Jim:     …the presentation was an eye-opener, Professor. . .

Prof:    Call me Peter. And thanks for the help setting up…

Jim:     Sure thing. . . Dick, are you coming. . .

Dick:   I’ll stay behind.

Jim:     Professor…

Peter:  Peter.

Jim:     Peter, ah, this is Dick. . .

Dick:   Jim, I’ll handle my own introductions. Thanks.

Jim:     [Turns to Peter] Maybe catch you the next time you’re in the area. . .

Peter:   Right. [Jim leaves.]

[Dick and Peter are about the same age, though both older than Jim. They look at each other, almost say something, but Peter returns to packing up his briefcase. The room quiets.]

Dick:   Well. . .Peter [said as if testing the word], you don’t really believe that drivel of a presentation, do you?

Peter:   You came in late, didn’t you. . .Dick?

Dick:   Early enough to catch the guff about rapid population growth exceeding the earth’s carrying capacity. You’re scaring the shit out of …well, almost everyone.

Peter:   It’s pretty obvious that population growth is doing just that.

Dick:   Obvious to everybody but me, you mean.

Peter:   Obvious to everyone. [Closes the briefcase and looks about to leave]

Dick:   You know what I think is going on? The problem is experts–like you?–generalize too soon too much.

Peter:   “Generalize“? What, you don’t believe the evidence?

You don’t believe greenhouse gases are increasing and climate change disruptions are here to stay and worsen? You don’t believe loss of biodiversity and species extinctions are racing ahead, urban sprawl is metastasizing, waste and pollution out of control?

[More agitated]

. . .That violence and environmental conflict are on the rise everywhere? That what we need more than anything else is to reduce population growth in developing countries and per capita consumption levels in this, our so-called developed world. We went through The Great Lockdown and people died all over the place. Did you miss that?

Dick:   The Gloomy Scenario. You do it so well:

Quote. Populations are bounding forward without limits; the most rapid growth rates are in the poorest countries; natural resources are exploited and destroyed at ever expanding rates; the gap between rich and poor is wide and widening without stop; technology has fueled overconsumption and environmental degradation; and degradation everywhere continues to accelerate, be it congestion, poor sanitation, or the destruction of ecosystems, fields, forests or fisheries; humans have irreversibly changed conditions for the worse; and, last but certainly not least—right?—disease, conflict, nationalism and worse are burgeoning. Unquote!

Peter:   Read my lips: Quality-of-life-is-declining. What do you call the travesty of being locked down, all over the world? But you already know all this. . .

[It’s obvious by this point that there’s much more going on in this exchange, given its intensity.]

Dick:   There it is again: generalizing. For you it’s snap-easy to leap to the global. You guys [Peter looks at him sharply] talk about “global population,” “global CO₂,” “global greenhouse gas emissions” “global markets,” and “global pandemics”. . .

Peter:   And your point?

Dick:   If the global has any meaning, it’s exactly the level of analysis where you cannot generalize. The global must–right? by definition?–include all the differences that make up the world and because of that, things have to be too complex to be known with any kind of certainty at such an overarching scale. It’s not that our ignorance should humble us as much as we should be humiliated by going no further than recognizing the kind of certitude your offer is not what we have. . .

Peter:   Repeat: Your answer?

Dick:   If you want answers, start with those really-existing cases where more people make for a better environment, where more people make for less disease, less poverty, less inequality, where more people make for. . .

Peter:   You can’t generalize from a few site-examples.

Dick:   Nor can you generalize. The global is too full of difference to generalize.

Peter:   So your “answer” is that every time reduced population growth and per capita consumption and globalized disease control are advocated, you find an opposite example with which to counter? Every example of ours is matched by one of yours?

Dick:   I have no answers, or at least the big-A ones you lot talk about.

My guess is that if you started with all the differences out there, you’d find many more cases where reduced population growth and per capita consumption and globalized disease control can’t be the solution—and it is precisely these counter examples you and yours don’t talk about.

Peter:   That’s no help, and here too you know that. Start with differences? Which ones, pray tell?

At this rate, you’ll end up telling us it’s impossible to identify the ones that matter. That way, you don’t need to tell us what will happen if rapid population growth isn’t halted or per capita consumption sliced or what to do to avoid the next Great Lockdown.

When do we get really worried, as you keep adding to your list of differences? When the earth is suffocating under the weight of 10 billion people?

