Schizophrenic links: pessimism, optimism, more pessimism

Some interesting material from The New Scientist

• Pessimism: Rio+20 declaration talks fail almost before they begin The title pretty much says it all. But, for the gory details of the backroom negotiations among the US, Venezuela, Canada, Russia and Japan to kill any major deal, read the story.
• Optimism: Peak planet: Are we starting to consume less? A reasonably thorough assessment of the argument that humanity's ever-rising environmental impact is about to go into reverse. The article discusses value change and 'dematerialization' but places the greatest hope in new technologies. 

Will we grasp the nettle? The Danish agricultural economist Ester Boserup argued that throughout history, population growth and the pressure of shortages have been necessary spurs to technological developments, which seem to arrive just in time to avert the sort of disasters that exercised the likes of Malthus and Ehrlich. The signs are that we already have the know-how to live long and prosper without demanding ever more from a finite planet. The question is whether we will make the decisions to realise that promise before "just in time" becomes "just too late".

• More Pessimism: The fixation on Boserup and the notion that "we already have the know-how to live long and prosper without demanding ever more from a finite planet" runs afoul of deeper analyses of our current condition. The Ingenuity Gap, for example, suggests that the increasing complexity and interconnectedness of our problems has created a situation where our requirement for ingenuity has outstripped our ability to supply it.

Two new World Bank reports

The past few days has seen the release of a couple of interesting World Bank reports. Yes, they have been associated with some rather misplaced policy initiatives (I'm looking at you, shock therapy!), but they do a good job of bringing together global information and, arguably, have been tarred for the sins of their twin sibling, the IMF.

The first report, Toward a Green, Clean, and Resilient World for All: A World Bank Group Environment Strategy 2012-2022, lays out the Bank's vision of global environmental policy for the next decade. The general point of the report is to underscore the connection between environmental concerns -- particularly at the global scale -- and the Bank's main mission of poverty alleviation, particularly in the developing world. To this end, they articulate the need for a 'green, clean, and resilient world' defined as follows:

• "What do we mean by “green”? Green refers to a world in which natural resources are conserved and sustainably managed to improve livelihoods over time. It is a world in which ecosystems (both green and blue) are healthy and increase the economic returns from the activities they support—such as the fish-breeding and coastal protection services of coral reefs and the water filtering and soil protection services of forests. Other vital ecosystem services such as erosion regulation, carbon sequestration, and pest control are supported and protected. Subsoil assets are also leveraged to build other forms of wealth, such as productive and human capital. In all of this, the private sector uses natural resources sustainably as part of good business, creating jobs and contributing to long-term growth.
• "What do we mean by “clean”? Clean refers to a low-pollution, low-carbon world. This is a world in
  which cleaner air, land, water, and oceans enable people to lead healthy, productive lives. It is also
  a world in which cleaner production standards spur innovation—whether through reducing air
  pollution, addressing legacy pollution, or encouraging recycling. It is a world in which industries are built around clean technologies— either for energy, water, transportation, or housing—providing jobs, offering the potential of export-led growth, and contributing to sustainable economic development. It is a world in which the clean technologies and production methods used by the private sector meet or even exceed international standards—partly because of management choices, but also because regulation rewards clean technologies and because clients and investors seek it. It is a world in which governments and companies are held to account by people on their clean performance.
• “Resilient” means being prepared for shocks and adapting effectively to climate change. In a resilient
  world, countries are better prepared for more-frequent natural disasters, more-volatile weather patterns, and the long-term consequences of climate change. Healthy and well-managed ecosystems are more resilient and so play a key role in reducing vulnerability to climate change impacts. Climate resilience is integrated into urban planning and infrastructure development. Through effective social inclusion policies, countries and communities are better prepared to protect vulnerable groups and fully involve women in decision making.

The second report, What a Waste: A Global Review of Solid Waste Management, focuses on municipal waste. The world's cities currently generate around 1.3 billion tonnes of MSW a year, or 1.2kg per city-dweller per day, nearly half of which comes from OECD countries. That is predicted to rise to 2.2 billion tonnes by 2025, or 1.4kg per person. The Bank estimates China's urbanites will throw away 1.4 billion tonnes in 2025, up from 520m tonnes today. By contrast, America's urban rubbish pile will increase from 620m tonnes to 700m tonnes.

Rio + 20 in Nature

In the run up to the Rio+20 conference, the June 6 issue of Nature put together a fascinating set of articles assessing the current state of knowledge on the two issues that dominated the original Rio agenda: biodiversity and climate change.



