references-notes/homer-dixon-2000.html

Homer-Dixon, T. (2000). The Ingenuity Gap: Facing the economic, environmental, and other challenges of an increasingly complex and unpredictable world. New York, Vintage Books, Random House.

1- "complexity, unpredictability, and pace of events in our world, and the severity of global environmental stress, are soaring."

"they will need more ingenuity - that is, more ideas for solving their technical and social problems"

"some face an ingenuity gap: a shortfall between their rapidly rising need for ingenuity and their inadequate supply"

2 - "Western triumphalism is dangerously self-indulgent, and even delusional; it assumes agnecy where there may be mainly good luck."

"Ingenuity, as I define it here, consists not only of ideas for new technologies like computers or drought-resistant crops but, more fundamentally, of ideas for better institutions and social arrangements, like efficient markets and competent governments."

3 - natural systems can flip from one mode to another

we don't fully understand how these systems work

4 - "production of useful new knowledge in these areas can be very slow.

"Progress in the social sciences is especially slow, for reasons we don't yet fully understand;"

"Today, a disturbingly large proportion of people in rich countries seem to believe that our ingenuity is practially boundless and that our technical experts have all the authority and knowledge they need to manage our ever more compolex wolrd. These beliefs and the complacency they produce are often completely unwarranted: in fact we often have only superficial control over the complex systems we've made and critcally depend on."

5 - super elite are people with certain cognitive skills that match capitalism, "largely self-enclosed and self-referential group"

22- two kinds of ingenuity, technical and social

23 - was working on a project about environmental problems and ingenuity

two questions:

"First: Is humanity's requirement for ingenuity rising as its environmental problems increase, and if so, how fast and why?

Second, can human societies supply enough ingenuity at the right times and places to meet this rising requirement, and if not, why not?

26 - NGOs using the internet are transforming institutions

"As new communication techn ologies swamp us in information, we often devote more time to managing information and less to producing new, high-quality ideas.

30 - "untempered faith in human ingenuity was often grounded in a partial and selective reality"

31 - some facts

over 40% of people on Earth use firewood, charcoal, straw or dung (2.4 billion people)

50-60% of these (1.2 billion) rely on biomass fuels as their primary source of energy

over 1.2 billion people lack access to clean drinking water

46 - key idea is emergence, "of new and unexpected properties as individual components are combined into increasingly complex systems."

47 - quoting Whitfield - "Our ignorance is compounded by the fact that human societies and many natural systems operate on radically different time scales."

67 - "Vaclav Smil, ..., has calculated that about 40 percent of all protein in humanity's diet depends on synthetic nitrogen fertilizer"

unanticipated costs - soil acidity, loss of other vital nutrients, nitrous oxide into the atmosphere,

linked to marine coastal dead zones

76 - discussing Harvey's The Condition of Postmodernity - "rejects all efforts to identify objective truths, universal and enduring patterns in nature and human history, and ideal forms of social order. Its hallmarks are "fragmentation, indeterminancy, and intense distrust of all universal or 'totalizing' discourses (to use the favored phrase_." Postmodernism extols the ephemeral, the fragmented, the discontinuous, and the chaotic...."

90 - our cities are on a big scale "As a result, as urban dwellers we inhabit an entirely meso-scale world, a world constructed entirely in the middle range of nature's space and time scales. .. "This leaves us with an astoundingly impoverished awareness of the small and large systems that intimately affect or lives."

101- most of are aware that we are surrounded by systems created by humans - and that these are becoming more complex

technology is one factor that increases complexity

a system is things interacting with each other

104 - quoting Brian Arthur "complexity, in the form of greater diversity and a more intricate web of interactions, tends to bootstrap itself upard over time ... With entities providing niches and niches making possible new entities, it may feed upon itself; so that diversity itself provides fuel for further diversity.

coevoling systems become more diverse and complex because of competition

Arthur calls the second process "structural deepening" entity "becomes steadily more sophisticated in order to improve its performance"

3rd process - "capturing software" - "systems take over or "task" simpler systems, exploiting them ...."

"apply the same grammar to these deriviatives to create further objects of value in a progressively thickening hierarchy of complexity."

104 - six features of complex systems

"composed of a multiplicity of things"

"dense web of causal connections" - many links to each other

sometime components are tightly coupled

"interdependence of the components"

"openness to their outside environments: they are not self-contained"

degree of synergy

"exhibit nonlinear behavior" - such as thresholds

pg 115 - "the information content of an event varies inversely with the probability of that event occuring" - "minimum length of the statement needed to fully describe the sytem"

119- "steep and seemingly endless rise in the connectivity and in the level of kinetic activity in our world generally makes the social and economic systems we depend on more tightly coupled, synergistic, and likely to exhibit abrupt and unexpected nonlinearities."

131 - Holling's four models of nature

Nature Balanced

Nature Anarchic

Nature Resilient

Nature Evolving

175 - Edward Tenner has identified a ""pathology of intensity," which is "the single-minded overextension of a good thing""

178 - Edward Tenner - "revenge effects" - unintened outcomes from technology and ingenuity

194 - "the greater complexity of our world requires greater complexity in our technologies and institutions" <!-- which is applying Ashby's Law of requisite complexity to the solution of these problems -->

205 - discussing Steven Mithen --- "cognitive fluidity - which is exemplified by our capacity for analogy and metaphor - is "the defining property of the modern mind."

most important is the much more rapid cultural evolution

refering to Peter Richerson's work - "culture is "information -- skills, attitudes, beliefs, values -- capable of affecting individuals' behavior, which they acquire from others by teaching, imiation, and other forms of social learning."

