I’m never sure if it’s worth blogging about things like this, but sometimes I suddenly see commentators, usually conservative commentators, using a phrase I’ve never heard before and I wonder if it’s going to become part of their standard shtick.
A few weeks I read Jim Manzi argue that we shouldn’t try to do anything about global warming because our economy is a a complex adaptive system (I can’t find the article but he makes similar arguments here without using the phrase). I think the idea was that it was so complex that we can’t understand it and so adaptive that it will just modify its carbon-producing ways no matter what we do.
Today, David Ignatius is touting a Niall Ferguson article about how America is going to collapse because it’s a complex adaptive system. So apparently, it’s an all-purpose phrase, like Burkean gradualism.
Does this have legs? Is Bobo going to start using it to argue in favor of school vouchers?
Update. (I realize that “complex adaptive systems” are something that people actually study and this is not meant as any kind of a slight of the field.)
Yutsano
It sounds like a phrase to make themselves sound smarter than they are but in the end really doesn’t mean much of anything when you analyze it. To me personally a system can be complex and adaptive but thinking that gives you some idea of it future is playing futurist without a license or knowing what the hell you’re talking about. In other words a tale told by an idiot signifying nothing.
Bill E Pilgrim
The US Congress is a complex adaptive system.
The Republicans have a complex, and the Democrats adapt.
Scott Alloway
Ask them to expand on it. If they can’t, it’s just simple BS. These people need to be called on their crap. Making shit up as if one has a real vision (idea/concept) is game playing. Attach a name tag to it and expect us to buy into it? It’s not 1984 anymore.
ericblair
Ooookay, as an engineer for whom this phrase has actual real meaning: if you have systems that are difficult to characterize and very sensitive to inputs, you stabilize them and treat them gently. In the climate case, you stop throwing megatons of crap into the system and don’t get any ideas about half-assed compensating effects. In the economic case, you reduce financial leverage to stop overdriving the system and regulate the crap out of it to prevent actors in the system from pushing it strongly into unusual states. And if an airplane is getting out of control, you try to place it back into a known stable state, not throw up your hands, call it a complex system, and let is corkscrew into the ground.
For all the anti-intellectual crap these morons throw around, they sure are willing to put on the propeller cap and play scientist if they think it will score points.
Doctor Science
I have not read Ferguson’s article with care, but (besides mis-characterizing Jared Diamond as an “anthropologist”) he is completely misunderstanding the way biologists think of “complex adaptive systems”. In biology, especially ecology, complex systems are well-known to be more stable than simple ones, mostly because it’s less likely that a straightforward positive feedback loop will develop. Boom-crash cycles are characteristic of very simple systems in marginal environments, such as the Arctic lynx-hare cycle.
Basically, in biology a system which is both “complex” and “adaptive” is going to be *stable*, not fragile, which is pretty much the opposite of what Ferguson is saying.
Cheryl from Maryland
Niall Ferguson is a historian specializing in WWI and the decline of Britain. Who turned to punditry because his first job wasn’t working out. Who cares what he thinks about contemporary times?
Polish the Guillotines
This. By the same token, my lower GI tract is a complex adaptive system that’s been disrupted by a localized increase in the temperature gradient brought on by the chipotle sour cream from the burrito I just ate.
Just more pseudo-scientific, wanky-spanky nonsense words.
Bill E Pilgrim
Ferguson by the way as I’m sure you know is of the Hoover Institution, was shocked that anyone minded that he refers to Obama as “Felix the Cat”, and that article is heavy on concern trolling about deficits and being overstretched militarily, which the right wingers have suddenly decided to worry about because a Democrat is now President.
mcc
Whereas the earth’s climate system is simple, predictable, and safe to fuck around with?
Bill E Pilgrim
@Doctor Science:
That’s what I thought.
It’s sort of like “fungible”, if someone uses that word I generally just stop reading/listening.
The phrase “complex adaptive system” is clearly fungible, since anyone can use it or any part of it to mean whatever the hell they want.
