the dangers inherent in their activity; all was well until the party ended.  We might excuse some of the aforementioned were we convinced that our governing and business classes were now taking our concerns into account.

Because Politicians Didn't Take The Crisis Seriously

Is our government really paying any attention? It seems to me that the DC crowd is diving ever deeper into denial.

What interests me is that common citizens in the US are paying attention, but our politicians are not. A further quote:

What at the time looked like scaremongering has now become bitter reality -- because politicians didn't take the warning signs seriously.

Below in the comments, Who Struck John writes that he thinks getting politicians to take the US government debt seriously will take a few election cycles.

We don't have a few election cycles. As of April 30th, US debt held by the public had risen to almost 8.4 trillion. Bookmark this Treasury Direct page. You can enter a date range at the bottom to see how debt has risen. At the beginning of 2010, the public debt was 7.81 trillion. Q1 nominal US GDP (see Table 3) was 14.6 trillion. The danger ratio is 80% of nominal; at this rate we'll be there by 2012 or 2013. It takes time to correct. We only have a few years to start that correction, which must include both tax increases and hefty cuts in government spending.

[NB: Read the whole thing including the comments to her post.]

I have no particular facility with economics, which is why I rely on people whose credibility has been earned over the years.  I find the front page reporters at the MSM to be without credibility anymore when it comes to almost anything.  They are so busy propelling an agenda that the actual news is a minimal part of their reports.  Yet, as M_O_M points out, the information is available.  Its import is seeping in as more and more people Tune In to what is happening to our country. 

America was founded and populated by people who just wanted to be left alone by their government.  As long as the government left us alone, (relatively speaking) we were willing to pay our taxes and leave well enough alone.  Since the Reagan revolution the government has been consistently reasserting its desire to not leave us alone.  At first slowly, then suddenly, the government has grown so large and become so demanding to be fed, that it now endangers our ability to be left alone. 

Once people Tune In, the next step, the Turn On, becomes inevitable.

Tune In, Turn On, Drop Out: Introduction

According to Wikipedia, the phrase, popularized by Timothy Leary,

came to him in the shower one day after Marshall McLuhan suggested to Leary that he come up with "something snappy" to promote the benefits of LSD.  It is an excerpt from a prepared speech he delivered at the opening of a press conference in New York City on September 19, 1966. This phrase urged people to embrace cultural changes through the use of psychedelics and by detaching themselves from the existing conventions and hierarchies in society.

Here is an excerpt from the speech:

'Turn on' meant go within to activate your neural and genetic equipment. Become sensitive to the many and various levels of consciousness and the specific triggers that engage them. Drugs were one way to accomplish this end. 'Tune in' meant interact harmoniously with the world around you - externalize, materialize, express your new internal perspectives. 'Drop out' suggested an elective, selective, graceful process of detachment from involuntary or unconscious commitments. 'Drop Out' meant self-reliance, a discovery of one's singularity, a commitment to mobility, choice, and change. Unhappily my explanations of this sequence of personal development were often misinterpreted to mean 'Get stoned and abandon all constructive activity'.

The subtext that does not show up in this excerpt is that Timothy Leary, et al, believed that America was a corrupt country, engaged in a War of Colonialism (Vietnam) and that capitalism was inherently evil.  These ideas grew in fertile soil.

The 60s were an interesting time in which, for the first time in human history, an entire generation grew up and came of age with the expectation that they would never be so poor that they would face starvation and that the diseases which had traditionally taken the lives of half of all human beings before they reached age 5 were a thing of their past.  Because of such remarkable changes, each baby boomer child was invested on average with far more parental narcissism than previous generations.  To add to their Narcissistic investment in their own pleasures, the baby boomers came of age when sex had made the transition from a pleasurable activity fraught with consequences to one where its recreational aspects could be imagined to be primary.  Penicillin, the Birth Control Pill, and finally, elective abortion, completely changed the calculations involved in sex; there was, for a time, no apparent risk to casual sex, and the free love movement of the late 60s, the apotheosis of Narcissism, collided with the reality of War. 

As a result of that collision, the 1960s went from this:

And so, my fellow Americans: ask not what your country can do for you - ask what you can do for your country.

