The danger in stopping short by organizing around probabilities and consequences of large infrastructure failure is the notion that the two are independent of each other. You don’t realize what you have before you may well be little more than unforeseen contingencies associated with a chaotic afterwards. Its causality is the last thing you understand and your risk management framework misleads you in thinking otherwise. In reality, to equate system uncertainties and unknown-unknowns with systemic risk is the disaster to forestall rather than hasten unintentionally.

Or to put the point in positive terms. When an experienced county emergency manager told us, “Floods are complex events, they have many variables,” it wasn’t helpful to tell him, as some did, that he’d be better off first simplifying those events for the purpose of risk modeling. To assume he needed to first understand the flooding better ignored that he was already managing the complexity there. The complexity sands away any shield of photo-clarity and reveals the contingencies and exigencies in action underneath.

So what? Infrastructure reliability managers are in an important sense like that top-most weathervane made to take lightning strikes outside so to protect the house underneath. More, such protection against dangers is a public good, and is what we expect from leaders, regulators and policymakers.

The idea that current capitalist pathologies arise because the capitalism of markets and productivity has disappeared. The idea that Amazon Inc. should be broken up because of its monopoly power and anti-competitive practices, as professed by a think tank whose goal is nothing like a competitive market society. The idea of Eurocommunist parties that the working class isn’t to be praised but contested by, among others, middle class workers.

Time after time, making human behaviour more predictable for the client of prediction (the manager, the police officer) often means making life and work more unpredictable for the target of prediction (the employee, the urban citizen).

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/20539517231171053

Meanwhile I’ll be plotting to outwrite it; I want to be the first human being to imitate ChatGPT perfectly.

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2023/may/20/m-john-harrison-i-want-to-be-the-first-human-to-imitate-chatgpt-wish-i-was-here?utm_term=6469c17386bac9427580944744a8948a&utm_campaign=Bookmarks&utm_source=esp&utm_medium=Email&CMP=bookmarks_email

Large proportions of the Chinese collection are perhaps copies in the eyes of those collectors and dealers, who believe that authentic African art has become largely extinct due to diminishing numbers of active traditional carvers and ritual practices. However, the ideological structure and colonial history of authenticity loses its effects and meanings in China, where anything produced and brought back from Africa is deemed to be “authentically African”.

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/13696815.2021.1925089

Lessons from post-socialist transformation for social-ecological transformation

The economies of Central and Eastern Europe have experienced two different economic systems and transformations. These experiences are valuable for the social-ecological transformation towards a post-growth society. The central findings of our analysis of these transformation experiences are presented here. . .In our view, it is worthwhile to include these experiences in the degrowth debate.

I. Experience with the economy of shortage shows that low production of goods does not necessarily go hand in hand with positive environmental effects.

In an economy of shortage, there can be a forced equilibrium of adjustment with scarcity and abundance often being at odds with each other: “We had nothing [in the shops], no vegetables, no fruit, just tangerines for the New Year. And then we bought them in advance for a whole month. But imagine what happens to them when they lie around for a month. Half were rotten and had to be thrown away. [Laughs]” (Interview, Narva/Kudruküla, 2019). Accordingly, shortage can even lead directly to waste. For a degrowth economy, this means that a one-sided orientation towards ecological limits on the supply side can lead to inefficient hoarding tendencies with high environmental burdens on the demand side. A sufficiency economy must therefore consider both the supply and the demand side in order to bring about a new equilibrium of adjustment.

II. Experiences with the shortage economy must not be reduced to shortage, because this often devalues the whole body of knowledge and life practices associated with it.

Although practices such as semi-subsistence agriculture can also be seen as a way of coping with shortage and as such provide socio-economic buffers and resilience, they cannot be reduced to mere economic neediness. For this image, whether intentionally or not, leads to a renewed process of marginalisation and devaluation of the knowledge and life practices involved. It is inseparable from the hegemonic discourse of modernisation, according to which only Western standards of living are considered universally desirable. At the same time, the image reproduces the binary opposition of the ‘modern West’ and the ‘catching-up East’, thus preventing socially and ecologically desirable practices from ‘the East’ from gaining the same (global) acceptance and recognition as those from ‘the West’.

III. The distinction between the basic components of a system and its economic effects is central to understanding transformations.

The transformations in Central and Eastern Europe were successful at the macro level because they addressed the fundamental components of the systems: political power, the distribution of property rights and the coordination mechanism. The previously typical behaviour of economic actors and phenomena changed as a result of these fundamental changes. If the degrowth discourse is serious about a social-ecological transformation, and does not (mis)use the term as a synonym for ecological reform, then it is essential to examine how people in Central and Eastern Europe have experienced these changes and to take more account of post-socialist transformation research. . . .

https://www.ipe-berlin.org/fileadmin/institut-ipe/Dokumente/Working_Papers/ipe_working_paper_215.pdf

How many times have we heard something like, “If implemented as planned…,” “If the right structures are in place…,” or “Given market-clearing prices…”? Just like that older version: “Monarchy is the best form of government, provided the monarch possesses virtue and wisdom.”

