By Prof, Kenneth Watt, posted here by permission.
Brief Outline
There is an extremely revealing way we can determine which are
useful and wich are potentially catastrophic approaches to
thinking about the future. We can assemble a set of forecasts that
have proved remarkably prescient, and another set which have
been proved remarkably inaccurate, and identify the differences in
the methods that were used in the two sets of cases. This chapter
deals with a set of five remarkably accurate forecasts.
The subjects abut which accurate predictions were made include
war, air war, the overall character of society, and the future
production of fossil fuels. Only one of the five made extensive use
of mathematical models. The key to success in all cases was that
their conceptual models of reality were strongly influenced by real
world data, not abstract reasoning based on untested assumptions.
That is, realistic, accurate forecasters are concrete random
thinkers, not abstract sequential thinkers (de Bono, 1977). Their
worldview is driven by exhaustive research on facts and causal
pathways, not belief.
I. Homer Lea: The American Mandarin in the Court of Sun Yat Sen
A remarkable book by Lea was published in 1909: The Valor of
Ignorance. He correctly identified the fundamental system drivers
in determining the aggressiveness of nations: their demand for
resources relative to their supply, and their military preparedness
relative to that of a potential target nation which had superabundant
resources. He had a remarkable grasp of the details of the armed
forces of Japan and the United States, particularly with respect to
their navies. He saw that Japan was the nation most likely to be
belligerent with respect to the United States, and grasped the
vulnerability to surprise attack of Hawaii and the west coast of the
U.S.
As with the other premier forecasters discussed here, he made
conscious use of a "method". He was convinced of the need to
base theories on facts, not deduction, and of the need for
objectivity, free from influence by ideology, or overlooked
fundamental assumptions that had an overriding impact on results.
In his words, "Truth, outside of the exact sciences, can only be
approsimated. The degree to which that approximation approaches
completeness depends upon the exactitutde of empirical knowledge
and freedom from error in deductions, which means, principally, a
freedom from antipathies or attachments".
He understood the overwhelmingly and overridingly important role
of a small group of fundamental system drivers: "The future life of
this Republic has not only been predetermined by the primordial
laws already mentioned, but it has blazed the way of the future by
its acts of the past". that statement implies the operation of
historical forces with very long time delays. compare this with the
pundits who get on television and argue that energy shortages are
not as dangerous to economies as some people think, because
energy was in short supply and expensive this week, and the
economy did not collapse.
He kept emphasizing the importance of data: "It is through
empirical knowledge alone that man is able to ascertain what laws
do or do not regulate his activities"/
He was clear about the identity of the fundamental system drivers"
"The wealth of a nation, what it produces, is dependent on the
natural resources of its territorial possessions, on the intelligence
of its people, the means they employ, and, lastly, the size of the
population. The the wealth of France with thirty-eight million
people is infinitely greater than that of India with two hundred
million". These ideas sound remarkably like those of other
important thinkers in all countries, and throiugh all of time. Lea
sounds very much like the last epilogue to Leo Tolstoy's War and
Peace.
______________________________________________________
| Lea thought that a nation would be highly vulnerable to attack by | | other nations if the population was politically, naive, and it had a |
| superabundance of natural resources. | ________________________________________
Therefore, he believed that the United States was becoming
increasingly vulnerable to a future attack by Japan. "The American
people, and not Japan, are responsible for this approaching
conflict. In sacrificing the national ideal to the individual the
expansion of this nation has been determined by his wants. All
national growth, following in the wake of individual desires, has
been industrial, while political development, together with its
concomitant military and naval expansion, has been relegated to
secondary consideration". The sounds astonishingly prescient,
given that it was published in 1909. The U. S. government is
primarily a creature of special interest groups, is rendered very
non-nimble by massive bureaucracies with high inertia, and is
largely oblivious to new ideas and ominous warnings about future
threats of all kinds.
The detailed understanding Lea shows of the military preparedness
of varioius nations is simply mind-boggling. He knew how long it
took various nations to build battleships, how long it took to train
officers, how many men it would take to keep the guns in a fort
from rusting. His comparative statistics on sizes of armies were
shocking. In the time that Japan would take to get 500,00-0 veteran
troops into combat, the United States could field an army of 19,000
regular soldiers. He knew the distances between naval bases and
their likely targets, the speed and design of naval vessels, the
logistics of refueling warships, the characteristics of torpedoes and
mines, and the topography of the landscape where battles would
likely be fought around Los Angeles, San Francisco and Portland.
Hawaii, American Samoa, the Philippines, Washington, Oregon and
California could all be invaded and taken over easily, and it would
be immensely difficult to drive out the invading enemy (because of,
for instance, the mountain arrier to invasion by American forces
from the eastern seaboard). After the second world war, General
MacArthur's chief officers said this, concerning Lea's
foreknowledge of the Japanese attack on the Philippines,
"clairvoyant to the point of specifying the precise bays and beaches
the Japanese would use to debark their troops". (Anschel, 1984).
Lea was completely interdisciplinary, and certainly understood
that we can learn from history. As an adolescent and young man
he was steeped in military history and geopolitics of Europe and
China.
II. Billy Mitchell: The Air Commander Without An Air Force
Mitchell was a pioneer in the organization and execution of mass
bomber raids, beginning at the end of the first world war (1918).
