If average global temperature rises are to be limited in line with the 2015 Paris agreement, climate finance globally will need to increase to about $9tn a year globally by 2030, up from just under $1.3tn in 2021-22, according to a report last year from the Climate Policy Initiative.
https://www.ft.com/content/6873d96e-3e40-45c6-9d84-8ce27b7b23e1
The article from which the above quote is extracted is written as if it were a quest story with beginning, middle and end by way of such funding. In reality, it is a conversion story of before and after a revelation.
For my part, I like my conversion stories upfront: “Any socialist effort to navigate the very real state shift in the climate will require a massive reconstruction and deployment of productive forces. For example, all the major cities that are on a coastline on this planet will have to be moved inland. That means the electrical grids and sewer systems need to be rebuilt. We will need to reimagine urban life on a massive scale. It’s not wrong to point that out.” (https://www.the-syllabus.com/ts-spotlight/the-right-climate/conversation/jason-moore)
Nor do you need to be socialist to hear all kinds of people insisting we need to change the very way we live, $9tn dollars a year or not. For us, it is to be as in: Saul the Jew before; Paul the Apostle after.
The one great virtue of being blunt is of course patent: It’s clear all manner of blunders, contingencies, not-knowing, and inexperience will be incurred in this drastic march from the sea. Where in this article are the parallel mistakes, accidents etcetera in wait for the $9tn per annum?
Source
For more on conversion narratives, see Adam Phillips (2022). On Wanting to Change. Picador Paper
How do you know you’ve made a mistake if caught in the grip of everything else being uncertain? You know more, of course, after the fact when consequences are clearer in hindsight. But how do you know in real time and in these fogs of struggle and strife that this or that action on your part is a mistake to be avoided, right now and here?
It is highly relevant for the purposes of policy and management to insist that real-time error avoidance is possible even under particular (but not all) conditions of widespread systemwide complexity and uncertainties.
Research Findings
I
Paul Schulman and I have been undertaking research on a set of interconnected critical infrastructures in Oregon and Washington State. The upshot is that not only do major uncertainties and risks change with shifting interconnectivities, but new errors to be avoided emerge as well, and clearly so for some cases.
Based on interviews with infrastructure control room operators and emergency managers, real-time surprises are widespread in flooding, wildfire, road and other transportation disruptions, levee breaches, and transmission failures in electricity and water.
But, as many also told us, there can be and often are an urgency, clarity and logic about what to do by way of just-in-time or just-for-now interventions. What needs to be done is at times evident to front-line infrastructure staff and emergency management professionals, when not so to those in incident command centers or higher-level management or official positions. For these experienced front-line staff and in these circumstances, not doing what needs to be done constitute errors to be avoided in real-time. They are, in other words, opportunities that cannot be missed.
II
What are those circumstances and conditions of urgency, clarity and logic?
Ones identified by our interviewees focus on an infrastructure’s key interconnectivities with infrastructures they depended upon and which depended upon them. More specifically, this focus and concern centers around shifts in the interconnectivity involving their respective systemwide control variables, like frequency and voltage for electricity transmission, main-pipe pressures for large-scale water supply or natural gas systems, and network bandwidth in telecommunications.
During normal operations, these control variables are already interconnected. What defines system disruption and failure is when the interconnectivities shift in unignorable ways. Fire-fighters setting their firebreaks under more accessible rights-of-way, which are the same rights-of-way created for electricity transmission lines, can create conflict between backfires needed by the fire- fighters and the voltage and flow paths along the transmission lines. Because they share the same waterway, clearing a river passage for ongoing marine transport and re-opening a major port along the way is important to both infrastructures.
When these systems as systems are disrupted, or fail outright, restoring or recovering what had already been interconnected system control variables require urgent and often improvisatory behavior by all manner of infrastructure operators from the control rooms on down to field staff. These improvisations may be last-second one-offs saving the day, like seen in battle. From our perspective, these are better understood as part and parcel of the wide range of workarounds that line operators and field staff undertake–beginning in normal operations, routine maintenance and non-routine repair–to ensure safe and reliable operations at the system level.
III
In particular, we found:
–Under conditions of shifting or shifted interconnectivity, it would be an error for infrastructure operators and emergency managers not to establish lateral communications with one another and undertake improvisational and shared restoration activities where needed, even if no official arrangement exists to do so.
