Edmund Storms wrote:
Well, let me provide a few examples. Never before was a "wrong" decision
able to eliminate most life on earth. We now have at least three ways to
do this - by nuclear weapons, by bioweapons . . .
Ah, well, that is not an increase in complexity, but rather heightened
consequences. I certainly agree that the consequences of decisions are much
more serious and far-reaching. As Jared Diamond shows in the book
"Collapse" people thousands of years ago made disastrous decisions that
caused widespread ecological calamities and the extinction of their own
tribes. They created vast deserts; nowadays our leaders can make a desert
out of the whole planet much more quickly.
Never before have the economics of the world been so inner rated and
complicated.
That's true, but ancient economies were pretty complicated!
In the past a company, located in a particular country, made something
using local labor and materials. A simple ledger could be used to keep
track of their activities.
Most of them, perhaps, but since the 17th century there have been hundreds
of corporations and government agencies that are far more complicated than
that. For example, the 18th and 19th century life insurance companies had
manual data reporting and processing capabilities that would be impressive
even today, with a good-sized computer.
Some companies are more wealthy and powerful than many governments. The
activities can only be understood using large computers.
You would be amazed at how well they managed to keep track of millions of
details without computers in 1800, in the Japanese government, at the US
Census Bureau, and at British life insurance companies. It was slow but
effective. Mechanized data processing only become necessary for the US
Census Bureau when the population reached 50.1 million, in 1880. That data
took 9 years to process. Since the census must be taken every 10 years,
according to the Constitution, that was the limit.
It took a lot of manual work to do an in-depth analysis of the data sets,
for things like actuarial tables, but 19th-century statisticians did
impressive work.
Never before has scientific knowledge been so extensive and complicated.
Knowledge is growing so rapidly that it can only be organized using
computers and no single individual can understand the general field of
scientific knowledge.
Yes, indeed.
The British experience with the East India Company and later with their
colonies was so complicated that economists and historians still argue
about whether the British made money or lost money on the deal, and it is
even more difficult to determine whether the people in India benefited
more than they were harmed.
Yes, and this is a good example of my point. As a result of this
complexity, the British Empire Died.
The empire was not done in by complexity. It was destroyed by rising
nationalism in India and elsewhere, by the Labor Party in England, and by
World War II.
[The Shogunate government] decreed what kind of dishes people of
different classes and occupations would be allowed to use. They did not
just make these rules; they enforced them, with inspectors, paperwork
galore, centralized record keeping and so on. This was an incredibly
complicated undertaking.
I suggest the effort was designed to reduce the complexity for the general
population.
No, that had nothing to do with it. The government wanted to control every
aspect of people's lives and infiltrate every organization and clan with
informants. Their goal was to prevent opposition, and to squeeze as much
wealth out of the population as they could, in taxes. It was a
quintessential fascist organization. The only thing similar was the
Mesoamerican pre-Columbian governments, and the modern East German
government. The Italian fascists tried to monitor and control the
population, but they were inept at that. (Also, by the way, the trains did
*not* run on time, according to a retired Italian railroad conductor.)
Ordinary people in Japan did not need to know very much, they only had to
follow the rules.
Actually they were the best educated premodern population on record. They
sure did have to follow the rules!
The people in charge had to understand the system very well, but these
people could be given sufficient education.
They were well-educated, but the rules and laws were deliberately obscure.
Some were actually state secrets. You could be hauled off to jail for a
breaking a law that no one was allowed to know about, based on evidence
that you were not allowed to hear. The same thing can happen in the US
today thanks to our recent anti-terrorism laws, but we consider it anomalous.
Japanese government tends to be opaque even today. There are more hidden
"guidelines" and "suggestions" than there are laws, and many
extra-governmental organizations collect taxes and pseudo-taxes off the
books, such as the money from highway toll booths. Nobody knows how much
money comes in from the tolls, or where it goes to. Periodic scandals erupt
when it is revealed that most of the money goes into the pockets of
officials and ex-officials (amakudari). There are thousands of semi-public
organizations such as NEDO, which briefly researched cold fusion. They take
in and spend millions of dollars, but nobody knows how much or what they
spend it on. They do not answer to the Prime Minister or the Parliament,
because they are semiprivate, and they do not have to report profit and
loss the way a corporation does, because they are semipublic.
Greed will always be present. The problem comes when complexity is so
great that greed can not be kept under control. ENRON is a good example
of a greed driven company that created a system that was so complicated
that government could not control it.
That is true. Enron thrived on a combination of complexity and opaque
obscurity.
- Jed
