World is suddener than we fancy it.

World is crazier and more of it than we think, 
Incorrigibly plural.
                            Louis MacNeice, "Snow"

There are so many different programs, projects, activities and initiatives connected to “income inequality” that the immediate challenge is to compare and contrast them before drawing generalizations about anything like an [Inequality] bracketed off from really-existing variability.

The comparison is not so much at the level of that country’s family support program contrasted to this country’s family support program, when it comes to a capitalized benchmark called [Inequality].

The comparison is more across many family support programs, much along the lines that no single heart is the same as another but these different and other different hearts set the stage for recognizing patterns across really-existing ones. That pattern recognition is of inequality, with a small-i.

Jesus Christ having a lot to say, but wise enough not to write it down

Everyone having the right not to be killed by people they don’t know

“A thing is a hole in the thing it is not” (Carl Andre, artist)

Decorum demanding that Medea kill her children offstage and that Macbeth do the same for King Duncan

Each person on earth being allocated a randomly unique number: “This one is yours. It’s irreplaceable.”

Understanding that carbon pricing and cap-and-trade are easy to talk about because they’re hard to implement. How else to buy time to avoid all the other approaches that are quicker by being context specific?

Seeing that in Trump, Boris Johnson, Putin, and Xi Jinping, we are weaponizing a late-version of collapse with its very own celebrity brands

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Principal sources available on request.

I

Reliability professionals are central to translating statements of systemwide policies, laws and regulations into reliable real-time operations within and across the system infrastructures. This means reliability professionals are neither macro-designers located in the infrastructure’s headquarters nor micro-operators at individual facilities. Instead, they operate in between the macro- and the micro-levels, working in a very important middle domain within the infrastructure as a whole.

In this domain of expertise, infrastructure reliability in systemwide operations is achieved only if macro-designs are modified into different scenarios that take into account local conditions affecting infrastructure operations and where the real-time better practices that have evolved across a diversity of really-existing cases of operations are applied so as to ensure achievement of the original reliability mandates of policies, laws and regulation.

II

For example, the land board’s longstanding policy may be that livestock watering boreholes should be spaced 8 kilometers (5 miles) apart in order to reduce the effects of overgrazing. Indeed, land board members and staff may still insist it is their policy, even when your map of actual livestock water boreholes shows conclusively that boreholes are not spaced 8km apart on the ground. Does your map of allocated boreholes mean the 8km rule is not really land board policy?

No, it doesn’t

It is better to say that any such policy has to be modified in practice because variability in site conditions, aquifers, range composition and livestock characteristics differ so much (e.g., the hardveld is not the same as the sandveld). Furthermore, actually-existing practices for siting and spacing livestock borehole evolving across all the land boards and all their sitings, and this more up-to-date knowledge helps them in the placement of new livestock water boreholes (e.g. more knowledge and mapping now exist about the underground aquifers).

In other words, to say this map of livestock watering boreholes shows that the spacing policy was NOT in fact implemented misses the fundamental point that the policy was indeed implemented by land board members and staff in ways that cannot be attributed to their being expedient or corrupt, full stop. Even if the latter were true in some cases, no policy can be reliable if it is one-size-fits-all.

III

The chief implication of the preceding example is that the locus and focus of “implementation” shifts from micro-site—”drilling his borehole right here and right now”—to the middle domain where reliability professionals convert macro-policies into local contingency scenarios—”siting the borehole this side differs for us from siting the borehole that side”—and where better practices that have emerged out of all siting and spacing activities since the policy was adopted are used to modify new placements under the overall 8km policy.

This means that the micro-operators at any individual site—the drilling rig and operator, the borehole owner(s) and their specific herds and herders—are not the only unit and level of analysis for the actual implementation, here and now of the 8km policy. Implementation of borehole siting and spacing also takes place when teams or groups of reliability professionals adapt borehole siting and spacing in light of both locally contingent conditions and newer systemwide practices developing across different conditions relevant for up-to-date, reliable borehole placement.

