More on The Icarus Syndrome
I earlier linked to an article I have in the current Weekly Standard called The Icarus Syndrome. Not much of this post will make sense unless you’ve read it first.
In the article I made the point that the idea of the simple, low-to-the-ground society as more resilient to disaster seems, so far, to be a myth. A speculative extension of this idea that I didn’t think was appropriate to get into the magazine article is how to deal with the following objection: “OK, but how do we know that this will always continue to be true in the future?”
Icarus theorists argue that modern societies are unsustainable because they have some critical flaw that the Icarus theorist can see, but that the herd of sheep who get in their cars and drive to the office park every weekday morning can not. While specific theories can be rejected based on facts, the nagging feeling that we are all doomed can never be refuted by logic – one is always faced with the problem of induction. It can only be refuted by irrational faith in the future, which in practice usually means religious faith. Because unless we live in a providential universe, we are doomed.
Without providence, no matter how much our choices about lifestyle lower the odds of the annihilation of humanity in any given year or century, as the future rolls out toward infinity something is certain to happen eventually that will do the job. In the end, even the smartest hedging strategy will fail, and just as each individual dies, the human species will go extinct. It will be Game Over – not just for you and me, but for everybody, forever.
Confronting this realization tends to produce a variety of reactions: gloominess, craziness and denial, chief among them. It also tends to drive thoughtful people to attempt some sense of identification with something beyond the human species. Of course, in the physical universe this is a sucker’s game. As we race up the ladder of abstraction from humans to intelligent life to some notion of consciousness or whatever, we keep confronting the fact that everything, even all information, will eventually die when the universe either achieves heat death or implodes back into a point-mass. As physicists colloquially put the three laws of thermodynamics: you can’t win, you can’t break even and you can’t get out of the game.
But even if you believe that we live in such a universe, and further accept that pursuing economic and technological development would shorten the lifespan of the human species, it still doesn’t follow that we would purposely retard material development. I would rather humanity have 1,000 more generations of Shakespeare, city life and space exploration than for humans in the 100,000th generation to emerge from their huts near crystalline clear rivers and look up at the night sky wondering what all those pretty lights are.
You’re the best commenters on the Internet. What am I missing?
I would say you are missing the notion of individual virtue. Maybe material progress shouldn’t be sacrificed on behalf of pretty rivers, but if it undermines human beings’ potential to realize fully their humanity through virtuous life, maybe it should be reconsidered. I think that’s the core of Patrick Deneen’s arguments about thrift, conservation, and localism – not what we’re doing to threaten the survival of humanity, but what we’re doing to threaten the humanity of humanity.
— Zak · Sep 3, 03:29 PM · #
Well, Jim, you’re not missing out on heapin’ helpins’ of condescension, that’s for sure.
You’re basically making the argument, “well, we’re all doomed in the long run anyway, so let’s put the pedal to the metal and have as much fun as possible before we crash.” That argument has two unspoken assumptions, the first being that because we’re ultimately doomed anyway, it doesn’t make sense for us to do what we can to ward off more immediate threats. (I’ll skip over the assertion, buried in talk about “sheep driving in their cars”, that the threat from global warming, etc., is somehow irrational and undetectable except for true believers.)
The second flaw in your argument is that we’re facing a choice between mud huts on the one hand and “Shakespeare, city life and space exploration” on the other. This is silly and incorrect on its face – there are huge numbers of environmentalists pointing to big, dense cities like NYC as a model of per capita resource and energy consumption – but gets back to a core theme of your writing, namely that we’re somehow making some profound economic sacrifice by discouraging the use of SUVs and boosting the use of renewable energy sources. To be blunt, you haven’t proved that’s the case, and the Weekly Standard article is actually a step away from doing so – you’re replacing reasoned argument with textbook fear, uncertainty and doubt about those darned environmentalists.
Not cool, man.