Dick:   There’s no such thing as the earth’s carrying capacity [makes quotation marks in the air with his fingers]. Which one of the hundred or so expert estimates are you going to choose as the carrying capacity of the entire earth? And even if you did, there is the techno-managerial elite to regulate to that number?

Peter:   We’re a million miles apart. What exactly is your point?

Dick:   That things are not what they seem to you. That there are no big A answers. [Pause]

There’s just. . .right here right now… [at a loss for words, he looks away from Peter]

Peter:   Don’t patronize me. You’re not talking to someone with a room-temperature IQ who does stupid. Anyone listening today knows I’m not locked into totalizing answers. What do you want from me? Continually repeating myself…

Dick:   You don’t want to see it, do you?

Peter:   Spare me the condescension. . .

Dick:   No, I mean, Peter, why are you always in a future that isn’t the mess we’re already in. Why aren’t you here, with that view [points to the window], in this instant?

Peter:   I am here. We may be seeing the same view, but I’m the only one who wants to ensure it’s there to see.

Dick:   Who’s “we”, bwana?

Peter:   We—you, me, every—

Dick:   You and me?

Peter:   . . .everyone.  Almost everyone knows we can’t continue using up Nature’s capital. Everywhere cries out for setting limits, for stewarding our resources. . .

Dick:   Stewardship! God, nothing is safe from that gaze. Stop a rocket from leaving earth, and it means you’re stewarding the universe!

There’s nothing you guys say you can’t manage, or at least try to, because there’s nothing that you guys aren’t responsible for stewarding, nothing, anywhere, no matter how far away.

Talk about delusional. Just another garden-variety imperialism…

Peter:   Excuse me, but where were you during the Great Lockdown? Repeat, we can’t continue on as we have been doing. We can’t go on abusing the planet this way. We have to love it and that means setting limits. . .

Dick:   . . .limits on love?

Peter:   [As if he can’t believe what Dick just said]

. . .when everything cries out for setting limits, safe limits, critical thresholds, establishing carrying capacities, accepting the very real risks that have to be balanced against the so-called benefits of new technologies etcetera. Rangelands, forests, wetlands, that sea over there. Every indicator of sustainability and health is flashing red, and here you are BABBLING as if none of this matters in your version of here and now.

Dick:   You see complete disaster where I see unfinished business.

Peter:   Whatever has this to do with saving the planet?

Dick:   Everything. We can’t save it, because there’s no such planet to save at the level you’re talking about.

Peter:   Christ, what a recipe for despair…

Dick:   Not despair. If we can’t find meaning in what remains, are you telling me you and the others’ll do a better job of finding meaning in the future. . .

Peter:   Just your postmodern scholasticism. This is getting nowhere. . .

Dick:   Sure this is getting us somewhere. It means it’s up to us to decide which unfinished business we want to give meaning to.

[Pause] Like all relationships.

Peter:  Everything has always had to be personal for you, on your terms. We can’t generalize, you say. We have to stay specific, you say. When all you’re saying is, I like tea. You like coffee. And there’s the end of it.

Dick:   So you’d still like me to believe.

Peter:   [Long pause, as if finally deciding something] OK, Dick. What are you really trying to say?

Go on, what is all this to-and-fro about?

Dick:   You know. You knew from the minute we started talking, the minute I showed up in this room…

Peter:   I don’t.

Dick:   You do.

Peter:   No.

Dick:   It has to be your way, like always?

Peter:   You have no solutions, no answers, only opinions.

Dick:   “Only”?

Peter:   [Pause] What’s the upshot, Dick?

Dick:   Hah! “up-shot-dick”.

Peter:   [Avoiding the obvious] Just tell me?

Dick:   Oh, Peter.

Peter:   What.Are.You.Saying.

Dick:  [Says nothing, and then]

So. . .let’s talk about the anger.

Peter:   Will you PUHLEESSE get to the point!

Dick:   QED: Anger.

Peter:   Anger?

Dick:   . . .and its flip side, hurt.

Peter:   And you’re not angry. No anger behind all this of your “here and now”?

Dick:   So, we’re both angry and not talking about it.

Peter:   What’s left to say?

Dick:   Ok, Peter, ok.

But try to meet me half way this time round.

Peter:   Your stakes and mine in all this aren’t the same. If they ever were.

