Why the Shortages??

There’s a lot of nonsense (understandably) being talked about the shortages being experienced at the moment in the developed world – in the UK, Europe and America alike. Initially, I assumed it was an obvious result of Brexit – with Britain famously relying on Russian and Ukrainian long-distance lorry drivers and treating them like shit. It’s only on the continent that decent facilities for truckers are available.

But it seems that things are more complicated – and much more to do with food prices and climate, globalisation and “just-in-time delivery”

By far and away the best article on the crisis is this one on the situation in America

There’s a quiet panic happening in the US economy. Medical labs are running out of supplies, restaurants are having trouble getting food, and automobile, paint, and electronics firms are curtailing production because they can’t get semiconductors.

The problem seems to be getting worse, as the shortages pile on top of each other like a snake eating its tail. For instance, the inability to fix trucks means that truck drivers can’t haul boxes of goods, which might actually contain the parts needed to fix the trucks, and so forth.

 

There are multiple arguments about why the problem is as bad as it is. Everyone agrees that the Covid pandemic and chaotic changes in consumption habits have caused inevitable short-term price hikes and shortages.

But what we’re experiencing is also the net result of decades of policy choices starting in the 1970s that emphasized consumer sovereignty over citizenship. The consolidation of power into the hands of private equity financiers and monopolists over the last four decades has left us uniquely unprepared to manage a supply shock. Our hyper-efficient globalized supply chain, once romanticized by men like Tom Friedman in The World Is Flat, is the problem. Like the financial system before the 2008 crash, this kind of economic order hides its fragility. It seems to work quite well, until it doesn’t.

 

The specific policies that led to our supply constrained world are lax antitrust, deregulation of basic infrastructure industries like shipping, railroads, and trucking, disinvestment in domestic production, and trade policy emphasizing finance over manufacturing.

 

Take biopharmaceutical equipment necessary to make vaccines. There’s a shortage of fancy plastic bags that you mix chemicals in to make medicine, which isn’t surprising in a pandemic. But the reason for the shortage isn’t just Covid but a merger wave; over the last 15 years, four firms bought up the biopharmaceutical equipment industry, without any antitrust agency taking meaningful action. These firms now have market power, and dominate their competitors, by ensuring their bags can only interoperate with their specific mixing machines. It’s like not having enough Keurig coffee machine pods; the shortage isn’t the coffee, it’s the artificial bottleneck used to lock in customers.

 

Another example is railroads. Since deregulation in 1980, Wall Street consolidated 33 firms into just seven. And because the Surface Transportation Board lacks authority, Wall Street-owned railroads cut their workforce by 33% over the last six years, degrading our public shipping capacity. The Union Pacific closed a giant Chicago sorting facility in 2019; it now has so much backed up traffic that it suspended traffic from west coast ports.

 

Ocean shipping is the same. The 1997 Ocean Shipping Reform Act legalized secret rebates and led to a merger wave. The entire industry has now consolidated globally into three giant alliances that occasionally crash their too-big-to-sail ships into the side of the Suez canal.

 

Then there’s trucking. Talk to most businesspeople who make or move things and they will complain about the driver shortage. This too is a story of deregulation. In the 1970s, the end of public rate-setting forced trucking firms to compete against each other to offer lower shipping prices. The way they did this was by lowering pay to their drivers. Trucking on a firm-level became unpredictable and financially fragile, so for drivers schedules became unsustainable, even if the pay during boom times could be high. Today, even though pay is going up, the scheduling is crushing drivers. The result is a shortage of truckers.

There are more problems that strike at the heart of our economy. The most obvious is semiconductors. Production of high-end chips has gone offshore to East Asia because of deliberate policy to disinvest in the hard process of making things. In addition, the firm that now controls the industry, Taiwan Semiconductor, holds a near monopoly position with a substantial technological lead and a track record in the 1990s and early 2000s of dumping chips at below cost.

 

Fortunately, policymakers have noticed. The Federal Reserve’s most recent Beige Book, a report on the economy that is published eight times a year, mentions “shortage” 80 times, and FTC commissioner Rohit Chopra recently pointed out that shortages are slowing the economic recovery. Surface Transportation Board Chair Martin Oberman noted that railroads stripping down their operations to please Wall Street resulted in container congestions at US ports, a significant chokepoint for imports. And Congress is on the verge of funding tens of billions of dollars to boost domestic semiconductor manufacturing.

