Archive for the ‘bottom up’ Tag
The “Job Creator” Myth
Filed under: emergent | Tags: bottom up, economy, job creators, Republicans, top down
Leave a Comment Quick – which came first: economies or wealthy elites?
I raised this question because some politicians have developed a passion for referring to the wealthy as “job creators” – inferring that the well-being of the economy is tied to the well-being of the wealthy elite. The House Republican Caucus has a whole section of their website devoted to “job creators.” House Speaker John Boehner claimed last fall that “job creators are on strike.“ There’s even a group of business leaders who have established something called the Job Creators Alliance.
Since the middle of 2011, it has become almost impossible to find a Republican who will say that someone is rich. As Jon Stewart noted at the time: “Republicans are no longer allowed to say that people are rich. You have to refer to them as ‘job creator.’”
The question begging to be asked in all of this is whether the wealthy are, in reality, “job creators.” Based on a look at the facts involved – including both relevant statistics and insights provided from modern science – I believe the answer to that question is NO.
In an article about Boehner’s “job creators are on strike” claim, the website Crooks and Liars offers an array of numbers that don’t support his claim. They point out:
On January 9, 2009, the Republican-friendly Wall Street Journal summed it up with an article titled simply, “Bush on Jobs: the Worst Track Record on Record.” (The Journal’s interactive table quantifies his staggering failure relative to every post-World War II president.) The meager one million jobs created under President Bush didn’t merely pale in comparison to the 23 million produced during Bill Clinton’s tenure. In September 2009, the Congressional Joint Economic Committee charted Bush’s job creation disaster, the worst since Hoover:
The reason Republicans claim the rich are “job creators” is that they believe in “trickle down economics.” According to Investopedia:
Proponents of this theory believe that when government helps companies, they will produce more and thereby hire more people and raise salaries. The people, in turn, will have more money to spend in the economy.
Basically, if you let those at the top of the economic pyramid have more, the benefits will “trickle down” to everyone else.
This reflects a classic mechanical, “top down” view of how things work. In such a world, those at the top of an organization – be it economic, social or political – “operate” the machinery of the organization. They make the decisions and call the shots. Those below them in the hierarchy follow their orders.
If those on top operate the machinery properly, they reap the benefits; those who follow orders are compensated as those on top see fit. If they don’t operate things properly, then (in theory) the organization replaces the operators. It’s all very controlled and orderly – especially for those in control at the top. At least that’s the way it should be according to the believers.
Unfortunately, after 30 years of trickle down economics, it’s pretty clear things don’t work that way. How could we be in our current economic mess if they did? (Anyone blaming the current mess solely on Obama and the Democrats is just not looking at the facts. See the above chart, in which job growth from Reagan forward has yet to equal that of Carter.)
So why don’t they work? It’s because they’re based on an outdated world view. Republicans and conservatives have been looking at things from the traditional paradigm of Newtonian physics, which presented us with the “mechanical universe.” According to this paradigm, the best way to understand things is mechanically: an organization can be structured according to distinct tasks, each making a discrete contribution to the larger task of generating value, with everything managed according to classic command and control principles.
This view of management, which was the basis for mass production, was very successful for industrial production in the 19th and 20th centuries. And from this perspective, it might make sense to focus on those at the top who are “operating” the machinery.
However, some have begun to recognize that the mechanical universe is an illusion. As Dr. Brad Cox noted in a 2004 presentation titled “Command and (Out of) Control – The Military Implications of Complexity Theory“:
The Newtonian paradigm was so compelling, so neat, so logical – in short, so “right” – that it saw and imposed regularities where none existed. For the sake of finding solvable problems, science simplified reality by assuming an idealized world. It connected the discontinuities and linearized the nonlinearities – in short, it simply ignored all the countless inconsistencies and surprises that make the world – and war – such a complex and interesting problem.
The evidence is unmistakable: the Newtonian paradigm no longer satisfactorily describes most of our world (if it ever did). Science is slowly coming to recognize that the world is not remotely an orderly, linear place after all.
The same thing is true in economics. As Richard Wagner noted back in 2003, in an article in Financial Advisor:
Trouble is, our money words tend to ground in old models, particularly 17th Century physics and 19th Century biology. They have yet to incorporate the integral visions of 20th Century quantum physics or ecology. The result: “machines” vs. “ecosystems.” Not wrong, but not necessarily helpful. Often harmful. Mechanistic metaphors induce linear thinking that doesn’t accurately reflect 21st Century money. And money is hard enough without dysfunctional underpinnings. Unfortunately, inappropriate metaphors contribute to misunderstandings and questionable actions.
If we want to get beyond “inappropriate metaphors” that lead to “misunderstandings and questionable actions,” we need to face the facts. Trickle down economics doesn’t work, those at the top of the economic scale are not “job creators,” and making the rich richer will not make the economy stronger. But where does that leave us?
