So, is the ever-increasing complexity of modern society throwing it out of balance and leading to an almost inevitable course correction that will leave an ocean of misery and despair in its wake?
Probably.
In fact, barring some sort of visionary scientific advance that makes money irrelevant, makes energy both bountiful and cheap, or allows us to make much better use of human potential, it seems very likely that humankind is going to be forced to stagnate or even take a step or two backwards after some horrible upheaval while we readjust to a less prosperous or, at a minimum, very different future than we expected. The good news on that front is that the wheels of history turn very slowly and whole generations of human beings can come and go before the world’s bike goes off a cliff. That gives our species a lot of time to prepare, a lot of time to make changes, and even the hope that any terrible crashes come after we’ve departed this world for greener pastures. In the end, all we can do is go forward the best we can and hope for the best. It’s what our species does.
The future is unwritten
See John Hawkins’ follow up:
John Hawkins is a professional writer who runs Right Wing News and Linkiest. He's also the co-owner of the The Looking Spoon. Additionally, he does weekly appearances on the #1 in its market Jaz McKay show, writes a weekly column for Townhall and PJ Media, does YouTube videos, and his work has also been published at the Washington Examiner, The Hill, and at Human Events.
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Somewhat more modestly, Matt Ridley in “The Rational Optimist” just says we ALREADY have the technology to get to 11 billion living comfortably on Earth, or maybe need just some very minor progress in this or that. Say, another century. This book seems to look ahead a lot farther.
“In fact, barring some sort of visionary scientific advance that makes money irrelevant, makes energy both bountiful and cheap, or allows us to make much better use of human potential, it seems very likely that humankind is going to be forced to stagnate or even take a step or two backwards after some horrible upheaval while we readjust to a less prosperous, or at a minimum, very different future than we expected.”
Money will always be relevant, if for no other reason than as a medium of exchange. How humans use their potential will always be an individual question, not a societal one, provided you’re talking about a free society. So the only one on that list that renders the question in any way relevant is the comment on energy.
Here’s the thing about energy though: we already have abundant amounts of fuels, in coal and oil, in the US. We’re also the nation that built the first self-sustaining nuclear reactor, and uncovered such large amounts of uranium ores a half-century ago that the market never really recovered. As long as those methods of producing power are off the table, for whatever reason, then the stagnation that’s predicted becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
What I’ve come to realize is that there isn’t one purpose to an economy – there are two of them, and they’re mutually exclusive. You can base your economy on consumption (ie, “demand”), and end up with an economy that must by its very nature become focused on regulating where scarce resources are applied. Your other option is to base your economy on production (ie, “supply,” including production of raw materials). There you will find a fully-matured economy that must focus on identifying new markets and new products, as supply outstrips demand. The choice of which economic model to emulate is, in the end, one made by individuals as well as nations, which means that there are billions of economies just in the free world alone.
So the answer to the riddle the competing books pose (that is, “which title better describes our world today?”), is that both of them do, and neither. They’re talking past each other – in fact, they’re not even speaking the same language.
*yawn* It’s the 21st century. Our world should have already collasped. Peak oil was suppoed to be decades ago. We’re all supposed to be blasted back to a pre-steam (or post-engine) technology level. Oh, and we’re supposed to be starving.
The world as a whole will get incredibly richer over the next century. Whether we get richer, stagnate, or collaspe is entirely dependent on our choices. Sadly, I predict European-style stagnation, given the direction we’re going in. Heavy entitlements are an anchor that makes headway against unemployment and high cost of living virtually impossible.
I’ve long said this – the REAL future won’t have arrived until I get my flying car – just like in the Jetsons. That’s my criterion for how I’ll know we’ve made another significant jump as pictured in the 1950s.
I don’t know, man. You really want the a-holes you drive with every day to have their own flying machines? I try to imagine the Washington DC Beltway at 10,000 feet and all I see is an endless stream of flaming wreckage falling from the sky.
We may one day get flying cars, but only our personal robots should be allowed to drive them.
As Mike Royko put it: Do we really want huge masses of people flying around our cities? We already have enough disgusting problems with pigeons.
The REAL future will have arrived when I apply for and accept a job as janitor for an apartment complex on Ceres. To the Belt!
We ARE living in the future, but are fooled by the goofy golf clothes that are the current fashion (sport shirt and slacks, same as Arnold Palmer wore). We expected fins on our shoulders and antennae on our hats (only a few hats are worn and they are mostly sideways, except for a few fedoras), robot maids and, of course, flying cars.