IV

This also means that active micro-operators and reliability professionals–or at least their roles–need to be distinguished from each other. One or two drilling rig operators may be preferred by livestock owners because of their skills in getting results. But these drilling rig operators are reliability professionals when they also work with land board members/staff in the latter’s effort to identify more reliable scenarios for actual sitings as well as more up-to-date systemwide siting/spacing practices. Here they are in the role of reliability professionals because they have a bigger picture of borehole siting and spacing than when they work as a single driller at a single site with a specific livestock owner.

Or take another example. When the paravet is great one-on-one, developing unique relationships with each of his or her clients, then s/he is a micro-operator. When that same paravet acts according to his or her official job definition–“A para-veterinary worker is a veterinary science expert who, as part of a veterinary aid system, performs procedures autonomously or semi-autonomously”–then that system and team component points to his or her being a reliability professional. (Note these networks can be informal and not just formal ones.)

Last but not least, a case study rich in examples of networks of reliability professionals, involving pastoralists and others, is to be found in: Alex Tasker & Ian Scoones (2022). “High Reliability Knowledge Networks: Responding to Animal Diseases in a Pastoral Area of Northern Kenya,” The Journal of Development Studies 58(5): 968-988.

Bells were increasingly used not only to summon people to church, but also to provide another prompt for a belief act to those laity who had not attended: the major bells were to be rung during the Mass at the moment of consecration of the Host, and from the late twelfth century onwards we find texts calling upon lay people to kneel and adore where ever they were at that moment…

John Arnold (2023). Believing in belief: Gibbon, Latour and the social history of religion. Past & Present, 260(1): 236–268. (https://doi.org/10.1093/pastj/gtac012)

I

I suggest that early warnings promulgated as part of official drought management systems are designed to be bells in the above sense: People are to demonstrate their belief in the warnings when issued. They are to take action then and there because of them.

But, as Arnold also reminds us, demonstration of obedience always entails the possibility of failure. Heeding the warning might not work.

Indeed, some early warning systems are designed to fail because they are meant also for non-believers. The latter include, most notably for our purposes, those who subscribe to other types of warnings (e.g., https://pastres.org/2023/05/12/local-early-warning-systems-predicting-the-future-when-things-are-so-uncertain/).

This matters because the stakes are high when it comes to drought for both believers and non-believers. How so?

II

It is important to understand the conditions under which the designers themselves don’t believe in their own bell-ringing systems. In their article, “Drought Management Norms: Is the Middle East and North Africa Region Managing Risks or Crises?,” Jedd et al (2021) examine the efficacy official systems in the MENA region. They conclude:

Drought monitoring data were often treated as proprietary information by the producing agencies; interagency sharing, let alone wider publication, was rare. Government officials described the following reasons for this approach. First, it could create pressure on decision-makers to take action (politicizes the issue). Second, intervention measures are costly, and so, taking measures creates strong and competing demands for financial resources from agencies and/or ministers (increase political transaction costs). Therefore, given existing policies and institutions in the countries, it is unclear to what extent drought decision-making processes would be improved or expedited with increased transparency of monitoring information. . . .

This creates a difficult puzzle: In order to mitigate future drought losses, a clear depiction of current conditions must be made publicly available. However, publishing these data may require that agencies take on the burden of allocating relief if the release of this very information coincides with a future drought crisis.

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1070496520960204

III

So then the obvious policy and management question is: When it comes to the efficacy of early warnings for drought, who do you want to start with: believers or non-believers?

I

Say you are residents of Oregon, a state in the US Pacific Northwest facing a magnitude 9.0 earthquake just off its coast. Aftershocks will likely be around magnitude 8.0 with a 60′ tsunami hitting the shore first thing.