— Chris · Sep 3, 03:39 PM · #
Zak brings up a very interesting point. I think the answer to this is to eschew the misassumption that all economics is material. Humans are motivated by all manner of things. Economists often focus on material wealth because it’s the most obvious and measurable of human motivations.
I would posit, though, that not only is it not the only human motivation, it is not even amongst the most powerful of motivations. The drive for material wealth must share our attention with drives for love, friendship, physical pleasure, aesthetic beauty, the upholding of virtuous principles, social acceptance, absolution of guilt, cultural stimulation, appreciation of the natural world, “solidarity” (for lack of a better term) with a place or community, and any number of other potential primary and secondary movers.
This tapestry of motivation, I believe, largely defines our humanity. While Jim’s discussion is largely one of material wealth (again, because it’s easier to talk about and measure), mankind, at least en masse, will never subordinate all of its other motivations to that of maximizing wealth. We would not destroy our virtues in order to make a buck any more than we would pimp our mothers into prostitution. Indeed, the technology and development that we enjoy from the free-market growth of our material economy is usually employed in the service of that humanity. Sure, you can find vivid exceptions, but they’re not significant in comaprison.
It can be difficult to remember, but not all economics is material. Indeed, most of it isn’t.
— John Bejarano · Sep 3, 04:02 PM · #
@Chris: You say that Jim hasn’t proven that fixing global warming in the manner prescribed by the most prominent advocates against it will have huge economic costs. I’d say the results of that William Nordhaus study Jim cites are pretty compelling. $17 trillion indeed!
@John: It is very true that there are other economic goods besides wealth. But it is also true that increases in wealth correlate with these other goods, for the simple reason that a comfortable lifestyle allows more time and energy to be available for these other pursuits.
I just saw “Lawrence of Arabia.” At one point Prince Feisal says to Lawrence, addressing the latter’s romanticization of Arabia, “No Arab loves the desert. We love water and green trees. There is nothing in the desert and no man needs nothing.” Be careful you don’t fall into a Rousseauian trap and say, upon looking at less wealthy societies, “These folks, in their simplicity, are how we should be.” I think less wealthy societies would gladly trade their simplicity for readily available food, medicine, clean water, and energy.
— Blar · Sep 3, 05:19 PM · #
About the whole article: I like how you can turn up or down the level of the argument of the “Manzi Climate Change” argument depending on the venue. It’s gotten sharper. However you are really boxing a strawman here. Huts?
1) I still think it is worth noting that the IPCC doesn’t in fact give a confidence interval of 1-5%, with a mean of 3%, but instead quotes two studies a decade old with two different means of 1 and 5%.
2)
“One serious objection to this logic is that the forecasts for warming impacts might be wrong, and global warming could turn out to be substantially worse than the IPCC models predict…That is, we are concerned here with the real, but inherently unquantifiable, possibility that our probability distribution itself is wrong.
The argument for emissions abatement, then, boils down to the point that you can’t prove a negative. If it turns out…then we really should start shutting down power plants and confiscating cars tomorrow morning.”
a) On the first approximation, if you were a member of the public at large, would you believe that economic modelers have a solid grasp of the third moment of their prediction function?
If you did, would the fact that the brilliant and talented research team at Freddie/Fannie couldn’t get the tail risk down 2 years out on the housing market change it? The Bear quants on their solvency models 6 months out? The Nobel Prize winners at LTCM? The option traders on Black Monday? We could go on…
All those are examples of third moment expectations breaking down within a few years – no offense to the researchers quoted, but I have near-zero confidence in these models’ confidence intervals 150 years out (What’s your p value?). You make a similar point, but what’s important is that it isn’t a matter of “can’t prove a negative” but an actual modeling argument – in the tail, there are cross-effects/feedback loops that can’t be pulled from empirical data that speed our movement down the tail. Just as subprime loans can cross-effect (screw-up) prime homeowners, as the temperature warms, resource depletion, global migration, border breakdown, water, and other issues etc. will cross-effect into each other’s GDP effects. These economic models are going to be untrustworthy in the tails.
b) Confiscating Cars! Wha-wha-what? How about pricing carbon first? I know you disagree, but at least give your opponents their say.
