Was there a structural change in the economy in the late 1970s - early 80s?

(Click on the graph for a larger view.) I really don't know what to make of this graph, other than it is really interesting. My thoughts are below, feel free to share yours.

The lines trace the impact of various recessions on employment. Each color refers to a particular recession. The individual lines trace both the extent of job loss (the deeper the drop, the greater the drop in employment) and the length of time to get back to the pre-recession rate of employment (the further to the right, the longer the recovery takes).

The striking thing about the graph is that something fundamental appears to have occurred around 1980/81. If you look at the lines for the seven recessions that occurred between 1948 and 1980, they all have the same basic V shape. There is also a fairly systematic relationship between the depth of the recession, the length of time until the bottom is reached and the time until employment returns to the pre-recession level. In systemic terms, all recessions up to 1980 behaved in a generally similar fashion.

There is also a noticeable difference between the earlier V shaped recessions and the later ones. The earlier ones (1948, 1953, 1957) have very similar profiles; they were deeper (job losses of 3.4-5.2%) and longer (with 13 months until the bottom) than the later V-shaped recessions. The recessions of 1960, 1969, 1974 and 1980 were shallower (job losses of 1.3-2.7%) and shorter (between 4 and 10 months to the bottom).

The three most recent recessions (1990, 2001, 2007) have a very different profile. Rather than the sharp drop and bounce back of the V shape, the whole process appears to have slowed down. The rate of decline and the rate of recovery are both much slower and the impact of the recession on employment is much longer. The profiles of the three most recent recessions look more like a river basin than the V-shaped valley of the earlier ones. It has taken longer to reach the bottom (24 months, or almost twice as long as the 48-57 recessions) and, once there, the percentage of job losses has flat-lined for close to a year before starting to recover. 

The transition appears to have occurred in 1980/81. This is the only case where there is a double-dip recession. Moreover, where the 1980 recession looks like the smallest of the V-shaped recessions, the 1981 curve has a transitional look. Unlike any of the previous recessions, the bottom comes a few months later and flatlines for a few months before the upsurge in employment occurs. The other point of significance. Where recessions had occurred on a crude 5 year cycle up to 1980, the cycle is more like 9 or 10 years since the 81 recession. This, like the shifting shape, suggests the overall process has slowed.

As noted in an earlier post, there are other indicators that the global economy significantly changed at this time, a period linked with the early phases of economic globalization.

So, to take a shot at translating this into panarchy terms, recessions are a product of the adaptive cycle. 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. This national level process, around 1980, confronted a different dynamic -- resulting from changes to the higher (global) level cycle associated with economic globalization. In other words, the shift from one form of recession (V-shaped) to another (river-shaped) involves a cross-scale interaction where changes in the global economy (outsourcing of manufacturing and the increasing financialization of the US economy, for example) affect the ability of the US to rebound from recessions and, in particular, to create jobs.

Panarchy, the President, and a Whack-a-mole approach to countering terrorism

The Foreign Policy article Mission Not Accomplished disputes the claim by US Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta that al Qaeda's defeat is "within reach."