Dick:   Try to meet me halfway.

Peter:   Which means?

Dick:   [Realizing Peter is not going to budge]. Ok, your way, Peter.

But enough of your ABSTRACTIONS!

Peter:   [The longest pause of both yet.]

Half way? OK.

When I walked in today, I half hoped you’d be in the room. And when I didn’t see you, I thought, What a fool I’d been to think I could try this. I must have been crazy.

[Another long pause]

. . .and while we’ve been arguing just now, I wondered for a moment, What would we be saying to each other instead?

Dick:   Me? What would I have said?

I wanted to come up and cup your face in my hands and say, “When do we kiss? Now, later. . .never?”

Peter:  Hah!

Dick:   I won’t give up my fantasies.

Peter:   You always were crazy for happy endings.

Dick:   That’s bad?

Peter:   Where’s the reality?

Dick:   Love protects reality.

Peter:   Even when the reality then was “Good-bye, Peter”?

Dick:   [Smiling for the first time in the play] That was then.

[Pauses] You know, Peter, no one can put his arm around you [Dick puts his arm around Peter’s shoulder, moves closer] and say [taps Peter’s chest], “You know, Professor, you really are right and have been all along!”

You know that.

[They face each other and Dick slides his other arm onto Peter’s shoulder, moving closer]

Peter:   Your addiction to happy endings. . .

Dick:   Happiness? That’s the messiness too.

Speaking of crazy, [Dick places his forefinger on Peter’s lips] you always said my mouth was your perfect fit. . .

Peter: Hey, this from someone whose career goal was to suck a mile of cock. . .

[Pause] So, all the rest we’ve talked all about is left to “Until then if not later”?

Dick: Until then if not before.

End

I

If we start with the commonplace that analysis and deliberation center around what is known or not, then the boundaries of the known blur not just into the unknown, but also into the preknown.

The latter is the preexisting knowledge that one is born into and “takes for granted.” In his essay, “The Well-Informed Citizen,” Alfred Schütz, the sociologist, described it this way:

The zone of things taken for granted may be defined as that sector of the world which, in connection with the theoretical or the practical problem we are concerned with at a given time, does not seem to need further inquiry, although we do not have clear and distinct insight into and understanding of its structure. What is taken for granted is, until invalidation, believed to be simply “given” and “given-as-it-appears-to-me”–that is, as I or others whom I trust have experienced and interpreted it. It is this zone of things taken for granted within which we have to find our bearings. All our possible questioning for the unknown arises only within such a world of supposedly preknown things, and presupposes its existence.

One consequence of ignoring the blurred borders of preknown, known and unknown is: We end up acting as if it does not matter that it takes preknowing and knowing-enough to avoid entering into the unstudied conditions of the unknown. If Schütz is right, the preknown is where we “find our bearings” with respect to the known and unknown.

II

So what?

Against that backdrop, all the talk about “unintended consequences of human action” begins to look unintentionally simplistic:

• “Unintended?”: When the preknown is the platform that has nothing to do with intentions but that enables us to take our bearings so that other factors in the known and unknown carry the weight of argument about “unintended consequences.”
• “Consequences?”: Rather than that blurred borders of knowing, preknowing, and not-knowing we chalk up also to contingency and exigency.
• “Unintended” + “consequences”?: When too often what we are really dealing with are contingencies with disproportionate effects about which we have little or no causal understanding.

To rephrase the point, “unintended consequences of human action” is a coherent phrase only by missing the rest of that overwritten palimpsest called “human action,” off of which the phrase is cobbled together and read.

Principal source

Schütz, A. (1964). “The Well-Informed Citizen.” In: Alfred Schütz, Collected Papers II: Studies in Social Theory. Edited and introduced by A. Brodersen. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff.

I

Remember when those orbiting twins of freedom and necessity shone brightest on the intellectual horizon? Now it’s capitalism all the way down. And yet the minute you differentiate that capitalism you are back to limits and affordances, constraints and enablements–in a phrase back to the varieties of freedom and necessity. Or if you prefer: back to when blindspots are also strengths.

None of this would matter if the macro-doctrinal and micro-personal were nowhere alike. But the doctrinal and personal are conflated together in at least one major public domain: namely, where stated policies become more and more like memoirs, and where memoirs are cast more as policy statements.