1) In "Biodiversity and its Impact on Humanity" Cardinale et.al. review current understanding about the role of biodiversity in relation to ecosystem functioning and the provision of ecosystem services. Key findings re: ecosystem functioning:

• There is now unequivocal evidence that biodiversity loss reduces the efficiency by which ecological communities capture biologically essential resources, produce biomass, decompose and recycle biologically essential nutrients.
• There is mounting evidence that biodiversity increases the stability of ecosystem functions through time.
• The impact of biodiversity on any single ecosystem process is nonlinear and saturating, such that change accelerates as biodiversity loss increases.
• Diverse communities are more productive because they contain key species that have a large influence on productivity, and differences in functional traits among organisms increase total resource capture.
• Loss of diversity across trophic levels has the potential to influence ecosystem functions even more strongly than diversity loss within trophic levels.
• Functional traits of organisms have large impacts on the magnitude of ecosystem functions, which give rise to a wide range of plausible impacts of extinction on ecosystem function.
• The impacts of diversity loss on ecological processes might be sufficiently large to rival the impacts of many other global drivers of environmental change.
• Diversity effects grow stronger with time, and may increase at larger spatial scales.
• Maintaining multiple ecosystem processes at multiple places and times requires higher levels of biodiversity than does a single process at a single place and time.
• The ecological consequences of biodiversity loss can be predicted from evolutionary history.

The findings re: ecosystem services were more tentative:

• There is now sufficient evidence that biodiversity per se either directly influences (experimental evidence) or is strongly correlated with (observational evidence) certain provisioning and regulating services.... For provisioning services, data show that (1) intraspecific genetic diversity increases the yield of commercial crops; (2) tree species diversity enhances production of wood in plantations;
  (3) plant species diversity in grasslands enhances the production of fodder; and (4) increasing diversity of fish is associated with greater stability of fisheries yields. For regulating processes and services, (1) increasing plant biodiversity increases resistance to invasion by exotic plants; (2) plant pathogens, such as fungal and viral infections, are less prevalent in more diverse plant communities; (3) plant species diversity increases above ground carbon sequestration through enhanced biomass
  production (but see statement 2 concerning long-term carbon storage); and (4) nutrient mineralization and soil organic matter increase with plant richness.
• For many of the ecosystem services reviewed, the evidence for effects of biodiversity is mixed, and the contribution of biodiversity per se to the service is less well defined.
• For many services, there are insufficient data to evaluate the relationship between biodiversity and the service.
• For a small number of ecosystem services, current evidence for the impact of biodiversity runs counter to expectations.

2) In "A global synthesis reveals biodiversity loss as a major driver of ecosystem change" Hooper, et. al. summarize evidence showing that extinctions are altering key processes important to the productivity and sustainability of Earth’s ecosystems

3) In "Approaching a state shift in Earth’s biosphere" Barnosky et. al. review the basics of state shift theory, review the evidence relating to past planetary-scale critical transitions and state shifts, and examine research related to a number of contemporary global-scale forcing mechanisms: human population growth with attendant resource consumption, habitat transformation and fragmentation, energy production and consumption, and climate change.

4) The political/policy pieces -- documenting how poorly nations have done in realizing their 1992 promises and describing developments that hold out the potential for a more optimistic future -- are worth checking out as well, but they are significantly less interesting than the articles summarizing current scientific knowledge.

Mash up: Joseph Steiglitz, Edward Wilson and Bicycles

A miscellany of links:

Joseph Steiglitz, Thomas Kuhn and the state of economic theory

One of the central ideas in Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions was the recognition that scientific knowledge changes by evolving away from failed theories rather than toward truth. A large portion of the book is devoted to describing the processes whereby anomalies that are recognized (but largely ignored by the discipline) are transformed into central problems that can't be fixed through the puzzle solving process of normal science and, hence, necessitate a paradigm shift. In a recent interview, Joseph Steiglitz unleashes a devastating critique of economists, noting that discipline as a whole has failed to internalize the events of 08 in a manner that would serve as a stimulus for the reformulation of economic thinking.

Academic economists played a big role in causing the crisis. Their models were overly simplified, distorted, and left out the most important aspects. Those faulty models then encouraged policy-makers to believe that the markets would solve all the problems. ... After the crisis, you would have hoped that the academic profession had changed and that policy-making had changed with it and would become more skeptical and cautious. You would have expected that after all the wrong predictions of the past, politics would have demanded from academics a rethinking of their theories. I am broadly disappointed on all accounts. .... Within academia, those who believed in free markets before the crisis still do so today. A few people have shifted, and I want to give credit to them for saying: “We were wrong. We underestimated this or that aspect of our models.” But for the most part, the response was different. Believers in the free market have not revised their beliefs.

In the longer view, Steiglitz sees changes in economic thinking coming, potentially, from a generational shift in economists:

I think that change is really occurring with the young people. My young students overwhelmingly don’t understand how people could have believed in the old models. That is good. But on the other hand, many of them say that if you want to be an economist, you still have to deal with all the old guys who believe in their wrong theories, who teach those theories, and expect you to believe in them as well. So they choose not to go into those branches of economics.

