I

How often have we heard versions of the following?

• Studies of actual project and policy implementation ratify the status quo, claiming it is a miracle anything gets done as planned or designed; where
• Policymakers never have had time anyway for social science findings (either the evaluation finds nothing good to say or finds evidence-based hesitations the only thing worth saying); where also it must be assumed that
• Market-based instruments of management—outsourcing, vouchers, service level agreements—determine the design of the public agencies responsible for their implementation, a rather unpromising assumption given the mountain of evidence that bureaucracy frequently determines policy; all of which is said to lead to
• “Therefore,” better policy and management require, by default, better leaders as our last line of defense and we must design for that (back to “design”?); albeit
• Leadership looks more and more to be the unexplained variance after politics, dollars and jerks explain most of what is going on anyway. . .

Such is how the fault-filled save-all of “designing” is shackled to the fault-filled catch-all of “leadership.”

II

A much more practical implication follows, however. It is likely that that policy and regulatory leaders who do not appreciate the requirements of real-time operation of society’s complex infrastructures are apt to confuse their own values and scenarios for those of the real-time operators. Where so, the logical and empirically prior problem is not designing better leadership but correcting for the mis-designs of leaders that arise unintentionally or negatively.

Such is why I argue for the regulatory functions to be dispersed beyond the regulator of record. Real-time operators must and do play an important role in correcting for errors in official regulation, leadership and technologies.

There are any number of critiques of neoclassical economics, particularly contemporary microeconomics. The best, most recent one I’ve found is:

Glick, Mark, Lozada, Gabriel A., and Darren Bush “Antitrust’s Normative Economic Theory Needs a Reboot” (December 9, 2024). Institute for New Economic Thinking Working Paper Series No. 231, https://www.ineteconomics.org/research/research-papers/antitrusts-normative-economic-theory-needs-a-reboot

It will be a hard slog to read for the non-specialist such as myself, but even a dedicated browse is worth the effort (downloading the pdf also took some time). Its point of departure is antitrust regulation in the US, but its focus is on one of the key pillars of mainstream economics, consumer surplus, and its critique brings together a wide range of arguments from across the critical literature. In so doing, it marshals a wonderful survey of why the economic sciences are like the rest of the social sciences, knee-deep in essential ambiguities.

Below are copied the paper’s abstract and table of contents for ease of reference:

Antitrust has adopted a normative economic theory based on maximizing economic surplus. The theory originates with Marshall but was introduced into antitrust as the Consumer Welfare Standard by Judge Robert Bork, and survives today in virtually every industrial organization textbook. This persistence is unwarranted. Welfare economists abandoned it several decades ago because the theory is inconsistent, and we review those inconsistencies. Moreover, welfare economists and moral philosophers have shown that the theory is biased in favor of wealthy individuals and corporations—the very powers the antitrust law is supposed to regulate. Finally, behavioral economists and psychologists have shown that the model of human behavior behind the economic surplus theory is simplistic and often in conflict with actual human behavior. We argue that antitrust should be brought into alignment with modern welfare economics. We also discuss how the New Brandeis Movement’s proposal to replace the consumer welfare standard with the protecting competition standard could be developed to accomplish this goal.

From where I stand, I don’t think that the progressive counterpart to the market is the state. I think it should be culture, very broadly defined – culture where it encompasses the knowledge and practices of communities.

Amy Kapczynski in https://www.the-syllabus.com/ts-spotlight/post-neoliberal-moment/conversation/amy-kapczynski

And what’s wrong with the state as a progressive counterpart? Here’s one answer consistent with “communities” as an alternative:

Liberal forms of planning involve both the extension and the conscious self-limitation of the state’s responsibilities. Liberal planning redraws the boundary between the realm of political authority and the realm of free market activity without ever abolishing it. . . .The current tensions in the governance of capitalism may be best captured, not in terms of a struggle between competing hegemonic projects, but as a struggle internal to the state. This struggle consists of the political difficulties in managing the state’s impulse to mitigate the various crises of contemporary capitalism while affirming its liberal form. . .Capitalist states across the world are called to manage the consequences of the global economy’s entrenched tendency towards economic stagnation, financial instability, persistent underemployment and the accelerating climate crisis. . .Yet neither planning nor market-making offer a durable solution. The sources of crisis emanate from the mode of social interaction in civil society, not the administrative measures of the state. As long as commodity exchange constitutes the mode of socialisation in the economic realm, the state can at best palliate the socially destabilising tendencies of capitalist growth, not arrest them, no matter the scale of intervention.

