The Pyramid of Accountability
We produced the hierarchy of social organization. Now it is the only way out of our ecological dilemma.
Embracing Complexity
Limits to Mobility (LTM) claims to be about the complexity of the urban ecology. In its expanded version (Parts I, II and III) it approaches 3,000 text pages. That does not include related book-length treatments of Urban Rail and Troy and Prediction needs Regulation (that also has a SciFi theme to it). Then there are 63 posts in this Substack series, so far.
This all suggests a lot of spare time, but that would not be true over 50 years of writing overlapped with a 40 year career in system engineering. A better model is the blind people and the elephant: There are so many ways to approach the urban ecology that is complex in its four space-time dimensions and its many dimensions of measurable or subjective attributes.
The writing has a semiotics of urban complexity. The 1980’s were key to my education in complexity when I was dealing with complex cybernetic systems. I was in the DC region that was a core of complex-systems thinking especially through the Washington Evolutionary Systems Society (WESS) and the Nonlinear Systems interest group at Mitre where I worked. I found Charles Sanders Peirce’s theory of categories and semiotics as an important logical characterization of complexity and self-organization from which complexity emerges. Those are three signs already looking for connection in a semiotic network for us to interpret.
That time was also a great efflorescence of theory about networks as instantiated in the Worldwide Web (an object whose acronym WWW has more syllables to say than the root sign). The model of “small-worlds networks” has the same power-law distribution of nodes (measured by connective hits) as the size hierarchy of cities. The implication is that there are some signs of complexity that are commonly recognized, if not well understood like “chaos”, catastrophe” and “complexity”. When it comes to a combination like “complexity of the urban ecology” we are among the many small-hit nodes, like the 30 or so any of these posts gets.
I could use this semiotic approach to analyze why we are in a dilemma of urban ecology, as covered in The Accessible City, that we cannot discuss our way out of. Rather we are polarized into two inconsistent views of “the elephant” marked by our political Red/Blue or Urban/ex-urban polarity. Such a blithe splitting of everything into twos points to the aspect of complexity I want to get to: It has a hierarchical structure, physically and in our heads (which the eco-logy literally refers to).
At a low level (the base of a logical pyramid) we have the variety of each of us, and of everything else (see the binary?) in the ecology. The “variety” is complex, but conceptually we simplify toward the apex of the categorical pyramid, often just splitting “everything” in two. Since that is usually how we split electoral issues and candidates as we manage public issues, it is obvious how badly that manages ecological complexity. People physically aggregated (a population, an electorate, a nation) are logically an unspecification of the real variety. We are reduced to few and binary categories, such as Red and Blue, urban and ex-urban, etc. And that brings us right to the problem of our society in the ecology.
The Social Pyramid
A pyramid is something that can lead to those unspecific, even binary categories. But at the top is a singular “All” object. Governance is such a pyramid so how can it map to a complex ecology? How can a government map to its social constituency? That is the problem LTM recognized with all its symptoms of badly managing the urban ecology.
A pyramid is not a network in our usual semiotics. LTM makes mush more of networks because they are our concept of any system (ecology). However we perceive ourselves embedded in a “flat” network of our peer connections. The pyramid is a “vertical” subordination ordering of sets of nodes (levels). The difference has been used to contrast “Markets and Hierarchies” [Oliver Williamson, 1975]. That dichotomy underlies the whole contention between markets and the State and many other confused contentions. LTM is interested in how that bears on accepting State projects—as long as they more powerfully exploit the ecology for inequitable wealth—and rejecting State regulation of damage to the ecology that most affects the most greedy.
That becomes the strange political polarity of resentments among binary us-thems. That feeds the economic/political pyramid with the ironic ability of concentrated economic/political power to exploit a binary electorate. The pyramid co-opts the peer communities and ecology we live in. But if there is physical separation, as urban/ex-urban that is the perfect storm for a polarization of ecological salvation or ecological threat. Consider why climate change has become such a polarized issue (or vaccines, or sexuality, or race, or even transport modes). The vilification of DEI exemplifies how the the power pyramid exploits a logical simplification of our real variety.
