Source
S. Bose (2023). Photovoice With Pastoralists: A Practical Guidebook. PASTRES, Institute of Development Studies, Sussex and the European University Institute in Florence. Reproduced with permission and accessed online at https://pastres.files.wordpress.com/2023/11/photovoice-guide-digital.pdf (Photo by Malicha, used with permission of the ERC PASTRES project)
I
Graduate students in public policy analysis and management will know the idealized sequence for undertaking a professional policy analysis, e.g., first define the problem, then assemble the evidence, then analyze it so and so on until we make our recommendation. This sequence, or something like it, is cast in the present tense.
My experience is that the idealized steps are markedly not in the present tense, but rather:
Having completed the analysis, I wrote the memo with my recommendations.
The past gerund, “having completed the analysis,” indicates something finished, a hope that stands in sharp contrast to real-world policies in their persisting incompletion—a very different kind of “present tense.” The gerund also serves to situate analysis within an ongoing context without which there wouldn’t be analysis.
In turn, the prepositional object , “recommendations,” introduces its own promise that our memo will be dealt with, albeit beyond our control but still within that context of which we analysts are part. Indeed, the point of the past gerund/past tense/object formulation is to make clear that, “objectively speaking”, analysts in the present are not to blame for anything like the real-world incompletion all around us.
II
Here’s another way to look at the incompletion.
It’s also common enough that today’s accounts of policy and management be presented from not just one discipline’s perspective (say, economics), but many—including political science, psychology, organization theory, and more.
Yet what frequently gets missed are the implied hyphens, i.e., “from a socio-politico-economic-cultural-historical-psychological. . .perspective”. How so?
Consider Polonius in Hamlet: “The best actors in the world, either for tragedy, comedy, history, pastoral, pastoral-comical, historical-pastoral, tragical-historical, tragical-comical-historical-pastoral. . .”
The hyphens there function as the performative demonstration of Polonius’s long-windedness. Interdisciplinary accounts of policy analysis and management, however, insist that you take their added wordage as anything but long-windedness.
Or another example: “It is obviously a highly complex phenomenon that needs global cooperation as a response as well as a holistic approach because the potential collapses are interrelated” Each word is written as if it anchored, resolute, placed there to resist being dragged elsewhere. In fact, each word functions as a cowpat to be stepped into and distract us into something that looks like. . . longwindedness as another form of incompleteness.
Source
Moretti, F. (2013). The Bourgeois: Between History and Literature. Verso: London and New York
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I
This week I attended an informative conference on sea-level rise, storm surges and flooding in the greater San Francisco Bay Area, now and projected into the near decades.
Most of the day was spent on projects and interventions for climate change mitigation and adaptation that I knew nothing about, including: a Lake Mendocino water storage innovation, several dredging and sediment projects geared to beneficial uses, several wetlands restoration projects, and a great many planning and feasibility efforts funded with respect to not just sea-level rise, increased storm surges and inland flooding, but also for rising groundwater levels and changing air temperatures affecting major infrastructures differently.
In addition to these specifics, I was told:
Millions of cubic yards equivalent to over 420 Salesforce Tower high-rises? Some $110 billion which has no possibility whatsoever of being funded, locally let alone regionally? And those massive new requirements posed even locally by the melting ice caps? How are these unprecedented high requirements to be met?
It’s not surprising that the individual interventions presented that day and all the hard work they already required paled into insignificance against the funding and work challenges posed by the bulleted challenges.
What to do? How to respond?
II
These massively large sums (and like figures) are meant to underscore the urgency of the matter, to stir us to action that matches the unparalleled magnitude of the crisis. Such numbers do that for some people, but others instead respond by becoming even more uncertain than they already are. Some of that increased uncertainty is translated into dread over how to proceed (like we saw with respect to nuclear weapons in the Cold War), and dread can also be instrumental in generating action.
More often though, I’ve found that the increased uncertainty generated by category-five sums ends up reinforcing the focus on and approach to projects and interventions already underway. At least we know and can see hard work achieves this!
