Beyond the Tipping Point: preventing a global collapse

The fundamental principle by which the modern world works is that increased efficiency reduces costs and therefore quality of life increases as each individual can either afford more of what they like or they can step up to improved quality at the same cost.

This is the basic driver behind every business endeavour: the delivery of content that would be too inefficient in terms of overall cost to quality of life for an individual to provide for themselves, and for which they are therefore willing to pay another to provide to them.

This core function of any financial transaction is true regardless of technological level, historical era, or magnitude of transaction. It applies just as much to the wool trade of mediaeval England, as it does to a hedge fund in 2011; and to the purchase of a loaf of bread by a citizen in the Roman Empire, as to buying a house today. Even hunter-gatherer tribal societies apply this principle by dividing the hunting and gathering (and other tasks of life) between different subsets of the tribe, thus improving overall tribal efficiency. Communist societies are no different either, with the profit motive being abstracted into (and distorted by) a central authority, still existing through quota allocations. While there exists a limited amount of resources to be divided amongst a number of people, the drive for efficiency will always accompany humanity.

There is therefore a permanent drive built into society to increase efficiency as to do so increases the economic power of any given transaction. This is to the benefit of both the seller and the purchaser as both have potential to get more out of the transaction: more service gained by the buyer, and more profit accrued to the vendor.

The limiting factor to this activity is the stability of the mechanism by which efficiency is increased. For every step up in efficiency, there is an increase in complexity. A highly unstable mechanism becomes unpredictable, and so costs rise, negating the initial efficiency gain. Risks to the system occur when unstable mechanisms are implemented in an attempt to extract the efficiency gain (and so extra profit) before the system is stable enough to endure implementation. If this happens, the net cost to both parties actually increases: the buyer purchases a faulty item or service, and the seller has to fix the problem.

This is the root of moral hazard, the financial risk associated with implementing any new system. It is the loss of this connection between risk and return that concerned central bankers so much during the financial crisis (both with regard to the way debt was repackaged/resold and with the bank bailouts thereafter), and continues to ripple outwards in examples as diverse (but connected) as the risks attached to European sovereign debt levels and credit availability in the mortgage market.

A more prosaic example can be found in the recent discovery of toxic dioxins in German eggs used in various products in the UK. Here the system is the interconnected nature of the global food industry, and the efficiency gained by leveraging mass industrial processes to feed populations at a cost they will tolerate. Without this complex logistic web, food would be significantly more expensive. The flipside is that the when the system fails, the negative effect ripples outwards much more than it would have in an earlier era.

Technological advances drive efficiency gains, which lead to more refined and extended logistics chains, delivering more affordable products to more people, driving up purchasing power and so, quality of life. The challenge is how to ensure systems that are implemented to improve efficiency are also sufficiently robust to reduce the risk of systemic collapse to a tolerable level. In other words, how not to push the system beyond the tipping point.

The question is what level of risk is tolerable? Any logistics chain is inherently risky. Equally, surviving independently of a wider economic network would be a subsistence and lonely existence. Redundant systems (or their abstract corollary, the insurance industry) stabilise complex system, but carry their own costs and so are themselves prone to the same failings (viz. the failure of collateralised debt obligations/CDOs to protect the banks in the way they expected).

Understanding how complex and chaotic systems interact with each other will be crucial to safeguarding our ever more complex and interdependent society.

But even that does not provide a solution to the fundamental conflict between efficiency and stability. I wonder if such a solution exists?

The only possible theoretical way out I can think of would be a the equivalent of a perpetual motion machine: a way to get something for nothing, a lifting off the pressure on resources. Perhaps developing fusion power would allow that, at least for a while? Virtually free unlimited power would increase efficiency of every other system, though of course we would then be dependent on yet another fragile system (the fusion power generation network). Still, I think it no random coincidence that every single major world power is investing in that fusion research. Certainly, I can think of no other project that has unified China, the EU, the USA, Russia, Japan, Korea and India in common purpose.

Loaves and fishiness

At the height of McCarthyism in the early 1950s, the CIA was busy conducting a series of covert and illegal experiments on human volunteers. The project, codenamed MKULTRA, was designed to investigate interrogation and mind-control techniques. It exposed unknowing human test subjects to a range of mind-altering chemicals such as LSD.

I mention that background to put this news story today into context. It discusses the possibility that a famous outbreak of ergot poisoning in a small French village was one of those experiments. Ergot poisoning, incidentally, is thought to have played an important role during another time of public lynchings, it being a likely causative agent for the bewitchings leading to the Salem Witch Trials… but that is another story.

