I

The admonition to manage ahead latent interconnectivities before they are triggered into manifest ones by a disaster is easier said than done. What are the practices to do so? Mitigations like retrofitting a bridge, installing automatic shut-off valves, 2 week readiness supplies in advance of an earthquake are examples. So too are table-top exercises, increasing one’s contact list for emergencies, and advanced contingency planning.

Each of these comes with no guarantee that they will actually mitigate once the disaster hits. It might be useful, then, to start with what is guaranteed to happen and see if that offers insights in what to do beforehand and afterwards.

II

One guarantee when major disaster hits: Latent interconnections unmanaged beforehand, particularly those that are invisible or dormant, necessitate improvisations in immediate emergency response afterwards. That is, disaster is the only way these vulnerabilities become visible for management, if any.

Obviously, not all latent interconnectivities are invisible beforehand. To bring to light what can be made visible and manage ahead for them is the function of contingency planning, table-tops, joint drills and other mitigations, like retrofitting. The only thing I have to offer here based in our Oregon and Washington State research on a Magnitude 9 earthquake is that a number of interviewees did not have specific response scenarios for their own departments or units.

This lack of granularity is understandable (i.e., the more specific the scenario the more likely it is wrong about actual events unfold), but it makes some M9 discussions, in the words of one state infrastructure coordinator, “theoretical”. To avoid that, increased granularity in what-if scenarios seems necessary in managing for vulnerabilities that are not hidden out of view. Think again of table-tops, but this time around multiple what-if scenarios and interconnections.

III

But what to do beforehand for those cases where latent vulnerabilities are altogether unknown until disaster makes them manifest?

One answer follows from the guarantee that, when it comes to major disaster, prior latencies are joined at the hip with subsequent improvisations. Managing ahead means the latter are to be more doable and effective. I think immediately of cross-desk or cross-position training, e.g., control room dispatchers have also trained on the scheduler’s desk or water department staff can clear a major road even if the roads department staff have priorities elsewhere.

But it must also be recognized that some improvisations would not happen, cross-training or not, without the disaster. One state coordinator involved in communications management during emergencies told us about convening an online group of competing companies and infrastructure providers:

During a winter storm we had a utility or provider say we’ve got fiber cuts in this area, we don’t have the fiber to replace it in that area, our resources are in this other area—that allowed us to look at the group and say now is the time for some teamwork: Can anyone else solve that problem and be a good team member? And we’ve seen a lot of that sort of problem-solving manifest among the agencies with very little input from us. Another example might be a cellular carrier who is a competitor of another carrier going “Hey, we’re going to fill our generator, can we top off your fuel tank while we’re up there?. . .But I don’t think [those kinds of cooperation] would occur if we didn’t coordinate it and get everybody on the same call and provide a platform for them to kind of air those sorts of things.

Disaster shifts the interconnectivity configurations of staff and infrastructures not only in ways that open up opportunities to improvise but also in ways that make any such missed opportunities mitigable errors to be avoided.

IV

So what, practically?

Many interviewees reiterated they have no idea who or how many of their staff will be able to resume work immediately after the M9 earthquake. “The first 72 hours and you’re still trying to figure out who’s alive out there and those who can communicate,” said a state emergency manager. In other words, referring to “the M9 event” is misleading if it’s taken to imply one event and not thousands or more of them unfolding unpredictably.

One major implication is that it’s better to assume infrastructure cascades are part of the unfolding nature of the M9 earthquake, where just-in-time joint improvisations play an important role in addressing those cascades. Far too often “inter-infrastructure cascades” are assumed–and not just by modelers–to be instantaneous and unmanageable when in fact they are delayed and open to human intervention.

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For managing latencies ahead, please also see https://mess-and-reliability.blog/2024/06/03/managing-ahead-for-latent-risks-and-latent-interconnectivity-2/

From our framework’s perspective (Roe and Schulman 2023), the key feature of a “trade-off” is that it is an inter-relationship between parties, more precisely: an interconnectivity between them.

Economists tell us more guns mean less butter, other things equal. Say this produces X amount of guns and Y amount of butter. But “change one causes the other to change” is only one type of interconnectivity, in this case sequential. Assuming both guns and butter require infrastructures to produce and distribute means that other types of interconnectivity could as well explain arriving at X and Y. For example, the parties reciprocated and so ended up there; or someone from the outside mediated the interchange between the parties, leading to those joint values for the time being.

