Tag: network

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The Old New Business Model

Supply networks
Next-generation, self-healing supply networks will feature robustness against supply interruptions. Image by urbans/Shutterstock

15 April 2020 – Business organizations have always been about supply networks, even before business leaders consciously thought in those terms. During the first half of the 20th century, the largest firms were organized hierarchically, like the monarchies that ruled the largest nations. Those firms, some of which had already been international in scope, like the East India Trading Company of previous centuries, thought in monopolistic terms. Even as late as the early 1960s, when I was in high school, management theory ran to vertical and horizontal monopolies. As globalization grew, the vertical monopoly model transformed into multinational enterprises (MNEs) consisted of supply chains of smaller companies supplying subassemblies to larger companies that ultimately distributed branded products (such as the ubiquitous Apple iPhone) to consumers worldwide.

The current pandemic of COVID-19 disease, has shattered that model. Supply chains, just as any other chains, proved only as strong as their weakest link. Requirements for social distancing to control the contagion made it impossible to continue the intense assembly-line-production operations that powered industrialization in the early 20th century. To go forward with reopening the world economy, we need a new model.

Luckily, although luck had far less to do with it than innovative thinking, that model came together in the 1960s and 1970s, and is already present in the systems thinking behind the supply-chain model. The monolithic, hierarchically organized companies that dominated global MNEs in the first half of the 20th century have already morphed into a patchwork of interconnected firms that powered the global economies of the first quarter of the 21st century. That is, up until the end of calendar-year 2019, when the COVID-19 pandemic trashed them. That model is the systems organization model.

The systems-organization model consists of separate functional teams, which in the large-company business world are independent firms, cooperating to produce consumer-ready products. Each firm has its own special expertise in conducting some part of the process, which it does as well or better than its competitors. This is the comparative-advantage concept outlined by David Ricardo over 200 years ago that was, itself, based on ideas that had been vaguely floating around since the ancient Greek thinker Hesiod wrote what has been called the first book about economics, Works and Days, somewhere in the middle of the first millennium BCE.

Each of those independent firms does its little part of the process on stuff they get from other firms upstream in the production flow, and passes their output on downstream to the next firm in the flow. The idea of a supply chain arises from thinking about what happens to an individual product. A given TV set, for example, starts with raw materials that are processed in piecemeal fashion by different firms as it journeys along its own particular path to become, say, a Sony TV shipped, ultimately, to an individual consumer. Along the way, the thinking goes, each step in the process ideally is done by the firm with the best comparative advantage for performing that operation. Hence, the systems model for an MNE that produces TVs is a chain of firms that each do their bit of the process better than anyone else. Of course, that leaves the entire MNE at risk from any exogenous force, from an earthquake to a pandemic, which distrupts operations at any of the firms in the chain. What was originally the firm with the Ricardoan comparative advantage for doing their part, suddenly becomes a hole that breaks the entire chain.

Systems theory, however, provides an answer: the supply network. The difference between a chain and a network is its interconnectedness. In network parlance, the firms that conduct steps in the process are called nodes, and the interconnections between nodes are called links. In a supply chain, nodes have only one input link from an upstream firm, and only one output link to the next firm in the chain. In a wider network, each node has multiple links into the node, and multiple links out of the node. With that kind of structure, if one node fails, the flow of products can bypass that node and keep feeding the next node(s) downstream. This is the essence of a self-healing network. Whereas a supply chain is brittle in that any failure anywhere breaks the whole system down, a self-healing network is robust in that it single-point failures do not take down the entire system, but cause flow paths to adjust to keep the entire system operating.

The idea of providing alternative pathways via multiple linkages flies in the face of Ricardo’s comparative-advantage concept. Ricardo’s idea was that in a collection of competitors producing the same or similar goods, the one firm that produces the best product at the lowest cost drives all the others out of business. Requiring simultaneous use of multiple suppliers means not allowing the firm with the best comparative advantage to drive the others out of business. By accepting slightly inferior value from alternative suppliers into the supply mix, the network accepts slightly inferior value in the final product while ensuring that, when the best supplier fails for any reason, the second-best supplier is there, on line, ready to go, to take up the slack. It deliberately sacrifices its ultimate comparative advantage as the pinnacle of potential suppliers in order to lower the risk of having its supply chain disrupted in the future.

This, itself, is a risky strategy. This kind of network cannot survive as a subnet in a larger, brittle supply chain. If its suppliers and, especially, customers embrace the Ricardo model, it could be in big trouble. First of all, a highly interconnected subnet embedded in a long supply chain is still subject to disruptions anywhere else in the rest of the chain. Second, if suppliers and customers have an alternative path through a firm with better comparative advantage than the subnet, Ricardo’s theory suggests that the subnet is what will be driven out of business. For this alternative strategy to work, the entire industry, from suppliers to customers, has to embrace it. This proviso, of course, is why we’ve been left with brittle supply chains decimated by disruptions due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The alternative is adopting a different, more robust paradigm for global supply networks en masse.

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So, Tell Me What You Really Think!

Submarine missile launch
The government-funded project to develop Polaris, the first submarine-launched ICBM, transformed the way projects – and indeed most 21st-century businesses – are run. Image by Alexyz3d/Shutterstock

9 February 2020 – I’m about half way through a course on global economics at Keiser University, and one of this week’s assigned readings is a 2012 article by Argentine-American legal scholar Fernando R. Tesón discussing his views on the ethical basis of free trade. I was particularly struck by the wording of his conclusion section:

More often, trade barriers allow governments to transfer resources in favor of rent-seekers and other political parasites. … Developed countries deserve scorn for not opening their markets to products made by the world’s poor by protecting their inefficient industries, while ruling elites in developing nations deserve scorn for allowing bad institutions, including misguided protectionism. (p. 126)

This was unusually blunt in a scholarly article! Tesón, however, did a good job of making his case. Citing David Ricardo’s and Hecksher-Olin’s theories of comparative-advantage, He provided a well-thought-out, if impassioned, argument that trade barriers are misguided at best, and at worst unconscionable. Among the practices he heaped scorn upon are “tariffs, import licenses, export licenses, import quotas, subsidies [emphasis added], government procurement rules, sanitary rules, voluntary export restraints, local content requirements, national security requirements, and embargoes” (Tesón, 2012, p. 126).

Generally, that was a defensible list. All of those practices tend to slew market-based purchase decisions toward goods produced by firms lacking true competitive advantage. The case against subsidies, however, is not so simple. There are various reasons for creating subsidies and ways of applying them. Not all are counterproductive from an economic-development standpoint.

Stephen Redding, in a 1999 article entitled “Dynamic comparative advantage and the welfare effects of trade” pointed out that comparative advantage is actually a dynamic thing. That is, it varies with  time, and producers can, through appropriate investments, artificially create comparative advantages that are every bit as real as the comparative-advantage endowments that the earlier theorists described.

The original Ricardian model envisioned countries endowed with innate comparative advantages for producing some good(s) relative to producing the same good(s) in another country (Kang, 2018). Redding pointed out that a country’s productivity for manufacturing some good increases with time (experience) spent producing it. He posited that if the country’s competitors’ comparative advantage for producing that good is not great, it may be possible for the country to, through investing in or subsidizing development of an improved production process, overtake its competitors. In this way, Redding asserted, the relative competitive advantage/disadvantage situation may be reversed.

The counterargument to subsidizing such a project is that the subsidy has an opportunity cost in that the subsidy uses funds exacted from the country’s taxpayers to benefit one or more selected firms. Tesón’s position is that this would be an inappropriate use of taxpayer funds to benefit only a small subset of the country’s citizens. This is ipso facto unfair, hence his stigmatizing such a decision. The reductio ad absurdum rejoinder to this argument is that it leaves government powerless to effect economic development.