My fellow citizens of the world: ask not what America will do for you, but what together we can do for the freedom of man.

Inaugural Address by John F. Kennedy - January 20th 1961

to thsi:

Steven won't give his arm
to no gold star mother's farm;
War's good business so give your son
and I'd rather have my country die for me.

"Rejoyce" from After Bathing at Baxters Jefferson Airplane, 1967

It took all of 6 years for the baby boomer cohort to assert their individual desires as the law of the land.  Of course, there were always those reactionary hicks and rednecks, not to mention military fascists, who still believed in honor, duty, and love of country trumping love of self, but among the liberal elite college students, the Vietnam War was a horror precisely because it asserted that their country might have some demands on their abilities that deserved primacy.  (Please note, I am not re-fighting the Vietnam War; it was poorly managed in many ways and we fought to not lose and thereby lost.) 

[For more discussion of the Narcissistic transition of the 60s, see Demographics & Narcissism.]

I suspect that during the next decade, the twenty-teens, "Tune In, Turn On, Drop Out" will acquire new meanings that would have confounded the early proselytizers of psychedelia. 

In the next few posts in this series I plan on exploring how Americans are in the process of Tuning In, and Turning On, and what a future of Americans Dropping Out might look like. 

Freedom, Darknets, and Resilient Communities

John Robb is one of the foremost advocates of Resilient Communities.  In his view, like minded people will come together to form RCs that are able to sustain themselves even during periods of great upheaval.  An RC would be able to sustain itself by growing enough of its own food locally to withstand disruptions in the supply chain, and would have a robust manufacturing base, perhaps resting on maturing desktop fabricators.   He believes the opportunity is ripe for the development of RCs:

Tribal Opportunity Space

Here's a question:  what's the opportunity space -- the ease of recruiting members -- for a new tribe?  At the macro level, it couldn't be better.  

Why?  The tribe we're working on doesn't seek control or radical change at the macro level, but rather competes with the status quo for high quality members that are willing to make a lifelong commitment to a better/different life.  Within that framework, trends in employment driven by the global system are making it easier than ever.  The biggest trend is to turn workers into variable inputs so they can be easily interchanged, outsourced, or terminated.

The characteristics of this shift are:

• No benefits (from health coverage to sick/vacation days).
• Variable hours/employment.  Employees absorb all risks and costs associated with employment (i.e. training/education). 
• Pay slowly drifts down to global norms (much lower than current levels) due to pressure from off-shoring.

The psychological result of this shift includes:

• Zero loyalty.
• Willingness to shift rapidly to new opportunities.  
• Broad dissatisfaction (only 45% of workers like the current arrangement).

Go to his site to see his conclusion and fill in the details.  I am struck by his description of the psychology behind his thinking.  Zero loyalty is already becoming a fact.   However, "willingness to shift rapidly to new opportunities" only pertains, at this time, to a small subset.  As young people find their entry into an upwardly mobile, functional economy increasingly inhibited many, perhaps most, will become apathetic.  Apathy is a typical response to helplessness and there is little evidence that our government schools do a particularly good job of fostering independence of thought or action.  A subset of  bright and talented young people will maintain an entrepreneurial spirit despite the best efforts of the surrounding culture at stultifying their animal spirits.  It is those young people who will form the core of the first functioning RCs.  At the moment, most bright and talented young people follow the predictable, established path: Work hard in HS, go to a selective college, followed by professional school or a job at the leading edge of the economy.  It takes a rare youngster to deviate from the established path. 

[Many of our best and brightest already go into the military, one of the few institutions that still works and is highly respected.  In the Northeast such a pathway is not esteemed  by the liberal CW, but even in New York these archaic and reactionary attitudes are shifting.]

The balance between fear of the unknown and the pull of the supposed safety of the known pathway means that most will not take the leap into the unknown of the RC world until they are forced to do so.  Until the point at which our systemic failures lead to widespread disruption, it is most likely that our young people will slowly enter into evolving RCs through social networking and gaming.

This is another way of saying that RCs will develop in response to evolving conditions and that the seeds of RCs are evolving in real time in response to evolving stressors.

