If my previous post demonstrates anything, it should be that logic and reason are not pathways to simplicity. Perhaps the most famous story in this regard is that of Bertrand Russell and Alfred North Whitehead, who spent something on the order of a thousand pages of dense logic to prove 1+1=2 in a way that still doesn’t completely dispense of the need for a leap of faith. Stephen Wolfram (of Mathematica nd Wolfram Alpha fame) gives an excellent overview of the significance of Russell and Whitehead’s efforts.
It is important to make distinction, though, between the ultimate utility of such efforts in simplifying our lives (evidence of which is to to be found in every electronic device or product made by an electronic device) and simplifying our understanding by providing answers to the questions that matter.
Logic, it turns out, is great for helping you build a house if you already know you want to build a house. Logic is not so great for figuring out if you should build another house if you already have one.
The confusion between these two tasks is more than just a trifle. Rather, it is a the center of every important public and private decision. It is at the root of not only our current social malaise, but also of all of the worst horrors of the past century.
To put it plainly then: We cannot hope to progress as a species if we cannot find a way to reconcile this dilemma in societies. The success and failure of societies depend on the grasp that officials and citizens have of this issue.
An example or two may be useful here:
Example 1: A couple of years ago, Cape Town suffered from a severe drought that had people deeply rationing water to the point of near breakdown. While modelled analyses are quick to leap to human caused climate change as being at the heart of the problem, the danger of the fallacy involved in such injudicious reasoning is almost impossible to overstate.
The mistake is easy enough to grasp when one consider what the size of the human population was before technology. The number is quite shocking. While estimates vary, of course, it is generally understood that human beings suffered a population bottleneck around seventy thousand years ago resulted in a final population of as few as two thousand individuals. Whatever the exact amount, these numbers are comparable to the current estimated population of giant pandas.
In other words, while it is often convenient to present human population growth statistics like this:
It is perhaps more correct to think of them as potentially being like this:
That is not to say that I expect a giant population crash in the near future, but what it does mean is that without technology, the natural population of human beings is not very large.
So when a natural disaster occurs, even it can be linked to human activity, it is very tempting to think of the consequences in terms of a population size that is only enabled by the human activity in the first place. In the case of Cape Town, that means that simply means that population has outstripped infrastructure. If you want to support X number of people in a place for whatever reason, then, regardless of what one might think about the environment, a certain level of population support is required.
Put another way: While we as a society may find it useful to care for the nature and the environment, as far as nature and the environment is concerned the ideal human population might as well be zero. Nature doesn’t care about your well-being.
I fully realize this may come off as heartless and cynical, so to balance the books, as it were, I would like to present the second example.
Example 2: The island of Hispaniola has often been cited as a prime example of negative consequences of unchecked development run amok.
The island is divided between two nations: Haiti and the Dominican Republic. Basically, as the story goes, despite being blessed with less favorable conditions, Haiti developed a thriving agricultural industry well-before the neighboring Dominican Republic did. However, the environmental damage caused by a failure to care for the environment ultimately resulted in a huge disparity in wealth between the two states (almost a 10x disparity in nominal GDP between them as I write this).
Simply continuing a successful strategy
Of course, as with all such stories, there are a lot of factors that come into play, but the basic lesson is something that any investment advisor should tell you: “Past performance is no guarantee of future results.”
To synthesize the two examples into an aphorism:
Just because building a dam was a good idea doesn’t mean that building two dams would have been a good idea.
And the corollary:
Don’t think of maintenance costs as a loss.
…which is to say, if you develop an asset that has value or produces cash flow, it will almost always come with costs in the form of risks or additional required inputs. Being the loss averse creatures we are, it is always easy to fall into the trap of valuing the $100 we gain from an investment as less than $90 we have to pay to keep it, especially if the payment follows the gain and especially if that trade off is delayed.
The key thing to take away from this post, though, is that analysis can only ever tell us what is, never what will be. The difference between a bad analysis and a good analysis is not in how well it describes a state of affairs, but in how well its description of a state of affairs allows us to navigate the world successfully.
This will always remain a difficult problem, but there is something we can, ironically, say with absolute certainty, and that is that anyone who sells a solution that is easy to understand and perfectly reliable is not balancing inputs and outputs properly. It may not always be possible to find the flaw in the reasoning, but it is there. I consider it as no hyperbole to say that the continued prosperity (if not the very existence) of our society, and perhaps humanity itself, depends on our ability to identify and avoid easy solutions.
Human beings needs to balance their needs and desires with future and the environment, but the future and the environment has no such obligation to us.