In a democracy, government decisions are assumed to have tacit acceptance by the whole population. Thus, an action by the government to support a small group developing a comparative advantage through a subsidy must be assumed to have a positive externality for the whole population.

If the government is an autocracy or oligarchy, there is no legitimate claim to fairness for any of its decisions, anyway, so the unfairness argument is moot.

There are thus conditions under which subsidizing firms or industries to develop enhanced productive capacity for some good make economic sense. Those conditions are as follows:

  1. Competitors’ comparative advantage is small enough that it can be overcome with a reasonable subsidy over a reasonable length of time;

  2. There is reason to expect the country will be able to maintain its improved comparative advantage situation after subsidies have been removed;

  3. Achieving a comparative advantage for production of that good will have ripple effects that will generate comparative advantage throughout the economy.

If and only if all of these conditions obtain is it reasonable to create a temporary subsidy.

An example of an inappropriate subsidy is that by the European Union for Airbus, which began with the company’s launch in 1970 to create an EU-based large civil aircraft (LCA) industry to compete with the U.S.-based Boeing Aircraft Company and continues today (European Commission, 6 October 2004). While this history indicates that item 1 on the list above was fulfilled (Airbus became an effective competitor for Boeing in the 1980s), and item 3 certainly was fulfilled, the fact that the subsidies continue today, half a century later, indicates that item 2 was not fulfilled.

On the other hand, the myriad salutary effects that came out of the Polaris missile program of the mid-20th Century shows that all three conditions were valid for that government-subsidized project (Engwall, 2012).

References

Engwall, M. (2012). PERT, Polaris, and the Realities of Project Execution. International Journal of Managing Projects in Business,.5(4), 595-616.

European Commission. (6 October 2004). EU – US Agreement on Large Civil Aircraft 1992: key facts and figures. (MEMO/04/232). Retrieved from https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/MEMO_04_232

Kang, M. (2018). Comparative advantage and strategic specialization. Review of International Economics, 26(1), 1–19.

Redding, S. (1999). Dynamic comparative advantage and the welfare effects of trade. Oxford Economic Papers, 51, 15-39.

Tesón, F.,R. (2012). Why free trade is required by justice. Social Philosophy & Policy, 29(1), 126-153.

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Making Successful Decisions

Project Inputs
External information about team attributes, group dynamics and organizational goals ultimately determine project success.

4 September 2019 – I’m in the early stages of a long-term research project for my Doctor of Business Administration (DBA) degree. Hopefully, this research will provide me with a dissertation project, but I don’t have to decide that for about a year. And, in the chaotic Universe in which we live a lot can, and will, happen in a year.

I might even learn something!

And, after learning something, I might end up changing the direction of my research. Then again, I might not. To again (as I did last week ) quote Winnie the Pooh: “You never can tell with bees!”

No, this is not an appropriate forum for publishing academic research results. For that we need peer-reviewed scholarly journals. There are lots of them out there, and I plan on using them. Actually, if I’m gonna get the degree, I’m gonna have to use them!

This is, however, an appropriate forum for summarizing some of my research results for a wider audience, who might just have some passing interest in them. The questions I’m asking affect a whole lot of people. In fact, I dare say that they affect almost everyone. They certainly can affect everyone’s thinking as they approach teamwork at home and at work, as well as how they consider political candidates asking for their votes.

For example, a little over a year from now, you’re going to have the opportunity to vote for who you want running the United States Government’s Executive Branch as well as a few of the people you’ll hire (or re-hire) to run the Legislative Branch. Altogether, those guys form a fairly important decision-making team. A lot of folks have voiced disapprobation with how the people we’ve hired in the past have been doing those jobs. My research has implications for what questions you ask of the bozos who are going to be asking for your votes in the 2020 elections.

One of the likely candidates for President has shown in words and deeds over the past two years (actually over the past few decades, if you care to look that far into his past) that he likes to make decisions all by his lonesome. In other words, he likes to have a decision team numbering exactly one member: himself.

Those who have paid attention to this column (specifically the posting of 17 July) can easily compute the diversity score for a team like that. It’s exactly zero.

When looking at candidates for the Legislative Branch, you’ll likely encounter candidates who’re excessively proud to promise that they’ll consult that Presidential candidate’s whims regarding anything, and support whatever he tells them he wants. Folks who paid attention to that 17 July posting will recognize that attitude as one of the toxic group-dynamics phenomena that destroy a decision team’s diversity score. If we elect too many of them to Congress and we vote Bozo #1 back into the Presidency, we’ll end up with another four years of the effective diversity of the U.S. Government decision team being close to or exactly equal to zero.

Preliminary results from my research – looking at results published by other folks asking what diversity or lack thereof does to the results of projects they make decisions for – indicates that decision teams with zero effective diversity are dumber than a box of rocks. Nobody’s done the research needed to make that statement look anything like Universal Truth, but several researchers have looked at outcomes of a lot of projects. They’ve all found that more diverse teams do better.

Anyway, what this research project is all about is studying the effect of team-member diversity on decision-team success. For that to make sense, it’s important to define two things: diversity and success. Even more important is to make them measurable.

I’ve already posted about how to make both diversity and success measurable. On 17 July I posted a summary of how to quantify diversity. On 7 August I posted a summary of my research (so far) into quantifying project success as well. This week I’m posting a summary of how I plan to put it all together and finally get some answers about how diversity really affects project-development teams.

Methodology

What I’m hoping to do with this research is to validate three hypotheses. The main hypothesis is that diversity (as measured by the Gini-Simpson index outlined in the 17 July posting) correlates positively with project success (as measured by the critical success index outlined in the 7 August posting). A secondary hypothesis is that four toxic group-dynamic phenomena reduce a team’s ability to maximize project success. A third hypothesis is that there are additional unknown or unknowable factors that affect project success. The ultimate goal of this research is to estimate the relative importance of these factors as determinants of project success.

Understanding the methodology I plan to use begins with a description of the information flows within an archetypal development project. I then plan on conducting an online survey to gather data on real world projects in order to test the hypothesis that it is possible to determine a mathematical function that describes the relationship between diversity and project success, and to elucidate the shape of such a function if it exists. Finally, the data can help gauge the importance of group dynamics to team-decision quality.

The figure above schematically shows the information flows through a development project. External factors determine project attributes. Personal attributes, such as race, gender, and age combine with professional attributes, such as technical discipline (e.g., electronics or mechanical engineering) and work experience to determine raw team diversity. Those attributes combine with group dynamics to produce an effective team diversity. Effective diversity affects both project planning and project execution. Additional inputs from stakeholder goals and goals of the sponsoring enterprise also affect the project plans. Those plans, executed by the team, determine the results of project execution.

The proposed research will gather empirical data through an online survey of experienced project managers. Following the example of researchers van Riel, Semeijn, Hammedi, & Henseler (2011), I plan to invite members of the Project Management Institute (PMI) to complete an online survey form. Participants will be asked to provide information about two projects that they have been involved with in the past – one they consider to be successful and one that they consider less successful. This is to ensure that data collected includes a range of project outcomes.

There will be four parts to the survey. The first part will ask about the respondent and the organization sponsoring the project. The second will ask about the project team and especially probe the various dimensions of team diversity. The third will ask about goals expressed for the project both by stakeholders and the organization, and how well those goals were met. Finally, respondents will provide information about group dynamics that played out during project team meetings. Questions will be asked in a form similar to that used by van Riel, Semeijn, Hammedi, & Henseler (2011): Respondents will rate their agreement with statements on a five- or seven-step Likert scale.