Or, more ominously, from yet another crisis:

If my forecast about the consequences of austerity is correct, you will see a new round of protest movements. We had a crisis in 2008. We are now in the fifth year of crisis, and we haven’t solved it. There’s not even a light at the end of the tunnel. When we come to that conclusion, the discourse will change.
The European: The situation needs to be really bad before it will get better?
Stiglitz: Yes, I fear.

E.O. Wilson  On the Origin of the Arts

Among many interesting nuggets, Wilson argues the following:

Substantial evidence now exists that human social behavior arose genetically by multilevel evolution. If this interpretation is correct, and a growing number of evolutionary biologists and anthropologists believe it is, we can expect a continuing conflict between components of behavior favored by individual selection and those favored by group selection. Selection at the individual level tends to create competitiveness and selfish behavior among group members—in status, mating, and the securing of resources. In opposition, selection between groups tends to create selfless behavior, expressed in greater generosity and altruism, which in turn promote stronger cohesion and strength of the group as a whole.

An inevitable result of the mutually offsetting forces of multilevel selection is permanent ambiguity in the individual human mind, leading to countless scenarios among people in the way they bond, love, affiliate, betray, share, sacrifice, steal, deceive, redeem, punish, appeal, and adjudicate. The struggle endemic to each person’s brain, mirrored in the vast superstructure of cultural evolution, is the fountainhead of the humanities. A Shakespeare in the world of ants, untroubled by any such war between honor and treachery, and chained by the rigid commands of instinct to a tiny repertory of feeling, would be able to write only one drama of triumph and one of tragedy. Ordinary people, on the other hand, can invent an endless variety of such stories, and compose an infinite symphony of ambience and mood.

Steiglitz, in the earlier article, makes a parallel observation about the ambiguity the individual versus the collective within economic theory:

The European: What do you say to someone who argues thus: Demographic change and the end of the industrial age have made the welfare state financially unsustainable. We cannot expect to cut down on our debt without fundamentally reducing welfare costs in the long run.

Stiglitz: That is absurd. The question of social protection does not have to do with the structure of production. It has to do with social cohesion or solidarity. That is why I am also very critical of Draghi’s argument at the European Central Bank that social protection has to be undone. There are no grounds upon which to base that argument. The countries that are doing very well in Europe are the Scandinavian countries. Denmark is different from Sweden, Sweden is different from Norway – but they all have strong social protection and they are all growing. The argument that the response to the current crisis has to be a lessening of social protection is really an argument by the 1%

BICYCLES !!

After all the doom and gloom of the above, you need to check out the uplifting history of bicycle transportation in the Netherlands which explains how the Dutch got their cycle paths. 

Limits to Growth Revisited

It was forty years ago today,
Donella Meadows taught the band to play
They've been going in and out of style
But they're guaranteed to raise a smile.
So may I introduce to you
The act you've known for all these years,
Donella Meadows' Limits to Growth.


.... Well, truthfully, it was forty years ago on March 1, but close enough.

This book, which sold over ten million copies in various languages, was one of the earliest scholarly works to recognize that the world was fast approaching its sustainable limits. Forty years later, the planet continues to face many of the same economic, social, and environmental challenges as when the book was first published. Suitably, the event has spawned a number of retrospectives. The most fulsome occurred at the Smithsonian where the Club of Rome sponsored Perspectives on Limits to Growth: Challenges to Building a Sustainable Planet. Among the presentations were the following:

• Dennis Meadows It is too late for sustainable development
• Jørgen Randers Lessons of forty years of promoting limits to growth
• Lester Brown World on the Edge
• Doug Erwin Biodiversity: past, present and future
• Richard Alley Climate change and energy; challenges and opportunities
• Neva Goodwin Labor’s declining share and future quality of life
• Panel discussion moderated by Eva Pell, Under Secretary for Science, Smithsonian Institution 

The full nine hour program -- including 10 minutes watching the audience mill about before the first presentation -- is archived at the above link.

For those who would like their celebration served up in a more time efficient manner, journey on over to Resilience Science where Garry Peterson has two interesting posts: Forty Years of Limits to Growth and Paul Gilding talks about Limits to Growth which includes Gilding's recent Ted Talk.

Transformation, Vulnerability and Resilience

Emilio Moran poses an interesting question, what makes social ecological systems more vulnerable and less resilient?, in his recent article Transformation of social and ecological systems. The bulk of the article is a rather sweeping history of humanity aimed at emphasizing the unique nature of our current situation. In the conclusion, quoted after the break, Moran identifies the factors he sees as responsible for making current systems more vulnerable and less resilient: Hypercoherence, loss of redundancy, loss of trust and a sense of community, and the misuse of information by decision-makers.  Read on .....