— Mike · Sep 3, 05:22 PM · #
BTW: I should finally get around to reading the Weitzman paper and your response to it. However I’m not sure if he has a specific feedback-driven-acceleration down the tail argument as opposed to a more pure econometrics argument.
— Mike · Sep 3, 05:30 PM · #
Thanks to all for the great comments.
Zak:
Fair enough; I agree that your conclusion follows from your premise. There is obviously a value judgment to be made about “the good life”.
Chris:
You say:
I think I would try to say something more like: if the human species is mortal, then like each mortal person, the good life should not be exclusively focused on longevity, but instead focused on higher concerns. As per my comment to Zak, defining those higher concerns is obviously a deeply value-laden thing.
Mike:
I tried to draw a bright line between these more philosphical comments, and the empirical discussion of the specific issues of AGW and peak oil.
I guess the problem with the “I don’t believe the IPCC predictions for the future impacts of increasing temperatures” argument is it begs the questions: (1) OK, what alternative forecast do you have, and why should we choose to accept this alternative forecast as superior?, and (2) if you don’t have a forecast, then on what rational basis do you recommend that we give up benefits today in order to avoid a completely unknowable possible future imapct about which you can provide no useful information?
I think everybody who is serious about the climate change debate should understand Weitzman’s argument in detail. In my opinion is the most rigorous existing case for a carbon tax.
— Jim Manzi · Sep 3, 06:35 PM · #
Sorry didn’t mean to jump on the technical side for a more philosophically minded post, I had just been thinking about this technical argument recently. Thanks for the double-incentive for getting on Weitzman’s paper.
The impending ‘Apocalypse’, and how to avoid/enjoy it, has been such a part of Western Thought that it is tough to think of our culture without it. And disenchantment with material progress as a stand-in for all progress is a(n obvious) critique all the time, but especially moreso for us since Modernism. (I’m sure some of your co-bloggers have a better handle on that than myself.)
It’s probably worth noting that Shakespeare, who our hut dwellers don’t get to read, wrote all his stuff when the World’s GDP was < 2% of what it is today. So now who is talking about material progress?
— Mike · Sep 3, 07:35 PM · #
Mike:
I agree that this has been a ever-present psychological reality. In the pre-secular age, I suspect the same basic anxiety played itslef out in religous premonitions of doom.
Great point about WS. I guess I associate his creating those plays with a dynamic culture. Preserving them would not require that.
— Jim Manzi · Sep 3, 07:46 PM · #
Blar,
On looking at my previous post, it does seem that I’m trying to romanticize other motivations at the expense of wealth creation. I was just trying to address Zak’s point where he stipulates that it shouldn’t all be about material progress.
Too often, when someone complains about material progress they believe (or appear to believe) that it somehow eclipses, diminishes, or outright squashes other human endeavours. My point was that this is not so; that free-market, minimally regulated wealth creation is perfectly compatible with life’s other pursuits. Do I find material progress important? You betcha! The point I tried to make toward the end of my post, but you aptly emphasize more strongly is that wealth creation is very often an enabler of these other motivations.
No, I don’t think that personally I’m in danger of falling in Rousseau’s trap. I’m sorry if my previous post seemed to make it out that I was.
— John Bejarano · Sep 3, 10:00 PM · #
Jim, few scattered thoughts.
1. Jim: It also tends to drive thoughtful people to attempt some sense of identification with something beyond the human species. Of course, in the physical universe this is a sucker’s game. As we race up the ladder of abstraction from humans to intelligent life to some notion of consciousness or whatever, we keep confronting the fact that everything, even all information, will eventually die when the universe either achieves heat death or implodes back into a point-mass.
