As if lives cannot suddenly and startlingly change for the better, but they can suddenly and shockingly change, sometimes irreversibly, for the worse.

Adam Phillips (2021). On Wanting to Change, p. 69

The epigraph is suggestive: Sample people–on this planet of 8 billion and more–whose lives have in fact suddenly changed for the better. What might they have to tell people who insist they know the next is as bad, and probably worse?

My own answer: Sudden positive change is a real-time performance than can’t be plagiarized by others. Negative change is photocopied all the time, everywhere. In Phillips’ terms: The former’s acknowledgement differs from the latter’s knowledge.

At best, socio-technical systems are reliable only until the next failure ahead. This means that preventing that next failure is just as important for establishing a track record in failure prevention as future failures being prevented because, say, the systems are more sustainable than now.

Further, this is a track record of real-time system operators who manage reliably because they learn and unlearn. They are reliable because (not in spite) of learning that they didn’t know what they initially thought they knew, they in fact knew more than they had first thought, or both.

What a senior risk manager told us applies to the challenge of reliability management in key socio-technical systems, now and ahead: “Really, just because we haven’t had a meltdown doesn’t mean our practices were effective”.

I

I don’t know about you, but I’ve turned into a survivalist when reading articles on major policy issues. If it doesn’t hook me in the first couple of paragraphs, I scroll down to the last paragraph and read backwards on the look-out for the upshot. If I find something, I read backwards for a bit longer and decide if it’s worth returning back to where I first left off.

This is largely a problem of genre. The journalist article starts with the dead or dying victim, when I the reader want to know upfront, not what’s wrong, but what’s actually working out there by way of strategies to reduce the victimhood. Something must be working out there; we’re a planet of 8 billion people!

I want to know right off how people with like problems are jumping a like bar of politics, dollars and jerks better than we are. Then tell me how we might modify their doing so in order to make it work here as well.

II
There is also that other genre, the academic article on a major policy issue. To be honest, some articles are doing better to get to the upshot(s), at least within the first two or three pages of single-spaced text, i.e., if and when they get to the part, “This article contributes to. . .” Still, too many top-of-the-page Abstracts conclude with, “Finally, implications are drawn for further action.” As if the oasis is somewhere out there in the desert of words ahead.

Tell me what those implications are so I have energy to read the next 20 pages. I’m not asking the authors to simplify. I’m asking them to tell me what they conclude or propose so I, the reader, can decide whether or not their actual analysis supports their case. Indeed, tell me upfront, because I may find I have something better to recommend from their assembly of facts and figures.

III

There is also that Executive Summary you find in some–by no means all–policy-advocacy reports. Many such reports are also doing a better job laying out recommendations upfront so that the readers can decide for themselves whether the rest of the text makes their case.

The problem arises where the rah-rah of advocacy gets in way of the details of how to implement the recommendations. You still find many instances of the already obvious, “We need a more equitable society,” and then full-stop. Not.Good.Enough. These aren’t calls for action but a form of bearing witness, a very different policy genre than the advocacy report.

IV

In fact, many long-form journalism pieces or academic articles come to us posing as two other genres, essays or mysteries. We the readers are meant to see how their thinking unfolds. Or in the case of executive summaries, the values of the advocates are to shine bright above all else. Fair enough for readers knowing they are reading essays or mysteries or a tract. But not good enough for others who want more by way of action.

I

Our interviewees were insistent: A magnitude 9.0 Cascadia earthquake will be unimaginably catastrophic. The unfolding would be unprecedented in the Pacific Northwest. True, magnitude 9.0 earthquakes have happened elsewhere. But there was no closure rule for thinking about how this earthquake would unfold in Oregon and Washington State, given their specific interconnected infrastructures and populations.

Fair enough, but not enough.

So many interviewees made this observation, you’d have to conclude the earthquake is, well, predictably unimaginable for them. That is: not totally incomprehensible, like unknown-unknowns. It is a known unknown, something along the lines of that mega-asteroid hit or a modern-day Carrington event.

II

I think something more is going on in these interviewee comments. It has to do with the interview as its own genre.

