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Bill
Phil
wrote:
There's a good amount of growth these days based on trying to improve
efficiency,
workflow, best practices, processes, etc. Part of the
quality movement is about gains
made in eliminating waste and
eliminating reviews, and instead having quality as an
up-front and
intrinsic effort.
[PH] That's good and bad.
Refinement is wonderful in itself in lots of ways, but it's inherently a
diminishing return endeavor, like polishing. You do the easy
gains first and then successively smaller gains take increasing
work.
Wow, that's a pretty low expectation for efficiency and quality. In some
ways it sounds like
the complaints about Total Quality Management from the
Six Sigma crowd -
that the former focused on the easy gains in a localized
area (technical only, say),
while ignoring the organizational needs as a
whole. So you might have a spruced
up assembly line that runs really well
but the organization needs a better sales force.
Combine this with an
approach that gets IT focused on business processes with
enterprise
systems, improved supply chain, better mobile access to sales support
in
the field, better customer ability to configure and order...
[PH] Well our scenarios are different. You seem
to be describing a constant resource being used to enable growth produced
by creating emergent levels
of reorganization. I was assuming that the
difference between growth (positive exponent increase) and refinement
(negative exponent increase) was clear and you seem to be using good
English in a way that makes it unclear which we're talking about.
My description was meant for the later.
Certainly the progress from dragging a
hoe, letting a yak do it, letting a machine do it
has been more than
"diminishing returns". It's been exponential returns.
[PH] Right, of course not, it's leveraging a fixed amount
of labor using quantum shifts in technique.
If you extend
the refinement to across-the-board: getting the crops to
market (Kenyan roses through Amsterdam to the
US and Britain), improved
crop survivability through fertilizer and genetic modification, etc.,
better handling of the company's finances through other methods, better
user service
through automated info & purchases via the Internet, etc.,
you get something completely
opposite of "smaller gains taking increasing
work". Now, at some point maybe that
efficiency process hits a wall, but 10
years ago that wall would have been predicted
as much closer.
[PH] Well,
yes, that's related to my mention that historically it has always
appeared that the new system taking over the old one was on shaky
foundations. I fully accept that there are deep perceptual
problems in judging where the limits to explosive change actually
are. I'm just quite convinced from what I think is an set of
principles that completely avoid the perceptual problems, that pushing a
growth system as a whole to a point of failure is highly
dangerous.
[PH] Can
you say that pushing exponential growth to failure is a benign means of
approaching our limits on earth?
Watch
microprocessor development. Yes, its current way of improvement has
some
expected diminishing returns, but combining those with hybrid
techniques, going off
into nanotech, biocomputing, etc., there are still a
few tricks up their sleeves. Progress
may stop being linear - it may become
much more discrete as we shuffle around looking
for disruptive methods vs.
enhancements - but it will quite likely continue.
[PH] As I
understand it there is still considerable room for increases in
raw computational power, even without the radical increases some talk about
conceptually. That may facilitate a greater ability to
respond the the exploding side effects of growth, or just help explode the
side effects leaving everyone in the dark as to how to
respond. It really depends on our
intent.
[PH] Think
about what limits the growth of living things. An
animal's organs don't stop growing because they grow till the animal
starves or can't walk, or because the skin gets so tight it
prevents animals from eating. It's not from outside
causes. Living systems very largely stop their growth at some
internal point of completing the design, when they do in fact switch from
explosive growth to maturation and refinement. It's
that 2nd step after the 1st that our global system is built to be unable
to take. The unified world master plan is to encourage
investors to build whatever they think maximizes their profits,
compounding returns to build their wealth exponentially.
It's that magical trick for creating revolutionary change, the compounding of
returns, that I think is truly dangerous to push to it's natural failure
limit.
I remember hand-soldering shops 25 years ago,
which were completely replaced by
wave soldering, which is now being
replaced by reflow soldering. Aside from the little
issue of inhaling lead
fumes, it makes the electronics business much more flexible
and
affordable.
