I

Psychologist, Daniel Gilbert, writes the “problem is that people seem pleased to use this one word [happiness] to indicate a host of different things, which has created a tremendous terminological mess on which several fine scholarly careers have been based”. He adds: “If one slops around in this mess long enough, one comes to see that most disagreements about what happiness really is are semantic disagreements about whether the world ought to be used to indicate this or that. . . “.

Let’s think more of happiness as a mess. “How can that mess be managed better?” is an important policy question then, if only because public policy has something to do with making people happy.

II

Start with the macro-design node for happiness. For years, we have been told that it is a right, or at least the pursuit of happiness is self-evident truth. We’ve also been told that the more income—purchasing power—we have, the happier we will be.

Yet the systemwide patterns recognized, our second node of analysis, consistently fall short of these macro-principles. Vast swathes of the world don’t agree on what that right to happiness means. Data showed that, after a point, more income does not mean we become happier. “People in rich countries are generally happier than people in poor countries. But once basic needs for food, clothing, and shelter are more or less universally met—high gross domestic product does not seem to make societies happier,” John Kay, Financial Times economist, once put it. When a country passes a threshold level of income, the correlation between the happiness of its people and the nation’s aggregate wealth has been weak, studies found. Worse, affluence can make people unhappier. It was reported that in the US as income doubled or more, yet the percentage of people saying they were very happy remained by and large constant.

Nor do localized scenarios of design principles, our third node of analysis, conform to their originating macro-design assumptions. Specific regions of the world are happy in unprincipled ways, it seems, with (1) Latin American countries registering far more subjective happiness than one would have predicted from their economic status and (2) Africans optimistic in the face of documented travails.

This takes us to the last node, the level of individual micro-operator. We were told for years that happiness, like personal utility, was next to impossible to compare with others. Even as social-psychological measures improved for the comparison of interpersonal happiness, strong evidence remained that individuals often are not very good at predicting what will make them happy, or unhappy for that matter.

III

Almost just as worrisome, the temptation has been to jump from pattern recognition to macro-design bypassing all the mess in between.

Since the marginal utility of a dollar is higher from poorer people that for richer, since the gains in happiness are palpably greater among poorer people than losses are among richer people, since more affluence above a point can make people unhappy and since people care a great deal about their relative income, therefore it is better to tax the rich (if simply to contain their unhappy rat race), transfer that money to the poor, and make incomes overall more equal. Many still believe these syllogisms.

IV

I’d rather first know just what those in the middle of these four nodes are doing about sorting out this happiness mess. Who reliably translates the systemwide patterns and localized scenarios into what we can call happiness or provide those services that lead to that happiness?

Typically, the initial answer is our network of family, friends, partners—those immediate social relationships that matter for personal happiness.

Less typically mentioned is the networked wraparound of large infrastructures for water, electricity, transportation and telecommunications, without which society-wide happiness would be even more of a gamble.

Who would have thought that, as these wraparound services wither in the name of hollowing out the state, individual happiness reduces to the techno-speak of being one’s own full-time “infrastructure” manager!

The term, “ecosystem,” comes to us through A.G. Tansley’s 1935 article, “The Use and Abuse of Vegetational Concepts and Terms.” He has been criticized for his role in colonial British ecology, but here Tansley has salience for two other reasons.

–First, ecosystems for Tansley make no sense without taking humans and their interactions with the landscape into account. “We cannot confine ourselves to the so-called ‘natural’ entities and ignore the processes and expressions of vegetation now so abundantly provided us by the activities of man. Such a course is not scientifically sound, because scientific analysis must penetrate beneath the forms of the ‘natural’ entities, and it is not practically useful because ecology must be applied to conditions brought about by human activity,” he wrote.

This might seem to be pushing at an open door today, but Tansley deployed a discourse quite different than his contemporaries, the U.S. ecologists. Theirs were just-so stories about “climax communities” evolving on their own—if and only if devoid of human beings mucking things up. Two commentators on Tansley’s work (Laura Cameron and John Forrester) argue that his “principal contributions were, in contradistinction to American ecology, to emphasize the systemic interrelations of human activity and botanical phenomena—he sees no real difference between those ecosystems which are natural and those which are ‘anthropogenic’ (nature ‘produced by man’, as he glossed in 1923).”

–Tansley is, however, important to us for another reason. Not only was he a founder of the British Ecological Society (precursor to ecological societies in many countries) and the Nature Conservancy, he was also well-known and respected member of the British Psycho-Analytic Society, having been analyzed by Freud for nine months in 1922 and 1924. For Tansley, humans and their desires (“energy”) were and are never far away from ecosystems in a profound way.

We see few if any ecologists today take human desires as nothing less than The Enemy. Such, I’d like to think, would have appalled a Tansley who took desire and ecosystem to be inseparable. He’d be the last person, I suspect, surprised or shocked by large critical infrastructures, created to satisfy desires and wants, as having environmental impacts, bad and good.