Even business leaders are getting it. Chemical firms are asking regulators to act. And at last week’s Intermodal Association of North America’s Intermodal Expo, where representatives from the shipping, rail, ports and drayage industries spoke, one executive said, “Without fear of regulation, I don’t know what will motivate all stakeholders to be at the table.” Fundamentally, America – and the world - has to move away from the goal of seeking cheap stuff made abroad for consumers in a low-wage economy. That means rearranging our hierarchies of power so finance, consulting and capital-light tech leaders became less important than people who know how to make things. The problem we have is shortages, so it’s time to put people in charge who value production. 

In the UK, gas prices are increasing by no less than 70%. And this article certainly suggests that (although there is pressure on global prices) the culprit is privatisation – with few companies providing reserves and therefore being caught short when demand increases. No fewer than 8 suppliers have gone bankrupt.

There is also the little factor of Covid19 which caused first lockdown and a huge slowdown in production followed by massive "injections" of government cash to both workers and companies. Containers may have kept most global goods flowing - but the uncertainty combined with initial reduction of supplies and then renewed demand has completely upset the balance of demand and supply in many commodities as Boffy's comment emphasises.   

update; When you have a British Prime Minister actually saying that the 

Queues for petrol and mass culls of pigs at farms because of a lack of abattoir workers are part of a necessary transition for Britain to emerge from a broken economic model based on low wages 

then it’s clear I have to walk back a bit my suggestion that the current British crisis is simply part of a wider global phenomenon.  Now I see that it’s part of a Johnson “cunning plan”!! It remains, however, too easy to blame Brexit completely. Things, as always, are more complicated.  

update; an interesting German take on the issue

and one of the best explanations - courtesy of Dave Pollard's fantastic monthly roundup

an even better https://ourfiniteworld.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/Gail-Tverberg-Our-Fossil-Fuel-Energy-Predicament-Nov-9.pdf

Am I the only person in the world finding Adam Tooze's regular bulletins totally incoherent? eg https://adamtooze.substack.com/p/chartbook-51-explaining-the-energy

What about Me?

Exactly two years ago I asked whether our social DNA was changing. I conceded that older generations have this annoying habit of finding fault with the latest generation – in our case things like the “attention deficit” which modern IT gadgets seem to develop, “instant gratification” and how this might affect future “character”.

Surveys such as the World Values and Eurobarometer do indicate a large and significant trend since the early 1970s toward more individualistic, selfish and less trusting societies….And the post quoted the studies on this of people such as Daniel Bell (Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism), Richard Sennett (The Culture of the New Capitalism), Francis Fukuyama (The Great Disruption – human nature and the reconstitution of social order) – ending with Reckless Opportunists – elites at the end of the establishment (2018) with its ruthless exposure of the almost criminal damage which a new breed of elites have inflicted on a once proud nation. 

But we have to be careful – none of these writers have any particular claims to psychological insights into people’s souls. They are, rather, social commentators. I read the occasional psychology book – Robin Skynner and John Cleese’s "Life and How to Survive it" (1993) made a big impact. Jonathan Haidt’s “The Righteous Mind” was much appreciated – Steven Pinker less so.

"What about Me? the struggle for identity in a market-based society" by a Dutch psychotherapist, Paul Verhaege, came out in 2014 and was quite an unusual choice for me. It lay on the shelf for some time before I opened it – to discover a real gem.  It ranges through intellectual history, sociology and ethics before suggesting that the last few decades have seen a radical new self-identity being engineered – which he calls “The Enron Society”. 

The book starts by contrasting our two basic urges as individuals - the initial sense of "belonging" and the growing need for "separation" - and how this expresses itself in later struggles eg "self-respect" v "self-hatred". 

From his initial discussion of "identity", he then moves onto a fascinating discussion of values and morality - showing how the Greeks had an integrated view of our character which Christianity destroyed when it placed God as an external power. The Enlightenment dethroned religion to an extent – although Verhaeghe argues that Diderot’s emphasis on reason, passion and empathy was set aside by an unholy coalition of Voltaire and Rousseau who basically helped the French state set up a new religion. He also argues that true rationality started only after the second WW – which fits with the more recent arguments of people like Nicolas Guilhot who are beginning to analyse the role of the military in the post-war social sciences. 