By November, 1918, Britain, France and the United States had 6440
war planes ready to take off within minutes, and the skies of
Europe were essentially devoid of German war planes. If ever a
historically important fact has been suppressed virtually forever,
this is that fact. This is why attacks by comparatively tiny air
armadas of Germany against Poland and Japan against the United
States came as such surprises. The Japanese attacked Pearl
Harbor with 390 planes, or about 1 sixteenth the air force the Allies
were using in November of 1918. Mitchell realized that all military
forces, from battleships to armies to air forces would from 1918 on
be vulnerable to surprise attack by large fleets of bombers (several
hundred or more planes). He understood the significance of great
circle routes for long range travel in aircraft, military or commercial.
Unlike ships and trains, planes would lower the cost of traveling
very long distances by flying as much of any trip as far from a
midline around the planet as possible so the distance around the
planet is less. therefore, places that never before had had large
military or commercial significance would become highly
significant: Alaska and the Aleutian Islands, for example.
He knew that the battleships of all countries would be no match for
dive bombers in all wars after 1918. No one listened, and the losses
to British, German, American and Japanese battleships were
horrific. He also realized the vulnerability of Pearl Harbor, and was
explaining details of a likely future attack by the early 1930's. the
detail in these predicitons was uncanny: he realize attack would
come on a quiet sunday morning when the armed forces would be
sleeping late after Saturday night.
He understood the importance of avoiding total destruction of air
forces on the ground in surprise air attacks: a scenario that
occurred repeatedly after 1937 (Poland, Pearl Harbor, the
Philippines, Wake Island, Libya much later). He was very
sophisticated on the issue of lag effects, a major theme of this
book. This is an illustrative passage, concerning the defending air
force: "If they are not in the air when the hostile air force appears,
they will have no effect on it, because they cannot arise to a great
altitude and catch it. Consequently, not more than about one-third
of an air force can be kept constantly in the air, so that in the future,
the country that is ready with its air force and jumps on its
opponent at once will bring about a speedy and lasting victory."
That was published in 1925; the Polish air force was destroyed on
the fround in 1939 and 475 United States air force planes were
converted to burning wreckage on the ground before takeoff at
Pearl Harbor in 1941.
What does this scenario mean? If 300 of your fighters are
destroyed on the ground by 300 enemy dive bombers or fighters,
where in time is the cause of that even? Not 10 minutes in the
past, because if you had decided to get your entire force in the air
then, only 10-20 of your fighters would have been off the ground by
the time the enemy force arrived,m and your airborne planes would
have been outnumbered 30 to 1 or 15 to 1. Clearly, you would have
had to start getting your planes in the air about 40-60 minutes prior
to arrival of the enemy force in order to avoid being outnumbered,
and to have reached altitude above the attackers. This alertness
implies installation of an enemy detection system using radar and
spotter planes, both of which had been brought to full effectiveness
by weeks of intensive drill. this line of thought was apparently
unknown in connection with the New Orleans flooding of 2005.
In short, the critical events leading to the destruction at Pearl
Harbor probably occurred three to five years in the past, when we
include the time for decision making, equipment manufacture and
deploument, crew training to battle readiness, and so on.
Like Lea, Mitchell;s theories grew out of mastery of detailed data;
he understood the significance of critical systems driving
mechanisms, and he was interdisciplinary. Also like Lea, he was
completely independent and uninfluenced by "groupthink". Lea
and Mitchell illustrate the great danger when military departments
of nations becomes locked into an outmoded worldview, can not
progress, and enter a war prepared for wars of several decades in
the past. Given this, the United States experiences of 2001, of
2004 and 2005 have been very thought-provoking. The U.S. military
was simply not prepared to deal with an "insurgency" of the type
they now face daily. In particular, no thought had been given to
developing electronic systems for detecting remote controlled
bombs or "suicide bombers". Many U. S,. military vehicles were
lightly armored death traps.
III. Ivan Bloch: The Quantitative Military Historian
Bloch (In 1889) was one of only a very few people who had any idea
what world War I would be like. (Ferro, 1973). He understood that
major wars in the future, if anyone was crazy enough to start one,
would involve stalemates lasting for years between two groups of
nations with approximately equal resources, that casualties would
be extremely high because of great advances in the effectiveness of
rifles and artillery of which few people were aware, and that major
battles could kill 88 or more per cent of all the officers involved, and
73 per cent of the enlisted men,.
He knew that the economic consequences of caring for the
wounded and of damage to nations would be catastrophic. As of
1899, the nest rifles and bullets could shatter bone at 3500 meters,
and a single bullet could pass through six men. the quantitative
data in his book about future wars is astonishing.
He began life as a poor Polish boy, a peddler in the streets of
Warsaw. He got enough money to go to Berlin for three years,
where he studied with French and English totors. He developed a
fortune as a banker, and became famous as a sociologist and
economist, He wrote exhaustive books in many volumes on
Russian railways, finance, and local government. He became the
leading banker of Poland, and the president of important railway
systems.
He began to see that the "war system" of Europe was a menace to
all countries He then wrote a massive six-volume treatise on the
future of war explaining why any future war would have a character
predicted by essentially no one, and would be almost totally
destructive to winners and losers alike. He used technical data on
the operating characteristics of weapons, and economic analysis of
the impacts of war on nations to prove that victory in an traditional
military sense would be impossible. Edwin D. Mead said in the
introduction to the English translation, "Indeed, I think it is not too
much to say that Ivan Bloch was the most thorough and important
student of the question of War in all its details and upon its many
sides who has ever lived,...,." Marc Ferro, writing in 1969, thought
that Bloch was one of only three people who had any idea what
World War I would be like, in advance of the fact.