Principal source

John Forrester and Laura Cameron (2017). Freud in Cambridge. Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, UK. This is a massively informative volume and its footnotes alone are an entire education.

I dislike being herded into certainty.
                  Louise Glück, Nobel poet

My argument is that if disasters averted by pastoralists (and farmers, for that matter) were more identified and differentiated, we’d better understand how short of a full picture is equating their real time to the chronic crises of inequality, market failure, precarity and such.

To ignore disasters-averted has an analogy with other reliability professionals. It is to act as if the lives, assets and millions in wealth saved each day doesn’t matter when real-time control room operators of critical infrastructures prevent disasters from happening that would have happened otherwise. Instead, we are repeatedly told that what matters more are the disasters of modernization, late capitalism, and environmental collapse destructive of everything in their path.

Even where the latter is true, that truth must be pushed further to incorporate the importance of disasters-averted-now. Disaster-averted matters to herders precisely because herders actively dread specific disasters, whatever the root causes.

The implications for pastoralist development end up being major—not least when it comes to “pastoralist elites.” But let’s start closer to the beginning.

***

–A young researcher had just written up a case study of traditional irrigation practices in one of the districts that fell under the Government of Kenya’s Arid and Semi-Arid Lands (ASAL) Programme. (We’re in the early 1980s.) I remember reading the report and being excited. Here was detailed information about really-existing irrigation constraints sufficient to pinpoint opportunities for improvement.

That was, until I turned the page to the conclusions: What was really needed was a country-wide land reform.

Huh? Where did that come from? Not from the details and findings in the report!

–Reference to the pernicious, when not totalizing effects of marketization, privatization, commodification, financialization, globalization, and like (e.g., monetization, mechanization, marginalization. . .racism, colonialism, militarism, imperialism. . .) appear from beginning to end in development publications, and never more so—it seems to me—than in paragraphs that detail case-specific complexities one would have thought worked against generalizing processes across cases.

Of course, inequality, marketization, commodification, precarity and other such processes matter. The same for modernization, late capitalism and global environmental destruction.

BUT they matter when detailed and differentiated in terms of their being “with respect to.”

Just what is marketization with respect to in your case at hand? Smallstock? Mechanized deliveries? Alpine grazing? Is it in terms of migrant herders here rather than there, or with respect to other types of livestock or environmental conditions? Where so, the under-acknowledged methodological issue moves center-stage: How do the broader processes summarized as “marketization” get redefined by the very different with-respect-to’s?

Or back to where I was that day: “What kind of land reform for whom and under what conditions at your research site?,” I should have asked.

***

–This leads to my main speculation: Claiming that over-arching explanations are empirical generalizations made across complex cases too often voids the case-specific diversity of responses and emerging practices of importance for policy and management.

Why? Because appeals to processes or state conditions generalized as “marketization,” “commodification,” “precarity” and the like run the risk of diminishing the centrality of disasters averted through diverse actions of diverse herders. This diminishment leaves us assuming that marketization, commodification, precarity. . .are the chronic crises of real time for herder or farmer. They, we are to assume, take up most of the time that really matters to pastoralists.

But the latter is the case only if the with-respect-to scenarios show how these broad processes are chronic and how they preoccupy real time because herders have failed to avert dreaded events altogether. Without the empirical work showing that no disasters have been averted by pastoralists, the appeal to broad structural explanations begins to look less as a denial of human agency than the idealization of the absence of agency, irrespective of the facts on the ground.

–Here’s an example of what I am trying to get at. Andrew Barry, British sociologist, reports in his article, “What is an environmental problem?,” a research finding from his work in Georgia:

A community liaison officer, working for an oil company, introduced me to a villager who had managed to stop the movement of pipeline construction vehicles near her mountain village in the lesser Caucasus. The construction of the pipeline, she told us in conversation, would prevent her moving livestock between two areas of pastureland. Her protest, which was the first she had ever been involved in, was not recorded in any official or public documents.

Barry found this to be a surprising research event (his terms) and went on to explain at length (internal citations deleted) that

my conversation with the villager pointed to the importance of a localized problem, the impact of the pipeline on her livelihood and that of other villagers, and her consequent direct action, none of which is recorded or made public. This was one of many small, fragmentary indicators that alerted me to the prevalence and significance of direct action by villagers across Georgia in the period of pipeline construction, actions that were generally not accorded significance in published documents, and that were certainly not traceable on the internet. . .At the same time, the mediation of the Georgian company liaison officer who introduced me to the villager was one indicator of the complexity of the relations between the local population, the oil company, and the company’s subcontractors. . .

I believe the phrases, “managed to stop,” “would prevent her moving livestock,” “a localized problem,” “consequent direct action,” “generally not accorded significance,” and “the complexity of the relations” are the core of my argument here.

***

–But, so what?

