Archive for November, 2023

Properties of complexity and wickedness

November 29, 2023

Some of this is opaque to me, and some of it is very clear. I’ll keep working on it, but apart from the idea that complexity can be easily ‘reduced’, and that approaches to problem solving can be integrated and aligned within complexity (assuming I read them correctly), this seems very useful. And showing that people may not want to fully recognise the issues around complexity is also useful – assuming again, that I have read them correctly.

It is taken from:

Claes Andersson, Petter Törnberg “Wickedness and the anatomy of complexity”. Futures 95 (2018) 118–138 with occasional comments in [ ]s

If this in anyway compromises intellectual property or is found exploitative, then please let me know and I will remove it.

Andersson & Törnberg begin:

We may now identify a number of general conclusions – to be read as a sequence of very short aphorisms – about the constraints that exist on understanding and intervening in wicked systems. We will offer suggestions about future pathways for developing such capabilities, as well as integration and confirmation of some existing pathways and insights.

1. Wicked systems are so strongly and heterogeneously connected that it is impossible to exhaust even small portions of them empirically to produce a “realistic picture”. [Complex systems are too multiply interlinked to comprehend completely.]

2. “Pictures” must therefore be perspectives, rarely subject to universal agreement. [‘Pictures’ is a term for a model, or a vision. The point is the standard one, that “the map is not the terrotory” and there is unlikely to be a shared realistic picture or undestanding.]

3. Even if we could obtain a “realistic picture”, this would frequently not help much since the system changes unpredictably over time – including as a direct result of us interacting with it. [Any model or understanding, not only carries only a small part of the possible information about the system, but it is likely to be out of date, being made sometime earlier. Furthermore, interaction with reality can change the workings of reality, and hence alter the accuracy of our models. Attention to what happens in interaction is vital.]

4. Uncertainty includes not only foresight but also e.g. what the problem consists in, what tools are available, what actors to include. [Uncertainty about almost everything is fundmental to our interactions with a complex world and they rightly point to uncertainties around understanding the nature of the problems, the set of tools we have available, and which actors should be including in solving the problem as some are likely to be invested in not solving, or ignoring, the problem. Interactions and models which insist on certainty, or insist that they are certain, are delusional and probably harmful. We should alwats be on the lookout for ‘unintended consequencs’ when complexity escapes us.]

5. “The game” and its rules frequently change dynamically on similar time scales. [The strong form of this proposition is Whitehead’s question, “do the laws of nature themselves, evolve?” In other words even if we understand the rules of the system correctly, we cannot say the rules will not change. As complex systems evolve, they almost certainly will change.]

6. The usefulness of models and theory hinges critically on whether, how, and to what extent it is realistic to decouple the game from its rules. [I think this means reality is more important than our rules for reality. There are situations in which people have to act, irrespective of their prospects for success as not acting appears lethal. We always risk decoupling the system from its real rules.]

7. Since this is more likely to be realistic for basic, slow-changing, features (e.g. physiology, logical dilemmas, strongly locked-in features, etc.), useful general regularities tend to be highly abstract [and thus not very useful 🙂 However, tipping points do not allow us to assume that apparent general regularities cannot change rapidly. Slow changing features may not be permanent. This prospect cannot be ignored in any succesful problem solving.]

8. Every wicked problem, however, is critically unique in its details. Interventions to address wicked problems must therefore be designed in the form of meta-solutions that scaffold the generation of actual solutions. [Wicked problems are defined in many different ways. They say “An attribution of wickedness to a problem illustrates a feeling that the problem almost seems to avoid resolution and/or that attempting to solve it keeps generating hosts of other and seemingly unrelated problems.” Other ways of looking at wickedness are as extensions of complexity. Wicked problems are problems in which there may be no agreed upon problem, no agreed upon cause, no agreed upon trends (limited predictability), and no agreed upon solutions. Wicked problems are complex problems, they may well be (apparently) new problems with no established technique of procedure, and uncertainty is fundamental.