We need to get to the bottom of this – literally.
One of the basic principles of complexity theory is called emergence. According to this principle, complex systems – be they biological, military, economic, etc. – develop from the bottom up. As Dr. Cox explains in talking about military battles:
Evolution moves from the simple to the complex. Healthy complex systems evolve by chunking together healthy simpler systems. Attempts to design large, highly complex organizations from the top down rarely work, if ever. This merely confirms what successful military organizations have long recognized: success starts at the small-unit level. Build strong, adaptable squads and sections first. Train and equip them well – which includes giving them ample time to train themselves (i.e., to evolve). Give them the very best leaders. Give those leaders the freedom and responsibility to lead (i.e., let them act as independent agents). Then chunk the teams and squads together into increasingly larger units.
What this means is that if you want to improve the economy and create jobs, you need to focus on the simplest element in the economy: the individual consumer. If they feel economically secure and have sufficient funds, they will buy products, which will stimulate production, which will lead to the need for more workers. As venture capitalist Nick Hanauer blogged in his post “Raise Taxes on the Rich to Reward True Job Creators“:
…I’ve never been a “job creator.” I can start a business based on a great idea, and initially hire dozens or hundreds of people. But if no one can afford to buy what I have to sell, my business will soon fail and all those jobs will evaporate.
That’s why I can say with confidence that rich people don’t create jobs, nor do businesses, large or small. What does lead to more employment is the feedback loop between customers and businesses. And only consumers can set in motion a virtuous cycle that allows companies to survive and thrive and business owners to hire. An ordinary middle-class consumer is far more of a job creator than I ever have been or ever will be.
From the perspective of emergence, this is easy to understand. It’s not just “quantum sense” – it’s common sense.
Say you have some money and a passion for baking. So you decide to open a bakery. If your cakes and pastries are a hit with your customers, they will come back to buy more and tell their friends about your shop. The end result? With more and more customers you prosper – eventually to the point you need help and hire others.
But what if your customers don’t like your shop? What if they think your cakes and pastries taste bad or are over-priced? What if your shop is not convenient or they just don’t like you? It doesn’t matter how much money you have. Unless you make the right changes, your shop is never going to prosper. At the least, you won’t be hiring others to help you. More likely you’ll be firing any help you have and sooner or later you’ll go out of business.
And if you’re the richest person in town and hardly anybody else has money for cakes and pastries? The end result will be the same. Without enough customers, your shop is doomed.
The essential point here is that an economy is a complex emergent phenomena. It starts out as something small and simple; only as it grows does it become more complex.
The earliest economies really were small and simple. Unlike market economies or even barter economies, they were “gift economies,” in which people gave things to each other – often without an expectation for immediate or future compensation. As economic anthropologist David Graeber described it:
…what would really happen, and this is what anthropologists observe when neighbors do engage in something like exchange with each other, if you want your neighbor’s cow, you’d say, “wow, nice cow” and he’d say “you like it? Take it!” – and now you owe him one. Quite often people don’t even engage in exchange at all – if they were real Iroquois or other Native Americans, for example, all such things would probably be allocated by women’s councils.
As societies grew larger and more complex, their economies gradually evolved into what we now call a market economy. However, we still can find examples of gift economies in modern life. These include free software like Mozilla and websites such as Wikipedia. In a sense this also true of science itself, in which discoveries are shared with others who are then free to build on them. The main benefit received by those doing the sharing is an enhanced reputation – a kind of variation of Graeber’s “you owe him one.”
So, getting back to my original question: which came first: economies or wealthy elites? As emergence teaches us, the answer is “economies.” While more or less wealthy elites may develop in an economy over time, they are not the primary force behind that economy’s growth. Most importantly, they are not the “job creators.”
If we truly want to be effective in promoting economic growth and creating jobs, we should use what we learn from emergence. Let’s stop giving special favors to the rich and powerful, and let’s start focusing on the well-being of the real job creators – the middle class consumer.
Signs of the Times – 1/19/12
Filed under: dual nature, emergent, signs of the times | Tags: bottom up, failing institutions, government, individualism
Leave a Comment I often come across items that I believe reflect the changes I’m describing on this blog. To me they are “signs of the times.” Here are a couple.
“The Rise of the New Groupthink”
The New York Times recently ran an article about a paradox in the way we work today. For many organizations, there is an emphasis on the idea of collaboration. As author Susan Cain notes:
Most of us now work in teams, in offices without walls, for managers who prize people skills above all. Lone geniuses are out. Collaboration is in.
However, she notes that there is a problem with this approach:
Research strongly suggests that people are more creative when they enjoy privacy and freedom from interruption. And the most spectacularly creative people in many fields are often introverted, according to studies by the psychologists Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and Gregory Feist. They’re extroverted enough to exchange and advance ideas, but see themselves as independent and individualistic. They’re not joiners by nature.