Alexis Moraitis in https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/08969205241303445 (my bolding)

A timely example of where the lack of actionable granularity matters is the level at which democracy and transformation are discussed in the face of the climate emergency. There is a patent asymmetry in many of these discussions: The climate emergency is manifestly empirical and context-dependent; democracy and transformation are left, too frequently but sometimes necessary, as abstractions. An example helps.

A point made about longer-term transformations in light of the climate emergency is: “Based on climate science, there is not enough time to first overhaul a critical mass of economies simultaneously according to socialist democratic planning and then to realise emission reductions” (https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/13563467.2024.2434469 ). And yet, so what?

For others it is increasingly obvious that the realization of democratic processes outweigh the consequences: “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://doi.org/10.1215/00382876-10242756; my italics).

What’s missing in all of this is the adverbial property of what it means to act democratically (or in varied transformative ways). To answer that requires sensitivity to diverse contexts. Here but not there, to behave democratically means people choose leaders by these elections, pay these taxes, have these social protections, and more. Elsewhere the really-existing practices of “behaving democratically” can and do differ.

All of which means that without first differentiating the impacts of the climate emergency by location and time, it is next to impossible to identify, let alone differentiate, the consequences with respect to the disparate and different practices of acting democratically or transformationally.

I

Proposition. The expression, M&R (maintenance and repair), signals an already-established state/stage of infrastructure operations (e.g., “operations and maintenance” or “maintenance and repair,” for which there are official and unofficial procedures, routines and protocols).

M&R is a widely accepted, indeed formal, stage of infrastructure operations, and as such deserving of scholarly study with respect to enhancing the resilience of critical infrastructures. Indeed, M&R provides an officially-recognized period for and expectations about identifying and updating what are precursors to system disruption and failure and their prevention/avoidance strategies. Recurrent M&R is all about continuous building in of precursor resilience (e.g., using M&R for identifying obsolescent and now possibly hazardous software or other components). M&R moves closer to the center-stage of infrastructure operations, if only because of the common perception about infrastructures, i.e., “they’re invisible until they break, right?”

II

Implications. Start at the macro-level but with more granularity than conventionally assumed. A form of societal regulation occurs when critical infrastructures, like energy and water, prioritize systemwide reliability and safety as social values in real time. For our purposes here, these values are further differentiated and uniquely so within infrastructures.

Consider the commonplace that regulatory compliance is “the baseline for risk mitigation in infrastructures.” There is no reason to assume that compliance is the same baseline for, inter alios, the infrastructure’s micro-operators on the ground, including the eyes-and-ears field staff; the infrastructure’s headquarters’ compliance staff responsible for monitoring industry practices for meeting government mandates; the senior officials in the infrastructure who see the need for more and better enterprise risk management; and, last but never least, the infrastructure’s reliability professionals—its real-time control room operators, should they exist, and immediate support staff— in the middle of all this, especially in their role of surmounting any stickiness by way of official procedures and protocols undermining real-time system reliability.

To put it another way, where 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 necessarily go beyond their official duties). This in turn also holds for the the operational stage, “maintenance and repair.”

So what?

III

The above implies that M&R provides for increasing precursor resilience, which is best seen now as a differentiated process (resilience will look very different from the intra-infrastructural perspectives of enterprise risk management and real-time control room operations) and which takes place within a wider framework of social regulation not associated solely with the official regulator of record.