It’s the chapter on the Enron Society where he really lets rip – “The west has never had it so good – but never felt so bad!” leads to a discussion on mental illness and the pharma industry. How, he asks, has 30 years of neoliberalism affected our DNA – with its “Rank and Yank” systems of management; Universities as knowledge businesses; anonymous call-centres; CCTV; ubiquitous contracts, rules, regulations, league tables, fear, uncertainty - but no real accountability 

Typically, however, it’s the final section which lets him down. Apart from repeating Mintzberg’s call for “balance” and praising the Wilkinson/Pickett line on equality, his only advice seems to be for greater activism – “Ditch the cynicism!”!!

But it’s good to have a text from outwith the anglo-american core – with several interesting discoveries in his little bibliography (which doesn’t, however, mention Kenneth Gergen’s “TheSaturated Self” or “Life and How to Survive it”)

In the same spirit, I was disappointed to notice that William Davies’ Nervous States – how feeling took over the world (2018) didn’t mention Verhaeghe;s book

The Power Elite

It’s not so easy to have a serious discussion about power since those who are paid to consider (academics) have carved up the market so that political scientists focus only on what they call “Politico-administrative relations”; and sociologists on those with economic or (these days) financial power. Since economists, for their part, won’t even talk about power, they are left to focus on “the market” - although even they will concede that it often displays “oligopolistic” tendencies

In the absence of the academics, journalists (and Marxists) are about the only people left willing and able to analyse power. In Britain, for example, that means the likes of Owen Jones (“The Establishment”), Peter Oborne (“The Triumph of the Political Class”), Frederic Mount (“The New Few”), Stuart Weir (the annual Democratic Audit), John Foster, Susan George or Susan Watkins

My experience before and after 1990 operating in the no-man’s land between the political system and the bureaucracy places me firmly in the political science category – although I have great respect for what journalists, historians, anthropologists let alone political economists such as Mark Blyth bring to the feast  

Initially I belonged to the school which felt that the bureaucracy had too much power. A combination of Thatcher, “Yes, Minister” and New Labour saw things swing back to the political system. More recently, the technocrats seemed to have wrested power back – only for Trump and Brexit to remind us that “the people” also have a voice.

The grand old man of this field is B Guy Peters whose The Politics of Bureaucracy first came out in the 1970s, is now in its 5^th edition and is considered the bible on this issue. He has been an inspiration and active presence since 1990 in the network of schools of public administration in central and eastern Europe (NISPAcee) – Politico-Administrative Relations – Who Rules? (2001) very much showing his influence.

That this is still an important issue in the region is evident from recent publications such as The Principles of Public Administration produced by SIGMA (OECD) in 2016 and Quality of Public Administration – a toolbox for practitioners (EU 2017).

However, a lot of what the global community preaches as “good practice” in government structures is actually of very recent vintage in their own countries and is still often more rhetoric than actual practice.

Of course public appointments, for example, should be made on merit – and not on the basis of family, ethnic or religious networks. 

·       But civil service appointments and political structures in Belgium and Netherlands, to name but two European examples, were – until very recently – influenced by religious and party considerations. Rules were set aside to keep religious and political blocks (or pillars) happy. 

·       In some countries indeed such as Northern Ireland (until recently). the form and rhetoric of objective administration in the public were completely undermined by religious divisions. All public goods (eg housing and appointments) were, until the end of the 20th century, made in favour of Protestants.

·       The Italian system has for decades been notorious for the systemic abuse of the machinery of the state by various powerful groups – with eventually the Mafia itself clearly controlling some key parts of it. American influence played a powerful part in sustaining this in the post-war period – but the collapse of communism removed that influence and has allowed the Italians to have a serious attempt at reforming the system. At least for a few years – before Berlusconi scuppered it all   

These are well-known cases – but the more we look, the more we find that countries which have long boasted of their fair and objective public administration systems have in fact suffered serious intrusions by sectional interests.

The British and French indeed have invented words to describe the informal systems which perverted the apparent neutrality and openness of their public administration –

·       the “old boy network” which was still the basis of the senior civil service in Britain in the 1960s and 1970s a century after the first major reform.

