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On The Collapse of Complex Societies
One of the mailing lists that I'm on had a great short essay about the disastrous decision that societies can make - and their consequences. The author is Jared Diamond, who also wrote Guns, Germs and Steel (First Slashdot book review was that book), and is still one of the most interesting books I've read in a while.
Fisheries are being depleted around the planet. In each case that the problem is identified ahead of time, the local fishing industry mobilizes to prevent restrictions on their own fishing. They always find some other cause to blame for the loss of fish populations - in Japan, they blame it on whale protection laws; in the Maritime Provinces of Canada, they blamed it on environmental policies. In no case did they accept overfishing as responsible, until it was too late.
Now, the North Sea fisheries are facing the same threat. And predictably, the fishing industries their are in deep denial, insisting that quotas on fishing "threaten their way of life." A group of former fishers from New Brunswick actually travelled to the UK to testify that, in fact, it was quite conceivable that overfishing was responsible, and to beg the British fishing industry to not be as stupid as they had been.
I think this is the key to poor decision making in groups - it's group-delusion, strengthened by fear of challenging group consensus, and fed by short-term self-interest.
It's a good thing that modern loggin companies plant new trees when after they cut them down. Too bad a lot of enviro-wackos forget that part.
They plant commercially viable species, and harvest them at the optimum ROI age (15-30 years). A healthy forest has a variety of species at various stages of maturity. A commercial plantation is no more a forest than a swimming pool is a wetland.
Remain calm! All is well!
Society is the aggregation of the decisions we make as individuals.
That's more true now than it has been for most of our history. On some level that's always true, but I doubt keeping Saddam in power was truly the will of the Iraqi people.
A lot of factors, not least of which is governmental power being vested in a few or even one person, bend the decisions the "society" would make if it was in some hypothetical "pure" state. (I personally interpret Arrow's Theorum to imply that there is no such thing as one clear "voice of the society" no matter how you slice it. YMMV, but it's not an unreasonable corrolary.)
But even now it's not completely true. The closest thing to a pure "society is the aggregation of decisions we make as individuals" would be a pure democracy, which breaks down and forms a tyranny of the majority.
The aggregations of decisions we make as individuals has an impact, but in the final analysis if Jack T. Ass, owner of a large logging interest, decides to clear cut a county in Montana and does it before the law (i.e., "the rest of us") even notices, then the environmental damage has occurred, regardless of how the rest of the individuals feel about it.
The problem with any kind of "public" resource is that it doesn't belong to everyone -- it belongs to noone. Noone cares enough about it to protect or conserve it. Everyone just wants to grab as big a piece as possible.
What an... interesting view of things.
So, I presume that you'd like to argue that Yellowstone, the Grand Canyon, etc. should be privatized - because obviously them being National Parks (which are de facto public property managed by the National Park Service) means that nobody cares about them.
Frankly, when it comes to individuals they generally act in the most self improving way possible. If I owned a few hundred acres of trees I may be tempted to sell the rights to log them to someone for a few million. After all, they're my trees, and I can do what I want with them.
On the otherhand, there's some very large swaths of land near my house that won't ever be logged... they're part of the Chatahoochee National Park system. While other greenspace all around is being cut down to put in new subdivisions, this land (which was either purchased by the Federal government, or by local interest groups and then donated to the government) isn't going to sprout McMansions anytime soon.
I'm not a fan of big government, but claiming that individual rights would solve everything is a load of crap. I can choose to pollute my bit of land afterall, and then say that I was within my rights to do so since it was my land. Funny thing though, eco systems don't respect legal borders.
Groups have emergent properties that you can't predict by looking at individuals.
A mob doesn't act like an individual multiplied by a thousand. Any single person who acted like one one-thousandth of a mob would be institutionalized.
One generality about large organizations is that they're inflexible. They're like computer programs -- they may perform well or poorly at the problem they're designed for, but give them unexpected input or a novel situation and they crash.
William Livingston wrote an interesting book about this in 1988, called "Have Fun At Work". He points out that when you toss a complex problem at a system that doesn't know how to deal with it, some predictable malfunctions happen. One is that the real problem becomes taboo for discussion. Another is that all proposed actions make the problem worse. Want examples? Consider the "War on Drugs", or your workplace.
The cure he proposes is to implement tightly coupled feedback cycles. For example, one software company bills its business units for the tech support calls that come in about the software they produce.
I'd also suggest keeping organizations small enough that it's tolerable for them to die. One of the advantages of real capitalism would be that when (not if) a company fails to adapt to change, it ceases to exist. An extreme version of this point of view was Jefferson's idea that there should be a revolution every twenty years.