The American author, Joyce Carol Oates, recently summed up its limitations to one of her interviewers:

David, there are some questions that arise when one is being interviewed that would never otherwise have arisen. . .I focus so much on my work; then, when I’m asked to make some abstract comment, I kind of reach for a clue from the interviewer. I don’t want to suggest that there’s anything artificial about it, but I don’t know what I’m supposed to say, in a way, because I wouldn’t otherwise be saying it. . .Much of what I’m doing is, I’m backed into a corner and the way out is desperation. . .I don’t think about these things unless somebody asks me. . .There is an element of being put on the spot. . .It is actually quite a fascinating genre. It’s very American: “The interview.”

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2023/07/16/magazine/joyce-carol-oates-interview.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare&utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Lit%20Hub%20Daily:%20July%2019%2C%202023&utm_term=lithub_master_list

Oates adds about interviewees left “trying to think of reasonably plausible replies that are not untrue.” I suspect such remarks are familiar to many who have interviewed and been interviewed.

III

I believe our interviewee statements to the effect that “The M9 earthquake will be unimaginably catastrophic” also reflect the interview genre within which this observation was and is made. The interviewees felt put on the spot in the midst of answering about other important work matters. They wanted to be just as plausible as in their earlier knowledgeable answers. That is: “unimaginably catastrophic” is, well, not untrue.

So what? “Anyway, this is not to say that there was anything wrong about my statement to you,” adds Oates. “It’s that there’s almost nothing I can say that isn’t simply an expression of a person trying desperately to say something”–this here being something about a catastrophe very desperate indeed.

Buy, borrow or otherwise acquire Digging Up The Future by Maarten Vanden Eynde (2020, Maastricht University Press). Or go first to his website, https://www.maartenvandeneynde.com/.

Below are reproduced (apologies for the poor digital quality) three selections, verbatim, from the book and found at the website:

—Restauration du lac de Montbel

“Every year the Montbel lake in the southwest of France, dries out a bit more. This is partly due to global warming and partly to the use of the lake by local fire department helicopters in fighting nearby forest fires. In a vain attempt to restore something that is broken both physically and metaphorically, Maarten Vanden Eynde tries to repair the bottom of the lake by filling up the cracks with plaster. The gesture, documented in this photograph, is of course futile and to no avail.

“‘Restauration du lac de Montbel‘ hints at the loss of knowledge that is an inherent result and part of the passing of time. Consequently we are all doomed to make ridiculous gestures and draw false or incomplete conclusions in the future, because objective knowledge will always be outnumbered by subjective (mis)interpretation.”

(from https://www.maartenvandeneynde.com/?rd_project=11&lang=en)

—Homo stupidus stupidus

”’Homo stupidus stupidus‘ is a human skeleton that has been taken apart and put back together again in a different and rather puzzling shape that bears little relationship to human anatomy despite our knowledge of it. It is a critical comment on the human arrogance that declares itself doubly wise – Homo sapiens sapiens – and names after itself an entire geological era, the Anthropocene, to represent its own influence on Earth. ‘Homo stupidus stupidus’ questions the extent of human self-awareness, of self-knowledge of where we come from, how we evolved, and where we are going. The work symbolises our inherent failure in understanding ourselves or predicating our future on the basis of our past and present.”

(from https://www.maartenvandeneynde.com/?rd_project=336&lang=en)

—Genetologic Research no. 2 & 4

“Lengths of wood from different trees are glued together so as to resemblea tree trunk. The growth rings are matched together like a puzzle, as if an attempt has been made to recreate a tree’s original shape without any surviving point of reference, the growth rings being the only visible guidelines available. ‘Genetologic Research no. 2 & 4‘ are among the earliest examples of an imaginary journey into a fictional future past, where knowledge is lacking and frames of reference are flawed.”

(from https://www.maartenvandeneynde.com/?rd_project=66&lang=en)

Today I read: “A few years ago I would have said that there was no chance that the US will be the world’s biggest economy by the end of the 21st century. Now I am certain the US will remain the largest economy throughout the whole of this century.”

One reason why is offered by what I read yesterday: “Any socialist effort to navigate the very real state shift in the climate will require a massive reconstruction and deployment of productive forces. For example, all the major cities that are on a coastline on this planet will have to be moved inland. That means the electrical grids and sewer systems need to be rebuilt. We will need to reimagine urban life on a massive scale.”