I recently read a fine piece mentioning today’s Pokot elites and Turkana elders in Kenya. I confess, this made me smile. When I was there in the early 1980s, they were neither elderly nor elites all. I’m also pretty sure had I interviewed some of them at that time I’d have considered them “poor pastoralists.”

So my question: What happens when some of the poor pastoralists of then are better off now? Is there a point at which better-off pastoralists are no longer poor enough for the researcher’s concern?

More formally as above: “Under what conditions do pastoralists, initially poor but today better off, become elites in the negative sense familiar to criticism of elites?” This is important because an over-arching development aim of the first-generation ASAL programs was to assist then-poor pastoralists to become better-off.

My answer now would focus on the disasters averted over time by the now-elites compared to those who remained poor in the same period. It seems to me essential to establish if equally (resource-) poor pastoralists nonetheless differentiated themselves over time in terms of how they (and others with them) averted disasters that would have befell them had they not managed or coped the ways they did. Practices underlying their intentions, choices and actions are what interest me.

Now, of course, some of the poor pastoralists I met in the early 1980s may have been more advantaged than I realized. Of course, I could have been incorrect in identifying them as “poor pastoralists.” Even so, my focus on disasters-averted holds for those who were not advantaged then but are so now.

Principal source

Barry, A. (2020). What is an environmental problem? In the special issue, “Problematizing the Problematic,” Theory, Culture & Society: 1 – 25.

When I and others call for better recognition and accommodation of complexity, we mean the complex as well as the uncertain, unfinished and conflicted must be particularized and contextualized so that we can analyze and manage, if only case-by-granular case.

When I and others say we need more findings that can be replicated across a range of cases, we are calling for identifying not only emerging better practices across cases, but also greater equifinality: finding multiple but different pathways to achieve similar objectives, given case diversity.

What I and others mean by calling for greater collaboration is not just more teamwork or working with more and different stakeholders, but that team members and stakeholders “bring the system into the room” for the purposes of making the services in question reliable and safe.

When I and others call for more system integration, we mean the need to recouple the decoupled activities in ways that better mimic but can never fully reproduce the coupled nature of the wider system environment.

When I and others call for more flexibility, we mean the need for greater maneuverability across different performance modes in the face of changing system volatility and options to respond to those changes. (“Only the middle road does not lead to Rome,” said composer, Arnold Schoenberg.)

Where we need more experimentation, we do not mean more trial-and-error learning, when the systemwide error ends up being the last systemwide trial by destroying the limits of survival.

While others talk about risks in a system’s hazardous components, we point to different systemwide reliability standards and then, to the different risks and uncertainties that follow from different standards.

“Reset” is a popular word for our “starting over” (as if from a clean slate) or “starting again” (as if restarting from where we are). But there are other ways to think about “reset” as it applies to societal issues.

One is unfamiliar to readers of this blog: the recent response to a Thai BL (Boys’ Love), “Bad Buddy.” It’s a twelve episode series, now moving to the 11th “cursed” episode. BLs, like other Asian dramas, are full of tropes, one of which is: Things must get worse in the next to the last episode (just) in order to get better at last.

–I’m not going to describe the history of BL series (they’re not, e.g., Greek boy’s love), nor how Thai series differ from BLs in Japan, Taiwan, or more recently South Korea, which themselves differ. For those interested, the sinkhole of web-links awaits you (by the time you get to the history of China’s censorship of BLs and their current wink-wink, nudge-nudge “bromances,” you’ve learned a great deal).

What I want to focus on here is one major response of YouTube viewers to “Bad Buddy” (with its millions and millions of episode views and tens and tens of thousand episode comments): This series represents, right now, a “reset” of Thai BLs.

I want to argue that the “reset” talked about in YouTube comments (at least those in English) is an optic through which to think about calls to reset specific contemporary politics and society.

–One of the first things “Bad Buddy” viewers comment about is the great acting and chemistry of the two male leads, Ohm and Nanon. Just say it’s astrophysical. The higher-quality of storyline, filming and direction, original sound track, and pacing are also singled out for note. All and more are clear in Episode 5’s lead-up to the roof-top scene, where in the language of Asian dramas Ohm confesses his feelings and they kiss.

–That last sentence in no way conveys the intensity of what we viewers actually saw and what that embrace conveyed. There is something very fitting in the reset being triggered the moment Ohm utters a mai (“no”) unlike any before.

One convention of many BLs has been that these be straight actors kissing according to a storyline written by a female author for a largely female audience–where the kiss would more often be two sets of closed lips compressed together. Not so in “Bad Buddy”!

Other BL conventions have been bumped out of the way by “Bad Buddy.” Most invidious to international viewers has been the question of “who’s the top, who’s the bottom?” or “who’s wifey” in the relationship. “Bad Buddy” makes it clear the protagonists see themselves as boyfriends. Nor is there the usual, “He’s the only guy I’d ever love.” Nor are the females cyphers funny or incidental as has so often been the case.