Later in the article she says:
…I’m not suggesting that we abolish teamwork. Indeed, recent studies suggest that influential academic work is increasingly conducted by teams rather than by individuals. (Although teams whose members collaborate remotely, from separate universities, appear to be the most influential of all.) The problems we face in science, economics and many other fields are more complex than ever before, and we’ll need to stand on one another’s shoulders if we can possibly hope to solve them.
But even if the problems are different, human nature remains the same. And most humans have two contradictory impulses: we love and need one another, yet we crave privacy and autonomy.
To me this is an example of a basic principle of the Quantum Age: contrary to the popular myth that we must choose between individualism and collectivism, we are inherently both individualistic and collective by nature. We often have a hard time grasping this because it’s impossible to see both qualities simultaneously. You can see a group or you can see a person in that group; you can’t see both at the same time. But just as subatomic particles have an intrinsic dual particle/wave nature, we humans have a dual individual/collective nature. We will only resolve many of our current problems when we recognize this fact and proceed accordingly, disposing of the prevalent mythology regarding individualism versus collectivism.
Country in Crisis: Looking to America’s Mayors to Rise to the Challenge
Arianna Huffington recently wrote an article regarding how America’s mayors are working to develop solutions to problems that seem to be stumping the politicians in Washington. As she notes:
We’re now in the midst of a battle to see who will sit atop the pyramid in official Washington. This battle will dominate the media in the year ahead, but what the last year showed is that the more important story is what’s happening outside Washington. It was a year in which Time declared “The Protester” its Person of the Year and “Occupy” was named Word of the Year by the American Dialect Society. It was a year of solutions and energy and activism from the bottom up. And given that top-down thinking not only brought us a Depression-level crisis, but also shows no signs of getting us out of it, it’s bottom-up innovation that will be more relevant.
The rest of her article offers examples of such bottom-up innovation.
These examples demonstrate the power of emergence, the principle that living, self-organizing systems develop from the bottom up, within the context of their environment. As I’ve written here and here, many heads of institutions believe things are best run from the top down; that is a major reason why many of those institutions are in trouble. The solution will not be to accord more power and wealth to the heads of those institutions. The solution will be to recognize the power of emergence, and to learn how to rebuild our institutions in a way that harnesses that power.
Improving the Norm
Filed under: dual nature, emergent, holism | Tags: bottom up, CeaseFire, change, government, Hobart and William Smith Colleges, social norms
Leave a Comment New York Times columnist Bob Herbert had a recent column about an effort to reduce violence in Chicago. He points out that a basic problem with violent behavior is that many believe it’s just part of life, noting:
One of the most frightening aspects of the murderous violence plaguing so many urban neighborhoods across the country is the widespread notion among young people that killing somebody who ticks you off is normal. It’s something that is only to be expected, like eating when you’re hungry.
Herbert goes on to describe an initiative in Chicago called CeaseFire, which is
…trying to intervene in potentially violent situations to ward off tragic outcomes. Individuals who are most likely to be involved in violence, either as offenders or victims, are personally engaged, talked with, counseled, cajoled — whatever it takes to prevent bloodshed. Those who intervene know the streets firsthand, and in many cases are former gang members and convicts themselves.
While the immediate goal of CeaseFire is to stop the violence, the long range goal is to “change the violent norms of big-city environments.”
The program appears to be having success. According to a study by Prof. Wesley G. Skogan of Northwest University,
Over-time trends revealed that violence was down by one measure or another in six of the seven areas that were examined statistically. The broadest measure of shootings (which included attempts) declined an additional 17 to 24 percent, due to the program. In four overlapping sites there were distinctive declines in the number of persons actually shot or killed ranging from 16 to 34 percent.
CeaseFire is just one of numerous programs that take a more holistic approach to dealing with aberrant behaviors. For some time now Hobart and William Smith Colleges have been using a social norms approach to reduce binge drinking, and the program has received national attention. As an LA Times article noted in June of 2001,
The practice, called “social norms marketing,” has grown rapidly in the last three years, along with the realization that scolding, scaring, educating and even passing laws can’t stop young people from harming themselves and others. In sharp contrast to generations of adults who argued, “If all your friends jumped off a bridge, would you?” the new theory encourages the young to conform, since most of their peers aren’t up to much anyway.
“The reality is, we’re herd animals and we behave in accordance with social norms and the expectations of others,” said H. Wesley Perkins, professor of sociology at Hobart and William Smith Colleges in Geneva, N.Y., who is known as the father of social norms marketing. “We’re taking conformity behavior and using it in a positive way.”
The traditional approach to aberrant behavior is to view it in individualistic terms: if an individual misbehaves, it’s because there is something intrinsically wrong with them. The solution, according to this view, is to scare or browbeat the person into proper behavior.