Note that infrastructures do convey and instantiate social values, but these values—particularly for systemwide reliability and safety—are not the command and control typically discussed in “infrastructure power”. In the latter, formal design is the starting point for eventual operations; in the former actual operations are the informal starting point for real-time redesign. Not only do actual implementation and operations fall short of initial designs, one major function of operations is to redesign in real time what are the inevitably incomplete or defective technologies of infrastructure designers and defective regulations of the regulator of record.

In this way, it’s better to see “maintenance and repair” as part and parcel of normal operations that follow from and modify formal infrastructure design. M&R’s focus on improving precursor resilience becomes one way of maintaining the infrastructure’s process reliability when older forms of high reliability are no longer to be achieved because of inter-infrastructural dependencies and vulnerabilities.

IV

These distinctions have major implications for reinterpreting “infrastructure resilience.” For example, noncompliance by an infrastructure’s control room may be a regulatory error for the regulator of record; the same noncompliance may reflect a (more) resilient infrastructure (or at least a more resilient control room if there) able to ensure system reliability when the task environment indicates the said regulation to be defective.

In fact for real-time operations, noncompliance is not an error, if following that regulation jeopardizes infrastructure reliability and safety now or in planning the next steps ahead. So too in the case of defective technologies. To put it another way, the criticality of time from discovery to correction of error reinforces a process of dispersed regulatory functions, where one of the regulatory functions of the infrastructure’s real-time operations is to catch and correct for error by the regulator of record and/or design errors by engineers under conditions of mandated reliability. In fact, the latter catching and correcting error are part and parcel of what we mean by a resilient infrastructure and its control room.

V

Finally, the M&R perspective presented here can help us rethink the formal design and planning processes for creating new infrastructures or majorly repurposing existing ones after a major emergency. As Paul Schulman argues “adaptive capacity [for emergency management] can be facilitated in part by planning and design processes that themselves create prior conditions, such as contacts among diversely skilled people in other infrastructures, robust communications systems and contingent resources in different locations, for restoration actions.” I interpret the passage to mean that the mentioned design and planning interventions pass the ‘‘reliability matters’’ test.

That is, the aim of maintaining or enhancing contact lists, communication systems and distributed inventories is to reduce the task volatility that emergency managers and infrastructure operators face, increase their options to respond more effectively, and/or enhance their maneuverability in responding to different, often unpredictable or uncontrollable, performance conditions. That is what we mean by resilience in aid of system reliability. (In case it needs saying, not all design and planning pass the test!)

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My thanks to Paul Schulman and Antti Silvast for thinking through some points. Any errors that remain are due to my stubborness. Some material has appeared in earlier blog entries.

Not to worry, we’ll scale up later, soothes the techno-managerial elite. Later on, presses the happy-talk, we’ll relax assumptions and add realism. Anyway, we know how to reduce inequality (just give them money!), overpopulation (just don’t have babies!) and save the environment (just don’t cut down the trees!). So many of these just-do-this suffocate in their repetitive fat of “Well, this time is different,” “This time we really don’t have any other choice,” and “This time, you have to believe us, failure is not an option here and now.”

The chief problem with “start simple here and now” is that each scale/level is complex in its own right. The shoreline only looks smooth on the map. “Keep it simple” and “Break it down to essentials” only work, if they work at all, when context complexity is first admitted as helpful. “Which do you find to be simpler,” asks novelist and essayist, William Gass: “The radio that goes on when you turn a single knob, or the one that won’t work because the parts are all lined up on the floor?”

When I hear someone telling us “Keep it simple!” I immediately suspect they’ve lost the plot, like the actor playing Hamlet, who finished the bedroom scene with Gertrude but forgot to kill Polonius.

For many policy practitioners, incompleteness is the stuff of their working lives. At any point, problems remain to be addressed, obstacles surmounted, and goals attained, along with fires to put out, constraints to be lifted, objectives to be met, missions to be fulfilled, and crises to be faced. These policy and management worlds become one in terms of unwanted interruptions, and interruptions make for unfinished business. The only thing not interrupted are disasters, which is why they are so often described as “complete.”