III
And in that hard work is one answer to why such large numbers, even when they measure true requirements, fall short of the needed analysis.
The problem lies in the estimates of losses (economic, physical, lives, and more) incurred if we don’t take action now, right now. It’s been my experience that none of these estimated losses take into account the other losses prevented from occurring by infrastructure operators and emergency managers who avoid systemwide and regional system failures from happening that would have happened had they not intervened beforehand, sometimes at the last moment.
Why are these uncalculated billions and billions of saved dollars important when it comes to responding to sea level rise, increased storm surges, more inland flooding, rising groundwater levels and other sequelae?
Because it from this pool of real-time talent and skills and practices that society will be drawing for operationally redesigning the inevitable shortfalls in new technologies, macro-plans and regulations for climate restoration and recovery.
IV
We have a pool of such professionals already. They are not being consulted nor is their professionalism adequately recognized for the Anthropocene challenges ahead. Those in infrastructures who are already making billion-dollar saves are going to be needed even if the impossible sums were funded, and most assuredly because they won’t be.
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You’d think that with the catastrophic disaster scenarios the planet is said to face, we’d see more investigations of how large critical infrastructures actually do avoid or avert massive system failures. You’d also think that the costs to society of confronting limitless disaster scenarios is set by the dangers of ignoring disasters, like earthquakes, floods and fires, easier to identify and assess.
So what?
Appeals to processes or state conditions such as “globalization,” “financialization,” “disaster capitalism,” and the like leave us assuming these processes are indeed the peoples’ chronic crises. The latter, though, is the case only if the with-respect-to scenarios detail how these broad processes are chronic because people have failed to avert all their own dreaded events.
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I
Retrofitting a bridge pre-disaster isn’t a chancy wager on what might or might not happen to the bridge later. Retrofitting is managing latent interconnectivities between bridges and other infrastructures that become manifest during and immediately after the disaster. That inter-infrastructural connections will shift and these shifts will involve bridges is far more predictable than this or that bridge will fail, unless retrofitted.
This means attention is crucial to the track record in retrofitting bridges before and after disasters, here and elsewhere. Note the implication: Retrofitting has to occur in order to have a track record to monitor and learn from.
Since there are real material and cognitive limits on controlling inter-infrastructural connectivity at any point in time, doing more by way of managing the pre-disaster latency of interconnectivities is elemental. An interviewee with engineering and management experience told us their city water infrastructure was behind the electricity utility in the adoption of automatic shut-off valves. Bringing water systems up to power’s better practices is a way of managing latent interconnectivity in advance of disaster.
II
In other words, the question we should be asking is more akin to: “What have we learned, here or under like conditions elsewhere, that actually works in better managing latent interconnectivity for post-disaster response and recovery?”
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I
An article starts with: “The climate crisis calls for a massive and rapid retooling of our economy and society.” Yes, surely that and more; but what do we do immediately?
Which means in the US setting, activating a city or county emergency operations center and/or incident management teams at the department level to coordinate immediate response efforts. States also do the same with respect to their own EOCs, IMTs or equivalent.
This activation is done all the time, when high winds, ice storms, wildfires, heat dome effects, flooding and their combinations take down essential services, particularly backbone infrastructures of water, electricity, roads and telecoms.
II
Now the thought experiment: Activate the EOCs and IMTs, or at least the ones which know we are the climate emergency. And who are the distressed peoples and sites? Well, that’s not something you can answer a priori or universally. It’s up to the EOCs and IMTs, who recognize the climate emergency is leaving local people hungry, making local spaces uninhabitable, taking away local employment. . .
In thinking these things through, one rather counter-intuitive implication becomes clearer.
Those oft-mentioned “stop-this-and-that” (fossil fuel, biodiversity loss, and so much more) immediately hit a major obstacle. In really-existing emergency response, fossil fuel is needed to evacuate people, ship goods and services to distressed areas, keep the generators running when electricity fails, and so on. Cutting down trees, distribution of water in plastic bottles, and wide use of readily available gas-guzzling vehicles, in case it needs saying, are not uncommon.
