Pandemic lesson: the disappearance of externalities
Lazy neurons, they fail to see connections even when they are obvious.
I cannot recall when I started hearing people talking about the global village, globalisation, hyperconnectivity, spaceship earth, Gaia, ... I grew up with this holistic language as my conceptual koiné.
But only recently, thanks to the pandemic, I realised that I should have linked it to another phenomenon: the disappearance of externalities. It is so obvious now.
In pseudo-precise literature or pretentious conversations, an externality is a negative effect of a profitable activity, call it a cost, paid by someone else. Like what happens if one runs a profitable business that pollutes someone else's environment. My externalities may be unintended, possibly avoidable, but it is not my problem whether they occur, and the fact that they may occur is not going to stop me from pursuing my activities, since the cost paid by someone else is not a sufficient disincentive to sacrifice my own benefit. Sometimes, I think that when people speak of "externalities" what they really mean is "collateral damage".
However, an externality, in economics, is something more neutral and precise. It refers to a cost or a benefit (negative or positive externality) – due to the production or consumption of a good or service (and I would add here policies, regulations or courses of action) – incurred or received by a third party, which has no control (more on this in a moment) over the creation of that cost or benefit. Thus pollution may be an externality, but only if the polluted has no control on it, and the benefits of pollination caused by beekeeping are also externalities, but of a positive kind, even if we do not attach a reward to them.
Politics has always known the value of both externalities: nobody is grateful for positive externalities (who does ever thank the keeper of the bees for the pollination they facilitate?), and the negative externalities of bad government today are paid tomorrow, by the next government, or another generation of citizens. Brexit comes vividly to mind.
As for "control", this is an important clause. The lack of control may be due to lack of information: the third party may not know. I can imagine this might have been common during the industrial revolution, all the way down to the post-war reconstruction. Today, in an information society, this seems to be increasingly unlikely. More plausibly, the lack of control is due to a lack of power. In this case, an externality is both known and imposed. We need to remember this below, when internalities are in question. They are more and more obvious, and if we do not deal with them is not for lack of knowledge, but for lack of power.
Politics has always known the value of both externalities: nobody is grateful for positive externalities (who does ever thank the keeper of the bees for the pollination they facilitate?), and the negative externalities of bad government today are paid tomorrow, by the next government, or another generation of citizens. Brexit comes vividly to mind.
As for "control", this is an important clause. The lack of control may be due to lack of information: the third party may not know. I can imagine this might have been common during the industrial revolution, all the way down to the post-war reconstruction. Today, in an information society, this seems to be increasingly unlikely. More plausibly, the lack of control is due to a lack of power. In this case, an externality is both known and imposed. We need to remember this below, when internalities are in question. They are more and more obvious, and if we do not deal with them is not for lack of knowledge, but for lack of power.
Juxtaposing these two phenomena – one world and the nature of externalities –seems enough to see their correlation: connectivity is changing externalities.
Today, externalities are quickly becoming merely displaced (elsewhere) or delayed (elsewhen) internalities, that is, costs and benefits incurred or received by the very agents who are responsible for them, even if they did not consider them. We live in a single network, where there is no external space to dump one's own negative externalities and where positive externalities percolate more widely, building resilience.
If I did not see the end of negative externalities until recently, it is also because, despite all our holistic theorising, we practically keep behaving as if we had plenty of space and time at our disposal. The growth of space debris and the recurrent suggestion that rubbish or even radioactive waste may be disposed of in Outer Space show how reluctant we are to take seriously the view that there is no disconnected, other reality where negative externalities migrate for good, never to return home.
The pandemic has made painfully clear that negative externalities are increasingly an untenable abstraction. What we do affect each other, here modifies there, today changes tomorrow. In an ever faster and more connected world, the time between doing something and its consequences becomes increasingly shorter. Brexit was possible not despite but because of the delays. If it had been immediate, its critics would have been right about the sudden pain it would have inflicted. This is also why the same political approach did not work with COVID-19, the effects of which have had a dramatic impact on the population almost immediately. Nothing better than a robust externality slapping one in the face immediately to make one change behaviour asap.