DougJ
@mcc:
I think its complex, adaptive nature was somehow an argument against trying to save it. I’m not sure how the logic worked, though.
Claudia
I’m not a conservative, but I still find Ferguson interesting most of the time. That’s why I reposted his article from Foreign Affairs.
He says there that
In other words, we may be complex but we don’t seem to be doing enough adapting. His summary for the piece says it all:
It’s a mistake to assume that this idea will automatically become a “talking point.” Especially when American dysfunction (and imperial delusion) is so obvious to all.
Mark S.
I’m not curious enough to do whatever I have to do to read freaking Niall Ferguson, so I’ll have to go with Ignatius’ description:
Bullshit, at least in the case of Rome, which was tottering in the third century. Diocletian kept it going for another 200 years, but the problems weren’t exactly solved. Or, conversely, one could argue that the Roman Empire didn’t collapse for another thousand years, when Constantinople fell.
My point is that this kind of wankery can be used to prove anything. The Persian Empire fell quickly thanks to Alexander, while the Spanish Empire fell slowly and painfully. Granted, I’m kind guessing what Ferguson’s argument is, but my experience with him is that he is a shallow thinker who makes sweeping statements to advance his agenda.
JGabriel
DougJ:
Huh? Doesn’t an adaptive system, um, adapt? As in, not collapse?
Fucking morons, I swear.
.
Yutsano
@Bill E Pilgrim: Fungible is my new dog whistle word. As soon as I hear someone use that I know whatever else they’re about to say plus whatever came beffore is now instant bullpuckey. Exhibit A: Michael Scherer. I swear that’s his new favorite word and every time he does use it it’s both a malapropism and makes whatever his argument is weak and ineffective.
Bill E Pilgrim
Nifty tie-in piece to the last two posts here.
Hey, we readers try to hold up our end.
The Claw
They have been reduced to saying all policies are doomed because it’s Calvinball!
Which they are only too happy to help along, naturally.
jenniebee
@Mark S.: What’s his point anyway about the Soviet Union? That it was Glasnost and Perestroika that brought down the Soviet Union? Is there an alternate universe in which the USSR was in hunky dory economic shape and didn’t need any so-called “reforms” but Gorbechev just decided to screw around with it for s&g?
Sly
Complex does not mean opaque, and adaptive does not mean immune to change. CAS is a catch-all term for any network of interdependent operators where all operators are changed whenever one operator changes. An economy, a culture, an ecosystem, a colony of insects, an immune system, etc.
In that there are people who will dry-hump any piece of scientific-sounding gobbledygook to justify their unexamined assumptions, probably. Deepak Chopra has made a small fortune off of people who have no fucking idea what “quantum” means, so why not?
jl
I like this new use of the term complex adaptive systems.
Let us see how it could work out for a typical schlub:
I am obese and completely sedentary. I have the muscle tone of mud fish, and wolf down greasy fries like a like a garbage disposal running on overdrive.
I could do something about that… Like eat healthily and exercising more.
But I am a biological organism and therefore am a complex adaptive system.
So, nothing will work and I should just stay this way.
And sooner rather than later, I will collapse, and me being a complex adaptive system and all, the Niall Ferguson thesis is confirmed.
In other words, this use of the term is BS. They haven’t even got as far as building a sandpile model of ‘self-organized criticality’ in order to throw in a few equations to explain everything.
And I mean know disrespect to sandpile models or self-organized criticality, or complex adaptive systems, but rather the charlatans who misuse math to gull the gullible.
Looks like Ferguson is going the way of the con men, which is too bad.
DougJ
@Bill E Pilgrim:
Thanks.
chrismealy
Complex adaptive systems/complexity/emergence/agent-based-modeling is actually really cool stuff. I hope these morons don’t permanently taint it.
alex
Ferguson is an intellectually gussied-up maroon. Following Ezra Klein’s characterization of Dick Armey, he’s a stupid person’s idea of what a thoughtful person is like. The general thesis seems to be that bad things build up and build up and build up until some small thing tips an empire, or whatever, over the edge. So public debt is too high, which isn’t a big deal, unless it being a big deal is a widespread perception, in which case the American empire can snap like a twig… which is why Niall Ferguson is trying to undermine the perception that the US in crisis is fixable?