–In addition, there are also errors of anticipation and planning. It would be a management error in anticipation and planning not to provide robust and contingent interinfrastructure communication capabilities, including phone connections between the control rooms of interconnected infrastructures. This communication, it has been demonstrated, is also greatly facilitated by establishing lateral interinfrastructure personnel contacts prior to emergencies
–Further, it would be an error not to have some contingent resources for restoration and recovery activities such as vehicles, portable generators and movable cell towers in differing locations available across infrastructures if needed, particularly where chokepoints of interconnected infrastructures are adjacent to each other.
While these three errors are not the entire set, our interviews and prior research convince us that they are of primary and are to be avoided because they seriously degrade effective resilience in emergency prevention and responses.
Three Important Policy and Management Implications
I. Error avoidance is not risk management
Let’s start with a US example. It would be an error not to put into the mandated county/city hazard mitigation plan a proposal to replace a majorly vulnerable culvert with a new bridge, should the former be washed away in new flooding and when federal funds would be available for bridge replacement under those conditions. Put this way, there is a role for forward planning in anticipating and taking advantage of these already existing funding and construction opportunities.
Or from the other direction, rural town that did not anticipate accelerated gentrification after a major wildfire in its hazard mitigation plan will have to deal with the consequences of not having prepared for this gentrification (e.g. newly added residential water and wastewater demands and transportation requirements).
In both cases and from this perspective, the mandated hazard mitigation plan is a problem definition, parts of which are latent until activated during immediate emergency response, initial service restoration or longer-term recovery. Collapsing either example under the category of “risk management” is to miss the fact that these error (or, if prefer, missed opportunities) are not to be managed, more or less like risks, but rather managed categorically as yes or no. Did you avoid or did you not?
II. An example of how distinguishing between error avoidance and risk management is also important for locality residents affected by the disaster
Friends are telling us wonderful things about their recent move to a rural area in the Pacific Northwest. They were also surprised, given all the rain, about the high fire hazard risk mapped for their area and nearby environs. As in California, such maps created political and insurance company push-back. And there are methodological issues in mapping fuel loads in the absence of not knowing point-of-ignition information in advance.
So what to do? In their case, they talked about how they and neighbors agree in advance to help each other should a wildfire threaten (ignited, say, by vehicle sparks along the roadside). If one neighbor was threatened, all would move to that site to help out.
Such self-organizing happens all over the world and there is nothing extraordinary in this example, except one thing that deserves highlighting: What is going on here (and I suspect many other examples) is not managing the risks associated with fire hazards but rather avoiding known errors when faced with fire hazards, whatever the associated risks.
These errors include the aforementioned need for robust communications in this case among the neighbors and the need to have firefighting tools and associated equipment distributed and accessible beforehand. In addition, it is hoped that here too they and other residents use their county’s hazard mitigation plan to seek federal and state support for improving their lifeline infrastructures (water, electricity, roads and telecoms), should fires and other disasters actually undermine them in the future.
To repeat, it is an error to have missed really-existing opportunities for more robust communications, more dispersed equipment and tools, and greater use of existing planning and funding mechanisms. But why is that distinction important? It implies that there should dedicated support and staffing to assist such locality-based error avoidance, in addition to and separate from risk management efforts, not least of which being those fire hazard maps.
III. The special institutional niche for infrastructures in error-avoiding disaster management
Those who study major earthquakes, tsunamis, or other place-based catastrophes often remark about how populations left behind self-organize by way of saving lives and providing what relief they can on their own. We have seen this too. What is less recognized, I believe, is the institutional niche that critical infrastructures hold in this group adaptive behavior.
In some cases, the group-organization of groups takes place because there is little government presence, let alone as the disaster unfolds. One thinks of the media attention given to earthquakes in some low-income countries.
Self-organizing groups, however, are also observed in disaster situations that destroy longstanding critical infrastructures in middle to high-income countries. Error-avoiding behavior in the form of increased lateral communication and improvisational behavior are witnessed, in particular, among front-line infrastructure staff, emergency managers and some local communities.
I want to suggest that group adaptation in these latter cases differs in at least one under-acknowledged respect. A major part of that self-organization of field crews and the public is to provide initial restoration of some kind of electricity, water, road, communications and other so-called lifeline services, like medical care. This niche of critical infrastructures is already established.
