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Bradford DeLong praises a recent Dan Davies book explaining why big, complex social systems so often go off the rails

Economy / opinion
Bradford DeLong praises a recent Dan Davies book explaining why big, complex social systems so often go off the rails
foiled by complexity

How can we be at least 15 times richer than our pre-industrial Agrarian Age predecessors, and yet so unhappy? One explanation is that we are not wired for it: nothing in our heritage or evolutionary past prepared us to deal with a society of more than 150 people. To operate our increasingly complex technologies and advance our prosperity, we somehow must coordinate among more than eight billion people.

We therefore have built massive societal machines comprising market economies, government and corporate bureaucracies, national and sub-national polities, cultural ideologies, and more. Yet we struggle to fine-tune these institutions, because we simply do not understand them. We are left with a globe-spanning network of profoundly alien leviathans that boss us around and make us unhappy, even as they make us fabulously rich compared to previous generations.

The economist Dan Davies has written a wonderful little book about our problematic creations. In The Unaccountability Machine: Why Big Systems Make Terrible Decisions – And How the World Lost Its Mind, Davies weaves together an argument from five separate threads. The first is his observation that our world is rife with accountability sinks: places where things are clearly going wrong, but where there is no one to blame. Instead, the entire system is at fault, and the system has no way of seeing or correcting the problem.

Second, Davies points out that every social system needs not only to pursue its mission but also to preserve itself. This generally means that it cannot focus on one narrow metric. Instead, every system must perform multiple sub-tasks in addition to its core mission. These include providing sufficient resources to the people doing the work; coordinating things in the here and now; looking ahead from the here and now to the “there and then”; and maintaining the human participants’ focus on what the organisation is for (its guiding philosophy). Davies gives the example of an Elton John cover band, where these tasks are carried out, roughly, by “[the] musicians, conductor, tour manager, artistic director, and Elton John.”

Third, delegation is crucial to reducing complexities and keeping an organisation’s mission manageable. You do not need to watch the temperature inside the squirrel cage minute by minute; you just need to set a thermostat.

Fourth, it is important to build strong feedback loops. This means amplifying the outside signals that you most need to see, and maintaining enough internal processing power to act on them before it is too late.

Lastly, the best way to reform organisations so that they do not become unaccountability machines is to revive the post-World War II quasi-discipline of management cybernetics. Pioneered by the computer scientist Norbert Wiener and the political scientist Herbert Simon, the approach was named for the Greek word kybernētikos: “good at steering a boat.”

The guru who made the most progress in building management cybernetics was the counterculture-era management consultant Stafford Beer, whose book Brain of the Firm explored how bureaucracies can be reformed so that the internal flow of information between deciders and decided-upon is kept in balance. Without that, a system will not remain viable and useful to humanity over time.

Reviewing The Unaccountability Machine in the Financial Times, Felix Martin describes Davies’ approach as “a kind of psychoanalysis for non-human intelligences, with Stafford Beer as Sigmund Freud.” I could not have said it better. Our social world is no longer confined to our families, our neighbours, our co-workers, and those with whom we directly interact via networks of affection, antipathy, barter and exchange, small-scale planning, and arm-twisting. Instead, more and more of what we do is driven by an extremely complex assembly of vast interlocking social and technological mechanisms that we have made but do not understand.

If the challenge of modernity is to figure out a better way to work and think together as a global community of more than eight billion people, how can we improve our understanding, and thus our control? Unfortunately, Davies does not give us much of an answer. His book concludes with typical business-school blather. Nonetheless, he deserves credit for defining the task we face and pointing us toward a new intellectual path forward.


J. Bradford DeLong, a former deputy assistant US Treasury secretary, is Professor of Economics at the University of California, Berkeley, a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research, and the author of Slouching Towards Utopia: An Economic History of the Twentieth Century (Basic Books, 2022). Copyright: Project Syndicate, 2024, and published here with permission.

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29 Comments

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1644264/pdf/procrsmed00338…

Death Squared: The Explosive Growth and Demise of a Mouse Population by John B Calhoun MD (Section on Behavioral Systems, Laboratory ofBrain Evolution & Behavior, National Institute of Mental Health, 9000 Rockville Pike, Bethesda, Maryland 20014, USA)

I am of the view that the very complexity of our society will be its demise.  