I also liked this sentence; it’s about the stupidest thing I’ve ever read: “There is a zero-sum game at the heart of the budgetary process: if interest payments consume a rising proportion of tax revenue, military expenditure is the item most likely to be cut because, unlike mandatory entitlements, it is discretionary.” Remind me when, during the HCR debate, anyone in congress said we should pay for reform by cutting military spending?
What is the point of the article? The last few paragraphs meander around how the Gov’t has to change its monetary policy to suit Ferguson’s fantasy-based economics otherwise the American empire will suddenly collapse.
Yutsano
@alex: The number of factual errors in that sentence boggles the mind. If I were a person whose career deal directly with complex adaptive systems as a matter of course, I would be screaming at Ferguson to get the hell off my phrase.
Bill E Pilgrim
The more I think about this I can just see it.
“Niall Ferguson (link) argues that the US is about to collapse suddenly because of deficits and military campaigns, none of which existed until last year. I shall now spend the bulk of this column explaining his column, and then make an absurd logical leap at the end concluding that the fact that men don’t wear vests anymore is at the heart of it, both as symptom and the real cause.”
PeakVT
our economy is a complex adaptive system
Shorter: Marketz rool!
The problem with the “leave it to the markets” approach, no matter how it is phrased, is that markets are great at providing private goods and lousy at providing public goods. And the more abstract the public good is, the less markets are able to provide it. Markets can be used to provide public goods, but only after government has created an artificial demand in one way or another.
Sentient Puddle
Sounds to me like a variation on the “this problem is really hard and we might not do it right, so we’re better off not even attempting” meme that they’re so fond of throwing around (see also: health care).
Brian J
I don’t know if I’d say that. From what I’ve heard, he’s a great historian. But as you know, he also writes about economics and other topics out of his direct area of expertise. That’s not really bad, since there are plenty of smart people, like Brad DeLong and Tyler Cowen to take two examples, who discuss areas besides economics. And perhaps since he did teach at Harvard Business School, he’s got more credibility than I realize. That said, he does seem to make misguided claims that draw the attention of actual experts for how off base they can be. It’s the same sort of criticism that was thrown at Paul Krugman for so many years, except that people just didn’t like Krugman’s values, or so it seemed to me.
cleek
appropriate any bullshit in the name of the cause. whatever it takes to convince the noobs that conservatism is right.
Dan Robinson
These assholes throw terms like that around and don’t have a clue about what they really mean.
I work on control systems: I write software that controls lasers and micromirrors. There is an expected behavior and I use feedback to drive the mirror and lasers to the desired behavior. That is a closed loop system. I can try to drive it open loop, meaning that I don’t use feedback to inform me about how the system is really working.
Too much politics is being driven open loop. Ideologists spray crap ideas around and think that they know what they are doing, never getting any feedback for how those policies actually perform. WItness the meme that tax cuts raise revenues.
Fuck it.
J. Michael Neal
@Yutsano:
I have to disagree. There really isn’t any other word that means “perfectly substitutable” like “fungible” does.
J. Michael Neal
@Brian J:
You say that like it’s a positive mark on someone’s record. HBS is one of the biggest jokes in the world, even by the standards of business schools.
asiangrrlMN
@Bill E Pilgrim: Agreed. Fungible. This nonsense. Death panels. Communist/Sockulist Party. All words, which if used in seriousness, means the person speaking is a full of shit, and I can stop listening to him.
I hate the misappropriation of phrases such as this. There is a specific meaning to the phrase: use it correctly, or don’t use it at all. And yes, I know that asking people who think facts are what they make of them to use a phrase correctly is spitting into the wind, but it still irks me.
Yutsano
@J. Michael Neal: Read the rest of my sentence. It’s the misuse of the word and the application to put on an air of ersatz intelligence that makes it a dog whistle. asiangrrlMN Or this.
