It feels like we are living through history at the moment.
I am not just referring to the collapse of US power in Afghanistan, although that obviously contributes to this feeling.
Nor am I just referencing Covid, although the world's inability to beat a disease when it had been assumed for lifetimes that nature had been tamed is clearly an issue.
Humankind's current denial of the impact of climate change is also a factor. That is staggering, and maybe the biggest historic failure we are moving through.
But there is something else as well. And that is the feeling I have that we have just made life to complicated, and that we cannot keep up with it now. That possibility seems like an epoch changing moment as well.
The first three of these events are easy to spot. I will not say more about them. I fully accept that the last point I am making is based on nothing more than a hunch. Well, that and the fact that the world's carmakers cannot get enough chips to make their products. Toyota is cutting production by 40% because of this chip crisis. VW is also making cuts. The situation is ongoing, and it's not wholly clear it is simply Covid related now.
It is obviously possible to claim that this issue is merely logistical. And at some levels that is obviously true. But I am not quite convinced of that. There has been an assumption that the continued computerisation of the world is possible, and inevitable. The assumption that computing power could increase exponentially and be applied to almost any task has been implicit in most product development logic for decades. But now it's hit an obstacle. The most basic product required to fulfil that assumption is not available. The chips are literally down.
This matters for all sorts of reasons. In economies built around meeting consumer demand inability to meet it is a major failing. It disrupts employment, pricing, corporate fortunes, and even the ability of companies to survive. Inflation is in part being driven by demand for second hand cars as new ones are not available, so this has macro as well as micro implications. And it is not clear that this problem is necessarily soluble.
I am not suggesting that chip production might not increase again. Maybe it will. Instead what seems to be possible is that so complex are supply lines that their disruption in the face of other threats, like conflict, disease and climate change, is something that appears to be considerably more likely now.
As evidence I noted a couple of weeks ago that at the height of the UK soft fruit season plums were not readily available in supermarkets. Now the supply issue appears to be chicken. It is out of stock. Of course Brexit has exacerbated this in the UK, but that supply chains are now so vulnerable to even minor disruptions is my point. We have a world economy dependent on everything functioning as it is assumed it should.
My suggestion - and I stress it is purely speculative - is that this moment is historic because it is the time when supply chains might have stoped functioning as they should. And that is for one common reason. It is that they are too complex.
We do not need the number of chips found in the modern car fir it to function, for example. It is entirely possible to open a car window mechanically, but that is almost unknown now. That example is itself simple, but also symbolic of the point that I am making. Maybe we have just made the world too unnecessarily complicated, especially where complication is not required. Maybe that is why there aren't enough chips in the world. And maybe that is why we aren't prepared for many of the risks that we now face.
I simply offer it is as thought. Maybe there is merit in keeping it simple, after all.
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I remember when power windows in cars first became a thing, someone asking “what is the problem for which this is a solution?”.
It’s a question that needs asking more often (not just about power windows).
🙂
I propose that the reason for the problem is that globalisation is defined by stripping “redundancy” out of all business systems. Redundancy means stripping substantial functions out of the system wherever possible, and even strip redundancy out altogether; redundancy like ‘stocks’ (material or immaterial – it could apply to shares, replaced by a derivative, acting as a form of supposed insurance). Why do we strip out such well tried protections as redundancy offers in something so vast as a Globalised business system? Because ‘redundancy’ ties up capital. Redundancy is insurance, and we are building a Global world that insists that we don’t need insurance; we have Globalisation and nothing can go wrong.
Just in time has reached its limits
John – spot on.
But also, the term ‘redundancy’ – it hardly sells the benefits of the phenomenon you describe so well.
Why do we tend to name such positive attributes so negatively?
In my MBA I studied Knowledge Management and there in the subject matter was the term ‘redundant knowledge’.
What do you think ‘redundant knowledge’ was in this context?
It was the banter and chit-chat that took place between workers that was in addition to the knowledge there were sharing to work together – get things done.
And ‘redundant knowledge’ was acknowledged in academia to be BENEFICIAL to effective team working and knowledge transfer at work.
