Two examples of surprise as a policy optic

I

For G.L.S. Shackle, British economist, possibility inverts surprise: The larger one’s surprise that something will happen, the less possible it is from the perspective of the person concerned. To ask what would be the biggest surprise in Global Climate Change (GCC) is to ask what would be the most counter-expected or unexpected event with respect to it. When I do ask, I’m told the most surprising eventuality would be things become far worse far faster, but in unimaginable ways.

But wouldn’t the total surprise be instead: Most everyone most everywhere benefits as a result of GCC? This would have to mean more than producing local sites of net benefit, i.e.,  some countries, regions or people benefit in aggregate from climate change, while most do not. Rather, the greatest surprise here would be that “business as usual” in intervening in climate change makes things better for far more people and the planet than currently supposed. The real surprise would be if we managed our way through GCC with no more than the counter-measures already underway or in the pipeline (business as usual of course does not mean do-nothing).

For Shackle, the more surprising, the less possible. How then could such a counter-expected event about GCC even be possible?

One answer is that of well-known philosopher of science, Roy Bhaskar: While the world is real, it is more complexly real than humans with their instruments can cognitively grasp. Should climate change be real in Bhaskar sense, its reality must as well be more differentiated than uniform, unknowable and not just unknown, more immanent or emergent than fixed, right? In this view (and again it is a possibility only) it is unrealistic to assume surprise (and so, necessarily, knowledge) is even on net, negative. Surprise is only negative if resilience cannot incorporate unpredictability, including randomness, as a resource.

II

It’s long been recognized that large complex systems are surprising even to their managers and real-time operators. The unexpected often happens. Even the most experienced operators, who say little shocks them by this point, find themselves wondering how this happened, now.

This is a very suggestive finding in my view. The financing and construction of homes and flats in the San Francisco Bay Area is a complex housing sector. All manner of politicians, regulators, investors, advocacy groups, developers, jurisdictions, localities and residents interact, and this unsettled and unsettling variety is itself often pointed to as proof-positive of the complexity. In this sector, everyone has stories to tell about the unexpected I’ve been told.

What if then we recast the stakeholder complexity in terms of the surprises experienced by those involved? Instead of housing prices going, we talk about: COVID comes, things shut down including construction, and yet the price of lumber skyrockets in ways that shock even those in the know (think supply chain interruptions).

So what? This implies unexpected ripple effects by way of inter-linked surprises, which in turn raise at least one methodological question (surprising to me, anyway): When it comes to this construction sector in the Bay Area, is it better to say we have networks or communities of surprises?