I could go on about why I’m such a fan, but suffice it to say: At the time of writing, many of the viewers of this series agree they are witnessing what they take to be a bigger reset of cultural conventions at least in the BL industry.

–Now I shift the register and talk about my views of their views.

It seems to me that this type of “reset” is not one of resetting Thai society views of LGBTQ+ communities there or elsewhere (watch the Thai Channel 3 BL series, “Miracle of Teddy Bear,” to get some comparison). Nor is the reset one of setting a gold standard or benchmark for future BL series.

The reset I take away from the comments–that is, the reset I believe I’m witnessing through to Episode 10–is more akin to shaking the kaleidoscope of BL conventions and then making a new twist. The different colored shards—those conventions and tropes—don’t disappear but are being reconfigure anew. YouTube viewers of “Bad Buddy” are recording, participating in and energizing just such a reset. In more conventional terms, expectations are changing and viewers are managing the changes and those expectations.

–So what?

For someone living in the United States at the start of 2022, the economy is narrativized almost always into top and bottom. The top shafts the bottom; rich and poor are all having to take it up the ass. A lifelong Democrat or Republican says this is the first time ever voting for someone like Trump or Obama. This US drama of ours is cursed to end early. The notion that top and bottom could be “friends,” that the other half aren’t funny or incidental, that even when we’re fucked up and down, it’s complicated, and that even if society can’t be reconfigured as a whole, some major representations and conventions can be so as to make them work better–well, that’s one imaginary too far in the US, it seems to me.

If so, then I take the positive upshot of–let’s call it “a Bad Buddy reset”–to be: Focus on kaleidoscopes that can be twisted.

Two examples as far away from BLs but ready, I believe, for “Bad Buddy” resets will have to be illustrative.

(1) Once you refocus, philanthropy needn’t be viewed as the city’s rich helping the city’s poor; urban-generated remittances needn’t be seen as one set of family members helping other family members elsewhere. Both philanthropy and remittances twist into something else when it’s “urban citizenship”–its duties and responsibilities–that come into better view through these very transactions.

(2) Another example. A more traditional configuration of dryland herds as assets is being twisted into a newer configuration of herds as global environmental liabilities. One consequence of the latest twist is to exclude pastoralists from being considered part of the near-global asset boom in rising prices of stock, bonds and real-estate.

At some point in the twisting ahead of what patently is a kaleidoscope of very different configurations of herd assets and liabilities, it will be clear that a big question was missed in the earlier twist: Who benefited when public attention was distracted by reclassifying cattle as global environmental liabilities from recognizing instead that their owners/managers were and continue to be entrapped in capitalist asset bubbles, and on a global scale?

The Yale Law Journal recently published an important article, “Building a Law-and-Political-Economy Framework: Beyond the Twentieth-Century Synthesis,” by Jedediah Britton-Purdy, David Singh Grewal, Amy Kapczynski and K. Sabeel Rahman (2020, 129: 1784 – 1835). It concludes with a call for action (here quoted without their footnotes):

If it is to succeed, law and political economy [i.e., the framework in the article’s title] will also require something beyond mere critique. It will require a positive agenda. Many new and energized voices, from the legal academy to political candidates to movement activists, are already building in this direction, calling for and giving shape to programs for more genuine democracy that also takes seriously questions of economic power and racial subordination; more equal distribution of resources and life chances; more public and shared resources and infrastructures; the displacement of concentrated corporate power and rooting of new forms of worker power; the end of mass incarceration and broader contestation of the long history of the criminalization and control of poor people and people of color in building capitalism; the recognition of finance and money as public infrastructures; the challenges posed by emerging forms of power and control arising from new technologies; and the need for a radical new emphasis on ecology. These are the materials from which a positive agenda, over time, will be built.

I agree with this agenda and ask you to do the same for the following thought experiment.

–Assume I start my own article with the above quote. Where do subsequent paragraphs lead? In what directions do I–or you–drive this agenda? To make this interesting, I sketch five extensions that most differ, I believe, from what the authors seem to assume:

• Instead of feeling overwhelmed by the enormity of the implementation challenges, I’d ask: Where are the activities already underway? What are the better practices there that can be modified and applied here, or if not, then elsewhere? The point is that this agenda is too good to be restricted to the US only.

• Instead of thinking the agenda stands or falls on how I pre-define key terms (capitalism, power, democracy. . .), the better practices identified in the preceding do the next best thing: entail the ends sought by the means used. Here, behaving democratically is with respect to these practices to achieve those outputs or outcomes. There, power is supposed to be control by these means for those ends; elsewhere, power is managing in these rather than those ways as control is no longer (if ever) possible.