The portions of the survey that will be of most importance will be the second and third parts. Those will provide data that can be aggregated into diversity and success indices. While privacy concerns will make masking identities of individuals, companies and projects important, it will be critical to preserve links between individual projects and data describing those project results.

This will allow creating a two-dimensional scatter plot with indices of team diversity and project success as independent and dependent variables respectively. Regression analysis of the scatter plot will reveal to what extent the data bear out the hypothesis that team diversity positively correlates with project success. Assuming this hypothesis is correct, analysis of deviations from the regression curve (n-way ANOVA) will reveal the importance of different group dynamics effects in reducing the quality of team decision making. Finally, I’ll need to do a residual analysis to gauge the importance of unknown factors and stochastic noise in the data.

Altogether this research will validate the three hypotheses listed above. It will also provide a standard methodology for researchers who wish to replicate the work in order to verify or extend it. Of course, validating the link between team diversity and decision-making success has broad implications for designing organizations for best performance in all arenas of human endeavor.

References

de Rond, M., & Miller, A. N. (2005). Publish or perish: Bane or boon of academic life? Journal of Management Inquiry, 14(4), 321-329.

van Riel, A., Semeijn, J., Hammedi, W., & Henseler, J. (2011). Technology-based service proposal screening and decision-making effectiveness. Management Decision, 49(5), 762-783.

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Computing Diversity

Decision Team
Diversity of membership in decision-making teams leads to better outcomes. By Rawpixel.com/Shutterstock

17 July 2019 – It’s come to my attention that a whole lot of people don’t know how to calculate a diversity score, or even that such a thing exists! How can there be so much discussion of diversity and so little understanding of what the word means? In this post I hope to give you a peek behind the curtain, and maybe shed some light on what diversity actually is and how it is measured.

This topic is of particular interest to me at present because momentum is building to make a study of diversity in business-decision making the subject of my doctoral dissertation in Business Administration. Specifically, I’m looking at how decision-making teams (such as boards of directors) can benefit from membership diversity, and what can go wrong.

Estimating Diversity

The dictionary definition of diversity is: “the condition of having or being composed of differing elements.”

So, before we can quantify the diversity of any group, we’ve got to identify what makes different elements different. This, by the way, is all basic set theory. In different contexts what we mean by “different” may vary. When we’re talking about group decision making in a business context, it gets pretty complicated.

A group may be subdivided, or “stratified” along various dimensions. For example, a team of ten people sitting around a table trying to figure out what to do next about, say, a new product could be subdivided in various ways. One way to stratify such a group is by age. You’d have so many individuals in their 20’s, so many might be in their 30’s, and so forth up to the oldest group being aged 50 or more. Another (perhaps more useful) way to subdivide them is by specialty. There may be so many software engineers, so many hardware engineers, so many marketers, and so forth. These days stratifying teams by gender, ethnicity, educational level or political persuasion could be important. What counts as diversity depends on what the team is trying to decide.

The moral of this story is that a team might score high in diversity along one dimension and very poorly along another. I’m not going to say any more about diversity’s multidimensional nature in this essay, however. We have other fish to fry today.

For now, let’s assume a one-dimensional diversity index. What we pick for a dimension makes little difference to the mathematics we use. Let’s just imagine a medium-sized group of, say, ten individuals and stratify them according to the color of tee-shirts they happen to be wearing at the moment.

What the color of their tee-shirts could possibly mean for the group’s decisions about new-product development I can’t imagine, and probably wouldn’t care anyway. It does, however, give us a way to stratify the sample. Let’s say their shirt colors fall out as in Table 1. So, we’ve got five categories of team members stratified by tee-shirt color.Table 1: Tee-Shirt Colors

NOTE: The next bit is mathematically rigorous enough to give most people nosebleeds. You can skip over it if you want to, as I’m going to follow it with a more useful quick-and-dirty estimation method.

The Gini–Simpson diversity index, which I consider to be the most appropriate for evaluating diversity of decision-making teams, has a range of zero to one, with zero being “everybody’s the same” and one being “everybody’s different.” We start by asking: “What is the probability that two members picked at random have the same color tee shirt?”

If you’ve taken my statistical analysis course, you’ll likely loathe remembering that the probability of picking two things from a stratified data set, and having them both fall into the same category is:

Equation 1

Where λ is the probability we want, N is the number of categories (in this case 5), and P is the probability that, given the first pick falling into a certain category (i) the second pick will be in the same category. The superscript 2 just indicates that we’re taking members two at a time. Basically P is the number of members in category i divided by the total number of members in all categories. Thus, if the first pick has a blue tee-shirt, then P is 3/10 = 0.3.

This probability is high when diversity is low, and low when diversity is high. The Gini-Simpson index makes more intuitive sense by simply subtracting that probability from unity (1.0) to get something that is low when diversity is low, and high when diversity is high.

NOTE: Here’s where we stop with the fancy math.

Guesstimating Diversity

Veteran business managers (at least those not suffering from pathological levels of OCD) realize that the vast majority of business decisions – in fact most decisions in general – are not made after extensive detailed mathematical analysis like what I presented in the previous section. In fact, humans have an amazing capacity for making rapid decisions based on what’s called “fuzzy logic.”

Fuzzy logic recognizes that in many situations, precise details may be difficult or impossible to obtain, and may not make a significant difference to the decision outcome, anyway. For example, deciding whether to step out to cross a street could be based on calculations using precise measurements of an oncoming car’s speed, distance, braking capacity, and the probability that the driver will detect your presence in time to apply the brakes to avoid hitting you.

But, it’s usually not.

If we had to make the decision by the detailed mathematical analysis of physical measurements, we’d hardly ever get across the street. We can’t judge speed or distance accurately enough, and have no idea whether the driver is paying attention. We don’t, in general, make these measurements, then apply detailed calculations using Gallilean Transformations to decide if now is a safe time to cross.

No, we have, with experience over time, developed a “gut feel” for whether it’s safe. We use fuzzy categories of “far” and “near,” and “slow” or “fast.” Even the terms “safe” and “unsafe” have imprecise meanings, gradually shifting from one to the other as conditions change. For example “safe to cross” means something quite different on a dry, sunny day in summertime, than when the pavement has a slippery sheen of ice.

Group decision making has a similar fuzzy component. We know that the decision team we’ve got is the decision team we’re going to use. It makes no difference whether it’s diversity score is 4.9 or 5.2, what we’ve got is what we’re going to use. Maybe we could make a half-percent improvement in the odds of making the optimal decision by spending six months recruiting and training a blind Hispanic woman with an MBA to join the team, but are we going to do it? Nope!

We’ll take our chances with the possibly sub-optimal decision made by the team we already have in place.

Hopefully we’re not trying to work out laws affecting 175 million American women with a team consisting of 500 old white guys, but, historically, that’s the team we’ve had. No wonder we’ve got so many sub-optimal laws!

Anyway, we don’t usually need to do the detailed Gini-Simpson Diversity Index calculation to guesstimate how diverse our decision committee is. Let’s look at some examples whose diversity indexes are easy to calculate. That will help us develop a “gut feel” for diversity that’ll be useful in most situations.

So, let’s assume we look around our conference room and see six identical white guys and six identical white women. It’s pretty easy to work out that the team’s diversity index is 0.5. The only way to stratify that group is by gender, and the two strata are the same size. If our first pick happens to be a woman, then there’s a 50:50 chance that the second pick will be a woman, too. One minus that probability (0.5) equals 0.5.