My thoughts on this are quite preliminary and not well developed.  I imagine the seeds of new structures evolving in response to external constraints.  Freedom can not long survive in a true democracy, which is why our founders created a Representative Democracy.  The world is rapidly moving toward inclusive democracy in which abilities and knowledge mean less than numbers and the entrenched powers are increasingly resistant to change. 

(NB: The wisdom of crowds works when the members of the crowd agree on fundamentals; it breaks down when the information density wildly fluctuates.  A community of stock market investors may be able to more accurately predict the direction of the markets than a small group of "experts" however, if that community of stock market investors was expanded to include ten times their number of primitive tribesmen from Papua New Guinea, their results would be less likely to work well in the long run.  A timely example of the irrationality of crowds comes courtesy of Yaacov Lozowick:

"A Cartload of Cat Litter"

Large chunks of political and other public discourse would fail if submitted as a term paper in Logic 101. Very large chunks. Normblog has an example from yesterday's British media, which all piled on to Tony Blair for once saying what he never said. And remember: journalists and politicians often have more years of education than regular folks. They're supposed to be more sophisticated, whatever that means.

The UN is the apotheosis of democratic governance.  Every thugocracy has an equal vote in the GA and the patron states of thugs sit on the SC.   The passion for enlarged government, which has led to the loss of freedoms and sovereignty for our Europeans friends, is mirrored by the internationalists among the left here at home.  In a true democracy of nations, any successful society is going to be under constant assault from by envy and its derivatives.]

At the same time as our technology has provided a medium through which our free speech capabilities have been maximized as never before, our free speech rights are under attack throughout the world, facilitated by the UN and its de facto alliance with radical Islam.  This becomes most obvious when considering the attempts by the most "sensitive" within Islam to proscribe free speech as noted in “I’m Kurt Westergaard!” and efforts to outlaw blasphemy being pressed in the UN.

More insidious is the similar, current imbroglio over Harry Reid's foolish comments over which such a great kerfuffle has arisen.  Reid said nothing that hasn't been thought or uttered by a great many people.  Whether you consider Reid a corrupt buffoon or an effective political street brawler, his private pontifications do not deserve the kinds of indignant opprobrium they are receiving.  If we are ever to have an honest discussion about race (something I doubt will occur in my lifetime; yet another lost opportunity of this Presidency) we will need to address the discomfort many Whites feel with the rhythms and locutions of Black English and the ways in which such linguistic tendencies and affectations reflect Black experience and underline their estrangement from the larger White community.  Barack Obama used his ability to "talk White" to disarm racialist opposition and used his ability to "talk black" to inform his Black bone fides.  There is nothing wrong with a politician speaking differently to different groups; that is what they do when they try to build a winning coalition.  There should also be nothing wrong in commenting upon such tendencies.  The racism is in the eyes of the beholder.  Harry Reid's comments were offensive only to the religion of PC, which differs from the cries of blasphemy we hear the Islamists only in degree rather than kind.

The Israelis are successfully separating from the Islamists who control Palestine; the analogue of Israel's attempt to build an RC would be the kinds of RCs John Robb suggests and would evolve under similar, though milder, stressors.  People increasingly fed up with the ossification, bureaucratization, and sclerosis of our modern dysfunctional society, would essentially "tune in, turn on, and drop out", but with meanings never imagined by Timothy Leary.

Some of these ideas come together in Daemon and its sequel Freedom.  Daniel Suarez has merged the onrushing world of networks with the more specific worlds of gaming to create a world in which people join private "Darknets" to create a community. 

[As an aside, I found Daemon to be the most thought provoking and gripping science fiction story I have read in many a year; thus far Freedom has not quite started off with the same intensity, but the story is maturing.]

I hope to expand upon these ideas in a follow up post.

On the Way to the Singularity

From time to time I allow myself to freely associate and speculate.  Consider this a highly speculative post written without any particular view on where it is going...

There are many different conceptualizations of the Singularity, the one I find most salient is, as described by Michael Anissimov at Accelerating Future, defined by that moment at which an AI becomes recursively self improving.  Shortly thereafter the intelligence of the AI(s) will begin to exponentially surpass the intelligence of Homo sapiens and it is impossible to predict what will ensue.