[I’ve No idea what the second sentence of the above proposition means. It sounds over-optimistic]

9. Navigating innovation pathways in everyday sub-wicked systems is congruous with doing so in wicked systems: an iterative and reflexive process of alignment, integration and problem solving. [They define sub-wicked systems as “wicked systems that have not outgrown our capacity to design and govern them – a capacity that it is no coincidence that we possess: we are adapted specifically for dealing with sub-wicked Systems”. This could be hopeful more than probable. What evidence counts to suggest some wicked problems are not real wicked problems? It is safest to assume they are wicked/complex and work on them as if they were wicked (we cannot fully understand them, we are uncertain about them etc), and as if they are able to escape us. I’d suggest that we deal with wicked problems and complex systems all the time; from talking to our friends to getting the family out of the door on time, so this is not necessarily bad or impossible. Remember most succesful policies, such as neoliberalism, function because they reduce complexity to harmful simplicity, and hence have the bias towards ignoring complexity, even when it bites back – hence we have a bias towards determining problems are not wicked, or that they can be integrated, which may not be justified. It may just be a delusion.]

10. Policy can be formulated in the likeness of this capacity rather than of our capacity to design complicated artifacts (designed, assembled and launched). [I’m going to assume that this means negotiating wicked systems in an ‘ok manner’ can often be easier than designing working artfects, or solving the problem completely with technology, or othewise, but I don’t know if that is what they mean.]

11. Reducing wickedness to sub-wickedness is attractive since this preserves more of its ontological and epistemological features [Preserves more than what? What convinces us that the reduction is realistic and preserves the characteristics we need to face. Sure it might be easy to pretend we have done this reduction and don’t have to deal with uncertainty and unintended effects, but what checks are there, other than failure to process when it occurs?].

12. What we need to pay particularly attention to in such a reduction is:

  • Incomplete and biased perspectives on the wicked system from sub-wicked perspectives that reflect how we are embedded into the seamless web (culture, education, roles, interests, power).
  • Wicked systems exhibit more complexity than we can handle: we have an eminently poor – even outrightly misguiding – intuition for complexity. [These points seem to be implying that reducing wickedness to sub-wickedness might be prone to errors of optimism, which I can agree with, but lose any understanding of why they have been so focused on the possibilities of reducing complexity, or gaining alignment.]

13. The suggested response is to:

  • Prioritize the integration of different perspectives.
  • Integrate the use of models as crutches for understanding complexity. [No idea what this is supposed to meam. It sounds management gobble, or like prozac leadership, to me. It does not seem to deal with the fundamental issues of uncertainty, incomplete models or the social distribution of incomplete models]

14. Also sub-wicked systems are constantly under the threat of misalignment. We need cooperation for aligned and directed action and so alignment should also be prioritized [Alignment of what? People? Knowledges? Maybe it would be better to knowingly keep incompatbilities and rough edges in order to preserve remembrance of the complex reality, and to gain diverse viewpoints, rather than ignore it to make things more uniform.]

15. Alignment is also important normatively (deciding what we want to achieve) since, by contrast with engineering problems, goodness cannot be integrated uniquely at  a top level with respect to external functions. Wicked systems are good or bad in relation to the components that they contain – components that are, in many ways, in competition – and a “good arena” might have qualities such as sustainability (inequity and other problems do not amplify) and a balance between goodness from local perspectives that is acceptable to most. [Wicked problems are not evil, or deliberately malicious. Non-wicked problems are not good. This seems to be a misplacement of language]

16. Narrative and negotiation have strong aligning and integrating functions and can form the “glue” in iterative cycles of sub-wicked approaches. [They also have strong forgetting and misdirectional functions.]