Although U.S. counterterrorism efforts have indeed substantially weakened the organization, Panetta's comments miss the bigger point about the terrorist threat facing the United States. Over the past decade, that threat has morphed from one led by a hierarchical al Qaeda organization into something much more diffuse, with a greater presence online, that no longer depends on orders from senior leaders in Pakistan.
...
Viewing the terrorism threat as solely embodied by al Qaeda as a discrete and hierarchical organization is both inaccurate and dangerous. The more important metric is the popularity of the Islamist movement generally and the jihadi movement specifically. Although it is difficult to measure, its online presence has undoubtedly grown rapidly over recent years. The jihadists' media capabilities have expanded considerably over the past 10 years, and that content can easily be found across the Internet, even on the most mainstream of websites.
...
Al Qaeda as we knew it 10 years ago may be no more. But at the rate it has been adapting, it seems likely the United States will be at war with this enemy for another decade. Whether individuals can be mobilized by AQAP's media or that of other jihadi outfits to carry out effective attacks on the United States without training overseas is the most important question in counterterrorism and will likely remain so for years to come.
...
On Aug. 3 the White House took a good first step in creating a framework to counter violent jihad, in releasing "Empowering Local Partners to Prevent Violent Extremism." But it is just that: a framework. Ten years after 9/11, this document marks the U.S. government's first concerted policy effort at countering radicalization. Certainly, it is coming years too late, but it is also short on detail and built largely around the concept of community engagement. Community engagement has been the centerpiece of British and Australian efforts to counter radicalization for at least the last four years. What those programs lacked was an element that confronted the ideology of militant Islam, at the national level and online. Emphasizing local community efforts is a logical endeavor, but the jihadi message is global and focused on Muslim suffering abroad, not on local issues in London, Melbourne, or Chicago. Eventually, Washington will have to confront the underlying ideology of militant Islam, not just its byproducts.

In other words, Al Qaeda hasn't decentralized so much as it has franchised. There remains a global ideology. Or, in panarchy terms, the network has presence at the local level (individual cells), the national level (loose network within a particular region) and the global level (typically more in terms of ideology than direct interpersonal contact). As the article points out, the focus on (local) community engagement fails to confront the ideology of militant Islam either at the national level or online.  Or, to render the problem in panarchy terms, the approach omits consideration of cross-scale interactions -- particularly the remember interaction whereby lower-level processes (local organization) are rejuvenated through access to resources from the higher levels. In practical terms, you can't only play whack-a-mole at the local level and be successful.

The Evolution of Political Complexity

As someone with a personal interest in the processes that govern the long-term evolution of complexity in socio-ecological systems, my attention was drawn to an article in the October 14 issue of Nature, Rise and fall of political complexity in island South-East Asia and the Pacific (doi:10.1038/nature09461). The article is an attempt to empirically address an argument in anthropology and archaeology about the evolution of political systems.

According to the classic academic narrative of political evolution, post-ice age complexity — defined as increasing levels of social hierarchy — evolved slowly but surely, with mechanical predictability. First came egalitarian bands of closely-related people; then came larger but still-egalitarian tribes, with only informal leadership; these clustered into chiefdoms, with hereditary leaders; chiefdoms united into states, with bureaucracies and administrative offices.

To some scholars, however, this narrative is deterministic. They say that political evolution doesn’t proceed neatly from lower to higher complexity, but proceeds in bursts. To them, tribes, chiefdoms and states all represent distinct evolutionary trajectories rather than stages of a single progression. The critics also say that the tendency of societies to move from higher to lower complexity has been underestimated.

Here is the article's abstract:

There is disagreement about whether human political evolution has proceeded through a sequence of incremental increases in complexity, or whether larger, non-sequential increases have occurred. The extent to which societies have decreased in complexity is also unclear. These debates have continued largely in the absence of rigorous, quantitative tests. We evaluated six competing models of political evolution in Austronesian-speaking societies using phylogenetic methods. Here we show that in the best-fitting model political complexity rises and falls in a sequence of small steps. This is closely followed by another model in which increases are sequential but decreases can be either sequential or in bigger drops. The results indicate that large, non-sequential jumps in political complexity have not occurred during the evolutionary history of these societies. This suggests that, despite the numerous contingent pathways of human history, there are regularities in cultural evolution that can be detected using computational phylogenetic methods.

In short, the article argues (as shown in the following diagram) that political complexity evolves slowly through a series of stages (e.g., from simple chiefdom to complex chiefdom to state), but can fall apart much more rapidly and dramatically (e.g., in addition to reversing the process described above, a collapsing society could go directly from state to simple chiefdom).