Nothing has ever happened like that to Oregon. Some began thinking seriously about this earthquake and its aftermath only a decade or so ago. Thinking about the infrastructure interconnectivities within a regional focus is even more recent. People talk about the more recent spate of snowstorms, fires, flooding and heat dome effects as “eye-openers and wake-up calls” than as sources from which lessons are to be learned. According to the experts, emergency management is itself a relatively new profession and organizational priority there.

The good news, if you can call it that, is that key resources, like electricity generation and regional transmission, are on the eastern side of the state. But that too is at jeopardy if instead of a Cascadia subduction zone earthquake off the coast, we are talking about, say, a massive geomagnetic storm like the Carrington Event of 1859. That too can happen and take out a much wider swathe of electric and telecom assets.

II

What to do in response to these prospects of “earth-shattering” events?

One thing is: “get out of Dodge.” But then do you know what’s in store when you arrive somewhere you’ve never have been? That even the state’s infrastructure operators aren’t fleeing like mad indicates people’s preferences for known unknowns over unknown unknowns.

Known unknowns, after all, can be cast in the form of scenarios, and scenarios can be more or less detailed. Restoring water, electricity, telecoms and roads after the earthquake will be an immediate priority once saving lives is underway. We imagine the known unknown called the unimaginable all the time.

And the second we try to anticipate the unimaginable–that is, prepare for it–the preparedness scenarios beg to become granularized for now, not some other time. Operating in the blind during the 1755 Lisbon earthquake, which had a major impact on European history, is quite different than operating blind in the Cascadia one and its aftermaths.

Your scenarios are what separate you from unstudied/unstudiable conditions. “Humans can only really know that which they create,” as the older insight has it.

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The Augustinian threefold present—as in: the past as present remembrance, the present as current consciousness, and the future as present expectation—is the cognitive linchpin of real-time management.

Yet, it’s an odd sort of a-historicism to deny utopian possibilities because we live in an endless present that forecloses on anything like the unexpected future.

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Actually, the unexpected event is informative. In this case, uncertainty isn’t the absence of information.

It is one thing to say the present advances to the future it helps render for itself; it is quite another thing to say the future advances to the contingencies the present affords. That latter is like finding the best hamburger in town at the Vietnamese diner, at least for now.

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Catastrophism, like irony, is a knowingness, not knowledge. As when people are more wont to quote Rilke about death being the part of life turned away from us rather than Wittgenstein to the effect that death is not an event in life.

Ironically, the post-apocalyptic novel—doomer lit generally—nails home the fact that we don’t need widespread fear and dread of COLLAPSE to provoke remedy and progress, because, well, we no longer believe in either. Less repeatedly said: But this means you are still here, reading the very words.

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If, as they say, need connects everything, then rarely have we been as connected as we were when isolated from each other during the pandemic.

Janet Flanner, the journalist, reported in 1945 from war-struck Paris: “Everything here is a substitute for everything else.” Think: Cigarettes could be traded for food, food could be traded for clothes, clothes could be traded for furniture, and so on. It is in disaster where everything is connected to everything else; that’s why the only thing complete is “complete disaster” these days.

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Not to worry, we’ll scale up later. Later on, presses the happy-talk of true believers, we’ll relax assumptions and add realism. Don’t bother the details; we know how to reduce overpopulation (just don’t have babies!) and save the environment (just don’t cut down the trees!). Just keep fossil fuel in the ground! So much of this suffocates in its own fat: This time it’s different; leave the complications for later.

You’d think that “radical” in “radical uncertainty” would require responses other than the same-old same-old. Yet in his book on the last financial crisis, Mervyn King, former head of the Bank of England, ends up recommending more of the same, i.e.: Radical uncertainty–King’s term–needs to be better reflected in economic and financial theories and practices. It seems that “radical” is dumbed down at the precise moment when needed most.

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There is something worryingly “closed-time” about the Precautionary Principle. If we accept its definition—“the principle that the introduction of a new product or process whose ultimate effects are disputed or unknown should be resisted”—then the precaution is based on what is known/unknown by way of effects understood now. If so, there appears to be little or no possibility—no second chance—of any “afterwards” that demonstrates when the initial precaution was irreversibly in error.