However, if we take a cue from the wave/particle duality and recognize that people are inherently both individuals AND members of groups, we will recognize that only treating people as individuals is bound to be an incomplete approach. In addressing the context provided by the groups they belong to, the social norms approach helps create a complete approach to improving individual behaviors.
Flu In The Time Of Globalism
Filed under: complexity, emergent, interconnected | Tags: bottom up, flu, health
Comments (1) The big news item of the moment is the growing threat of a swine flu pandemic. The speed with which this disease has spread is yet another reflection of our interconnected world. In earlier times diseases tended to travel slowly from place to place, often with localized events; the Third Pandemic started in China in 1855 and slowly traveled around the world until the 1950s. With the availability of cheap air travel, things can happen much faster today.
The primary question is what do we do about this risk? The New York Times columnist David Brooks observes:
In these post-cold war days, we don’t face a single concentrated threat. We face a series of decentralized, transnational threats: jihadi terrorism, a global financial crisis, global warming, energy scarcity, nuclear proliferation and, as we’re reminded today, possible health pandemics like swine flu.
He goes on to present two possible approaches:
So how do we deal with these situations? Do we build centralized global institutions that are strong enough to respond to transnational threats? Or do we rely on diverse and decentralized communities and nation-states?
After providing a brief discussion of both options, he comes down in favor of the decentralized, bottom-up approach:
A single global response would produce a uniform approach. A decentralized response fosters experimentation.
The bottom line is that the swine flu crisis is two emergent problems piled on top of one another. At bottom, there is the dynamic network of the outbreak. It is fueled by complex feedback loops consisting of the virus itself, human mobility to spread it and environmental factors to make it potent. On top, there is the psychology of fear caused by the disease. It emerges from rumors, news reports, Tweets and expert warnings.
The correct response to these dynamic, decentralized, emergent problems is to create dynamic, decentralized, emergent authorities: chains of local officials, state agencies, national governments and international bodies that are as flexible as the problem itself.
I’ve written about emergent phenomena before, and I’m generally in favor of approaches that promote it. But it’s important to realize that the outcome of a bottom-up approach is tied to a larger context. Without proper guidance and values, free-wheeling emergence can lead to anarchy.
There’s an excellent article – Command and (Out of) Control: The Military Implications of Complexity Theory – that offers an interesting take on Brooks’ dichotomy. The author John Schmitt starts with a discussion of traditional command and control theory, which he says is based on a mechanical world view inherent in classic Newtonian physics. This approach relies heavily on a top-down approach, with those on top striving to control both their organization and whatever larger situation they’re confronting. The “centralized global institutions that are strong enough to respond to transnational threats” that Brooks talks about reflect this traditional kind of command and control.
However, like Brooks, Schmitt has problems with this approach. He starts by describing traditional command and control:
The natural result is a highly proceduralized or methodical approach to the conduct of military operations—war as an assembly line. Newtonian command and control tends to be highly doctrinaire—heavy on mechanistic and elaborate procedures. The mechanistic view recognizes that war may appear disorderly and confusing but is convinced that with sufficient command and control we can impose order, precision, and certainty. We can eliminate unpleasant surprises and make war go “like clockwork.” Just as the Scientific Revolution sought to tame nature, the Newtonian approach to command and control—especially with the help of the information-technology revolution—seeks to tame the nature of war.
But there’s a problem, as Schmitt notes:
The Newtonian paradigm offers a neat, clean and intellectually satisfying description of the world—and of war. There is only one problem: it does not match most of reality.
Schmitt goes on to describe war – and the world – as an open, dynamic, complex system. As such, it is impossible to control in a traditional, top-down way:
One of the defining features of complex systems is a property known as emergence in which the global behavior of the system is qualitatively different from the behavior of the parts. No amount of knowledge of the behavior of the parts would allow one to predict the behavior of the whole. Emergence can be thought of as a form of control: it allows distributed agents to group together into a meaningful higher-order system. In complex systems, structure and control thus “grow” up from the bottom; they are not imposed from the top. Reductionism simply will not work with complex systems: the very act of decomposing the system—of isolating even one component—changes the dynamics of the system. It is no longer the same system.
All of this is pretty much in line with what Brooks said in his column. However, in viewing our options as either “centralized control” or “decentralized control,” Brooks misses another alternative. Schmitt presents an approach that encompasses input from those at the top and those at the bottom:
Rather than thinking of “command” and “control” both operating from the top of the organization toward the bottom, we should think of command and control as an adaptive process in which “command” is top-down guidance and “control” is bottom-up feedback…All parts of the organization contribute action and feedback—”command” and “control”—in overall cooperation. Command and control is thus fundamentally an activity of reciprocal influence involving give and take among all parts, from top to bottom and side to side.
