Efficiency tends to encourage specialisation. Stable environments tend to select for efficiency.
Resilience is about being able to continue to operate in changing circumstances.
Resilience tends to encourage generalised adaptability. Unstable environments tend to select for resilience.
It is a long essay, and I have not necessarily picked out the main point. But in terms of this scheme, I think that complex supply chains and high debt are suited to efficiency but not to resiliency. The result is that the housing bust of 2006-2007 and the current pandemic imposed much higher economic costs than might have been the case otherwise.
Off topic from ASK’s analysis, but this essay presents an eloquent critique of open borders:
“Attempts by economists to calculate how much economic activity (defined as production for exchange) would be increased if all countries had open borders presume that the social structures within which exchange takes place would not themselves be affected by the flow of people. We can see from the above that this is not remotely a reasonable assumption. Organisations, institutions and cultures are not independent of the people who participate in and interact with them. More to the point, they are not independent of patterns of belief, action, norms and expectations, patterns that vary highly non-randomly across human populations and are not automatically transferred due to change in residence.”
“In their 2001 book, (Domicide: The Global Destruction Of Home), J. Douglas Porteous and Sandra E. Smith developed the concept of domicide, the deliberate destruction of home against the will of the home dweller. This can extend beyond the destruction of a domicile to the destruction of a sense of place and belonging. Such senses of place and belonging is anchored in shared connections to the past. Any ideology that seeks to create some transformative future based on pervasive moral rejection of the past must tend to be culturally domicidal.”
Heck of an essay.
State capitalism promotes efficiency at the expense of resilience.
Intrigued by:
“Shakespeare’s characters often show great concern for their reputation. Shakespeare was writing in the age of duelling. The willingness to engage in duels provided a way for people to signal their character and their norm commitment, establishing themselves as trustworthy recipients of office in a patronage society. As cognitive skills became more dominant, Classicism became a means of signalling norm commitment. As bureaucracies and the human-and-cultural capital class have continued to expand, an ostentatious commitment to designated moral goals that both morally and cognitively differentiates from the wider society has become the increasingly dominant norm commitment signal. The claim to own morality is, however, rather different in its social and status implications than the claim to own honour or to have a superior education of cultural commitment. When associated with transnational networks and identities, it encourages cultural polarisation presented as moral polarisation.”
And was disturbingly willing to accept the following at face value and will need to chew on it for a while: “Elite self-interest undermining social resilience is a persistent pattern in human history.”
Quite a lot of ground covered.
Warby has written a lot of other highly informative, perceptive and insightful pieces. Pretty amazing stuff. Glad that Dr King’s post has gotten me to sit up and pay attention.
Quick thought about test jet airplanes, or racing cars. Efficient for speed, but highly susceptible to minor problems that can cause big collapse.
The Space Shuttle explosion with O-rings.
All very high-performance machines / systems are subject to more major failures after minor problems.
Sorry, Arnold. I’ve been trying to understand Mr. Warby’s long essay and some of his recent essays, but I’m not sure I’ve understood any of them.
You refer only to efficiency and resilience to highlight that Mr. Warby is making a point about efficiency being harmful to resilience. I think he’s wrong. I think resilience assumes a high degree of efficiency. Why? First, the distinction between stable and unstable environments makes nonsense. We use the idea of a stable environment only for an analytical purpose, but as soon as we want to understand how some shock affects our analysis we recognize how unstable the environment is. Even if we restrict the analysis to how the new information changes our beliefs we engage in decision-making to learn about collecting and processing information efficiently. We may fail but that will depend largely on our cognitive ability and risk preferences (in case of “radical uncertainty” we know that most likely we will be wrong and that’s why we are cautious — remember your posts about the early stages of the pandemic and how you decided to stay home). Efficiency is the relevant criterion to assess how good individual decisions are. Indeed, if we are too emotional, most likely we are going to make bad decisions.
Second, we all know that we live in a changing world, and we struggle to understand the changes. Even if we bet that tomorrow will be no different from today, most likely we have learned from our experiences what to do if some unexpected event happens, that is, we may have a plan B. We may discuss a lot about how to deal with future unknown viruses, but you can bet that little will be invested in an effective warning system (we don’t pay much attention to possible earthquakes even in places like Chile or California where experts are always concerned about the next big one).
Third, the relevant issue is how we adapt to environmental changes that can be assumed to be permanent (to last at least more than one generation). Could we accelerate adaptation if we were concerned that climate change is going to have lasting, severe consequences over several generations? To the extent that it requires “collective” action at the world level, “we” have to identify the relevant “we” and go back to what “we” have learned about the limits of “collective” action –one of those limits refer to coercion as an effective means to “save” humanity. Indeed, this is well beyond the references of Mr. Warby to adaptation (despite the length of his essay, collective action is not considered).
Warby is one smart guy.
I don’t know. Our most complex supply chains are agricultural food supplies and cheap consumer goods. You can get anything from pair of socks to an apple sourced from hundreds of jurisdictions, from manufacturers of all sorts of sizes, from a supply chain as complex as a big-box store or as simple as showing up to a farmer’s market. The diversity of nominally-similar products are through the room.
Our least complex supply chains are medical devices / drugs / PPE. An N95 mask must meet pretty rigid requirements, they have designed homogenized by both government fiat and private industry requirements (imagine a hospital saying “yeah, that’s close enough” to a blemish batch in normal times even without regulation).
Its pretty conspicuous that food items and consumer goods like toilet paper and bottled water recovered much, much faster, while I still can’t in good conscious buy an n95 mask for my woodworking hobby.