Indeed, what better acknowledgement of society’s institutional niche for interconnected critical infrastructures than the immediate emergency response of trying to avoid all manner of errors in restoring the backbone infrastructures of electricity, water, telecoms and roads?
————-
Acknowledgement. My thanks to Paul Schulman for working through and crafting a number of these points. All errors–!–remain mine.
Reference. For an initial discussion of topics in this blog entry and its source material, see: E. Roe and P.R. Schulman (2023). “An Interconnectivity Framework for Analyzing and Demarcating Real-Time Operations Across Critical Infrastructures and Over Time.” Safety Science (available online at https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ssci.2023.106308)
Friends are telling us wonderful things about their recent move to a rural area in the Pacific Northwest. They were also surprised, given all the rain, about the high fire hazard risk mapped for their area and nearby environs. As in California, such maps created political and insurance company push-back. And there are methodological issues in mapping fuel loads in the absence of not knowing point-of-ignition information in advance.
So what to do? In their case, they talked about how they and neighbors agree in advance to help each other should a wildfire threaten (ignited, say, by vehicle sparks along the roadside). If one neighbor was threatened, all would move to that site to help out.
Such self-organizing happens all over the world and there is nothing extraordinary in this example, except one thing that deserves highlighting.
What is going on here (and I suspect many other examples) is not managing the risks associated with fire hazards so much as avoiding known errors when faced with fire hazards, whatever their risks. More formally, risks are to be managed more or less effectively in an emergency; errors in contrast are to be avoided—not more or less, but categorically yes or no.
II
And what errors are these? They include the need for robust communications among the neighbors and the need to have firefighting tools and associated equipment distributed and accessible beforehand. This may or may not be in our friends’ case. In addition, it is hoped that they and other residents use their county’s hazard mitigation plan to seek federal and state support for improving their lifeline infrastructures (water, electricity, roads and telecoms), should fires and other disasters actually undermine them in the future.
Ensuring more robust communications, more dispersed equipment and tools, and greater use of existing planning and funding mechanisms are opportunities that must not be missed, if they already exist. In fact, it is an error not to take advantage of them.
And why is that distinction important? It implies that there should dedicated support and staffing to assist such locality-based error avoidance, in addition to and separate from risk management efforts, not least of which being those fire hazard maps.
“Opportunity costs?,” “Systemwide failure is always an option (major read),” “Those numbers, those predictions,” “Emancipation as risk management?” and “Does it stick?”
—Special announcement
When Complex is as Simple as it Gets: Guide for recasting policy and management in the Anthropocene has been published at
Therefore, we argue that any attempt at reforming AI from within the same interlocking oppressive systems that created it is doomed to failure and, moreover, risks exacerbating existing harm. Instead, to advance justice, we must radically transform not just the technology itself, but our ideas about it, and develop it from the bottom up, from the perspectives of those who stand the most risk of being harmed.
[Sound of clearing my throat.] “About those ‘risks’ of yours. . . Are you quite sure you want to define radical transformation in ‘risk reduction’ terminology?”
We are so used to hearing “failure is not an option!”, we forget reality is often the other way round: We manage complex critical infrastructures as reliably as we do because their systemwide failure is always the dreaded option to be prevented.
This means it’s more than passing odd that those exhorting “failure is not an option” seem to believe the rest of us are not trying hard enough to manage what must be managed better. It’s thus not surprising that those who dissent justify doing so by focusing on what they know can be managed–even while admitting the climate emergency we find ourselves.
Consider one such example:
We emphasize the importance of taking political time and maintain that collective social responses to major climate impacts must center actually existing material and symbolic inequalities and place procedural and distributive justice at the heart of transformative action. This is so even where climate change will have devastating physical and social consequences.
Such dissent has the merit of at least recognizing the human devastation entailed in its approach, unlike those who insist we must do whatever it takes, regardless. Nor is the quoted passage a lone dissent. Others too insist the pre-eminent fact is that “doing whatever it takes” will be on the backs and in the flesh of already poor people and impoverished minorities globally (e.g., https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4416499).
II
So what?