Bloch had a "method". ".....you have a saying that it is often the
outsider that sees most...........in order to form a correct idea as to
the changes that have taken place in the mechanism of war, it is
quite conceivable that the bystander who is not engaged in the
actual carrying out of the evolution now in progress may be better
able to see the drift and tendency of things than those who are
busily engaged in the actual detail of the operation."
"I have taken all imaginable pains to master the literature of
warfare, especially the most recent treatises upon military
operations and the handling of armies and fleets, which have been
published by the leading military authorities in the modern world".
He then checked his conclusions in detailed conversations with
experts,
His theories grew out of data, masses of it, not ideology or
deduction, and he certainly understood the critical role of key
system driving mechanisms, such as the firepower of weapons.
His central thesis was that the improvements in rifles, and the
efficiency of artillery "by themselves are sufficiently serious to
justify grave doubt as to whether or not we have reached a stage
when the mechanism of slaughter has been so perfected as to
render a decisive battle practically impossible; but these two
elements are only two. They are accompanied by others which are
still more formidable to those who persist in contemplating war as
a practical possibility". Thus he had identified the killing efficiency
of the most commonly used weapons as the fundamental system
driver determining the outcome of wars. In every phenomenon or
process, such drivers can be discovered.,
Block gives an example of the role of antipathies (mentioned by
Homer Lea). A committee of economists was appointed in France
"for the purpose of ascertaining how the social organism would
continue to function in time of war, how from day to day their bread
would be given to the French people. But not sooner had he begun
his investigation than a strong objection was raised by the military
authorities, and out of deference to their protests the inquiry was
indefinitely suspended. Hence we are going forward blindfold..."
Bloch, like other premier forecasters, understood the importance of
considering linkages between different parts of a system of cause-
to-effect pathways. "Thus we find that military questions are bound
up with questions of economy. But military writers look on the
future war only from the point of view of attaining certain objects by
destroying the armies of the enemy; the economic and social
consequences of war, if they are considered at all, are considered
only as secondary objects."
Bloch's writings contain many examples of these linkages. What
happens to a military alliance if one ally to pull out because of
inadequate resources to pay for a war?
______________________________________________________
| The proportion of officers killed in battles is much higher than |
| the proportion of enlisted men killed. Officers require a certain |
| background, experience and training. The proportion of the |
| population suitable to be trained as officers varies significantly |
| between countries. What happens if a country with a lower level |
| of industrial organization (Russia at that time) and hence a lower |
| proportion of the population suitable to be officers suffers mass |
| casualties amongst its officers? |
| Who replaces them? Note the interdisciplinary style of |
| reasoning: the effectiveness of a nation at war fighting is being |
| traced back to social structure and organization. |
______________________________________________________
Some countries are self-sufficient in food and raw materials;
others are not. Bloch collected statistics of that type: for exanple,
a very high proportion of the wheat, barley and rye used in England
was imported. Russia was short of salt. He also explored year-to-
year variability of harvests. In general, countries are motivated to
initiate wars if they are short of food or other resources, and their
intended target has an overabundance of food or energy.
Also, the domestic availability of young men is critical in initiating
war. To illustrate the significance of such inquiry, the United States
in 2005-6 is developing a new style of warfare intended to use high
technology weapons to compensate for limited manpower, given
the number of our potential enemies. The hidden implicit
assumption underlying this seemingly brilliant strategy is its's
critical dependence on massive availability of energy to
manufacture, deploy and operate the new weapons systems.
Dependence on foreign, often unfriendly nations for the necessary
energy is our "Achilles Heel.".
Bloch collected a great deal of data on the effectiveness of different
kinds of rifles and artillery. At that time, for example, a Mauser rifle
was 1/5 as effective at 1870 yards as at 27.5 yards. That meant that
such a high proportion of all bullets fired would still have some
effectiveness at a great distance that there would be a 1000-yard
band of land between armies in which the probability of survival
would be very low. This, in effect, guaranteed stalemated trench
warfare with unimaginable loss of life persisting for years, with
little forward motion on either side. A statemate with massive loss
of life on all sides was exactly what happened from 1914-18.
Further, several of the countries never really recovered from the
economic losses. France? England? Russia? Were they ever the
same again?
IV. H. G. Wells:
Wells was the most prolific, influential, and most intellectually wide-
ranging forecaster who ever lived, Indeed, he was one of the most'
important people who ever lived, apart from heads of state, or
religious movements, inventors, or scientific pioneers. One
measure of the influence of a human is the number of books by and
about them in the library system of the University of California (all
nine campuses). This is one of the most enormous collections of
books there is. The scores for three well-known people are:
Adolf Hitler 2070
H. G. Wells 1071
Winston Churchill 965.
His significance to global society was that he explained the
implications of science, and an age of science to a vast audience,
in language that was simple, direct, and understandable, As he put it,
"Thep eculiar strength and the peculiar weakness of my mind are
one and the same quantity. Put favourably, mine is a very direct
mind; put unfavorably, it is unsubtle, I am impatient of
complicating details and conventional misstatements because I am
afraid of them........I hammer at my main ideas, and this is an
offence to delicate-minded people. If a door is not open, I say it is
shut, and I am impatient with the suggestion of worldly wisdom that
it may be possible to wangle a way round.". (Wells, 1939).