Klinenberg: Going Solo

Sociologist Eric Klinenberg, author of the noted and controversial social autopsy of the 1995 Chicago heat wave, has just published Going Solo, a fascinating study of a relatively under-discussed demographic trend -- living alone. A variety of the studies findings are highlighted in his op-ed piece One's a Crowd:

MORE people live alone now than at any other time in history. ... The decision to live alone is common in diverse cultures whenever it is economically feasible. Although Americans pride themselves on their self-reliance and culture of individualism, Germany, France and Britain have a greater proportion of one-person households than the United States, as does Japan. ....

The mere thought of living alone once sparked anxiety, dread and visions of loneliness. But those images are dated. Now the most privileged people on earth use their resources to separate from one another, to buy privacy and personal space.

Living alone comports with modern values. It promotes freedom, personal control and self-realization — all prized aspects of contemporary life.

It is less feared, too, for the crucial reason that living alone no longer suggests an isolated or less-social life. After interviewing more than 300 singletons (my term for people who live alone) during nearly a decade of research, I’ve concluded that living alone seems to encourage more, not less, social interaction.

Paradoxically, our species, so long defined by groups and by the nuclear family, has been able to embark on this experiment in solo living because global societies have become so interdependent. Dynamic markets, flourishing cities and open communications systems make modern autonomy more appealing; they give us the capacity to live alone but to engage with others when and how we want to and on our own terms.

In fact, living alone can make it easier to be social, because single people have more free time, absent family obligations, to engage in social activities.
....
Today five million people in the United States between ages 18 and 34 live alone, 10 times more than in 1950. But the largest number of single people are middle-aged; 15 million people between ages 35 and 64 live alone. Those who decide to live alone following a breakup or a divorce could choose to move in with roommates or family. But many of those I interviewed said they chose to live alone because they had found there was nothing worse than living with the wrong person.

Systems: Economic and Ecological

Two items worth contemplating:

1. Simon Johnson in The Libertarian and the Lobbyists explores the role of government regulation (or lack thereof) on the recent financial crash. Of particular interest is the discussion of the findings from two recent IMF reports by Prachi Mishra analyzing lobbying practices in the US.
   

   Legislators, of course, have different preferences about what kinds of laws to support, which can make it hard to study mechanisms of political influence precisely. But Igan and Mishra approach the problem in a clever way – they look for instances when elected officials switched their position on legislative proposals that surfaced more than once. And they devote a lot of effort to figuring out what caused this switch. ...
   A big increase in lobbying expenditures helps to persuade legislators to switch their votes. And “whether any of the lobbyists working on a bill also worked for a legislator in the past sways the stance on that bill in favor of deregulation.” It is deregulation, of course, that financial firms want – fewer rules and less oversight of any kind. And it really is all about whom you know, and how you know them. In particular, your value as a lobbyist seems to depend very highly on whom you worked with in the past. Igan and Mishra find “spending an extra dollar is almost twice as effective in switching a legislator’s position if the lobbyist is connected to the legislator compared to the case where the lobbyist is unconnected.” ...
   Essentially, financial firms have been buying the right to take on more risk. When things go well, executives in these firms get the upside – mostly in terms of immediate compensation, because few executives are compensated on the basis of risk-adjusted returns. That means that when the risks materialize and the firms suffer losses, the costs fall on taxpayers.
   Ron Paul is right to point to imbalances of power and massive distortions within the financial sector. He is also correct that many government policies favor relatively few big firms – and favor them in a way that encourages excessive and dangerous risk-taking.
   But Paul and others are wrong to argue that the government is the ultimate cause of all financial evil. Executives in financial firms want to take big risks. They like arrangements under which they win even when they lose.
   Big financial firms can more readily buy the necessary political protection (in the form of deregulation), enabling them to become even bigger and more dangerous. This incentive structure has only become more extreme since the financial crisis of 2008.

2. Erle Ellis describes the findings of his most recent publication, All is Not Lost: Plant Biodiversity in the Anthropocene, as:
   

   the first spatially explicit global assessment of contemporary patterns of terrestrial plant biodiversity (native loss + exotic species gain) at regional landscape scales.The main result: humans have caused a net increase in plant species richness across two-thirds of the terrestrial biosphere, mostly by facilitating species invasions. In most regional landscapes, native species losses were significantly lower than exotic species gains, with agriculture species causing minor increases, but ornamental species sometimes play a large role that is still hard to assess.

   
   While I'm not convinced Ellis's focus on the shift from biomes to anthromes captures the most fundamental characteristics of the Anthropocene, the work is both provocative and, as a result of his heavy use of maps, visually interesting. A number of relevant links are contained in this post by Andrew Revkin.