II

Sallie Tisdale, writer and essayist, draws the upshot:

Today autobiography seems to be a litany of injury, the recounting of loss and harm caused by abuse, racism, abandonment, poverty, violence, rape, and struggle of a thousand kinds. The reasons for such a shift in focus, a shift we see in every layer of our social, cultural, and political landscapes, are beyond my scope. One of the pivotal purposes of memoir is to unveil the shades of meaning that exist in what we believe. This is the problem of memoir; this is the consolation of memoir. Scars are fine; I have written about scars; it is the focus on the unhealed wound that seems new.

https://harpers.org/archive/2023/11/mere-belief/?src=longreads

Memoir in this shift ends up as a “grand reveal.” Now, of course, policy and management should be concerned with abuse, racism, abandonment, poverty, violence, rape, and struggle of a thousand kinds. It’s that exclusionary focus on the unhealed wound that is the problem, at least for those who take their scars and wounds also to be affordances, enablements and strengths as they move to the way-stations in-between macro and micro.

To collapse this complexity of memory and experience into “identity” and/or “politics” is to exaggerate one set of meanings at the expense of the others. To quote Tisdale again: “I used to think that I would be a good eyewitness. Now I no longer trust eyewitnesses at all.”

III

So what? To update a once-ubiquitous expression, both freedom and necessity are the recognition of how unreliable we are in eyewitnessing what is right in front of us.

Other sources

David Caute (1971). The Illusion: An essay on politics, theatre and the novel. Harper Colophon Books (New York, Evanston, San Francisco, London).

Katharine Jenkins (2023). “Ontology and Oppression: Race, Gender, and Social Reality” (accessed online at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UW4-VT_ZTJw)

For instance, with regards to the Migrant Victim Narrative, migrants and refugees using smuggling services are almost never only victims, because they need to overcome considerable obstacles and need strong willpower in order to bear the costs and risks usually involved in moving. Yet the images and stories of migrants dying while crossing deserts or seas, or of migrants abused and exploited by smugglers and employers, are the ones that dominate the headlines.

Without denying the realities of extreme suffering and exploitation, the problem is that such narratives typically deny human agency involved in most forms of forced and precarious migration or represent them as an irrational act. In reality, people can be victims and exert agency at the same time in an active effort to defy or overcome constraints. Most vulnerable migrant workers, including victims of trafficking, see an interest in migrating despite being exploited, if only because the alternative of staying at home was worse for them. Therefore, they avoid being ‘rescued’ as in practice this usually means deportation and loss of investments, income and livelihood (e.g., Costello 2015; O’Connell Davidson 2006; Weitzer 2000; Parreñas 2006). For this reason, one of the slogans of anti-anti-trafficking activists has even become ‘rescue us from our rescuers’ (de Haas 2023, 311).

The point is not to trivialize abuses and extreme exploitation, but that reducing migrants and refugees to passive victims is simplifying the reality. Crucially, this ignores the rather inconvenient truth that, for most of them, immigration is a rather deliberate investment into a better future, that most ‘victims’ have migrated out of their own will, essentially because leaving was still much more attractive than staying because of the real hope for a better future that migration represents for millions of people around the world, particularly in the form of labour opportunities and the ability to send remittances back home (Agunias 2009).

This is not to morally justify human rights abuses, or to deny states’ responsibilities in upholding the rule of law and preventing exploitation by criminals and employers, but to acknowledge a lived reality in which migrants exert their agency within such severe constraints.

The implicit underlying assumption often seems to be that migrants, particularly when they are perceived as poor, uneducated and non-Western, somehow do not know what they are doing and that they would have stayed at home if only somebody had told them about the terrible circumstances in which they have ended up. On a deeper level, this seems based on often barely conscious, colonial stereotypes of non-Western people as somehow less capable of thinking, acting, or speaking for themselves (see Said 1978), or to act in their own best interests. In other words, such patronizing, condescending victimhood narratives continue to portray the non-Western and low-skilled other as ‘less rational’ who must be ‘sensitized’ and ‘informed’ about what is best for them: staying at home. . . .

de Haas, H. (2024). Changing the migration narrative: On the power of discourse, propaganda and truth distortion. IMI Working Paper No. 181/PACES Project Working Paper No. 3. Amsterdam: University of Amsterdam (accessed online at https://www.migrationinstitute.org/publications/changing-the-migration-narrative-on-the-power-of-discourse-propaganda-and-truth-distortion)