Didn’t happen that way.
We are growing new organs, producing materials of astonishing strength (carbon nano-tubes) and we just had the first completely successful civilian orbital rendezvous. Our rifle companies, submarines and fighter squadrons are worth 10 of anybody else (OK, with maybe 1 or 2 exceptions).
We have unlimited individual access to more knowledge than the entire planet had just 50 years ago.
Fish are simply unaware of water.
There is a mobile phone sitting on my desk right now that is about ten thousand times more powerful and versatile than the communicators on the original Star Trek. I have a computer in front of me that makes UNIVAC look less complex than a wind-up toy by comparison and a television hanging on my wall that is fifty inches across and only six inches thick. These are things that nobody could have imagined twenty years ago, let alone sixty years ago. Don’t try to tell me we’re not getting anywhere.
What about “both”? The current tyranny cannot continue to enrich itself at its current rate without bringing the system it relies upon to collapse. After all that dead weight is shed, free men will be able to produce once more, bringing a time of plenty.
The question is how long will the free seek “safety” and keep the system working, how hard the crash will be, and how long the interregnum will last.
The whole argument about things getting too complex misses a critical point. Sure, there are hundreds, maybe thousands of steps to get a loaf of bread to the supermarket, but each person involved in the process only deals with a few elements thereof. Division of labor: Adam Smith rules all.
Thank you, DMM. The complexity only matters without the division of labor, or under the ideas of a top-down command economy. All this complexity shows is the insurmountable barriers to such an economy being effective, and why those barriers grow daily. Also what the complexity hides is the degree of redundancy in the system that allows for the system to recover from temporary or local setbacks.
Yes, the complex global financial system hit a major setback recently. Yet it didn’t result in mass starvation, nor in people burning an overinflated currency. The relatively low change in the standards of living through this “crisis” are a demonstration of how remarkably robust the distributed economy really is.
There’s a lint lizzard and a slap-chop and some ninja gadget…how is life not awesome? lolz
Don’t forget CuddleUppets! If someone had told me fifty years ago that there’d be a blanket that’s also a puppet, I would have thought them insane. “How can such things be?” I would have asked. Yet today, I can order my very own CuddleUppet on the “Internet!” I love living in the Future!
Overpopulation is by far the greatest danger facing mankind. Countries like Nigeria and Egypt among others simply have too many people. Mumbai and New Delhi are mad s–tholes bursting at the seams.
Until the U.N. starts to recognize this fact and stop enabling population growth and instead have a dialogue about purposefully ending it, we’re going to have nothing but more trouble on the horizon.
Who’s going to stop empire-building next time in Asia and Europe or the middle east when a distracted America is buried under politically correct populations that can’t carry on our traditions. Anyone who thinks Mayan Indians and Somalis are going to “carry on” with missions to the outer planets or string theory are living in the same politically correct bubble that now puts those people by the millions here in the first place.
Given a choice between carrying on and shanty towns, and given the real nature of Third World countries, put me down for shanty towns in America in just a few years.
A project for you:
1) Read Julian Simon
2) Reflect and see if you have learned anything
3) If not, return to step #1
It’s an ivory tower pedant’s view of the world. And no surprise, he parses this subject through economics, as if that’s the way to do it. Well, that’s his way to do it, not THE way to do it.
Some people see what they want to see. If you want to believe it’s one big happy family when we have 14 billion people, knock yourself out. I’ll be dead, thank god. People live like animals all over the world in dystopian mega-cities. There’s such a thing as quality of life for those who can stop crunching numbers to see how many spiritless zombies in a phone booth one can feed.
“If you want to believe it’s one big happy family when we have 14 billion people, knock yourself out.”
Nine billion may be a more reasonable projection.
Right on. We continue to pollute the earth with people and not enough resources to supply everyone. When are we going to learn.
“Until the U.N. starts to recognize this fact and stop enabling population growth and instead have a dialogue about purposefully ending it, we’re going to have nothing but more trouble on the horizon.”
I agree, unsustainable populations without outside interference would be reduced to sustainable levels via starvation and violence. Let the games begin, “May the odds be ever in your favor.” (And, I’m not being sarcastic.)
That’s the point of what I said: it’s going to happen anyway. The “games” have already begun.