He was an enormous influence on worldwide thought and on
politics during the period 1900 to 1946. Near the end of his life, he
held private meetings with both Roosevelt and Stalin to seek better
relations between the two systems they headed. He was an
important advocate of the United Nations. From our study of his
writings, we conclude he was underappreciated.
He was born "in a rather unprosperous home", as he put it. He was
the son of two servants, who later became small shopkeepers.
However, he was very curious from a very early age, and was able
to complete a university degree, during which time he was exposed
to some of the leading thinkers of his day. Before long, he was
making enough money from his writing so he was able to support
himself without holding any other employment. At no time in his
life was he a member of the staff in any large (or small) institution.
Thus he was free to be a totally independent thinker.
He thought the whole point of his life was to identify the
fundamental systems drivers regulating historical forces, and to
use this understanding to forecast the future, after which he tried to
explain his findings in the simplest manner possible, so that the
largest possible number of people could understand him. In his
language, "Sociology-or, to give it a recent and better name, human
ecology - has become a real science, analyzing operating causes
and forecasting events" (Wells, 1939). he was clearly involved in a
constant search for these fundamental systems drivers, in an
enormous range of types of phenomena.
At the level of all mankind on the entire planet, he identified three
overridingly important forces pushing us into the future: (Wells,
1939, 1940).
1. evil patriotic and religious traditions that produced ill will
between different groups of peoplem and sowed the seeds of future
conflict (The Motive for Conflict) "There is no creed, no way of
living left in the world at all, that really meets the needs of the time.
When we come to look at them coolly and dispassionately, all the
main religious, patriotic, moral and customary systems
..........appear to be in a state of jostling and mutually destructive
movement,,,To the very last moment, men and women cling to the
ways to which they have grown accustomed.....when at last they
realize the inevitability and universality of disaster, most of them
have become too frantic to entertain the bare possibility of one
supreme engineering effort that might yet intercept those seeping
waters that have released this whole mountainside of destruction"
2. horribly magnified weapons, (The Means for Magnifying the
destructiveness of conflict) In 1940, Wells said this: "There is
more power expended in a modern city like Birmingham in a day
than we needed to keep the whole of Elizabethan England going for
a year....Man is able now to produce or destroy on a scale beyond
comparison greater than he could before this storm of invention
began......The new power organizations are destroying the forests
of the world at headlong speed, ploughing great grazing areas into
deserts, exhausting mineral resources,.......and devastating the
planet".
3. the relative excess of unemployed young men. (The agents
of conflict) It is virtually certain that he understood that the
proportion of any population consisting of unemployed young men
would be greater, the greater the population growth rate. Thus the
sheer awfulness of government or gang violence in any society is
greatest where there has recently been greatest population growth
rates: Iran, Iraq, Rwanda, Somalia, Zaire, mexico. "The
"mob" of the twentieth century is quite different than the almost
animal "mob" of the eighteenth century. It is a restless sea of
dissatisfied young people, of young women who no longer bear
children, and young men who can find no outlet for their natural
urgencies and ambitions, young people quite ready to :make
trouble" as soon as they are shown how." :Every sort of energetic
male human being is a potential criminal, if nothing else is found to
occupy and interest him. These expanding human societies in the
past were needing less and less energy per head to be sure of their
food supply and security. Something had to be done to and for
these young men, and the easiest way of keeping them out of
mischief, keeping them disciplined in fact and the numbers of them
down, was war. Primitive war was a necessity forced upon the
human community by biological success through the production of
a surplus of young males. ......You can write human history in a
variety of ways, but one way of writing it would be to consider how,
age after age, humanity has met the problem of What to do without
sons. there was war and what was generally associated with war,
conquest and colonization.
It is gripping to compare Well's predictions with a
comprehensive on the ground assessment in the book on global
anarchy by Robert Kaplan, the Ends of the Earth, A Journey at the
Dawn of the 21st Century, written over a half century after Wells
died. Indeed, many nations now appear like the final scenes in
Wells' apocalyptic vision of his worst case scenario: Afghanistan,
Rwanda, Somalia, Ethiopia. This passage, from The Salvaging of
Civilization (1921) summarizes his apocalyptic vision. "This new
phase of disorder, conflict, and social unraveling upon which we
have entered, this phase of decline due to the enhanced and
increasing powers for waste and destruction in mankind, is bound
therefore, to continue so long as the divisions based upon ancient
ideas of conflict remains; and if for a time decadence seems to
be arrested, it will only be to accumulate under the influence of
those ideas a fresh war storm sufficiently destructive and
disorganizing to restore their decadent process".
In additon to 34 novels, many of which were forecasts in disguise,
Wells wrote The Outline of History (purchased by one out of every
thousand living people at the time of publication), a treatise on
biology, another on economics, books on religion, a variety of other
subjects, and many books on the future: Including Anticipations,
The Outlook for Homo Sapiens, and The Fate of man.
Wells (in 1902) said that the enormous and elaborate system of
international railroads "...is really only a vast system of trains of
horse-wagons and coaches drawn along rails by pumping engines
upon wheels. Is that, in spite of its present extension likely to
remain the predominant method of land locomotion even for so
short a period as the next one hundred years?". He had noticed
that there was a great deal of technical innovation underway to
develop a light, powerful engine. He saw that the future would
involve a shift from trains to "privately owned motor carriages, and
motor trucks".
Further, Wells saw how everything in society connected to
everything else., At this time, human populations were
concentrated in big cities because of the railroads. However,
"...the general distribution of population in a country must always
be directly dependent on transport facilities", and therefore,m in the
future "The multiplication of types of traction will lead to
suburbanization".