While this is more speculation than evidence based conclusion, translating these findings into a panarchy framework highlights some interesting possibilities. Specifically, it seems that some of the transitions (e.g., from simple to complex chiefdom) would most likely be the product of adaptive cycle processes. Others, however (e.g., from complex chiefdom to state), seem intuitively to involve the emergence of processes operating at a larger scale (similar to the problem of going from nation-state to global governance). In other words, to involve the emergence of a new and separate adaptive cycle that operates at a larger scale. If this is the case, this would also make sense of the asymmetric nature of the process whereby development occurs in a path (with each level in the controlling panarchy necessary for the emergence of the next) but collapse can be more dramatic (as processes of cross-scale interaction cascade down through the panarchical levels).

Homer-Dixon sighting .... or, actually, hearing

Think Globally Radio recently posted an interview with Tad Homer-Dixon. As is typical of interview format shows, the topics covered are wide ranging but somewhat disconnected. If you are someone who follows his work closely, the program doesn't break any new ground. There are, however, some interesting specifics and nuances. Thus, there is the inevitable discussion of his take on events following the publication of his last book, such as the financial meltdown and the collapse of climate change negotiations at Copenhagen. More interesting to me, however, were the following:

1) An implicit call for a shift from individualist to collectivist decision making. I may be reading more into this than he intends, but beginning at the 30 minute mark of the program there is a characterization of past history in a great man framework, i.e., that major historical transformations were the product of new worldviews brought forward by charismatic leaders. He uses the World War II examples of Roosevelt and Hitler to illustrate the role of leaders taking their countries in good and bad directions respectively. He then shifts to a discussion of the need for building networks of trust and social capital, so that society can use the periods of inevitable system shock to reorganize itself in a more desirable form. Here he uses the example of the Orange Revolution and the end of apartheid. Personally, I think it is an overstatement to render the bulk of past transformations in terms of the influence of a select few. Networks, social capital and other collective processes have always been important. What has changed is the scale, character and complexity of the problems humanity currently faces. Emphasis on collective processes is more important now than in the past because the problems have exceeded the reach of our existing collective institutions and processes.

2) At the 36 minute mark, Tad defends his call for small-scale testing of geoengineering technologies. Like Dyer and others, he notes that some of the ideas are comparatively inexpensive and, should the shit really hit the fan, roughly one third the countries of the world would be financially capable of deploying such technologies in unilateral attempts to manage the global climate. To prevent the international chaos likely to irrupt if that path were taken, he advocates not only testing of the technologies (to determine which, if any, work and which don't) but intergovernmental arrangements to identify who deploys what, who pays, who is responsible if things go horribly wrong and other non-technical aspects of using geoengineering technology. As a former Boy Scout (Be Prepared!), this is a suggestion I think makes immanent sense.

3) Complexity theorists have developed a variety of different ways of conceptualizing complexity. In his earlier writing Tad opted for the 'strings of instructions' definition. There is a discussion of complexity and coupling, starting at the 7:30 mark, where he suggests that the problem with these ideas is not competing definitions and frames but, rather, an underdeveloped vocabulary for articulating the concepts themselves. He goes on to note several interesting possibilities: a) that there may be multiple forms of complexity and b) that the practical benefit of a particular level or form of complexity or coupling may be contingent on circumstances. This seems to indicate a new level of nuance and sophistication in his thinking about the concepts. A number of years ago I had a lengthy discussion with him about precisely this topic. At that point, he was heavily influenced by the debate within ecology over the relationship between ecosystem complexity and stability and argued that complexity was good (See footnote 34, Chapter 5 of the Ingenuity Gap). Similarly, he rendered Perrow's arguments (that highly complex technological systems are inherently more risky than less complex ones) as wrong. As empirical evidence of Perrow's mistake, he noted there had not been more Three Mile Islands. He was both surprised and intrigued by my suggestion that there could be multiple forms of complexity and, hence, the two arguments were not necessarily incompatible.