Yes – banter and chit-chat about holidays, what’s on TV, problems with the hubby or missus or mother in law, jokes and wind ups and celebrating birthdays all help to make people work together better and makes for effective teams apparently!! Would you credit it?
What is so ‘redundant’ about that? Maybe Amazon should ask the same question?
It’s amazing how this Neo-liberal world we live in abuses language – from economics to knowledge management and everything else.
You call it redundancy, I call it resilience. Or indeed robustness, or reliability.
In a world that is filled with risk and uncertainty, we have created too many “optimised” or “efficient” systems that are fragile and can only work when all is well.
What we need, as Taleb would tell us, is systems that react to problems by getting better, not breaking.
Wholeheartedly agree
Andrew
I ‘d call it what you’d call it. Or even ‘being human’.
All I was doing was highlighting what an area of academic study calls it – rather erroneously at that.
Globalisation is showing more of its limitations and for redundancy read resilience. That’s what’s been stripped from the supply chain.
I had thought the transport drivers’ strike back in 2000 would make people think twice about “just in time”. Evidently not. Another area where the cancellation of prudent redundancy provision has been lethal has been hospital beds.
Purging all “redundancy” out of any system in the name of “efficiency” seems to me like a recipe for inevitable disaster. Just as engineers design bridges to support loads well beyond their normal working capacity, so, to some extent, any system should be able to work when the unforeseen occurs. Especially if that system underpins large national or international security. “Efficiency” should not depend on ideal conditions only.
Mr Hall,
An intersting analogy. Unfortunately neoliberalism does not live in the real world; that faced by civil engineers. Neoliberals do not allow exceptional or severe adverse events to impinge on their picture of the world. Everything is expected to operate within narrow, easily predicted (because not actually predicted, but merely assumed) parameters. That is why neoliberalism is unable to respond to crises (financial crash, Covid, Brexit just as examples).
Neoliberalism rthen elies on Governments and States endlessly to bail neoliberalism out from its abject failure to cope with real adversity; and then uses politcs and propaganda to reassert its assertion of authority over the public. Neoliberalism is an intellectual scam.
Well put
Hi Richard,
Did not automakers just make a classic error? They cancelled orders due to lack of demand at a time when demand from home buyers rocketed (both due to the pandemic) and suddenly the chipmakers who had lost business to the carmakers found themselves able to get better margins selling to the home buyer market?
Because homeworking (and somewhat by default) the need for cloud computing is still booming, chipmakers have no incentive to return production to marginally costed components for big buyers?
Carmakers arrogance just got themselves into a problem?
But I agree, supply chains are complex and of course when margins are under constant pressure “safety stock” is always the victim as it is a quick win? Especially if it is that or go bust?
Even if that is true the supply chain is still inadequate to meet demand
And it may be demand that is wrong, is my point
Well, I’ve just finished “Doughnut Economics” and I like the idea that we need to learn to thrive without GDP growth, for sure.
Kate is right
A very interesting twist – we dig all the silicon out of the ground and then we find it has run out.
But maybe this was always going to happen? That we’d mine out the resources for technology and revert back………………….to people!!
I am trying to get new affordable homes built – the cost has gone up considerably because of the supply chain and also caused us huge delays.
It would be nice to see a reckoning of some sort.
@Pilgrim Still can’t believe people inflate balloons with Helium.
But what’s your take on these factory-built prefab houses that are becoming the default for new housing estates?
Mike
I’ve seen these and been in them. It’s what we call MMC – modern methods of construction.
Like everything, it depends on how well they are put together Mike. Even your modern MacDonald’s store is built in a factory, then divided up and carted by lorry, to the new site and craned in, bolted back together and connected up. Its all false brick work and pretend concrete. People who build those are also building houses like that.
Even in the postwar period, what we called ‘non-traditional housing’ – if put together properly with components (reinforced concrete panels) built to spec and not hurried (as many were), and well maintained, they could last well beyond their projected life cycle. We have some where I work installed in 1947 on what is one of our most popular estates – the tenants love them.
The only reason why we are thinking about replacing them is because they now fail the requirements of modern building regs and energy performance and bring down the overall EPC of our stock as a whole. And yes, they are now only just beginning to show signs of end of life performance in terms of the structure. They are now at the end of their lives, and they’ve got to go.