Space and time have shrunk and keep shrinking. This is obvious. Therefore externalities are disappearing. This should have been equally obvious. Better late than never. We should really speak only of internalities that, like boomerangs, seem to go away but always come back to the point of departure, faster and faster. This may seem problematic, but it is good news.
First, there is value in clarity. As long as we thought that externalities were alive and kicking, we could try to manage them. Now it seems we have been trying to manage phlogiston. It makes no sense to misbehave thinking that the cost of such misbehaviour will be paid by someone else. "Anyone first", America included, is a head-in-the-sand approach because it is caused (also) by the end of externalities (in a smaller world the "first" is, and sees itself being, challenged by the second and the third) and yet makes such end even more dangerous by refusing to acknowledge it.
Second, accepting the end of externalities means that we can start focusing entirely on internalities and design systems that handle them better. We need to become critically aware of them, and design policies to incentivise good internalities, which make the world a better place, and disincentivise negative internalities, which make it worse.
The end of externalities is the end of the delusion that we may live in a disconnected world. It should also be the beginning of a better management of a connected one. As often in our age, this is a matter of good design: the right solutions developed in the right way. Good design requires knowledge and intelligence, of which there is plenty. But unfortunately, its implementation requires goodwill and political leadership, of which there should be much more. Recall the lack of power to control the old externalities, not of information about them. So the simple conclusion is that the end of externalities should lead to society's stronger demand for better politics.
Today, externalities are quickly becoming merely displaced (elsewhere) or delayed (elsewhen) internalities, that is, costs and benefits incurred or received by the very agents who are responsible for them, even if they did not consider them. We live in a single network, where there is no external space to dump one's own negative externalities and where positive externalities percolate more widely, building resilience.
If I did not see the end of negative externalities until recently, it is also because, despite all our holistic theorising, we practically keep behaving as if we had plenty of space and time at our disposal. The growth of space debris and the recurrent suggestion that rubbish or even radioactive waste may be disposed of in Outer Space show how reluctant we are to take seriously the view that there is no disconnected, other reality where negative externalities migrate for good, never to return home.
The pandemic has made painfully clear that negative externalities are increasingly an untenable abstraction. What we do affect each other, here modifies there, today changes tomorrow. In an ever faster and more connected world, the time between doing something and its consequences becomes increasingly shorter. Brexit was possible not despite but because of the delays. If it had been immediate, its critics would have been right about the sudden pain it would have inflicted. This is also why the same political approach did not work with COVID-19, the effects of which have had a dramatic impact on the population almost immediately. Nothing better than a robust externality slapping one in the face immediately to make one change behaviour asap.
Space and time have shrunk and keep shrinking. This is obvious. Therefore externalities are disappearing. This should have been equally obvious. Better late than never. We should really speak only of internalities that, like boomerangs, seem to go away but always come back to the point of departure, faster and faster. This may seem problematic, but it is good news.
First, there is value in clarity. As long as we thought that externalities were alive and kicking, we could try to manage them. Now it seems we have been trying to manage phlogiston. It makes no sense to misbehave thinking that the cost of such misbehaviour will be paid by someone else. "Anyone first", America included, is a head-in-the-sand approach because it is caused (also) by the end of externalities (in a smaller world the "first" is, and sees itself being, challenged by the second and the third) and yet makes such end even more dangerous by refusing to acknowledge it.
Second, accepting the end of externalities means that we can start focusing entirely on internalities and design systems that handle them better. We need to become critically aware of them, and design policies to incentivise good internalities, which make the world a better place, and disincentivise negative internalities, which make it worse.
The end of externalities is the end of the delusion that we may live in a disconnected world. It should also be the beginning of a better management of a connected one. As often in our age, this is a matter of good design: the right solutions developed in the right way. Good design requires knowledge and intelligence, of which there is plenty. But unfortunately, its implementation requires goodwill and political leadership, of which there should be much more. Recall the lack of power to control the old externalities, not of information about them. So the simple conclusion is that the end of externalities should lead to society's stronger demand for better politics.
Fascinating.