As others, exemplified by Ray Kurzweil (The Singularity is Near) , have pointed out, if we think in terms of the speed and cost of information processing, the history of our planet/universe/species has been punctuated by a series of discontinuities.  For example, the beginning of the biosphere (emergence of life) on the planet can be thought of as a Singularity.  Once life began its long march, nothing was ever the same again.  In more human terms, the invention of Movable Type was a Singularity whereby the ability to process information expanded exponentially as, in an historical eye blink of time, the number of people able to read and process data went from a relative handful to several orders of magnitude larger.  The internet has once again increased by an exponential level the number of people involved in processing data and, even more importantly, the number of connections available for data processing, which is probably on the order of N X 10³ (assuming each person on the internet has connections to 1000 others, who have connections to 1000 other, a very conservative estimate; the information transmission will propagate as the cube of the number of people in the network.  I welcome other estimates by anyone who has some expertise in information science.)

With each mini-Singularity there was a subsequent economic dislocation as suddenly archaic methods of adding value were swamped by the new economies of scale.  Where once a book had to be painstakingly written by hand and were so rare and precious that only the wealthiest individuals and institutions could afford them, once the printing press was invented, the cost of the book became substantially reduced, making it possible for even those with modest wealth to accumulate tlibraries.  With the advent of the internet the marginal cost of "printing" a book has descended to as near to free as to make the distinction invalid.  As this mini-Singularity has overwhelmed those industries that were based on controlling the creation and distribution of printed material, their business models have begun to crumble.  In fact, every industry that depends on disseminating information has found their business model failing.  For the newspaper business, network news, the music industry, and a host of other industries, the economic Singularity has effectively already happened.

The next mini-Singularity is already in its nascent stages, as noted by Kevin Carson in his review of Cory Doctorow's  Makers: [HT: John Robb]

The major themes I’ve written about here lately — the decline of traditional mass-production industry, the crisis of value and shift of production outside the cash nexus, the rise of micromanufacturing (see “The Homebrew Industrial Revolution“), the digital/network culture — are all central to Makers.  And given my research and writing interests, it’s a foregone conclusion that any work of cyberpunk or other near-future sci fi is going to wind up marked and dogeared beyond belief.  Just about anything I’ve read by Neal Stephenson or William Gibson has ended up that way, as did the machine shop material in the first volume of S. M. Stirling’s Nantucket series.  So after just one reading, Doctorow’s book looks like it’s had the living shit beaten out of it.  It’s that good.

...

The story begins sometime in the second decade of this century.  It’s set against the background of the kind of economic clusterfuck I’ve written about a lot recently (for example, “The End of Economic Growth“  at this blog, and my paper “The Decline and Fall of Sloanism” at Center for a Stateless Society).

Doctorow’s near-future scenario is the culmination of a long trend that began in the 1970s, with Japan’s development of cheap CNC machine tools scaled to the needs of the garage factory and job-shop.   Since then we’ve seen progressively larger shares of total industrial production shifted from the old mass-production core to a periphery of flexible manufacturing networks like those of Emilia-Romagna and Shenzhen, and the growing shift of contract production to independent supplier networks.  By 2000, a majority of transnational corporations’  industrial production took place not in their own facilities, but in the job-shops of Asia.

The rise of the micromanufacturing and Fab Lab movements in recent years has taken things an order of magnitude further in the same direction.  According to Doug Rushkoff, the destructive effect of the desktop computer on the old information and culture industries resulted from the imploding cost of the means of production.    As Yochai Benkler described it, in a few decades we went from conventional radio stations, music studios and printing presses costing hundreds of thousands of dollars, to desktop publishing and podcasting operations that were two orders of magnitude cheaper.   When the initial capital outlays for information and cultural production fall by a factor of a hundred, all the capital previously absorbed by those industries becomes superfluous.