Like Bloch, Wells saw a steady progress in the range and
effectiveness of rifles and artillery, and realized that future wars
would be industral contests. A winning state will have "organized
every element in its being:. Wells was another one of the only
three people whom Marc Ferro thought knew in advance what
World War I would be like.
Wells expected the airplane would be developed, probably before
1930.
Wells was more explicit about the "method" he used than any other
forecaster. his method was based on five key ideas.
(1) You can not understand or predict complex society systems if
your conceptual model is based on unexamined first principles,
assumptions or premises. ".........it is one of the queer common
weaknesses of the human mind to be uncritical of primary
assumptions and to smother up any inquiry into their soundness in
secondary elaboration, in technicalities and conceptual formalities.
Most of our systems of belief rest upon rotten foundations, and
generally those foundations are made sacred to preserve them from
attack. They become dogmas in a sort of holy of holies. It is
shockingly uncivil to say "But that is nonsense"."
(2) Cycles are a jey characteristic of human systems. One of the
explanations is that humans do not remember the lessons from
past experiences, so simply repeat them, over and over, People
who learn lessons necessary for personal and societal survival,
under horrible circumstances die off, and the next generation
doesn't value history, so is condemned to repeat the experience.
Armaments "were part of the display side of life and would never
get to actual destruction and killing.............In 1914 hardly anyone i
Europe or america below the age of fifty had seen anything of war
in hsi own country." this phenomenon of societies collectively
forgetting the lessons of history is an important component of the
explanation for long time lags in societal systems causal
mechanisms. No one would knowingly set up the preconditions for
a world war or a depression just after the last one. Further, the
ratio of the number of grandparents to grandchildren has typically
been too low to allow for a great deal of information transfer across
two generations. Grandchildren typically aren't old enough before
grandparents die to know the need to ask certain critically
important questions, such as :What was the real reason why
World War I started, which country started it, why, and what were
you told about it at the time?"
Wells rephrased this idea in World Brain (1938): "It is our
common quality to be wise after the event and still quite
unprepared for the next change ahead, It is an almost universal
human failing to believe that now we know everything, that nothing
more than we know can be known about human relations, and that
in our limitless wisdom we can fix up our descendents for
evermore, by constitutions, treaties, boundaries and leagues:. the
parallel of this to Galbraith's comment about not knowing what we
don't know is striking.
(3) Wells constantly wrote abut the need for grasping the
significance of causal connections between different components
of systems, and between systems and their environments. "I dislike
isolated events and disconnected details. I really hate statements,
views, prejudices and beliefs that jump at you suddenly out of
midair. I like my world as coherent and consistent as
possible". He wrote this of the people who initiated the League of
Nations: "Although they have a very considerable amount of
knowledge, uncoordinated bits of quite good knowledge, some
about this period and some about that, but they had no common
understanding whatever of the processes in which they were
obliged to mingle and interfere.. Possibly all the knowledge
....needed to establish a wise and stable settlement of the world's
affairs in 1919 existed in bits and fragments, here and there, but
practically nothing had been assembled, practically nothing had
been thought out, practically nothing had been done to draw that
knowledge and these ideas together into a comprehensive
conception of the world". ".,..,our world cannot struggle out of its
present confusions and insufficiencies without a vigorous re-
organization of its knowledge, thought and will. Its universities,
schools, books.....seem absurdly inadequate for the task of
informing and holding together the mind of our modern world
community". In The Fate of Man we find "The young university
philosopher, historian or economist is in many cases not so much
biologically ignorant as biology-proofed. It is because of such
mental gabs and barriers that it is necessary to recapitulate...
certain facts which, although matters of general knowledge......"
are effectively unknown in view of their practical impact. this
contrast of established knowledge and its effective application is a
very remarkable one. Men can know a thing and yet know it quite
ineffectively if it contradicts the general habits and traditions in
which they live". In the last 10 years of his life, Wells was
constantly travelling, giving lectures and talking to political leaders
about new approaches and institutions to deal with
this problem.
(4) Wells also wrote repeatedly about how leaders did not
understand the systems they were supposedly leading, . "...these
politicians, these statesmen, these directive people who are in
authority over us, know scarcely anything about the business they
have in hand. Nobody knows very much, but the important thing to
realize is that they do not even know what is to be known. They
arrange so and so, and so and so must ensue, and they cannot or
will not see that so and so must ensue". In other words, in dealing
with complex societal systems, there is no widespread knowledge
of the effect that will follow inexorably from a particular policy
decision. therefore there is compelling reason to reconsider the
conventional wisdom, even if it brings one into conflict with
authority figures. it is mind-boggling how universally appropriate
this concept is in 2009, when so many people are supposedly well-
educated and well-informed. In fact, much of the supposed
"information" in which we are drowned is simply propaganda,
marketing, and a deliverate attempt at underhanded manipulation
of our subconscious minds.
(5) Wells was sensitive to the distinction between stocks and
flows, a key idea of this book. In the New World Order (1940), he
wrote about how mankind appeared to be much wealthier than in
1918. "But there is a sound reason for supposing that a large part of
this increased productivity is really and swifter and more thorough
exploitation of irreplaceable capital, It is a process that cannot go
on indefinitely. It rises to a maximum and then the feast is over,
Natural resources are being destroyed at a great rate, and the
increased output goes into war munitions whose purpose is
destruction, and into sterile indulgences no better than waste.