I

Here I focus on what a socio-cultural perspective has to say about infrastructure repair that a socio-technical perspective might wish to pursue further. Since my work is from the socio-technical perspective, it’s only fair that I not try to summarize positions from a socio-cultural perspective but quote from their work directly:

For all of their impressive heaviness, infrastructures are, at the end of the day, often remarkably light and fragile creatures—one or two missed inspections, suspect data points, or broken connectors from disaster. That spectacular failure is not continually engulfing the systems around us is a function of repair: the ongoing work by which “order and meaning in complex sociotechnical systems are maintained and transformed, human value is preserved and extended, and the complicated work of fitting to the varied circumstances of organizations, systems, and lives is accomplished” . . . .

It reminds us of the extent to which infrastructures are earned and re-earned on an ongoing, often daily, basis. It also reminds us (modernist obsessions notwithstanding) that staying power, and not just change, demands explanation. Even if we ignore this fact and the work that it indexes when we talk about infrastructure, the work nonetheless goes on. Where it does not, the ineluctable pull of decay and decline sets in and infrastructures enter the long or short spiral into entropy that—if untended—is their natural fate.

Jackson S (2015) Repair. Theorizing the contemporary: The infrastructure toolbox. Cultural Anthropology website. Available at: https://culanth.org/fieldsights/repair (accessed 24 September 2015)

The nod to “sociotechnical systems” is welcome as is the recognition that these systems have to be managed–a great part of which is repair and maintenance–in order to operate. Added to routine and non-routine maintenance and repair are the just-in-time or just-for-now workarounds (software and hardware) that are necessitated by inevitable technology, design and regulatory glitches–inevitable because comprehensiveness in analysis and operations is impossible to achieve in complex large-scale systems.

For its part, sociotechnical research on infrastructures calls into question any assumption that macro-designs control every important micro-operation, an assumption also very much questioned in this socio-cultural perspective, e.g., “approaching infrastructure from the standpoint of repair highlights actors, sites, and moments that have been absented or silenced by stories of design and origination, whether critical or heroic.”

Also, the socio-technical perspective I’m familiar with focuses on the systems operating longer than some expect. A famous theory of large-scale tightly coupled, complexly interactive hazardous technologies–Normal Accidents Theory–predicts far more major accidents and failures than have occurred in critical infrastructures, to date.

Not only is this better-than-expected operation because of repair and maintenance but also because real-time system operators seek to preclude must-never-happen events like loss of nuclear containment, cryptosporidium contamination of urban water supplies, or jumbo jets dropping from the sky. That these events do from time-to-time happen only increases the widespread affective dread that they must not happen again.

From the socio-technical perspective, the “end of infrastructure operations” isn’t decay, decline or entropy as much as system failure and immediate emergency response, including seeking to restore, as quickly as possible even if temporarily, water, electricity and telecoms to survivors. In this view, any “new normal” could be indefinite “recovery,” or attempts to do so. Systemwide failures are often attributed to a range of socio-technical factors, from “operator error” to uncontrollable exogenous shocks like earthquakes or hurricanes and tornadoes, among others.

What to my knowledge has not been pursued in the socio-technical literature is the following from a socio-cultural focus on repair:

Attending to repair can also change how we approach questions of value and valuation as it pertains to the infrastructures around us. Repair reminds us that the loop between infrastructure, value, and meaning is never fully closed at points of design, but represents an ongoing and sometimes fragile accomplishment. While artifacts surely have politics (or can), those politics are rarely frozen at the moment of design, instead unfolding across the lifespan of the infrastructure in question: completed, tweaked, and sometimes transformed through repair. Thus, if there are values in design there are also values in repair—and good ethical and political reasons to attend not only to the birth of infrastructures, but also to their care and feeding over time.

That the values expressed through repair (we would say, expressed as the practices of actual repair) need to be understood as thoroughly as the practices of actual design reflects, I believe, a major research gap in the socio-technical literature with which I am familiar.

II

Explicit consideration of an infrastructure’s life brings together the changes to an infrastructure’s material form over time and the (often unequal) embodied labor that is embedded in these transformations. Life phases identified in the literature include destruction, decay, ruination, repair, maintenance, and rebuild (Anand et al., 2018; Humphrey, 2005; Simone, 2004). While these terms are often used to capture infrastructure not “in order” or “working to standard”, collapsing these phases, or ignoring their particularities, means missing how materiality in these various phases is connected to infrastructural labor, and how fluidity and transitions between decay and repair mobilize particular affective responses and actants.