‘If implemented as planned’, when we know that is the assumption we cannot make. ‘If the right structures are in place.” when we know that “right” is unethical without specifying just what the structures are, often case by case. “Given market-clearing prices,” when we know not only that markets in the real world often do not clear (supply and demand do not equate at a single price) – and even when they do, their “efficiencies” can undermine the very markets that produce those prices.

Admit it: We could as well believe that the surest way to heat the house in winter is by striking a match under the thermometer outside.

I

A good deal has been written arguing that economic efficiency and equality in economic well-being can move in the same direction (e.g., healthier people are more economically productive). The dominant view, however, remains the two are in The Big Tradeoff: more equality means less efficiency.

All this is curious from the perspective of the social sciences: Why would anyone take a movement in efficiency (or equality) to be caused by a movement in the other rather than caused by some intervening variable affecting both efficiency and equality independently?

II

More institutionally-informed economists say they do talk about intervening variables, at least in the form of secure property rights that underpin gains in economic efficiency. Yet those are no more second-order considerations. For when economists talk about the necessity of “secure property rights,” they rarely see any need to underscore a hugely reliable contract law, insurance and title registration infrastructure in place and “always on.”

Could it be, for example, that consumption is less unequally distributed than income precisely because critical infrastructures have been more reliable in the delivery and distribution of goods and services than they have been in the creation and generation of income opportunities for those doing the consuming?

In a very fine article on degrowth strategies in urban areas, “Strategic planning for degrowth: What, who, how,” Federico Salvini of the University of Amsterdam concludes:

The concepts of synergy and regionalization are already familiar in strategic planning theory. They stress that, to trigger strategic processes, it is essential for planners to grasp the existing landscape of prefigurative practices, directly engage with them, connect them through frames of meaningful interaction, and define a common understanding of the territory in which those practices coexist. In this paper, I argued that strategic spatial planning needs to go back to these two foundational processes to be able to address the extreme urgency of today’s social and ecological challenges (i.e., ecological breakdown and its related socio-political implications). Yet, it needs to do so by focusing on those practices that see reduction as imperative. In cities, these practices are increasingly common. Examples include housing cooperatives, ecological social housing, squats, community agriculture, food sovereignty, collective voluntary simplicity, and networks of care, education, and health.

(Accessed online at https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/14730952241258693?__s=5c7iz8sjrdi0asw7ei91&utm_source=drip&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Your+Syllabus+This+Week)

Now, I don’t want to make too much of those degrowth “how-to-reduce” practices I’ve bolded in the above.

But aren’t many pastoralists and pastoralists areas still doing the equivalent–and long before degrowth moved to where it needs to be in the global policy agenda?

Let’s start with some of the big questions. How to maintain funding for the welfare system in a non-growing economy? How do we manage the increasing relative costs of welfare? Overcome structural and behavior growth dependencies within the welfare system? Transform the welfare state for the better?

Now the thought experiment. What if we “answered” these questions with an observation that only initially seems far afield and entirely off tangent? Namely: Unfree labor flows and flows of illegal funds, goods, and services are a stable part of the global economy, not an aberration:

Two fields of scholarship, human trafficking for sexual exploitation and that of forced labour in supply chains, rarely intersect.” “In showing that unfree labour is a stable aspect of the contemporary global economy, scholars studying labour in supply chains challenge the idea that forced labour is an ‘aberration’ (Phillips and Mieres, 2014: 245) from the normal functioning of labour markets and that of unfree labour as the opposite of free waged labour.

That is, deregulation, liberalization and privatization not only introduce failure regimes–less stable by definition–where there were none before (e.g., once public entities can now go bankrupt, thereby undermining the welfare state), but also provide more stable markets for all manner of unofficial and illegal items.

“Welfare,” “state” and the “welfare state” have indeed been transformed. Its official non-growing economy is not the only economy of relevance anymore.

So it has always been, though arguably not as marketized globally as now. So what?

The observation would be banal were it not for its major policy implication. If asked, What makes for better planning ahead?, we should answer: Why even ask if you can’t learn better to plan and respond for now and the next steps? Or to put the point from the opposite direction: It’s not insignificant that most miracles are about healing finally.

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Sources.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0921800921001245

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/13505068211020791

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/puar.13388

The reason for what the modelers dub ‘no prediction’ is given in another paper attempting to predict the habitat of the Tsetse fly, which emphasizes that all environmental conditions will not have been captured by the model and that when the environment is too different, they prefer creating a category of ‘no prediction’:

“Mapped outputs record the similarity of each pixel in an entire set of satellite images to the satellite-determined environmental characteristics of the training set sites. Obviously for this to be successful the training set should have captured the entire range of conditions present throughout the area for which predictions will eventually be made. This is not always the case, and it is then preferable to identify in the output image a separate category of ‘no prediction’ for those areas where the environmental conditions are some specific minimum distance (in multivariate space) away from any of the training set clusters (Rogers and Robinson, Citation2004, p. 144. Emphasis added.).”

Accessed online on August 26 2024 at: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09505431.2023.2291046#d1e910

I

Many people with whom I’ve worked and interacted insist that, when it comes to ecosystems and the environment, more things can go straight-out, hair-raisingly wrong than right.