Me: I almost failed out of law school trying to find the answer to this (very Woody Allenish of me, I know). As far as I can tell, there is only one justifiable ways of refining this crude but accurate way of looking at things into something like an inspirational/motivational/ordering meme. This is the high-watermark view, where we commit to “recapturing the possible” by creating the greatest amount of logical depth that we humans can possibly achieve before a terrestrial or extraterrestrial event wipes it all away. This is like measuring your vertical by putting chalk on your fingers and jumping; the mark will be erased, but it was there for a little while. Except, whereas with the latter your achievement is against gravity, with the former the achievement is against entropy/disorder, against meaninglessness and non-existence, against the Nothing from whence we came and to which we all return. In fact, there is a (long, tortured, but valid) argument to be made that it is from such a standard that human beings can derive the Idea of the Good (or “God” for short). For instance, Franz Rosenzweig’s definition of God as “All that is not Nothing”, the all-encompassing, the initial “Yea”, the eternal consequent — all 10 dimensions of it (that’s a whole ‘nother discussion).
In practice, this identifies ourselves with “something beyond”, and places each human within this scheme as ordinal value ‘x’. Add in some bonding concepts like covalence, and some topographical concepts like vectors and phases, and you have the makings of a robust theory of life, the universe and everything. You also have a rigorous way to evaluate cultures.
For instance, using this measure we are forced to value a dynamic culture — one optimally balanced on the border between order and chaos — over a static culture, a computationally complex culture over a logically shallow culture, and an information-preserving culture over one whose intergenerational information channels are noisy and prone to transmission error. But enough about that.
2. Re: which kind of society is more robust to random failure.
The type of networks which are most robust to random error are scale-free networks. Complex systems (there’s that word again) are very good at maintaining basic functions if one of their components break down; they have an amazing capacity to function in the face of many errors. Every network has a critical point for random network, after which it will break apart, but the critical threshold for the scale-free network is the highest. For instance, if you take a very large scale-free network, you can remove 80 percent of the nodes randomly and the remaining 20 percent still talk to each other.
Of course, these types of networks have an Achilles’ Heel: they are very robust against random error, but fare poorly when their core nodes face a targeted, intelligent attack (a core node, or core module, is one that is necessary in all environments).
But since your point is about random error, it’s beyond any doubt that a self-organizing, dynamic, complex-and-getting-more-so culture is highly preferable to any other type. (It’s worth noting that this tracks with Hayek’s thesis on market-prices and distributed knowledge).
4. re: “eschew the misassumption that all economics is material.”
You guys should read Nozick (1993) on “symbolic utility” and “rational integration”, Heap (1992) and Searle (2001) on expressive rationality vs. instrumental rationality, Anderson (1993) on the inappropriateness of using cost/benefit analysis exclusively when defining human rationality, and Sen (1977) on the concept of “commitment” in economic analysis. These works clarify and amplify much of what’s been said above.
4. Re: Maybe material progress shouldn’t be sacrificed on behalf of pretty rivers, but if it undermines human beings’ potential to realize fully their humanity through virtuous life, maybe it should be reconsidered.
In addition to the above list of scholars, there’s something else that should be said about this. As material progress brings the individual a greater amount of moment-to-moment stability, our ability to override our TASS cognitive systems increase. You can think of this in terms of temperature. As the temperature goes up, as our environment becomes less and less certain (i.e., when catastrophic events become more and more likely) our ability to reflect, deliberate and exercise free choice — to, in the words of Keith Stanovich and Richard Dawkins, make vehicle-interested decisions rather than gene-interested decisions — goes down.
Rule of thumb: the cognitive space one must inhabit to exercise human free will (which, as agency goes, is more than zero, less than complete) is best acquired during serial moments of hedonic room temperature.
It’s not the fault of modernity if we are live without virtue; if anything, modernity allows us a chance at greater virtue by giving us the ability to supersede the immediate worries of a close-in Mother Nature.
— JA · Sep 3, 11:21 PM · #