Far from a linear trajectory, the relationship between infrastructure and socio-ecological relations involves ongoing negotiations between institutions and individuals through phases of decay, maintenance, and repair. Indeed, Barnes (2017) finds that maintenance is not an “inherent good”, but rather a “field of socio-material contestation” (148). She observes that maintenance of irrigation works occurs at multiple levels: on an individual level farmers are responsible for maintaining irrigation ditches, although blockages (and lack of maintenance) may actually be advantageous depending on where along the system one farms; on an interpersonal level between farmers as they negotiate communal relationships; and between farmers and state irrigation engineers, as the latter choose how and when to “assert control” over the infrastructure through annual maintenance. Socio-ecological relations, thus formed over and through infrastructure, are not always constant or consistent.

Ramakrishnan K, K O’Reilly, and J Budds (2021) The temporal fragility of infrastructure: Theorizing decay, maintenance, and repair. EPE: Nature and Space Vol. 4(3) 674–695

Repair and maintenance of plant and equipment are often treated as part of normal infrastructure operations, e.g., under the heading, “routine outages.” So the caution about conflating the phases and missing their particularities is very well taken, in my view.

So too the point about the wider dependencies that form with respect to infrastructure users and nonusers. A “road transportation catastrophe” due to a massive earthquake isn’t just about that infrastructure. Large socio-technical systems, like roads, have evolved over time, one feature of which has been their evolution of worker schedules (x weeks on, n days off) and remuneration packages that made pre-disaster commutes worth it.

A socio-technical perspective asks: Are these arrangements still worth it? How are the latent and manifest vulnerabilities posed by new arrangements, post-disaster, more compatible? Answers would require careful attention to vulnerabilities arising out of designing new infrastructures as well as arising out of infrastructures as they actually have been repaired, restored, recovered and maintained before and after previous disruptions and disasters.

Finally, I cannot over-stress the importance of this notion of infrastructures fragility, contrary to any sturdy-monolith imaginary one might have to the contrary. One can only hope, for example, that wind energy infrastructure being imposed by Morocco/Siemens on Western Sahara is so fragile as to require endlessly massive and costly repairs and maintenance–but I confess that is my management take from a socio-technical perspective.

I

Traffic congestion is routinely described as a mess, but rarely analyzed for the different messes that it is.

To see how, start with a simplified assumption to be problematized shortly: The net monetary value of any transportation system aggregated across all car users increases with the number of cars using that system up to the system’s carrying capacity for cars, which if exceeded leads to a decline in net value. This is shown in Figure 1’s net monetary value curve, AA’, which falls after reaching the system’s limit in carrying more automobiles (CC):

Assume the only value of interest is the value of the transportation system to car users. Assume initially that CC is fixed and that the current number of cars on system roadways exceeds that value. It may be possible to add new roads and new lanes over time, thus moving CC to the right (“supply management”). It may also be possible to reduce the number of cars to the left of CC by congestion pricing, vehicle taxing, and other tolls (“demand management”). Assume, however, that such interventions are not possible anytime soon (or if possible, their effects are not to be realized soon).

What can the transportation professional do instead in the face of car congestion?

II

Further benefits follow from other ways to increase the value of the transportation system, even when it is not possible to increase the number of cars on the roads, e.g., through reducing average car size or narrowing lanes. Value also increases, ceteris paribus, when the number of passengers in a car increases (this being, the important issue of increasing shared mobility and/or the number of uses to which the car is being put by its users).

Once other net benefits are added, the net monetary value curve rises, illustratively, to AB in Figure 1, with a gradual, delayed decline after CC being reached. More multiple-use vans on the road replacing existing vans and vehicles increase the value curve before carrying capacity is reached. Once carrying capacity is exceeded, the time lost being stuck in traffic will be offset for some period by being able to do more things in one’s vehicle than before.

—Diagrammatically, the increment in value between AA’ and AB, particularly after CC, is the value car users attach to a good mess coming out of the bad mess of the formal transportation system.

This is the value car users attach to producing a mess (AB) better than the one (AA’) that would have happened instead. Other things equal, the aim of transportation professionals is to enlarge that increment. For example, not only do professionals want people “to get their best ideas” while stuck in traffic, they want more people to do so.