Mark S.
@alex:
I would be worried about that if the US didn’t spend as much on the military as the rest of the world combined.
I’m not a historian like Ferguson is, but I wonder if that has ever happened before in history. I’m going to go out on a limb and guess no, there has never been another time where one nation spent as much as the rest of the world combined on the military.
Bill E Pilgrim
@Yutsano: Agree entirely.
It’s exactly as in the case of complex adaptive systems, as several have pointed out here, the phrase has real meaning, it just gets abused.
I’ve seen people try to claim that workers are “fungible”. Like so many drops of oil, grains of rice, just part of an undifferentiated mass.
@asiangrrlMN: Just saw yours. Yours too.
cat48
I think it is going to be a new excuse for the Right that they can’t reform anything in Washington because the country is too varied and big. Sounds similar to Lamar Alexander’s opening statement at the health care summit:
jenniebee
@Bill E Pilgrim: I don’t get why you have a problem with companies refering to people this way. It’s reality – just about every retail store views 100+% annual turnover as a feature, not a bug.
Bill E Pilgrim
@jenniebee: It’s true, anyone who objects to this fundamental fungibility of employees is clearly in the tank for the socialists. Or as I like to call it, the complex adaptive cistern.
Just the idea of “human resources” has always struck me as a tell.
Bill E Pilgrim
Oy. Forgot the moderation avoidance two-step:
@jenniebee: Itâs true, anyone who objects to this fundamental fungibility of employees is clearly “in the tank” for the so Shlitz. Or, as I like to call it, the complex adaptive cistern.
Just the idea of âhuman resourcesâ has always struck me as a tell.
cat48
I really can’t bear to read more Niall right now. This was the last Ferguson column I read which I found quite disturbing last August:
Yutsano
@cat48: They really do get desperate when they can’t say the N-word don’t they? I’m amazed somehow uppity didn’t sneak in there somewhere.
jenniebee
I just keep thinking about this and it’s pissing me off to no end. We never stop hearing about how the system is so reactive that a change in taxation on the top .5% of income has this inevitable and predictable magnified domino ripple effect of zomg jobs and prosperity for everybody else (and even better, that in order to keep everybody else prosperous, that these top “earners” have to be continualy fed reductions). Touch the market and it jumps – that’s what they think is so “dangerous” about this HCR.
But, there’s no way to “fix” the health care system as long as it’s private because that private system is a “complex adaptive system” that will just shrug off any efforts to change it because it’s so stable, and then shrivel up and die because it’s so fragile.
Steeplejack
@Bill E Pilgrim:
Fix’dclarified.Bill E Pilgrim
@Steeplejack: Yeah, but they discovered the same sudden concern about military over-extension (Somalia! Kosovo!) when Clinton was President. And despite the “first black President” joke about him, it wasn’t meant literally.
There are aspects of some of the hyperventilating going on now that have to do with race, certainly, but I’d say that’s much more in the tea bagger ranks than those in Congress. Though telling the difference gets trickier all the time.
Yutsano
@Bill E Pilgrim: Are you kidding me? They not only can’t stand that a black man passed them up for the most powerful job in the land, but also the junior Senator from Illinois. In their world view, Obama broke so many damn rules and protocols that he flouted every single piece of congeniality that exists. Look at how Grandpa acted at the health care summit. That was his chance to put the young n*gger in his place, and instead Obama humiliated him again. They want to beat him and beat him bad. They just haven’t figured out how to pull that off yet.
Bill E Pilgrim
@Yutsano: Well, that’s why I say it’s tricky to tell the difference, in any case what I was responding to was the idea that they’re only suddenly finding objections to military extension and deficits because Obama is black. Which doesn’t hold water because they really did have the same objections to Clinton. “They” meaning the GOP and in many cases the same people.
Yeah some of them hate that Obama is black. They hated Clinton because he wasn’t right wing enough for them, and because “he came in here and trashed the place, and it wasn’t his place”.