·       And the elitist and closed nature of the French ENArque system has, in the new millennium, become the subject of heated debate in that country. And Macron recently decided to close the school 

It is clear that national european systems are becoming more politicised. This trend was started by Margaret Thatcher who simply did not trust the senior civil service to do what she needed. She brought in individuals who had proved their worth in the private sector and came into government service for a limited period of time (sometimes part-time and unpaid) to do a specific task which the Minister or Prime Minister judged the civil servants to be incapable of doing. Her critique of the UK Civil Service was twofold –

-       first that those at the top were so balanced and objective in their advice that they lacked the appetite to help lead and implement the changes she considered British society needed; and

-       second that those further down the ladder lacked the management skills necessary to manage public services. The Labour Government since 1997 inherited a civil service they considered somewhat contaminated by 18 years of such dominant political government – and had more than 200 such political appointees. 

Such trends are very worrying for the civil service which has lost the influence and constraining force they once had. 

The two decades since then have seen national reputations for integrity challenged – the British judicial system, for example, took a battering after a series of revelations of judicial cockups and its policing has always been suspect. But it was 2015 before a book with the title ”How Corrupt is Britain?” Ed by D Whyte appeared – followed a few years later by “Democracy for Sale - dark money and dirty politics”; by Peter Geoghegan (2020).   

Conclusion; Too much of the commentary of international bodies on transition countries seems oblivious to this history and these realities – and imagines that a mixture of persuasive rhetoric and arm-twisting can lead to relevant, rapid and significant changes. A bit more humility is needed – and more thought about the realistic trajectory of change. To recognize this is not, however, to condone a system of recruitment by connections – “people we know”. Celebration of cultural differences can sometimes be used to legitimize practices which undermine social coherence and organizational effectiveness. The acid test of a State body is whether the public thinks they are getting good public services delivered in an acceptable way! 

The missing backbone

Just Words – a sceptic’s glossary defines a consultant as 

“a con-artist who behaves like a Sultan”  

which is not an unreasonable way to sum up the attitude of those consultants who arrive in countries whose language they don’t speak - and whose brief is to “modernise” systems in countries which were previously imperial or communist outposts.

I was – for more than 20 years – a consultant in capacity (or institutional) development – in ex-communist countries. And I didn’t like the term. When required to complete forms, I would describe myself as a “writer” – after all that’s what most of my work involved. Initially reports – but increasingly books and lectures. 

That soon brought home too me the importance not just of words – but of concepts which were enormously difficult to translate. And, in some cases, went beyond mere language. It was, after all, only in 2003 that Richard Nisbett produced his “Geography of Thought” which argued that easterners and westerners look at the world in very different ways – with the latter focusing on detail and the former on the context. Richard Lewis’ “When Cultures Collide” (which doesn’t quite go so far) first came out in 1996 and simply looks at national differences in behaviour

For at least 20 years my most important team appointment was that of the individual who could convey the subtleties of the exchanges between myself and the “beneficiaries”. For an entire decade – in Central Asia and Bulgaria – I was extraordinarily fortunate but, in 2010, my luck ran out (in China) and I soon left not only the project but consultancy. When I had to use people I didn’t know (for example at Conferences) I would find the interpreters to give them a short summary of the main points I would be making and take the time to discuss it with them in advance – to make sure they understood the concepts

Many of the countries in which I worked were very proud (Hungary) and/or fairly rich (Azerbaijan with oil). For whatever reason, its leaders felt they needed some “modernisation” – at least of an institutional sort. Too many of the consultants who accompanied me, however, had a superior attitude to their hosts – spouting the latest fashions in their particular country and conveniently forgetting that most of it was of very recent vintage.  

There are tens of thousands of books about development – of both the “how to” and more critical sort. Since the new millennium, there has actually been a bit of a “mea culpa” mood – with the latest fashion known as “Doing Development Differently” or DDD in the acronyms beloved by technocrats.

Humility is a rare quality in this literature – but can be found in the writings of people such as Robert Chambers (“Can we know better?” 2017) and in the very powerful “Helping People Help Themselves” (2006) which explores what might happen if people actually took that phrase seriously.

One of my friends (another consultant!) has this great ability to smoke out bullshit. He goes into a project with open eyes; spots the nonsenses; and will then not just point out that the Emperor is naked but present practical solutions. In other words, he uses his mind – whereas most consultants seem to have the attitude that this is a dangerous thing to do. Better to follow the letter of the contract – no matter how irrelevant to prevailing conditions.    