III

The simplified figure suggests two other ways to change net value. One is to redefine carrying capacity; the other is to redefine the “transportation system” and its services of interest. Carrying capacity has been a popular concept in modeling traffic congestion, its intuitive appeal being that there must be a limit to the number of cars that a system can accommodate, other things constant. As other factors are rarely constant, carrying capacity is necessarily a variable rather than a given.

This leads to the second way to alter net value. Just what is the “transportation system” being evaluated in terms of a good or bad mess? It need not only be the “official” system discussed so far. It is possible to redefine the transportation system of interest by changing the scope and knowledge bases for the “system” being analyzed and managed.

How to do this?

IV

Imagine you are a professional in the Regional Transportation Authority. You have just undertaken a stratified random sample survey of RTA residents as to what they perceive to be locally successful transportation interventions about which they have first-hand knowledge. Focus groups and public meetings have subsequently been held, identifying other perceived successful interventions in the region.

Assume the current list identifies interventions that include traffic calming sites in some neighborhoods, increased off-street parking in others, widening streets at different sites, adding bicycle lanes in another set, and so on. Your task is to determine an implied or de facto “transportation system(s)” that link these discrete (groups of) sites together.

The implied systems, if any, are more than street networks that connect the sites concerned. The existing availability and distribution of garages for cars, both above and below ground, connects sites as well. Yet the RTA currently does not consider the de facto, informal network of public and private garages to be a major point of intervention in improving the formal, official transportation system.

Your challenge in the constructed example is to ask, What are we missing by focusing only on the formal transportation system and in answer to see what could or does connect sites of successful interventions into a system or network that can be supported by transportation professionals.

V

One such informal system is illustrated in Figure 1. Here the transportation system is an informal one, i, implied by the connected sites, with its value curve AC_i and its carrying capacity, CC_i (which would now be recast in terms of local knowledge and familiarity with specific traffic patterns).

Diagrammatically, AC_i is the net value car users attach to a good mess that could go bad at some point near or after CC_i. If traffic professionals cannot squeeze good messes out of the bad mess that congestion has become (i.e., realize and increase a value increment between AA’ and AB), they can identify, protect and enhance different systems that are not (yet) bad messes.

What should the professionals do if there are neither informal systems to be improved nor any value increment to be realized in the formal transportation system? The “best” they can do under such circumstances is to try to keep Figure 1’s AA’ as “close” to the left of CC as possible or on the non-declining portion of AA’, should it exist, after breaching CC. Barring either, the professional is left with trying to halt or delay the further decline of AA’.

VI

Four kinds of good messes are, in other words, to be distinguished in the constructed example. They are the product of two states and transitions, namely, what start out as good or bad messes and what end up as more of a good mess or less of a bad one. Table 1 summarizes the four positions:

Table 1: Four Types of Good Messes in Traffic Congestion

In case it needs saying, each is a good mess in its own right, though perceptions and expectations about the four cells vary considerably.

I

Yes,

One space spreads through all creatures equally –
inner-world-space. Birds quietly flying go
flying through us.                                                                          Rainer Maria Rilke                                                                                                                                                                                                                         

but,

They spoke to me of people, and of humanity.
But I've never seen people, or humanity.
I've seen various people, astonishingly dissimilar,
Each separated from the next by an unpeopled space.                 Fernando Pessoa

II

I in fact believe that we possess valid criteria for judging when criticism is good and when it is bad…But I also think it is a mistake to assume, and self-defeating to pretend, that these criteria are simple and obvious….To get progressively clearer to the multiple and interdependent discriminations involved requires the evolving give-and-take of dialogue…[W]hen a proponent says, ‘This is so, isn’t it?’ his interlocutor will reply, ‘Yes, but. . .’ M.H. Abrams, literary critic

The motto on his shield is a bold ‘YES BUT—.’ Dwight Macdonald, the critic writing of himself

Remember, I started out learning and appreciating literature at the time of the Black Arts Movement, when people were saying, ‘Look at what’s around you. Look at the people around you. Look at all that music around you.’ I was learning poetry at that time. So I was learning poetry when people were saying, ‘We don’t need no poems about trees. We need poems about the people.’ That was one of the things that you would hear from the people who wanted a certain kind of community poetry. But see, you’ve got a guy like me who’s listening to that, and I’ve been twelve miles out on the Bermuda reef and working in Alaska. My job was with nature. So when I picked up the Black Arts Movement, I picked it up with, ‘Yeah, yeah. But—.’ Ed Roberson, poet

Economists long insisted that the heroic stakes were framed around Market Competition versus State Planning, with Competition winner of the palm. Who needs Illiquid Government when you have Liquid Markets, right?