The idea of a natural- then social-hierarchy is longstanding and leads to human-hierarchical governance with inequitable power. But how does that map to the ecology?
The Urban Ecology is our Spatial Ecology
These posts have already tried a semiotics of ecological complexity focused on the urban ecology. By urban is meant our social organization, of how we live in relation to each other. It is only a binary distinction from isolated subsistence groups who are not that significant in our society or the global ecology anymore.
If all is “urban” then the next binary level contains the urbanite who admits to living in a city and others who, whether suburban commuters or subsistence survivalists, deny being in a city. If instead we mapped the network of interactions we would get the small-worlds image of a few metropolitan areas of intensive and extensive dependence between people and places, and the remaining large areas that contain only a few people subsisting on that area. These are different social ecologies of how we exploit space but capped by the One Sun-Earth ecology.
Overlooking the anarchist survivalists—do they vote for Trump?—our urban ecology has been the human development over about ten millennia. LTM considers that it takes a “long view” of our ecological dilemma, but it focuses on the last century that saw a change in the urban-ecological form from transit-oriented development (TOD) to auto-oriented sprawl (AOS). Yes that is another binary but we are (almost) all caught in the current transient of the AOS leaving behind compact “cities” and extending our interactions over space.
I note the paradox of how we get more “congestion” by the AOS strategy of exploiting more space. The governance hierarchy fails in its management of the ecology, whether the urban (what we think we live in) or the Sun-Earth ecology that contains us all. The highway program is an excellent example of projects to concentrate congestion by the traffic/capacity cycle. The locations needing auto traffic spread out in space in the AOS and the highway concentration traffic follows the prior paths. We have strip-developed the old arterial roads and so ruined their traffic capacity while adding traffic. Epic fail.
Why this Tragedy?
Several of these posts have considered how the social hierarchy has evolved. It has social class levels and a governance hierarchy (the State). The State is a pyramid with a subordination ordering of jurisdictions. This becomes the eminent domain principle of the upper over the lower and so a political, and now political/economic hierarchy.
Many have tried to explain this hierarchy. Must be because it fulfills some social goal, right? But such a search for a line of “better” or “progress” or “goal-seeking” as an explanation (final cause) for what evolves (or self-organizes) is wrong from the get-go. I elaborated that in “Did the highway system evolve?” Another way of seeing the fallacy is to consider Hardin’s Tragedy of the Commons (TOTC). What we individually want at our peer-network level does not “add up” to what we cumulatively want and in the tragic case is just what we do NOT want. Also called “congestion” and all real networks (ecologies) are congested.
The fallacy is also “social Darwinism” when we confuse some measure of social subordination (like wealth or fame) with some purposeful superiority. This is where the complexity comes in. All states (set of our measures) and status (hierarchical) emerge from interaction like urban places or our governance levels. The sign ex officio well describes how people occupy emergent positions in the ecology. Then we confuse the hierarchical position with the “big”, “better” or “more powerful” person. In fact the occupation is more like a random pinball path open to many people but “adding up” to only one person on the slot. Sometimes a real jerk gets the slot. We can say our current political selection is biased toward mendacious egomaniacs who cater to the most exploitative corporations. That kind of social-Darwinian selection will be different from the rest of the ecology.
Social “positions” are all selective by the “fitting” attributes (qualifications). Sometimes that is intelligence or kindness or humility. But I am going to focus on the governance hierarchy. The time of patriarchal (occasionally matriarchal) succession of a “ruler” (or god-monarch) was a thorough confusion of genetic evolution and some social-Darwinist subordination. Of course people did not recognize that for a long time and rather confused the ecological hierarchy (big Heaven or Nature containing little us) as ordaining the ruler (the Priests said so).
Ha ha. How naive. No: Our democracy selects the Leader. How? By mixing all our ecological variety (what we think we are in and need) into voting on an essentially binary choice as we go up the governance hierarchy to One Leader. It is a perfect storm for political polarization. This method of polarization/simplification occurred over time in our social evolution and development. But so did our capacity to exploit the ecology as the hierarchical corporate-State organization apply technology. That is the increasingly critical confrontation in the ecology.