Indeed and more globally, years and years of R&D have gone into studying, prototyping and distributing more sustainable options, like eco-friendly stoves, toilet facilities, renewable-energy generators, and other alternatives. Shouldn’t we then expect and want their increased use in immediate emergency response, especially when (not: “even if”) expediting them to the distressed sites and peoples means, e.g., using petrol to get them there?
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Below in full and without edit is a letter to the editor of the TLS:
Sir, – Unless a substantial proportion of the world’s scientists are deluded and are (innocently) deluding us, articles that blithely project a long-term future extrapolated from a continuing present need to be challenged (see “The last mortals” by Regina Rini, May 17). Or rather the publishing of them. To make predictions based on the present could be an act of climate catastrophe denial, an act that recursively makes the catastrophe more likely. This article is particularly odd in that it posits the exact opposite problem to the one we (almost certainly) face. It’s not how we cope with watching the next generation sail off into immortality, but how we cope with leaving them to face the conclusion of our civilization. Even the most sophisticated actuarial programs would struggle to tell me my grandchildren’s life expectancy, but I’d bet it’s shrinking by the day. A more useful challenge for philosophers would be to ask why environmental and social collapse are increasingly inevitable now, why we don’t care, and perhaps why we seem not to care that we don’t care. Are we incapable of seeing the world as real? Better to deal with these sorts of questions than to go floating off into Elfland.
MARK STEINHARDT
Bedford.
I wonder if Mr Steinhardt and like-minded people fully appreciate the equally strident policy implication that directly follows from the climate emergency being so catastrophic that thinking about anything else is irresponsible?
Namely: Such persons should be publicly shamed and humiliated, if it turns out that, of course the climate emergency is going on and yes, it is disastrous, but that does not excuse humanity from thinking about other existential disasters.
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I
It’s not surprising that those who don’t “give whatever it takes to save the planet” justify doing so by focusing on what they know can be managed or realized for the climate emergency. 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.
https://read.dukeupress.edu/south-atlantic-quarterly/article/122/1/181/319765/Taking-Political-Time-Thinking-Past-the-Emergency
Note this dissent at least has the merit of recognizing the human devastation entailed in its approach, quite unlike those who insist we must do whatever it takes, full stop. Nor is the quoted passage on its own. Others just as well 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 immiserated 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?
I
Recently, I attended an informative conference on sea-level rise, storm surges and flooding in the greater San Francisco Bay Area, now and projected into the near decades. It was held by the Propeller Club of Northern California and the Society of American Military Engineers (San Francisco Post), both long established marine-focused institutions in the Bay Area.
Most of the day was spent on projects and interventions for climate change mitigation and adaptation that I knew nothing about, including: a Lake Mendocino water storage innovation, several dredging and sediment projects geared to beneficial uses, several wetlands restoration projects, and a great many planning and feasibility efforts funded with respect to not just sea-level rise, increased storm surges and inland flooding, but also for rising groundwater levels and changing air temperatures affecting major infrastructures differently.
In addition to these specifics, I was told:
Millions of cubic yards equivalent to over 420 Salesforce Tower high-rises? Some $110 billion which has no possibility whatsoever of being funded, locally let alone regionally? And those massive new requirements posed even locally by the melting ice caps? How are these unprecedented high requirements to be met?
It’s not surprising that the individual interventions presented that day and all the hard work they already required paled into insignificance against the funding and work challenges posed by the bulleted challenges.
What to do? How to respond?
II
These massively large sums (and like figures) are meant to underscore the urgency of the matter, to stir us to action that matches the unparalleled magnitude of the crisis. Such numbers do that for some people, but others instead respond by becoming even more uncertain than they already are. Some of that increased uncertainty is translated into dread over how to proceed (like we saw with respect to nuclear weapons in the Cold War), and dread can also be instrumental in generating action.