We and the economist still see X guns and Y butter, but from our interconnectivity framework perspective, it matters greatly what type of interconnection that trade-off is (i.e., sequential, reciprocal, mediated). Two examples of key concepts in emergency management help illustrate why thedifferences matter:

1. Post-Disaster Evacuations. From our framework’s view, evacuations of people from a disaster area are efforts to shift the demands for major infrastructural interconnectivities from that area to sites where those demands can be met through interconnections involving electricity, water supplies, telecoms and other lifeline infrastructures.

This means that there is difference relevant for policy and management between a disaster area now without water, electricity or telecoms and a disaster area still with levels of electricity, water and telecoms but insufficient for population demands. Even with evacuation eventuating in the latter case, the trade-offs in its origin area differ from the former case where the infrastructures and their critical services have been eliminated. If, as they say, a thing is also defined by what it is not, then evacuation also means those remaining behind.

So what? Recourse to “trade-off” terminology can be too coarse for management purposes if it is without the granularity differences in interconnectivity impose on the analysis.

2. Pre-Disaster Mitigations. From our framework’s perspective, pre-disaster mitigations are efforts to manage latent interconnections before they become manifest by virtue of a triggering disaster. This challenge is compounded by the fact that not only are some latent interconnections extremely difficult to see or predict beforehand, they and others may also only become visible during the disaster or afterwards.

So what? Any vacuum produced by difficulties in prediction matters because the professional(s) whose job it is to make these predictions and calls for pre-disaster mitigation will always be confronted by politicians, whose politics ground and justify making such calls anyway. How is this relevant for policy and management?

One answer is to shift the issue to a different question: Who is better at improvising solutions once the latent become manifest in the disaster: Those politicians, those professionals, both depending on the circumstances, others? In other words, whose improvisation learning carries more weight when it comes thereafter to offering pre-disaster mitigations? Now that’s the trade-off–interconnection–of interest!

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Source:

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. Interviews and research were funded by National Science Foundation grants BCS-2121528 and BCS-2121616.

I

Interviewees frequently mention “classic examples” of communication gaps that emerge or recur in emergency response and recovery. Issues of interoperability across communication technologies is one. As for others, I don’t need to spell out all the acronyms for you to still get that déjà vu when reading the following passage from a recent draft after-action report for a Cascadia earthquake exercise:

Numerous resource requests in OpsCenter were marked as “Unable to Fulfill” without any follow-up communication from the ECC Operations Section. This lack of communication resulted in stalled requests, even though federal resources were available to address them. The FEMA Liaison Officer identified, submitted to the RRCC, and resolved this issue, but only after delays had occurred. ESF staff reported being overwhelmed with incoming requests, leaving little capacity for follow-up or escalation, while ECC Operations did not proactively monitor or coordinate these unresolved requests. Highlighting a siloed approach to resource management, where the absence of centralized oversight contributed to gaps in communication and missed opportunities for resolution.

Well yes, but there is a more subtle persisting problem here.

II

In terms of our framework, a communication gap is the absence of interconnections established when task demands and response capabilities match (in this case, with respect to the broad tent called communications). The problem is the backdrop against which the communication gaps emerge, namely: All manner of other gaps and matches come and go in the emergency. What is the relationship between persisting gaps and the more fleeting ones?

Here part of the answer lies in other interconnectivities. Part of the definition of a major disaster is that task demands and resource capabilities are highly unlikely to be isolated to the purview and authority of one agency. The disaster is too big for that.

The state and federal infrastructures for emergency management could never undertake the tasks of preparedness, response, restoration and recovery on their own without the major and active participation of the key lifeline infrastructures under threat. Task environment demands are so varied, numerous and unpredictable when it comes to immediate response and initial service restoration that requisite variety in options requires multiple sites (organizational, locational) of response capabilities—and even then there are no guarantees.

III

In fact, we were told, “Emergency management coordinates with anyone who can help.” For example, bringing community members into emergency preparedness, response and recovery isn’t just because members could well make infrastructure response and restoration more effective. It can also bring in different interconnectivity, i.e. restoring social and cultural relationships before or in parallel to immediate response. Either way, the emergency management priority, while saving lives and property, is to restore power and water for those remaining.