From this perspective, we might agree with Brooks’ argument to “create dynamic, decentralized, emergent authorities: chains of local officials, state agencies, national governments and international bodies that are as flexible as the problem itself.” However, we should also have in place institutions – like perhaps the World Health Organization in the case of a pandemic – that can serve as resources for relevant information and avenues for collaboration among those decentralized authorities.
Such an arrangement assures that all involved are seeing the whole picture – both the forest and the trees.
How the Internet Got Its Rules
The New York Times had an article recently, “How the Internet Got Its Rules,” which offered an intriguing glimpse of the beginning of a phenomena that is an integral part of life today. The article was written by Stephen Crocker, one of the people involved with creating those rules forty years ago in 1969.
One thing that’s striking is how the way the underlying rules for Internet programming were developed is reflected in the very nature of the Internet. As the group working on this matter proceeded, they were concerned about not “sounding presumptuous.” As a result, the process for making rules was open to all; bulletins on what was being discussed and decided were labeled “Requests for Comments,” or R.F.C.s. Crocker notes:
The early R.F.C.’s ranged from grand visions to mundane details, although the latter quickly became the most common. Less important than the content of those first documents was that they were available free of charge and anyone could write one. Instead of authority-based decision-making, we relied on a process we called “rough consensus and running code.” Everyone was welcome to propose ideas, and if enough people liked it and used it, the design became a standard.
Maybe it’s just me, but I’m sensing a bit of a “60′s vibe” in this paragraph. “Power to the people” indeed…
Anyway, the rules for the Internet were apparently an early form of open standards, which are integral to open source software today. This openness was key to the rapid development of the Internet and the World Wide Web:
This was the ultimate in openness in technical design and that culture of open processes was essential in enabling the Internet to grow and evolve as spectacularly as it has. In fact, we probably wouldn’t have the Web without it. When CERN physicists wanted to publish a lot of information in a way that people could easily get to it and add to it, they simply built and tested their ideas. Because of the groundwork we’d laid in the R.F.C.’s, they did not have to ask permission, or make any changes to the core operations of the Internet. Others soon copied them — hundreds of thousands of computer users, then hundreds of millions, creating and sharing content and technology. That’s the Web.
Put another way, we always tried to design each new protocol to be both useful in its own right and a building block available to others. We did not think of protocols as finished products, and we deliberately exposed the internal architecture to make it easy for others to gain a foothold. This was the antithesis of the attitude of the old telephone networks, which actively discouraged any additions or uses they had not sanctioned.
The way the rules for the Internet were encouraged to emerge through open collaboration is reflected in the emergent nature of the Internet itself. Recognizing the power of this approach, Crocker has a suggestion regarding the issues we face today:
As we rebuild our economy, I do hope we keep in mind the value of openness, especially in industries that have rarely had it. Whether it’s in health care reform or energy innovation, the largest payoffs will come not from what the stimulus package pays for directly, but from the huge vistas we open up for others to explore.
An Illuminating Paradox
Filed under: complexity, dual nature, emergent | Tags: bottom up, individualism, regulation, traffic safety
Comments (2) One time, while driving on an interstate highway when the weather was gray and misty, I noticed a curious paradox.
Although it was only sprinkling occasionally, nearly every car had its headlights on, complying with an obscure New York Sate law requiring headlight use when it rains. However, nearly every car was also going 65-75 miles per hour. This was certainly not in compliance with the well-known and publicized 55 miles per hour speed limit in effect at the time. It also didn’t make sense. Why would people obey a law they were unlikely to get ticketed or punished for breaking, while at the same time they disobeyed a law that they could easily get ticketed for, with substantial costs in fines and higher insurance?
This question stuck with me for a long time. While the behavior I witnessed did not seem logical, I was inclined to believe there had to be some reasonable explanation for it. After all, I was doing the same thing most of the other drivers on the road were doing. But beyond that, I sensed this observation might provide a key to getting people to be better drivers. This was particularly relevant to me at the time, as I was on my way to a traffic safety conference when I observed this paradox.
Around this time, I was reading M. Mitchell Waldrop’s book “Complexity.” While I was vaguely familiar with the concept of entropy, in which things are seen to be perpetually running down, I was totally unfamiliar with the new science of complexity, in which things are seen to be perpetually evolving into ever more complex and sophisticated ways of being.
And yet, while I had never heard of complexity, I recognized many examples of the phenomena it focused on. The cars we drive today are much more complex than even those I had admired in the 1960’s. Likewise, the economy we work in that enables us to produce and purchase those cars has also grown in complexity from that of the seemingly straightforward days of the 60’s; that economy in turn was much more complex than that of say, 100 years ago.
Perhaps, I thought, the paradoxical behavior I had observed on the highway was somehow a reflection of this tendency to evolve to increasingly more complex patterns of behavior. One of the qualities that Waldrop discussed was the “bottom up” nature of self organizing systems. Increasing complexity comes about because that is what the users of a given system want; it is not imposed from on high somewhere. Cars today are increasingly complex largely because we expect more and more from them.