• Instead of starting by prioritizing what do first, second and afterwards, I’d stay with the mess of interconnections and see where they lead. Think of the agenda as a composite argument read off a very layered and overwritten palimpsest of earlier arguments about power, capitalism, democracy and more, each new argument assembled from older ones effaced in the process. Resurfacing earlier erasures is one way to signal where to go with my paragraphs. E.g., toward those willfully ignored cases where capitalism looks less like control and more like negotiation and bargaining among, yes, unequals.

• Instead of trying first to reduce the agenda’s uncertainties and complexities, I’d see if there were analogies that recast its tasks differently. For example, a longstanding analogy has been that of “being at sea,” as in challenges likened to: keeping balance while stepping through a muddy shoal, treading water with no bottom to touch, tacking into unpredictable winds, repairing the ship at sea with only what is at hand, no safe harbor to return to in the storm, and keeping your head above the rushing tide-race. That to my mind is the view-scape within which or on which the positive agenda, over time, will be based. Better to know this than delude ourselves in thinking it’s about “Reduce uncertainty” or “First, simplify”!

• Instead of seeking to integrate the agenda into a coherent single narrative, I’d look for narrative discrepancies that indicate where other more useful narratives are complicating matters. For instance, it’s not surprising as someone who writes on critical infrastructures that I’d trip over the conflation of stock (e.g., facilities) and flow (e.g., money to run the facilities) in the quote’s two references to “infrastructures.” But this then raises a productive question: Are there in fact conditions under which money is an infrastructure just like large-scale water supplies and electricity grids? Here’s one such set of conditions: when government releases emergency funding to recover from those disasters that have destroyed the infrastructures upon which we survive. In this case, money and assets are fungible. By extension, think of the radical agenda as massive emergency responses to recover and repurpose critical infrastructures (like that for justice and education) failing us.

–Such would be the leads in the Results section of my paper. I’m in no position to sketch a follow-on Conclusion, but the first point in the Discussion section following the Results is obvious to me: Why accept anything less radical than the starting agenda? The standard retort of gradualism, “Well, here we want something more modest having greater chances of being achievable,” makes sense only if other really-existing practices in like situations weren’t more successful. Have the experts in planetary interconnectivity undertaken that canvassing? I don’t think so.

–It’s not just the contingent (idiosyncratic), complex and uncertain remain unavoidable whatever the agenda; it’s not just that the unfinished may be unfinishable. It’s also because your radical differs from my radical, while radical responses are to be expected regardless. Because, from the perspective here, people-in-contexts differ in their inexperience, difficulties and not-knowing, and those differences matter now as you read these very words.

If people are as equal as the teeth of a comb, the numbers of different combs are too many to add up.

–Developments under the rubric of AI (artificial intelligence), including machine learning, Big Data, and algorithmic management/decisionmaking, are often deployed to reinforce a longstanding narrative: Important forms of technological change are labor-substituting by displacing workers and their livelihoods. Given the issue has always been complex, evidence continues to be provided both in favor of or against the narrative. In fact, new articles on “the impact of automation” repeatedly rehearse the same arguments for and against.

What is less recognized, I believe, is that specifics are often erased or palimpsested over by continuing to maintain versions of the generalized narrative. This matters when the specifics of earlier debates—particularly, options and insights offered but not followed up–can, if resurfaced, question and recast in useful ways the current debate.

–Here’s one illustration. Schlögl, Weiss and Prainsack (2021) undertook a review of relevant literature from 2013 – 2018 on the policy topic, “Future of Work,” concluding in part:

Our findings show the dominance of a specific narrative within the grey policy literature on [Future of Work]. It starts with the assumption of unprecedented, rapid technological advance that, embedded in demographic and ecological transformations as well as globalisation, creates opportunities and risks. The main opportunities are gains in productivity, new jobs and higher living standards. The risks are new inequalities, pressures on social security systems, and the costs of transition and disruption for various groups. The answer to these challenges lies in the re- or upskilling of the workforce and adjustments to social and labour market policies [according to the document review].

Assume this storyline is correct as far as it goes.

The problem is that narrative discrepancy, “unprecedented,” in the preceding quote. This technological change is not unprecedented. The unprecedented is happening all the time when it comes to this narrative. The authors themselves point out that “U.S. president Lyndon B. Johnson even set up, in 1964, a ‘National Commission on Technology, Automation, and Economic Progress’. Transformations and crises of work as a result of technological progress are a recurring theme throughout modernity.”

Therein, I submit, lies one clue to rethinking the policy narrative of unprecedented change and recurring impacts on labor.

–If you actually go to the referenced final report of that National Commission on Technology, Automation, and Economic Progress, Technology and the American Economy, you’ll find the labor-substituting narrative in terms that still resonate even when in outdated terms, e.g., “technological change would in the near future not only cause increasing unemployment, but that eventually it would eliminate all but a few jobs, with the major portion of what we now call work being performed automatically by machine.” (If in doubt about the continuing salience of the latter, search the web for today’s “fully automated luxury communism”.)

