by Noah Raford
How did we wind up in this mess? The answer is disturbingly simple: we lost our legitimacy at the goat rodeo.
The Goat Rodeo Index
Figure 1.1 Left, players versus goals in goat rodeo; right, levels of goat rodeo complexity.
The term goat rodeo is taken from aviation, where it means a situation in which several impossibly difficult things have to simultaneously go correctly for there to be any realistic chance of survival. The term also refers to the messy Texas practice of having small children practice their lasso skills on goats, as a safer alternative to full-sized cattle. For our purposes, a goat rodeo occurs when a committee sets out to solve a problem but is composed of individuals with different goals who are representing different classes of organization or agency. A typical post-disaster goat rodeo might include a couple of people from State Department or another government agency, some NGO reps, a few local partner organizations, and a few people from national monopolies for water and electricity, plus the host-state representatives, of course. Lacking a shared competitive framework or genuinely shared goals, the situation inevitably devolves into failure. Cooperation is impossible, because people want different things, and competition is implausible because the actors involved have entirely different rule sets. For larger problems, increase the size and diversity of the group until no action is possible at all. The size of the failure can be estimated using the scale above.
Again and again, chains of command and responsibility are abrogated in complex, shared governance arrangements that produce no responsible parties when failure comes. From no-fault divorce through to Kyoto, Copenhagen, Cancun, and the Millennium Development Goals, we plead that none of us are responsible, because all of us are. Warlord entrepreneurs eat this for breakfast. Every time the world of the white picket fences or the blue helmets of peace and justice fail to deliver on their promises, every time they burn people in internecine bickering over different priorities in the crisis, legitimacy bleeds out. Every time the bureaucrats do the wrong thing for the right reasons—or, more commonly, simply fail to do anything at all—a little more of the lifeblood of our civilization leaks out.
That’s where the warlord entrepreneurs are coming from: it’s us, screwing up one day at a time. American drug policy burns half of South America. European immigration policy ensures human trafficking remains intensely lucrative. Uneasy collusion in Africa is good for business, but that’s not just legitimate business, it’s every dirty scam going—from diamond mining to over-advertising breast-milk substitutes in places where we know there’s no clean water.
You have to wonder how the world runs at all when we, the people who are supposed to be governing, supposed to be helping, cannot get our acts together. Every time we quietly complain about the bureaucracy, about lax decision making, about human resources, about inadequate briefings and vague political goals, that’s your reminder that we are part of the problem, not just vendors of the solution.
My advice is to prevent goat rodeos: permit only a single class of player to participate, or fix the goal and bar those with alternative objectives.
2 Social and Economic Collapse
Lessons from History and Complexity
Peter Taylor and Noah Raford
The Potential for Societal Collapse and Reshaping of Society in the Next Twenty Years
There is now a substantial body of evidence—from studies of both historical and contemporary cases—that human societies and their economies are prone to rapid collapse at the peak of their prosperity.1 Why is this the case? The evidence argues that the cause of collapse can be attributed to a mixture of external factors, such as the loss of critical resources like fuel or water, and internal political and economic stresses, which combine to exceed the system’s ability to cope with change. But often it is not clear what triggered the decline. Almost all such rapid declines were unforeseen at the time, though in hindsight we may rationalize them as inevitable bubbles where demand outruns supply. Complexity theorists and punctuated equilibrium studies suggest that such rapid “phase transitions” may be endemic to all classes of complex systems but are particularly prevalent in those experiencing certain combinations of internal and external strain.
Could such a rapid phase transition—that is, social collapse—happen to our civilization? And if so, what might trigger it, and how can we best mitigate its effects? Commentators from a wide range of fields suggest that we may face serious threats to civilization in this century.2 While there may be many risks associated with many resources—food, water, information networks, the environment, and climate—and the knock-on effect of their failure on financial systems, economies, and social institutions would be severe—the greatest immediate threat may come from energy.3 With a rapidly increasing population in the majority of the world, studies suggest that demand will remorselessly exceed supply even if oil discovery continues at current levels. Technological innovation and cheap energy sources have allowed us to build a world in which our food, energy, goods, and services are more likely to be remotely sourced than locally produced. Longer, more efficient “just-in-time” supply chains may deliver goods and services to our doorstep from across the world, but any rupture to the links in these chains can propagate failures throughout the global network, and, in turn, precipitate other failures in other supply chains.