4) The early part of the interview revolves around the discussion of tectonic stresses developed in the first half of Up-side of Down. A longer and more coherent presentation of the book's argument is available below.



5) Beginning around the 40 minute mark the interview turns to an analysis of the cultural factors behind our attachment to economic growth. This is an interesting and useful attempt to get beyond the standard diagnosis -- that we have such an attachment and it is a problem -- to an understanding of why we have the attachment and what needs to change for us to shed the attachment. These ideas are developed further in "The Great Transformation: Climate Change as Cultural Change."

6) The interview turns to a discussion of Homer-Dixon's early work on the connection between environmental stress, scarcity and violence at the 50 minute mark. The most interesting point, around 53:30, involves a discussion of the current situation in Pakistan.

Hornborg, Part 4: Power in Resilience Theory

This is the final post on the work of Alf Hornborg. For the earlier posts, see Part 1, Part 2 and Part 3.

Hornborg's book is titled The Power of the Machine. In the book he uses the word power in two different senses; to reference both political/social power and mechanical power. The underlying claim is that these two forms of power are manifestations of the same thing; that the capacity of machines to do work is a product of power in the social world.

Hornborg's focus on power led to a rather interesting, if ultimately unproductive, series of exchanges between himself and the posters at Resilience Science. Like ships passing in the night, Hornborg critiqued resilience theory for its lack of attention to power while the resilience researchers offered up references to papers done within the resilience tradition that they claimed explicitly incorporated the analysis of power into the work. Ironically, both have a point.

Hornborg appears 1) to ground his critique of the perspective on a reading of the conceptual material describing the resilience framework (e.g. Holling) rather than a familiarity with the empirical studies employing the framework and 2) to mistakenly interpret the resilience framework as sharing a view of systems similar to functionalism and, hence, subject to some of the same critiques. Putting aside Hornborg's misunderstanding of the notion of system embedded in panarchy/resilience approach, the root of the argument turns on the distinction between a theory and a framework.

Holling, in "Understanding the Complexity of Economic, Ecological and Social Systems" develops the concept of panarchy as a means to elegantly account for the empirical behaviour of complex adaptive systems (i.e., by postulating a structure that allows a relatively small number of factors to generate the observed complexities rather than treating complexity as the product of a very large number of interacting factors). The concept of a panarchy involves three essential elements as diagrammed below: 1) a set of adaptive cycles (the sideways figure 8's in the diagram) that are 2) hierarchically ordered (from processes that are small scale and short duration to processes that are large scale and of long duration) and involve 3) processes of cross-scale interaction (the links labeled revolt and remember on the diagram).

Visual Representation of Panarchy as Framework and Metaphor

It is important to recognize the level of abstraction present in this representation. It is meant to apply generically to complex adaptive systems, whether they are social, ecological, economic or whatever. As such, it is a description of structure and processes that explain the general properties of systems, but does not theorize the operation of any specific system. To theorize the operation of particular systems, one must additionally outline the various 'controlling factors' that govern the operation of the various adaptive cycles associated with that specific system (as shown in the diagram below).


Visual Representation of Panarchy as Theory for a Specific System


Controlling factors for Adaptive Cycle A -->


Controlling factors Cycle B -->


Controlling factors Cycle C -->


Seen in this light, Hornborg is correct. The panarchy framework does not theorize power. However, the resilience researchers are also correct. Many empirical studies drawing on the panarchy framework have paid attention to power relations when attempting to 'fill in the blanks' and specify the factors responsible for the operation of the adaptive cycles in particular systems.