The latter’s impossible-to-implement undermines anything like the certitude in the former’s starting point.

1/4. THE OPTIC

One of the most famous typologies in organization theory in that of James D. Thompson:

(https://oxfordre.com/business/display/10.1093/acrefore/9780190224851.001.0001/acrefore-9780190224851-e-77)

The entry in Wikipedia explains the typology this way:

1. Where both preferences and cause/effect relations are clear, decision making is “computational”. These decisions are often short term and information about the decision is fairly unambiguous.
2. Where outcome preferences are clear, but cause/effect relations are uncertain, Thompson suggest that “judgment” takes over and you make your best educated guess. These decisions are based on prior experience and are often qualitative in nature.
3. When the situation is reversed, and preferences are uncertain, then you rely on compromise between different groups. Political coalitions may be built which rely on negotiating and bargaining.
4. When neither preferences nor cause/effect relations are clear, then you rely on “inspirational” leadership. This is where the charismatic leader may step in and this type of decision often takes place in times of crisis.  (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_D._Thompson)

I want you to keep Thompson’s typology in mind when you read the following article on the case for better emissions reductions by Dr. Hannah Ritchie in the Guardian.

It’s quoted at length, in large part because I agree with every word of it. The virtue of Thompson’s typology is that it unlocks reasons why her points need to be extended, and when doing so, the important policy and management implications that follow for the climate emergency.

2/4. THE ARTICLE

The big idea: why climate tribalism only helps the deniers

Hannah Ritchie

One of the most effective ways to be a climate sceptic is to say nothing at all. Why expend the effort slapping down climate solutions when you can rely on feuding climate activists to tear each other’s ideas apart? We tend to fight with those we are closest to. This is true of family. But it’s also true of our peers, which for me, are those obsessed with trying to fix climate change. Step into the murky waters of Twitter and you’ll often find activists spending more time going after one another than battling climate falsehoods.

These might seem like small squabbles, but they have a real impact. They slow our progress and play into the hands of the deniers, the oil companies, the anti-climate lobbyists. These groups push on while our heads are turned.

What we want to achieve is the same: to reduce carbon emissions. The problem is that we are stubborn about how we get there. We often have strong opinions about what the evils are, and how to fix them. The nuclear zealots want to go all-in on building new power stations. The renewable zealots want no nuclear at all. Some promote electric cars; their opponents want car-less roads. Vegans advocate for cutting out animal products; flexitarians feel judged when they eat their weekly roast chicken. . . .

. . .But the reality is that we can’t afford to be choosy. The answer to almost every climate dilemma is “We need both”. We need renewables and nuclear energy (even if that means just keeping our existing nuclear plants online). We need to tackle fossil fuels and our food system; fossil fuels are the biggest emitter, but emissions from food alone would take us well past a temperature rise of 1.5C and close to 2C. Not everyone can commute without a car, so we need electric vehicles and cycle-friendly cities and public transport networks. We can’t decarbonise without technological change, but we need to rethink our economic, political and social systems to make sure they flourish. . . .

So how can we make these debates work better? First, we need to become less fixated on the ideal pathway. None of us will get precisely what we want; we need to compromise and take a route that reduces emissions effectively and quickly, using a combination of solutions.

Second, we need to be more generous when dealing with our rivals. Intellectual disagreements can quickly descend into name-calling. Real conversation stops and we talk past one another instead. We become more focused on winning the argument than understanding the other side. This makes the climate solution space hostile, which is counterproductive considering we want the world’s best minds to be there.

Third, we need to be honest about what is and isn’t true about the solutions we don’t like. “EVs emit just as much CO2 as petrol cars” is simply wrong. They emit significantly less, even if they emit more than the subway or a bike (and yes, this is still true when we account for the emissions needed to produce the battery). “Nuclear energy is unsafe” is wrong – it’s thousands of times safer than the coal we’re trying to replace, and just as safe as renewables. It’s fine to advocate for your preferred solutions, but it’s not OK to lie about the alternatives to make your point. . .