Table 4.2 is a tabular depiction of the "feast and subsequent
famine: metaphor. thus by 1939, Wells had in mind the same
overview of civilization that M. King Hubbert quantified about 17
years later, and that became widely known amongst geologists and
sociologists as "The Hubbert Pimple."
Wells was very concerned about issues of scale, an idea that has
only been rediscovered by ecologists in the last few years. In 1921,
he wrote this, "A neglect of the importance of scale is one of the
gravest faults of contemporary education". To illustrate what he
meant by "scale", previously, if a civilization collapsed totally (the
Mayans, Palmyra), it was not threatening to all mankind, because it
would be replaced by one or more civilizations elsewhere.
However, once civilization becomes a global phenomenon, if it
collapses, there is no "elsewhere".
Wells (in 1921) saw the resistance of change of traditional
institutions as being a major threat to the common good. "the dull
and the dishonest in high places will suppress these greater ideas
when they can, and ignore when they dare not suppress. It seems
too much to hope for that there should be any willingness on the
part of any established authority to admit the obsolescence.........It
is the blank refusal to accept the idea of an orderly evolution
towards new things that gives a revolutionary quality to every
constructive proposal."
Three remarkably similar passages appear near the end of a very
important 1995 book, Barriers and Bridges to the Renewal of
Ecosystems and Institutions (Gunderson et, al), representing the
collaborative effort of a large international network of scholars,
analyzing case studies illustrating the way institutions deal with
crisis. Near the end of the book, in their summary, they state this,
regarding complex systems:
".....a number of insights appeared during our analysis, One
insight was the extreme nature of the recalcitrance or inertia of
institutions, and the almost pathological inability to renew or
restructure."
".....at times behavior is determined by.....the pioneers and
opportunists..... they set the conditions for control to shift to.....the
effective competitors and consolidators of position and power. As
a result, resilience is reduced, controls are intensified, and the
system becomes an accident waiting to happen".
The authors see "fundamental similarity between adaptive
ecological and adaptive human systems....." However, they believe
the human systems have much greater powers for both rigidity and
novelty. they offer a solution, with which we agree. In institutions,
"the locus and speed of the adaptive cycle can be changed by
conscious design so that renewal of norms, values and other traits
occurs internally while maintaining much of the overall
organizational structure". this is reminiscent of the Planning
Branch proposed by Rexford tugwell in his elavorate model for a
new United States constitution.
V. M. King Hubbert: The Scientist as Economist
Hubbert was the only one of our five premier forecasters whose
ability can be explained in part gy the power of his training, in
addition to his energy, curiosity, and brilliance. He was trained at
the University of Chicago in mathematics, physics, geology and
geophysics and finished with a ph. D. His life's work falls into
two different parts. In his early years, he did research on economics
(around 1933) for the Tenocracy movement, an organization
proposing a new approach to management of the economy, based
on energy, not money. Amongst many other, he used
analysis of data to demonstrate that under the price system,
production and employment could not be maintained. It would
always be more profitable to gradually decrease the number of
people used to produce one unit of manufactured or service output.
Doesn't that sound like "downsizing" or "restructuring"?.
His research from that period shows the same concern with
quantitative detail, and with theory based on data, not deduction,
that we find in his later incarnation as a world-class expert on
global energy supplies working for the oil industry, universities, or
the National Academy of Sciences-National Research Council.
While Hubbert's name is not well known to the public, he had a
large impact on the environmental movement worldwide in the late
1950's and early 1970's, by assembling convincing evidence and
analysis showing that world energy resources were not only finite,
but would run out in the rather near future. He provided a younger
generation of environmental and energy systens analysts with
data, techniques, and an overview of the global situation available
from no one else alive at that time. GHe became of dean of world
energy supply forecasters in the 1950"s and 1960's, by using a
combination of simply theory, and detailed statistics to project the
history of the coal, oil and natural gas production cycles for the
United States and the world.
He based his work on a handful of simple, yet powerful ideas. The
complete historical life cycle of production for any type of fossil
fuel in any geographical region must start at zero, grow
continuously for a period, reach a peak,m then decline back to zero.
He assumed that the curve just described would be symmetrical.
the area under that curve (for example, billions of barrels
multiplied by years) must represent the ultimate cumulative
production of that fossil resource in that region, so that the curve
had to be consistent with estimates from geological or other data.
As of March 1956, after reviewing the geological literature and consulting
with many experts, he concluded that the ultimate amount of oil
obtained from the 48 contiguous states and the outer continental
shelf would be between 150 and 200 billion barrels. From that
estimate he concluded that the year of peak production would be
around 1966 to 1971. (It was 1970-).
His approach is illustrated using recent data as in Table 4.2. A
simple equation is fitted to the data on oil production in the United
States in this century. We can now use the equation represented by
the black dots to project ahead., We see that the complete history
of crude oil exploitation in the United States will last only
two centuries: from 1850 to 2040. Indeed, it will be 180 years or less,
because use of United States domestic crude oil was trivial prior to
1860, and will be inconsequential by 2040, or before. People who
reject this notion will need to explain to themselves (and others)
why the equation projecting that scenario fits the data so well prior
to 1996.
Hubbert was unlike many experts who were more preoccupied with
a cornucopian view of the human situation than realism.