More often though, I’ve found that the increased uncertainty generated by category-five sums ends up reinforcing the focus on and approach to projects and interventions already underway. At least we know and can see hard work achieves this!
III
And in that hard work is one answer to why such large numbers, even when they measure true requirements, fall short of the needed analysis.
The problem lies in the estimates of losses (economic, physical, lives, and more) incurred if we don’t take action now, right now. It’s been my experience that none of these estimated losses take into account the other losses prevented from occurring by infrastructure operators and emergency managers who avoid systemwide and regional system failures from happening that would have happened had they not intervened beforehand, sometimes at the last moment.
Why are these uncalculated billions and billions of saved dollars important when it comes to responding to sea level rise, increased storm surges, more inland flooding, rising groundwater levels and other sequelae?
Because it from this pool of real-time talent and skills and practices that society will be drawing for operationally redesigning the inevitable shortfalls in new technologies, macro-plans and regulations for climate restoration and recovery.
IV
We have a pool of such professionals already. They are not being consulted nor is their professionalism adequately recognized for the Anthropocene challenges ahead. Those in infrastructures who are already making billion-dollar saves are going to be needed even if the impossible sums were funded, and most assuredly because they won’t be.
GMM-TV just announced their new line-up of Thai shows for next year, including a remake of the Japanese “My Love Mix Up.” Some netizens worry that the actor in the Thai trailer doesn’t get the Japanese “ehhh?” right. This may seem esoteric, but it’s not.
If you go online, the Japanese “eh?” is often equated to the English, “huh?”. Not so in the Japanese tv series I’ve watched. There, the elongated “ehhh?” can mean wtf? or really! This difference between a simple, huh?, and the incredulous, what?!, finds a parallel in public policy and management.
As a start, I don’t think I’ve heard “ehhh?” pronounced, let alone expressed as the Japanese do, in the other Asian tv series I’ve watched. More, there is something of the German komish in that “ehhh?”: funny but now responding to something also strange or weird.
I think a good number of us, wherever we are, respond this many formal policy pronouncements today. “Ehhh?”
Think: The New Weirder as a policy regime.
—A risk-averse farmer keeps multiple varieties of crops, livestock and/or sites so that, if one fails, s/he has others to fall back on. The more different crops, livestock and sites a farmer can muster and maintain, the greater the chances s/he won’t lose everything. Where possible, the risk-averse farmer avoids hazards whose probabilities and uncertainties cannot be managed so as to maintain a survival mix of crops, livestock and productive sites. The risk-averse farmer faces a land carrying capacity that sets exogenous limits on the total crops and livestock produced.
—A reliability-seeking farmer keeps multiple varieties of crops, livestock and/or sites because any single resource—e.g., the soil that sustains the crop, site and livestock—is managed better if it provides multiple services. The more crops, livestock and sites a farmer can muster and maintain, the greater the chances s/he can meet peak demands made on his or her entire production system. The reliability-seeking farmer seeks to manage the probabilities and uncertainties of hazards that cannot be avoided so as to maintain a peak mix of crops, livestock and sites. The reliability-seeking farmer faces a carrying capacity whose endogenous limits are set by farmer skills for and experience with different operating scales and production phases.
Upshot
Farming behavior, no matter if labelled “subsistence” or “traditional,” that
is scarcely what one would call “risk-averse.”
Here is my rearrangement of separate quotes from philosopher, Akeel Bilgrami:
[I]t is often felt that. . .the commons is not doomed to tragedy since it can be ‘governed’ by regulation, by policing and punishing non-cooperation.
Who can be against such regulation? It is obviously a good thing. What is less obvious is whether regulation itself escapes the kind of thinking that goes into generating the tragedy of the commons in the first place. . . .