We’re seeing the same thing now in the realm of physical production.  We’re seeing the development of homebrew CNC cutting tables, routers and 3-D printers that can be built for a few hundred bucks.  A Fab Lab with homebrew machine tools and RepRap — essentially a factory — can be built for $5000.  The desktop manufacturing revolution is in the process of making the majority of investment capital superfluous, the same way the desktop computer revolution has destroyed the information and entertainment industries.   If there’s an analogue of Moore’s Law for industrial hardware, you can stand it on its head and get a general rule:  if capital outlays for micromanufacturing fall exponentially, then every so many years the amount of stuff that requires mass production industry to make will be reduced by half.

The review is long but well worth your time.  The key graph is that as more and more actual stuff* is manufactured locally, in garages and warehouses of now defunct industries, the economic dislocation will be profound.  Our current Recession/Depression, with lost jobs which will never come back, is a foretaste of the kinds of dislocation that abundance can create.

Read the entire review and keep in mind that the current, first generation, desk top fabricator can make simple plastic models, but not too far down the road are vdesk top printers (now in the laboratory) that can create printed circuits to order and fabricators that will be mini-machine shops able to work with metals, plastics, and composites.  It is possible to imagine some of the attributes of an economy that is based on a growing percentage of economic activity taking place at the most local level, but the impact on the state and the largest corporate structures is not so easy to predict.  Where will the state get its tax money when the marginal cost of new stuff is minimal? 

A current TV commercial touts the fact that there are already >83,000 iPhone apps available.  What happens when there are >83,000 iPhone iterations available?  Right now, to make a knock-off cell phone costs pennies but requires a large investment of capital to set up the plant to make them; soon enough a smart teenager will be able to use his allowance money to buy a decent functioning fabricator(or more likely fabricators) and build his own customized cell phones for costs approaching free.  If economies are based on managing scarcity, how will  we manage abundance?

The future is getting closer by the minute and it is likely to be fascinating but the dislocations are going to create more than their share of vertigo.

On Demographics: Part II

Resilient Communities

The two greatest engines of change in the next decades will involve improvements in the health and longevity of human beings (Resilient Humans) and the development and increasing robustness of the local environment (Resilient Communities). 

John Robb writes about the dangers that Globalization engenders in our increasingly connected world.  He is, in some ways, the mirror image of Tom Barnett.  However, his discussions of Resilient Communities as a response to, and protection from, the inevitable dangers of increased connectivity, is worth exploring.  In John Robb's conception, a Resilient Community is one where the people can survive and thrive even in the face of major disruptions in its connectivity.  Imagine a successful terrorist attack in which the electric grid is damaged or rendered useless for two weeks.  Few communities have food and water reserves that can last for that long and far too few people have two weeks worth of provisions on their property.  Here is the interesting point: John Robb and Tom Barnett are both correct.  Increased connectivity and increased community resilience are going to continue to co-evolve and the results will prove to be fascinating.  The future will be forced by developing technologies and cost-benefit/risk-benefit calculations that will all point in the same direction.

We are entering a period of time when most of the things that we depend on are becoming more expensive.  The cost of energy is escalating, even with the current temporary decrease in gasoline prices;  while free markets could well prove to manage the price of energy without marked increases even in the face of peak oil (which is a theory, not a fact), the point is that we do not have free markets in energy production in the West.  Our layers of regulation, based on the fear of environmental catastrophe (a nuclear "China Syndrome", Anthropomorphic Global warming, etc) and the NIMBY mentality means that even if the political environment were to change markedly, it would still take years to ramp up production adequately to force the price to do much more than moderate its inexorable increase; the era of cheap energy is over.  The down stream effects mean that everything that needs to be moved from one area to another will become more expensive with time.  One answer lies in the possibility of mini-nuclear reactors:

Commercial Shipping Uses 9% of world oil and is Major Air Pollution Source

Factory mass produced small nuclear reactors like the one being developed by Hyperion Power Generation or variants of the pebble bed reactor being made in China or new liquid flouride thorium reactor proposals would all work for total nuclearizing commercial shipping. There would also be the benefit that the ships would need to rarely stop for refueling and in general could operate at faster speed.

While the article is focused on the costs of shipping, the possibility of using mini nuclear reactors (MNRs) to supply electricity to communities has already been broached (and China is moving toward full scale production of such MNRs.)  Even if the United States refuses to move into large scale use of MNRs, other nations will have to use them to generate more and more of their energy.  They will have very little choice in the matter since petroleum is not getting cheaper any time soon.  But, in fact, there may well be an alternative to MNRs in your back yard.

