Stable and Unstable Systems

 I am no fan of Guardian writer George Monbiot. The phrase “crying wolf” might have been invented for this Cassandra of a journalist. If 5% of the apocalyptic prophesies peppering his articles had come true, we would all be dead by now. His speciality is environmental writing, and, while he does unearth excellent new angles of despair, his solutions tend to be wildly impractical, and the overall tone turns me off after a while.

 

Still, earlier this month he did introduce me to one of his smart new angles. The concept was simple enough, and even familiar, but I found the context to be new and it did then lead my mind down a few other paths that I found interesting. Monbiot divided systems up into stable and unstable ones. Both types of system are subject to change and even to shocks, but the stable ones can absorb most of these while the unstable ones are more fragile and liable to collapse completely.

 

Monbiot’s rather strange example was of the system of global food production and distribution, and true to his pessimistic form, he argued that this had possibly become unstable to the point of imminent collapse, which would presumably be defined by widespread famine across much of the world.

 

He pointed out a few potential root causes to support his claim. One was the concentration of food production. It is potentially a good thing when places with suitable climates or economic advantages come to produce more than their locally required share of certain foodstuffs. These places can produce at a better quality and cheaper and then trade with other places to create overall societal value, despite the additional costs of storage and distribution involved. Thus everyone can potentially have a broader diet with better nutritional content at an affordable cost.

 

The problem is that this improved system is more complex and has more components that can go wrong. Even a poor African nation with a harsh climate can produce enough for people to live on, otherwise its population would have died out long ago. Sure, there were droughts and diseases, but the simpler system could find ways to compensate over time, even at the expense of malnutrition and some death. With the new complex global system, that nation may have forgotten how to produce its staples and the people may have evolved to no longer be able to survive with that diet anyway. Yet there is no guarantee that the potentially abundant global diet will always make its way to every corner of the populated world.

 

In Monbiot’s view, this risk is then exacerbated by a tendency towards monopolies. Not only do a very few nations produce most of the world’s needs of specific crops, but the production and distribution are increasingly concentrated in a very small number of firms. These players buy each other out and relentlessly drive out costs to maximise returns to shareholders, but their operations may become so efficient that tolerances become too small.

 

Put these root causes together and add a shock or two and disaster becomes possible. Of course, the shocks we now face include the Ukraine war, on top of the coronavirus disruptions and against a background of growing hostility and suspicion between large nations. A disaster may indeed be about to manifest itself in wheat, in sunflower oil and in some key chemicals.

 

Here Monbiot rests his case. He may be right. There is certainly a looming crisis of hunger around the world. The Economist highlighted this in the very early stages of the war and the avoidance of famine has become an urgent consideration of the UN and the diplomatic efforts of altruistic countries. The intense concentration and tightness of supply chains will probably make this crisis more immediate and acute than it would have been before the onset of globalisation.

 

This is a fair and established argument. But, as usual, I fear Monbiot may be trying to lead us to places where his logic is less sound. He implies that the globalisation of a diet and concentration of production are inherently bad things, driven by his favourite evil force, capitalism. He regularly pins the blame for climate change and a host of other poor outcomes on the same forces. He is arguing that the market is not the best method to allocate such resources.

 

But do we really want to go back to subsistence diets? I am currently in the south of Portugal, and every day when I visit our small town, I see the impact of past diets: the older locals are emaciated and about a foot shorter than the younger ones or the expatriates. Were people happier then? I doubt it; healthy life expectancy was certainly much lower.

 

And if the market is so bad, we must consider the track record of the alternatives. What about the Irish famine of the 1840’s, or Stalin’s famines of the 1930’s or Mao’s of the 1960’s? Or the poverty in Venezuela, a land of abundant potential wealth, today?

 

Furthermore, when disaster does strike, won’t the market and technology help us to recover more quickly than we did in the past? It may be halting, and unfair, but recovery will occur somehow. As is happening around the world right now, companies will start to build in some resilience and governments will legislate to protect their citizens, especially those that might become violent or vote incumbents out of office.

 

So I don’t accept that the global food system is inherently unstable, and I don’t accept an implied argument that overriding the market is justified, except in smart ways of regulating emergency supplies and of encouraging competition.

 

But the distinction between stability and instability did lead me to consider other systems in that way. Monbiot’s conclusion that excessive complexity and uniformity are risk factors, while built in fail safes and contingencies are good, feels sound.

 

The human body is a wonderful example of a stable system, and we still don’t have the technology to fully understand how. Evolution is an amazing force towards stability. Somehow we seem able to heal from almost anything, and advances in medicine improve our abilities every day. Reproduction, cell renewal, bacteria and many other factors play a role in our remarkable stability.

 

The climate may well be an unstable system just now, as I am sure Monbiot was leading us to conclude from his article. There are too many inter-dependent parts, it is hard to see the full picture, and the human actors are not aligned in motives and incentives. Our progress will surely be messy and there will be disasters. But even here I think humanity will find a way to recovery, though perhaps with many decades of lost lives and less attractive conditions.

 

What about the financial and economic systems? In 2008 the financial system in the capitalistic world appeared unstable because so much risk was piled into so limited an asset class, so the scale of loss was large and the recovery slow. But ultimately the actors could align behind somewhat common goals, and with the help of some excellent political leadership, sound regulations emerged. As our collective understanding of economic drivers improves, the system promises to become even more stable, though not necessarily fairer. I am happy to join in with Monbiot’s frustration that, even with stable systems, humanity consistently falls below its potential.

 

Is the military equilibrium stable or unstable? That will likely be tested over the next few years. The concept of MAD never worked for me as an inherent stabiliser, and, indeed, the great powers are working to actively undermine it.

 

Then there is human governance. It is fashionable to argue that a system like the Chinese one is more stable than the current mess evident in democracies. But I feel we must take the long view. Concentration of power gets things done and can perform well over an extended period. But power dos tend to create corruption, and as inequities grow, and are bottled up via repression until they explode, and the longer the bottling up the greater the explosion tends to be.

 

Democracies, despite having more checks and balances, are not immune, as the current trends in the US demonstrate. But, sooner or later, there will be a reckoning and the people’s will be heard. Over time that will becomes more informed and fairer.

 

Overall, I find myself more in the camp of Steven Pinker than of George Monbiot. But even Pinker accepts that progress does not follow a straight line and that plenty of disasters pepper the path of development.