Now, let’s assume we still have twelve team members, but eleven of them are men and there’s only one token woman. If your first pick is the woman, the probability of picking a woman again is 1/12 = 0.8. (The Gini-Simpson formula lets you pick the same member twice.) If, on the other hand, your first pick is a man, the probability that the second pick will also be a man is 11/12 = 0.92. I plugged all this into an online Gini-Simpson-Index calculator (‘cause I’m lazy) and it returned a value of 26%. That’s a whole lot worse.

Let’s see what happens when we maximize diversity by making everyone different. That means we end up stratifying the members into twelve segments. After picking one member, the odds of the second pick being identical are 1/12 = 0.8 for every segment. The online calculator now gives us a diversity index of 91.7%. That’s a whole lot better!

What Could Possibly Go Wrong?

There are two main ways to screw up group diversity: group-think and group-toxicity. These are actually closely related group-dynamic phenomena. Both lower the effective diversity.

Group-think occurs when members are too accommodating. That is, when members strive too hard to reach consensus. They look around to see what other members want to do, and agree to it without trying to come up with their own alternatives. This produces sub-optimal decisions because the group fails to consider all possible alternatives.

Toxic group dynamics occurs when one or more members dominate the conversation either by being more vocal or more numerous. Members with more reticent personalities fail to speak up, thus denying the group their input. Whenever a member fails to speak up, they lower the group’s effective diversity.

A third phenomenon that messes up decision making for  high-diversity teams is that when individual members are too insistent that their ideas are the best, groups often fail to reach consensus at all. At that point more diversity makes reaching consensus harder. That’s the problem facing both houses of the U.S. Congress at the time of this writing.

These phenomena are present to some extent in every group discussion. It’s up to group leadership to suppress them. In the end, creating an effective decision-making team requires two elements: diversity in team membership, and effective team leadership. Membership diversity provides the raw material for effective team decision making. Effective leadership mediates group dynamics to make it possible to maximize the team’s effective diversity.

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The ASEAN Community

ASEAN Summer 2019 Logo
The 34th Asean Summit Bangkok: Advancing Partnership For Sustainability, 23 June 2019

Apologies to all the folks whose words I’ve expropriated for this piece with insufficient attribution – mostly from Wikipedia and ASEAN sources. It’s already taken three days to piece this essay together and I’m trying to get it published while the dateline is still good! Just ONE more editing pass.

26 June 2019 – This is an appropriate time to visit a little-known and -acknowledged regional international community being developed in Southeast Asia: ASEAN. Last Sunday (23 June 2019) marked the 34th meeting of the ASEAN Summit in Bangkok, Thailand

ASEAN was established on 8 August 1967 with the signing of the ASEAN Declaration (Bangkok Declaration) by the five founding member states, namely Indonesia, Malaysia, Philippines, Singapore and Thailand. Five additional member states – Brunei Darussalam (1984), Viet Nam (1995), Lao PDR and Myanmar (1997), and Cambodia (1999) – joined later to complete the ten member states of ASEAN today. An eleventh nation, Timor-Leste (in English: East Timor) has applied for membership.

The creation of ASEAN was originally motivated by a common fear of communism among the original five founding member states. ASEAN achieved greater cohesion in the mid-1970s following a change in the international balance of power after the end of the Vietnam War in 1975. The region’s dynamic economic growth during the 1970s strengthened the organization, enabling ASEAN to adopt a unified response to Vietnam’s invasion of Cambodia in 1979.

ASEAN’s first summit meeting, held in Bali, Indonesia in 1976, resulted in an agreement on several industrial projects and the signing of a Treaty of Amity and Cooperation, and a Declaration of Concord.

The end of the Cold War between the West and the Soviet Union at the end of the 1980s allowed ASEAN countries to exercise greater political independence in the region, and in the 1990s ASEAN emerged as a leading voice on regional trade and security issues.

ASEAN has a total population of 642 million people, which is nearly double that of the United States (327 million), and twenty-five percent larger than that of the European Union (513 million). Its average annual income per person, however, is only $4,308.00, putting it between the Israeli-occupied West Bank and Mauritania in the Western Sahara as far as average wealth per person is concerned. That means its people still have a long way to go! Its GDP growth rate, however, is 5.3% per annum, which is comparable to that of Egypt or Pakistan and ahead of the average for even emerging and developing countries.

Why Do We Care?

Why should Americans care about ASEAN?

First, it has aspirations to be a regional intergovernmental organization similar to the European Union in an region where the United States has economic and political interests. Their charter specifically calls for adherence to basic principles in line with those of the United States and other Western democracies. Notably the ASEAN charter specifically calls for adherence to democratic principles and maintaining the region as a nuclear-free zone.

Second, as a large and (aspirationally) politically and economically cohesive regional intergovernmental organization, ASEAN can provide a large and (again aspirationally) economically powerful ally in Southeast Asia to counterbalance Chinese efforts to extend its hegemony in the region. Especially, their actions reveal a desire to cooperate with the United States and its allies. For example, the charter refers in numerous places to working with United Nations principles and protocols, and establishes English as the ASEAN working language.

Organization

The ASEAN Community is comprised of three “pillars:” the ASEAN Political-Security Community, the ASEAN Economic Community and the ASEAN Socio-Cultural Community. Each pillar has its own Blueprint, and, together with the Initiative for ASEAN Integration (IAI) Strategic Framework and IAI Work Plan Phase II (2009-2015), they form the Roadmap for an ASEAN Community.

The figure below shows ASEAN’s top organization levels. At the top is the ASEAN Summit, comprised of the heads of state or government of the member states. By charter, they meet together twice a year, hosted by the member state holding the ASEAN Chairmanship, which cycles through the member states. At present, that is Thailand (Prime Minister General Prayut Chan-o-cha), so the latest meeting was held on 23 June 2019 in the Thai capital, Bangkok.

ASEAN Org Chart
ASEAN Organizational Structure.

At the next level, ASEAN is divided into three Community Councils that represent the three pillars of ASEAN activity:

  1. The ASEAN Political-Security Community Council

  2. The ASEAN Economic Community Council

  3. The ASEAN Socio-Cultural Community Council

Each of the three Community Councils has their own makeup and sphere of activity. The ASEAN Coordinating Council, for example, comprises the Foreign Ministers of the ASEAN member states and meets at least twice a year, not only to prepare the meetings of the ASEAN Summit, but to undertake other tasks provided for in the Charter, or for such other functions as may be assigned by the ASEAN Summit. For example, the Coordinating Council coordinates implementation of agreements and decisions of the ASEAN Summit.

In order to realize the objectives of each of the three pillars of the ASEAN Community, each ASEAN Community Council ensures the implementation of the relevant decisions of the ASEAN Summit; coordinates the work of the different sectors under its purview; ensures implementation of Summit decisions on issues that cut across the other Community Councils; and submits reports and recommendations to the ASEAN Summit on matters under its purview.

Each member state designates its own national representatives for each ASEAN Community Council. In addition, each ASEAN member state establishes an ASEAN National Secretariat that serves as a national focal point, the repository of information on all ASEAN matters at the national level, coordinates the implementation of ASEAN decisions at the national level, coordinates and supports the national preparations of ASEAN meetings, promotes ASEAN identity and awareness at the national level, and contributes to ASEAN community building.

Political-Security Community

ASEAN member states pledge to rely exclusively on peaceful processes in the settlement of intra-regional differences and with regard to their security. They are fundamentally linked to one another and bound by geographic location, as well as by a common vision and objectives.