Increasing Complexity and levels of Power
Has complexity increased over time? There are theories of how to measure that (entropy=information to describe the ecology). I prefer to note that the things interacting have increased (our population and all our artifacts) and that mobility and bandwidth have increased both the extension and intensity of the interactions. Technology just reinforces the increasing complexity. But the real tip off is the emergence of hierarchical levels. And there we have a divergence of our social hierarchy (governance, but not neglecting corporate-economic hierarchy) from the Sun-Earth ecology. Both can be measured by power however.
The power measure needs some physical explanation. That is where my system engineering background plagues LTM. Prediction needs Regulation gets even further into that regarding a statistical hierarchy inherent in prediction (and so risk) characterized by a power spectral density (PSD). Whoa. That becomes a pretty small semiotic cluster. Then let me re-phrase:
Power is a density of energy and so capable of a rate of change.
Our governance hierarchy organizes social power that can either change our urban ecology (eminent domain projects) or defend it from threat of change (requisite variety).
The complete ecology always had a hierarchy of change because it organizes the solar energy into particular space-time forms with the available matter (generalized turbulence).
Both our social and the containing ecology have evolved with a scale hierarchy of this power organization (technically, the PSD). That is why we always saw “structure in nature” as weather, geology, genomes or their scaling into “the ecology” that is the variety of space-time volumes of that organization. We are not random diffusers of energy and the urban ecology is not random sprawl of locations. But mobility as spatial diffuser heads that way. I pick on weather as an example, mostly because I worked on weather-affected systems. But it is a tangible example of a power hierarchy from “calm” weather to the huge storms we see on the news. We are see/feel air turbulence as organized levels of energy diffusion.
“Climate change” is at the top of a hierarchy of weather power density. It is (as “warming”) an increase in the total energy to be organized. Our polarized attitudes to this illustrate how our social hierarchy fails to map to the complete ecological power hierarchy. Our fellow genomes also bear mention and they are also caught in in political polarization.
Our governance hierarchy has two inconsistent options for use of power: As threat to our ecology or defending it. That was covered in The Illogic of Government. The threat is the projects that have destroyed the TOD ecology and that is what LTM harps on. We speak of “defense” as if against any external threat of change. But over time with our increasing complexity and polarization the threat of us on us has become dominant. In fact bug-a-boos of foreign threats have only served to amplify the polarized application of State power of us on us (those Antiwar Hippies become Antifa). Freeways to demolish urban development and pave over the countryside? Oh, but it is an Interstate and Defense system. Lead on that tank charge down the freeway, if it is not too congested. Horatio at the Interstate bridge (if it does not collapse as “decaying infrastructure, another ecological-risk management failure).
LTM covers how we got into this absurdity but the absurdity goes beyond urban transport and form. As climate change so well illustrates, with Drill Baby as the powerful threat ordained by half of us, our governance hierarchy has diverged from the ecological hierarchy of complexity. It is a rampant power that produces risk and inequity because it cannot understand and control the ecology across all the levels that have emerged with complexity. The Top only aligns with its own power and unspecificity level that is a statistical level aligned with the space-time of the Top jurisdiction. Like poverty, dosage risks and climate change. But the Top does not stay in the power-swim lane it should be accountable for.
The Ecological crisis is Constitutional too
How the State uses power is bound to show up in both constitutional and ecological risk and inequity. How that happens is a matter of accountability.
The little person in the position of Big power is either bound constitutionally to the ex officio position, or rampages as a mendacious egomaniac. We are finding out, right now, that our social aspirations (final cause, goals) for the Constitution are false. Sorry.
Our Constitution emerged from the inconsistent aspirations of centralizing power (the Federalists) and limiting its application inward to us (the anti-Federalists who were also more polycentric or little-f federal). A version of this inconsistency for the ecology and urban projects was also covered in Ostrom vs. Ostrom. But what do we expect when we put two contending poles together?
One outcome could be self-organizing. The novel can only emerge from antitheses. In political form we have an antithesis in the jurisdictional hierarchy: Let us govern ourselves (polycentrism) versus; We want Big Brother to smite our foes (Gargantua). The logic is scale-invariant: There are many levels of “us” and so many network levels in a hierarchy. Our motto E Pluribus Unum states just that but is mostly interpreted at the ultimate level of a Unum State.