This seems to be a natural function of the way we are. The more something like a car can provide us, the more we tend to want. Even if our present car is reliable, luxurious and sporty in its performance, after some time has passed we are likely to be drawn to a newer car that is better designed, more luxurious and sportier. And to provide us with such qualities in a car, manufacturers have to continually strive to use more refined and complex technology to improve on their product.
I felt this “bottom up” quality was important in understanding the motorists’ behavior I had observed. Clearly, the authoritative power of the State, conveyed both through the raw power of the police and the cajoling power of slogans like “55 Saves Lives” did not seem to be greatly altering their behavior. Something within each motorist seemed to be propelling them forward in the behavior they were pursuing. But what? And how?
Some time later I stumbled upon what is arguably one of the most revolutionary concepts in modern science. This is the dual, wave/particle nature of matter. I vaguely remembered something from the few weeks’ of high school physics I’d had about the dual nature of light, and how it behaved as both a particle and a wave. But I had always assumed, as most people do, that some things were particles while other things were waves. In a foggy kind of logic, I had presumed that tangible things like a table or a chair were made up of particles, while forms of energy like light or sound were composed of waves. However, modern science has discovered that, at it most basic level, everything is both particles and waves simultaneously.
At first I found this concept hard to understand. But with more reading and thinking, I gradually realized that the world around us is full of examples of this dualism. The catch is that at any one time you can only perceive something as either a particle or a wave. For example, you can see the ocean’s wave quality in the way it rhythmically crashes on the shore. Take a drop of sea water and put it under a strong enough microscope and you would see the particles that water is made up of. But you cannot see the particle and the wave nature of the ocean at the same time; you have to adjust your focus to perceive either one or the other.
The same is true of a crowd creating a “wave” in a stadium. You can either focus on the movement of the wave or you can focus on some individuals participating in it; you cannot focus on both at the same time.
With this new awareness, I realized what had been happening on that highway that morning. Viewed from the individual, particle perspective, the behavior of those motorists did not make sense. They were obeying a minor law while flagrantly disobeying a much more important one. This did not seem to be in their own, individual/particle interests. But viewed from a group/wave perspective, there suddenly appeared a logic to their seemingly inconsistent behavior. In terms of both the minor and the more important law, their behaviors reflected those of the other motorists they observed on the highway.
If I see many other drivers turning on their headlights because it is raining, I will feel an inclination to do the same. If I see them going ten miles per hour over the speed limit, I will feel an inclination to do that as well. In both cases, the behavior reflects the “bottom up” quality complexity science focuses on. The drivers themselves create the norms for their behavior. While the State may establish a context for this behavior, through headlight laws or speed limits, the actual behavior has an ad hoc quality to it.
The reason often given by traffic safety authorities for drivers mirroring others’ behavior is because they (the drivers) feel there is less possibility in a group of being caught. However this reflects only the self interest, particle perspective, which leads us back to the original paradox. It might explain the speeding, but what about the minimally enforced headlight law? Why did they obey that?
I believe the answer to this question lies in recognizing the group/wave side of our behavior. We are individuals, yes, but we are also social beings with a strong inclination to synchronize our behaviors with those of a larger group. Even when that group happens to consist of anonymous motorists on a superhighway.
A version of this post was originally published on the web site Quantum Age in October, 1996.
On Track to Saving Gas
Filed under: emergent | Tags: bottom up, CAFE, energy, gas tax, regulation
Leave a Comment According to Slate, there’s a growing push to raise the Federal gas tax to reduce our dependence on foreign oil (and to combat global warming, though they don’t get into that).
It’s not too surprising to find an argument like this on a brainy site like Slate. But I was surprised to discover one of their article’s links was to a “horsepower-addled car magazine editor” promoting the same idea.
Still more surprising was to find that, in skimming the comments section, many “horsepower-addled car magazine” readers actually seemed agreeable to the concept. I was struck by one entry in particular, by an apparently erudite commenter – “Trackaholic” – who argued for what I believe would be a wise approach to promoting fuel economy in our nation’s vehicles:
I agree with DrCruelty: Change the CAFE rules from artificial limits placed on the Auto MFG’s, to taxes/rebates geared toward the consumer. Change the “gas guzzler” tax on new vehicles to affect trucks as well as cars, and make it more progressive, so that more vehicles are affected. Provide incentives for people to get rid of old, inefficient vehicles and move into smaller cars with better mileage. Increase the tax on petrol to be more similar to the tax on deisel.
The overriding goal is to provide consumers an incentive to move towards more efficient vehicles and to make them think twice before purchasing something that they might not need. In the end, they still have the choice to buy a large truck or SUV, and they will still have the choice to buy a high powered sports car or sedan, and the auto MFG’s will not have artificial constraints about trying to build a 35 MPG vehilce if everyone still wants to buy a truck.