The ones I have checked over are really solid and tight – you can’t even hear the stairs squeek. And in terms of energy efficiency there are no gaps in structural joinery to create drafts and heat leakage – so we are talking about really high performance – much easier to achieve than with brick built stock. What you have is a basic stainless steel frame, filled in with wood and then the panels are attached. All the services go down a central funnel. The walls feel solid, the windows are the same windows you’d put in a traditionally built house, as are the heating systems. The external finish is a coating that looks like brick but is not. I’m not sure how long some of that would last.
The other thing is, they are quick – you just do the ground works, connect the services (drainage, electric) and crane them in, make sure that they are level and commission them. Bingo!
However – the dark side is that is that those who build them are on minimum wage in the factories – even if they are doing skilled work like tiling and parquet flooring and joinery – even plumbing.
Traditional builders are doing much better than that wages wise . MMC might lead to the destruction of well paid skilled work.
Finally, the mortgage industry does not like them, and the estate agents too. Neither do the Estates departments of local authorities who need assets of certain value. Yet housing people like them because you are less likely to lose them to Right to Buy and they are easy to maintain.
Would I live in one? Yes – it would last me I think if brand new my entire life at what ever male life expectancy is these days. But it would still need to be maintained well.
That is the key to MMC and any non-traditional property but also bricks and mortar.
That’s where things go wrong – affording to keep them. In a society of declining wages and income, property will suffer too.
Silicon makes up about 30% of the crust, most of which is silicates of one sort or another. Sure, it needs a huge amount of purification to be suitable for fabrication as semiconductors, but the base resource is essentially sandstone, of which there is not going to be a shortage any time soon.
There is a shortage of capacity at the huge and expensive factories (“fabs”) that produce chips, and an unexpectedly high demand. Not least for graphics cards that are good at running the sort of software used to mine for cryptocurrencies (to answer Nicholas below).
Yes, indeed.
In fact, I’ll add that anectodally, my team has no trouble sourcing silicon wafers. They remain plentiful (or there is at least a large enough stock pile to keep up with demand)
I suspect the issue is that it takes many months to do a full chip fabrication run – even in a top-spec foundry.
Semiconductor work is protracted and prone to going wrong at any point (and you often cannot save anything if it does go wrong). It requires much more time and is more likely to mess up than i believe it is easy to understand, unless you are directly involved.
@Pilgrim. Thanks for your detailed & considered response.
What happened to the idea of ‘fail-safe’?
We depend on electronic cash tills and banking. Computer systems are frequently hacked yet, at the design level, we ignore the likelihood of major fraud or deliberate disruption. An extended loss of mains electricity supplies would/will also be catastrophic – for financial transaction reasons alone. There won’t even be anywhere near enough notes or coins.
So if the security guards can’t be paid (as in Afghanistan) and where hydro-power projects are incomplete and electricity supplies are inadequate … how like present day Afghanistan would/will that be in the UK?
And in the full knowledge that disastrous climate impacts are increasingly frequent, Barclays leads the other UK banks (www.banktrack.org) … in accelerating investment in fossil fuel projects.
Joseph Tainter, in his book, Collapse of Complex Societies makes the point that civilisations become more complex as they solve problems, until they reach a point where they can’t keep up, and at that point start to collapse.
It is a fact that every civilisation before ours has collapsed, and in some ways you could say we have “built back better”, but if you look at the graphs of population growth, industrial production output, wealth, resources consumed, food grown, etc, then it is really stark how everything has ramped up in the last 200 years or so, since the industrial revolution fuelled by coal and then oil. Finite resources with no obvious replacements that can maintain the steep growth curves of these graphs into our children’s future.
I believe we need to seriously work out how to manage de-growth. Is it possible for instance, to persuade us in the West to come down in our expectations, so there is room for the rest of the World to come up and meet us, in a fair and equitable way?
I wish I knew the answer to that
This is mainly in reply to Richard Kirby but generally to all contributors.
I express an opinion below on an difficult to define, global process which you all seem to be discussing directly or indirectly so your disagreements with much what I say are expected.