Complexity is portrayed as an upper barrier to the human intellect, but this is not quite true. In the scientific areana, where human intelligence can really come out and play, the “solution” to complexity is a shift to a higher perspective, i.e., a movement toward a more comprehensive and explanatory theory that puts the complexity into perspective. In biology, it was Darwan’s theory of the origin of species that led to an evolutionary world view. In physics, it was Einstein’s theory of realitivity at the macro level, and quantum physics at the micro level, that provided conceptual tools to understand the complexities of the physical world. Today, the need is for a shift to a higher perspective on what it meanns to be human–and already a few have lept to the challenge. What is it that we all have in common? Insights: striking unplanned reorganizations of what is known that reveals a new universe. Archimedes’ “eurika!” happens. That, and a common cognitive structure that sets out the context for the emergence of insights: experience, understanding, judging, and deciding. Every human being that moves into the intellectual realm experiences things, attempts to understand these experiences, judges the reality of this understanding, and comes to decide what to do based on this new verified understanding. When extended, the result in an epistemology of critical realism with all its implications for a proper philosophy and a world view of emergent probability. When a shift has been made to this level, much of the complexity that we now face can be put into a broader more comprehensive and explanatory level of understanding.
Sorry for the typos; in too much of a rush and hit the submit key too soon.
Hurtling Toward Oblivion, by Richard Swensen: A logical argument for the end of the age.
“…Exponential growth of negative factors bringing a fallen world to the threshold of lethality…The question being, what event(s) will combine to trigger such lethality, and when…”
Oh well; if we can still watch “Oprah,” who cares?
“The book argues that advances in technology will solve all of our problems.”
Hogwash. As Lawrence Summers will tell you men have a natural competitive advantage with math and science, and hence with technology. As Dr. Helen Smith will tell you there’s an ongoing war on men in the Western World. Thus we’re destroying the very people we need to save us. Aren’t we the smartest people ever!
Throughout history, poverty is the normal condition of man. Advances which permit this norm to be exceeded — here and there, now and then — are the work of an extremely small minority, frequently despised, often condemned, and almost always opposed by all right-thinking people. Whenever this tiny minority is kept from creating, or (as sometimes happens) is driven out of a society, the people then slip back into abject poverty.
This is known as “bad luck.” (Robert Heinlein)
But we can avoid the inevitable poverty if we just eliminate 90% of government and let free people do what free people do… prosper, create, innovate and thrive. It’s a tough choice: freedom and everlasting prosperity or crushing government and abject poverty. I know, you’re thinking “that’s a no-brainer, it’s freedom and prosperity” yet each election is about how much more of our lives the government will control, how much closer we’ll creep to the abyss. Poverty is the natural condition of man because man fears to be free.
Some men fear freedom because freedom requires creative labor; such men end up as serfs. Serfs may derive a small bit of unpursued happiness as they recieve a guranteed small bowl of leftovers from their superiors.
Our great visionary leader, Obama the Hun has decreed that we must get by with less. Less food, less travel, less energy use. This will create a utopian future for the ruling class. Not so much for the rest of us.
The more complex the so called advancement becomes, the more fragile and subject to breakdown the entire system.
Last week Twitter went down briefly in some region and some people wrote that they’d lost their reason for living. If writing Tweets is your reason for living, you’re already on the path to nowhere.
There is truth to that adage…Gain the world but lose your soul
I try to keep it simple and not become overly dependent on technology and at least retain the vestiges of self-sufficiency.
Self-sufficiency is the most important quality of manhood because it requires creativity and persistence. Self-sufficiency is that which underpins real self-esteem.
Many complex systems in fact are very resilient. For example, if in reality oil where to run out our hypothetical farmers would have switched to alternate fuel as the price of oil rose. If there was no water, or indeed too much in one area food supplies would be sourced elsewhere thanks to our complex transport system. Complexity played a part in the 08 financial collapse but more important where political idiocy, incompetence, corporate dynamics and outright fraud IMO.
We have fantastic technological potential NOW. But not the cultural / political will. Perhaps the Chinese do.
That’s probably why we owe the Chinese so much of our money.
Problem is, the US owes more than the entire planet can pay back.
This cannot end well.
“Many complex systems in fact are very resilient.”
Remember those words the next time a squirrel fries out a transformer and 6,000,000 (or 60,000,000) lose electricity for 3 days.
Remember those words the next time 60 million people regain electricity in 3 days.
Aesop’s Fables, particularly The Grasshopper And The Ant should be required reading for today’s world. It’s over folks. The sooner more people face reality the better chance they may have to survive the very near future. Fiat money is worthless period.