To explain why this is so, permit me the indulgence of a personal anecdote. It concerns an experience with my father. He would sometimes ask that I go for walks with him in the early morning on the beach near our home in Bombay. One day, while walking, we came across a wallet with some rupees sticking out of it. My father stopped me and said somewhat dramatically, ‘Akeel, why shouldn’t we take this?’ And I said sheepishly, though honestly, ‘I think we should take it.’
He looked irritated and said, ‘Why do you think we should take it?’ And I replied, what is surely a classic response, ‘because if we don’t take it, somebody else will’. I expected a denunciation, but his irritation passed and he said, ‘If we don’t take it, nobody else will’. I thought then that this remark had no logic to it at all. Only decades later when I was thinking of questions of alienation did I realize that his remark reflected an unalienated framework of thinking. . . .
From a detached perspective, what my father said might seem like naïve optimism about what others will do. But the assumption that others will not take the wallet if we don’t, or that others will cooperate if we do, is not made from that detached point of view. It is an assumption of a quite different sort, more in the spirit of ‘let’s see ourselves this way’, an assumption that is unselfconsciously expressive of our unalienatedness, of our being engaged with others and the world, rather than assessing, in a detached mode, the prospects of how they will behave. . . .
The question that drives the argument for the tragedy of the commons simply does not compute. . .
https://www.thephilosopher1923.org/post/what-is-alienation (my bold)
To repeat: The question that drives the argument for the tragedy of the commons simply does not compute in such cases.
There is no more fundamental way of freeing Hamlet from the constraints of text than by removing words altogether, as ballet of necessity does.
Michelle Assay (2022). “The late- and post-Soviet trials of Hamlet in song, ballet, and opera.” Cahiers Élisabéthains: A Journal of English Renaissance Studies, 108(1) 35–52 (accessed on line at https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/01847678221092791)
The artist as the created; Mona Lisa’s Leonardo, Beatrice’s Dante. Curious concept.
Guy Davenport in a letter to Hugh Kenner, 1963 (Questioning Minds: The Letters of Guy Davenport and Hugh Kenner. Edited by Edward M. Burns, 2 volumes (Counterpoint, Berkeley, CA; 2018).
If anything, the notion of “Hamlet‘s Shakespeare” looks to be a way of textualizing Shakespeare. Not just his becoming the playwright through writing Hamlet, but also writing his own narrative self by thinking through Hamlet. As if in referring to Satan’s Milton, I am positing how John Milton might have worked out his own personal theology by having to dictate (verbalize) that Satan into Paradise Lost.
If so, then freeing both Hamlet and Shakespeare from the textual is to imagine something altogether different, like those ballets called Hamlet.
Here the upshot is that there are multiple versions, not just necessarily unique performances, of the single play, e.g., Robert Helpmann’s 1942 version for the Sadler’s Wells Ballet, Kenneth MacMillan’s 1988 Sea of Troubles, Stephen Mills’ 2000 Hamlet, and the 2015 Hamlet of Radu Poklitaru and Declan Donnellan’s for the Bolshoi Ballet (https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0184767820913797).
For policy and management to have multiple versions, rather than many unique implementations, is also to imagine policy and management through different genres than those of the textual.
One great example is that of the refusal. There have been those whose rejection to involvement in policy and management, let alone in politics, has been uncompromising: “At a certain moment, when faced with public events, we know that we must refuse. Refusal is absolute, categorical. It does not discuss or voice its reasons. This is how it remains silent and solitary, even when it affirms itself, as it should, in broad daylight.” This silence and isolation includes refusing to “to formulate a political demand, a different path, a different solution”(quotes from https://illwill.com/the-movement-of-refusal)
The rejection goes further than refusing to take sides; it refuses to offer even a position. Now, of course, you can say this is through and through political, as in “silence is consent.” But the functions of silence depend on the medium of expression. Silence as consent is no more political than swimming under water is. Or better yet: In what ways do you want voiceless ballet or swimming to be political?
1. My starting point (by way of wicked policy problems)
The ‘real world’ surely has infinitely more variables than any abstract economic model and their ‘actual’ interrelations are neither known nor, I fear, knowable.