For just over a decade I thoroughly enjoyed my work – particularly in Central Asia. And one of the things I really appreciated there is that I was working with people who didn’t have to pretend they were seeking membership of the EU - and therefore took the projects on THEIR terms….For example, for reasons best known to themselves, one regime had landed itself with a Civil Service Law but really didn’t want to venture any further into this unknown territory. Instead of twiddling my thumbs, I decided to use the accident of my office being in the Presidential Academy to work with a couple of their staff and some other individuals who spoke the language of reform - to produce not only a result which took everyone by surprise (a Civil Service Agency) but the first 3 books in the local language about public admin reform and HRM. 

I made firm friends in such work but hope that I also set an example. Of what a few people can achieve if they have a vision, energy and commitment. Margaret Mead put it beautifully – 

Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful committed individuals can change the world. In fact, it's the only thing that ever has 

Sadly, that group will never contain a consultant – they watch their backs too carefully! Which is why it’s odd that, in 2009 the EC produced a new “Backbone strategy” in response to a (fairly critical) assessment by the EC Court of Auditors of the EC’s programme of development assistance to developing and ex-communist countries. Interestingly it’s almost impossible to find the “Backbone Strategy” now but you can get a sense of it from this short paper I wrote in 2011 as I prepared a longer critique for a NISPAcee Conference in Varna (called The Long Game – not the logframe)   

It’s ironic that the post which attracts the largest number of hits (by far) is a short one I did on “strengthening the backbone” more than a decade – which I try to warn people off! If there’s one thing which consultants don’t have, it’s backbone!!!

Against the Current

Creativity is an over-used word these days…..The reality is greater and greater homogeneity. I have to rack my brains to come up with the names of individuals – including the dead - whose combination of original insights, language and sensibility makes me feel as if I'm being directly addressed. I’ve just tried to do that exercise – and here’s what I came up with….So far. Interesting that most tend to be awkward characters and out of sympathy with the prevailing mood. 

I need to include more women – and Chinese!! 

Name	Nationality	Reason for inclusion
Perry Anderson 1938-	UK/US	The insights his wide reading give of both other countries and previous periods – and the elegance with which they are expressed
Jacques Barzun 1907-2012	French/US	Historian – with special interests in cultural history and history of ideas
Dietrich Bonhoeffer 1906-1945	German	Pastor whose protests and writings against the Hitler regime continue to inspire; and who was executed in the final days of the Second WW
Brecht poetry		He may not have been a very laudable character but his political poetry is very powerful
Peter Drucker 1909-2005	Austro/US	America’s first writer on management
JK Galbraith  1908-2006	Canadian/.US	The breadth of his experience in both public service and academia gave him the ability to express home truths in a pithy, amusing and provocative way – much to the discomfort of the powerful
Francis Fukuyama  1952-	US	He writes brilliantly – on a wide range of subjects
Johan Galtung 1930-	Norwegian	Initially a sociologist but has made major contributions to other social sciences. Occupied the world’s first chair in Peace Studies
David Graeber 1961-2020	US/UK	Anthropologist, anarchist and activist – and prolific writer
Chris Hitchens 1949-2011	UK/US	may lack the humility but compensates with his brilliant oratory and range of reading
Ivan Illich 1926-2002	Austro/South American	A cleric who moved on to work with Paolo Freire and to brilliant critiques of western society
Clive James 1939-2019	Anglo Australian	A hugely underrated essayist and aphorist
Paul Johnson 1928-	English	is an extraordinarily cultured and highly independent English historian whose book on “Intellectuals” did him no favours. “Modern Times” OK
Arthur Koestler 1905-1983	Hungarian/UK	Spanned journalism, literary and scientific work
Deirdre McCloskey 1942-	US	may be too much the American centrist - but is both highly original and a fantastically clear writer
Pankaj Mishra 1969-	Indian	A bit of an autodidact essayist
Edgar Morin 1921-	French	a real original – a prolific writer who breaks disciplinary boundaries and speaks frankly even about the most personal matters for which French academics take him to task. This is a superbly crafted profile
Michel Onfray 1959-	French	An original, prolific and provocative French thinker – who set up a people’s university in Brittany
Elinor Ostrom 1933-2012	US	Has straddled various disciplines – and produced the key intellectual justification for the new work on “the commons”

The New Uncertainty

I wondered in the last post why The Age of the Unthinkable – why the new global order constantly surprises us and what to do about it had – despite its readability – made so little impact when it came out in 2009. I suspect it was perhaps just a bit ahead of its time – if only by a year or so. At the time, most of us were trying to get our heads around the global financial crisis and hadn’t yet realised that this would be the first of a wave of crises to buffet us in the West. John Urry’s “What is the Future?” was published in 2016 and, in 3 pages, gives the titles of no fewer than 60 books which, between 2003 and 2015, spelled out the dystopian future which beckoned… starting with “Our Final Century” (Rees 2003) and finishing with “The Sixth Extinction” (Kolbert) 

The buzzwords of our new world are those from systems, chaos and complexity theory - interconnectedness, networks, feedbacks, emergence, nonlinear change, exponential, tipping points….