The ASEAN Political-Security Community (APSC) aims to ensure that countries in the region live at peace with one another and with the world in a just, democratic and harmonious environment. The APSC Blueprint envisages ASEAN to be a rules-based community of shared values and norms; a cohesive, peaceful, stable and resilient region with shared responsibility for comprehensive security; and a dynamic and outward-looking region in an increasingly integrated and interdependent world. The APSC’s normative activities include: political development; shaping and sharing of norms; conflict prevention; conflict resolution; post-conflict peace building; and implementing mechanisms.

Economic Community

The ASEAN Economic Community (AEC) has a Consolidated Strategic Action Plan (CSAP) that includes strategic measures in the AEC Blueprint 2025 that takes into account the relevant sector work plans, and is reviewed periodically to account for developments in each sector.

The inaugural issue of the ASEAN Economic Integration Brief (AEIB) was released on 30 June 2017. The AEIB provides regular updates on ASEAN economic integration progress and outcomes, and is a demonstration of ASEAN’s commitment to strengthen communication and outreach to raise stakeholder awareness of the AEC.

The ASEAN Good Regulatory Practice (GRP) Core Principles was adopted at the 50th AEM Meeting in 29 August 2018 and subsequently endorsed by the AEC Council. It provides a practical, non-binding set of principles to assist ASEAN member states to improve their regulatory practice and foster ASEAN-wide regulatory cooperation.

Socio-Cultural Community

At the heart of the ASEAN Socio-Cultural Community (ASCC) is the commitment to lift the quality of life of ASEAN peoples through cooperative activities that are people-oriented, people-centered, environmentally friendly, and geared toward the promotion of sustainable development through member states’ cooperation on a wide range of areas including: culture and information, education, youth and sports, health, social welfare and development, women and gender, rights of the women and children, labor, civil service, rural development and poverty eradication, environment, transboundary haze-pollution, disaster management and humanitarian assistance.

Free-Trade Zone

The AEC aims to “implement economic integration initiatives” to create a single market across ASEAN member states. Its blueprint, adopted during the 13th ASEAN Summit (2007) in Singapore, serves as a master plan guiding the establishment of the community. Its characteristics include a single market and production base, a highly competitive economic region, a region of fair economic development, and a region fully integrated into the global economy.

The areas of co-operation include human resources development; recognition of professional qualifications; closer consultation on macroeconomic and financial policies; trade financing measures; enhanced infrastructure and communications connectivity; development of electronic transactions through e-ASEAN; integrating industries across the region to promote regional sourcing; and enhancing private sector involvement.

The AEC is the embodiment of the ASEAN’s vision of “a stable, prosperous and highly competitive ASEAN economic region in which there is a free flow of goods, services, investment and a freer flow of capital, equitable economic development and reduced poverty and socio-economic disparities.”

The average economic growth of member states from 1989 to 2009 was between 3.8% and 7%. This was greater than the average growth of APEC, which was 2.8%. The ASEAN Free Trade Area (AFTA), established on 28 January 1992, includes a Common Effective Preferential Tariff (CEPT) to promote the free flow of goods between member states.

ASEAN member states have made significant progress in the lowering of intra-regional tariffs through the CEPT. More than 99 percent of the products in Brunei Darussalam, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore and Thailand, have been brought down to the 0-5 percent tariff range. ASEAN’s newer members, namely Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar and Viet Nam, are not far behind.

ASEAN member states have also resolved to work on the elimination of non-tariff barriers, which includes, among others, the process of verification and cross-notification; updating the working definition of Non-Tariff Measures (NTMs)/Non-Tariff Barriers (NTBs); the setting-up of a database on all NTMs maintained by member states; and the eventual elimination of unnecessary and unjustifiable non-tariff measures.

I led this essay off with the comment that ASEAN does not seem to get the attention it deserves, at least in U.S. national media. Certainly, U.S. President Donald Trump seems to feel it’s not worth a tweet. The closest I was able to find with a quick Internet search was a report that he insulted Philippines President Rodrigo Duterte before meeting him on the sidelines of the Winter 2017 ASEAN Summit meeting!

That said, I must report that I became interested in ASEAN through a segment in Fareed Zacharia’s GPS show on CNN. So, not everybody is completely ignoring what I’ve come to realize is potentially an important regional intergovernmental organization.

I encourage you to learn more about ASEAN by visiting the various links peppering this column. Maybe together we can generate more interest in what could be a powerful U.S. ally in the Eastern Pacific.

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The Fluidity of Money

Money exchange
Money is created in the exchange of credit for debt. Image by bluedog studio/shutterstock

19 June 2016 – I’m supposed to have some passing understanding of economics and accounting. I have, after all, a Master’s degree in Business Administration, for which I had to study Macroeconomics and Microeconomics, as well as Cost and Financial Accounting.

Howsomever, while trying to make sense of what folks call “Modern Monetary Theory” it dawned on me that, not only didn’t I have a clear concept of what money actually is, but the people babbling on about money and monetary policy aren’t any clearer on the concept than I am. A review of the differences between neoclassical economics based on Keynsian ideas and so-called Modern Monetary Theory reveals an incomplete understanding of money.

We all think we know what money is, and spout long winded and erudite-sounding loads of gobbledygook that only serve to prove, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that none of us have a clue what the stuff actually is!

I find that situation intolerable, and have set out to change it by trying real hard to come up with a theory that makes sense of all the stupid things we do with and say about money.

Now, I’m not a financial wizard, or a prize-winning economist, or even a whiz-bang developer of computer models of the global economy. I’m just some schmuck with some basic math ability, a little time on my hands, and the desire to make sense of something that it seems the “experts” haven’t wrapped their brains around, yet. So, I’ve thought about this problem a bit, and have a hint of an answer that I want to run up the flagpole to see if anyone salutes.

If this essay triggers something in the brain of somebody smart that sets him, her or it thinking in a new direction about money, I’ll count it time well spent.

So, here goes … .

In science, we try to make sense of anything we don’t fully comprehend by developing some kind of conceptual model that helps us predict what will happen in any given situation. The fact that we currently haven’t a clue what will actually happen when, for example, the Federal Government runs up huge deficits for a very long time, indicates that we’re very far from knowing what we’re talking about with regard to money.

I generally try to model things poorly understood through analogy with things that are well understood. I’ve developed a two-fluid model of money by analogy to certain ideas in classical physics. It seems to work decently for the situations I’ve applied it to.

Analogy with Momentum

Specifically, the model draws an analogy with Newtonian momentum, which is a conserved vector quantity – meaning that the total momentum in a closed system cannot be changed, and that the quantity involves both a magnitude and a spatial direction.

For our analogy to be useful, we need to also use the idea of generalized coordinates, which allow the idea of “direction” to extend beyond strictly cartesian spatial coordinates (motion in straight lines). For example, a bicycle drive chain wraps around two sprockets and has flexible spans linking them, so its motion certainly does not follow along a single cartesian coordinate, yet there is a well-defined path along which any two points on the chain follow each other, maintaining their separation (measured along the path). That allows us to measure motion along the path by a generalized coordinate.

In Newtonian mechanics, momentum is exchanged between objects, which are thought of as components of a system, through the action of forces. Mathematically, the magnitude and direction of the force equals the rate of flow of momentum between the objects.

Newton’s third law, which states that every force is paired with an equal and opposite reaction force, is just an expression of conservation of momentum in that every force (representing a transfer of momentum from one object to another) is paired with an equal and opposite transfer of momentum from the second object to the first. This takes care of maintaining conservation of momentum.