Other external shock factors increase the risk of such disruption. Rapid developments at the nano-scale in biological systems, computers, and materials make it likely that not only will further threats emerge to humanity and the environment, but that rogue groups, including terrorists and unsupervised tinkerers, will find it increasingly easy to use these technologies, as we have seen with computer viruses propagated through the Internet. Some authors see technology as a potential solution to these problems—that, as these technologies begin to be used against us, technological fixes will be developed to counter them. While technologies will undoubtedly keep moving the goalposts of the discussion, the time they take to come to maturity makes their immaturity potentially more of a threat than a solution in our time frame, especially in bioterrorism, which requires much less investment than, say, nuclear weapons.
The combination of external shocks and decreased internal resiliency is exactly the formula found before past phase transitions in complex civilizations. Credible scholars and leaders in positions of influence are beginning to look seriously at the threat of systemic failures and social collapse as a result. What many of them have not stated explicitly, however, is the imminence of the threat.4
A threat in 2050 is someone else’s problem, and, as with climate change, it may be that we can do little but wring our hands and sound the alarm. But a threat in 2025 is rightly ours and should be addressed directly and vigorously while we still enjoy the advantages of a fully functioning global supply system.
Why are decision makers beginning to get worried? Even if stresses reach a breaking point, why should they lead to “collapse” and not just a cascade of small failures or, at worst, a gentle decline into the sunset of civilization’s years? Empirical evidence from ecosystems to economics suggests that when a transition occurs in interlinked, networked systems, it is sharp and dramatic. Thinking of human society as a “complex system” shows why this might be so. As connections within systems develop in time, they typically move from one state of dynamical equilibrium to another—and do so very rapidly, as seen in examples from phase transitions in liquids to crashes in financial markets. The argument is that the system itself becomes more prone to collapse as its connectedness increases. Simple computer models illustrate this behavior clearly and offer explanations of catastrophic change in many areas of the natural, financial, and social world. However, these models are primarily explanatory rather than predictive. Even networks we thought were robust, such as the Internet, turn out to be fragile.
If Western society continues to develop in response to economic demands, as it has done to date, it will further lengthen our supply-chain networks
and increase our interdependence and fragility in the event of major failure. A recent comparison of the effect of an actual economic collapse in Russia and a hypothesized collapse in the United States highlighted the massive exposure coming from the Western lifestyles. In Russia, nationalized power utilities and transport systems kept running during the collapse, people could not be dispossessed of their homes, and people lived near to their places of work. After fifty years of cheap transport, most of these conditions are no longer true in the United States and industrialized West. One of the ironies, then, of highly interconnected structures is that they make us more—not less—prone to collapse.
What Responses Are Effective in Post-Collapse Environments?
The argument is simple—unfettered growth and interconnectedness makes human society more, not less, susceptible to collapse. Many foresee the crisis yet offer little in the way of practical answers, other than hopes for technical progress, a move to sustainability, or hitherto unseen forms of inter-governmental cooperation. Unfortunately, we expect neither a technological white knight nor some new form of socially responsible humanity to occur. Instead, we fear that it is far more likely that the current trend of self-interested economic growth will continue until it literally reaches a breaking point.
Let us suppose, then, that failure will happen and that it will be abrupt. What then? In the absence of other measures, should we presume that we will rely on martial law to see us through a crisis? A sobering prospect, given that the track record of such measures has been poor (see chapter 7 in this volume). Shouldn’t we instead look to the way people naturally behave under the pressure of collapse? We have good evidence that in the immediate aftermath of a catastrophe, people behave well, often waiting for assistance and offering each other mutual support until it arrives. But such behavior does not last forever. Other research indicates that although communities often support themselves in the immediate aftermath of a collapse, without the intervention of outside institutions, there is often a breakdown into scavenging, self-defense, and far less reasoned, communitarian behavior. History has shown that, indeed, we are just “nine meals from anarchy” in these conditions.
Playing this forward, the final breakdown in historical cases often occurs when stocks of plunderable resources are exhausted, after which local militias coalesce into small administrative or tribal groups that either destroy or are destroyed. We have seen such cycles on a small scale in natural disasters such as hurricanes and earthquakes, on a medium scale with the aftermath of wars and plagues, and on a large scale with the failure of entire civilizations. In many cases, most notably when resources are exhausted, the social order does not recover in its original form. There is a lot we can and should learn from human and social response to real-life disasters. A key action is to review and maintain “best-practice” measures for post-disaster recovery and keep these measures up to date.