They hate lots of people for lots of reasons. It isn’t all race. Moreover, they’re just entirely, completely taken over by political mercenary concerns and will actually even put aside their hatred of people if they think it can help them politically. Case in point: the religious right, which many Republicans despised, and embraced anyway.
Mark S.
@jenniebee:
That got me curious about what caused the USSR to collapse and I stumbled upon this:
Which reminded me of something Yglesias said a while back:
It’s pretty pathetic that a country with enormous natural resources and a very educated populace should be so dependent on one commodity, but there you go.
Bill E Pilgrim
@Yutsano: By the way my absolute favorite moment of that health care meeting was when McCain delivered a belligerently-framed point, just all geared up for a fight, and Obama responded “Well, I agree with you on that, John”.
McCain’s reaction was absolutely priceless, he just sort of sputtered and jerked his hands up and down and muttered and came to a complete stop. It was like watching a robot whose circuits had imploded from an input he couldn’t parse. “Must destroy human for good of country. But first law says can’t. But second law…”
I think he managed to actually say “Well, I …. okay!” as the camera panned off him.
Quiddity
“complex adaptive system” = “the market will solve the problem”
bago
@J. Michael Neal: Commodity?
SRW1
Maybe our learned friends from the conservative commentariate have problems with ‘complex adaptive systems’ because such systems, by virtue of being adaptive, violate the conservative longing for stasis?
mclaren
@quiddity:
Just the opposite. Niall Ferguson’s article proves that he doesn’t remotely understand what the term “complex adaptive system” really means.
In reality, a complex adaptive system behaves nonlinearly, which means that external regulation is essential to keep the system from blowing up.
Therefore characterizing the economy as a “complex adaptive system” offers the best possible argument in favor of liberal policies designed to closely regulate the economy. If the economy really is a complex adaptive system, even a slight random input may shove it over the edge into chaos, and this makes close supervision of the economy by watchdog regulatory agencies absolutely crucial.
Niall Ferguson is no scientist and he proves this with perfect clarity when he makes the absurd claim that “blaming such a crash on a policy of deregulation under U.S. President Ronald Reagan is about as plausible as blaming World War I on the buildup of the German navy under Admiral Alfred von Tirpitz.” No, absolutely wrong, as chaos theory proves — when you remove all regulation from a complex adaptive system you yank out the very restraints which prevent the system from blowing up.
It’s ironic indeed that Republicans would choose to use the jargon of “complex adaptive systems” in a failed and futile effort to argue that regulation of the financial markets is pointless, because the theory of complex adaptive systems shows us that the danger of sudden collapse due to the unanticipated effect of small inputs to the system is exactly why we need so many safeguards and regulatory systems in place.
A great example from electrical engineering involves thermal runaway. An amplifier without a feedback circuit to regulate it is prone to a condition in which the resistor heats up, becoming more conductive, which in turn lets more current through the system, which in turns heats the resistor up even more, and soon leads to a condition in which so much current pumps through the system that it burns out — a condition known as thermal runaway. This can occur even in modern CPUs, and that’s why Intel CPUs have a thermal detector inside that shuts the CPU down if it goes beyond a certain temperature.
To argue that shutting down the termal regulator has no effect on blowing up that CPU is as wrongheaded and as ignorant as trying to argue that Reagan’s elimination of crucial economic regulations played no part in wrecking the U.S. economy. That kind of argument is so stupid and so ignorant it shows that the person who makes it has no idea what a complex adapative system actually is.
Skip Intro
I don’t know anything about the conservative commentators mentioned in the OP, but the study and modeling of complex adaptive systems are a major component of contemporary evolutionary biology (see Stu Kaufman’s The Origins of Order for a well-written, less technical intro) and have been making inroads into economics for about 15 years.
The Santa Fe Institute put together two edited volumes on CAS & the economy several years back that are worth reading for someone with a fairly robust mathematical background.