Climate Change and Extinctions

Biologists have long argued that the current rate of species loss rivals the five great mass extinctions of the geological past. As long ago as 1993, Harvard biologist E.O. Wilson estimated that Earth is currently losing something on the order of 30,000 species per year, or three species per hour. Some biologists have begun to feel that this biodiversity crisis — this “Sixth Extinction” — is even more severe, and more imminent, than Wilson had supposed. Significantly, where past extinction events were the result of physical processes, the current uptick is largely a product of human actions: transformation of the landscape and resultant habitat destruction, overexploitation of species, pollution, and the introduction of alien species. An article in the current issue of Nature argues that climate change may significantly increase the rate of species extinction through processes that have not previously been considered. Here's how Nature describes the article

More species may become extinct as a result of climate change than previously thought, a modelling study suggests. As the climate warms, many species are predicted to shift their ranges to stay within comfortable temperature zones. However, some species will be better able to do so than others. Mark Urban at the University of Connecticut in Storrs and his colleagues have created a model that takes into account the competition that species face for habitats when they move to new ecosystems. They modelled the effect of 4 °C of warming over 100 years on 40 simulated species, and found a much higher number of extinctions than did models that do not account for species competition and species' differing dispersal abilities. Even species with broad heat tolerances might be outcompeted — either by the arrival of newcomers in their current habitats or by native species in ecosystems that become habitable to them in future.

More technical details are provided in the abstract below:

Most climate change predictions omit species interactions and interspecific variation in dispersal. Here, we develop a model of multiple competing species along a warming climatic gradient that includes temperature-dependent competition, differences in niche breadth and interspecific differences in dispersal ability. Competition and dispersal differences decreased diversity and produced so-called ‘no-analogue’ communities, defined as a novel combination of species that does not currently co-occur. Climate change altered community richness the most when species had narrow niches, when mean community-wide dispersal rates were low and when species differed in dispersal abilities. With high interspecific dispersal variance, the best dispersers tracked climate change, out-competed slower dispersers and caused their extinction. Overall, competition slowed the advance of colonists into newly suitable habitats, creating lags in climate tracking. We predict that climate change will most threaten communities of species that have narrow niches (e.g. tropics), vary in dispersal (most communities) and compete strongly. Current forecasts probably underestimate climate change impacts on biodiversity by neglecting competition and dispersal differences.

Design in Nature

I recently came across a reference to the forthcoming book by Adrian Bejan and J. Peder Zane Design in Nature: How the Constructal Law Governs Evolution in Biology, Physics, Technology, and Social Organization. Here is the publisher's blurb:

In this groundbreaking book, Adrian Bejan takes the recurring patterns in nature—trees, tributaries, air passages, neural networks, and lightning bolts—and reveals how a single principle of physics, the Constructal Law, accounts for the evolution of these and all other designs in our world.

Everything—from biological life to inanimate systems—generates shape and structure and evolves in a sequence of ever-improving designs in order to facilitate flow. River basins, cardiovascular systems, and bolts of lightning are very efficient flow systems to move a current—of water, blood, or electricity. Likewise, the more complex architecture of animals evolve to cover greater distance per unit of useful energy, or increase their flow across the land. Such designs also appear in human organizations, like the hierarchical "flowcharts" or reporting structures in corporations and political bodies.

All are governed by the same principle, known as the Constructal Law, and configure and reconfigure themselves over time to flow more efficiently. Written in an easy style that achieves clarity without sacrificing complexity, Design in Nature is a paradigm-shifting book that will fundamentally transform our understanding of the world around us.

There are lots of similarities between Bejan's ideas and Geoffrey West's work on scaling laws. At its heart, as argued here, Bejan wants to replace explanations of form based on processes of growth with an explanation that emphasizes flow.His website has an interesting set of resources and his TedX talk is below.

Stability is Destabalizing

A post from a couple of months ago charted the course of various post-WWII US recessions and posed the question Was there a structural change in the economy in the late 1970s - early 80s?

Over the period from the late 1950's to 1980, US macro-economic policy became better and better at managing recessions. They continued to come at roughly the same frequency, but they were shorter and shallower than the earlier ones. This could, potentially, indicate an increase in rigidity over time as US macroeconomic policy attempted to 'smooth out' the business cycle.

A recent post at Resilience Science draws attention to a similar matter and provides a nice set of links to analytic resources relative to the issue. Here is a key passage:

In complex adaptive systems, stability does not equate to resilience. In fact, stability tends to breed loss of resilience and fragility or as Minsky put it, “stability is destabilising”. Although Minsky’s work has been somewhat neglected in economics, the principle of the resilience-stability tradeoff is common knowledge in ecology, especially since Buzz Holling’s pioneering work on the subject. If stability leads to fragility, then it follows that stabilisation too leads to increased system fragility. As Holling and Meffe put it in another landmark paper on the subject titled ‘Command and Control and the Pathology of Natural Resource Management’, “when the range of natural variation in a system is reduced, the system loses resilience.” Often, the goal of increased stability is synonymous with a goal of increased efficiency but “the goal of producing a maximum sustained yield may result in a more stable system of reduced resilience”. The entire long arc of post-WW2 macroeconomic policy in the developed world can be described as a flawed exercise in macroeconomic stabilisation.

