Let’s not solve Anything
There is a jocular version of system engineering of which I remember only the last two steps:
Penultimate step: Allocate blame.
Ultimate step: The taking of credit by the uninvolved
This is too close to the truth for some bad experiences in my career. In considering how we manage our ecology, as I do in Limits to Mobility (LTM), it applies well to our governance hierarchy. We see the ribbon cutting on projects by the officials who did no work, even when those projects (like urban highways) only give more space to a traffic problem. The inability to solve any problem by such officials can be masked by scapegoats, hence the penultimate step. Immigrants are now a preferred target.
Walt Kelly, “We Have Met the Enemy…” 1970 poster [Ohio State University Library].
Whether auto traffic in urban areas or any degradation of the ecology, the problem is our consumption without accountability for any outcomes beyond the little satisfactions we take the credit for how we satisfied ourselves. This is the general case in the ecology as a congested network where our focal behavior (what we individually want) becomes collectively a change in what we all get. For some kinds of focal interactions (altruism, conviviality, cooperation…) it may be that the collective outcome is better than what any one can achieve. It is “teamwork”. A nation that is a “more perfect Union”, a nice community to live in, a society that educates its young may be a “Comedy of the Commons” (COTC). Why then are there so many “Tragedies of the Commons” (TOTC) as Garret Hardin wrote of in 1968? Or as Walt Kelly said via Pogo: “We have met the enemy and He is Us.”
Hardin used the example of consuming a grazing field. The Tragedy of Highway Traffic exhibits the same problem: We just behave under the circumstance we perceive and lose accountability for effects that propagate over the network, the ecology. Economists say (for the non-market case) that we act on the average cost but we impose a marginal cost increase on all when we consume a limited resource. We could also produce the resource and that would be a COTC. But after all we are the uninvolved in producing most of the ecology we get dropped into. That brings us to the “projects” and “infrastructure” that we look to “others” to produce. And the “others” have become the State [as discussed in Polycentric Infrastructure].
The TOTC of Complexity
LTM is mostly about the rise of eminent-domain projects (EDP) by the State, exemplified by highways. The mission to demolish urban development to give more capacity to auto traffic where it does not fit (and could not otherwise exist) is a TOTC in which the State amplifies our unaccountable consumption of urban space. The State of course blames that on “what We want”, so there is the penultimate step. In fact the history (in LTM Part II) and method of EDP (in LTM Part III) shows that the program of the State led demand. And it led it from the “open” rural space (rural Good Roads) into the cities.
As covered in many of these posts the urban form of transit-oriented development (TOD)—in which locations and connections fit together in the access form—became the TOTC of auto-oriented sprawl (AOS). Every addition of capacity for traffic that consumed cities was a marginal increment of the TOTC. Bottlenecks were blown open and propagated elsewhere. Repeat. Whether or not the “induced traffic” was ever satisfied, we reached 1973 when urban and economic problems (generally ecological problems) reached a crisis [1973: The year petroleum killed America]. Cities were depleting, small cities (e.g., Troy) lost their commercial role, private transit met its end and our particular energy dependence produced “stagflation” when supply was constrained. There seems to have been a structural change in the economy [Robert J. Gordon, The Rise and Fall of American Growth: The U.S. Standard of Living since the Civil War, 2017].
As for traffic, the State assumed that it was a supply problem. Not enough fossil resource was extracted so that we could not consume it faster. But the urban problems were rooted in the formal cause of the end of the TOD, that LTM dates back to 1920 [1920: The year that killed TOD].
Our urban form, and the hierarchy of our political State are accountable to us. These are self-organized, meaning that they emerge from our interactions [that’s in LTM Part I]. We participate but the emergent forms are beyond individual accountability. Then we are the enemy for a TOTC, or our own allies for a COTC. LTM is concerned with the parameters of interaction (mobility and bandwidth) that affect accountability and so lead to TOTC or COTC.
The parameters—for which we adopt technologies to consume more—inevitably extend and intensify our interactions. What we call out economy—or better the global supply chain to our point of consumption and polluting—developed by extending where we intensively destroy an ecology that we never see on the Big Box shelf. That is how we lose accountability. We have just developed ourselves into a global ecological TOTC. But we observe it in our own urban ecology where we gripe about our little problems.