17. Due to uncertainty and dynamics any propositions and goals should be treated as tentative. [Yes]

18. Dynamic exploration must include components that are actually or potentially part of the process:

  • We cannot know in advance what parties to include or leave out, nor what roles they should or will play. [True. However it might easily appear that some parties or policies seem harmful. what we do about those policies and the power of those advocating for them is difficult. It might appear that some people would rather suicide and take the system down with them. It is doubtful that helping them to kill the system without change is useful, Hence alignment is not always possible, and we need to be aware of cultural, or political, bias which keeps potentially knowledgable people out of the discussion all together.]
  • Components in a seamless web are subject to substantial uncertainty; they cannot be sufficiently declared in mission statements, CV’s etc. [Also social conflict]

19. Large black-box models (such as detailed predictive planning models) are hard to integrate into seamless webs: they cannot intermix with the viewpoints, knowledge and experiences of the participants (e.g. Klosterman, 2012).

20. Many wicked problems are so unique and contingent that modeling makes no sense. Complexity remains important, however, and simple, pedagogical models could be important for building a better intuition for complex dynamics [Yes. but this goes back to the problem. what is the way we should deal with a complex, conflictual mess?]

To make these linked points easier to overview, we will now boil them down to three main themes:

  • 1. Uncertainty is intrinsic to wickedness and the issue should not primarily be how we reduce it but how we deal with it. Dealing with uncertainty is at the core of what dealing with wickedness is about. [italics added]
  • 2. Integration of interests, models, tools, viewpoints, expertise, capacities for action (e.g. authority), and goals is essential, both instrumentally and for normative reasons. [They never explain how all conflict can be intergrated away. I personally think this is unreaslistic and dangerous. We have to solve the problem despite the social conflict, or be prepared to recognise the irriducible problems]
  • 3. Alignment is tightly tied to integration and is essential for maintaining the direction and integrity of efforts. [It is nice if people agree on the problem and that it is necessary to fix that problem, but the point of wicked problems is that this unity is unlikely. Climate change is a classic example. some people want to pretend it is not a problem at all, and that nothing should be done which risks contemporary profit or order.]
  • 4. Dynamics/emergence is at the core of innovation and wickedness, giving rise to uncertainty and other wicked phenomena. Interventions must therefore be dynamically intermeshed with the unfolding dynamics. [A simpler way of expressing this, is that unintended consequences, unexpected results and suprises, will occur. Look out for them, and be prepared to change actions, by their observed results.]

Tags:
Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a Comment »

Odum’s model of growth, descent and collapse

November 7, 2023

Odum seems to argue that complex living systems (ecosystems) tend to have a surge model, they boom and then they collapse or withdraw once the resources required are consumed. Or in more detail they have a cycle:

  • Growth – different groups of organisms (or societies) compete and some outgrow the others and become more plentiful or dominant and hamper the others.
  • Climax – the system grows until nearly all important available resources are consumed and it reaches maximum development. It may also produce pollution at a level that kills off biologies or resources it needs. Some plants for example kill surrounding plants which support the biodiversity they need, if they are too succesful.
  • [Maturity – the system shifts from growth to maintenance and symbiosis, competition lowers, less resources are consumed for the outputs. There can be a degree of stability or conservation. Perhaps the societies do not consume more resources than they can replace. Maturity is not always reached]
  • Descent – assets, raw materials, energy decrease because growth has used up available stores of resources, or there is a surge of destruction at the climax of growth as more resources are used up faster than ever to try and maintain stability, or cyclical ecological conditions change (eg. autumn begins). The ‘higher’ co-ordinating functions of the society/ecology can fall apart as they don’t have the available energy to support them. “By one means or another, the developed system has to adapt to coming down… An unresolved question is when is it good policy to downsize gradually [and in an organised manner] and when should [downsizing] be catastrophic?” [for example some forests may require major burns to renew and regrow]
  • Low energy restoration – before another period of growth, resources have to be rebuilt up, usually naturally, as humans have few resources or little spare energy. Soil may need to be left fallow to rebuild itself etc. “Processes of environmental production must exceed consumption” for some while to rebuild. Some resources may have extremely slow periods of rebuild, such as fossil fuels and effectively not be largely available again, and some dispersed resouces may never accumulate together in a form useable in large quantities. For example phospherous or helium is not lost but dispersed, and it may be very hard to retrieve without much more energy than is available.