So now we have an answer to the Big Question: Why isn’t an Magnitude 9 earthquake in Oregon and Washington State a critique of economic system that leads to the earthquake being such a catastrophic failure with such catastrophic consequences there and beyond?

Because critical service restoration–from the Latin restaurare, to repair, rebuild, or renew–is such a high priority, now and not just ahead, for the communities, lifeline infrastructures and emergency managers combined. Plus, they want to get back to where they were before, if only to plan the next steps ahead. Let others critique the end of the world through capitalism or the climate emergency or the polycrisis. Now that’s what we might call a persisting gap in communications?

I

The admonition, “We need to get out of our organizational silos!,” is a familiar one. It is also said of immediate response and service restoration by the feds and state emergency management agencies. The causes and the consequences of human-made disasters are inter-sectoral and so too, the argument runs, should be emergency management.

That may be demonstrably true as far as it goes, but differences in contexts require going further by imposing all manner of caveats and qualifications. I focus here on one because of its surprising implications for policy and management.

II

Oregon and Washington State have separate and separately staffed Emergency Support Functions, e.g., in Oregon ESF-1 is responsible for transportation, ESF-2 responsible for communications, ESF-3 for public works and so on. The separate functions seem to be a welcomed way for inter-function coordination apart from but complementary to the formal federal and state Incident Command System.

One reason for this seems to be each ESF unit is small, a single staff-person with or without some support, who recognizes that the formal duties with respect to his or her function need to be supplemented by informal responsibilities to coordinate with other units and field staff. This is especially so when it comes to infrastructural interconnectivities emerging before, during and just after a major disaster.

In formal terms, you can think of each ESF undertaking their respective duties and responsibilities as a focal unit mediating between those on the ground and those in the Incident Command Structure (ICS) chain of command. Where so helps make sense of one conundrum we encountered in our research in both states on the huge and awful impacts of a Magnitude 9 earthquake there.

III

“If the earthquake’s going to be that bad, why plan for it at all?” Answer: Because it someone’s job–in terms of their duties and responsibilities–to do that.

We were told that it’s better to build a resilient cell-tower now, as long as you have done a detailed study showing on that cell-tower is instrumental to your post-disaster response/recovery. Why? A resilient tower is built to last, long after people and disasters come and go, we were told. But we were also told the M9 events would test any “built to last” assumption.

Yet even if the latter remains true, building more resilient cell-towers is still the job of someone or organization. This is true in the same sense that the question–“Whose ESF is responsible for ensuring mobile generate are provided?”–has an answer, including “Well, no one is doing this right now., so it’s our job. . .”

IV

This focus on whose job we are talking about means that the position holder (if there) carries an authority and expertise others don’t have. When he or she says, “That ain’t gonna happen,” that message conveys a level of certainty in the midst of uncertainties. “What percentage of electricity can we expect to be restored within 2 days after M9?” “Well, about zero,” has the ring of truth if it’s the responsible ESF or ICS person saying it. So too if these professionals say, “We won’t know where to start until we see what actually left to work with.”

Note another implication of whose job is it. It is also common to hear, and not just in emergency management: “Everything is connected to everything else.” If so, then the other side of “everything’s connected” is “nothing can be completely reduced to something else.” As in: “It would be crazy for the regulator to do the work of the utilities, when the latter are the experts.” (For example, “we can’t tell them where to de-energize lines,” a regulator told us.)

A last implication. It is one thing is to insist on unimaginable M9 impacts, but quite another to leave out those whose job it is think about those impacts with respect to other infrastructures. We were told that wastewater wasn’t at the planning and emergency preparedness table as often as other infrastructures like electricity, roads and potable water. “If there’s an earthquake and water is restored, here we’ll be calling for no flushing of toilets,” said a wastewater manager responsible for making this call. He didn’t need to add: Now, how would that look?

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Source: Interviews and research were funded by National Science Foundation grants BCS-2121528 and BCS-2121616. See also 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.

. . . .SPIEGEL: Surely you would include here the communist movement?

Heidegger: Yes, unquestionably — insofar as that, too is a form of planetary technicity.

SPIEGEL: Americanism also?

Heidegger: Yes, I would say so. Meantime, the last 30 years have made it clearer that the planet-wide movement of modern technicity is a power whose magnitude in determining [our] history can hardly be overestimated. For me today it is a decisive question as to how any political system — and which one — can be adapted to an epoch of technicity. I know of no answer to this question.