In previous cultures small elites have eventually caused
ultimate social and economic destruction. Capitalism is today dominated by a relatively small number of multi and trans- nationals, although constrained by regulation in most democracies. Technical knowledge and economic organisation have advanced without equivalent social, global progress. Poverty, ignorance and inequality and now environmental destruction counteract and contradict the enormous, positive, technological advances globally. There are global, national and local interdependences which are neglected in the intense search for short-terminist profitability.
Humanity has the intelligence but not the motivation to adopt long-term, inclusive thinking and behaviour. Instead, complex, social and economic, inclusive progress is dependent on disruptions from below in elite dominated hierarchies. Such disruptions or revolts may be interpreted by Intellectuals, scientists for positive change. But such change needs to be closely aligned with technological change and should happen almost automatically. That requires different social structures which act and interact with the technological changes which in turn act and react to social change.
A long time ago Marx attempted to analyse and interpret this type of process together with many others. But each period has its own social, economic etc structures although the issues of interdependencies, the long and short term, inequality and ignorance have enduring significance.
I don’t believe there are simple answers but I do believe democratic structures with well educated, well informed and politically participating populations have chance of cultural survival in the long term.
Sorry for the generalities. I am trying to express something immensely complex without being too detailed.
Thank you
Yes, you’re onto something. I strongly agree we’re getting too complex and I’d add stupid; the latter is another matter. Who is left to look after these systems when we lose, devalue or fire our technical base.
An example I think about when flying – is cruising at high altitude in a jet. The so-called “Coffin window” region of the flight envelope, a small change in speed can lead to the aircraft stalling and dropping like a stone. As a one-time engineer I like landings and take offs as these should be stable events, you get some warning entering bad flight.
I think of the stability of certain systems as the behaviour at the tip of a triangle, the inside represents stability the outside instability. A small movement (in parameters) may have big consequences. It’s well researched, look up Stability in Complex Systems, but perhaps not appreciated for new systems.
My own wake up call was when I found out our planetary orbits are chaotic i.e. we could, over long time, end up literally anywhere.
And heaven forbid adding in one of our world leading politicians to help direct matters along. Maybe Johnson has something in his chaos rules approach.
What is more – the evidence is that orbits really have changed
Complexity is a common theme, I remember my late father looking at new cars in the 70’s and listing all the things they had that were not needed but just there to go wrong.
That of course and the fact that modern stuff is so complex that its hard to get your head around how it works, or unless you are a technician do anything with it? We have become deskilled
If I may be so bold, may I give Chris Smaje’s book and website a plug for a way forward?
https://smallfarmfuture.org.uk/
Electric wing mirrors. Why?
I have read Chris Smaje’s book.
Fascinating and terrifying at the same time.
Well worth a read but beware!!! There is no going back once you have read it!!!!!!
The one realisation that I got from the book was that, the one thing that has allowed me to have the life of comfort, privileged, adventure, good health, plentiful food, travel that I have enjoyed is……………….. OIL.
A world without it is a really scary place!
I am probably getting old and grumpy, but I increasingly fail to see the benefits of the digital age that tries to encompass every aspect of life. Researchers, having found that being in a forest improves people’s wellbeing, wonder if they can recreate that on a screen with the same outcome. Yes, I can see the benefit of an image being shown to someone who cannot get out, but doesn’t it make you feel utterly constrained and somewhat miserable?
So, I agree with the notion of ‘too much’ tech.
Simplicity is quality.
It is not electric car windows which are the problem ( I understand that is artistic licence ) my 30 year old Volvo has electric windows and transistors in the dashboard. – they malfunction because the solder blows after decades – not hard to repair if someone knows how. It is handy having electric windows to wind down passenger window to talk with someone on the pavement without having to strain a muscle trying to reach over to the handle.
There are now innumerable chips and sensors in cars which are just unnecessary and stop easy fixes.
My Volvo – solid Steel Chassis still great, the engine starts every time and mechanics love to work on it when it occasionally needs it – as there is plenty of room and all parts are easily accessible.- there is not much that fails, yes there is some rust from decades of over salted winter roads, that needs fixing with welding – but most mechanics don’t do that now.
It’s computerised diagnosis and hours to get to a specific screw after removing parts that aren’t broken for most modern cars.