Arguably we started to become familiar with this language in 1977 when Ilya Prigogine won the Nobel prize in Chemistry for his work on “dissipative structures” which led to the field for which he is better known – self-organising systems.

His Order out of Chaos - man’s new dialogue with nature wasn’t published in the USA until 1984 but it has a powerful introduction written by the famous Alvin Toffler which starts – 

One of the most highly developed skills in contemporary Western civilization is dissection: the split-up of problems into their smallest possible components. We are good at it. So good, we often forget to put the pieces back together again. This skill is perhaps most finely honed in science. There we not only routinely break problems down into bite-sized chunks and mini-chunks, we then very often isolate each one from its environment by means of a useful trick. We say ceteris paribus-all other things being equal. In this way we can ignore the complex interactions between our problem and the rest of the universe.

llya Prigogine, who won the Nobel Prize in 1977 for his work on the thermodynamics of nonequilibrium systems , is not satisfied, however, with merely taking things apart. He has spent the better part of a lifetime trying to "put the pieces back together again"-the pieces in this case being biology and physics, necessity and chance, science and humanity. 

And the decline of the industrial age forces us to confront the painful limitations of the machine model of reality. Of course, most of these limitations are not freshly discovered. The notion that the world is a clockwork, the planets timelessly orbiting, all systems operating deterministically in equilibrium, all subject to universal laws that an outside observer could discover-this model has come under withering fire ever since it first arose.

In the early nineteenth century, thermodynamics challenged the timelessness implied in the mechanistic image of the universe. If the world was a big machine, the thermos-dynamicists declared, it was running down, its useful energy leaking out. It could not go on forever, and time, therefore, took on a new meaning. 

-       Darwin's followers soon introduced a contradictory thought: The world-machine might be running down, losing energy and organization, but biological systems, at least, were running up, becoming more, not less, organized.

-       By the early twentieth century, Einstein had come along to put the observer back into the system: The machine looked different-indeed, for all practical purposes it was different depending upon where you stood within it. But it was still a deterministic machine, and God did not throw dice.

-       Next, the quantum people and the uncertainty folks attacked the model with pickaxes, sledgehammers, and sticks of dynamite. 

Nevertheless, despite all the ifs, ands, and buts, it remains fair to say, as Prigogine and Stengers do, that the machine paradigm is still the "reference point" for physics and the core model of science in general. Indeed, so powerful is its continuing influence that much of social science, and especially economics, remains under its spell.

The importance of this book is not simply that it uses original arguments to challenge the Newtonian model, but also that it shows how the still valid, though much limited, claims of Newtonianism might fit compatibly into a larger scientific image of reality. It argues that the old "universal laws" are not universal at all, but apply only to local regions of reality. And these happen to be the regions to which science has devoted the most effort. 

Thus, in broad-stroke terms, Prigogine and Stengers argue that traditional science in the Age of the Machine tended to emphasize stability, order, uniformity, and equilibrium. It concerned itself mostly with closed systems and linear relationships in which small inputs uniformly yield small results. With the transition from an industrial society based on heavy inputs of energy, capital, and labor to a high-technology society in which information and innovation are the critical resources, it is not surprising that new scientific world models should appear.

What makes the Prigoginian paradigm especially interesting is that it shifts attention to those aspects of reality that characterize today's accelerated social change: disorder, instability, diversity, disequilibrium, nonlinear relationships (in which small inputs can trigger massive consequences), and temporality-a heightened sensitivity to the flows of time. The work of Ilya Prigogine and his colleagues in the socalled " Brussels school" may well represent the next revolution in science as it enters into a new dialogue not merely with nature, but with society itself.