SPIEGEL: But someone might object very naively: what must be mastered in this case? Everything is functioning. More and more electric power companies are being built. Production is up. In highly technologized parts of the earth, people are well cared for. We are living in a state of prosperity. What really is lacking to us?

Heidegger: Everything is functioning. That is precisely what is awesome, that everything functions, that the functioning propels everything more and more toward further functioning, and that technicity increasingly dislodges man and uproots him from the earth. I don’t know if you were shocked, but [certainly] I was shocked when a short time ago I saw the pictures of the earth taken from the moon. We do not need atomic bombs at all [to uproot us] — the uprooting of man is already here. All our relationships have become merely technical ones. It is no longer upon an earth that man lives today.

SPIEGEL: . . .Now the question naturally arises: Can the individual man in any way still influence this web of fateful circumstance? Or, indeed, can philosophy influence it?

Heidegger: If I may answer briefly, and perhaps clumsily, but after long reflection: philosophy will be unable to effect any immediate change in the current state of the world. This is true not only of philosophy but of all purely human reflection and endeavor. Only a god can save us.

SPIEGEL: . . .The question, then, is this: isn’t it possible, after all, that suggestions come from the thinkers (if only as a by-product) either as to how this system may be replaced by a new one and what a new one would look like, or that reform must be possible — together with some indication as to how this reform could be possible.

Heidegger: As far as I can see, an individual [thinker] is not in a position by reason of his thought to see through the world as a whole in such fashion as to be able to offer practical advice, and this, indeed, in view of the fact that his first task is to find a basis for thinking itself. For as long as thought takes itself seriously in terms of the great tradition, it is asking too much of thought for it to be committed to offering advice in this way. By what authority could this come about? In the domain of thinking there are no authoritative statements. . .

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“By what authority could this come about? In the domain of thinking there are no authoritative statements. . .” BUT WHAT THEN IS THE STATEMENT, “ONLY A GOD CAN SAVE US”?

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Source: https://www.ditext.com/heidegger/interview.html

. . . .Given the scope and scale of the financing (and divestment) required for mitigation and the support for adaptation, current financing gaps suggest transitions are not happening at the pace or scale they need to cope with catastrophic change. CPI find that global climate finance needs will amount to $6300 billion worldwide in 2030 (Buchner et al., 2023) and should have reached about $4200 bn in 2021. Yet in 2021, total climate finance amounted to $850 bn: a significant sum, but nowhere near what is required. This is hugely challenging, yet needs to be set against the costs of inaction. Without such interventions, warming will exceed 3°C, leading to macroeconomic losses of at least 18% of GDP by 2050 and 20% by 2100 (NFGS, 2022). . . .

(https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/10245294251318468; my bold)

Excuse me, but is your point that the $850bn would have been better spent elsewhere?

Below I commit an injustice to the insights of three publications: (1) Tahari Shariff Mohamed (2022). The Role of the Moral Economy in Response to Uncertainty among Borana Pastoralists of Northern Kenya, Isiolo County, PhD dissertation, Institute of Development Studies, University of Sussex: Falmer, Brighton UK; (2) Jonathan Levy (2025). The Real Economy: History and Theory, Princeton University Press: Princeton, NJ; and (3) Chiara Cordelli (2025). “What Is the Wrong of Capitalism?” American Political Science Review 1–16.

Yet the Levy/Cordelli perspective on the central role of investments–not accumulation, not markets, not prices, but investment–in real economies is an excellent lens with which to add to and extend the already more nuanced work now underway on moral economies.

Let me start with Mohamed’s work. She makes many fine points about really-existing moral economies, but we have space for probing only one–her connection between diversification of pastoralist livelihoods and investments (I bold terms to be parsed through the Levy/Corelli lens):

Pastoralists rely on fundamental practices such as herd mobility, livestock species and livelihood diversification, and investing in social relations in order to navigate livestock production uncertainties. Within these practices, particular moral economy practices, centred on collective redistribution of resources remain significant. The thesis identifies five types of moral economy practice. In the more remote pastoral setting, with intensified insecurity and limited state and institutional presence, practices of redistribution and comradeship are central. In the more urban pastoral setting, with a proliferation of institutions, markets, diversification and investment, institutionalised support and collective crisis management through the use of newly important technologies are seen. Contrary to the assumption that the moral economy is waning due to social stratification and individualisation, the thesis finds that moral economies persist, and new forms are emerging. (p.xvi)

