foreseeing vulnerability

Foreseeing Vulnerability in a Chaotic World

Responding to biological drives all animals including humans tend to expand numbers and consumption to the point of systemic collapse when they have the means to do so. Civilizations have repeatedly demonstrated this over the eons. When the Mayans over-leveraged their resources and their civilization collapsed amid wars, impacts were severe but relatively localized. At the time inter-regional links and dependencies were limited. Later when Europeans exhausted resources they were able to rely on trade with their colonies to provide relief. And so it went. When resources were stressed, effects were either local or mitigated by drawing on lands yet to be exploited.

But humanity now faces a much different scenario. Lands yet to be developed for exploitation are far fewer, and we have gradually created a growing global network of resource and financial inter-dependencies. And because of our rapidly increasing numbers coupled with growing per capita consumption, we see signals that some critical resources could be stressed to the point where upsets could have world-wide ramifications. Vulnerability has been further increased by unprecedented leveraging in practically every market and obscured by a growing complexity making consequences almost impossible to comprehend or predict. So either confused or oblivious we tend to ignore risk exposure, or hope any disruptions will somehow be smoothed by the benevolent hand of free markets. However, markets are not always benevolent and few remain free. Markets are much a reflection of mass psychology� hardly a prescription for benevolence. And they are often distorted by monopolies that have grown to mammoth proportions to the extent they can bribe the government for subsidies claiming they are too big to fail.

There have been ominous Malthusian type projections and warnings in the past that have proven wrong with time. But there is a fundamentally different alignment of trends today effecting fundamentally different vulnerabilities. Consider the rapidly growing worldwide inter-dependencies in basic resources that support the common welfare (finance, energy, food, fresh water, etc.) at a time when world population and material consumption are growing at record rates. As the linkages expand they create a network that becomes chaotic leaving us unable to see developing problems. A chaotic system responds to the forces that field its neighborhood. But when forces become increasingly unpredictable and links increasingly networked, a complexity develops to the extent that critical variables cannot be measured accurately enough to predict future outcomes. Thus we fail to foresee clouds on the horizon leaving us exposed and vulnerable. Upsets, once locally managed or controlled, can now ripple around the globe. The result can yield waves of world panic that can negatively affect the welfare of billions. We face a world where we will be more frequently surprised.

The burst of the financial bubble should give us a heads-up glimpse of this fragile web. What appeared to be a minor regional instability due to over-leveraging in housing markets triggered world-wide upsets with economic disruptions affecting essentially all nations linked by finance and trade. Academics and managers in every sector were surprised by the "house of cards" vulnerabilities that they had not foreseen or understood. They were further shocked as disruptions and instabilities spread around the world. This economic "collapse" or shake-out may have the effect of a wake-up call bringing to our attention the dangers of poorly understood network complexities and motivate us to plan more carefully for the unforeseen. If this happens it will be a "silver lining" for which we should be grateful.

However, once the world economic situation stabilizes, business will likely return to "normal" with the gradual resumption of leveraging until another bubble is created in a different market with even greater repercussions. This is an inherent weakness common to open market societies. It can be very difficult to get nations, or even groups, to view economics holistically. We see the warts on the tail but miss the elephant. It is difficult to get people to "see" the vulnerabilities of increased inter-connectedness while struggling to avoid local potholes and political alligators. Without seeing the train coming, it is difficult to get people off of the tracks. A further impedance to planning is that the mere mention of the term brings to the minds of many visions of a growing and controlling government� or the famous "five year plans" of the old socialist economies that always seemed doomed to failure.

It is comforting to believe that open markets generally tend to self-correct... that there is an inherent guiding hand expressed as the desires of the many that will "automatically" restore balance. But the world has changed. We have chaotic inter-relationships that we demonstrably fail to understand. The recent financial and high tech bubbles should have made this evident. If it did, we are fortunate. If it did not, we will certainly suffer much bigger collisions with reality in our future. Planning is no longer an option. We will either submit to the painful process or suffer future upsets that will make past bubbles seem like puddles in the road. We must understand the limits to our resources and provide the necessary back-up fail-safes, or we risk shutting down the whole factory due to the failure of a single switch.

Solutions to these problems, like so many others, will only be found in education. But it will not be easy. Part of the challenge will be acknowledging that that there are strong biologically embedded drives acquired during our evolutionary progression to Homo sapiens. These drives, useful during our evolutionary struggles, now nudge us to do things that are often not in our best interests� that not only threaten human welfare, but the survival of many of the forms of life around us that nourish us and make our lives worth living. Chief among them are compulsions to "excessively" reproduce, consume, embrace tribal loyalties, and believe in absurdities in the name of religion. With our expanded population each of these four instinctual drives subliminally motivates us to do things that endanger the future welfare of life on the planet. They are part of our biology because they were once important to our survival. But they now threaten it.

Changing our embedded psychology will be difficult. But it can be done with good social and political leadership, economic incentives, and a more holistic educational system. Humans are very "social" animals. This means that they are trainable. We have the capability to change our behavior when it is made clear for us that it is in our best interests. Over the past eons we seem to have made progress in controlling many impulsive behavior patterns in favor of a more "civilized" lifestyle that increasing benefits the well-being of the many. We rarely see the burning and pillaging of villages or the general rape of a population, and the taking of slaves. But it does happen. We still have our Holocausts. And more recent decades have seen tribal and ethnic tensions often driven by religious hate explode in places ranging from the Balkans to the Middle East to Africa with the slaughter of millions. The voices acquired during our evolutionary struggle still howl when sufficiently provoked. We still carry the signs of our lowly origins and their occasional atavistic expression should haunt us all.

If we want to mitigate future upsets we must first goal ourselves with the de-leveraging of many critically networked dependencies and enhance safeguards with back-up plans for the unforeseen. It will be difficult for the public to be convinced that the efforts and sacrifices required to do so are necessary. As coastal dwellers know it is even difficult to awaken people to the obvious dangers from storms after a several year lull. They continue to build and rebuild their houses on sand. With the threat of systemic failures large enough to affect the welfare of much of the life on the planet, we should force ourselves to act more wisely.

6509