Take, for example, a person stepping off a boat onto a dock. At first, everything is (as seen from the perspective of the dock) stationary. The momentum of an object is defined as the object’s mass (amount of material) times its velocity (a vector combining speed and direction). Since both the person and the boat are stationary (meaning they both have a velocity of zero), the total momentum of the system of person + boat is zero.

Then, the person applies a force to the boat in a direction away from the dock. The Newton’s-third-law reaction force is a push by the boat on the person toward the dock. That’s how the person actually gets to the dock. The boat pushes him/her toward it!

The boat moves away from the dock. The person moves toward the dock. So, the directions of the two momenta are opposite. The speeds of the person and boat automatically (or maybe you’d like to say “magically”) adjust to keep the total momentum of the system equal to zero at all times. That is, at every instant the momentum of the person is equal and opposite to the momentum of the boat.

Money

In the theory of money that I’m proposing, money itself is analogous to momentum. Altogether, it’s conserved. That is, it cannot be created or destroyed. There’s always the same amount of “money” – zero!

What we’re used to thinking of as “money” is only half the story, which is why there’s so much confusion over it. Borrowing from double-entry bookkeeping, we’ll call what we usually think of as money as credit. Everyone who understands double-entry bookkeeping knows that for every credit, there is an equal (and opposite) entry called a debit. For our purposes, we’ll shorten that word to something we’re all familiar with: debt.

Debt is the other side of the analogy, which we tend to ignore and that accounts for all the confusion.

We’re going to visualize credit and debt as fluids because they’re measured as continuous, as opposed to quantized, variables. That means that they’re representable by real numbers as opposed to integers. So, nobody has a problem with dividing seven dollars ($7) into two portions each containing three and a half dollars ($3.50). Current usage is to round everything to the nearest cent, or hundredth of a dollar, but that’s for convenience and not wanting to be bothered with truly small change.

At one time, we had half-penny ($0.005) coins, but we don’t do that anymore.

Okay, so “money” actually represents credit and debt in equal amounts, which consequently always add up to zero. Whenever money is created, it’s created as equal amounts of credit and debt.

Money creation always requires activity by two cooperating entities: a creditor and a debtor. Credit is created and transferred from the creditor to the debtor. An equal quantity of debt is created and flows from the debtor to the creditor. “Money” consists of these paired fluids, which flow through the economy via paired interactions between creditors and debtors. Money is created by an interaction that creates equal amounts of credit and debt, and the words “creditor” and “debtor” simply indicate the direction of flow.

Once created, the money flows around in the economy through paired transactions in which credit flows one way and debt the other.

Wealth

This visualization allows us to separate the concepts of “money” and “wealth.” Wealth refers to tangible and intangible assets, such as commodities and intellectual property. Wealth is very definitely not conserved. When a contractor builds a house, he or she creates wealth from, essentially, nothing. The contractor then sells the house to the new owner in a binary transaction that transfers credit to the contractor and debt to the owner.

We’ll leave out discussion of what happens to the wealth represented by the house, since this essay is about money, and money is not wealth.

The owner previously got the credit through a transaction with a lender in which money was created as a transfer of credit to the owner and debt to the lender. The lender can then, for example, package the debt up into something called a “collateralized debt obligation,” and exchange it with somebody else for an equivalent amount of credit. The lender then transfers that credit to another prospective home owner in exchange for an equivalent amount of debt, and the merry-go-round keeps turning.

Unlike wealth, which was created from nothing, the total of credit minus debt in the system remains zero at all times.

It is interesting to note that wealth appears through the creation of a pattern in the physical universe. For example, bricks used by a contractor to build a house start out as a less-organized pile. The contractor creates wealth by arranging those bricks in a house-like pattern. The owner has no use for the disorganized pile of bricks, but has a use for them when arranged as a house. Similarly, the contractor had no use for the raw clay that went into the bricks until the brick manufacturer rearranged it into the pattern we call “bricks.”

Historically, folks’ fascination with the credit side of money has led them to confuse “money” with “wealth.” They’re entirely different things. One is a medium of exchange related to entries in a bookkeeper’s ledger, the other is a real thing related to patterns in the physical world.

I hope this essay manages to help make sense of the money nonsense!

masiLeave a comment

What is This “Robot” Thing, Anyway?

Robot thinking
So, what is it that makes a robot a robot? Phonlamai Photo/Shutterstock

6 March 2019 – While surfing the Internet this morning, in a valiant effort to put off actually getting down to business grading that pile of lab reports that I should have graded a couple of days ago, I ran across this posting I wrote in 2013 for Packaging Digest.

Surprisingly, it still seems relevant today, and on a subject that I haven’t treated in this blog, yet. It being that I’m planning to devote most of next week to preparing my 2018 tax return, I decided to save some writing time by dusting it off and presenting it as this week’s posting to Tech Trends. I hope the folks at Packaging Digest won’t get their noses too far out of joint about my encroaching on their five-year-old copyright without asking permission.

By the way, this piece is way shorter than the usual Tech Trends essay because of the specifications for that Packaging Digest blog, which was entitled “New Metropolis” in homage to Fritz Lang’s 1927 feature film entitled Metropolis, which told the story of a futuristic mechanized culture and an anthropomorphic robot that a mad scientist creates to bring it down. The “New Metropolis” postings were specified to be approximately 500 words long, whereas Tech Trends postings are planned to be 1,000-1,500 words long.

Anyway, I hope you enjoy this little slice of recent history.

11 November 2013 – I thought it might be fun—and maybe even useful—to catalog the classifications of these things we call “robots.”

Let’s start with the word “robot.” The idea behind the word “robot” grows from the ancient concept of the golem. A golem was an artificial person created by people.

Frankly, the idea of a golem scared the bejeezus out of the ancients because the golem stands at the interface between living and non-living things. In our “enlightened” age, it still scares the bejeezus out of people!

If we restricted the field to golems—strictly humanoid robots, or androids—we wouldn’t have a lot to talk about, and practically nothing to do. The things haven’t proved particularly useful. So, I submit that we should expand the “robot” definition to include all kinds of human-made artificial critters.

This has, of course, already been done by everyone working in the field. The SCARA (selective compliance assembly robot arm) machines from companies like Kuka, and the delta robots from Adept Technologies clearly insist on this expanded definition. Mobile robots, such as the Roomba from iRobot push the boundary in another direction. Weird little things like the robotic insects and worms so popular with academics these days push in a third direction.

Considering the foregoing, the first observation is that the line between robot and non-robot is fuzzy. The old 50s-era dumb thermostats probably shouldn’t be considered robots, but a smart, computer-controlled house moving in the direction of the Jarvis character in the Ironman series probably should. Things in between are – in between. Let’s bite the bullet and admit we’re dealing with fuzzy-logic categories, and then move on.

Okay, so what are the main characteristics symptomatic of this fuzzy category “robot?”

First, it’s gotta be artificial. A cloned sheep is not a robot. Even designer germs are non-robots.
Second, it’s gotta be automated. A fly-by-wire fighter jet is not a robot. A drone linked at the hip to a human pilot is not a robot. A driverless car, on the other hand, is a robot. (Either that, or it’s a traffic accident waiting to happen.)

Third, it’s gotta interact with the environment. A general-purpose computer sitting there thinking computer-like thoughts is not a robot. A SCARA unit assembling a car is. I submit that an automated bill-paying system arguing through the telephone with my wife over how much to take out of her checkbook this month is a robot.

More problematic is a fourth direction—embedded systems, like automated houses—that beg to be admitted into the robotic fold. I vote for letting them in, along with artificial intelligence (AI) systems, like the robot bill paying systems my wife is so fond of arguing with.