 

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Actually our loss of technical competence and cultural cohesion will be. Countries and civilisations which can maintain that capability in their populations and political class will make it through fine I reckon - they always have. 

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The only ones that "make it through" are tribal types.

Until modernity arrives to throw them under a bus.

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CV - no they bl--dy well haven't. 

Name me one?

Rome, perchance? Ankor Wat? The Mayans? Sumeria perchance? 

 

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Possibly India. They've had different regimes rule over it for centuries, but the core civilisation and culture is pretty old.

There's a fire used for cremations on the banks of the Ganges at Varanasi that's been tended to by the same family for over 2000 years.

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No complex society lasts. We've tried it every which way, the end result is the same.

I think the problem lies in that 150 or so limit of other individuals our minds can relate to and empathise with. But what to do?

In the 60s, Timothy Leary and Ram Dass hypothesized putting LSD in the water supply. But that's only short acting and unreliable.

Probably, the answer lies in some sort of generic bio hacking of the human mind to give a serotonin release or the like to make people more conscious of one another, and less self interested.

We're probably a few collapses away from being capable of that.

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GREAT post. 

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Just wanted to comment on my appreciation of your recent article summarising some recent presentations. Particularly thankful for introducing me to Schmachtenberger and the concept of what he refers to as 'Molloc'. It really summed up and clarified much of my own thinking about the wider system we live in and the interrelatedness of the problems caused by it. The comparison to a misaligned AGI is sobering.

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...make people more conscious of one another, and less self interested.

It's not impossible for education to do this. Not easy, but not impossible. Unfortunately, most discussion about education and its purpose seems to revolve around the idea that it should be measured by how well it shapes people to serve our current economic system. I guess it's a reflection of what we (currently) consider to be the 'purpose' of society (or maybe what society considers an individual's 'purpose' to be).

Any commentary relating to STEM vs the humanities often reminds me of Captain Haddock and his colourful insults. He had some doozies. "Guano gatherer!", "vegetarian!" - and a favourite of mine - "artist!".

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It's not impossible for education to do this. Not easy, but not impossible

You need a core belief system that still involves a degree of mysticism. Some of our existing, longer lasting cultures still have this, but we left that behind long ago.

Much of our culture, thinking, and civilisation revolves around rather hard materialism (not just acquisition of material things, but the measuring of things in a material way). This leads to a more distinct sense of "I", in contrast to others and the rest of the world around us.

Our schools now involve a decent amount of messaging around sharing and caring, but this is mostly lip service. We are vocally virtuous but our actions are usually the opposite.

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If I understand you correctly, I'd have to disagree that most people get their sense of identity from what they acquire. I'd argue it's more often found in how they relate to others and the world around them. Ask anyone who they are and most will respond with something along the lines of "I am the son/daughter/mother/father/sister/brother of such-and-such and I am a <occupation> who lives in <place>.

Not saying that people don't get some sense of identity from ownership to different degrees.

With regard to the messaging in schools around sharing and caring, I think it's a good thing, but probably not fundamental enough (maybe what you were getting at when referring to 'mysticism').

Personally, I feel as though my own sense of identity and the quality of the relations I have with other people have improved together as I've matured. Both I attribute to a growing understanding of (or more correctly, belief in) how I fit into the world around me. Spending time in nature, positive socialising, reading philosophy, meditation, and other ...pursuits have been the means to that end. While I would still have described my younger self as empathetic, I would definitely say that my sense of empathy is both more consistent and broader now. It's an incredibly rewarding path to pursue - I (and probably many people I've crossed!) only wish I'd given it more attention earlier.

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Yeah you've misunderstood what I mean by materialism. I'm meaning more in a sense of viewing and measuring the world in a material way. It's all flat, no depth - dualist; big in relation to small, son in relation to father, hot in relation to cold. It's allowed for some amazing science, at the expense of trying to identify the whole.

In regards to your attention at a younger age, I think someone needs to experience a bit of life first, have some loss, etc, to truly grasp the nature of things. Even young monks are essentially just rote learning this sort of stuff until they reach a point of actual wisdom - usually in their mid 20s, which is about the time a male brain reaches some sort of maturity.

It's never too late. 

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Yeah you've misunderstood what I mean by materialism.

Yeah, after rereading your comment, I realise that. Cheers

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Its good fun watching the process though. Especially watching people grow .

I wonder if everyone were to have real wisdom when they were young ... would it take the fun out of living and working it out...