Briefly put, issue incompleteness is the persistence of unfinished business for policymakers, politicians and policy analysts. Granted, interruptions can arise out of complexity and leave us with uncertainty and, of course, tasks do get done of sorts. A few things even turn out better than we could have hoped for. Fires are contained, problems handled, goals addressed, objectives recongized–work does get done. But–and this is the point–our policy worlds are recognizably incomplete and unfinished for all that.

This point has to be pushed further, though. All manner of granularities and context are involved when it comes to managing or coping ahead with the interruptions and unfinished business.

I

There is a sense in which each of our mental models of a complex policy and management issue always unfinished, if it matters to us. By way of example, 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 painting (or any representation for that matter) depicts that which it is a painting of, but rather that representations problematize recognition itself. Moving toward uncertainty (from the direction of certainty–we’ve seen the square–or from the direction of unstudied conditions–but never before as painted) means not only that we have a better appreciation of reality as contingent, provisional or messy. We also end up seeing how the incompletion of representation drives the very production of more representation.

Of the original Venus De Milo statue, Cocteau asks, “Suppose a farmer finds the arms. To whom do they belong? To the farmer or to the Venus de Milo?” Or to something or someone altogether different? To ask the latter question is to open up incompletion, where knowledge is unsettled and knowledgeable gives way to inexperience.

II

Is this sense of incompleteness at the micro level the felt part of an irreducible particularity of being, that sense we never body forth as representative or total? George Steiner recounts a childhood experience:

. . .if there are in this obscure province of one small county (diminished Austria) so many coats of arms, each unique, how many must there be in Europe, across the globe? I do not recall what grasp I had, if any, of large numbers. But I do remember that the word ‘millions’ came to me and left me unnerved. How was any human being to see, to master this plurality? Suddenly, it came to me, in some sort of exultant but also appalled revelation, that no inventory, no heraldic encyclopedia, no summa of fabled beasts, inscriptions, chivalric hallmarks, however compendious, could ever be complete.

But what is to be learned from a run of such individual experiences across more diverse people?

As I understand it, this diversity means no single or new representation could ever complete social reality or erase the initial condition that other recastings are both irresistibly forthcoming and inescapably 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 for the policy and management worlds.

III

In those worlds, we have the techno-managerial elite still talking like this. “If people acted at the level of rationality presumed in standard economics textbooks, the world’s standard of living would be measurably higher,” assured Alan Greenspan, former chair of the US Federal Reserve.

So what if really-existing markets are one of the most diverse and hybridized of social institutions? So what’s wrong with believing that the answer to always-incomplete regulation must be always-incomplete markets?

Suspended somewhere between the always-incomplete pull of utopia and the never-good enough push from dystopia is more like the policy and management realism we–you and I–know and experience.

1. “Recalibrating politics: the Kennedy White House dinner for André Malraux (longer read)” https://mess-and-reliability.blog/2019/12/16/recalibrating-politics-the-kennedy-white-house-dinner-for-andre-malraux-longer-read/

2. “Spread the word: We need more Extreme Climate Resilience Desks for real-time infrastructure operations!” https://mess-and-reliability.blog/2024/04/23/spread-the-word-we-need-more-extreme-climate-resilience-desks-for-real-time-infrastructure-operations/

3. “What the Thai BL series, “Bad Buddy,” has to tell us about societal reset” https://mess-and-reliability.blog/2022/02/26/what-the-thai-bl-series-bad-buddy-has-to-tell-us-about-societal-reset-updated-2/

4. “Five most policy-relevant entries on pastoralists and pastoralisms” https://mess-and-reliability.blog/2024/01/27/five-most-policy-relevant-entries-on-pastoralists-and-pastoralisms/

5. “How the structural analysis of narrative is relevant for recasting pastoralist development” https://mess-and-reliability.blog/2024/01/06/how-the-structural-analysis-of-narratives-is-relevant-for-recasting-pastoralist-development/

I

What to do when there isn’t even a homeopathic whiff of “next steps ahead” in the policy-relevant document you are reading? Yes, it’s a radical critique that tells truth to power, yes it is a manfesto for change now; yes, it’s certain, straightforward and unwavering.