In our 1951 case, it is claimed that the ergot story was a cover-up for LSD experiments. It is alleged that loaves of bread were laced with LSD (or another psychoactive substance) to monitor the effect the drug had on the population.

Personally, it doesn’t strike me as a particularly useful experiment to conduct, given the lack of control over the subjects and the inability researchers would have had monitoring their behaviour in a meaningful way. It would be pretty difficult to gather any useful actual data. It also seems to duplicate some other MKULTRA work. But bad methodology doesn’t mean the experiment didn’t happen, and the truth is that we’re unlikely to ever know for sure.

Regardless of whether Pont-Saint-Esprit was another example or not, MKULTRA remains a salutory lesson to the psychiatric profession of the importance of maintaining its own sense of professional ethics, independent of the government of the day. It was a prominent psychiatrist, Donald Ewen Cameron, who was recruited by the CIA to run the experimental side of MKULTRA. By ignoring the concept of informed consent, he let himself become part of a system that authorised abuse on a wide scale. It wasn’t the first time the profession has been used in this way. And at the same time as MKULTRA was happening in the USA, psychiatrists were busy declaring political activists in the USSR insane for not believing in Communism.

But it is a reminder that the State – whatever State – should not be allowed to easily overwhelm the individual. The starting point should always be a sense of valuing liberty, freedom and individual choice above the needs of Leviathan.

Death

“One can survive everything nowadays, except death, and live down anything, except a good reputation.”

- Oscar Wilde

Death remains our fiercest taboo.

Uniquely on this planet, humans are able to anticipate their own death. A friend recently asked if we think enough about it, so I felt obliged to offer my own thoughts.

Death lurks in the darkest recesses of our collective psyche. The major world religions have all devised strategies for side-stepping death. According to the Jewish Talmud, the soul maintains a relationship with the body for a year after death. The righteous then gain entrance to Paradise (Gan Eden) and the wicked are cast into Geihinnom (transliterated to Greek as Gehenna). At the coming of Messiah, Orthodox Jews believe the soul will return to the dust and the body resurrected.

Christianity incorporated this belief in a life after death, refining notions of Heaven and Hell and the concept of a Judgement Day where the worth of souls is weighed and measured to determine whether one is doomed to burn in Hell or live forever at God’s side. Islam also claims a reward of life after death if one lives according to that religion’s values during life. Hinduism and Buddhism don’t go that far. Instead they recycle mortal life until Moksha or Nirvana is reached, at which time unity with the universe itself (another form of life everlasting) is achieved.

The totalitarian political ideologies of the 20th century – communism and fascism – attempted to override our fear of death by creating greater fear of the State. Both failed to frighten us enough, and so failed as ideologies themselves. The ideology that survived the 20th century – capitalism – instead uses Money, as the key secondary reinforcer, to substitute for religious salvation. By chasing money, we forget to chase life’s meaning, and instead can live in a drug-addled haze of false hope.

If religion and politics have both failed to solve the problem of death, perhaps we should turn to philosophy. The Ancients focused on what made for a just or a happy life, in the belief that this would assuage the eventual pain of death. Epicurus bravely tried to define death out of existence as it being merely “the deprivation of sensation” and so not to be feared. More recent thinkers have welcomed death as freeing us from the burden of life (Schopenhauer) or that death is as meaninglessness and non-existent as life (nihilism and its postmodern variants).

Psychology also attempts to help us accept death. Erik Erikson suggested that human existence has eight stages, the last of which is characterised by a conflict between feelings of integrity at a life well-lived and despair at its imminent end. Acceptance is brought about by the wisdom to acknowledge that on balance the positive was enough. It is a hopeful thought, that in the end we will be able to sigh, smile and breathe our last with contentment. I like the idea, but wonder if it is possible.

Humanity also still yearns for something more. Science Fiction is full of tales of DNA rejuvenation, human/computer interfaces and other fantastical devices for indefinitely prolonging life. Barely a month goes by without a feature in one of the glossy Sunday supplements of age-defying new medical therapies just over the horizon that will allow mankind to live forever. Craig Ventner recently hit the headlines when he created a synthetic cell, and one of the first questions journalists asked was whether it was a way to eternal life. The Grail Myth and its Elixir of Eternal Youth never quite disappears…

But for all these attempts to understand or evade Death, we can forget something more vital. We are a Death Cult. Our awareness of death has forced mankind to think, to adapt, to evolve, to strive to outwit the Reaper. It is the ultimate mother of invention. Our lives are seen through the prism of our mortality. Fear of death has built modern civilisation.