There is no reason to exempt human systems from these cycles, but it does mean that in human systems what is an appropriate policy in one part of the cycle “may be poor policy in another.”

The most likely result of our current growth is a collapse, “with dispersed smaller-population communities” living primarily on speedily renewable resources and energies, such as firewood or small cropping or, if we get it going, some surviving renewable energy technology.

Any relatively quick continuance. rebuilding or maturity will have to rely on renewable energy as fossil fuels are not only finite and are requiring more energy to extract, but they damage other needed systems for reaching some level of maturity.

Even worse, unless the energy generators and resources we currently use can be replaced or recycled, then the system will not have the pathways to start the regrowth phase, and we will stay at a low level after the collapse for a long time. This does not just mean limits to economic and population growth, but limits to social ‘development,’ social complexity and social comfort.

Such a cycle is probably inevitable. Regeneration systems almost certainly have limits. What is new, is that the cycle is likely to affect the whole planet, not just one ‘civlisation’ and its resource use. There will be few areas which will be immune and have the materials and energy to generate prosperity and start growing outward. People who are hunters and gatherers and slash and burn agrictulturists will probably do best.

It seems to be logically better to develop the way down now while we still have some, if lessening, slack than to wait until the crash.

Example

Simply because I was asked, this is a simple and unscholarly look at the collapse of Rome.

Rome develops an extremely effective citizen army and military technology – the best in the world. They were almost wiped out once or twice. But they survived. One basis that keeps this military going is the gifting of land to retiring or surviving soldiers and loot to victors. This is pretty standard. Pay can be small because of the promises of land and loot. However, that also forces the military to expand into new areas to provide loot and land for soldiers. It is locked into expansion.

The military technology is great enough that the expansion proceeds relatively smoothly for a few hundred years. However, changes in the political system mean that the Roman people become less involved in politics, or less identified with politics – they are excluded and it becomes dangerous to get involved. Rome also uses up its militarisable population and has to recruit military from conquered areas. These new recruits also have less involvement with the empire other than in terms of reward, and may require more consistent payment. Eventually the empire expands too much for the loot and land it occupies to be able to support the armies and centralised, or dispersed, control. The ruling classes tend to take what land they can to make large estates to cement their power and riches, which deprives soldiers and soldiers’ families of land or potential land. Supply lines became too long, people get bored. The looted became restless and look for opportunities to rebel. It takes more effort to maintain stability. Land becomes overused and became less fertile.

To keep functional, any empire has to either generate large amounts of energy and resources (which will eventually be used up), or plunder from its conquests more than it costs to rule those conquests, and keep expanding to get more plunder when they have stripped the conquered areas. That requires potentially infinte expansion, or calling off the empire and trying to become steady state, which is hard because so much power and wealth depend on expansion. Infinite explansion is always going to run against human and planetary limits. I have heard there is some evidence the Romans reached China! but they could not keep the outpost going. Once the expansion runs into limits you eventually can’t reward or pay the people who keep it up to those limits, and have to rely on having crushed the opposition, which is not going to stay stable for ever. Maintaining Empire requires more energy than unconquered peoples can provide if conquered, and it requires energy to keep it going. When that energy depends on agriculture and forestry, then you have the problems of using up the land’s fertility and using up the forests. You also need to keep up skills training and tech of conquest, administration and building, which takes energy and often peace to store the information accurately.

After the fall of Rome, it seems fertility of the land was problematic at best, and knowledge was destroyed, dispersed, or unretrievable. While the material and intellectual poverty of the European Dark Ages, can be exaggerated, it took a long time to get anything resembling even the city of Rome going again. Similarly, without oil, the remanants of the Islamic Empires and their collapse would probably still be in relative poverty from the same kind of causes.

Conclusion

Societies tend to consume the resources they rely upon faster than those resources can be replenished, or their mode of destruction exceeds the modes of production. If this is not realised, and massive reorganisation is not undertaken then the societies will collapse. We cannot rely on magical technolgy to save us. But more importantly, the modes of consumption and destruction tend to get entangled with modes of power, and people fight to keep them going, rather than risk uncertainty or loss of power and riches. People get distracted supporting the growth mechanisms instead of maturity mechanisms.