Take a poll and you will probably find that a majority of people believe the SUVs create a lot of pollution. Yet, everybody and their dog wants one.
:-)
Automakers promote SUVs because they are more profitable than econoboxes. The government cooperates, keeping oil prices low. Individuals buy what they are led to believe they need, and what they can afford.
A majority of people probably think that the world is or is becoming over-populated. Yet we, continue to crank out children at an enourmous rate.
Western countries are barely cranking out children at a break-even rate. Only countries where cheap labor is beneficial have a high birth rate.
As a group, we recognize problems and can even see solutions. But as individuals we are not willing to do anything about it.
Many groups can easily see the problems of other groups, and want to do something about it. When they do, it's called "war".
I don't recall butterflies being mentioned in "Guns, Germs, & Steel." Perhaps I missed it.
The point of the book, in case you missed it, is that the classic argument (they're savages, we're civilized) is not a scientific approach to the question of why certain achievements occurred in Eurasia rather than Africa, the Americas, or Oceania.
In fact, the arguments are not deterministic. The advantages that peoples had on a particular continent did not a priori determine their success, but does provide an explanation for why some societies could "advance" more rapidly than others.
If you actually study attractors in nonlinear dynamic systems, what's popularly called "chaos theory," you'll see that what you actually have are quasi-stable attractors surrounded by regions of long-term unpredictability.
If you're near an attractor, it will take a lot to dislodge you from near that attractor. A butterfly flapping its wings won't cause a hurricane, but a volcano erupting on the other side of the plant might.
But what people usually forget is that there can be multiple attractors, and if you're not that close to one attractor it may not take much to push you over the edge to another attractor.
That's what happened at Easter Island. Cutting down the first tree caused no harm. Saving the last tree wouldn't have prevented the massive population crash. The details would have been changed in each case, but in a century you would still have ended up with a heavily forested island or a stripped one.
But during a long period in the middle they could have changed the outcome *in either direction* by seemingly small changes. That's the chaotic realm - it was impossible to where any simple change would lead. What's the consequences of cutting down a single tree? What if it's used to shore up the ground in the forest it came from?
What does that mean to us today? That we need to be careful since we're clearly in a chaotic realm and we can't predict the long term consequences of our actions. Some of this is due to natural variability (e.g., did you realize that it's been an unusually long time since a massive volcanic eruption, and that alone has driven global warming to a large extent?), some of it is due to human neglect (overfishing, agricultural monoculturism). Some of our problems are due to prior solutions - our artificial fertilizers prevented global starvation in the late 19th century but has now spread throughout the entire biosphere, resulting in plant growth and algae blooms even far from human activities.
N.B., that doesn't mean we shouldn't try to change policies that will push us back to a desirable attractor. It means that there's no "final answer"... and that the consequences if we fail can be disasterous. It's not like we haven't had clear warnings (Easter Island, the Irish potato famine, smallpox ripping through the new world or syphillis (IIRC) through the old one.)
For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong. -- H L Mencken
I read the book, and I didn't find any "butterfly effect"-style determinism in it. Diamond's explanations for why civilizations rise and fall seem perfectly sensible to me. Would you seriously suggest that a civilization that was lucky enough to rise in an area blessed with an order of magnitude greater arable land (Eurasia) than another (Australia) would have a harder time developing a leisure class, with its concomitant art and science? What might explain it, then? Racial superiority? Manifest destiny?
Guns, Germs, and Steel doesn't nitpick particular instances in history and say, "This is where everything else inevitably sprang from." Diamond's book simply says: People tend to go where food is. If there's enough food, they stay, forming a mass. Masses of people tend to interact in interesting ways, producing culture. Positive feedback loops tend to develop. Cultures that miss out on the effects of the feedback tend to be dominated in the future. That's a powerful enough set of axioms to explain a great deal of history, without being mechanistic enough that it claims to determine how history will unroll into the future. Note the emphasis on large-scale aggregations of humans, long time scales, large land areas, etc. in the book. No butterflies required. Plenty of room for free humans to try and leave their mark in history.
Simply stating that assigning artificial costs to compensate for market externalities is not sufficient to solving the problems associated with long-term ecological and environmental change. Diamond is pointing out that recognizing the costs and properly assessing and the potential costs, are hampered by the psychological and sociological structures embedded within society. He's pointing out that economics alone cannot solve the problem. Because the root systemic causes of the problems don't lie only in the economic realm, but also in the psychological and sociological realm.
There is no trap so deadly as the trap you set for yourself
-Raymond Chandler, The Long Goodbye