I don’t comment often here, but it’s one of the two blogs where I regularly read comment threads, and I’ve been seeing an anti-intellectualism in posts that’s really troubling me. In recent memory, I’ve seen posts trashing philosophers that the OP admitted no knowledge of, and now this.
I don’t think everyone should be an academic, but really, I expect this “Harf harf idears r stupid” from RedState, not here.
Steeplejack
@Skip Intro:
DougJ’s post and most of the comments are criticizing not science but the adoption (and misuse) of a trendy-sounding scientific phrase. To characterize them as âHarf harf idears r stupidâ is a big stretch.
Marc
Doug, you let Manzi get inside your OODA loop.
Skip Intro
@Steeplejack:
I’d also point you to fairly recent posts about Leo Strauss and Reinhold Niebuhr. You may disagree, but I see a tendency to dismiss ideas mockingly without even the pretense of engagement, and that’s troubling to me.
gex
You know what’s a “complex adaptive system” that we don’t understand and should be concerned about screwing up? The fucking CLIMATE. Sheesh. The economy is a man-made thing, and we change it all the time. Next time they want tax cuts, we should throw this back in their faces. “But the economy is a complex adaptive system. Eliminating the estate tax might destroy it, so we better not.” Or “in the 1990’s we had a good economy, but the Bush tax cuts apparently damaged this complex adaptive system. We should let them expire.”
21st Century Snake Oil
Only Faux Nooz talking points are valid – all others need not apply.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DtMV44yoXZ0
matoko_chan
Manzi’s new schtick as NRO’s Token “Conservative” Scientist is to use sciencey buzzwords to cloak Stupid Conservative Failmemes.
See this epic classic on how the same invisible hand of the market that just punched working Americans in the face is going to fix the Econopalypse of greed that Wall Street has evolved into.
Here he uses a gloss of genetic algorithms to justify creationism.
But my favorite example of Manzi’s profound intellectual prostitution comes when he invokes evo theory of cooperation as a possible social cohesion model for market regulation, without EVER acknowledging that the benefits and social capital only accrue to WITHIN group members.
There is a reason that only 6% of scientists are republicans.
I fully expect to Jim Manzi get a chair at the Discovery Institute.
I used to relly like Manzi….but now I am forced to admit that he is just as much a cancer on the scientific community as Palin is a cancer on the body of politics.
Some populist memes are just stupid and unworthy of “equal time” in the political arena. Manzi’s time would be better spent in educating his base, instead of trying to legitimize Fail Paradigms with sciencey buzzwords. It is part of the whole republican populist schtick….those smart elite intellectual people just dont respect you…but we can use Big Science Words too!
Joey Giraud
Good complex adaptive systems will have both positive and negative feedback loops, non-linear transfer nodes and will exhibit both chaotic and non-chaotic modes. They will have adaptive coefficients for node weights and all kinds of training algorithms.
IOW, good luck applying yer Laplacian transform linear system analysis techniques.
Das Complexin Adaptiven Systemen ist nicht fer gerfingerpoken und mittengrabben.
Steeplejack
@Skip Intro:
I went back and looked at DougJ’s post “In the Niebuhrian Sense” from December 13. Of the 104 comments, fewer than 10 could be characterized as “dismiss[ing] ideas mockingly without even the pretense of engagement,” and some of those were probably jokes that misfired. Many of the other comments were thoughtful and informative. I’ll take that signal-to-noise ratio on a blog any day.
DougJ
@Skip Intro:
We’ll have to agree to disagree. You find my take anti-intellectual, I find yours gullible. You can read David Brooks’ next book on neuroscience, I’ll stick to Hunter S. Thompson.
Serious ideas from philosophy and science are best left out of conservative editorials, IMHO.
Shoe
@Skip Intro – It is not anti-intellectual to mock bullshit artists, and to point out their blatant inconsistencies.
What do you want? Intellectual debates on evolution vs ID? Supply side vs Keynes? Readings of In Defense of Internment and Liberal Fascism?
The Right are past masters at intellectual veneers and I should think anyone who has been reading this blog for any length of time would recognize it.