But, even if Hornborg read the specific empirical studies, I suspect he would still dispute the claim that the resilience researcher's had incorporated an analysis of power. The reason for this is that Hornborg advocates not just the incorporation of power into the analysis, but the incorporation of power theorized in a specific manner. To the extent that the resilience researchers incorporate power into their research they do it in relation to the specifics of the particular case and the theoretical proclivities of the individual researchers. Thus, viewed across the different empirical studies, the concept of power is not used in a consistent manner. Power means one thing in one study and another thing in a second study. In contrast, following Marx, Hornborg sees power as a very specific phenomena -- there is one dominant type of power (economic) to which all others are subservient. Thus, for example, he would recognize the coercive power held by the military but would argue that it is exercised in accordance with the interests of the ruling economic class.

This is where I part company with Hornborg. Historical analysis has showed that Weber had a better grasp on the concept of power than did Marx. Non-economic forms of power (military, bureaucratic, ideological, etc.) are often, but not always, subservient to the interests of the dominant economic elite. Thus, to preserve their explanatory utility in those situations where economic power does not trump all other forms, it is necessary to conceptualize power as consisting of a variety of independent dimensions rather than, as Marx does, as one dominant dimension that subsumes all other facets. For a concise discussion of this issue, see Chapter 1 of Michael Mann, The Sources of Social Power Volume 1.

Fractal Adaptive Cycles

This is an excellent interpretation of the Panarchy model, and the diminishing returns of complexity.

Fractal Adapttive Cycles

Climate Change as Evidence of A System

Where can we find evidence of a social system? Do we have to concoct some kind of academic hocus-pocus to linguistically conjure up the "idea" of a social system?

I don't think so. Evidence of a system, and by that I mean a human social system, is all around us: it's climate change.

Let's look at what we already know from the science of climate change:

• Individuals don't create climate change

• 6.5 Billion individuals together don't create climate change

However:

6.5 Billion individuals PLUS a capitalist system, a technological system, create climate change.

In fact, it isn't even all 6.5 billion of us. At least half the world's population is so poor, so "underconsuming," that their collective contribution to global carbon emissions is almost negligible.

It really amounts to the richest one sixth of the world's population, the 1 billion or so who consume the most, who contribute the vast majority of the world's excessive carbon emissions. And it's not just that 1 billion alone. It's 1 billion PLUS all their automobiles, highways, coal-fired power plants, suburban subdivisions, millions of acres of shopping malls, agribusiness, distant factories and 60" television sets, all consuming, burning and emitting energy, that together create climate change. The technological system of resource extraction, production, distribution and consumption, as an economic system, makes a larger contribution to the production of climate change as the billion or so "individuals" who participate in that system.

To this we must add "nature's own" climate feedback cycles that, triggered by this excessive human C02 production, continuously creates more warming than just the human social system alone. What begins as a human system problem then becomes a human/environment system problem. And that is the ultimate designation of a system.

And to prove this point, please listen to physicist Anita Burke, who worked for Shell Oil International, advising their top corporate leaders on the causes and impacts of climate change. She spoke at the "Gaining Ground" conference in Vancouver, Oct. 2009, along with Bill Rees. Anita gives us the numbers: individual and household consumption of energy, water and other resources only counts for 10-25% of all resource consumption. The other 75-90% is used by corporations.

From Environmental to Ecological Sociology

Here is a position piece I wrote a number of years ago. I'm putting it up for several reasons. First, it used to be on the web as part of the conference program, but the Australian Sociology Association took it down. While it was up, it made it to the top of the Google list when you searched for for ecological sociology. So, it needs to be returned to public view.

Second, I'm curious about embedding a pdf in a blog. So I thought I'd see if it would work. Here goes ....

From Environmental to Ecological Sociology

Books about Panarchy

Two items from Paul Hartzog at Panarchy.com. First up is this visual diagram of the network of people and ideas tied to panarchy theory. Click on the diagram to see the whole thing.

Second, he's created a library listing of 200 books and growing about "panarchy" on LibraryThing.com. The list is as interesting for what is left out (no Holling!, no Homer-Dixon) as for what is included.