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/jul/16/big-oil-climate-pledges-extreme-heat-fossil-fuel

3/4. DISCUSSION

For me, Dr. Ritchie speaks the truth; better yet, truth to power. But if you’ve kept in mind the Thompson typology, you’ll see what she’s doing a bit differently.

In Thompson’s terms, the article posits a low uncertainty over preferences—we do want to reduce carbon emissions—even if there are among us people more uncertain as to what best achieves our preferred outcome. As such, the decisionmaking process is primarily a matter of judgement, and involving the drive to consensus not just among experts but also among more and more people who have come to the same judgment about the priority of reducing emissions.

Fair enough, but now return to that part of her text about “the need to compromise,” a term that for Thompson means something quite different. For him, yes of course there are occasions when negotiating and bargaining are the primary decision processes, but these are more the cases of greater uncertainty or disagreement over preferred outcomes than over the available means to achieve them.

What Dr. Ritchie is talking about, on re-reading, are interventions where the specific means utilized require the occasional compromise, without however jeopardizing the common end to be achieved. The ends remain clear(er). That is also why her article reads at points almost computational in Thompson terminology: “’Nuclear energy is unsafe’ is wrong – it’s thousands of times safer than the coal we’re trying to replace, and just as safe as renewables”.

4/4. SO WHAT?

Positively put, the policy and management challenge is to document those really-existing cases, if any, where computation, judgement, compromise and inspiration are achieving lower emissions. This includes cases of compromises, whose ends while not being (only) emission reductions nevertheless lead to reductions even greater than those explicitly promoted as doing so in terms of computation and judgement.

–“Who we are is what we can’t be talked out of” Adam Phillips

versus

“What we don’t know, what we haven’t understood, can be the realest thing about us” Adam Phillips

=

The real as “the things we cannot possibly not know, sooner or later, in one way or another” Henry James

I

I’ve just finished a study of state and federal emergency management efforts in two US states, Oregon and Washington, were a magnitude 9.0 earthquake to happen offshore in their nearby Cascadia Subduction Zone. Suffice it to say, there is great worry that not enough is being done by way of preparing for, responding to, and recovery from such an event.

More formally, the counterfactual thrown-up to get more resources is: Were infrastructures and governments there spending more on automatic shut-off valves, retrofitting bridges, mobile generators and telecommunication towers, 2-week readiness kits for individual households, etc etc, they would be in a better position for immediate emergency response and recovery.

No guarantees of course, but still fair enough. Yet the preceding is not the only counterfactual about what would or could happen instead there.

II

If your world is the world, you will very quickly come across the literature on Shock-Responsive Social Protection that also addresses massive shocks. But here you’d find almost an entirely different set of terms, namely, how social protection programs work with humanitarian response and disaster risk management for what is called here in the US emergency preparedness, immediate emergency response and initial service restoration.

III

A social protection program might focus on how to transfer and get cash into the hands of the victims asap; the emergency management efforts we looked at worried about how ATMs and cellphone transactions would work once the infrastructures failed.

Humanitarian programs readily admit the need for international assistance; we interviewed no one in Oregon and Washington State who described “humanitarian aid” as a key emergency response, let alone from anywhere outside the US.

For its part, disaster risk management, while close to what we mean by emergency management in the States, might also include insurance mechanisms (e.g., assisting in paying premiums before the disaster) and contingency credit programs not just for recovery but also during immediate response

IV

So what?

We are a rich country that knows emergency management inside out. SRSP, if we were to get that literature, is for poor countries, from which we wouldn’t learn anyway. We have infrastructures, they don’t. That western Oregon and Washington State won’t have infrastructures either after a magnitude 9.0 earthquake is what another literature calls denial.

Source

O’Brien, C., Scott, Z., Smith, G., Barca V., Kardan, A., Holmes, R., Watson, C. and Congrave, J. (2018), Shock-Responsive Social Protection Systems Research: Synthesis Report, Oxford Policy Management, Oxford, UK

Critical infrastructures are defined as those large-scale systems and physical assets so vital to society that their failures undermine society and economy, in whole or major part.