My Volvo 740 GL – which had plenty of Carbon involved in its high quality production and parts without a single chip in it – is now obsoleted !
I will have to pay £15/ day to drive it into the zone soon. Bumps and speed limits mean it never gets out of 2/3 gear – it will be forced to the scrappy and all that CO2 will be wasted! Like Dobbin to the glue factory!
Replaced with some fancy electric plastic bodied buggy built of unnecessary chips that will never last as long and involve much greater Carbon.
We are born, live and die. It is simple – are we to be complicated by ever more invasive chips? Are there space aliens who have slowly been taking over the Earth and geo engineering it? Converting oceans to plastics, air to CO2 and eating up life on Earth with plenty of Chips!
Have a good day.
I was forced into replacing the graphics card (GPU) is my main machine last week. The card being replaced cost £555 in 2019 and was concidered to be a ‘mid-range’ card. It’s replacement, and not top of the line cost a little over £1000. Top range cards are costing several £1000s now. The point is several fold. (I fully accept that I am part of this particular arms race, although when I upgrade my main machine I use old parts elsewhere.)
Are GPU chips in short supply? Are the materials and precious metals required to make these cards in short supply? What happens to cards that have been replaced? These modern cards are large, imagine a carton of 200 Bensons, that’s a lot of material. Consider what is driving the arms race with these cards, are games developers forcing the pace or are hardware manufacturers forcing it?
Perhaps car manufactures are seeing a mixture of all of these factors. Perhaps there is a shortage of chips, perhaps the car manufacturers are reluctant to pay inflated crisis. Perhaps someone with lots of cash has bought as many of these chips as possible and is limiting supply to force up prices. Chipfinger rather than Goldfinger.
None of us seem to want to wait for anything these days, perhaps car manufacturers have got used to clicking on Buy Now rather than planning ahead.
I read something years ago about using the UK’s network of canals to move none perishable goods around. Washing machines for instance. As this meant that retailers would either have to keep stocks in their warehouses or require their customers to wait a while the idea never gained traction.
In short this is an example of an unsustainable growth/use of resources, possibly a failing of free markets and an example of companies running everything as lean as they can.
The point that all societies collapse is not strictly true. When the Roman Empire collapsed the eastern half became Byzantium. It survived by becoming a lot simpler, cash ceased to be used so widely, etc . Interestingly, my son, who works for a multinational computer driven organisation, says that real techies understand the value of paper.
Thinking about it of course, a lot of stuff these days is very complex, but, for example I have a 13 year old Kia Rio that my wife drives, its got 130000 miles on the clock, OK, the Air Con doesn’t work any more but I am sure those of us about Richards age must remember those pretty basic, but (at the time) much newer care we learnt to drive in that by the time we got hold of them were completely knackered.
I started with a mini van. I could repair most of it. I can now do almost nothing on my car
Your comment that your first car was a minivan, and that you could carry out most repairs on it, brought back mixed memories. I also started my motoring career with a 7 year old, third-hand, mini van. It must be said that the only thing between it and the scap heap was yours truly, and a supply of parts often retrieved from the local scrap heap in which it seemed determined to end its short but troubled life! I grudgingly had to learn DIY car mechanics just to keep mobile and get to work. These days the inner workings of my boring but reliable 11 year old Mondeo are a complete mystery to me, and long may it stay that way!
That’s my journey
And my Volvo is just a Mondeo in another skin
Drains. With the increase in catastrophic rainfall quantities drains have become overwhelmed. Not only because their capacity is insufficient for the excessive volumes of water cascading along tarmac roads as a result of torrential downpours we are experiencing but because of the lack of maintenance. I have been trying to get the local council to jet the drains for years. Some of them are solid with soil and compacted run-off detritus. And the a week or so ago, after lodging yet another request on the council website, someone turned up with an iPad and started to inspect the gullies. He told me that the private company with the council contract to do the work is paid on a standard rate that makes it unprofitable to actually come out and dig out the drains. Many roads in our town are narrow and the company’s large tanker water jets designed for use in suburbs presumably cannot reach gullies on many of the roads. So they don’t do them. However, for some reason, a week later the tanker turned up with a couple of crew and proceeded to spend a whole morning on one drain, digging it out by hand with a small shovel and then maneuvering the tanker as close as possible to get the long large hose into position to jet it clean. The other word driven out by neoliberalism, along with ‘spare capacity’ and prudent redundancy’ is ‘regular maintenance.’ Most UK local authorities have lost virtually all these to austerity.