The Sociology of Resilience: Panarchy and Post-Katrina

Our planet is faced with an array of ecological crises—in particular, peak oil, climate change, and fresh water scarcity. Scientists have begun in earnest to examine the impacts of these crises on natural and social systems, and how these systems respond. The ability of a system to respond to and survive crisis has come to be known as “resilience.” There are many theories of resilience, but one that has attained great influence recently is the resilience theory of Canadian ecologist Buzz Holling and his coauthor, Lance Gunderson. Resilience theory is part of their monumental work on cycles of transformation in natural systems called Panarchy. Their theory of resilience was developed out of detailed research on the life cycles of forests (including New Brusnwick) and other ecosystems. In Panarchy, they attempt to apply these theories of transformation and resilience to human social systems, in particular, the ability of social systems to respond to environmental crises.

My early study of this work raised questions for me as a social scientist. In the course of their research, Holling and Gunderson had to admit that human social systems were different from natural systems; social systems didn’t neatly fit the model. So they developed a set of “exceptional conditions” for social systems to explain how human systems responded differently. But what I found particularly troublesome was that their theory of resilience seemed to be completely antithetical to the way we experience the human condition. Panarchy’s theory of resilience states that in third stage of transformation, the ecosystem breaks down, collapses, and in the process, releases all the biological “wealth” that was stored during the “wealth-building” and “conservation” (first and second) stages. During the collapse stage, the system’s raw materials, nutrients and species are freed from their former links to the ecosystem. According to Panarchy, it is in the collapse stage that the system obtains its maximum resilience to ecological crises. In the final stage, the materials and species released by collapse can be recombined, new niches are built, and new species, formerly suppressed under the old system, can become the new dominant species.

I found this concept of resilience a little troubling, especially when applied to human social systems. I immediately thought of Hurricane Katrina, perhaps the greatest ecological catastrophe in U.S. history. It was an ecological catastrophe, not just an environmental one, because it was caused by the combined forces and failures of both the natural system (climate change, hurricanes), and the human systems (systemic poverty, racism and a lack of preparedness to respond to disaster). To this day I can still remember the horror of seeing poor people of color drowning in the floods, stranded on roof-tops, imprisoned in hellish conditions in the Superdome, thirsty, hungry, searching for their families, for clean water, food, and a way out. To this day, I can still see the images of families walking down abandoned highways, carrying their few belongings, walking, walking toward they didn’t know where, trying to find a safe place to rest.

I had to ask myself, “is this maximum resilience?” Here you have a perfect test-case: complete collapse of both the natural and human social systems, and yet they these people did not seem to be “resilient” in the sense of "surviving.” More than 1400 people died in the storm. Half a million people left New Orleans and the affected Gulf region, the largest migration in U.S. history. Two years after the hurricane, only one-third of the City's population returned or remained in the area.(1.) Most of the evacuees never returned, and were forced to find homes in other cities and states. Not much is known about the fate of people who were forced to leave and resettle elsewhere, but one thing is certain: they left with little more than the clothes on their backs. Poor, traumatized, unemployed, bereft of connections and support from their former communities, how did they possess the resilience necessary to rebuild their lives? How is it possible that they would eventually be better off than before the crisis? Is this resilience?

These are the questions and concerns that led me to conduct research on the concept of resilience. I am not trying to discredit or debunk Hollings and Gunderson's theory, or Panarchy, because I think there is much in the theory that does work and is highly applicable to human social systems. But there also remains much in the theory that needs to be tested against the realities of the human condition. Human social systems are different from natural ecosystems, and thus we need to develop a sociological theory of resilience that accounts for that difference. And certainly I hope that research into the resilience of human social systems will yield knowledge and strategies that will help us face the many ecological crises ahead.

1. Source: NARAYAN SASTRY: Tracing the Effects of Hurricane Katrina on the Population of New Orleans: The Displaced New Orleans Residents Pilot Study

http://www.rand.org/pubs/working_papers/2007/RAND_WR483.pdf