ReplyDeleteOf course, the dissolution of externality is something of an inevitability in any complex system considered in toto; the invalidation of truly (or aspirationally) external vantage points, similarly so. Self-gravitation of accelerating, hyper-inflating recombinatory conceptual and technological languages, grammars and (associated, adaptive, procedurally adaptive) cognitive algebras simultaneously require and cultivate this as both the message and the medium of their own recursive (internal, systemic) self-propagation. Partisan political adversarialism is a case-in-point of an evolving information and communications system that most effectively self-propagates via the turbulent medium of it's own distributed self-expression.
System extensibility is always internal when considered logically (Godel meets Kolmogorov - or Chaitin and A.I.T.), only ever external when considered as the multiplicity of manifest material artefacts, components, configurations. Externalities can only ever, and - loathe as I am to speak of "ultimates" or irreducible foundations - ultimately be a suspension of disbelief in the foundational (or at least implicit) unity and interdependence of complex systems. The semantic ambiguities of psychology and embodied experience are hardly extricable from theses analyses - we seek a reflexive teleological certainty in an external semantic anchor which does not exist; the foundations of metaphysics are as vacuous as are those of the logically (or perhaps - topologically, self-referentially) inward-spiralling matrix of extended-cognition of, as and through technology.
This inward-momentum and metamorphosis is of course that which provides us with indefinitely extensible referential and constitutively complex biological systems through, from and as which COVID-19 emerges to give us all (and Globally) a swift and unexpected existentially-threatening kick of information entropy in the socioeconomic crown jewels. Good news is that indefinite extensibility of internal structure or pattern is also the artist previously (or otherwise) known as adaptation and living systems, including the generally-inefficient of uselessly self-propagating organisational hierarchies of ascendant bureaucracy, are generally quite adept at adapting when their lives depend upon it. Necessity being the mother of innovation...
It may be something of an inevitability that a recognition of the putative dissolution or invalidation of the "true" or plausible and concrete externality occurs at around the same historical inflection point that the nature of self-inflating interior surfaces of complex (mathematical or information and technology-oriented) systems begins to disseminate more broadly across the sciences and the humanities. An idea "has it's moment"; yet - most concise, succinct or effective (i.e. powerful) definitions, descriptions or self-representations are as adaptive as the systems in and from which they emerge and are, consequently, as a much a moving target as are the Objects to which they are directed.
.....
Please persist with your revivified blog - I receive the email mail-outs. It is thought provoking and I enjoy nothing more than the resonant discontinuity and utility of an information entropy borne of creative intelligence and perspicacity. Your words and concepts invoke (the fearful symmetry of) butterfly wings in other's minds and that, at base, is the lifeblood of this hyper-inflating referential space of autonomously self-propagating information and energy-processing (i.e. computation) as complexity and intelligence that we inhabit and that, equally, inhabits us.
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Regards,
Graeme Wallace
Little note: there is a typo with COVIS-19 :)
ReplyDeleteVery interesting topic, by the way (as usual), thank you for sharing your thoughts. :)
Interesting and informative writeup!
ReplyDeleteHowever, in this context, there is no difference between externalities and internalises except the one that is positional. The fact that externalities are disappearing and internalitiess are the one thing we will have left corroborates the point. Also, the hyper-technical distinction is not relevant in the holistic understanding of our society because the externalities and the internalities have genesis in the same underlying treatment afforded to human existence by humans.The externalities were always destined to become internalities, for the systemic dynamics do not work in isolation to the implications of the constituting forces and processes.
Importance afforded to micro-aspects of the whole system is a flaw in the understand how how everything works. it may be good for academic discussion though!
Please do afford me more insights if I could not get the point. Always eager to learn,
Best,
P
counted..
ReplyDeleteSorry! forgot to add something, for the mind is becoming totally dependent on technology (hope there will be an easily accessible machine that will translate thoughts directly into comments)
Internalities are simultaneously turning into and becoming externalities (in a way) and the other way around (in a way, as well) for the society is characterised by evolving dynamics. The form keeps changing in order to reinforce the underlying mechanism of how end human beings treat human existence through various actions/non-actions. The sum totality of humanity in the form of what it wants is at the core of this ever evolving dynamics. It seems to be changing but only superficially. The externalities and internalities are merely symptomatic manifestation of how (and not why) are society functions the way it does. They do not fundamentally matter in how the status quo maintains itself, in essence.