Analyst: Solar approaching grid parity in U.S

By 2015, two-thirds of the U.S. will have achieved grid parity, the point at which electricity generated from photovoltaics is equal in cost or less expensive than grid power, an analyst said Monday (July 13). At that point, solar power will be no more than 5 cents per kilowatt hour more expensive than grid power for 99 percent of the country, according to Travis Bradford, founder and president of the non-profit research group The Prometheus Institute for Sustainable Development.

So far, the environmental lawyers have not yet found a way to attack Solar Power and as time goes on the logic of using solar power for very local power and a means to become partially independent from the grid will become compelling.  The idea that we are going to decide to upgrade our electrical system to a "Smart Grid" is a chimera.  It will cost (see NPR) somewhere between $100 billion to $2 trillion (and maybe more once the government and the lawyers get involved), and there is no possibility of such a large scale  infrastructure development taking place in the foreseeable future.  In addition, it may well prove to be obsolete even before it is started.  Once a significant portion of our electric power comes from local sources (our homes, cars, MNRs) with any excess being sold back to the grid, the next logical step will be to increase manufacturing and farming on a local basis; from John Robb's Global Guerrillas:

JOURNAL: The Switch to Local Manufacturing

Here's a think piece that you may find of value:

It is likely that by 2025, the majority of the "consumer" goods you purchase/acquire, will be manufactured locally.  However, this doesn't likely mean what you think it means.  The process will look like this:

...

Local fabrication will get cheap and easy.  The cost of machines that can print, lathe, etch, cut materials to produce three dimensional products will drop to affordable levels (including consumer level versions).  This sector is about to pass out of its "home brew computer club phase" and rocket to global acceptance.

By all means read the entire post and keep in mind that although he may have some of the details wrong, even if the price of raw materials, labor, and transportation remain low, the logic of home based desktop fabrication is unassailable.  Having a fabricator at home that can produce goods on demand for negligible prices means that for all but the most intelligence intensive products (those with the highest degree of complexity) it will be cheaper to have it made at home than going out to buy something made by someone on the other side of the world.  Please note that the first generation of desktop fabricators, still basically novelties, are already available.  Adding powder and getting a  dinner plate may not be very exciting, but such fabricators will almost certainly follow their own version of Moore's Law, which suggests most of us will be fabricating simple products within the next 10 years.  In addition, desktop printers that can produce cheap high tech electronics and biologicals are already in the works.

Food production may follow.  I doubt local farming of more than a small percentage of our food is likely except under certain circumstances.  For example, an electricity outage and failure of the transportation system of two to three weeks duration in a large section of the country (think Katrina times 10 or an EMP) could lead to food shortages rather quickly.  The lesson of such an event would encourage interest in and development of local farming.  Proof of concept for city (vertical) farming already exists, and suburban and rural farming would be a matter of simply scaling up.  Short of actual food shortages, such developments seem unnecessary and unlikely, but the option will be there if needed.  Upscale communities are likely to indulge in local farming if the quality trumps imported food.

[It is possible that a high budget Hollywood production depicting a post-EMP Dystopia could move a significant number of people toward local farming.  The recession has already had some effects in that direction, as well.]

Once energy, material, and, possibly, food production have become local, entire communities will be more robust, more self sufficient, and more able to sustain themselves in the face of large scale disruptions.  They will be Resilient in ways not seen in 100-200 years but with the advantage of high technology that would be indistinguishable from magic to our ancestors.

Such communities will develop their own trading patterns with other communities, facilitated by an internet vastly more robust and sophisticated than our current version.  Local wireless nets would connect through fiber and wireless to the larger internet; the local net would be able to survive a disastrous failure of the global network and would have firewalls in place to protect the local net from malicious software.  Each community would have their own defenders.

Beyond the logic of price there are additional factors which favor the development of Resilient Communities and this has everything to do with the coming acceleration of the development of Resilient Humans.  It is also important to understand that these developments, as all technological advances are wont to do, will occur first in certain wealthy communities, a point I will expand upon in the next post.