A general formula is that: “the processes that make a society successful eventually kill them when circumstances change, or resources start becoming limited”.

Roman military effectiveness and expansion destroyed the empire they made

Tags:,
Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a Comment »

Economics and climate: Another defense mechanism? 02

November 6, 2023

Common economic models of Climate Change

Apparently the Economic models used to predict the damage of climate change are totally unreal. They essentially do not even start to recognise that economies depend upon working ecologies and fairly stable weather patterns. They do not realise that modes of production can be modes of destruction, or that the (dis)information systems cultivated by business can also disrupt understanding of the economy, leading to booms, busts and bailouts. Any model which assumes economic stability, and lack of self-disruption, is not an accurate model of an economy.

William Nordhaus apparently put together the basic types of climate economy models which are used by financial organisations, the US EPA and the IPCC. These are known as ‘Dynamic Integrated Climate Economy’ (DICE) models. The IPCC calls its similar models ‘Integrated Assesment Models’ (IAM).

The prime conclusion from these models is that social and economic adaptation to climate change is pretty cheap. Nordhaus predicted “damage of 2.1 percent of income at 3◦C, and 7.9 percent of global income at a global temperature rise of 6◦C”.

At this price, it may be so cheap that it is not really worth cutting back emissions, or doing anything that could potentially harm profits. He apparently even suggests that the global economy reaches an “optimal” adaptation with a temperature rise between 2.7 and 3.5 degrees Celsius. So that is what we should aim for…. much higher than climate scientists generally think is reasonable.

Apparent assumptions of the models

Nordhaus and others can only argue the lack of both severe costs and serious disruption at even 6 degrees, by assuming that:

  • Frictionless market adaptation can occur easily and that companies which are profitting from damage, will not try and delay change through political connections and information distortion so that people (in power and elsewhere) will not want to change. Resistance to change can accumulate and block change, until only violent and unpredictable change can occur,
  • Global temperature increases have no significant or disruptive outcomes, and that increases in temperatures produce smooth and linear changes in weather and ecology, as if the temperature increase only produced warming and did not have ‘side effects’ like increased storm damage, change in rainfall, increased frequency of fires, activation of trigger points, increased death rates in some parts of the world, and change in agricultural conditions.
  • Pollution and destructive extraction have no effect on the economy, are external to it, or can easily be avoided,
  • Energy supply can continue to grow and will not slow down the economy, and that,
  • GDP can continue to increase in an economy that is hitting planetary boundaries.

He also assumes that thereare no bad consequences from ‘just-in-time’ production and distribution which cuts down on storage costs, and has the capacity to reduce resilience in a disruption (supermarket shelves emptying in times of panic etc). If just-in-time can be abandoned, long term storage set up or local production engineered again, then maybe this would be a lesser problem, but it would drastically change patterns of cost.

Trivialising Damage from Climate Change

As Keen et al put it in their abstract:

Such relatively trivial estimates of economic damages—when these economists otherwise assume that human economic productivity will be an order of magnitude higher than today—contrast strongly with predictions made by scientists of significantly reduced human habitability from climate change.

Nonetheless, the coupled economic and climate models used to make such predictions have been influential in the international climate change debate and policy prescriptions

Keen et al 2021 Economists’ erroneous estimates of damages from climate change IDEAS Working Paper Series from RePEcrg

They continue. arguing that the models:

severely underestimate.. damages from climate change by committing several methodological errors, including neglecting tipping points, and assuming that economic sectors not exposed to the weather are insulated from climate change. Most fundamentally, the influential Integrated Assessment Model DICE is shown to be incapable of generating an economic collapse, regardless of the level of damages

ibid

Tipping points should be part of the models

Tipping points are part of current climate models and cannot be ignored in economic models of climate change. There is almost no likelihood of a completely smooth transition, and current predictions are that several tipping points will get started long before the end of the century and before the average temperature increases are greater than 2 degrees. It may be necessary to point out that completion of a tipping point may take years but will continue after it starts, so tipping points can start before they are noticed.