Finally (maybe), it’s gotta be independent. To be a robot, the thing has to take basic instruction from a human, then go off on its onesies to do the deed. Ideally, you should be able to do something like say, “Go wash the car,” and it’ll run off as fast as its little robotic legs can carry it to wash the car. More chronistically, you should be able to program it to vacuum the living room at 4:00 a.m., then be able to wake up at 6:00 a.m. to a freshly vacuumed living room.

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Luddites RULE!

LindaBucklin-Shutterstock
Momma said there’d be days like this! (Apologies to songwriters Luther Dixon and Willie Denson, and, of course, the Geico Caveman.) Linda Bucklin/Shutterstock

7 February 2019 – This is not the essay I’d planned to write for this week’s blog. I’d planned a long-winded, abstruse dissertation on the use of principal component analysis to glean information from historical data in chaotic systems. I actually got most of that one drafted on Monday, and planned to finish it up Tuesday.

Then, bright and early on Tuesday morning, before I got anywhere near the incomplete manuscript, I ran headlong into an email issue.

Generally, I start my morning by scanning email to winnow out the few valuable bits buried in the steaming pile of worthless refuse that has accumulated in my Inbox since the last time I visited it. Then, I visit a couple of social media sites in an effort to keep my name if front of the Internet-entertained public. After a couple of hours of this colossal waste of time, I settle in to work on whatever actual work I have to do for the day.

So, finding that my email client software refused to communicate with me threatened to derail my whole day. The fact that I use email for all my business communications, made it especially urgent that I determine what was wrong, and then fix it.

It took the entire morning and on into the early afternoon to realize that there was no way I was going to get to that email account on my computer, find out that nobody in the outside world (not my ISP, not the cable company that went that extra mile to bring Internet signals from that telephone pole out there to the router at the center of my local area network, or anyone else available with more technosavvy than I have) was going to be able to help. I was finally forced to invent a work around involving a legacy computer that I’d neglected to throw in the trash just to get on with my technology-bound life.

At that point the Law of Deadlines forced me to abandon all hope of getting this week’s blog posting out on time, and move on to completing final edits and distribution of that press release for the local art gallery.

That wasn’t the last time modern technology let me down. In discussing a recent Physics Lab SNAFU, Danielle, the laboratory coordinator I work with at the University said: “It’s wonderful when it works, but horrible when it doesn’t.”

Where have I heard that before?

The SNAFU Danielle was lamenting happened last week.

I teach two sections of General Physics Laboratory at Florida Gulf Coast University, one on Wednesdays and one on Fridays. The lab for last week had students dropping a ball, then measuring its acceleration using a computer-controlled ultrasonic detection system as it (the ball, not the computer) bounces on the table.

For the Wednesday class everything worked perfectly. Half a dozen teams each had their own setups, and all got good data, beautiful-looking plots, and automated measurements of position and velocity. The computers then automatically derived accelerations from the velocity data. Only one team had trouble with their computer, but they got good data by switching to an unused setup nearby.

That was Wednesday.

Come Friday the situation was totally different. Out of four teams, only two managed to get data that looked even remotely like it should. Then, one team couldn’t get their computer to spit out accelerations that made any sense at all. Eventually, after class time ran out, the one group who managed to get good results agreed to share their information with the rest of the class.

The high point of the day was managing to distribute that data to everyone via the school’s cloud-based messaging service.

Concerned about another fiasco, after this week’s lab Danielle asked me how it worked out. I replied that, since the equipment we use for this week’s lab is all manually operated, there were no problems whatsoever. “Humans are much more capable than computers,” I said. “They’re able to cope with disruptions that computers have no hope of dealing with.”

The latest example of technology Hell appeared in a story in this morning’s (2/7/2019) Wall Street Journal. Some $136 million of customers’ cryptocurrency holdings became stuck in an electronic vault when the founder (and sole employee) of cryptocurrency exchange QuadrigaCX, Gerald Cotten, died of complications related to Crohn’s disease while building an orphanage in India. The problem is that Cotten was so secretive about passwords and security that nobody, even his wife, Jennifer Robertson, can get into the reserve account maintained on his laptop.

“Quadriga,” according to the WSJ account, “would need control of that account to send those funds to customers.”

No lie! The WSJ attests this bizarre tale is the God’s own truth!

Now, I’ve no sympathy for cryptocurrency mavens, which I consider to be, at best, technoweenies gleefully leading a parade down the primrose path to technology Hell, but this story illustrates what that Hell looks like!

It’s exactly what the Luddites of the early 19th Century warned us about. It’s a place of nameless frustration and unaccountable loss that we’ve brought on ourselves.

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Why Diversity Rules

Diverse friends
A diverse group of people with different ages and nationalities having fun together. Rawpixel/Shutterstock

23 January 2019 – Last week two concepts reared their ugly heads that I’ve been banging on about for years. They’re closely intertwined, so it’s worthwhile to spend a little blog space discussing why they fit so tightly together.

Diversity is Good

The first idea is that diversity is good. It’s good in almost every human pursuit. I’m particularly sensitive to this, being someone who grew up with the idea that rugged individualism was the highest ideal.

Diversity, of course, is incompatible with individualism. Individualism is the cult of the one. “One” cannot logically be diverse. Diversity is a property of groups, and groups by definition consist of more than one.

Okay, set theory admits of groups with one or even no members, but those groups have a diversity “score” (Gini–Simpson index) of zero. To have any diversity at all, your group has to have at absolute minimum two members. The more the merrier (or diversitier).

The idea that diversity is good came up in a couple of contexts over the past week.

First, I’m reading a book entitled Farsighted: How We Make the Decisions That Matter the Most by Steven Johnson, which I plan eventually to review in this blog. Part of the advice Johnson offers is that groups make better decisions when their membership is diverse. How they are diverse is less important than the extent to which they are diverse. In other words, this is a case where quantity is more important than quality.

Second, I divided my physics-lab students into groups to perform their first experiment. We break students into groups to prepare them for working in teams after graduation. Unlike when I was a student fifty years ago, activity in scientific research and technology development is always done in teams.

When I was a student, research was (supposedly) done by individuals working largely in isolation. I believe it was Willard Gibbs (I have no reliable reference for this quote) who said: “An experimental physicist must be a professional scientist and an amateur everything else.”

By this he meant that building a successful physics experiment requires the experimenter to apply so many diverse skills that it is impossible to have professional mastery of all of them. He (or she) must have an amateur’s ability pick up novel skills in order to reach the next goal in their research. They must be ready to work outside their normal comfort zone.

That asked a lot from an experimental researcher! Individuals who could do that were few and far between.

Today, the fast pace of technological development has reduced that pool of qualified individuals essentially to zero. It certainly is too small to maintain the pace society expects of the engineering and scientific communities.

Tolkien’s “unimaginable hand and mind of Feanor” puttering around alone in his personal workshop crafting magical things is unimaginable today. Marlowe’s Dr. Faustus character, who had mastered all earthly knowledge, is now laughable. No one person is capable of making a major contribution to today’s technology on their own.

The solution is to perform the work of technological research and development in teams with diverse skill sets.

In the sciences, theoreticians with strong mathematical backgrounds partner with engineers capable of designing machines to test the theories, and technicians with the skills needed to fabricate the machines and make them work.

Chaotic Universe

The second idea I want to deal with in this essay is that we live in a chaotic Universe.

Chaos is a property of complex systems. These are systems consisting of many interacting moving parts that show predictable behavior on short time scales, but eventually foil the most diligent attempts at long-term prognostication.