211 - Yaneer Bar-Yam argues that "the level of complexity of modern human society has recently overtaken the complexity of any one parson belonging to it"

223 - "abundance of physical things that serve our needs is an important part of what most of mean by "wealth"."

"some economists have focused on how ideas, specifically, contribute to economic growth."

225 - Solow's study capital only explained 12.5 to 20% of improvements in labor output, the rest was called the "residual" and came from better methods, not more machines

"new Growth or Endogenous Growth theory. ... technological ideas should be treated as an independent factor of production."

232 - "Social ingenuity is supplied by people at all levels of society...

"The two kinds of ingenuity, social and technical, are intimately interconnected. In fact, I came to understand that social ingenuity is a key prerequisite to technical ingenuity. We need social ingenuity to set up and maintain public and semi-public goods such as markets, funding agencies, educational and research organizations, and effective government.

233 -" long debate over the capacity of human societies to adapt to scarcities of natural resources - "

234 - neo-Malthusians - natural resources place an upper limit on population

economic optimists - market will adapt to scarce resources and find new resources

substitutability between resources

237 - econ optimists minimize difference between resources, "Renewables are dynamic and complex natural systems, and they are often ecological systems"

239 - example, fish are a dynamic resource

renewable resources: complex and often have "interactive effects, chaotic and nonlinear behavior, and unknown unknowns"

240 - "So in the case of renewables, economic optimism maybe seriously misguided>"

"The economic optimists' creed is a tightly integrated package of beliefs about the relationship between humanity and its natural world."

<!-- this is a world view, and in this case it is dystropic to consider renewables from the economic optimists' point of view because if it turns out that they don't obey the market paradigm, they will collapse -->

245 - Mancur Olson - not quoting him - "Poor countries, he continued, have economic institutions and policies that provide the wrong structure of incentives."

246 - "What early economists quite reasonably thought could be reduced to numbers, mechanism, and Cartesian equilibrium turns out to be vague, path-dependent, nonlinear, and phenomenally complex."

<!-- link to the difficult path to sustainability -->

255 - "human knowledge and ingenuity progress at different rates in different domains"

"This is not simply a reflection of differences in humanity's need for progress ... in fact, there may be only the roughest relationship between the degree of need and the rate of technological progress. Necessity, it seems, is not the only -- perhaps not even the most important -- mother of invention."

256 - four factors that affect the pace

1. human cognitive limits

"We cannot fully grasp the emergent properties and behavior of these systems if we only study their component parts in isolation from each other

"We can compensate by developing large mathematical or computer models

2. complexity or difficulty of the research field's subject matter

examples: multiple sclerosis and climate change

3. nature of scientific institutions

"Deeply embedded boundaries between disciplines can hinder creative cross-disciplinary cooperation ..."

4. "the broader context of social values and culture powerfully affects science"

273 - "If technological progress becomes our raison d'etre and miraculous machines our gods, we may begin to think that we, as the creators of these machines, are gods ourselves."

282 - quoting Douglass North -- "the rules of the game in a society or, more formally, the humanly devised constraints that shape human interactions"

293 - Peter Drucker - we need political organizations. quoting Drucker "And we do not have even the beginnings of the political theory or the political institutions needed for effective government in the knowledge-based society of organizations."

296 - Elinor Ostrom - not quoting her, " "Reciprocity" is the key norm for solving collective action problemsm, because it helps build trust within social groups; if someone does something nice to you, the reciprocity norm enjoins you to do somting nice back."

300 - "Infant mortality is therefore a reasonable surrogate measure of the level of grievance and frustration in a society, which is, in turn, a key precursor to civel violence."

"paucity of good environmental data, especially on fresh water availability, loss of forests, and damage to cropland,

"My own research indicates, for instance, that environmental factors will be much more common and powerful causes of civil violence in the future than in the past"

303- "Another justification for doing little is the "incrementalist" theory of decision making. Originally used to describe problem-solving in bureaucracies and large organizations, this theory can also be applied to whold societies. It says that decision-makers in large organizations should generally "muddle through." Because they have limited information and cognitive resources to apply to any given problem, they should make lots of small, incremental decisions, each building on what has gone before ...

306 - "secret of their success has been a self-reinforcing combination of institutions and culture that has maintaind Western societies on the fecund border between order and chaos"

309 - "This tendency to flirt with castrophe, the historian William McNeill says, seems to be intrinsic to our destiny: "Both intelligence and catastrophe appear to move in a world of unlimited permutation and combination, provoking an open-ended sequence of challenge and reponse. Human history thus becomes and extraordinary, dynamic equilibrium in which triumph and disaster recur perpetually on an ever-increasing scale as our skills and knowlege grow."

329 - "Our capacity for easy adaptation to incremental change keeps us from seeing how qualitatively new and possibly dangerous the world we have created really is. The human brain's hard-wired cognitive heuristics and short-cuts -- essential tools for dealing with large amounts of information -- are woefully inappropriate when we're enmeshed in nonlinear, tightly coupled systems in which small things and small events can matter a lot."

344 - for 101 and 102 data on water availability

benchmark of 1000 cubic meters of water per year per person

below this , economic development is at risk

356 - brutaility and fanaticism of political groups, such as using bombs "particulary dramatic example of how technologies can sharply boost the power of destructive subgroups relative to the state."

362 - nature of terrorism takes advantage of the trends in society "economic systems are evolving from hierarchies to networks and are becoming, in the process, borader in scope, faster-paced, and often more nonlinear and tightly coupled." loss of critical nodes can cause collapse

364 - the experience in Sri Lanka showed a central principle "everything is pointed to the rising poser of malign individuals and grups, and the increasing vulnerability of the institutions that supply the public goods -- the social ingenuity -- that we need to be prosperous and happy."