Fritz Machlup, Austrian-American economist
I
When i say concepts like regulation, inequality, and poverty are abstract, I am saying they are not sufficiently differentiated for actionable policy analysis or management. This of course does not mean these abstractions are not otherwise actionable. Ideas about regulation, inequality, and poverty have mattered and the history of ideas is replete with cases where ideas changed our understanding of human events, situations and behavior.
What interest me here, however, are: abstractions actionable with respect to policies and management strategies undertaken right now and here. That is, cases where abstractions have been rendered sufficiently granular for decisionmaking, and where decisions have been taken in light of this actionable granularity.
What then does “actionable granularity” mean?
I have in mind the range of policy analysis and management that exists between the adaptation of policy and management designs to local circumstances and the recognition that systemwide patterns 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 circumstances and being cognizant that patterns may well emerge across how really-existing people identify poverty and how these patterns differ from not only system poverty formulae but also localized scenarios based in the formulae.
(In case it needs saying, the preceding two paragraphs are an effort to render my own abstractions of policy and management more granularly helpful.)
II
None of the above points seem controversial to me. Nor should it be assumed I’m privileging one type of abstractions over others. What interests me are some of the implications to be drawn for the practice of policy analysis and management. One seems both obvious and under-acknowledged.
More granularities can also render cases non-actionable for policy and management. Cases that cannot be generalized in terms of being embedded in emerging patterns or identified with localized design scenarios are rightfully called “unique.”
But then a methodological problem is when cases are treated as unique or stand-alone albeit no effort has been made to ascertain (1) systemwide patterns and local contingency scenarios in which the case are embedded along with (2) the practices of adaptation and modification that also emerge along the way with in scenario formulation and pattern recognition. From a policy and management perspective, you can say these pseudo-unique cases have been over-complexified.
III
I stress this point if only because of the messy exceptionalism associated today with “wicked policy problems”. If you think about it, a core problem with wicked policy problems is, well, the concept is not abstract enough.
2. So what? “The root cause” abstracted of contingencies
Contingency is also a way to think about alternatives, and thus adopt a skeptical approach to deterministic discourses.
Éric Monnet, French economist
When it comes to abstracting, we mustn’t forget those who go for “the root cause” in policy messes.
But which root cause? Hegelian estrangement, Marxian false consciousness, Weberian disenchantment, Freudian defense mechanisms, Sartrean bad faith, Orwellian doublethink, Gramscian hegemony, or Goebbels’s Big Lie? Or is the root cause, in that famous “last instance,” Kuhnian paradigms, Foucauldian discipline, or God’s plan or that sure bet, politics/dollars/and jerks—or have I stopped short of the Truly-Rooted Root Cause?
Root-cause explanations exaggerate and pretend an outsized clarity that isn’t there. Root causes are abstractions that wash out the differentiation brought to you by contingencies. It is one thing to say the present advances to the future it renders for itself; it is quite another thing to say the future advances to the contingencies the present affords there but not here.
Let’s see how this works for inequality, regulation and poverty.
3. INEQUALITY: People may be equal like the teeth of a comb, but what about all those different combs?
–It just isn’t that values concerning (in)equality are socially constructed. It’s that the smothering paste of macro-principles cannot stop the bubbling up and surfacing of all those contingent factors that differentiate inequalities for the purposes of really-existing policymaking and management–societal, political, economic, historical, cultural, legal, geographical, governmental, psychological, neurological, technological, religious, and more.
–So what?
The World Bank estimates over 1.5 billion people globally do not have bank accounts, many being the rural poor. Yet having bank accounts ties people into a global financialized capitalism. What, then, has more value? The rural poor with bank accounts or not? Integrated even further into global capitalism or not?
There are, fortunately, those who insist such is not a binary value choice. Many with bank accounts also work to change the upper reaches of financial capital. But there are also those aiming for the lower-reach specifics: Surely, bank accounts work in some instances and even then differently so.