On Demographics: Part I

Is Demography Destiny?

Mark Steyn and John Derbyshire had a brief discussion of Demography over the last few days.

Mark Steyn:

No Future

The "alarmism" of my book seems to be going mainstream. Newsweek's economics editor Daniel Gross belatedly joins the demographic deathwatch on Japan:

...

The transformation of developed societies — either into old folks' homes (like Japan) or semi-Islamized dystopias (like Amsterdam, Brussels, etc) — will lead, in fact, to emigration. A young German or Japanese circa 2040 will have no reason whatsoever to stay in his native land and have most of his income confiscated in a vain attempt to prop up an unsustainable geriatric welfare system. So many will leave. Where will they go? At one time the obvious answer would have been America — but Good King Barack seems determined to saddle us with the same unaffordable entitlements that have scuttled the rest of the west.

For much of the developed world, the "credit crunch," the debt burden, and the rest are not part of a cyclical economic downturn but the first manifestations of an existential crisis.

In response, John Derbyshire:

Gerontocracy, Idiocracy, and the Coming Japanese Century

I'm no more thrilled than you are by the prospect of a geezer-heavy population. It's inevitable, though, so the sensible course of action would be to start thinking really hard of ways we might science ourselves out of the associated problems.

I'll qualify that "inevitable." There are actually two futures for the human population of Earth over the next century or so: (1) a big die-off, or (2) geezerization. There is obviously — inevitably! — some upper limit to the number of people our planet can support, so at some point the population has to stop growing. You can have an argument about where in time that point is located — past, present, or future (me: past) — but you can't argue that the point exists. Not many things are inevitable, but this one is.

...

When the human race comes to a bridge like this, the first nation to figure out a way across the bridge gets a huge head start on the rest. Britain was the first nation to transition from agricultural to industrial society, and she dominated the world for a century afterwards. Whichever nation can first figure out a way through the Great Demographic Transition will likewise be at an advantage. Japan, with one foot already on the bridge, has an excellent shot at being that nation. Then the 22nd century will be the Japanese Century.

Of course — and as you say in your book — the thing we should worry about is not so much demographic decline overall as differential demographic decline, with more-civilized nations aging and dwindling ahead of less-civilized ones. A related problem is the differential demographic decline within civilized nations.

There is no doubt that the most successful societies (in terms of the most modern and innovative) have apparently chosen to commit demographic suicide.  Modern, secular, liberal democracies are filled with highly educated people who do not value their own culture and are not reproducing.  The two options posited by John Derbyshire, of "a big die-off" or "geezerization", are certainly possible future scenarios for the West.  It is likely that the wealthy will be even more outnumbered by the impoverished (and I use that term in a broad sense that includes material wealth as a minor factor and cultural wealth as the primary determinant) as time goes by. 

There is a great deal of evidence suggesting that a significant majority of people from Gap societies, and more problematically a significant percentage of their offspring, are ill equipped to become productive members of modern societies.  Uneducated poor from rural Mexico, Pakistan, or Algeria can learn English or French, can learn to use a cash register, but far too few have the wherewithal to become generative members of a modern society.  (Please note, I am not ascribing this to a lack of intellectual abilities or cultural aspects or any other particular cause, simply stating a cruel fact; as an example, the percentage of fourth generation Mexican Americans who go to college has been dropping in the recent past, falling from already very low levels.  If education is the key to entering a modern society, this group is failing.)  It is for these reasons that people like Mark Steyn are pessimistic about the future of the West.  When Europe and Japan are no longer reproducing themselves, they are faced with the bleak prospect of either growing old and feeble or importing multitudes of young people from societies that have traditionally not integrated well into the European culture.  Worse, significant second and third generation immigrant cohorts often regress in their assimilation.  Simple extrapolation suggests that the crisis is coming.

However, both Mark Steyn and John Derbyshire may be limited by the fallacy of extrapolation.  The future will not look like the present and our technology may well be transformative in ways which intersect with our demographic crisis in surprising ways.  

In the coming days, I would like to suggest some alternate scenarios that are at least as possible as the bleak futures outlined above but will require the liberation of our imaginations and heightened innovation (both trends which are diminished in statist economies.)