And yet. . .the more you have to lose, the less you can take for granted. We are left somewhere between “Though to/hold on in any case means taking less and less/for granted…” and “to lose/again and again is to have more/and more to lose…” (Amy Clampitt from her “A Hermit Thrush” and Mark Strand from his “To Begin”). What to do? Elizabeth Bishop suggests in “One Art”: “Then practice losing farther, losing faster”.

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1. The problem with calling for more research on resilience is the path dependency now long entrenched: The proliferation of new types of resilience exceeds the operationalization of the constructs already out there. More research should mean more operationalization, but there are no guarantees if the past is our guide.

In other words, resiliencies have been differentiated conceptually, but many of the conceptual constructs remain equally devoid of the details and specifics for relevant policy and management, case by case. One of the best things Paul Schulman and I did in our research on electricity infrastructures was to develop an empirical measure of when and how the transmission grid operators moved within, outside, and back into their real-time bandwidths for reliable service provision.

Operationalizing requires not thinking in terms of abstract nouns, like “resilience” or “adaptive capacity,” but thinking adverbially. To ask, “What does it mean here and now to act resiliently with respect to this rather than that,” has the great virtue of pressing for identification and specification of the practices that actually constitute “acting resiliently.” We can all talk about safety culture, but it is quite another matter to identify and differentiate the specific practices of doing this resiliently rather than that in real time.

2. “Building in resilience” can have the same kind of abstractness associated with “designing leadership:” far too easy to recommend rather than operationalize. But even if planners knew the adverbial specifications of “building in resilience” for emergency management, none of this would lessen the priority role of improvisation and ingenuity by professionals in emergency response.

There is no planner’s workaround for improvisation. This means the question, “When is ‘resilient-enough’ enough?,” is not answerable by planners on their own.

3. Resilience, at the conceptual level, is said to be optimizing the ability to absorb or rebound from shocks, while minimizing the need to anticipate these shocks ahead of time. Anticipation, in contrast conceptually, is to optimize the ability to plan ahead and deal with shocks before they happen, while minimizing having to cope with shocks when they do occur. Consider the resulting Table 1:

System planners would like managers to be both optimally anticipatory and resilient at the same time—indeed that managers maximize their “readiness” for whatever arises, whenever. These all-embracing demands of planners and project designers can, however, reduce the managers’ much-needed capacity to balance anticipation and resilience case by case. Indeed, to do the latter requires respect for the granularities of resiliencies, not their abstractions.

4. Readers are familiar with advocacy pieces that call for more adaptive, collaborative, comprehensive, integrated, holistic, and resilient approaches to emergencies, without however providing the details for that implementation, here and now rather than then and there.

While it is too easy to make such calls, notice the positive practical implication: Those who do know (some of) the details and practices have much to say about the respective abstractions called variously, “resilience”.

We know that real-time operators and managers of critical infrastructures coordinate, adapt, improvise, and redesign all the time in the face of system surprises and shocks, big and small. They also practice different types of resilience (i.e., adjusting to surprises in normal operations differs from restoring infrastructure operations back to normal after a systemwide disruption). When it comes “comprehensive and holistic,” these professionals seek to maintain team situational awareness and a common operating picture of the system, again in real time. (The latter aren’t what most planners and designers consider “comprehensive and holistic”!)

Two inter-related implications follow. First, these operators and managers are professionals, whether officially certified or not. Second, because they are professionals, their operationalized definitions of adaptation, resilience and coordination matter for and in practice. There is no reason to believe these operational definitions have been sufficiently canvassed to date by scholars of resilience, let alone macro-planners and designers.