Here, the moral economy emerges through galvanising household members to engage in various income-generating activities to cover costs such as purchasing feeds and paying hired labourers. It is the shared responsibilities and duties to collectively contributes remittances and other income from diverse economies to save the livelihood that embodies moral economy. It embodies what Ellis referred to as ‘non-economic’ aspect of social relations that regulate resource use and access to ensure survival (Ellis, 2000a). It differs from the traditional moral economy of mobilising household members to provide labour support; instead, household members engage in diverse livelihood activities to generate much-needed income that is then invested in sustaining the herd. (p.138)

. . .there is a ‘non-economic’ component of diversification, including social relations, norms and values that regulate income distribution and access. For instance, the case studies presented in chapter seven on women and intra-household diversification illuminated the power dynamic and the transforming gender relations that defined how pastoralists survived in a more urbanising setting. Equally, the opening quote of this section alludes to ‘we’, meaning that it is not one person who diversifies; instead, it is a combined effort by individuals within the family that pull resources and share remittance to manage the livelihood. Thirdly, diversification espouses the moral economy practices defined in this study as a network of relations based on trust that enhances access to resources for survival in the face of uncertainties. I argue that pastoralists establish external connections through economic ties and symbiotic relationships in order to generate a reliable flow of goods, including feeds, labour and market access to survive unpredictable pastoral production. (p.154)

Yet, if I understand Levy and Corelli correctly, what is “non-economic” in the above is economic by virtue of the centrality of investment (e.g., “investing in social relations”). “What is the first act that creates the economy?,” asks Levy in an interview. “It is neither production nor exchange (market or otherwise). It is the storing of wealth over time, with which I associate with investment.” Livestock as a store of wealth with which to save and from which to invest has been one paradigmatic example.

For Levy, the centrality of investment applies to what he calls the real economy–which, importantly, need not be a capitalist one (e.g., p.21). This is important because capitalist economies have a feature that moral economies must mitigate. In Cordelli’s argument,

. . .under capitalism both the amount and the direction of production are driven by a distinctively future-oriented investment process. Such process is guided by a specific mode of economic valuation—capitalization—which consists in attributing monetary value to assets in the present on the basis of their expected future profitability, rather than their inherent productivity, or the labor expenditure that went into producing them. Since, under capitalism, what will be produced crucially depends on investment, investment is left to private markets, and economic valuation is oriented to future profits, capitalism structurally entails a radical loss of collective control over, and involvement in, the creation and valuation of the future. Capitalism privatizes the power to build the future, and to decide according to which values it should be built. It leaves such power to profit-oriented investment markets. (p.3)

Little of this description will trouble those insisting that capitalism has commodified and marketized every major aspect of contemporary pastoralism. The passage however should trouble those who see the investment in social relations as a way to mitigate or forestall such thorough-going commodification and marketization.

Yes, the latter are increasing, though one must keep in mind Mohamed’s caution about assuming everywhere the “waning moral economy”. Whatever, the bigger question remains, Why hasn’t the waning gone even faster?

Cordelli provides one answer, namely, livestock are not capital unless they can be capitalized: “[S]avings cannot per se count as capital, because they are not capitalized, and the inherent productivity of the means of production is insufficient to make them capital” (p. 6-7). That is, livestock as that walking savings bank isn’t capital just because that store of wealth is based in livestock production; it’s because investment in social relations has kept their flows of benefit from being altogether discounted into economic net present value for pastoralists.