Keen et al point to the:

concept of “tipping cascades”, whereby passing a threshold for one system—say, a temperature above which the Greenland ice sheet irreversibly shrinks—triggers causal interactions that increase the likelihood that other tipping elements undergo qualitative transitions—in this example, freshwater input to the North Atlantic increases the risk of a collapse of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC—also referred to as the ’thermohaline circulation’).

Such causal interactions can also be mediated by global temperature changes whereby tipping one system—e.g. the loss of Arctic summer sea-ice—amplifies global warming, increasing the likelihood that other other elements undergo a qualitative transition

ibid

The intial work by Nordhaus setting up the DICE denies the possibility of tipping points and cascades completely. According to Keen et al, Lenton et al:

calculated that including tipping points in Nordhaus’s own DICE model can increase the “Social Cost of Carbon” (by which optimal carbon pricing is calculated) by a factor of greater than eight [8], and proposed 2◦C as a critical level past which “tipping cascades” could occur [9,10,15]….

inclusion of tipping point likelihoods in DICE…. leads to much higher damages [8]

ibid

The economy is safe when indoors?

Using similar models to DICE, the 2014 IPCC report stated that “Estimates agree on the size of the impact (small relative to economic growth)” with a 2.3% increase in global income for a 1 degree C increase in global temperature over pre-industrial levels.

The Report summarised that:

For most economic sectors, the impact of climate change will be small relative to the impacts
of other drivers (medium evidence, high agreement). Changes in population, age, income,
technology, relative prices, lifestyle, regulation, governance, and many other aspects of
socioeconomic development will have an impact on the supply and demand of economic
goods and services that is large relative to the impact of climate change

Chapter 10 Key Economic Sectors and Services, p 662 In Climate Change 2014: Impacts, Adaptation, and Vulnerability. Part A: Global and Sectoral Aspects. Contribution of Working Group II to the Fifth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change

This unlikely assumption appears to be based on another bad assumption that:

  • by far the majority of economc action is independent of ‘weather’ events, ecological destruction and resources depletion.

That is, again, that this climate economics does not consider the world the economy occurs within. It also appears to assume that air cooling technology and energy supplies will be able to cope with the extra loads. Again the models ignore the economic consequences of “potential loss of lives and livelihoods on immense scale and fundamental transformation and destruction of our natural environment” (Stern et al 2022). Not to mention agricultural collapse. While Economists apparently don’t eat, most people would recognise that the total economy is errected upon food supplies, no matter how much else goes on. Stern writes that 6 degrees increase is unlikely to give losses of 8.5% of GDP, but:

we could see deaths on a huge scale, migration of billions of people, and severe conflicts around the world, as large areas, many densely populated currently, became more or less uninhabitable as a result of submersion, desertification, storm surge and extreme weather events, or because the heat was so intense for extended periods that humans could not survive outdoors. It is profoundly implausible that numbers around 10 percent of GDP offer a sensible description of the kind of disruption and catastrophe that 6 C of warming could cause.

Stern 2022 A Time for Action on Climate Change and a Time for Change in Economics , The Economic Journal, 132, 644: 1259–1289

Likewise:

Climate change (either regional or global) has played a role in the collapse or transformation of numerous previous societies (37) and in each of the five mass extinction events in Phanerozoic Earth history (38). The current carbon pulse is occurring at an unprecedented geological speed and, by the end of the century, may surpass thresholds that triggered previous mass extinctions (39, 40).

Kemp et al 2022 Climate Endgame: Exploring catastrophic climate change scenarios PNAS

Even if you could allocate calculated risk and danger factors for events that could completely change the system, that still does not mean that an estimate of a 1% chance of collapse means collapse cannot occur.

The orthodox economists, their models and the politicians who use them, seem completely unaware that complex systems can collapse, or change very rapidly, and they depend upon the idea that free markets can always beneficially adapt to almost anything without much cost.