[PH] yes, we can see long chains of positive
sign exponential increases in productivity from emergent new
systems. It's been going on for 5-600 years ( with an
accumulative productivity increase on the order of 1 billion!! ) and
we're kind of used to it. Still, I think I can build a
case of physical necessity as strong as the ones for entropy or conservation
of energy that it's a dead end into an impenitrable wall of complexity if we
pursue it to failure.
Steel was one area where we'd
supposedly hit technological peaks. During the 1980's
world production
levelled off at 40 million tons/month, in the 1990's at a bit over 60 million
tons,
and now we've jumped to 100 million tons. But often the old players
aren't set up to take
advantage of new methods and technologies - they have
too much invested in the older tech
and too many relationships, so that
innovation would be cannibalizing their own profits.
Instead, it's the new
players that are often able to reach new levels of efficiency that
allow
them to compete with the entrenched leaders. If they didn't, they'd
never get off the ground.
But improvement can mean efficient in production,
size, location, response, quality, diversity, etc.
[PH] all
absolutely correct, but we still can't find peace as the sorcerer's
apprentice. We've got to know when to cool
it.
Major layoffs by large
companies these days are often
a sign of improved efficiency (and
sometimes go hand-in-hand with additional hiring
of different types of
positions).
[PH] That's the magic of the serendipitous
growth we've had for the past 500 years, that putting people out of work
by innovation has had an net effect of putting everyone to work at higher
wages. That stopped in 1970. Check the
charts.
I've checked
the charts - computer wages are rising even as offshoring continues.
I
won't say it's all roses, but in general, it's producing wealth and more
better-paying
jobs. We're also putting the rest of the world to work at
better wages. Maybe we'd
rather be sending them charity checks, but this
version is more sustainable, and they
get to grow their own economies as
well. But it's not evenly spread.
[PH] It's the average wages I was
thinking of. Women's wages, though still lower than
men's, have a mildly positive exponential shape over the past 35 years,
but real men's wages are virtually flat. Of course an
aggregate figure hides many stories, but the lofty theory that making
investors rich by putting people out of work actually makes everyone richer
was only true before 1970. We've continued to pour money into the
hands of investors for them to fix the problem, ignoring that they
seem not to be investing in that way anymore...
The US has been doing a pretty good job of adapting to that change,
and getting more used to
continual obsolescence. In some ways we're
reaching a philosophical outlook antithetical
to traditional
Amero-European society, in that stability becomes a barrier to
progress.
[PH] yes sort of, if it were an infinitely extendable
game. Only our images of it are purely a game, however.
For example, the US is presently transferring the ownership
of our productive assets overseas in exchange for current consumption at
an accelerating rate now my rough guess around 3% a year (a state
and a half). It's bringing us a lot of
prosperity. Is that
good? This is more a political
issue that's separate from the complexity issue (IMHO), so I'll leave it to
the side.
[PH] I don't think the trade deficit is that
political. No one is rooting for it, for sure, and no one
seems to know what to really say about it either except it is very strange to
have something so fundamental go so suddenly lopsided. It doesn't
seem like a fluctuation that'll flip back the other way, but something
that reverses as a consequence of major events. It's just odd that
we're balancing the books by giving away assets and not doing much to stop
it.
Yes, but only half way. One of the fascinating aspects of our societal
response lags failure is the 'stop fixing it' movement of the new right
over the past 40 years. People had the choice and were drawn into the
illusion that the intrusiveness of government response to the complexity
of the world we're building would be solved by dismantling the
government response, rather than finding a better way to address our
growing problems. My observation is that every complaint has some
validity and should be constructively combined rather than separated.
We've done a better job at dampening economic cycles than we have at
dampening political
cycles. I think we're farther away from
over-idealistic impressions of what government can do,
which is good,
but now we have idealistic impressions of what government can't do.
Instead
it would be better to have good models of what factors make for
effective government in the
real world, including the recurring motions
of balances and corruption of power, .