Critical infrastructures are also a very useful lens through which to rethink topics of major importance like risk/uncertainty and low probability/high consequence events, or infrastructure fragility and market failure, or healthcare and NIMBYism, or that ever-present worry, Big System Collapse. Below are eight (8) reconsiderations prompted by thinking infrastructurally.

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1. Thinking infrastructurally about whole-cycle risk and uncertainty.

Think of an infrastructure as having an entire cycle of operations, ranging from normal operations, through disrupted and restored back, or if not, tripping over into failure, followed by emergency response including efforts at initial service recovery, then into full asset and service recovery, and onto a new normal (if there is to be one).

There are, of course, other ways to characterize the cycle or lifespan—for example, shouldn’t maintenance and repair be separated out of normal (routine) and disrupted (non-routine) operations?—but this segmentation from normal through to a new normal works for our purposes here.

I’m suggesting that “risk and uncertainty” vary both in type and degree with respect to these different stages in infrastructure operations. In normal, disrupted and restoration operations, we observed infrastructure control room operators worrying about management risks due to complacency, misjudgment, or exhausting options. When infrastructures fail, the management risks and uncertainties are very different, however.

The cause-and-effect relationships of normal, disrupted and restored operations are moot when “operating blind” in failure. What was cause-and-effect is now replaced in failure by nonmeasurable uncertainties accompanied by disproportionate impacts, with no presumption that causation (let alone correlation) is any clearer in that conjuncture. Further, the urgency, clarity and logic in immediate emergency response entail the need for impromptu improvisations and unpredicted, let alone hitherto unimagined, shifts in human and technical interconnectivities as system failure unfolds.

As for system recovery, in earlier research the control room operators we interviewed (during their normal operations) spoke of the probability of failure being even higher in recovery than during usual times. Had we interviewed them during actual system failure, their having to energize or re-pressurize line by line may have been described in far more specially demanding terms of operating in the blind, working on the fly and riding uncertainty, full of improvisations and improvisational behavior.

In short, risk and uncertainty are to be distinguished comparatively in terms of an infrastructure’s different stages of its lifespan operations.

Once we recognize that the conventional notion of infrastructures having only two states–normal and failed–is grotesquely underspecified for empirical work, the whole-cycle comparisons of different understandings of infrastructure risk and uncertainty become more rewarding.

For example, what separates the risks and uncertainties of longer-term recovery from risks and uncertainties found in a new-normal is whether or not the infrastructures have adopted new standards for their high reliability management. Endless recovery is trying to catch-up to some kind of reliability and safety standards; new-normal is managing to standards and the risks that follow from managing to the standards.

This may or may not be in the form of earlier, old-normal standards seeking to prevent specific types of failures from ever happening. We know that major distributed internet systems, increasingly viewed as critical infrastructures, are reliable precisely because they expect components to fail and are better prepared for that eventuality, along with other contingencies. Each component should be able to fail in order for the system to be reliable unlike systems where management is geared to ensure some components never fail.

More can be said, but let me leave you with a worry: namely, those commentators who assume “the new normal” is at best endless attempts at repair, where coping is the order of the day and managing for full recovery no longer possible.

So what? Well for one thing, how can you have “proper pricing of risk,” if you don’t know the socio-technical system to be managed across its states of operation, the reliability standard to which it is to be managed then and there, and the risks and uncertainties entailed by subscribing to that standard for those systems?

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2. Thinking infrastructurally about low-probability, high-consequence events.

Return to having to operate blind and on the fly in widespread infrastructure failure, where cause-and-effect scenarios most often found in normal operations have given way to being confronted by all manner of nonmeasurable uncertainties and disproportionate (i.e., predictably unimaginable) impacts, none of which seem obviously cause-and-effect.

The point is that both nonmeasurability and disproportionality still convey important information for their infrastructure operations during and after the disaster. This information is especially significant when causal understanding is most obscure(d). Not least is the fact that nonmeasurability and disproportionality tell them to prepare for and be ready to improvise, irrespective of what formal playbooks and plans have set out beforehand.

“Coping with risk” is highly misleading when an important part of that “coping” is proactive improvisations and in response to infrastructure failures that unfold in ways well beyond predicting or imagining a “low probability and high consequence event.”

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3. Thinking infrastructurally about fragility of large socio-technical systems.