Basically, encourage people from the bottom up, rather than trying to force them from the top down.
-TH
First, a couple of minor points:
1 – Whoever DrCruelty is, he didn’t sound quite as erudite as Trackaholic. DrCruelty’s suggestion was straightforward, but his argument was less developed: “Axe CAFE, tax gas.”
2 – I’m not sure how one reaches the formulation that “TH”=”Trackaholic.” Or vice versa. And what is this “petrol” of which he speaks? In spite of his NASCAR-like nom de plume, is he really a Brit?
Nevertheless, I applaud the idea of replacing a top-down regulation of dubious effectiveness like CAFE with the bottom-up approach proposed by TH. This approach is very much in line with a basic facet of our quantum world.
Such an approach offers a number of pluses. It sets values (higher prices for gas and inefficient vehicles) that are aligned with our nation’s interest (reducing dependence on foreign oil), while still giving individuals the freedom to drive whatever their hearts desire (and their wallets can afford). It also gives automakers a clearer and more consistent market environment to produce for – instead of one that swings wildly, salivating for SUV’s one month and then hot for hybrids 6 months later.
Finally – and not a small thing – removing a cumbersome regulation of dubious effectiveness like CAFE will do away with one source of automotive agita for “horsepower-addled car pundits” (and scourges of the “nanny state”) like Brock Yates. Not to worry – I’m sure they’ll still find plenty of other things to get rev’d up about.
The Word from the Street
Filed under: emergent, interconnected | Tags: bottom up, conservatives, future, internet, linked world, media, world wide web
Leave a Comment As I noted in my last post, times are hard these days for the mainstream media. But it’s not all a matter of digital change, greedy owners and shrinking balance sheets. There’s also the fact that many in the MSM don’t seem to have a handle on what’s going on.
Washington Post Columnist E.J. Dionne has a recent column titled “Coming Soon: The 21st Century,” in which he starts off by noting:
Social and political epochs rarely end precisely on schedules provided by calendars. Many historians date the end of Europe’s 19th century to 1914 and the outbreak of World War I. What we call “The Sixties” in the United States, with its ethos of reform and protest, ended with Richard Nixon’s landslide reelection in 1972 and the winding down of the Vietnam War.
In the same way, the outcome of this year’s election means that 2009 will, finally, mark the beginning of the 21st century.
This is all well and good, as far as it goes. However, he never presents any clues as to how things will be different in 2009. Instead, he just catalogs a variety of ways in which the Bush administration has dealt with current problems – like terrorists and the financial markets – from an outdated 20th century perspective.
Meanwhile Mr. Dionnes’ fellow Post columnist Robert J. Samuelson – in “Humbled By Our Ignorance” – pursues a pastime popular these days among conservatives: basking in ignorance. When confronted with the massive failures of their governance, conservatives fiercely proclaim that the source of such failures was totally unpredictable.
For them, no one could have foreseen 9/11 (except for those warning bin Laden was determined to attack inside the United States). No one could have known there were no WMDs in Iraq (except for the UN inspectors who made that point). No one could have known the levees would fail (except for engineers familiar with their limitations). And no one could have predicted that people preoccupied with maximizing profits rather than acting responsibly could bring the economy to its knees (except for economists like Paul Krugman who warned of impending disaster).
Apparently, to conservatives the idea they couldn’t predict what happened absolves them from responsibility for the failures they provoked. I guess being conservative means never having to say you’re sorry.
Contrary to Mr. Dionne, I would argue (as I often do) that the 21st century has been with us for some time. If we want to point to a particular event that defines a break from the 20th century, I would point to the development of the World Wide Web in the mid 1990’s. Up until that time it might have been said we were in the Information Age, but that information was generally controlled by powerful gatekeepers like the mainstream media.
Contrary to Mr. Samuelson, I would say that paying attention to what’s happening now – and borrowing some ideas from the science that has shaped our hyper-linked world – can enlighten us about the workings of current events. Ignorance is not inevitable.
An example of the 21st Century in action is presented by the brief article “The Tools Of Citizen Journalism.” It’s about Demotix -
…a London-based startup that allows users to upload pictures (and soon video) that are in turn sold to news outlets. The recent events around the Israel/Palestinian conflict were a perfect showcase of this type of user-generated content site (though, obviously, a tragic one).
This is just another example of how the source of information has changed. The mainstream media has limited space and time to devote to any of the many news topics today. But if you look for them, you’ll find all kinds of other sources that have emerged to give you an idea about what’s going on in places like Iraq and Wall Street .
There’s a great deal of concern these days about corporate control of the news media (for example, see here and here). This is indeed a serious problem – although some sound like prime candidates for the tinfoil hat brigade.
But compared to pre-web days, the mainstream media has much less control today over what we know about current events. And as long as the web is free to all the tide of content will continue to turn from a top-down model to one that is more bottom-up.