It is easier to mismanage an ecosystem than it is to manage it. Ecosystem collapse is more certain than ecosystem sustainability. Negative externalities in the environment are to be expected, positive ones not. Probabilities of large system failure and cascades are primed to flip to 1.0 in no time flat.

We must manage its resources better, but no one should expect technology to help. Economic growth is never a sufficient condition for improving the environment, while economic growth’s impacts on the environment are always sufficient for precaution. So much is uncertain that anything is possible, which means everything is at risk.

Huh?

II

Let’s agree that this expectation of next-is-worse follows from the core of today’s modernity—international capital, fossil fuel, global urbanization, the Enlightenment project—while in the same breadth, however, insisting all this is best understood in the very terms of that modernity: Anything and everything is at risk; all risks are potentially scary; indeed, any could be catastrophic.

That said, people with these expectations are like those trying to predict a poet’s next poem from their current body of work. A more productive approach might be to ask: What are we getting from this habituation to next-is-worse?

One answer: Doing so saves us all the trouble and worry of having to figure out the details. Another reason is the trained incapacity that comes with fatalism. Repeatedly, the doomer literature nails home that we don’t need widespread fear and dread of COLLAPSE to provoke remedy and recovery, because so many no longer believe in either.

How are the rest of us to respond to these expectations? What can we believe and be doing instead?

III

COP26, the 26th United Nations Climate Change Conference, was for many (me included) a failure to do the needful in limiting temperature rise. But the failure was not that “alternative voices were left out and alternative politics side-lined.” For it first has to be asked: Which COP26 failed?

Such a conference is never altogether in one place and time only, if only because those attending were being themselves in one venue while being other selves in other venues there. COP26 is and was riddled with this intermittence and who’s to say the earlier or later versions around and in between October 31 and November 13 2021 are not its upside? Next-is-worse is just one venue. What about the other venues, where the networking and horizontal relations were underway?

Here, the opposite of fatalism is intermittence. No state of affairs is one-way only.

I

The philosopher, Ludwig Wittgenstein, writes in The Big Transcript:

In a story it says: “After he said that he left her, as he had done the day before.” If I am asked whether I understand this sentence, there’s no easy answer. It’s an English sentence and in that respect I understand it. I would know, for instance, how one could use this sentence. I could come up with a context of my own for it. And yet I don’t understand it in the same way I would understand it if I had read the story up to that point. (Cf language-games.) [7e]

Replace “if I had read the story” with “if I had read the policy palimpsest.” The spaces in between the words, “After he said that he left her, as he had done the day before,” are just as important, if not more so, than the words read. The spaces signify all that has been left out, effaced or erased from prior texts used to assemble this composite sentence. Not to see what’s missing is a special kind of failure in understanding what you are reading. That you’d understand the sentence differently or better had you read the story up to that point doesn’t change the fact that the preceding text embeds interstices also to be examined and understood.

How so? Immediately after the above quote, Wittgenstein asks us to think of the sentence as if it were a painting:

What does it mean to understand a painted picture? Here too there is understanding and a failure to understand! And here too ‘understanding’ and ‘failure to understand’ can mean different things. –The picture represents an arrangement of objects in space, but I am incapable of seeing a part of the picture three-dimensionally; rather, in that part I see only patches of the picture. . .[M]aybe I know all of the objects, but – in another sense – don’t understand how they’re arranged. [7e]

So too we understand the words in a composite sentence but fail to understand the three-dimensionality of the palimpsest–its weight and heft layered and interweaved beneath–from which the composite has been patched together.

II

In actuality, each composite sentence is a rearrangement of the palimpsest’s elements-with-effacements from different layers and positions into, literally, the straight lines called sentences. These linear, sequential expressions are, in effect, meshes of interrupted time and space tethered in multiple places to the entire policy palimpsest.

The analogy I have in mind is the way painter, Gerhard Richter, uses the squeegee in his photo-paintings and more recent chromatic work. He smears the surface photo or layers of paint and produces something new, seen for the first time. So too the analyst seeks to smear the composite sentence or argument with an optic–a new method, metaphor, counternarrative–in order to see not just what’s below the surface but also to surface new ways of seeing all this.

III

No palimpsest is inscripted with the last word; no composite from it is indisputable. Each composite is allographic in the sense of having no one authoritative rendering. If a “readymade” is a mass-produced object elected by an artist for display as a work of art, a policy palimpsest is a “readyunmade,” one that is also mass-produced but constantly scored over by all manner of contingencies.

In case it needs saying, sometimes the scoring is visible and the sutures blatant. During his honorary degree ceremony in 1959 at the Czech Charles University, Haile Selassie was addressed as, well, “Comrade Emperor” (which is right up there with Louis-Philippe as “citizen King” in France’s July 1830 Revolution).

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For an introduction to “policy palimpsests,” see my “When Complex is as Simple as it Gets: Guide for recasting policy and management in the Anthropocene” at https://opendocs.ids.ac.uk/opendocs/handle/20.500.12413/18008