The last thing most people think is that infrastructures are fragile. If anything, they are massive structures, where “heavy” and “sturdy” come to mind. But the fact that they not only fail in systemwide disasters, but that they also require routine (and nonroutine) maintenance and repair as they depreciate, requires us to take the fragility features seriously.

Fortunately, there are those who write on infrastructure fragility from a broadly socio-cultural perspective rather than the socio-technical one with which I am familiar:

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

The nod to “sociotechnical systems” is welcome as is the recognition that these systems have to be managed–a 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 those inevitable technology, design and regulatory glitches–inevitable because comprehensiveness is impossible to achieve in complex large-scale sociotechnical systems.

Not only is the observed better-than-expected operation (beyond design and technology) because of repair and maintenance. It is also because real-time system operators have to actively manage in order to preclude must-never-happen events like loss of nuclear containment, cryptosporidium contamination of urban water supplies, or jumbo jets dropping like flies from the sky. That these events do from time-to-time happen only increases the widespread social dread that they must not happen again.

What to my knowledge has not been pursued in the sociotechnical literature is that specific 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 sociotechnical literature with which I am familiar.

Finally, I cannot over-stress the importance of this notion of infrastructure fragility, contrary to any sturdy-monolith imaginary one might have. One can only hope, by way of example, that wind energy infrastructure being imposed by the Morocco-Siemens occupiers of Western Sahara is so fragile as to necessitate of them endlessly massive and costly repairs and maintenance.

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4. Thinking infrastructurally about the market failure economists don’t talk about.

Economists tell us there are four principal types of market failure: public goods, externalities, asymmetric information, and market power. They do not talk about the fifth type, the one where efficient markets actually cause market failure by destroying the infrastructure underlying and stabilizing markets and their allocative activities.

Consider here the 2010 flash crash of the U.S. stock market. Subsequent investigations found that market transactions happened so quickly and were so numerous under conditions of high-frequency trading and collocated servers that a point came when no liquidity was left to meet proffered transactions. Liquidity dried up and with it, price discovery. ‘‘Liquidity in a high-speed world is not a given: market design and market structure must ensure that liquidity provision arises continuously in a highly fragmented, highly interconnected trading environment,’’ as a report by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) put it for the crash. Here, efficiencies realized through high transaction speeds worked against a market infrastructure that would have operated reliably otherwise.

The school economist will counter by insisting, ‘‘Obviously the market was not efficient because the full costs of reliability were not internalized.’’ But my point remains: Market failure under standard normal conditions of efficiency say nothing about anything so fundamental as infrastructure reliability as foundational to economic efficiency.

The research challenge is to identify under what conditions does the fifth market failure arises empirically. Until that is done, the better part of wisdom—the better part of government regulation—would be to assume fully efficient markets are low-performance markets when the stabilizing market infrastructure underlying them is prone to this type of market failure.

But what, then, is “prone”? Low-performing market infrastructure results from the vigorous pursuit of self-interest and cost-cutting when hobbling real-time market infrastructure operators in choosing strategies for high reliability of the market infrastructure.

There is another way to put the point: High reliability management of critical infrastructures does not mean those infrastructures are to run at 100% full capacity. Quite the reverse. High reliability requires the respective infrastructures not work full throttle: Positive redundancy or fallback assets and options—what the economists’ mis-identified “excess capacity”—are needed in case of sudden loss of running assets and facilities, the loss of which would threaten infrastructure-wide reliability and, with it, price discovery. To accept that “every system is stretched to operate at its capacity” may well be the worst threat to an infrastructure and its economic contributions.

In this view, critical infrastructures are economically most reliably productive when full capacity is not the long-term operating goal. Where so, efficiency no longer serves as a benchmark for economic performance. Rather, we must expect the gap between actual capacity and full capacity in the economy to be greater under a high reliability standard, where the follow-on impacts for the allocation and distribution of services serve and act as investments in having a long term.

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5. Thinking infrastructurally about healthcare.

The US Department of Homeland Security states healthcare is one of the nation’s critical infrastructures sectors, along with others like large-scale water and energy supplies.