[PH] Little will help if the complex systems we're
driving ever harder to perform miracles go
turbulent. No doubt better government would result from
combining the insights into common problems from different points of
view. I think it's directly symptomatic of our being pushed
over the edge mentally by the collision of growth and earth that we've
settled on a government that builds grand fantasies from a single view
instead of investing in research and planning. The business
cycles of the past were irritating but they gave us pause and a chance for
change. The fact that now we can go ever faster without
interruption has a hidden drawback in that it lets things get much
further out of whack before the correction.
One of the most stressful things you can do to a machine is stop it and
start it again,
unless it needs repair or particular maintenance.
[PH] Well,
an explosively expanding machine being run by rather short sighted humans may
be a special case. Our machine is essentially
blind and groping along. At the moment were about 50 years
behind in responding to global warming. It's not because
the problem wasn't understandable from a 20's 30's 40's 50's or 60's point of
view, but because we just were not thinking that we might need to look
anywhere near the horizon of our impacts. That concept was surely
well within the sophistication of business planners even well before
that. We just didn't do it.
I would think we'd want
less cross-coupling of different parts, and instead to have
some pieces
changing while others are quiescent. Do we all have to take off on
Sunday
for society to function? Or do we all simply need a day or two of rest
every
week or so, and stagger the particular days? Is there an innate
problem with the world
going faster? The earth is spinning some 1000
miles/hour, and yet I hardly notice it
except when the sun goes
down.
[PH] The marvelous thing to me about natural systems is their
flexibility and resilience and how they work so smoothly even while
networking vast collections of disconnected
parts. They mostly work with an 'any ol time' delivery
schedule and use it with amazing efficiency where every last thing gets
used. We don't know how to do that yet, but the potential is
there. Our approach tends to be to focus on a single output
and pull out all the stops, use it up and build something else. I
guess I'm making both a kind of aesthetic value judgment and just a simple
practical observation. If you're not in a hurry, everything's
relaxed, but most humans are always in a big hurry,... How that
tendency translates into our having built a life support system designed to
change ever faster until we make enough mistakes to stop it is very concretely
traceable. It could, if anyone wanted, be redesigned with some
free market complex systems design to work in new ways that would be
both more creative and actually sustainable.
We get back to Al Gore's question. We've
got the knowledge and a clear mission with otherwise unacceptable
consequences. Why does that not provide us with the information we
need? I think it's partly that no one is yet saying we should
also correct the underlying. Investing for sustainability is not
an investment objective.
I imagine it would also fall into the "sky
continually falling" motif, and without too much
stasis or unilateral
motion. If that's true, a biparty system tends to drift off into the
extremes too
often in the cycle, whereas a multiparty system would be
better at balancing and instead of a heavy
pendulum, the weight stays
towards the center of the zone. But then maybe that's our odd advantage
vs.
Europe, where we tack radically left and right and move much faster
than if stayed a center
course.
[PH] I haven't had a lot of chance to
observe those systems but, didn't Germany have a parliament and get a
little carried away a while back? I think the core problem is
not entirely solved by having an open hearing of diverse points of
view. If social movements develop with a winner-take-all
attitude powered by a long term campaign of character assassination for
its opposition, no structure will protect.
Re: Germany, I think I was referring to modern Western-like
non-critical-crisis governments, i.e. since 1952 or so. As far as modeling
governments,
I think it has less to do with open _expression_ and more to do
with competing sets of beliefs or even power-bases and how they align, and how
the system
allows them to align.
[PH] I look at the complex system
glue that animates and holds together power centers and social
movements as a definite physical reality. My observation
method does not tell me everything, but provides a framework on which
other particulars and generalities can be hung and connected. It's how I
organize system observation based on the rudimentary model for the four
developmental curves. [ ¸¸¸¸.·´ ¯ `·.¸¸¸¸
] It works pretty well.
Cheers,
Phil
Henshaw
¸¸¸¸.·´ ¯
`·.¸¸¸¸
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