Importance of noting extremes, disorder and uncertainty

Kemp et al 2022 suggest that investigating the “bad-to-worst cases is vital” for improving resilience, and informing policy and emergency responses. “

First, risk management and robust decision-making under uncertainty requires knowledge of extremes. For example, the minimax criterion ranks policies by their worst outcomes (28). Such an approach is particularly appropriate for areas characterized by high uncertainties and tail risks….. Climate damages lie within the realm of “deep uncertainty”: We don’t know the probabilities attached to different outcomes, the exact chain of cause and effect that will lead to outcomes, or even the range, timing, or desirability of outcomes, (30). Uncertainty, deep or not, should motivate precaution and vigilance, not complacency

They propose 4 main questions: all of which point to the importance of considering disorder and the production of lack of resilience.

  • 1) What is the potential for climate change to drive mass extinction events?
  • 2) What are the mechanisms that could result in human mass mortality and morbidity?
  • 3) What are human societies’ vulnerabilities to climate-triggered risk cascades, such as from conflict, political instability, and systemic financial risk?
  • 4) How can these multiple strands of evidence—together with other global dangers—be usefully synthesized into an “integrated catastrophe assessment”?

“even simpler ‘compound hazard’ analyses of interacting climate hazards and drivers are underused. Yet this is how risk[/danger] unfolds in the real world. For example, a cyclone destroys electrical infrastructure, leaving a population vulnerable to an ensuing deadly heat wave”. They further suggest that IPCC reports do not spend large amounts of space analysing what will happen at 3 degrees or above warming, and have indeed shifted over time to considering 2 degrees or less which might be fine if there was evidence we will reach that target. However, the culture of climate science tends “to ‘err on the side of least drama’ (7), to not to be alarmists, which can be compounded by the consensus building processes of the IPCC.

Political and economic instability, feeds into the dangers, as does a teetering energy system, heavy illth production, technological lock-in, failure to face challenges, and a harmful (dis)information system. These are all observable current problems.

What do the models do?

The Optimism of these models, and their framing of easy social change within an unstable environment, without political opposition from anyone, is absurd.

The models seem out of touch with what we know about earth systems and social systems, they can only be seen in terms of being a defense mechanism, ideologies useful for protecting the business and political system as it is now and which actively halt adaptation and prevention measures. They help convince people that doing nothing is ok, and nothing bad can happen.

However, eco-and-climate system change changes will almost certainly spill through other systems and change almost everything, including the current market’s ability to function, and the powerful people who use these models will not be prepared for it…. and hence neither will we. They are part of a collective suicide and refusal to face challenges, which might cost some people profit.

Tags:, , , , ,
Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a Comment »

Economics and climate: Another defense mechanism? 01

November 5, 2023

We know emissions are still rising.

We know that temperatures are increasing faster than expected. We have just had several months in which global average temperatures were over 1.5 degrees warmer….

We know governments such as those of Australia, the UK, the USA etc are still authorising new fossil fuel fields that can be described as “carbon bombs” that will either lock us into even greater emissions, or be abandoned at a huge loss to fossil fuel companies – no prizes for guessing which is most likely.

We know that it does not matter which country the fossil fuels are burnt, whatever governments argue about measurements of emissions, the burning will increase climate change for everyone.

We know that this increase is likely to lead to tipping points being triggered (such as runaway ice melts, Amazon forests dying, oceans dying, release of methane from under land and sea ice), which are likely to trigger even more tipping points, leading to irreversible ecological and climate change.

These events are likely to trigger agricultural collapse in at least some parts of the world, which could lead to mass human death, and human population movement.

In other words, while the best solution is to install governments that will listen to scientists and to the signs of collapse, the most likely result is that we will break the 1.5 degree limit.

One of the apparent tools to allow this emissions increase is economic models.