Or should we be taking the utter misapplication of ‘complex adaptive systems’ as a serious intellectual endeavor? The conservative tendency to collectively flog buzzwords as evidence of their seriousness is one well familiar to any observer of the past decade. The OP is pointing out the appearance of another.
asiangrrlMN
@Skip Intro: It’s not anti-intellectualism at all. It’s anti-the coldly hypocritical co-opting of intellectual ideas in the pushing forward of one’s agenda. The conservatives glom on to a phrase or a philosopher or whatnot and trot it out without understanding the complex nature behind the idea, phrase, or philosopher. As someone who values intellect, real intellect, it’s an affront to my intelligence to see these buffoons toss around phrases like complex adaptive systems, and, what’s worse, to totally misrepresent them.
As for the snark, can’t help you there. That’s what BJ is all about, and I, for one, am glad of it.
Claudia
Has everyone forgotten the massive military build-up and expenditures during the Reagan area- and the USSR’s attempt to keep up? We went into debt big-time while the USSR just went broke because their system (wasn’t adaptive?) didn’t provide for borrowing. We spent them into collapse.
Now we’re doing it to ourselves.
celticdragonchick
@Claudia:
Good point. The knee jerk response at this site all too often is to mock commentator (X) and make snarky, flippant comments that do not begin to address the arguments made in any way.
I think the points deserve serious attention, and I think that Davis Ignatious is dead on the money when he observes that the inertia in our system of governance is so severe that we cannot act to solve serious problems that are obvious and threaten the stability of the nation.
I have seen some articles on chaos theory applied to complicated finance systems that predict collapses in a system become…more unpredictable of all things with respect to what may trigger the collapse.
I wonder what “black swan” event may actually do us in as a viable nation. There is no guarantee that America as we know it will survive this century. We actually seem to be doing all we can to make sure that it won’t.
mclaren
@Claudia:
This myth was created by the far-right fringe lunatics like Podhoretz to shore up the fantasy that “Ronald Reagan was the man who won the cold war.” There’s no evidence to support that fringe lunatic claim, and a great deal of evidence against it.
Read Yegor Gaidar’s book “Collapse Of An Empire.”
Gaidar was one of the most inside of the Kremlin insiders. He was there watching it happen, unlike ignorant cranks like Podhoretz. Gaidar lays the blame for the Soviet Union’s collapse on the 1974 oil shocks and the USSR’s chronic inability to provide enough wheat for its own people — the latter problem traces back to Stalin’s elevation of Trofim Lysenko to a position of control over Soviet agriculture. Lysenko was a pseudoscientist whose bizarre ideas (like freezing seeds to allegedly make them more cold-resistant, or planting crops closer together, so that they would “gain the strength of massing together like the proletariat”) destroyed Soviet agriculture.
All the available evidence and all the testimony from Kremlin insiders who were on the scene uniformly contradicts the claim that America “spent the Soviet Union into collapse.” Gaidar says the rigid price controls in the USSR prevented adequate adjustment to external shocks, in particular, the oil shocks of the mid-70s, but primarily the chronic weakness of Soviet agriculture.
From a review of Gaidar’s book:
Gaidar shows that agriculture was the Achilles heel of the Soviet system. Stalin ruthlessly exploited agriculture to fund industrial development. This worked for a while, but only served to demonstrate that supply curves are much more elastic in the long run than the short run. In the short run, peasants could be forced to turn over the bulk of their harvest in exchange for a pittance. In the long run, however, the attempt to extract surplus from the countryside and the necessity of attracting labor to manufacturing and megaprojects led to a flow of the best and most productive labor out of agriculture and into industry. Soviet agriculture became progressively less efficient as a result. Combine this with assorted insanities, like the virgin lands program, and what was once the world’s breadbasket became a farming basket case.