But, like all policy narratives with beginnings, middles and ends, the big question remains: What happens next? Without provisional answers, endings are premature. “The thing is that you can always go on, even when you have the most terrific ending,” in the words of Nobel poet, Joseph Brodsky.

II

“It is an interesting fact about the world we actually live in that no anthropologist, to my knowledge, has come back from a field trip with the following report: their concepts are so alien that it is impossible to describe their land tenure, their kinship system, their ritual… As far as I know there is no record of such a total admission of failure… It is success in explaining culture A in the language of culture B which is… really puzzling.”
Ernest Gellner, social anthropologist

Thomas Carlyle’s mock philosopher, Dr. Teufelsdröckh asks in Sartor Resartus: “Am I a botched mass of tailors’ and cobblers’ shreds, then; or a tightly-articulated, homogeneous little Figure, automatic, nay alive?” That is: patched together when it comes for purposes of understanding.

III

There is talk of revolution, whispers of reform,
and everything seems possible except departure from the norm.
Sean O’Brien (“If I May”)

But then again: Consider the same norm–e.g., even cobblers should be happy–but change the point of departure. For example, Japanese adult pornstar, Jin Narumiya, has announced he’s retiring as a porn actor:

Dear Always Supportive People

I am celebrating my 28th birthday today. I have been able to do my best in my activities because of the support of all of you. Thank you so much. As some of you may already know, I have retired from pornoactor. There are three reasons. The first is that as I continued my activities, I lost sight of my own meaning life. I was chased by mysterious pressure, and before I knew it, my mind was empty. I was able to do my best even though I was on the edge of my mentality because I had people who supported me and were looking forward to my work, but I reached my limit and made time to face myself for a while. During this time, I focused on getting in touch with nature, meditating, and recovering my empty mind. Who am I? What is happiness? I faced these questions seriously, and the answer I came up with was retirement. And to take on a new challenge.The second is at work. I saw the reality of working in pornoactor and not being able to expand my work. And all you can do is get naked and have sex. I’ve had people say that to me. This made me feel very frustrated. It also made me very sad. So I wanted to challenge myself in a new field and achieve results, and look back at those who made me feel frustrated. Third, I wanted to live my life in a way that I could love myself more. I want to do what I want to do and make those who are involved with me happy. And I want to create the best life possible.I have been supported by many people in my life. I am helpless on my own. I cannot do anything. So we need your support going forward. I will soon start a new journey. I would like to make this journey exciting together with all of you. Thank you for reading this far. Lastly, I would like to thank my parents for giving birth to me, everyone who has always supported me, and all my friends who support me behind the scenes.

“If it were possible, I would have such priest as should imitate Christ, charitable lawyers should love their neighbours as themselves, . . .noblemen live honestly, tradesmen leave lying and cozening, magistrates corruption, &c., but this is impossible, I must get such as I may.” Robert Burton from his The Anatomy of Melancholy.

IV

quin etiam refert nostris versibus ipsis
cum quibus et quali sint ordine quaeque locata;
. . .verum positura discrepitant res.
(Indeed in my own verses it is a matter of some moment what is placed next to what, and in what order;…truly the place in which each will be positioned determines the meaning.)
Lucretius, De Rerum Natura

In other words, one answer to “What happens next?” is to juxtapose disparate quotes in order to extend the endings we have. There must be a sense in which such extensions are forced and since forced, any resonance (no guarantees) is compelling. This is a high-stakes wager that answers to “What happens next?” are alternative versions of what I would have thought instead.

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For an example of recasting a complex policy issue through the juxtaposition of disparate quotes, see “The analogy, ‘we are at sea’, remade for the Anthropocene” in my When Complex is as Simple as it Gets: Guide for recasting policy and management in the Anthropocene.

All you need to say is this: “Current conceptualizations of [x, y and z] are not theoretically equipped to unpack and examine their politics. This is because they have yet to grapple with the concept of power.”