Economics

John Stuart Mill explicitly excluded a large number of human and social factors from economic analysis, in order to make it simple. In somewhat convoluted terms (skip if its too much of a headache) he wrote:

“Political Economy” …. does not treat the whole of man’s nature as modified by the social state, nor of the whole conduct of man in society. It is concerned with him solely as a being who desires to possess wealth, and who is capable of judging of the comparative efficacy of means of obtaining that end…

Political Economy considers mankind as occupied solely in acquiring and consuming wealth; and aims at showing what is the course of action into which mankind, living in a state of society, would be impelled, if that motive, except in the degree in which it is checked by the two perpetual countermoves above adverted to [aversion to labour, and desire of the present enjoyment of costly indulgences,] were the absolute ruler of all their actions….

With respect to those parts of human conduct of which wealth is not even the principal object, to these Political Economy does not pretend that its conclusions are applicable. But there are also certain departments of human affairs, in which the acquisition of wealth is the main and acknowledged end. It is only of these that Political Economy takes notice….

Not that any political economist was ever so absurd as to suppose that mankind are really thus constituted, but because this is the mode in which science must necessarily proceed.

Mill On the Definition of Political Economy and Method of Investigation Proper to It

He admits to massively simplifying human psychological complexity. He also simplified other matters, but the problem is that on the whole, most neoclassical neoliberal economics, ignores vital factors of life and forgets they are doing it, making their economics the whole of life.

Mill admits to his economics ignoring the psychology of markets, the ways we engage in self destruction, fantasy, self-justification for harms and scapegoat others. He ignores the ways that markets and information might shape our psycologies in ways which sabotage our ability to take action on the challenges facing us, and even to use economics to distract us from real problems.

It ignores the way economic action is part of politics. Markets are also structured by power and politics, and power and politics structure markets. It ignores the fact that inequalities of wealth lead to inequalities of action and influence, and that inequalities of wealth can reinforce those inequalities through the State its laws, regulations and procedures. Established economics will tend to support established political and riches arrangements, as those forms of economics will receive the awards, the funding and promotion.

It ignores the effects of economic action on the ecology and climate, and the effects of climate and ecology on economic action. The pricing mechanism is supposed to mean that if prices go up, then people change their usages, or are stimulated to produce more. It does not assume that ecological effects can link together, or be suppressed by politics until they cascade or hit like a tidal wave. It ignores the politics and ecological ‘side effects’ of the struggle for resources. Economics is locked into viewing ecology as passive and endlessly giving – if something dies off somewhere, the same can be produced elsewhere. Economists can even argue that because agricultural production is a small fraction of the gdp (<4%) it is largely unimportant, while most people can figure out that without that production the rest of the contemporary world economy would crash.

It ignores the effects of illth (pollution, dispersion, destructive extraction and harmful labour), rendering them externalities that do not have an effect on the economy or life. Essentially this leaves it to taxpayers to clean up the mess produced by business, and helps boost profit from destruction and the loss of vital materials. Economics ignores harms produced by its actions, as it tends to be about justifying riches and producing more riches.

It ignores the effects of technology and technological lock-in, other than through magical claims that needed technology will always appear through the market. Economics only considers technology beneficial if it makes money.

It ignores the importance of information systems for economies, and how those can be ‘corrupted’ or ‘distorted’ by politics, riches or over-plenty, so that the economy is functioning only at a level of fantasy, (and that the economics used to describe that action is also a consoling fantasy). Economics ignores the ways economic propaganda can create harms and fantasies to boost the wealth of people making the sales. This is because one of its fundamental assumptions is that only good information counts, every one has access to good information, or that the price system acts as a perfect information processor. Economics assumes that error is not normal, and that people will not buy rubbish like collateralized debt obligations, which will lead to economic harm.

Finally it assumes energy production is simple, and continuous with no harms or limits, dependent largely on money (which stores psychological energy to an extent), so that economies can grow forever. Economies can supposedly violate the laws of thermodynamics with ease.

There are undoubtedly other issues that mainstream economics dismisses or hides which are important.

It should be clear that by ignoring these factors economic models go about hiding the challenges of climate change and eco-destruction, and that is the subject of the next page.

Tags:, ,
Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a Comment »