Bodies, Big Brains and Regulatory Reform

When I started this post, it was just a listing of two things I found interesting. Then I realized they were connected. So... what are the two articles?

1. A Body Fit for a Freaky-Big Brain, summarizing research on the anatomical adaptations necessary to accommodate our over sized brains -- which use 20 times as much energy per pound as muscle tissue. Among the factors identified: reduction in the amount of gut tissue (also very energy intensive); shifting of diet to a higher energy cuisine based on seeds, tubers and meats; and a genetic adaptation in glucose transporters that resulted in extra molecular pumps to funnel sugar into the brain, while starving muscles by giving them fewer transporters.
2. Individuals interested in takes on the financial collapse will want to check out Capital Inadequacies The Dismal Failure of the Basel Regime of Bank Capital Regulation. Put out by the libertarian Cato Institute, the paper provides 40 pages or so of analysis aimed at a) documenting that regulatory solutions to financial matters are misplaced because regulatory apparatus is subject to capture and b) advocating a solution based on financial laissez faire.

The solution is free banking or financial laissez faire. The state would withdraw entirely from the financial system and, in particular, abolish capital adequacy regulation, deposit insurance, financial regulation, and the central bank, as well as repudiate future bailouts (and especially the doctrine of Too Big to Fail). ... Such systems have worked well in the past, and reforms along these lines would take the United States a long way back to its banking system of a century ago, in which banks were tightly governed and moral hazards and risk taking were well controlled because those who took the risks bore their consequences.

Now we can debate the empirical validity of these claims -- the individuals who lost all their savings in the bank runs of the Great Depression probably wouldn't agree that "those who took the risks bore their consequences" -- but that isn't the point.

Compare the view of systems and adaptation in the two scenarios. In the first article the "system" is the human body. The basic argument is that modification of one major subsystem (the brain) necessitated modification to other parts of the system in order for the "big brained" version of humans to survive. Contrast this with the view of the economic system advanced in the Cato Institute analysis. Over the past century the economy has changed dramatically. The growth of financial services as the mainstay of many advanced economies is the equivalent of the emergence of big brains -- one particular part of the system is becoming unusually important. A century ago, advanced economies were based on manufacturing and agriculture. Today, these sectors play a comparatively minor role and financial services (conventionally rendered as Wall Street) rule. But, rather than recognizing that change in one part of the system requires an adjustment in other parts of the system, the Cato paper argues for stability in the other aspects of the system (as expressed in the desire for a banking system similar to what was in place in 1910).

There is also a confusion Cato Institute paper about the role of organization (regulation) as it characterizes complex systems, but getting into that would be another (lengthy and necessarily technical) post.

Padgett, Part III: Autocatalysis in the Economy and in Persons

This is the third in a series dealing with one of the most interesting ideas I've come across in a decade: the theory outlined in John Padgett's The Emergence of Markets and Organizations. For an overview of the book and description of the network perspective, see Part I. Part II provides a concrete illustration of the approach, the emergence of the partnership structure in Renaissance Italy. This  post summarizes the chemical process (autocatalysis) that Padgett uses as a conceptual model for understanding the production of goods and people. This post begins with a description of autocatalytic networks in chemistry and then applies the concept to economic production and, finally, to the production of persons.

World's strongest banks

There are two basic explanations for the recent global financial collapse. The first, the Marxist account, emphasizes the role of capitalist accumulation and, in particular, the ability of the financial classes to profit from asset bubbles. The second account emphasizes complexity and uncertainty. According to this account, lax regulation was a major contributing factor. In light of these competing accounts it is interesting to look at the information below, identifying banks in Singapore and Canada as the world's strongest. Both locations came through the crisis comparatively unscathed and both are noted for their relatively high level of bank regulation.

Reviews: Society in an Age of Uncertainty

Society, uncertainty, and three books that link the two as reviewed by Tom Slee at Whimsley

1) Everything is Obvious, by Duncan J. Watts

2) Adapt, by Tim Harford

3) Future Babble, by Dan Gardner

Co-evolution from another angle

As exemplified by this Economist cover article, the concept of the Anthropocene is getting lots of attention. While exemplifying the idea of co-evolution, that is that natural and social systems are engaged in a dance of mutual influence and shifting adaptive landscapes -- the primary focus is on how humans have altered the biosphere.

A recent NYTimes article takes a different approach, documenting various animal adaptations to the urban environment.