……. Words like "revolution," "economic crash," "technological upheaval ," and "paradigm shift" all take on new shades of meaning when we begin thinking of them in terms of fluctuations, feedback amplification, dissipative structures, bifurcations, and the rest of the Prigoginian conceptual vocabulary.) It is these panoramic vistas that are opened to us by “Order Out of Chaos”.

The Age of the Unthinkable

On or about summer 1977, the world suddenly started to become a much more complicated place when Ilya Prigogine won the Nobel prize in Chemistry for his work on “dissipative structures” which led to the field for which he is better known – self-organising systems. His Order out of Chaos - man’s new dialogue with nature wasn’t published in the USA until 1984 although it had been released in french the same year he had won the Nobel prize.

A few years later Chaos – making a new science (1987) was the first book to popularise the remarkable changes which were beginning to undermine the way we thought we had understood the world and science since Isaac Newton’s time.

Einstein’s theory of relativity had, of course, been a bit of a challenge a hundred years ago – but somehow we had ridden that out. But the findings of what was variously called systems, complexity or chaos theory have, for the last couple of decades, been challenging everything we thought we knew about cause and effect! 

This blog has several times tried to understand what the new approach actually meant – one of my first efforts appearing exactly ten years ago but has had to admit failure – this post containing the reading list I was using last December in a continuing effort to make sense of what the basic message and its implications actually were.

A highly readable book, however, has persuaded me to give the subject yet another chance. It is The Age of the Unthinkable – why the new global order constantly surprises us and what to do about it by J Cooper Ramo which actually appeared in 2009 - 12 years ago - but, curiously for such a great read, doesn’t appear to have made much impression. But he knows how to tell a good story – and they soon had a sufficient grip on me to be willing to put my prejudice aside about his being a Director of a Henry Kissinger institute. 

One story he uses is the famous one told by Isaiah Berlin about foxes and hedgehogs – with the latter knowing a lot about one subject and the former a little about a lot of subjects. He also makes good use of Richard Nesbitt’s work on the very different ways Asians and Westerners apparently think – with the former seeing more the context and background and the latter individuals. 

Indeed, apart from the story of a Danish scientist I hadn’t heard of (Per Bak who worked on what causes an individual grain of sand suddenly to cause collapse of an entire heap) Ramo doesn’t refer all that much to the extensive literature on systems and complexity theory. Perhaps indeed, that’s why I enjoyed the book so much! He chooses instead to focus on the ability of a few creative people to think outside the box. Indeed his book has parallels with Range – Why Generalists triumph in a specialised world by David Epstein and Rebel ideas – the power of diverse thinking by Matthew Syed

Let’s see what another of the (rare) reviewers of Ramo’s book had to say about it - 

The US-led ‘war on terror’ has succeeded only in creating more terrorists..... Largely self-regulating global capital markets have proven to be incapable of balancing or regulating effectively enough to stave off economic misery to millions. Capitalism itself, and its Cold War foe, communism, have in most cases achieved the very opposite of their aims of bringing prosperity, health and happiness to all.

Ramos does not suggest that the world is anarchic, however. His view is that the world is in a state of ‘organised instability’, a concept drawn from the physical sciences, in particular chaos theory and complexity science.

In this system, we never know what event, object or person may prove to be responsible for triggering unexpected and occasionally catastrophic change. 

Our current institutions are inherently incapable of grasping the idea of ‘organised instability’ and therefore formulate policy via outmoded thought and practice. Essentially, they make bad policy because they do not understand the environment in which they operate, and are too lethargic and inflexible to adapt and respond.

Ramo is encouraging policy-makers to take a good hard look at the world around them and at themselves and then begin reconfiguring power structures and decision-making processes in order to generate good and appropriate policy that reflects the dynamism of a complex world. Through a series of diverse case studies Ramo draws conclusions about how some people and organisations are thriving in an unstable world.  

At the heart of them all is a reliance on quick-wittedness, innovation, pragmatism, and an eye for opportunity. This holds true as much for Hizballah as it does for Silicon Valley entrepreneurs. The bulkof the book is taken up with describing how people are adaptingsuccessfully across the world while traditional structures are falling behind.

Ramo writes in engaging fashion, is adept at linking across times and subjects, and the reader is left in little doubt that he is definitely on to something. His suggestion that we view threats as systems, rather than objects, is wise but already part of military planning, if not political decision-making. 

In the next post, I want to go back to Ilya Prigigone’s 1984 book – not least because it has an extensive introduction written by no less a figure than Alvin Toffler