It’s not however the report’s resonances, but specifics that are striking. On the downside, the report is full of terms and references to no longer existing programs. On the upside—and this is what I want to emphasize—it offers up specific proposals that read more like “lost modernities,” i.e., pathways to addressing the narrative in ways that we no longer think about today:

We recommend that each Federal Reserve bank provide the leadership for economic development activities in its region.  The development program in each Federal Reserve District should include: (1) A regular program of economic analysis; (2) an advisory council for economic growth composed of representatives from each of the major interested groups within the district; (3) a capital bank to provide venture capital and long-term financing for new and growing companies; (4) regional technical institutes to serve as centers for disseminating scientific and technical knowledge relevant to the region’s development; and  (5) a Federal executive in each district to provide regional coordination of the various Federal programs related to economic development.

Nothing came of this recommendation as far as I can determine (a few commission members, from the then right and left, objected to it). But just think about the “what if’s”!

What if the recommendation had been adopted and implemented then? What if it were enacted today, in light of the Fed’s now longstanding mandate for promoting price stability and maximum employment? (The US Fed was legislated to promote maximum employment in 1977.) Even with inevitable caveats about politics, dollars and jerks, the question still compels: What if, indeed!

–The point is that one consequence of keeping the dominant policy narrative in general terms is to willfully avoid specifics where counternarratives, if they exist, are to be found. The starting assumption must be: For any complex policy and management issue, counterexamples are to be expected. The duty of care is to read closely and find them.

Principal sources

Schlögl, L., E. Weiss, and B. Prainsack (2021). “Constructing the ‘Future of Work’: An analysis of the policy discourse:. New Technology, Work and Employment: 1–20. https://doi.org/10.1111/ntwe.12202

U.S. National Commission on Technology, Automation, and Economic Progress (1966). Technology and the American Economy, Vol 1. Superintendent of Documents, Government Printing Office, Washington, DC. (Accessed online on July 17 2021 at: https://www.iftf.org/fileadmin/user_upload/images/ourwork/blockchain/Equitable_Futures_Lab/National_Commission_on_Technology__Automation_and_Economic_Progress_1965.pdf)

When Louis XIV saw the new maps of France he sponsored in 1693 he supposedly complained that his cartographers had cost his kingdom more land in a year than foreign armies had done in a century.

(From Paul Slack’s The Invention of Improvement)

–Long-held heuristics, like routines and standard operating procedures, are shorthand ways of doing things without all the uncertainty of reinventing the wheel. Newer heuristics include big data algorithms we don’t understand and policy narratives we think we do, both of which enable making decisions in the face of uncertainty. Both shorthands are treated as good-enough, like a new atlas of maps.

The older heuristics are relied upon because they are said to reduce uncertainty; more recent ones are used to better manage (in the face of) uncertainty that hasn’t been/cannot be reduced, at least for the moment.

One major commonality between both the old and new needs to be highlighted. While typically not taken as such, both are less a shorthand than clues for what to do ahead.

–By way of example, handbooks detailing how to respond to unpredictable floods and famines were written by and for administrators in Imperial China. Over the course of some thousand years, handbooks started to group together what had been learned into tables of maxims (sometime cast in rhyme) for ease of reference by users.

Handbooks “are quick to insist, however, that using the tables is not sufficient in the long run: for the professional administrator they are rather a ‘clue’. . .that indicates where to go in the more complete texts,” writes Pierre-Étienne Will, the most recent and comprehensive bibliographer of handbooks (2020, XLIV). This status of heuristic-as-clue is to alert us to important omissions that require reference beyond any shorthand exposition (Ibid, 568). Occasions when a map proves imperfect and misleading are all too familiar.

Professor Will elaborates in an email: “’clue’ (yinxian 引線. . .) literally means ‘a thread that leads to…’, ‘that can be pulled to get…, or something of the sort. The same character yin is part of the words suoyin and yinde, meaning ‘index’, in modern Chinese. The tables or rhymes are like indexes to the complete texts.”

---

–I want to apply this notion of heuristic-as-clue more speculatively to the newer algorithms derived from big data. We’re told that, even though the algorithms are not based on models of known cause and effect, they identify complex, albeit opaque, correlations said to be worth relying upon.

But that stops short of the needful. The status of a heuristic as clue underscores that, just as with causal models, there’s also a great deal yet to puzzle out with correlations before going forward. Correlations are not just the start of an analysis. They also are in context and those contexts start the analysis as well. Correlations index spatial-temporal references to be pursued.

–There is no obvious point of entry when it comes to revealing the wider references. For purposes of illustration, start with the canonical index of fire, smoke. In the same way, the heat from server centers (some indeed call it “data exhaust”) indexes the large electricity usage in generating and updating algorithms. But context doesn’t stop there. Other clues are less spatial-temporal and more social for the heuristic inseparable from wider referential meanings.