“In your plans for reform, you forget the difference between our two roles: you work only on paper which consents to anything: it is smooth and flexible and offers no obstacles either to your imagination or to your pen, whereas I, poor empress, work on human skin, which is far more prickly and sensitive,” so wrote Catherine the Great to Denis Diderot, the French Enlightener.
How has it come to pass that so many today think they are Enlighteners but act as our Empress, as if there were not alternatives?
–In the mid-1970s a group of physicists and political scientists met at MIT and “arrived at the conclusion that if a World Government was not implemented soon, the probability of a nuclear war before the year 2000 would be close to 100 percent”
But what were their nuclear war scenarios? Without details to evaluate, the experts are like the early astrologer who cast Christ’s horoscope and found the end of Christianity in sight.
–In the early years of World War I, Rainer Marie Rilke, the poet, wrote that “the misery in which mankind has lived daily since the beginning of time cannot really be increased by any contingency. . . Always the whole of misery has been in use among men, as much as there is, a constant, just as there is a constant of happiness; only its distribution alters.” Here too is the literary all-rounder Jean-Paul Sartre, “essentially, there is not much difference between a catastrophe where 300 or 3000 die and one where ten or fifteen die. There is a difference in numbers of course, but in a sense, with each person who dies, so also does a world. The scandal is the same.”
But the numbers do matter in determining whether or not misery is a constant. “From a statistical point of view, which is that of social and political life and of history, there is an enormous difference,” Maurice Merleau-Ponty said of Sartre’s remark. We know from survey research that conclusions are drawn much more confidently from structured surveys and samples consisting of 3000 people than, say, 30 persons.
I may be misremembering, but I think it was Kenneth Boulding, the early heterodox economist, who thought that the greatest contribution of the social sciences to humankind was sample survey, as imperfect as it is.
— Consider a passage from novelist, Virginia Woolf:
Let us begin by clearing up the old confusion between the man who loves learning and the man who loves reading, and point out that there is no connection whatever between the two. A learned man is a sedentary, concentrated solitary enthusiast, who searches through books to discover some particular grain of truth upon which he has set his heart. If the passion for reading conquers him, his gains dwindle and vanish between his fingers. A reader, on the other hand, must check the desire for learning at the outset; if knowledge sticks to him well and good, but to go in pursuit of it, to read on a system, to become a specialist or an authority, is very apt to kill what it suits us to consider the more humane passion for pure and disinterested reading.
While asserting no connection whatever between learning and reading, her text enables us to see one such connection, and an emphatically inverse one.
–Our problems are rooted in race? No; they are rooted in class? As each has its own social science, it’s long looked like a methodological debate between the two. Guess who the losers are in doing so? “Statistics,” as poet Robert Frost puts it in his Notebooks, “are the way I have to look at everybody but myself.”
The policy narratives of interest to me are those that accept, rather than deny, the complexity and unpredictability of one’s immediate task environment. In this view, when a complex or unpredictable issue comes to be viewed as intractable, the challenge is to recast that issue more tractably without simplifying it. Does the recast but still complex narrative stick better? More formally, does the recast narrative–as if seen for the first time or afresh–open up options more tractable to policy analysis and management?
This means I am deeply sympathetic with approaches that take (1) complexity and its cognates seriously, (2) differentiate these in ways that do not deny their complexities, uncertainties and conflicts, but then go on to (3) reconfigure them as different policy narratives more amenable to conventional analysis and management (no guarantees!).
II
An example is a recent article that, in order to get a better handle on public ignorance, parses it out into three components: radical uncertainty (including unknown unknowns), radical dissonance (disagreement and polarized conflict), and asymmetric knowledge (including power relations). I quote:
. . . we argue, political systems are complex systems inevitably exhibiting incomplete, imperfect and asymmetric information that is dynamically generated in society from actors with diverse life experiences, antagonistic interests and often profoundly dissonant views and values, generating radical uncertainty among political elites over the consequences of their decisions. Radical uncertainty, radical dissonance and power asymmetry are inescapable properties of politics. Good performance significantly depends on how political elites navigate through radical uncertainty to handle radical dissonance.
For the authors, this task environment endorses an equally complex policy narrative. They “recast the problem of ignorance” by linking it to democratic performance: “The real problem of a democratic system is not about aggregating and measuring preferences with a view to a correct outcome, but it is about how democracies handle this dissonance, which always leaves some, if not most, preferences, ideas, values and norms unfulfilled at any given time”.