We fogot the KISS principle along time ago in many areas.
Personally miss having an older car. As Richard and others said could fix it yourself with a few simple tools. Parts were generally available from a scrapyard if you were short of cash – one type of recycling starting early. Downside generally poor MPG. Looked at an electric car but nowhere to plug in as live on single track road.
Disappointed with that view of Non Standard construction of houses. Thats surely is a rapid solution to the housing crisis – local councils building homes again. Another example of lack of joined up thinking?
As I said Sean, the 1940’s pre-fab stock my landlord employer has managed were reinvested in over and over again throughout their lives to maintain their quality and have lasted much longer as a result.
If they were brick – they would last EVEN LONGER than any 1940’s pre-fab BTW. Think of all those Georgian and Victorian homes still standing.
The problem as you say is with the joined up thinking. Local Authorities have been defunded basically since 2010 and are more reliant than ever to have a strong asset base that can create liquid assets for sales to prop financial shortages in funding or act as collateral for loans.
The big thing with MMC is lack of experience with it. How long will it last when compared to a traditionally built home? This is one of the issues isn’t it with our Neo-liberal world. The market simply does not know how to deal with them and is still figuring that out, no matter about the standards the new builders of MMC have risen to, to guarantee and certify their products.
Housing is now valued as an asset above anything – never mind its use value which comes last – an asset to generate income and financial credibility. So the more predictable the product is, the more secure lenders feel to lend and sell at higher values to get the returns; the more secure property portfolio managers feel about the value of their assets. Hence favouring traditional build.
This demand of predictability and less risk locks out innovation and strangles the affordable sector which is the real key to meeting need in this country and many others, and where MMC is most useful.
And until the economies of scale can be made on MMC due to higher take up, they will compare badly to traditional build. I saw MMC units on a local news programme last night – £180,000 for a MMC 2 bed house. They looked to be on the smaller side of the National Described Space Standards (NDSS) too.
My employer is building 2 bed houses at £140,000 – £150,000. Or at least it was.
But I say again, you cannot have a quality housing sector without money – money to build, money to invest and maintain – money for owners, tenants and landlords through decent income and wages etc.
Assets are expensive to maintain and housing is no exception. Our financial system and Government fiscal policy is set up it seems to me only to acquire assets. Maintaining them seems to be not considered at all. Yes its Neo-liberal short-termism every time and it’s a hiding to nothing in the end.
Building houses is great, but no-one seems to give a fig for the condition of the ones we already have. That’s a big problem.
I appreciate your comments PSR
Speaking as someone who bought a heat pump that stopped functioning as soon as the warranty expired and which couldn’t be repaired but needed a new operating chip at almost the same price as the original pump but which cannot be obtained because there is a worldwide shortage I warm to your theme.
Fortunately I built resilience into my heating system by installing a wood burning stove which works brilliantly.
But as someone who worked in healthcare there are bigger systems issue here rather than just built in obsolescence. The first is that as more and more of the world is managed by those whose job it is is to eliminate organisational slack , reduce safety margins etc then the more blockages , shortages and inefficiencies are introduced. Thus the NHS which is run on the basis that the budget is king and the job of management is to squeeze as much from it as possible inevitably make it inefficient by not having enough staff, not maintaining and renewing facilities, and not measuring lost and poor quality production.
Another systems issue comes from the airline industry. It is very easy to design fail safe systems but they become enormously expensive and create their own risks. As Boeing can testify.
Finally financial mathematicians swore to me that their models couldn’t be wrong and that risk could be eliminated. I laughed and pointed to history.
The lessons I take are that simple solutions to complex problems do not exist. The market doesn’t solve all problems but requires constraints, regulation and government intervention. Similarly technological leaps in productivity and output relies on not costing externalities, accounting for longer term costs , or on looking at alternatives. Plus science itself is uncertain , needs time , and risk management.