–Insisting on case-by-case comparisons looks to be weak beer. That is, until you realize the self-harm inflicted when political possibilities are foreclosed by any macro policy narrative that abstracts the world into one that is colonized everywhere or all the time by capitalisms and their inequalities.
4. REGULATION: Learning about regulation from The Financial Times
Re-regulation of banking after a financial crisis adds significant costs to the economy and thus reduces growth, while the pre-crisis light-touch regulation undermines the very financial infrastructure necessary for economic growth.
What were indicators of positive economic growth under lighter-touch regulation—e.g., rapid uptake in home mortgages before 2008—were indicators of regulatory failure later on. Mortgages were a relatively safe asset for banks to own, until they were the source of unimaginable losses.
Overregulation is nowhere better illustrated than in comparing the nearly 2000 pages of Dodd-Frank legislation in response to the last financial crisis and the less than 20 pages of the Depression’s Glass-Steagall Act—but under no circumstances are our regulators to repeat the 1930s! Whatever, those who lobby for simplifying regulation end up making it more complex.
It’s a bad thing for regulation to try to squeeze too much risk and complexity out of banking, especially when fresh risk reduction—less leverage, more capital reserves—is itself too risky a strategy. Regulation discourages risk taking and only with risk taking do we have innovation, except when too much innovation and risk taking are encouraged as in the (re-)deregulated finance sector.
New financial instruments (one thinks of credit default derivatives) flowed to where they were not regulated, but regulated financial instruments always increase opportunities for perverse arbitrage and loopholes.
Regulators must always have the best information, even when those regulated—the banks and investment firms—haven’t a clue as to their current real-time positions. Regulators will never have the capacity to know the real-time positions of actual firms, except in those cases where firms, like Lehman Brothers, insisted regulators did have the real-time information.
Global business and supply chains are great, except when the firms are too big to fail. Country defaults are horrible, except where they work through being regulated de jure as in Argentina or de facto as in Mexico at one point.
Global markets are a permanent fact of life, but we must never suppose that the drive to regulate them for the better is just as permanent. Markets are best at price discovery, except where market efficiencies are realized because of lack of transparent discovery, as in unregulated dark pools.
In sum, what I’ve learned from the Financial Times is that always-late capitalism is in crisis because of the always-shambolic abstraction of regulation.
5. POVERTY: A question about Bt cotton
As I remember the too-ing and fro-ing over the introduction of Bt cotton in India, saving on insecticides was the putative plus and runaway GM crops the putative negative. In advance of actual evidence, the controversy struck me then as unhelpfully abstract.
All this came back to me when I read the following passage describing a recent conference paper on Bt cotton:
Ambarish Karamchedu presented on Dried up Bt cotton narratives: climate, debt and distressed livelihoods in semi-arid smallholder India. Proponents of this ‘technical fix’ position GMO crops as a triple win. India has semi-arid and arid areas where rural poverty is concentrated, with an intense monsoon season (3-4 months), making farming a challenge. BT cotton introduced around 1995, thrives here. India is the biggest cotton cultivator and Bt cotton is grown by 7 million smallholder farmers, 66 percent in semi-arid areas with poor soils and low rainfall prone to monsoon. In Telangana, 65% of farmers across all classes produce BT cotton, with good harvests for 5 years, after which they decline. Failure of farmers who face increased input prices have to resort to non-farm incomes. The triple win technological fix narrative perpetuates and exacerbates the problems it seeks to solve, and benefits farmer institutions rather than enriching farmer knowledge and practice.
https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1VfvjJlxB9VPKQj55dNbZ_VH6oPi2IEVd
It’s that “with good harvests for 5 years, after which they decline” that grabbed my attention. Did anyone predict that particular event happening, be they proponents or opponents of Bt cotton?
This matters because in the absence of any such prediction, why not also conclude: “Well, five years is five years more than expected?” Even contingencies can be positive for the poor, right?
UPSHOT: In other words, few seem prepared to admit that the bleak state of affairs attributed to regulation, inequality and poverty is no more or less an abstraction than are the latter.