The question I have is, Does this democratic narrative stick? While the authors mention a case (the water scandal in Flint Michigan), the efficacy criterion of “Does it stick?” requires a review of multiple cases of this narrative and variation across cases.
“Does it stick?” is an eminently empirical question. It is also an eminently sensible one to ask of a planet of 8+ billion people providing opportunities for empirical generalizations based in large numbers.
Economics assumes a theory of substitutability, where goods and services have alternatives in the marketplace; infrastructure reliability assumes practices for ensuring nonfungibility, where nothing can substitute for the high reliability of critical infrastructures without which there would be no markets for goods and services, right now when selecting among those alternative goods and services. There is a point at which high reliability and trade-offs are immiscible, like trying to mix oil and water.
One way of thinking about the nonfungibility of infrastructure reliability is that it’s irrecuperable economically in real time; it cannot be cashed out in dollars and cents in the here-and-now without it becoming different from high reliability. Real time, from this perspective, is an impassable obstacle to monetizing tasks by infrastructure control room operators, then and there, when undertaking the managing.
Which is to say, if you were to enter the market and arbitrage a price for high reliability of critical infrastructures, the markets transactions would be such you’d never be sure you’re getting what you thought you were buying.
2. The methodological equivalent to the ethical “do as you would be done by”
3. Methodologically, analogies without counter-cases are empty signifiers
4. Peer review: another area where error avoidance is the method for reliability management
5. Not all the “can’s, might’s, may’s, or could’s” in the worlds of policy and management add up to one single “must”
6. To paraphrase Wittgenstein, an infinite regress explains nothing
7. The Achilles heel of conventional risk management is the counterfactual
8. What “calling for increased granularity” means
9.What does “anti-capitalist” actually denote?
10. Pastoralists as social figures
NB. For those interested in methodological issues associated specifically with narrative analyses of public policy and management issues, please also see in this blog:
A young researcher had just written up a case study of traditional irrigation in one of the districts that fell under the Government of Kenya’s Arid and Semi-Arid Lands (ASAL) Programme. (We’re in the early 1980s.) I remember reading the report and getting excited. Here was detailed information about really-existing irrigation practices and constraints sufficient to pinpoint opportunities for improvement. That was, until I turned the page to the conclusions: What was really needed was a country-wide land reform.
Huh? Where did that come from? Not from the details and findings in the report!
This was my introduction to solutions in search of “problems” they should “solve.” Only later did I realize I should have asked him, “What kind of land reform for whom and under what conditions at your research site?”
II
Someone asserts that this policy or approach holds broadly, and that triggers your asking:
Under what conditions?
With respect to what?
As opposed to what?
What is this a case of?
What are you–and we–missing?
Under what conditions does what you’re saying actually hold? Risk or uncertainty with respect to what failure scenario? Settler colonialism as opposed to what? Just what is this you are talking about a case of? What are you and I missing that’s right in front us?
2. The methodological equivalent to the ethical “do as you would be done by”?
As regards analysis, I have been much influenced by Bob Goodin’s dictum: ‘Distinctions = arguments’. That formula cannot be quite right: distinction is often the basis for argument rather than the argument itself. For example, philosophers may distinguish different aspects of equality before using this for a normative argument. But Goodin’s essential insight is correct: we often benefit when we see that what we thought of as one thing is actually two or more things, and that our answers depend on which of these things we examine.
3. Methodologically, analogies without counter-cases are empty signifiers
The relentless rise of modern inequality is widely appreciated to have taken on crisis dimensions, and in moments of crisis, the public, politicians and academics alike look to historical analogies for guidance.
I have bolded the preceding phrase because its insight is major: The search for analogies from the past for the present is especially acute in turbulent times.
The problem–which is also a matter of historical record–is the misleading analogy. Jackson, by way of illustrating this point, provides ample evidence to question the commonplace that the US is presently in “the Second (New) Gilded Age,” with rising inequality, populism and corruption last seen in the final quarter of our 19th century.
II
Even were we to have a more apposite analogy from the past for present national trends, we are still stuck with the fallacy of composition: Just because a tree is shady does not mean each leaf provides shade. Not all of the country was going through the Gilded Age, even when underway. And doubtless parts of the country are now going through a Second Gilded Age, even if not nationally.