Your examples of housing and public transport are good ones in this respect but as Mazzucato has shown it also applies to the information technology and pharmaceutical industries.
The sense that life is too complicated and thus systemic change is inevitable is a reasonable position. Tainter, a writer on societal collapse made this point in 1988 in his book – the collapse of complex societies.
My slightly eccentric sister-in-law just sent me her copy of Small is Beautiful, by E. F. Schumacher (I sent her a spare copy of The Deficit Myth in return). Written around the time of the abolition of the Gold Standard, it was much talked about, though not read by many and not by me, as I was not interested in economics in my 20s. Before the word Globalisation had been coined, Schumacher was arguing against the process. Initial attempts to read it now, 50 years after publication, are something of a historical education. The chickens that he warned about have all come home to roost and are the substance of this discussion.
I have one of the second print – read as a sixth former and massively influential on me
I bought the third reprint in 1974. It is old-fashioned, but prescient. Schumacher wrote this: “It is a great error to assume, for instance, that the methodology of economics is normally applied to determine whether an activity carried on by a group within society yields a profit to society as a whole. Even nationalised industries are not viewed from this more comprehensive point of view. Every one of them is given a financial target – which is, in fact, an obligation – and is expected to pusue this target without regard to any damage it might be inflicting on other parts of the economy.” (‘Small is Beautiful’; Part I, iii, p.38-9).
Notice it is precisely this all-encompassing approach to economics as profit, and economics before everything, that renders it literally impossible to account for, or counteract such developing crises as a looming financial crash, or a worldwide virus pandemic, or global warming; until each one overwhelms us with disastrous consequences that cannot be ignored, that inflict damage to life, health or wellbeing to most of the population, and require concerted action by and total reliance on the forgotten Common Good to overcome the very, unavoidable consequences of neoliberal ideology; before it has completely destroyed society.
Purely by chance (probably) one of the other emails I get gave me this: To be more tech-savvy, borrow these strategies from the Amish (https://psyche.co/ideas/to-be-more-tech-savvy-borrow-these-strategies-from-the-amish) – reading it, I think thay may have the right idea…
And it led to me finding an ad/website for the Smartphone(TM) – brought to you by Another Soulless Corporation, at the price of a lot of difficult payments, your time, attention, esteem, motivation and general purpose – at https://thelightphone.squarespace.com/smartphonetm . Or you may prefer to get a Light Phone (It makes phone calls. What more do you want?)
In some areas modern technology has undoubtedly saved lives, for example both at sea and in the air, electronic navigation then satnav, and Radar – modern installations are light years away from the ‘Orange Screen’ I used as a teenager.
I have heard far to many tales from sailors and aviators about being lost in ‘pre electronics’ days.
Nevil Shute worked as a ‘Computer’ – Stress Engineer on the R100 (late1920’s British Airship) and commented that there was a limit on the number of longitudinal members that could be used in the design because they could not calculate the stresses for more than 16(?) as it would be to complex & take too long, again something that modern computers can deal with simply and quickly.
So complexity isnt all bad, its how you use the tools modern science has given you.
Agreed
That’s very true John Boxall and I would never venture out in my sea kayak without carrying my PLB – personal locater beacon. I have never used it and hope I never will, but it gives me the ability to call for help by plugging into an international system of satellites that will relay my distress call to the local coastguard station, who will instigate a rescue (and also phone my wife). The same wee device sends out a homing signal to guide a helicopter or lifeboat to my location.
I also carry a VHF radio, for communication with the Coastguard and others in my kayak group, but I don’t have a smart phone. My mobile is a cheap button phone, of the type called a ‘burner phone’ in detective series. It does phone calls and texts and that’s all I want from it. I read the links given by Jeremy GH about the Amish and their selective use of tech and that seems a very good approach.
I do spend too far much time on my lap-top though, and the approach of locking it away to create a barrier against thoughtless use seems a good one. I try to put it in a shoulder bag when not in use, but maybe the bag should hang up with the coats to seperate it a little further (I don’t have a closet to lock it in).
The selective use of technology fit for purpose is the key, I think
Instead, we are sim0ply getting gimmicks
Yes – gimmicks indeed, that soak up our attention and time and lead us to taking our eyes off the ball – anything really important.