So what? What’s the upshot for pastoralist policy and management? Best to let Levy have the last word in terms of understanding real economies:

Categorically speaking there is nothing wrong with the methodological use of abstractions, mathematical exposition, modeling, building up explanations from individual choice and behavior, extreme scaffolding assumptions, or statistical inference. It may be true that economics at times suffers from being incorrect. The critique I am most invested in making, however, is that even when correct economics also suffers from being intolerably incomplete. (p.16)

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NB. For more on the central importance of incompletion to policy and management, please see:

https://mess-and-reliability.blog/2025/03/15/its-time-to-reboot-policy-analysis/

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Sources

Donald Judt (2025). “Storage, Investment, and Desire: An Interview with Jonathan Levy” Journal of the History of Ideas Blog (accessed at https://www.jhiblog.org/2025/02/24/storage-investment-and-desire-an-interview-with-jonathan-levy/)

Mohamed’s thesis can be found at: https://sussex.figshare.com/articles/thesis/The_role_of_the_moral_economy_in_response_to_uncertainty_among_Borana_pastoralists_of_Northern_Kenya_Isiolo_County/23494508?file=41202650

Cordelli’s article can be found at: https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/american-political-science-review/article/what-is-the-wrong-of-capitalism/CD320C659A33C006C6562D363FD5D954

1.

There is a sense in which we—not least of which our mental models of policy and management issues—are indefinitely interrupted and left unfinished. Jean Cocteau, French litterateur, records the following interchange of composer, Darius Milhaud:

[Milhaud] shows his old housekeeper a very faithful painting of the great square at Aix.
You see, it’s the square at Aix.
Answer: ‘I don’t know.’
What? You don’t recognize the square at Aix?
‘No sir, because I’ve never seen it painted before.’

The rub isn’t how well the representation depicts that which it is represented, but rather that representations interrupt recognition itself. Moving from this incompletion toward uncertainty and risk means not just that we have a better appreciation of reality as contingent, provisional and messy. We as well see how the permanent incompletion of representation drives the very production of more representations. Of the original Venus De Milo statue, Cocteau asked, “Suppose a farmer finds the arms. To whom do they belong? To the farmer or to the Venus de Milo?” Or, for that matter, to something or someone (in)completely different?

Is this incompletion the felt part of an irreducible particularity of being, that sense we each never body forth as representative or in total? The resulting complexity means no single or new representation could ever erase the initial condition that other recastings are forthcoming and required. Yes, the photograph recasts the way racing horses were portrayed compared to earlier paintings of them; no, the photograph is not the only or exhaustive way to portray racing horses. So too when it comes to reality and policy.

2.

A child asks, When does the weather begin? Even answering delays completion in the sense that this answer completes only that question. Which is to raise another question: What is in between openly incomplete and narrow completion? “Rehearsals”? How so? If the recent COVID-19 pandemic wasn’t sufficient to institute basic income policies, what crisis is? Think of all that was lost by forgoing a one-off tax on windfall profits made in the pandemic. Which implies: We were only rehearsing policies on the fly then, and now. Of course we want to believe that rehearsals are learning experiences. But, while many masquerade learning as defined outcomes—it’s performance night!—learning still looks much like incomplete rehearsing.

To put it differently, those in public policy are rightly chary of calls that begin “We are at a crossroads” and move right into just-do-this blueprints. Policies pretending to be manifestos are like sticking theory into a novel: The latter was equivalent for Proust to leaving the price tag on a gift. It devalues the object it pretends to valorize. So too for policy analysis. Gone are days when we felt comfortable with discussions tagged, “Elementary economics demonstrates that. . .”

3.

What to do? In one sense, incompletion offers up the prospect of new policy and management narratives being assembled from the ones occluded, effaced, erased or altogether missing from what has become the heavy palimpsest of a complex policy.

There’s the view that public policy is like a mailbox from which we send important messages and in which we receive a lot of junk mail. Have you noticed, though, just how mismatched free-standing mailboxes are compared to the structures that stand behind them? So, we have misleading mailboxes in front of misleading facades to a range of insides whose good and bad messes no one can really see outside-in. Contrary to the illusion of policies as mailboxes, the policies we send and receive scarcely reflect all the busy, domestic life of the palimpsests they have become. This means, among other things, it should not be surprising that generalizations about power are better understood as only text on the surface of these palimpsests whose granularities, while overwritten, are still there to be rediscovered.

But then how to see these granularities, including missing ones? Today’s frequent answer: interdisciplinarity. Certainly, it’s common enough to argue that analyses and accounts of policy and management be presented not just from one discipline’s perspective (say, economics), but also from many–including political science, psychology, organization theory, and more. Any less would be too simple, if only because each discipline brings with it many of those multiple interpretations mentioned earlier.

4.