We want someone else to Solve the Problem
Our present urban-global complexity distances us from everything except for what we snarf up and our collective blame for the TOTC. Inequity for the risk we collectively produce assures that whoever sucks up the most will complain the most. Our social organization is where we will look for blame and solution of whatever problems we define. If we complain about too much “regulation” on our problem-creating behavior we have it exactly backwards. But then we are always looking in the wrong place for blame when we are uninvolved in any solutions.
We are then in a syndrome that only worsens with the complexity of our society, best measured by GDP. This has been worsening for a long time: I could say since 1973, since 1920 or for ten millennia. We just arrive at the present symptoms: We are polarized by our own inequities, including whether we live near or far from our fellows; We consume more just to get away from the ecological problems; We look for a magic Leader to solve the problems, and of course; We look to blame someone else.
I am going to focus less here on the scapegoats among us (them, those people, the others) and more on how this focuses on the State. LTM documents the dual sins of the State: Of failing to do the equitable risk management the Constitution intended, yet committing the projects of consumption the Constitution did not intend. We can argue about whether the form of the Constitution really could save us by replacing accountability but that thesis has been covered in other posts and for the TOD specifically [Urban Rail and Troy].
We have it backwards. We oppose any regulation that inhibits our consumption and seek any projects that give more capacity for consumption. Or more exactly, there are some people who actually want to preserve, who oppose projects and use regulation as a tool. The highway battles are all about that. But generally we have perverted the criteria of the ecology that are spoken of as sustainability, adaptation and resilience (SAR). Beside confusing the terms, they are applied as sustaining our consumption, adapting to other resources when we deplete some, and assuring that the supply chain keeps serving us. We have it backwards.
Make America simple again?
This brings us to MAGA and the Drill Baby.
At this edge of history, if I am right, we should have the most ecological complexity and the most application of the two last steps of Bad Engineering (problem non-solving). And I think the evidence supports that.
The “Again” in MAGA refers to what? A past we view as simpler. And it was because our parameters of intensity and extension were less. We did not collide with each other or limits as much. We were accountable in our COTC communities. Howdy, friend! Before they came. Before they took over the Gummint. Before we stopped believing in Santa Claus.
In the case of petroleum and fossil fuels generally, the syndrome is evident. Drill Baby stands exactly for the impulse that, when you have dug yourself into a hole, dig faster! But that part of the syndrome concerns the economic-political loop necessary to supercharge our TOTC. The money measure, represented by GDP, is how power over the ecology and us is concentrated. There is inequity and those on the top want their positions to get More while there are so many who just want enough. But the 99% are all paying a tax through the resource flow to the 1%.
In a more local example, the bottling/packaging industry has just used their share for an expensive lobbying campaign to defeat stricter regulation (recycling) of that stuff in New York. I am a jerk who picks up roadside trash and by volume most of that is plastic bottles and cups (Biggee that). The money-makers just do not want accountability for the trash and rather dump the problem “Away’, the same place we are indifferent to unless we have to walk through it. The fast vehicles dump it “Away” and only the slow have to live with it [see mobility]. The more intensive and extensive we are the more that syndrome increases. We are the problem but it takes technology, corporate organization and the State to make it a problem beyond our reach. I should mention that the street by which I pick up the crap was recently repaved for faster traffic while the sidewalk remains crap and crap covered.
But the problem is much bigger. At the national level we seek the most State power to solve our problems. We believe lies of a Leader who is expected to solve the problems and cannot. He is good at scapegoating which is just an inevitable aspect of the lie. We do not see the corporate-political loop necessary to power the Leader. Project 2025 is to enhance the power, the inequality and the omission of regulation. The evidence is there every day.
We have met the enemy and it is us. There are all kinds of TOTCs. Almost none will happen like Hardin supposed, of everyone squeezing out the last drop until suddenly none can get any. It is rather inequitable in time and space, and for us distant ecologies and the future are Away. Because it is inequitable maybe 50% or so will see the real problem and the other 50% will just hope they are given More or the old simplicity in which the problems, and Them, did not exist. Immigrants! Waaal, there was a time when them ferners warn’t flooding into the Country! Oh yeah…Them.
There is a critical threshold between sliding into a TOTC and just leveling off into real SAR that passes as a COTC. But we have passed that point. We are all suddenly in a TOTC in which we consumed our democracy.