Again, by way of example, the status of the algorithm-as-heuristic clues you into the underlying assumptions for using big dataset algorithms, not least of exemplify “trust.” Some say, e.g.:

• algorithms deliver the best result among the other methods and heuristics available;
• while not free of bias, they do a better job than others by virtue of the huge run of cases and calculations;
• some kind of result at the scale of big data is better than no result, plus the algorithmic result is often more timely; and
• anyway, there’s always a danger that the critics of big data algorithms take them more seriously than the users, like consumers who comparison-shop and then make their own decisions.

The wider point here is that the methodological duty of care in using heuristics means treating them as indexes of that which cannot be omitted, yet could have already been omitted, from analysis and practice when usefulness is the question.

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Principal sources

Pierre-Étienne Will (2020). “Introduction,” in: Handbooks and Anthologies for Officials in Imperial China: A descriptive and critical bibliography. Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands.

The notion of index in the sense of smoke and fire follows that of C.S. Pierce (“purse”), a founder of American pragmatism.

R. Machen and E. Nost (2021). “Thinking algorithmically: The making of hegemonic knowledge in climate governance.” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers: 1-15.

Julia Velkova (2021). “Thermopolitics of data: Cloud infrastructures and energy futures.” Cultural Studies.

Mike Featherstone, the left sociologist, writes: “For many academics in the social sciences and humanities, especially those influenced by cultural studies, what was seen as more important [than the possibility of a global culture] was to resist the violence of abstraction committed against the complexity of real life.”

Too right, I add.

Cease and desist orders should have been issued long ago against use of “wicked problems” so globally in the practice of policy analysis and management. As for academics, they too know that more nuanced sets of terms for complex policy problems are required than the originating “wicked” and “tame” dichotomy.

Fair enough, but good enough? Differentiation and nuance may actually reinforce a “there” that still isn’t there.

–How so?

My own answer is that wicked problems are best understood as part of a genre in literature, which enables very different statements and competing positions to be held without them being inconsistent at the same time. Literary and cultural critic, Michael McKeon (1987/2002), helps us here:

Genre provides a conceptual framework for the mediation (if not the “solution”) of intractable problems, a method for rendering such problems intelligible. The ideological status of genre, like that of all conceptual categories, lies in its explanatory and problem-“solving” capacities.

In McKeon’s formal terms, “the genre of the novel is a technique to engage epistemological and socio-ethical problems simultaneously, but with no particular commitment than that.”

Intractability appeared not only as the novel’s subject matter but also in the intermixed conventions of how these matters can be raised. This was the way nostalgia for a simpler past was categorized and talked about at the time.

–My view is that the literature on wicked problems is part and parcel of this longstanding genre. This literature’s content is not only about the intractable, but also its governing context is as historically tangled and conventionalized as that of the English novel. Masses of complexities take center place in wicked problems both by virtue of context and content (or force and field, if you prefer).

I am not saying wicked problems are fictitious (even so, there is the well-known truth in fiction). Rather, I am arguing that pinning wicked problems exclusively to their substance (e.g., wicked problems are defined by the lack of agreed-upon rules to solve them) misses the fact that the analytic category of wicked problems as such is highly rule-bound (e.g., by the historical conventions to articulate and to discuss such matters).

Again, how so? Return to the scholarly literature’s attempt to differentiate “wicked” and “tame” problems into more nuanced categories. Doing so is like disaggregating the English novel into romance, historical, gothic and other types. Such differentiation need not problematize the genre’s conventions. In fact, the governing conventions may become more complex for distinguishing the more complex content, thus reinforcing the genre as a vesselled intractability.

–So what? If wicked problems are to be better addressed, altogether different conventions and rules—what Wittgenstein famously called “language games”—will have to be found under which to recast these. . . . well, whatever they are to be called they wouldn’t be termed “intractable,” would they?

Wicked policy problem are complex problems that have yet to be recast in light of their very complexity. As with so much in contemporary policy and management, wicked problems end up as exaggerations: Even where they may be true as far as they go, the truth of the matter needs to be pushed further. Problems aren’t wicked when they are hard problems that profit from being left open.

Principal sources

McKeon, M. (1987/2002). The Origins of the English Novel, 1600-1740. 15th Anniversary Edition. The Johns Hopkins University Press: Baltimore and London.

On complexity enabling recasting, see blog entries: “Complexity is the enemy of the intractable,” “Even if what you say is true as far as it goes, it doesn’t go far enough…,” “Triangulating complexity for policy and management,” “Incompletenesses,” and “Poverty and war”

The opposite of the coping herder, who can only react to external shocks, is the resilient herder, who bounces back from the same. But how true is that? Both occur at the individual level, and the opposite of the individual is the collective (think “team situational awareness”), not a different individual with different behavior.