Odd then that economists began to agree that the maintenance of the storied perfect competition (all price takers and constant returns to scale) would have undermined entrepreneurial capitalism as actually practiced.

Odd that a major winner of always-late capitalism would not have been possible without imperfect competition (some price makers and increasing returns to scale) and an important role for—guess what?—government policies to foster technological change. Odd that, after all those storylines about the rising tide of market liberalization lifting all ships, it turns out that still-liberalized capital markets continue to be associated with rougher seas of financial instability.

Even odder is that implacable criticism economists levelled against price-setting by planners who couldn’t possibly process all that complexity when everyone knows that price discovery through markets does so much better. In the aftermath of 2008, however, economists told us that even core market mechanisms like auctions—Léon Walras must be turning in his grave!—can’t work because of the sheer complexity of the instruments of financial economists to be auctioned—which meant the defamed planners had to get involved anyway. Odd that economists also told us we needed dark pools and out-of-sight markets because price discovery, rather than being the raison d’être of markets, is merely a public benefit that markets may, but need not, provide.

To be fair, markets manage some risks better than government, but only those risks and certainly not the uncertainties that can come with their managing those risks through markets. The management of the latter has been placed in the hands of government and regulators.

There’s no part of the economic stories told us that even an eye-dropper’s worth of realism wouldn’t improve.

I

Stanley Cavell, the philosopher, wrote that “there is always a camera left out of the picture,” by which I take him to mean that were we able to bring it in, a very different picture would result.

A wonderful story passed on by the poet, Donald Hall, illuminates the point. Archibald MacLeish told him about the actor, Richard Burton, and a brother of his:

Then Burton and Jenkins quarreled over Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan.” Jenkins said it was a bad poem: disgusting, awful. Burton praised it: magnificent, superb. Jenkins repeated that it was nothing at all, whereupon Burton commanded silence and spoke the whole poem, perfect from first syllable to last. MacLeish told me that Burton’s recitation was a great performance, and when he ended, drawing the last syllable out, the still air shook with the memory and mystery of this speaking. Then, into the silence, brother Jenkins spoke his word of critical reason: “See?”

And do you see the camera you’re holding to frame this?

II

Go look for one of those early 20^th century American landscape paintings by, e.g., Redmond Granville, of wildflowers spreading across fields or Edgar Payne of a remote lake in the snowy Sierras. Then look at virtually the same painting, but this time with a young woman in her calico dress or cowboy on a horse.

In an instant, this painting dates the preceding one. What had been an idealized-now flips to a historicized-then. If you wiil, it reframes it. Public policy is full of such flips and reframing: reforms that work on paper but date immediately when real people with real problems in real time enter the picture—both as subject and as frame.

I

Two drivers of not-knowing, inexperience and difficulty are often conflated—information overload and cognitive undercomprehension.

Think of information overload as: The “right” information is actually there but hidden in the info glut around us. Cognitive undercomprehension, in contrast, is: Our cognitive limitations undermine our ability to recognize anything like “the right information” for the matter at hand.

Overload means we would be high-performing analysts and managers if only we were to tease out the right information from all the noise obscuring it. Undercomprehension means we are held to such high-performing standards we couldn’t possibly know the right information, even if it were in front of us before our very eyes. “I could do my job if only I had the right information” is not “No one could do the job I’m tasked with, whatever the info available.”

II

Two upshots deserve emphasis.

First, at or beyond the limits of cognition, not only are prediction and forecasting difficult, so too is identifying counterfactual conditions, not least of which is what would happen if overload and undercomprehension were absent or otherwise ameliorated.

Second, arguments asserted as policy relevant because of their diamond-sharp clarity rarely get beyond the magic stage. They misdirect us from better identifying any overload and undercomprehension already present, were we only to look for them. They don’t want you to see the shadows as their flashlight is too bright.

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Source

Sartori, G. (1989). Undercomprehension. Government and Opposition 24(4): 391–400.