The upshot is that we must press the advocates of this or that analogy to go further. The burden of proof is on the advocates to demonstrate their generalizations hold regardless of the more granular exceptions, including those reframed by other analogies.
Why would they concede exceptions? Because we, their interlocutors, know empirically that micro and macro can be loosely-coupled, and most certainly not as tightly coupled as theory and ideology have it. Broad analogies that do not admit granular counter-cases float unhelpfully above policy and management.
III
A fairly uncontroversial upshot, I should have thought, but let’s make the matter harder for us.
The same day I read Jackson’s article, I can across the following analogy for current events. Asked if there were any parallels to the Roman Empire, Edward Luttwak, a scholar on international, military and grand strategy, offered this:
Well, here is one parallel: after 378 years of success, Rome, which was surrounded by barbarians, slowly started admitting them until it completely changed society and the whole thing collapsed. I am sure you know that the so-called barbarian invasions were, in fact, illegal migrations. These barbarians were pressing against the border. They wanted to come into the Empire because the Romans had facilities like roads and waterworks. They knew that life in the Roman Empire was great. Some of these barbarians were “asylum seekers,” like the Goths who crossed the Danube while fleeing the Huns.
Of course, some read this as inflammatory and go no further. Others, of course, dismiss this outright as racist, adding the ad hominem “Just look who and where publishes this stuff!”
But the method to adopt would be to press Luttwak for definitions and examples, including most importantly counter-examples.
4. Peer review: another area where error avoidance is the method for reliability management
Below is part of an interchange in the Comments section of a recent Financial Times article on scientific fraud:
Comment: I am a scientist. I spend all my time trying not to be wrong in print. Even then, occasionally I am. It is the same for all of us. Furthermore, some scientists are very poor at dealing with statistics and are thus wrong more than others. Our common incompetence is different from actual fraud. The proportion of frauds has probably held steady since the time science became a profession and has grown as the number of scientists has grown. I find it unlikely that the proportion of scientists with this character flaw has increased recently. Possibly much more common than fraud is ripping off your collaborators, or stealing ideas during reviews of manuscripts and grant applications. That is quite hard to prove and so it seems to be popular among certain character types but again, there is no reason to think their proportion has increased.
Reply: It actually doesn’t matter if the proportion is remaining steady – even though it almost certainly is growing, with so much more financial, career and political pressure on academics these days, and a for-profit publishing system that reduces public oversight and is massively biased towards positive outcomes.
The goal should remain zero.
It’s unacceptable for scientists to publish errors due to being ‘poor at statistics’. Huge amounts of money is being wasted, lives are being lost – the least people can do is get training, or work with someone else who IS good at them.
If peer review isn’t solely about error avoidance, how can it aspire to be reliable?
5. Not all the “can’s, might’s, may’s, or could’s” in the worlds of policy and management add up to one single “must”
Consider the following example (my bolding):
Our expert-interview exercise with leading thinkers on the topic revealed how climate technologies canpotentially propagate very different types of conflict at different scales and among diverse political actors. Conflict and war could be pursued intentionally (direct targeted deployment, especially weather-modification efforts targeting key resources such as fishing, agriculture, or forests) or result accidently (unintended collateral damage during existing conflicts or even owing to miscalculation). Conflict could be over material resources (mines or technology supply chains) or even immaterial resources (patents, soft- ware, control systems prone to hacking). The protagonists of conflict could be unilateral (a state, a populist leader, a billionaire) or multi- lateral in nature (via cartels and clubs, a new “Green OPEC”). Research and deployment could exacerbate ongoing instability and conflict, or cause and contribute to entirely new conflicts. Militarization could be over perceptions of unauthorized or destabilizing deployment (India worrying that China has utilized it to affect the monsoon cycle), or to enforce deployment or deter noncompliance (militaries sent in to protect carbon reservoirs or large-scale afforestation or ecosystem projects). Conflict potentialcould involve a catastrophic, one-off event such as a great power war or nuclear war, or instead a more chronic and recurring series of events, such as heightening tensions in the global political system to the point of miscalculation, counter-geoengineering, permissive tolerance and brinksmanship. . . .