We observed reliability professionals in critical infrastructures undertaking four types of resilience at their system level, each varying by stage of operations in the system:

Table 1. Different Types of System Resilience

• Reliability professionals adjusting back to within de jure or defacto bandwidths to continue normal operations (precursor resilience);

• Restoration from disrupted operations (temporary loss of service) back to normal operations by reliability professionals (restoration resilience);

• Immediate emergency response (its own kind of resilience) after system failure but often involving others different from system’s reliability professionals; and

• Recovery of the system to a new normal by reliability professionals along with others (recovery resilience)

Resilience this way is a set of options, processes and strategies deployed by the system’s real-time managers and tied to the state of system operations in which they find themselves. Resilience differs depending on whether or not the large sociotechnical system is in normal operations versus disrupted operations versus failed operations versus recovered operations. (Think of pastoralist systems here as critical infrastructure.)

Resilience, as such, is not a single property of the system to be turned on or off as and when needed. Nor is it, as a system feature, reducible to anything like a “resilient” herder, though such herders exist.

Why does it matter that resilience is a systemwide set of options, processes and strategies? What you take to be the loss of the herd, a failure in pastoralist operations that you say comes inevitably with drought, may actually be perceived and treated by pastoralists themselves as a temporary disruption after which operations are to be restored. While you, the outsider, can say their “temporary” really isn’t temporary in this day and age, it is their definition of “temporary” that matters when it comes to their real-time reliability.

To return to Table 1, herder systems that maintain normal operations are apt to demonstrate what we call precursor resilience. Normal doesn’t mean what happens when there are no shocks to the system. Shocks happen all the time, and normal operations are all about responding to them in such a way as to ensure they don’t lead to temporary system disruption or outright system failure. Formally, the precursors of disruption and failure are managed for, and reliably so. Shifting from one watering point, when an interfering problem arises there, to another just as good or within a range of good-enough is one such strategy. Labelling this, “coping,” seriously misrepresents the active system management going on.

Pastoralist systems, nevertheless, can and do experience temporary stoppages in their service provision—raiders seize livestock, remittances don’t arrive, offtake of livestock products is interrupted, random lightning triggers veldt fires—and here the efforts at restoring conditions back to normal is better termed restoration resilience. Access to other grazing areas (or alternative feed stocks or alternative sources of livelihood) may be required in the absence of fallbacks normally available.

So too resilience as a response to shocks looks very different by way of management strategies when the shocks lead to system failure and onward recovery from that failure. In this case, an array of outside, inter-organizational resources and personnel—public, private, NGO, humanitarian—are required in addition to the resources of the pastoralist herders. These recovery arrangements and resources are unlike anything marshaled by way of precursor or restoration resiliencies within the herder communities themselves.

There is nothing predetermined in the Table 1 sequence. Nothing says it is inevitable that the failed system recovers to a new normal (indeed the probability of system failure in recovery can be higher than in normal operations in large sociotechnical systems). It is crucial, nevertheless, to distinguish recovery from the new normal. To outsiders, it may look like some of today’s pastoralist systems are in unending recovery, constantly trying to catch up with one disaster after another.

The reality may be that the system is already at a new normal, operating to a standard of reliability quite different than you might think. (Imagine that wet season grazing areas were magically restored to pastoralists who already adapted to their disappearance. Real-time herder options would increase, but would the collective response be altogether positive now? That question can only be answered if you are first clear about what is the actual system being managed now and the operating standard of reliability to which it is being managed before the restoration.)

If you think of resilience in a pastoralist system as “the system’s capability in the face of its high reliability mandates to withstand the downsides of uncertainty and complexity as well as exploit the upsides of new possibilities and opportunities that emerge in real time,” then they are able to do so because of being capable to undertake the different types of resiliencies listed here, contingent on the stage of operations herders as a collectivity find themselves.

Or to put the key point from the other direction, a system demonstrating precursor resilience, restoration resilience, emergency response coordination and recovery resilience is the kind of system better able to withstand the downsides of shocks and uncertainty and exploit their upsides. Here too, nothing predetermines that every pastoralist system will exhibit all four resiliencies, if and when their states of operation change.

The above raises a methodological point. If I and my colleagues can come up with four different types of system resilience—forget about the empirically different articulations of resilience at the micro and meso levels—we might pause over how useful any catchall term “resilience” is. More positively, when using the term resilience the burden of proof is on each of us to empirically differentiate the term for the case at hand.

To summarize, any notion that resilience is a single property or has a dominant definition or is there/not there or is best exemplified at the individual level is incorrect and misleading when system reliability is at stake.

Principal sources

E. Roe and P.R. Schulman (2016). Reliability and Risk: The Challenge of Managing Interconnected Infrastructures. Stanford University Press: Stanford, CA.

E. Roe (2020). A New Policy Narrative for Pastoralism? Pastoralists as Reliability Professionals and Pastoralist Systems as Infrastructure, STEPS Working Paper 113, STEPS Centre: Brighton, UK (available online at https://steps-centre.org/publication/a-new-policy-narrative-for-pastoralism/)