White-footed mice, stranded on isolated urban islands, are evolving to adapt to urban stress. Fish in the Hudson have evolved to cope with poisons in the water. Native ants find refuge in the median strips on Broadway. And more familiar urban organisms, like bedbugs, rats and bacteria, also mutate and change in response to the pressures of the metropolis. In short, the process of evolution is responding to New York and other cities the way it has responded to countless environmental changes over the past few billion years. Life adapts.

Paleoclimate evidence on rapidity of climate change

How rapidly will climate change occur? Traditionally, the changes were expected to be linear -- that as the amount of carbon in the atmosphere went up, the temperature would rise proportionately. Over the past few decades, this view has increasingly been replaced with the recognition of tipping points and the possibility of comparatively rapid change. James Hansen and Makiko Sato have recently produced a pair of papers -- one technical and the other focused on a more general audience -- describing their recent findings suggesting that the bulk of change from certain feedback processes will occur in a period of decades rather than centuries. Here is the introduction from the non-technical version: Earth's Climate History: Implications for Tomorrow

The past is the key to the future. Contrary to popular belief, climate models are not the principal basis for assessing human-made climate effects. Our most precise knowledge comes from Earth's paleoclimate, its ancient climate, and how it responded to past changes of climate forcings, including atmospheric composition. Our second essential source of information is provided by global observations today, especially satellite observations, which reveal how the climate system is responding to rapid human-made changes of atmospheric composition, especially atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2). Models help us interpret past and present climate changes, and, in so far as they succeed in simulating past changes, they provide a tool to help evaluate the impacts of alternative policies that affect climate.

Paleoclimate data yield our best assessment of climate sensitivity, which is the eventual global temperature change in response to a specified climate forcing. A climate forcing is an imposed change of Earth's energy balance, as may be caused, for example, by a change of the sun's brightness or a human-made change of atmospheric CO2. For convenience scientists often consider a standard forcing, doubled atmospheric CO2, because that is a level of forcing that humans will impose this century if fossil fuel use continues unabated.

We show from paleoclimate data that the eventual global warming due to doubled CO2 will be about 3°C (5.4°F) when only so-called fast feedbacks have responded to the forcing. Fast feedbacks are changes of quantities such as atmospheric water vapor and clouds, which change as climate changes, thus amplifying or diminishing climate change. Fast feedbacks come into play as global temperature changes, so their full effect is delayed several centuries by the thermal inertia of the ocean, which slows full climate response. However, about half of the fast-feedback climate response is expected to occur within a few decades. Climate response time is one of the important 'details' that climate models help to elucidate.

For those who want the technical details, here is the abstract of the scientific publication.

Paleoclimate data help us assess climate sensitivity and potential human-made climate effects. We conclude that Earth in the warmest interglacial periods of the past million years was less than 1{\deg}C warmer than in the Holocene. Polar warmth in these interglacials and in the Pliocene does not imply that a substantial cushion remains between today's climate and dangerous warming, but rather that Earth is poised to experience strong amplifying polar feedbacks in response to moderate global warming. Thus goals to limit human-made warming to 2{\deg}C are not sufficient - they are prescriptions for disaster. Ice sheet disintegration is nonlinear, spurred by amplifying feedbacks. We suggest that ice sheet mass loss, if warming continues unabated, will be characterized better by a doubling time for mass loss rate than by a linear trend. Satellite gravity data, though too brief to be conclusive, are consistent with a doubling time of 10 years or less, implying the possibility of multi-meter sea level rise this century. Observed accelerating ice sheet mass loss supports our conclusion that Earth's temperature now exceeds the mean Holocene value. Rapid reduction of fossil fuel emissions is required for humanity to succeed in preserving a planet resembling the one on which civilization developed.

Padgett, Emergence of Organizations and Markets, Part I

I'm an idea junkie. I have fairly diverse interests and scan lots of things. But, for the most part, the things I come across strike me as either generally similar to this or that idea I've come across before or interesting and novel but focused on a matter that isn't terribly consequential.

It is very rare that I come across something that strikes me as fundamental -- in the sense that it addresses a deep problem in a novel way that makes intuitive sense to me. I count three instances in the past decade:
1) Holling's conceptualization of the operation of systems in terms of panarchy.
2) Abbott's description of the process of knowledge change.
3) The ideas discussed in the rest of this post.

How do new organizational forms originate? As a visit to the Oil Drum, or virtually any other major environmental website shows, you see lots of calls for dramatic social transformation. And you can also find good studies documenting historical change in organizational form, for example Chandler's analysis of capitalist managerial organization. But these works, in a Darwinian sense, focus on the selection process -- why a novel form gets perpetuated -- rather than the innovation process -- how the novel form originated. While there is some discussion of where novel ideas come from, the focus tends to be on technological innovation. In many ways it makes sense to speak of bureaucracy as a technology, but it is profoundly problematic to think that the process of social innovation is just a mirror of the process of technological innovation. So, to summarize, a general recognition of the need for social innovation -- that is the development of new forms of social organization -- coupled with virtually no understanding of how novel forms of social organization are generated.