I
Let’s start with the current policy narrative about how intractable it is and will be to regulate the use of Generative AI, globally or not:
. . .while global regulatory solutions might [be] desirable, we also have to consider the standard or level of protection that these solutions can afford. Under the political reality of treaty negotiation, the more seats there are around the table, the more compromises will have to be sought. Such compromises often lead to lowering the level of protection. While this trade-off might be necessary to ensure that more individuals across the globe can benefit from a certain level of protection, this also results in a challenging and even paradoxical position where, simultaneously, more voices around the table push for further consensus on regulations, while many voices still remain completely excluded from the debate.
https://dataethics.eu/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/Generating-AI.pdf
Now let’s get to the reasons why this kind of reasoning is misleading.
II
Put aside the quote’s could-isms of the “can’s” and “might’s” that logically and empirically entail “it also might not”. Put aside the fact that “compromises often lead to lowering of the level of protection” actually means: Whether or not standards of protection are lowered depends on a case by case determination.
Focus instead on that assumption that it’s all about the regulator of record when it comes to Generative AI. God help us all, if that were true.
Fortunately, that cannot be true everywhere and in the same senses that matter when it comes to Generative AI.
We know, for example, that when it comes to critical infrastructures (which is and will be a major Generative AI adopter), regulatory functions must be dispersed beyond the regulator of record (e.g., infrastructure control rooms and support staff discover and correct for inevitable error by the regulator of record). [https://mess-and-reliability.blog/2023/10/01/when-it-comes-to-societys-critical-infrastructures-regulatory-functions-are-dispersed-beyond-the-regulator-of-record/]
We know that these real-time corrections for lapses by the regulator of record (i.e., the more regulators of record try to be comprehensive, the more they miss in dynamically changing conditions) are part and parcel of infrastructure control rooms as a unique organizational formation to address real-time contingencies, in this case with respect to Generative AI in actual use. In fact, the evolutionary advantage of infrastructure control rooms lies in the skills and expertise of its operators to operationally redesign in real time what is otherwise inadequate regulation and technology. [https://mess-and-reliability.blog/2023/05/24/a-national-academy-of-reliable-infrastructure-management-2/]
And in related fashion, we know that where highly reliable infrastructures matter to a society, it must be expected that the social values reflected through these infrastructures differ by staff and their duties/responsibilities (e.g., responsibilities of control room operators often go beyond their official duties). Whatever the societal values with respect to Generative AI, their differentiation through and by critical infrastructures is happening. [https://mess-and-reliability.blog/2022/04/16/critical-infrastructures-regulate-differently-than-government/]
III
So what?
Please then, more realism when it comes to regulating Generative AI! To the extent the preceding quote is today’s policy narrative, the sooner really-existing regulatory counternarratives are examined the better.
Sources. Published versions detailing the above claims and relevant cases can be found in
Re infrastructure control rooms as a unique organizational formation and the need for dispersed regulatory functions: Roe, E. and Schulman, P.R. (2016) Reliability and Risk, Stanford CA: Stanford University Press
Re evolutionary advantage in redesigning defective technology and regulation: Roe, E. (2021). “A National Academy of Reliable Infrastructure Management.” Issues in Science and Technology (accessed online at https://issues.org/national-academy-reliable-infrastructure-management-roe/; updated most recently in Roe, E. and Schulman, P.R. (2023). “An interconnectivity framework for analyzing and demarcating real-time operations across critical infrastructures and over time.” Safety Science (accessed online at https://authors.elsevier.com/a/1hl653IVV9uro7)
Re infrastructure differentiation of societal values: Roe, E. (2023) When Complex is as Simple as it Gets: Guide for Recasting Policy and Management in the Anthropocene, IDS Working Paper 589, Brighton: Institute of Development Studies, DOI: 10.19088/IDS.2023.025
WHEN COMPLEX IS AS SIMPLE AS IT GETS 