Hubbert became famous amongst environmental and energy
experts for figures based on data as in Table 4.2. These became known
as "the Hubbert pimple". While "pimple" seems a strange word to
honor the memory of a great man, the word is a metaphor for a
powerful idea. Looked at from a long historical perspective in
2100, 2200, or the year 20,000. the crude oil period from 1860 to
"2040 will appear as an insignificant, and aberrant "blip" in the long
sweep of human affairs. It will not be thought of as anything noble
or wonderful, but as a period of mindless and frantic wasteful
consumption of a great planetary resource, to support amongst
other things, giant traffic jams in which one person per vehicle
burned up crude oil idling their motors while vast throngs were
completely immobilized.
Petroleum geologists had a hard time accepting his overview, so
he developed another method of prediction to give a cross check
onhis findings. He pointed out that oil reserves at the end of year
Y must be equal to reserves at the end of Y-1, plus discoveries
during Y, less production of oil during Y, since production and
reserve figures were available, he could compute discoveries by
rearranging that equation. He found out that a curve of oil
discoveries is like the corresponding curve for production shifted
backwards in time by 10.5 years. that is, there is a lag of 10.5
years from the time oil is discovered to the time it is removed from
the ground and refined. the rate of discovery peaked around 1957
in the United States, so he knew the rate of production would peak
around 1968. It peaked in 1970. This relation between discoveries
and production is another way of predicting production.
To further bolster his argument that the world would soon run out
of petroleum, he complied statistics on the amount of oil
discovered per foot of exploratory drilling: it had been declining
since 1935. This supports the idea that oil is becoming more
difficult to find, which means that it is becoming more scarce.
He also found that the ultimate recoverable total amount of oil for
the entire world is only between 1350 and 2100 billion barrels, and
that global oil production would peak around 1990-2000. In fact, the
best contemporary estimate for ultimate recoverable oil from this
planet is 1750 billion barrels (C. J. Campbell). world crude oil
production per person in the global population peaked around
2007.
VI. What is "The Method"?
Anyone picking up a book by one of these five prescient
forecasters woiuld find it startlingly different in character than
almost anything else they had ever seen. They employ a common
method to predict the future, which has several unusual
characteristics ?Here are a few of the most important,
the style of thought,
they were all convinced that realistic forecasts should be derived
using conceptual models bvased on an exhaustive study of relevant
datam not from deduction or ideology, In the language of learning
theory, they were all concrete random thinkers, not abstract
sequential thinker (de Bono, 1977). They all realized the
importance of fundamental social system driving mechanisms in
shaping subsequent events.
---------------------------------------------------------------------
| They were all concerned with linkages: with what we now |
| call a "interdisciplinary, multidisciplinary" approach to solving |
| problems. They followed causal pathways across the artificial |
| mental boundaries that separate professions, academic |
| disciplines, or subunits of institutions. |
--------------------------------------------------------------------
Thus the tintanic conceptual model for forecasting should include
causal connections from the engineering system (the ship) to the
logistics of keeping watrch, steering, and lifeboat procedures and
drills to the "environment: of the system: the "ice lane" south from
Greenland around Newfoundland and further south, which poses
peak danger about April. they noticed side effects and effects,
They pursued causal pathways backward in the causal sequence
beyond proximate causes to ultimate causes, and forward in the
causal sequence beyond proximate effects to ultimate effects.
they were very objective all of then. they didn't buy into
unrealistic optimism. (Our nation, style of warfare, or favorite
weapons systems will always win over any opponent,m we will never
run out of critical resources, and we don't need to be worried
about prospective nasty surprises). they were seeing the truth
not results that would make them happy (and carefree and
blindfolded). they were not trying to please any client, exxcept all
of humanity.
Bloch and Wells were financially independent, Mitchell came from
a wealthy and prominent family, and Hubbert and Lea were
tenaciously committed to the objective search for truth without
regard to who employed then at the moment.
________________________________________________
| All of them had a very large perspective in time and space. |
| They learned from history. From from being oriented to |
| the short term, they understood the significance of |
| historical trends. |
________________________________________________
At a time when everyone thought the next war would be like the last
war, Bloch, Lea, Mitchell and Wells saw the significance of trends
in the evolution of weapons systems. They were personally free of
their societies' prevailing current and local worldview. (Battleships
are invincible, air forces are irrelevant to armies and navies).
To indicate how unusual Bloch and Wells were at the time,
literature by many forecasters about a forthcoming major war
became common from 1980 to 1914. While all such works
precisely described the popular view of what battles would be like,
the historical record of WWI had virtually no connection with the
popular forecasts. Only three men, of whom two were Bloch and
Wells, appreciated that war would be "industrialized, with millions
of deaths and entire nations mobilized". (Marc Ferro). All of the
prescient forecasters were skilled at distinguishing phenomena and
processes important in the short term from those important in the
long term, no mean feat, as we shall see.
The many forecasters who fail more often than they succeed are
usually only extrapolating surprise-free projections from recent
trends. In contrast, the prescient forecasters approached the future
as being governed by discontinuities, or surprises, not surprise
free trends. All of them understood the critically important
significance of a small number of fundamental system driving
mechanisms and variables, Modern systems engineers call these
:state variables": the small number of variables which can be
predicted from their own past values, and which collectively
accoiunt for almost all of the variation in society in time and space.
All these five men were uncanny selectors of critically important
information from the masses of data that surrounded them, and
were masters of detailed, quantitative and up-to-date information on
the subjects of their concern.