Into this gaping hole walks John Padgett and his collaborators with their forthcoming Princeton University Press title The Emergence of Organizations and Markets. In a work of stunning scope, they lay out a general theory of organizational innovation and then proceed to provide a diverse set of illustrative examples covering the sweep of modern history -- from early capitalism (the emergence of merchant banks, the partnership system, global markets and the joint stock system), thru studies of communist economic transition (China, USSR, Hungary), to the emergence of new linkages between science and capitalism (e.g., the emergence of Silicon Valley and other high tech research network clusters). While the book focuses on economic organization, there is no obvious reason the theory wouldn't apply to other types of organization.

In essence, Padgett translates the biochemical theory of autocatalysis, which Stuart Kauffman has argued provides a model for abiogenesis (the emergence of biological life out of inorganic matter), into a form useful for understanding the emergence of organizations. There are three key parts. First, there is the emergence of novelty. In the abiogenesis example, this would be the emergence of life out of inorganic chemicals. Second, there is the requirement of persistence through time. If life emerged, but failed to persist over many generations, then its development would be transient and not terribly important. Third, the new development must be consequential. The emergence of a single-celled living organism that persisted for millions of years but remained the only form of living organism, as significant as that example of life may be, is not as consequential as the development of a wide variety of diverse living organisms (cats, dogs, whales, people, birds, insects, etc.). I'm not talking about the value of the different organisms themselves, but rather the importance of a process which spills over into other areas and generates greater and greater variety.

In the process, Padgett comes up with a new way of thinking about individual humans: not as static, bounded objects but, rather, as dynamic flows of chemicals, energy and information embedded in networks. The implications for scholars interested in understanding conjoined socio-ecological systems, which have been plagued by the attempt to integrate ecology's focus on flows (energy flows and biogeochemical cycles) with approaches to human systems that emphasize the primacy of individuals and their actions, are hard to overestimate.

Here is how they organize the theoretical discussion:

First, we describe the problem of organizational novelty in the context of multiple social networks. Next, we explain our core dynamic motor of autocatalysis, at the levels of both chemical and economic production. Then, we extend the biochemical concept of autocatalysis to encompass the social production of persons. Fourth, we describe six network mechanisms of organizational genesis that we have discovered in our case studies. Fifth, we identify seven mechanisms of multiple-network catalysis that turned these organizational innovations into systemic inventions. Finally, we discuss the important outstanding issue of structural vulnerability to network tipping. This question of poisedness, for us, is the next research horizon.

There is way too much here for one post. So, there will be several spread out over time. If you can't wait, the key theoretical chapter is here. Padgett's homepage has links to other material, both published and unpublished, including several other chapters from the forthcoming book.  For an extended overview, including description of the multi-network perspective,  read on ....

Review: Dynamics of Disaster

Dynamics of Disaster: Lessons on Risk, Response and Recovery

Edited by Rachel A. Dowty and Barbara L. Allen
London: Earthscan
2011, 240 pages
ISBN: 9781849711432

Here's a briefly annotated Table of Contents followed by a review of the volume as a whole.

When The Water Ends: Africa’s Climate Conflicts

Here's a follow up to the previous post about climate change and war as threat multipliers; a link to a 2011 Webby nominated 16-minute video "When the Water Ends" produced by Yale Environment 360.

Here's a description of the video's content.

For thousands of years, nomadic herdsmen have roamed the harsh, semi-arid lowlands that stretch across 80 percent of Kenya and 60 percent of Ethiopia. Descendants of the oldest tribal societies in the world, they survive thanks to the animals they raise and the crops they grow, their travels determined by the search for water and grazing lands.

These herdsmen have long been accustomed to adapting to a changing environment. But in recent years, they have faced challenges unlike any in living memory: As temperatures in the region have risen and water supplies have dwindled, the pastoralists have had to range more widely in search of suitable water and land. That search has brought tribal groups in Ethiopia and Kenya in increasing conflict, as pastoral communities kill each other over water and grass.

“When the Water Ends” tells the story of this conflict and of the increasingly dire drought conditions facing parts of East Africa. — how worsening drought in parts of Africa, the Middle East, and elsewhere will pit group against group, nation against nation. As one UN official told Abramson, the clashes between Kenyan and Ethiopian pastoralists represent “some of the world’s first climate-change conflicts.” But the story recounted in “When the Water Ends” is not only about climate change. It’s also about how deforestation and land degradation — due in large part to population pressures — are exacting a toll on impoverished farmers and nomads as the earth grows ever more barren.