The Constitution is clearly focused on the top Unum. It simply accepts the several States as a compromise. But in doing so it ignores the complete hierarchy down to the important local level. The in-between several States are just left with the residual “States” Rights” to do whatever. There is no limit on State preemption of local discretion. When it comes to highways and the urban removal projects this has been fatal in our urban development as “urbanized regions” become the key ecological domains.
The pyramid must have a Unum peak. It would be nice to have global governance because that is the level meet to the global ecology and inter-nation wars. But we have instead national Unums. That could work as polycentrism if only there were adequate rules as a global Constitution. The same lack applies to our urban regions.
Our constitutional convention grappled with the antitheses of unitary power and polycentrism and I think—despite the current problem with Originalism—that we have to interpret the result as an intention to limit what would otherwise be top-down, singular power in any direction, home or abroad. Like now. We find that with recent means of exercising political power (unlimited corporate money, unlimited foreign influence, media centralization with the end of any fairness doctrine, and the subordination of jurisdictions to Federal cash) all the nightmares of the Constitution follow. The attempt at quasi-peer (tripartite) regulation of the singular (Executive) power collapses. We get a polarized-ideological homogenization of Executive, Judiciary and Legislature. It is also extremely binary-unstable. And yet the hierarchical unspecification of our real ecological variety is lost in that electoral homogenization. Which personality-ideology-corporate backed, electoral pole do you give your vote to?
Despite our ideological polarization—by which many dimensions of difference collapse into a binary—there is also a “principle of minimum differentiation” [Hotelling, 1929, reconsideration by Eaton and Lipsey, 1972]. That applies to some central position that may be either an urban location or a market product. That implies a homogenized product that can be “sold” to the electorate. There is another antithesis there. There is a duopoly because two poles compete for the Top but the poles can never depart too far from the corporate-political money flow equivalent to the net income from homogenized consumer products.
What will State power sell us on? It is always More: It will give you More, regardless of the inequity of who gets and who is taken from. The one thing that always sells is More from distant (other, not “our”) ecologies. That accompanies picking on distant or alien “others” as policy. The risk and inequity is just pushed “away”. But sometime, somewhere the “them” will be us.
Levels of Accountability
Climate change is the poster child of our ecological/political dilemma as Drill Baby is its denying celebrity. There is no limit to the singular power and we will get its aberrant exercise as long as about 50% if us cannot recognize the risk and inequity. Nothing else has to make sense when formal inconsistencies merge into a personality.
Across governance levels, rather than individuals, the necessary variety is in levels of accountability for risk according to the power to manage risk. Up the hierarchy the capability to redistribute and regulate for inequity increases along with the power against external threats. At each level there is accountability for the equity over each object at that level. This is not a “purpose” for which the State was created but rather an existential condition for the persistence of the State or any ecology. We do not see, for long, the species or ecologies too stupid or greedy to manage risk and equity well. As I have argued elsewhere [Standing in the Equalocene: The emergence and extension of anthropodicy] the extension and intensification of our “game with nature” brings the rest of the ecology more into the proper risk management and equity of our governance levels. Or we can ignore at each level what we are doing to the ecology. There are laws at the individual level against theft and mayhem. What about States?
This assignment of accountability is not different from Elinor Ostrom’s scheme for common pool resource (i.e., ecology) management. Where I differ, or augment, is in the scaling that necessarily turns from village images to our urban-industrial governance. The simplest cases are human groups who subsist with some resource like an exclusive fishery or water supply or fields. They will disappear into a TOTC if they are bad at managing for the future risk and the present equity. How that extends in governance levels is the subject of LTM borrowing from the kinds of complex systems (i.e., ecologies) that system engineering addresses.
There is a prescription there and the problem is to find out why it fails. That is the history part that considers the TOD, an ecology that should have been our common resource. Why did the governance hierarchy invert, from risk management and equity at every level to a top-down production of risk and inequity on us, and not even a very competent management of external threats? The answer is in how the upward hierarchy diverged from the Constitution and was seduced by the power game, that is funded by how efficiently we exploit the entire ecology. Drill Baby plays that game so well.