In business, we are used to problems like this and are required to have “business continuity”—also known as DR (disaster recovery)—plans in place and to test them regularly. They came to the fore in London following the IRA terrorist attacks and in New York following the 9/11 attacks. Such DR measures are not cheap to implement, and to rehearse, adding significant costs to running a business, but they are now mandatory in some circles. A second action is to produce scenarios and “continuity plans” for all relevant institutional elements of our society, such as local councils.
Given the recognized link between increased connectedness and to socioeconomic fragility, it is surprising there is so little active research into structural resilience. The authors of this chapter and others have developed “toy models” that allow simple dynamics of collapse and response to be tested. More complex models, such as the large-scale agent-based models created by Sandia Labs to test disruptions to the U.S. supply chain, offer more analytical power. Further research into such models is necessary, however, as long as it does not cause us to fall into the trap of believing the models are actually predictive (however explanatory they may be). Bridging the gap between massive, empirically tuned mathematical models run on supercomputers and the simple toy models explored above will help policy makers assess a variety of combinations and contingencies for local “continuity,” social resilience, economic response, and policy and policing options. A third action is to analyze and model socioeconomic systems to see what measures might be most effective and then, where possible, to compare these measures with what happened in actual cases of collapse.
Without such actions (and barring some deus ex machina intervention, such as the discovery of vast new resources or a technological breakthrough like nuclear fusion or space colonization), we believe that the “probable future” for many parts of the developed world will look surprisingly similar to its origins: violent, decentralized, inefficient, and uncontrolled, with islands of stability in an otherwise vast sea of lawlessness. Under these conditions, the strengths and tactics of unconventional actors will come to the fore, suggesting that the second half of the twenty-first century may indeed be dominated by non-state and para-state economic actors operating under the auspices of a new organization: the warlord enterprise.
3 Innovation, Deviation, and Development
Warlords and Proto-State Provision
Nils Gilman, Jesse Goldhammer, and Steven Weber
Development between the Cracks
Warlord entrepreneurs are some of the most audacious experimenters, risk-takers, and innovators in today’s global economy. In their relentless search for competitive advantage, they engage in just about all of the activities that other entrepreneurs do—marketing, strategy, organizational design, product innovation, information management, logistics, financial analysis.…
Hidden and powerful, this underground movement of human trafficking, drug dealing, gun running, cross-border waste disposal, organ trading, sex tourism, money laundering, and transnational gangs—a movement we call deviant globalization—is growing at twice the rate of the legal economy.
In many cases, warlord entrepreneurs create enormous profits while extruding inefficiencies from huge markets. And they often go to extreme lengths to drive new business ventures to success, placing their economic livelihood and sometimes their lives at risk. Talk about “animal spirits” (Adam Smith) or “disruptive innovation” (Clayton Christensen) or “creative destruction” (Joseph Schumpeter)—it is all here. Just because these markets feature goods and services that may disgust us, does not mean we can’t learn a great deal from deviant globalization’s “success stories” and “best practices.”
Deviant globalization is, in many crucial respects, about unsavory things happening in the Global South for the apparent benefit and pleasure of those in the Global North. Whether the harvesting of organs, extralegal extraction of commodities, deployment of weapons to insurgencies and rebel groups, or movement of laundered money into numbered Swiss bank accounts—these would all seem to indicate that deviant globalization represents yet another instance of the global rich oppressing the global poor. This classical view, shared by liberals and Marxists alike, holds that the sorts of illicit economies encompassed by deviant globalization represent a form of economic parasitism that diverts developmental energy, capital accumulation, human assets, and other valuable resources away from more “productive” uses. Instead of providing a platform for self-sustained growth, such deviant markets appear merely to line the pockets of gangsters.
But the role of the warlord entrepreneur in the “development” of the Global South is more complicated than this view would suggest. Nations, institutions, and NGOs from the Global North dedicate huge amounts of time and immense sums of money trying to help nations of the Global South modernize, diversify, and grow their economies. Liberal proponents of mainstream globalization view these efforts as a set of market-building steps toward delivering on the promise of capitalism. Marxist opponents criticize these “development” practices for fostering dependency and, paradoxically, a permanent
state of (at least relative) poverty. What both sides fail to appreciate is that many people living in poor nations in the Global South are already engaged in radical experiments in actual development through deviant globalization. Behind the backs of—and often despite—all those corporations and development NGOs, as well as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, the poor are renting their bodies, selling their organs, stealing energy, stripping their natural environments of critical minerals and chemicals, manufacturing drugs, and accepting toxic waste—not because they are evil, but in order to make a living. Thus, deviant globalization is a form of economic development.