Ironically, the mainstream media will probably remain clueless about this shift for some time. Fortunately for them, Robert Samuelson can someday write a piece glorifying their ignorance.
Maybe not everyone in the MSM is clueless. Time has a piece by James Poniewozik – “An End, and a Beginning, for the Media” – that gets it right:
Like the car companies, individual media outlets will probably have to learn to be smaller. And they’ll need to see their new-media “problems” as part of the solution. Internet users don’t hate the media. In fact, when given the tools by something like Twitter or YouTube, they want to be the media. People want the vetted information the news media offer–and they want to riff on it, respond to it and even, as in Mumbai, add to it. Journalists should embrace that rather than futilely fight it.
This means offering users more ways of interacting, commenting and contributing. It means seeing new media not as the dumbing down of civilization but as a new way of telling stories and even finding stories. And it means recognizing that the audience is no longer passive–it wants and expects to participate, even as it wants help in making sense of the info deluge.
It’s a Small World After All
Filed under: emergent, interconnected | Tags: bottom up, linked world, Obama, power, technology
Leave a Comment On election night 2008 I was at the Obama victory party in Albany, NY, to follow and celebrate the results. While it was a great evening, one moment in particular stood out. As we approached 11 PM, CNN showed a countdown clock for when the polls would close in California, Oregon, Washington and Hawaii. As the last seconds elapsed, we all started counting down with the clock, as if it was New Year’s Eve. We all cheered when the clock hit zero, and then cheered much louder as CNN announced that Barack Obama had indeed just been elected President. It was a wonderful moment.
Only later did I find out that crowds of people around the world were doing exactly the same thing at exactly the same moment. It was yet another example of how much we are all interconnected these days – in our awareness of what’s going on and in our awareness that events on the other side of the world can affect our lives.
While young people today may think nothing of this state of affairs, it’s something I still view with a degree of amazement. I was 11 years old and living in Panama when President Kennedy was assassinated. Communications-wise, it was a very different era. While people in the US watched on TV events like Oswald’s arrest and subsequent murder, the American (Canal Zone) TV station just provided a static graphic with Kennedy’s name and dates of birth and death – a sort of video gravestone. The audio consisted of radio transmissions and reports; I didn’t see Oswald get shot, I heard it reported – kind of like play-by-play coverage of a baseball game.
For better or worse, with today’s technology we are now much more tightly linked together. As Archbishop Desmond Tutu wrote, “…we are all caught up in a delicate network of interdependence, unable to celebrate fully our own heritage and place in the world, unable to realize our full potential as human beings, unless everyone else, everywhere else, can do the same.”
This is something we are still trying to understand and come to terms with. If the world is a network of links, how do we deal with it? The traditional way of dealing with things draws from a mechanical perspective of command and control that is pyramidal in form, with many down below and very few on top. In such a world, those with the most power control what happens. They are “the deciders.” But in a linked world, power is not pyramidal; it is networked, with everyone on basically the same plane. Clearly, this means the rules have changed. (An example of this change for military strategy is presented in the article “Command and (Out of) Control.”)
So what are the rules for a networked world? A useful resource for this is Albert-Laszlo Barabasi’s book “Linked – How Everything Is Connected to Everything Else and What It Means For Business, Science and Everyday Life.” One of his main points is that, while all nodes in a network may be equal in some respects, they are not equal in one key way. The difference between nodes is a question of how many links there are to a particular node. While there are many websites on the Internet, some receive a LOT more traffic and links than others. These popular nodes, which Barabasi calls hubs, are the power centers in any kind of network.
A key difference between traditional power centers and network hubs is defined by the source of their power. Traditional power comes from the hoarding of resources like money, weapons and control. Once one has the power, he or she can then dictate behavior to others. However, network power is more democratic: a hub gains or loses power based on the willingness of others to link to it. If something new and better comes along, a hub is likely to lose both links and influence. An example of this can be found with internet search engines: at one point AltaVista was one of the top search engines around; now Google rules the roost and AltaVista struggles to keep up.
In the traditional world, influence is something to be wielded: if you have enough power, you can influence the behavior of those you deal with. In a networked world, influence is something to be cultivated: the more connections you establish with others, the more influence you have. A great example of this from the music world is provided by songwriter Darrell Brown in “The Get-Out-the-Song Effort.”
Some may have wondered why so many people around the world were so excited by the election of Barack Obama. Surely, there are many contributing factors. But one of those factors may relate to the perception of how Obama will use power compared to his predecessor.
The Bush-Cheney administration had a very traditional view of power: they felt America had the biggest military and economy in the world, so they could tell everyone else what to do. Judging by Obama’s campaign, it appears he has a better understanding of power from a network perspective. If he deals with the world and its problems from that perspective, America’s policies are likely to be very different.
At least, that’s the hope!