States and actors will need to proceed even more cautiously in the future if they are to avoid making these predictions into reality, and more effective governance architectures may be warranted to constrain rather than enable deployment, particularly in cases that might lead to spiralling, retaliatory developments toward greater conflict. After all, to address the wicked problem of climate change while creating more pernicious political problems that damage our collective security is a future we must avoid.
Let’s be clear: All such “could’s-as-possibilities” do not add up to one single “must-as-necessity.”
The only way in this particular passage that “could” and “can” link to “must” would mean that the originating article (and like ones) began with “We must avoid this or that” and then proceeded to demonstrate how to undertake really-existing error avoidance with respect to those could-events and might-be’s.
6. To paraphrase Wittgenstein, methodologically an infinite regress explains nothing
Stop fossil fuels; stop cutting down trees; stop using plastics; stop defense spending; stop being imperialist; stop techno-solutionism; start being small-d democratic and small-p participatory; dismantle capitalism, racism and the rest; transform cities; save biodiversity; never forget class, gender, race, inequality, religions, bad faith, identity. . .and. . .
7. The Achilles heel of conventional risk management methods is the counterfactual
I
The crux of counterfactual history is a present always not one way only. You want a counterfactual, but for which current interpretation or set of historical interpretations?
Two moves generate an answer, working like the blades of a scissors.
One devotes time and attention to “what is happening,” a state of affairs that can be interpreted in multiple different ways. The other devotes time and attention to “what has happened,” a state of affairs that could have turned out differently and so too the allied interpretations. Where the blades slice, they open up not only the contingent nature of events past and present, but also the recasting of what is and has been.
II
This is a problem when it comes to risk assessment and management, shadowed as they are by their very problematic counterfactual history.
It’s not only that “risk” and “management” are historically contingent concepts with forgone alternatives. Their tools of the trade can be recast differently at any time, not least of which in light of those forgone alternatives.
Consider a city’s building code. Viewed one way, it is sequential interconnectivity (do this-now followed by then-that). But if cities also view their respective building codes as the means to bring structures up to or better than current seismic standards, then the code becomes a focal mechanism for pooled interconnectivity among developers and builders.
That neither is guaranteed should be obvious. That you in no way need recourse to the language of conventional risk management to conclude so should also be.
8. What “calling for increased granularity” means
I
When I say concepts like regulation, inequality, and poverty are too abstract, I am not criticizing abstraction altogether. I am saying (1) that these concepts are not differentiated enough for an actionable policy or management and (2) that this actionable granularity requires a particular kind abstraction from the get-go.
II
What does “actionable granularity” mean?
I have in mind the range of policy analysis and management that exists between, on the one side, the adaptation of policy and management designs and principles to local circumstances and, on the other side, the recognition that systemwide patterns emerging across a diverse set of existing cases inevitably contrast with official and context-specific policy and management designs.
Think here of adapting your systemwide definition of poverty to local contingencies and having to accommodate the fact that patterns that emerge across how really-existing people identify poverty differ from not only system definitions but also from localized poverty scenarios based in these definitions.
III
One implication is that cases that are not framed by emerging patterns and, on the other side, by localized design scenarios are rightfully called “unique.” Unique cases of poverty cannot be abstracted, just as some concepts of poverty are, in my view, too abstract. Unique cases stand outside the actionable granularity of interest here for policy and management.
Where so, then there is the methodological problem of cases that are assumed to be unique or stand-alone, when in fact no prior effort has been made to ascertain (1) systemwide patterns and local contingency scenarios in which the case might be embedded along with (2) the practices, if any, of adaptation and modification that emerge as a result.
From a policy and management perspective, such cases have been prematurely rendered unique: They have been, if you will, over-complexified so as to permit no abstraction. Unique cases are not themselves something we can even abstract as sui generis or even “‘a case’ in its own right.”
I stress this point if only because of the exceptionalism assigned to “wicked policy problems”. Where the methodological problem of premature complexification isn’t addressed beforehand, then by definition the so-called wicked policy problem is prematurely “wickedly unique.” Or, more ironically, uniquely wicked problems are abstracted insufficiently for the purposes of systemwide pattern recognition and design scenario modification.