Infrastructures, however, vary considerably in their mandates to provide vital services safely and continuously–that is, highly reliable. The energy infrastructure differs depending on whether it is for electricity or natural gas, while the latter two differ from large-scale water supplies (I’ve studied all three). Yet the infrastructures for water and energy, with their central control rooms, are more similar when compared to, say, education or healthcare without such centralized operations center.

What would healthcare look like if it were managed more like other infrastructures that have centralized control rooms and systems, such as those for water and energy? Might the high reliability of infrastructural elements within the healthcare sector be a major way to better ensure patient safety?

Four points are offered by way of answer:

(1) High reliability theory and practice suggest that the manufacture of vaccines and compounds can be made reliable and safe, at least up to the point of patient injection, the so-called sharp-end of healthcare. Failure in those back-end processes is exceptionally notable—as in the fungal meningitis contamination at the New England Compounding Center—because failure here is preventable.

So what? When dominated by considerations of the sharp-end, we overlook—at our peril—the strong-end of healthcare with its backward linkages for producing medicines and treatments reliably and safely.

(2) If healthcare were an infrastructure more like those with centralized control centers, the criticality and centrality of societal dread in driving reliable service provision would be dramatically underscored.

Yet, aside from that special and important case of public health emergencies (think the COVID-19 pandemic), civic attitudes toward health and medical safety lack the public dread we find to be the key foundation of support for the level of reliability pursued in other infrastructures. Commission of medical errors hasn’t generated the level of public dread associated with nuclear meltdowns or jumbo-jetliners dropping from the air. Medical errors, along with fires in medical facilities, are often “should-never-happen events,” not “must-never-happen events.”

What would generate the widespread societal dread needed to produce “must-never-happen” behavior? Answer: Public recognition that getting medical treatment kills or maims you unless professionally managed reliably and safely.

(3) How a reliable and safe healthcare system encourages a more reliable healthcare consumer would be akin to asking how does a reliable grid or water supply encourage the electricity or water consumer to be energy or water conscious. Presumably, the movement to bring real-time monitoring healthcare technology into the patient’s habitation is increasingly part of that calculus.

(4) In all the focus on the patient sharp-end, it mustn’t be forgotten that there are healthcare control rooms beyond those of manufacturers of medicines mentioned above: Think most immediately of the pharmacy systems inside and outside hospitals and their pharmacists/prescriptionists as reliability professionals.

One final point follows from an infrastructure perspective on healthcare risks and uncertainties. Can we find systematically interconnected healthcare providers so critical in the US that they could bring the healthcare sector down (say, as was threatened when the 12 systematically interconnected banking institutions were under threat during the 2008 financial crisis)? If so, we would have a healthcare sector in need of “stress tests” for systemic risks just as post-2008 financial services institutions had to undergo.

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6. Thinking infrastructurally about cognitive reversals.

What else can we do, senior executives and company boards tell themselves, when business is entirely on the line? We have to risk failure in order to succeed!

But what if the business is one of the many critical infrastructures privately owned or managed Here, if upper management seeks to implement risk-taking changes, they rely on middle-level reliability professionals, who, when they take risks, do so in order to reduce the chances of systemwide failure. To reliability-seeking professionals, the risk-taking activities of their upper management look like a form of suicide for fear of death.

When professionals are compelled to reverse practices they know and find to be reliable, the results have been deadly:

• Famously in the Challenger accident, engineers had been required up to the day of that flight to show why the shuttle could launch; on that day, the decision rule was reversed to one showing why launch couldn’t take place.

• Once it was good bank practice to hold capital as a cushion against unexpected losses; capital security arrangements now mandate they hold capital against losses expected from their high-risk lending. Mortgage brokers traditionally made money on the performance and quality of mortgages they made; in the run-up to the 2008 financial crisis, their compensation changed to one based on the volume of loans originated but passed on.

• Originally, the Deepwater Horizon rig had been drilling an exploration well; that status changed when on April 15 2010 BP applied to the U.S. Minerals Management Service (MMS) to convert the site to a production well. The MMS approved by the change. The explosion occurred five days later.

In brief, decision-rule reversals have led to system failures and more: NASA was never the same; we are still trying to get out of the 2008 financial mess and the Great Recession that followed; and the MMS disappeared from the face of the earth.