So what? in the climate emergency

So what? in capitalism

So what? in predicting the future

So what? in leadership

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So what? in the climate emergency

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. I was told:

• that Bay Area would need some 477 million cubic yards of sediment–the vast majority of which can’t be sourced locally–to restore area wetlands and mudflats;
• It would require an estimated US$110 billion dollars locally to adapt to higher sea levels by 2050, this being based on existing plans in place or used as placeholders for entities that have yet to plan; and
• To expect much more sea level rise locally because of the newly accelerated melting of the ice cap melting in Antarctica and Greenland.

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? How are these and the other unprecedented high requirements to be met?

II

But there is a major problem with these 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.

So what?

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.

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So what? in capitalism

Ending capitalism isn’t just hard to realize; it’s hard to theorize and operationalize. To wit: “Under capitalism” means that even with always-late capitalism, we have. . .

laissez-faire capitalism, monopoly capitalism, oligarchic capitalism, state-guided capitalism, party-state capitalism, corporate capitalism, corporate-consumerist capitalism, digital capitalism, financialized capitalism, political capitalism, social (democratic) capitalism, neoliberal capitalism, crony capitalism, wellness capitalism, petty capitalism, platform capitalism, surveillance capitalism, infrastructural capitalism, welfare capitalism, authoritarian capitalism, imperialistic capitalism, turbo-capitalism, post-IP capitalism, green (also red and brown) capitalism, climate capitalism, extractive capitalism, libidinal capitalism, clickbait capitalism, emotional (affective) capitalism, tech capitalism, American capitalism, British capitalism, European capitalism, Western capitalism, transnational capitalism, global capitalism, agrarian capitalism, residential capitalism, disaster capitalism, rentier capitalism, industrial capitalism, post-industrial capitalism, fossil capitalism, petro-capitalism, settler-colonial capitalism, supply chain capitalism, cognitive capitalism, asset manager capitalism, information (also data) capitalism, cyber-capitalism, racial capitalism, necro-capitalism, bio-capitalism, penny capitalism, war capitalism, crisis capitalism, managerial capitalism, stakeholder capitalism, techno(scientific)-capitalism, pandemic capitalism, caring capitalism, zombie capitalism. . .

Oh hell, let’s stop there. In a deep irony, much of this looks like classic product differentiation in competitive markets. In this case: by careerists seeking to (re)brand their lines of inquiry for a competitive advantage in professions that act more and more like markets anyway.

So what?

Now, of course, it’s methodologically positive to be able to differentiate types and varieties of capitalism, so as to identify patterns and practices (if any) across the diversity of cases. But how is the latter identification to be achieved with respect to a list without number? What then does being anti-“capitalist” actually mean these days for policy and management?

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So what? in predicting the future

So what if we’re lousy in predicting the future? We are so used to the idea that predicting the future is more or less about accuracy that we forget how murky and unclear the present is. To paraphrase Turgot, the French Enlightenment philosopher and statesman, we have enough trouble predicting the present, let alone the future. Because the present is not one-way only by way of interpretation, why expect anything less for the future?

Again: So what?

This means that the microeconomic concepts of opportunity costs, tradeoffs and priorities, along with price as a coordinating mechanism make sense–if they make sense–only now or in the very short term, when the resource to be allocated and alternatives forgone are their clearest. Without opportunity costs, notions of stable trade-offs and prices go out the window.

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So what? in leadership

Take even a cursory glance at the track record of advisers to their leaders:

• Plato and Dionysius II;
• Aristotle and Alexander the Great;
• Seneca and Nero;
• Ibn Rushd (Averroes) and Caliph Abu Yaqub Yusuf;
• Petrarch and Emperor Charles IV;
• Montaigne and Henri IV;
• Descartes and Sweden’s Queen Christina;
• Leibnitz and the Dukes of Hanover;
• Voltaire and Frederick the Great;
• Diderot and Catherine the Great; and
• In case you want to add to the list, Adam Smith and the Duke of Buccleuch or Goethe and Prince Carl August, and so on through the centuries. . .
• Or if you really want to cringe, just consider André Gide recommending against publishing Marcel Proust, Edward Garnett against publishing James Joyce, and T.S. Eliot against publishing George Orwell. . . .