The most interesting points in life seems to be as as one tries to seek happiness in various ways. . And sees they can't ever quite grasp and hang onto it.. and then fighting to solve it conceptually

And etc etc

The fun of humanity is to conceptualize at a far greater level and try to wrestle with finding happiness as a group of billions.. by layering and arguing over everyone's different concepts and opinions organising ourselves into tribes that also build their own opinions and concepts and trying to settle on the 'right' one and not the 'wrong ones (duality)..  which is surely even funnier and more interesting to watch.... until they start fighting about it all.

Imho .. Best to go for a surf until it all passes and sorts itself out. :)

 

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The most interesting points in life seems to be as as one tries to seek happiness in various ways. . And sees they can't ever quite grasp and hang onto it.. and then fighting to solve it conceptually

As soon as happiness becomes something to obtain and hold, is when it easily slips through your fingers.

The only answer I can see for all of us is to stop worrying about the world and enjoy it, and try to shine a light on others through your actions. We're all mirrors in a sense.

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Enough of this dollar-store philosophy already. Fight monsters, stare into the abyss!

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Each to their own. I've personally found an inverse relationship between my wanting or craving of things, be it relationship, financial success etc, and the abundance of such things in my life.

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Or be grateful for the growth and wonder that comes with challenges in life, confront the parasitic narrative of lack and separation, cultivate an attitude of gratitude and circumstance-agnostic contentment, whilst being ready to flip tables when appropriate

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Mysticism is still very alive and well. What is our economic system but a faith based exercise? Science is similar. It may be based on observation of natural phenomena, but faith in its ability to solve our inadequacies and facilitate our colonisation of the cosmos, is purely rooted in mythology an mysticism. Many have moved on from worshiping a sky fairy, but the vacuum has been replaced with consumerism, scientism and growthism. 

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We have very different understandings of mysticism. You seem to be equating it more to the supernatural, or magical thinking.

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No complex society lasts.

What does that even mean? I'm pretty sure after the classic Roman empire waned complex societies continued to exist. Same with the Greeks. All that nonsense about "Dark Ages" is just that, nonsense. Things wax and wane, things change, but the trajectory has always been onwards and upwards.

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No single complex society lasts. New ones arise, but they also invariably fail. It means there's a fundamental issue with sustainability.

Hence, we're still trying to work out how the Pyramids were built.

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Doom and gloom is a massive industry preying on children and the gullible. Industrial grade witch doctors have given us the multi trillion dollar climate change industry and the billionaire class making bank out of a bad flu season to give but two recent examples. Politicians love it as it give them a reason to be relevant, and the media and expert class clip the ticket.

Profits of Doom: Milking the Apocalyptic Cash Cow for All It's Worth

https://www.amazon.com/Profits-Doom-Milking-Apocalyptic-Worth/dp/143278…

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Isn't your insistence that we're all being hoodwinked and manipulated by shady elites also a form of doom and gloom?

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It's just human nature. Witchdoctors have been around for a very long time and we are still here. You don't think people profit, sometimes immensely, out of doom and gloom?

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Our entire economic and materialistic consumerism is built around the reporting, preventing or alleviating all sorts of "doom and gloom"... not enough this, not enough that...

And it's not human nature... free will, choice and all that...

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How can we be at least 15 times richer than our pre-industrial Agrarian Age predecessors, and yet so unhappy? One explanation is that we are not wired for it: nothing in our heritage or evolutionary past prepared us to deal with a society of more than 150 people. 

Our evolutionary past, the bulk of which was in the Pleistocene, has prepared us well for the modern age. The problem is we refuse to eat ancestrally appropriate food, exercise appropriately or get enough sunlight. Get your metabolism healthy and you can deal with anything the modern world throws at you, physically and mentally. It's a doddle compared to hunting mastodons and dealing with Neanderthals during an ice age while using only sticks and stones.

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We are definitely not engendered to live life like this. You've just highlighted a big part of the issue.

Historically, you would fear immediate peril, Mastodons, Tigers etc. Short duration fear.

Now, people live in constant states of the same level of fear, over social acceptance, having to pay bills, or any number of inane imagined hazards. The material abundance and ease of life, has us clawing at existential issues like meaning and happiness. 

It's a very 'heady' existence, that traps so many. Some traditional cultures can't even grasp the concept of self loathing.

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https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/humanity

Does humanity, our economics and politics, align?

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