9. What does “anti-capitalist” actually denote?
Ending capitalism isn’t just hard to realize; it’s hard to theorize and methodize. To wit: “Under capitalism” means that even with always-late capitalism, we have. . .
laissez-faire capitalism, monopoly capitalism, oligarchic capitalism, state-guided capitalism, party-state capitalism, corporate capitalism, corporate-consumerist capitalism, digital capitalism, financialized capitalism, political capitalism, social (democratic) capitalism, neoliberal capitalism, crony capitalism, wellness capitalism, petty capitalism, platform capitalism, surveillance capitalism, infrastructural capitalism, welfare capitalism, authoritarian capitalism, imperialistic capitalism, turbo-capitalism, post-IP capitalism, green (also red and brown) capitalism, climate capitalism, extractive capitalism, libidinal capitalism, tech capitalism, emotional capitalism, American capitalism, British capitalism, European capitalism, Western capitalism, transnational capitalism, global capitalism, agrarian capitalism, residential capitalism, disaster capitalism, rentier capitalism, industrial capitalism, post-industrial capitalism, fossil capitalism, petro-capitalism, settler-colonial capitalism, supply chain capitalism, cognitive capitalism, asset manager capitalism, information (also data) capitalism, cyber-capitalism, racial capitalism, necro-capitalism, bio-capitalism, penny capitalism, war capitalism, crisis capitalism, managerial capitalism, stakeholder capitalism, techno(scientific)-capitalism, pandemic capitalism, caring capitalism, zombie capitalism. . .
Oh hell, let’s stop there. In a deep irony, much of this looks like classic product differentiation in competitive markets. In this case: by careerists seeking to (re)brand their lines of inquiry for a competitive advantage in professions that act more and more like markets anyway.
Now, of course, it’s methodologically positive to be able to differentiate types and varieties of capitalism, so as to identify patterns and practices (if any) across the diversity of cases. But how is the latter identification to be achieved with respect to a list, namely the above, without number, something already bordering on the making of an infinite regress?
So what now? Yes, some of the listed terms do seek to denote specific contexts and levels of granularity and commonalities across cases. But, as others just as clearly do not, what then does being anti-“capitalist” actually mean?
10. Pastoralists as social figures
We consider a timeless model of a common property resource (CPR) in which N herdsmen are able to graze their cattle. The model has been constructed deliberately along orthodox economics lines. . . .We begin with a timeless world. Herdsmen are indexed by i (i = 1, 2, …, N). Cattle are private property. The grazing field is taken to be a village pasture. Its size is S. Cattle intermingle while grazing, so on average the animals consume the same amount of grass. If X is the size of the herd in the pasture, total output – of milk – is H(X, S), where H is taken to be constant returns to scale in X and S.
Dasgupta, P. (2021), The Economics of Biodiversity: The Dasgupta Review. London: HM Treasury: 221 (internal footnotes deleted)
After such bloodless abstraction, it’s a wonder more readers don’t rush to the anthropology literature for descriptions of really-existing pastoralists and their herding practices.
The methodological problem, though, is that there’s really-existing, and then there’s really-existing. There are pastoralists interviewed and quoted. Then there’s the social figure of the pastoralist, a composite assembled to represent the typical features of the pastoralists that have been studied.
All well and good, if you understand that the use of social figures extends significantly beyond the confines of anthropology or the social sciences. Social figures “potentially have all the characteristics which would be considered character description in literary studies,” notes a cultural sociologist, adding, “unlike ideal types, for example, which are written with a clear heuristic goal in a scientific context, social figures can also appear in public debate or be described in literary texts.”
So what? “For theorizing, this means. . .attention must be paid to a good figurative description: Is the figurative description vivid, descriptive and, as a figure, internally consistent? Does it accurately reflect the social context to which it refers? Therefore, the criteria to assess quality in theorizing must be complemented by literary criteria.”
And one of those literary conventions helps explain why the social figure of today’s pastoralist is routinely compared and contrasted to the social figure of the pastoralist in the past. “[T]here are often antecedent figures for a social figure. . .The current social figure can then be understood as an update of older social figures.”
A small matter, you think, and easily chalked up to “this is the way we do historical analysis.” It is not, however, a slight issue methodologically, when comparing your pastoralist interviewees today with the social figures of pastoralists in the past ends up identifying “differences” that are more about criteria for, rather than empirics in, “really-existing.”
WHEN COMPLEX IS AS SIMPLE AS IT GETS 