Phil wrote:
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?
[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.
[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.
[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.
There are different definitions of "failure". You seem to take it that
we're trying to
grow until we explode. Many would think of growing until it stops
pleasing.
I like a big car but I hate finding parking. I like a big house but I
hate cleaning.
I see us as growing, refining, culling. I don't see problems on the
horizon as
"failure" - I see them as more issues to deal with in normal
progression. Nuclear
war between governments is less a problem, global warming is more of
one.
But if we run out of fossil fuels, global warming's not a problem. In
any case,
possibly half the world's population understands that fuel supply and
global
warming are important issues, which should be enough to get something
useful
happening.
Other than that, I'm not convinced fast growth is a problem. I'm
waiting for
digital paper to make my books more portable (I'm halfway there, half my
books are digital, but my laptop's too bulky). I'm looking forward to
the
next more usable wave of search engines, Web 2.0 features, mobile
devices and electronics. Cheaper, better color printing - that would be
good.
Banking is solved, I have ATM's and on-line banking. Secure, honest
digital
voting with a paper trail - that will help. Faster, more modern trains
would
help (mag-lev in every pot?). Other than that, needs are basic, and
little
more rushed than those of 100 years ago. When I want to walk or go
to the country, I go. When I want a city scene, I stay here.
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...
So are men subsidizing women in the workplace? Cool. Are more women
choosing to stay home
in a return to 1960's norms? Are we prospering not through pay but
through more lifestyle choices,
better access to health care, more gadgets and information? I remember
having about 1-2 pairs of
shoes at a time in a middle class family. Now my kids have 8 or 9,
though it's affordable (okay,
a lot come from second hand shops, but that's wealth as well). My, kids
now have skateboards, snowboards,
ice skates, roller blades, bikes. Every house has 2-3 TVs, a hundred
channels, walkmans with large
music collections, DVD & VHS players, computer games, etc. There
are even large health food
supermarkets now, much more affordable than the small vitamin-focused
shops of 20 years ago.
Ain't progress grand? Wages may be flat, real purchasing power isn't. A
2006 van blows away a
1970 van in so many ways. And while we may not appreciate it, the work
that we do in 2006 is
a lot less sweaty.
Part of our wealth went into security. I'm here in Prague, there's no
worry about Russian troops
from the east, and there's little need to worry about a general
all-encompassing conflict.
Any terrorist attack is pretty well assured to be small potatoes in the
scheme of things - painful
for those affected, but much less than an Indian Ocean tsunami in both
intensity and duration.
A Russian invasion or similar wouldn't have been.
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.
I meant that I don't see it as having to do with complexity theory or
technology growth, that it has more to do with politics in DC,
and I don't really want to talk politics of that sort.
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.
[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.
First, Al's focused on 1 problem - good for him, but...
1) If you're in the Congo, you've got more pressing problems than
global warming - you have
a war that's killed more than 3 million people in the last 6 years,
rapes every day, literally backbreaking
work, extreme poverty, etc. Global warming also might help most of
Africa's climate if it brings more
rain, which it seems to be doing. And you might have little to change
to effect Global Warming.
2) If you're in Europe, Global Warming seems to be bringing more rain
and more cold. Kind of odd,
but seems to be not the most beneficial change for the economy (as well
as people's comfort, including mine).
But if you use mostly public transportation and recycle and pay
$6/gallon of gas, what else are you supposed to do?
3) If you're in Indonesia, even though rising waters would be a big
problem, earthquakes and tsunamis
are more pressing, as well as economic development.
4) If you're in China, you're spewing out gasses but you've got a
mostly backwards undereducated poor
population to deal with. Cut back on growth and you might easily get
revolution, and not necessarily
a pro-democracy everybody-happy-now one that leaves people more
prosperous. And you already
cut back on number of children.
I'm also not sure why you place this at the investor's feet. That's
only one part of the cycle.
Who's the buyer? How about "sustainable buying"? If your liver were
failing, you'd stop buying alcohol.
A free market is not the only "institution". John Dunning notes that
it's expensive to maintain a proper
free market, and that there are structural and endemic problems in
markets to deal with. Structural
problems should be solved if possible, whereas endemic ones should be
fixed only if the costs of
fixing are less than the cost of the problem. An externality like
global warming is an endemic problem,
but the issue with fixing it is that you incur costs in other areas.
The solution is non-obvious and painful
even if the problem is pressing. Sometimes the government should step
in, sometimes not.
What are the market costs and market gains of Sarbanes-Oxley? What are
the costs vs. gains on
the new hazardous substance law (RHoS) that's now in place in the EU?
Was that the right thing to
do for an economy that's been plagued with slow growth? How many jobs
will be lost, how many
products will be denied, how will that decrease competitiveness and
lifestyle - these are the real questions
that have to be answered in formulating policy.
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