“But, that’s a strawman,” someone counters. “Of course, we wouldn’t deliberately push reliability professionals into unstudied conditions, if we could avoid it.” Really?

The oft-recommended approach, Be-Prepared-for-All-Hazards, looks first like the counsel of wisdom. It however is dangerous if requiring emergency and related organizations to cooperate in ways they currently cannot, using information they will not have or cannot obtain, for all manner of interconnected scenarios, which if treated with equal seriousness, produce considerable modeling and analytic uncertainties, let alone really-existing impracticalities.

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7. Thinking infrastructurally about NIMBYism (newly added)

They believe that climate change is actually happening but don’t want those wind-farms off their coastlines. Those driving electric cars are opposed by those demanding no more automobiles on the roads. Those who want more renewable energy here are among groups opposing new construction of transmission lines from there.

The commonplace is to insist there are trade-offs involved. But the fact of the matter is tradeoffs aren’t the only starting point. How so?

Start with an observation in yesterday’s online New York Times,

While China is the world’s biggest adopter of clean energy, it also remains the world’s biggest user of fossil fuels, particularly coal. “We have to hold these two things, which can seem contradictory, in our heads at the same time,” [another Times correspondent] said. “China is pulling the world in two directions.”

This may not be a contradiction so much as a transition.

German Lopez in The New York Time’s online Morning, August 14 2023

That is: What if those instances of NIMBYism in the first section are not contradictions only but also part and parcel of transitions underway? What if the oppositions involved aren’t stalemates but instead are already leading to something else or different?

And to be clear, I do not imply the transitions are all positive or all lead to a clean energy economy or better yet, degrowth. Nor am I implying that the transitions are fueled only or primarily by contradictions that are untenable over time. I am asking you, in this thought experiment, to focus on complex states of affairs that are called transitions.

One such complex transition underway is the transfer of renewable energy between and across different electricity grids in the US.

As is frequently reported, there is a pressing need for new transmission lines. But that new construction would add to a base that already involves inter-regional electricity transmission, including the ongoing transitioning to clean energy. True, how much of that is going on is hard to document. True, the regional grids are fragmented and true more renewable energy interconnections are needed.

But, again, that would be part of a transition that is underway, at least when it comes to transfers of renewable energy between and across existing grids.

So what?

Go back to the Nimbyism: There, the point of departure is the individual or a city (say, voter or, a collectivity of voters). Electricity grids in contrast are complex organizations, even institutions, with their own reliability standards and interinfrastructural connectivities (to water, roads and telecommunications, for example).

Again, so what? Take a case where city residents objecting to wind-farms off the coastline are served by a grid not inter-regionally connected to clean energy sources. One interconnectivity “solution” to this Nimby would be to hike up the electricity rates of city residents not just because they are forgoing clean energy but also because their rates for the interconnected water, cellphone and transportation subsidize their choice.

To summarize: Transitioning to clean energy in my backyard is in the yard of inter-regional energy infrastructures.

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8. Thinking infrastructurally about Big System Collapse.

Here are early warning signals—typically not recognized—that those major critical infrastructures upon which we survive are in fact operating at, or beyond, their performance edges:

–The infrastructure’s control room is in prolonged just-for-now performance. This means operators find it more difficult to maneuver out of a corner in which they find themselves. (“Yes, yes, I know this is risky, but just keep it online for now!”)

–The real-time control operators are working outside their official or unofficial bandwidths for performance—in effect having to work outside their unique domain of competence.

–The decision rules operators reliably followed before are turned inside out: “Prove we can do that” becomes “Prove we can’t.”

–Real-time operational redesigns (workarounds) by control room operators of inevitably defective equipment, premature software, and incomplete procedures are not effective as before.

–Their control room skills as professionals in identifying systemwide patterns and undertaking what-if scenario become attenuated or no longer hold.

–Instead of being driven by dread of the next major failure, control room professionals are told that their track record up to now is to be benchmark for system reliability ahead.

I have yet to come across these as key indicators of infrastructure and big system collapse in the literature I’ve read.

Principal sources: Excerpted and revised from previous blog entries.