Yet what gets missed in the mashup of hyphens—”from a socio-politico-economic-cultural-historical-psychological. . .perspective”—is that the hyphen itself is more than a matter of sentence grammar. You may remember Polonius’s speech from Hamlet to the effect: “The best actors in the world, either for tragedy, comedy, history, pastoral, pastoral-comical, historical-pastoral, tragical-historical, tragical-comical-historical-pastoral. . .”? While the hyphens in that passage are the performative demonstration of Polonius’s long-windedness, never let it be supposed Interdisciplinary accounts are long-winded!

But long-windedness is inevitable when there is no closure rule. It’s not just that a complex and difficult policy issue can be seen, and thus analyzed, from different directions. “Western housing shortages do not just prevent many from ever affording their own home. They also drive inequality, climate change, low productivity growth, obesity, and even falling fertility rates”. Well ok, but why stop there? It’s that policy and issue are themselves open to multiple interpretation. “Sonata, what do you want of me?,” the philosopher Rousseau repeats. So too we ask, not of each intractability, but instead: Wicked problems together, what do you want of us?

5.

Example? If economics is about satisfaction, then the fact that people are satisfied in terms of happiness after reaching a certain level of income means that economics doesn’t apply in this way to those with even higher incomes, right? The extent to which they remain unsatisfied irrespective of income has more to do with, say, psychology and politics or more, right? If so, then it seems to me that almost anything but economics can explain these times when, e.g., saving Europe is reduced to saving the euro; when what were once broad economic stabilization policies are now this or that financial stabilization mechanism; when it makes “perfect sense” to use credit default swaps to determine entire countries are riskier than some corporations; and when economists defend “competitiveness” as cost-slashing, whatever that timeless economic theory says about labor productivity setting wage rates.

Even here, though, there is wicked, and then there is wicked. Just how do we study people in that far-off future who have yet to be born? I mean, think about that. Just how is extrapolating that far off our/their basic human needs—and from many different disciplines and interpretations—to happen? Or, if that’s too challenging, just stay here and now, with our choices over existing methods and categories. Our problems are rooted in race?, I ask. No, they are rooted in class, you answer. “No”? As race and class each have its own social science, it’s long looked like a methodological choice between the two. But we know who the losers are either way: Not me! “Statistics,” as poet Robert Frost puts it in his Notebooks, “are the way I have to look at everybody but myself.” That’s me, up on that perch above it all looking down. After all, up there when is talking to oneself ever long-windedness?

6.

Experts on their respective perches tell “us” that the majority of people don’t see how bad conditions really are, but they do; that their minority really has no power, only others of low and mean cunning down there have; and that it’s too late to expect the rest below to give the minority up here a serious hearing, but never too late for the up-here minority to be serious about anything and everything. “We therefore call upon governments and the United Nations to take immediate and effective political control over the development of solar geoengineering technologies.” But taking immediate and effective control globally is the last thing governments can do under conditions of the Anthropocene, right?

And, give me a break, control? Even advocates of dismantling capitalism want those otherwise reviled “mechanisms of control” to be claimed and exercised throughout. While involving truly urgent issues, this is about as likely to happen as seeing a blue rose in the Sahara. (We might as well try extracting sunbeams from cucumbers as in Gulliver’s Travels.) “Currently, the effectiveness of the regulation of platforms is debatable because platform infrastructures are constantly evolving and regulators have little insight in and control over how this happens.” Now that sounds closer to what’s happening in the 2025 I know, incomplete as it necessarily is.

7.

Where does all this leave us? The actual challenge remains, in a slight paraphrase of one critic, that of “demonstrating how to think with the past’s inadvertent posterity in the moment it tries to build an unknowable here-to-come that we have hitherto been used to viewing primarily through hindsight.” Which I take to underscore just how much a prejudice this “reliance on hindsight” is in a world of incompletion, contingency and difficulty.

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Sources

Alff, D. (2017). The Wreckage of Intentions: Projects in British Culture, 1660 – 1730. University of Pennsylvania Press: Philadelphia, PA.

Frost, R. (2006). The Notebooks of Robert Frost. (R. Faggen, Ed.) The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press: Cambridge, MA.

Neither am I religious nor do I understand the words but even so, hope isn’t disappointed here: Zelenka and Laetatus sum, Biber and Missa Salisburgensis, Jomelli’s Requiem, Fux (Costanza e Fortezza), and Foccio’s Missa Solemnis.

(https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11024-024-09558-8)