____________________________________________________
|They were masters at correctly identifying the key systems driving |
|mechanisms that would determine the nature of society in the |
|future. that is, they all knew that the most important question to |
|ask first was not, "What will the future be like?", but "What will be |
|the most critically important societal driving mechanisms shaping |
|the future?". |
|___________________________________________________|
That is a key idea in this book. It is the most important single
component of "the method". If you can predict the fundamental
systems drivers, you can compute the future of all other variables
from them. In the language of systems engineeringm if you can
identify and predict the state variables (the necessary and sufficient
set of variables to specify precisely the state of the system), you
can compute all the state-dependent variables from them.
They were all explicit about this notion that an understanding of
causal mechanisms is crucial. Wells: T.....the imagination, unless it
is strengthened by a very sound training in the laws of causation,
wanders like a lost child in the blankness of things to come and
returns empty". Prophecy must be based on analytic science,
"....the essential thing in the scientific process is not the collection
of facts, but the analysis of facts....It is analysis that has given us
all ordered knowledge, and... the aim and the test and the
justification of the scientific process is not a marketable conjuring
trick, but prophecy. Until a scientific theory yields confident
forecasts you know it ier undound and tentative; it is mere
theorizing, as evanescent as art talk or the phantoms that
politicians talk about".
-------------------------------------------------------------------
|All of these men were trying to understand phenomena and |
|processes, rather than trying to work productively within any |
|single academic discipline or profession. They were forerunners of|
|the interdisciplinary, multidisciplinary approach. All were seeking |
|causal connections between phenomena and processes normally |
|dealt with by discrete academic disciplines or professions. This |
|resulted in some brilliant forecasts, of which the following are only |
|a limited sample. |
-------------------------------------------------------------------
* Wells saw the connection between choice of transportation mode
and the spatial layout of cities and nations. therefore, he realized
that the compact, highh-density cities of 1905, with land use and real
estate patterns determined by the railroads, would switch to the low
density urban sprawl we have now, under theinfluence of the
automobile.
* Bloch realized that because the effective range of weapons had
been increased enormously by 1899, there would be a killing field
between armies of at least 1000 yards within which any advance
would lead to an extremely high casualty rate. therefore, this
would lead to stalemate and trench warfare lasting for years.
* Home Lea saw the connection between trends in supply relative to
demand for resources in a nation and the military aggressiveness
of that nation, and how vulnerability to attack by a resource-poor
nation would be increased by naivete about the need for military
preparedness. therefore, he reasoned, it was highly likely that the
politically and militarily sophisticated, and resource-poor Japan
would attack the resource-abundant, and politically and militarily
naive United States.
The prescient forecasters were all sophisiticated about how
processes change through time. they understood cumulative
effects, where slow, almost imperceptible change ultimately
crosses a threshold that appears in the historical record as a
dramatic change (e.g. attack on another nation). they understood
about time lags: the cause of an event can often be far in the past.
Hubbert, for example, understood that on average petroleum
production in the United States lagged petroleum discovery by
about ten years, so the curve for discovery against time was a
predictor of the corresponding curve for production.
Most thinkers about how the world works believe in a "flows-only"
worldview. That is, society is like a giant system of pipes with
valves. If you want more of something you turn a valve on a pipe,
as with the hot water faucet in a bathtub. In society, the valve
setting would be the money supply or the interest rate. there are
no limits on what you can get. In effect, central banks decide what
you can get.
___________________________________________________
|In contrast, these prescient forecasters undestood that accurate |
|description of the world required a "flows and storages: mental |
|model in which we need tanks of stored fluid or empty tanks to be|
|filled up, in addition to the pipes and valves. Unsold inventories of|
|houses, apartments, or office buildings, or fossil fuel still in the |
|ground are examples of storage. |
__________________________________________________
more unusual forms of storage are frequently identified by our
prescient forecasters. To illustrate, Bloch understood that Czarist
Russia was not a highly organized, industrial society, so there
would be a relatively small number of men suitable to be officers in
a future industrial-type war with masses of people, transit and
supplies to be managed. Fiven that casualty rates in war were
higher for officers than enlisted men, he saw a danger to Russia in
that it might deplete the storage of suitable to be officers.
[NOTE by poster, he is not saying that more officers than
enlisted men get killed, but that the percentage of officers that
die out of all the officers at war, is higher than the percentage
of enlisted men who die out of all enlisted men at war,
because there are fewer officers to start with.]
VII. The role of institutions in forecast realism.
Many readers willhave noticed that unrealistic forecasts seem to
emanate from powerful people in large institutions, whereas
realistic forecasts seem to originate from private individuals, or
people who resist the internal forces and traditions of the
institutions where they are employed (Mitchell). What is it about
institutions that colors their forecasts?
All institutions serve some client, or consortium of clients. A
government department of fisheries serves the fishing industry, not
the public. A department of defense, or NASA has strong ties to the
corporations that make their hardware. An institution is not in the
business of displeasing its clients, or telling them they can not do
something they want to do. there are tremendoux pressures
within any institution to avoid saying anything that would cause
discomfort to the institution either directly, or indirectly, by
displeasing the clients (and source of political and economic power
for the institution).
A primary goal of institutions is the preservation and enhancement
of their political and economic power, not the search for truth. It
should come as no surprise, therefore, that important predictions
or statements about the future coming from institutions come from
people of great power within an institution or system of institutions,
not from an expert on the subject under discussion. Thus Richard
Nixon speaks about the future energy independence of the United
States, George Marshall speaks about the conquest of infectious
diseases. It is unlikely that Nixon had any knowledge of fossil fuel
resources, or that Marshall had any knowledge of the classical
findings and theories of epidemiology.
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