I mean, get real: If these guys didn’t advise effectively, who the hell are we to think we can do better for the leaders of the day? (And, puhleeese, don’t throw up Kissinger and Nixon as the working template!)

So what?

Two things. It’s hard to imagine two words scarier in the English language than “designing leadership.” Second, we should take to heart the extensions of, “It was beyond our mental capabilities to predict Bob Dylan winning the Nobel in 2016.”

I

The typical divide across pre-disaster/disaster/post-disaster becomes more complicated when you talk to practicing emergency managers. They can go into great deal about efforts to “prepare for,” “mitigate,” and “prevent” situations even when already in immediate response and restoration, and not just beforehand.

It would however be a mistake, I think, to see preparation, mitigation and prevention as a continuous set of practices, albeit punctuated from time to time.

To telegraph ahead, what changes are different configurations of socio-technical interconnections around which ongoing prevention, preparedness and mitigation efforts are undertaken—from now into and across immediate response and initial restoration of services.

II

To see what this means for resilience, start this way.

Some infrastructure operators and emergency managers we interviewed say they are best in response and restoration when following plans; others say they are at their best when surprised by the unexpected. This means operations people may look like cowboys to the engineer department because both cognitively understand the same system differently: “I don’t think you respond to 92 breaks in 13 days without having the ability to adapt on the fly,” said a city’s water distribution manager.

But this may be less a matter of different professional orientations and more about orientations with respect to different “scales of operation,” even within the same city.

For engineers, seismically retrofitting a bridge represents efforts to manage ahead latent interconnectivity so that it does not become manifest during or after an earthquake, e.g., the bridge holds and traffic is not disrupted there. For operations people, even if the seismically retrofitted bridge does fail in the earthquake and traffic disrupted, improvisations are still possible, both by the city departments involved and by commuters who individually or collectively organize alternatives. The respective interconnectivities, before and after, of course look very different.

Improvising after failure may seem like weak beer compared to the promise of better avoiding failure in the first place, but not foregrounding the necessity of improvisations (and improvisational skills) leads to confusion about “building in resilience” and its role in emergency management.

All the money and political will beforehand won’t get rid of the key role of improvisation in emergency management. There is no planner’s workaround for improvisation. This means the question, “When is ‘resilient-enough’ enough?,” is not answerable by planners.

Climate doomers are to the climate emergency what heavy metal is to apocalyptic war: a kind of niche gardening.

“Culture eats policy for lunch every day.”

Ignorance leaves traces via surprise or shock, which means trace is never without place.

If pictured as a Renaissance ceiling fresco, risk-seeking innovators would be little putti wheeling around St Market, upwards into a cerulean sky.

One reason for policy messes is that those who should be turning in their graves can’t.

Inequality, like congeries, is a plural noun.

Sheets of blank paper held up by protesters–now that’s no empty signifier! [Alternatively: “It’s damned hard,” as Wittgenstein reportedly said, “to write things that make blank sheets better!”]

The function of policy and management messes is to frustrate the storyline of beginning, middle and end–which is a very good mess to be in at times.

The “r” in “water” is for reliability.

They read less as crisis scenarios in need of details than grudges passed off as threats.

It’s because we demand complex organizations to be rational (formal) that they have had to become natural (informal).

So many new policy statements are like staging a house for sale. If bought, the furniture actually used inside differs considerably.

Somewhere between platform governance and content moderation is curation of multiple websites granular enough for different policies and their management.

There is no little irony in a privatized market approach to critical service provision, based in individual self-interest, and a technology-based approach that promises to free us from all manner of selfishness when it comes to that provision.

Consider the economist’s “the opportunities are attractive, if technological and regulatory challenges are overcome” and the engineer’s “the opportunities are attractive, if economic and regulatory challenges are overcome”: In either case, scapegoating regulation keeps each discipline from fragmenting further.