A pendulum, by contrast, is a simple system consisting of, basically, three moving parts: a massive weight, or “pendulum bob,” that hangs by a rod or string (the arm) from a fixed support. Simple systems usually do not exhibit chaotic behavior.

The solar system, consisting of a huge, massive star (the Sun), eight major planets and a host of minor planets, is decidedly not a simple system. Its behavior is borderline chaotic. I say “borderline” because the solar system seems well behaved on short time scales (e.g., millennia), but when viewed on time scales of millions of years does all sorts of unpredictable things.

For example, approximately four and a half billion years ago (a few tens of millions of years after the system’s initial formation) a Mars-sized planet collided with Earth, spalling off a mass of material that coalesced to form the Moon, then ricochetted out of the solar system. That’s the sort of unpredictable event that happens in a chaotic system if you wait long enough.

The U.S. economy, consisting of millions of interacting individuals and companies, is wildly chaotic, which is why no investment strategy has ever been found to work reliably over a long time.

Putting It Together

The way these two ideas (diversity is good, and we live in a chaotic Universe) work together is that collaborating in diverse groups is the only way to successfully navigate life in a chaotic Universe.

An individual human being is so powerless that attempting anything but the smallest task is beyond his or her capacity. The only way to do anything of significance is to collaborate with others in a diverse team.

In the late 1980s my wife and I decided to build a house. To begin with, we had to decide where to build the house. That required weeks of collaboration (by our little team of two) to combine our experiences of different communities in the area where we were living, develop scenarios of what life might be like living in each community, and finally agree on which we might like the best. Then we had to find an architect to work with our growing team to design the building. Then we had to negotiate with banks for construction loans, bridge loans, and ultimate mortgage financing. Our architect recommended adding a prime contractor who had connections with carpenters, plumbers, electricians and so forth to actually complete the work. The better part of a year later, we had our dream house.

There’s no way I could have managed even that little project – building one house – entirely on my own!

In 2015, I ran across the opportunity to produce a short film for a film festival. I knew how to write a script, run a video camera, sew a costume, act a part, do the editing, and so forth. In short, I had all the skills needed to make that 30-minute film.

Did that mean I could make it all by my onesies? Nope! By the time the thing was completed, the list of cast and crew counted over a dozen people, each with their own job in the production.

By now, I think I’ve made my point. The take-home lesson of this essay is that if you want to accomplish anything in this chaotic Universe, start by assembling a diverse team, and the more diverse, the better!

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Reimagining Our Tomorrows

Cover Image
Utopia with a twist.

19 December 2018 – I generally don’t buy into utopias.

Utopias are intended as descriptions of a paradise. They’re supposed to be a paradise for everybody, and they’re supposed to be filled with happy people committed to living in their city (utopias are invariably built around descriptions of cities), which they imagine to be the best of all possible cities located in the best of all possible worlds.

Unfortunately, however, utopia stories are written by individual authors, and they’d only be a paradise for that particular author. If the author is persuasive enough, the story will win over a following of disciples, who will praise it to high Heaven. Once in a great while (actually surprisingly often) those disciples become so enamored of the description that they’ll drop everything and actually attempt to build a city to match the description.

When that happens, it invariably ends in tears.

That’s because, while utopian stories invariably describe city plans that would be paradise to their authors, great swaths of the population would find living in them to be horrific.

Even Thomas More, the sixteenth century philosopher, politician and generally overall smart guy who’s credited with giving us the word “utopia” in the first place, was wise enough to acknowledge that the utopia he described in his most famous work, Utopia, wouldn’t be such a fun place for the slaves he had serving his upper-middle class citizens, who were the bulwark of his utopian society.

Even Plato’s Republic, which gave us the conundrum summarized in Juvenal’s Satires as “Who guards the guards?,” was never meant as a workable society. Plato’s work, in general, was meant to teach us how to think, not what to think.

What to think is a highly malleable commodity that varies from person to person, society to society, and, most importantly, from time to time. Plato’s Republic reflected what might have passed as good ideas for city planning in 380 BC Athens, but they wouldn’t have passed muster in More’s sixteenth-century England. Still less would they be appropriate in twenty-first-century democracies.

So, I approached Joe Tankersley’s Reimagining Our Tomorrows with some trepidation. I wouldn’t have put in the effort to read the thing if it wasn’t for the subtitle: “Making Sure Your Future Doesn’t SUCK.”

That subtitle indicated that Tankersley just might have a sense of humor, and enough gumption to put that sense of humor into his contribution to Futurism.

Futurism tends to be the work of self-important intellectuals out to make a buck by feeding their audience on fantasies that sound profound, but bear no relation to any actual or even possible future. Its greatest value is in stimulating profits for publishers of magazines and books about Futurism. Otherwise, they’re not worth the trees killed to make the paper they’re printed on.

Trees, after all and as a group, make a huge contribution to all facets of human life. Like, for instance, breathing. Breathing is of incalculable value to humans. Trees make an immense contribution to breathing by absorbing carbon dioxide and pumping out vast quantities of oxygen, which humans like to breathe.

We like trees!

Futurists, not so much.

Tankersley’s little (168 pages, not counting author bio, front matter and introduction) opus is not like typical Futurist literature, however. Well, it would be like that if it weren’t more like the Republic in that it’s avowed purpose is to stimulate its readers to think about the future themselves. In the introduction that I purposely left out of the page count he says:

“I want to help you reimagine our tomorrows; to show you that we are living in a time when the possibility of creating a better future has never been greater.”

Tankersley structured the body of his book in ten chapters, each telling a separate story about an imagined future centered around a possible solution to an issue relevant today. Following each chapter is an “apology” by a fictional future character named Archibald T. Patterson III.

Archie is what a hundred years ago would have been called a “Captain of Industry.” Today, we’d refer to him as an uber-rich and successful entrepreneur. Think Elon Musk or Bill Gates.

Actually, I think he’s more like Warren Buffet in that he’s reasonably introspective and honest with himself. Archie sees where society has come from, how it got to the future it got to, and what he and his cohorts did wrong. While he’s super-rich and privileged, the futures the stories describe were made by other people who weren’t uber-rich and successful. His efforts largely came to naught.

The point Tankersley seems to be making is that progress comes from the efforts of ordinary individuals who, in true British fashion, “muddle through.” They see a challenge and apply their talents and resources to making a solution. The solution is invariably nothing anyone would foresee, and is nothing like what anyone else would come up with to meet the same challenge. Each is a unique response to a unique challenge by unique individuals.

It might seem naive, this idea that human development comes from ordinary individuals coming up with ordinary solutions to ordinary problems all banded together into something called “progress,” but it’s not.

For example, Mark Zuckerberg developed Facebook as a response to the challenge of applying then-new computer-network technology to the age-old quest by late adolescents to form their own little communities by communicating among themselves. It’s only fortuitous that he happened on the right combination of time (the dawn of a radical new technology), place (in the midst of a huge cadre of the right people well versed in using that radical new technology) and marketing to get the word out to those right people wanting to use that radical new technology for that purpose. Take away any of those elements and there’d be no Facebook!

What if Zuckerberg hadn’t invented Facebook? In that event, somebody else (Reid Hoffman) would have come up with a similar solution (Linkedin) to the same challenge facing a similar group (technology professionals).

Oh, my! They did!

History abounds with similar examples. There’s hardly any advancement in human culture that doesn’t fit this model.

The good news is that Tankersley’s vision for how we can re-imagine our tomorrows is right on the money.

The bad news is … there isn’t any bad news!