Forced to import larger and larger quantities of food, but non-competitive in the production of machinery or other manufactured goods, the USSR relied on the export of oil to pay for it. With increasing oil output from rich western Siberian fields, and spiraling prices (courtesy of OPEC and declining US production), for a time the USSR was able to overcome the creeping weakness of its agriculture sector, and even go on an aggressive military and political offensive that spanned the globe. But soon declining oil production (attributable to extremely inefficient Soviet practices) and plummeting prices (courtesy of growing non-OPEC output, burgeoning Saudi production, and more efficient consumption of energy in the West) conspired to create an acute fiscal crisis in the USSR.
None of this has anything to do with military spending by the United States. The delusion that America “spent the USSR into collapse” is a Reaganoid fantasy, and, like all the other Reaganoid fantasies such as the claim that “forest fires produced more pollution than all the smokestacks in America,” it has no connection with observed reality.
DougJ
@celticdragonchick:
The dysfunction is severe and that’s exactly why throwing our hands up and yelling “complex adaptive system” is not a good option.
There is a simple solution to our current political dysfunction: change Senate rules. I know that’s not very high-brow, but it’s true.
Tonal Crow
Ah, the all-pervading Magic of the Invisible Hand will come to our rescue, if only we shout “soshulist!” more often and demand more-frequent public readings of Ayn Rand. Is there, like, *any* evidence to suggest that his reasoning is correct?
Tonal Crow
@PeakVT:
Yes. It’s all about creating the appropriate incentives. If it costs nothing to dump carbon into the atmosphere, market participants will continue to do so. If dumping costs a little, a few market participants will spend a little effort on avoiding the cost. If dumping costs a lot, most market participants will spend considerable effort to avoid the cost.
BTW, is this one of the same cons who argues that tax cuts are the sovereign remedy for all economic ills? If so, how does he justify *that* tampering with such a “complex adaptive system”?
Tonal Crow
@Dan Robinson: An argument for empirically-driven public policy? Are you out of your science-addled mind? Officer! Officer! There he is! Get the chloroform! Get the straitjacket!
Bruce (formerly Steve S.)
Besides, you don’t expect collapsed empires to have huge standing armies and several thousand nuclear warheads. You also don’t expect collapsed empires to tell the U.S. to go fuck itself in regard to the Georgian situation. In fact, I’ve never understood the meme that it “collapsed” at all. Retrenched, perhaps.
Phoenician in a time of Romans
I have not read Fergusonâs article with care, but (besides mis-characterizing Jared Diamond as an âanthropologistâ) he is completely misunderstanding the way biologists think of âcomplex adaptive systemsâ. In biology, especially ecology, complex systems are well-known to be more stable than simple ones, mostly because itâs less likely that a straightforward positive feedback loop will develop.
Bingo.
The answer to complex adaptive systems is to change the conditions under which they function, and let them figure out how to adapt. For example, start charging for carbon emissions, and let people know that there will be a steady ramping up of that charge as time goes on. I dunno how they will adapt, but you can bet that they will, and quite nicely too.
Slaney Black
I once worked for a shady winger financial publisher (“America Collapses 2011: HOARD GOLD NOW!!!”) and most of the scammy ad copy they put out made Ferguson’s point much more cogently and compellingly than that soi-disant scholarly article.
It’s
amazingnot at all amazing that this whole article about political paralysis mentions the fiibuster not once. It’s an index of how much the Senate serves as the tribunate of the ruling class – the paid buttlickers of said ruling class won’t criticize it even when it’s obviously dragging the country down into oblivion.Peter Beinart did the same thing in Newsweek. Won’t even link to the article because that’s how much Beinart turns my stomach. Filibuster mentioned only in passing, everything else about encouraging Serious Bipartisanship.
The Versailles Media is like the abused child of the ruling class. “Stop fighting! Nothing’s really wrong!! Why can’t we be a family again!?”
There’s this fantasy that if only plutocrats could paper over their differences everything would go back to normal again. As if there weren’t any external forces pressing on them. As if there were nothing outside the the palace.
Claudia
I’ve found recent articles by Chris Hedges and others all circling around the idea of collapse, and William Engdahl has a book coming out. Just found another recent posting by scientist David Brin:
Claudia
Mclaren: