January 10, 2012

Does War Bring Prosperity Or Is It A Disaster To Be Avoided--And How Does Technical Progress really happen

Guest Post By Joseph Friedlander

Acknowledgement: Dr. Bruce Cordell’s 21stcenturywaves.com for extensive quotes---this is a summary of many threads of his put in one place for reader convenience and to facilitate the discussion of ideas. This serves as a

One line summary: War does not lead to prosperity and only marginally to new tech-- a debunking—the tech advances gained by war can be obtained in peace by careful incubating of tech seeds and the adroit management and exploitation of those tech seeds that do sprout--yet usually the opposite policies, ruinous in economic effect, are the default setting of many powerful bureaucractic forces.
War during Maslow Window is a particular disaster.

30 Second version:
Typically near the opening of Maslow Windows over the last 200+ years, conflicts, or even wars, can ignite or appear potentially devastating (e.g., the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962); Empirically, no Maslow Window of the last 200 years has ever been delayed or diminished in any observable way by an early or pre-Maslow Window military conflict. But this does not mean it can’t happen.

Dr. Bruce Cordell in his writings and the site 21stcenturywaves.com has brought to the attention of space and political enthusiasts the possible recurrence of long wave cycles and SOC http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-organized_criticality in human behavior and history.

We start with some defining questions: What is A Maslow Window?

Dr. Bruce Cordell:







What is SOC (Self-Organized Criticality?





Is there evidence for SOC catalyzed Wars?

Dr. Bruce Cordell:
Wars and the Evidence for Complexity serious conflicts or wars are typical features of the years just before a Maslow Window or early in the Window itself.


Dynamics of SOC — The Gap Equation



The Bottomline is: This compatibility with Bak’s law indicates that space projects and MEPs—and wars-- are most likely governed by SOC. The Space Project/MEP System is most fractal just before and during a Maslow Window. As in Bak’s computer simulations, transitions into and out of the strong SOC state are abrupt just before (e.g., in 1901; in 1958) or just after the Maslow Windows (e.g., in 1914 and in 1970). While in the critical state, large changes (i.e., great explorations, MEPs, major wars) can occur in response to even a minor stimulus. (My emphasis, JF)



Although Roberts and Turcotte (1998) only had data up to 150,000 deaths per war, the fact that “medium-size” wars are almost pure SOC indicates that the major wars of Maslow Windows are also fractal, as suggested recently for World War I -- historian Niall Ferguson suggested recently that WW I was a product of self organized criticality.


Thus far Dr. Cordell.

What Do Long Wave cycles look like charted over long stretches of time?



You will notice the peaks and wars that can frame, and even terminate great Maslow Window booms (Jeffersonian Polk Taylor Fillmore Pierce-Buchanan(~1847-60), TR-Taft (1903-13), JFK-LBJ-Nixon (1960-72) eras)
Usually these have been at least involving maneuvers between great powers even if conducted in the Third World, i.e. the TR era cycle’s interventions in Latin American, (in a way conducted with one eye on Germany), the LBJ era Vietnam intervention (one eye on Russia and China)—but in this upcoming cycle a unique feature now is the danger that EMP weapons can give vast leverage to a Third World combatant (the equivalent of successful barbarian raids vs. an Imperial capital).

Dr. Cordell has written:

Joseph Friedlander: A thesis of this article is that rebooting the economy is necessary and contrary to popular belief war is not only unnecessary to do that, it is destructive and a danger to future progress—

War per se does not help progress contrary to popular belief: what it can do BETWEEN MAJOR POWERS (fighting for their national lives so they take it seriously enough that anyone offering a bureaucratic excuse is eventually told ‘there’s a war on!’ as a self explanatory excuse to get with the program) is accelerate approval processes, and financing processes. It takes the brakes off. It cannot gun the engine of innovation itself other than through catalytic effect (A previously successful effort to develop the Internet, for example, may catalyze further developments more quickly than otherwise possible. But this, to paraphrase Eric K. Drexler, is an old story of old tools helping to build newer more productive tools).

If the tech pipeline of prospective innovations cannot be kept filled, despite any funding level within reason, only a trickle can come out.
FDR asked Congress to declare war against the Japanese Empire, and the relevant tech developments being in the pipeline, four years later two mushroom clouds rose over Japan, and an Empire fell. Nixon asked Congress to declare war against cancer, and (the prospective developments not being in the pipeline) many of the original Congressmen voting the funds have themselves died of cancer.
Note that the amount of prospective innovation in the pipeline could presumably be increased by increasing the scientifically literate and tinkering population—if a determined national effort was made using “tool kits” (see von Hippel, below.)—(A tool kit is a prepackaged tech aid package to greatly ease small user groups experience in producing a limited range of much easier than normal and acceptable quality output in proper format for a manufacturer to take their design and produce it. An analogy familiar to all Windows users would be the equivalent of Microsoft wizards that enable you to click next, next, next and input parametric data to produce a result that might take (gasp) skilled manual programming or at least command line skills.

By reducing the skill input presumably we could go from 1% of the population being tech innovators to as much as 10% as long as the incentives were there (both motivational and financial). X Prizes again could be a huge motivator, i.e. large prizes available to the first (self-financed) group able to produce a given result (within parameters) and the second (a lesser prize, but to encourage many entrants for a richer field of entry).

In the press of wartime heat, Funds (with a capital F) suddenly become available to deploy innovations thought of in private sector heads for many years beforehand. An example not commonly known: No fighter not on the drawing boards by Pearl Harbor saw combat before V-J day in the USA. And those innovations in waiting had often been debugged by their private inventors by decades of nickel and dime tinkering (see von Hippel, below). Their successful deployment is of course chalked up to a flawless government program rather than individual and small group genius taking pains over time. Those who know the story of Barnes Wallis appreciate to quote Wikipedia, “ the difficulties Wallis often faced in persuading those in authority or who controlled funding sources to support his ideas.”
Indeed, the more offices to visit to ask for permission, the larger the units of business academic or government to navigate, the less time and effort is left to actually innovate (leaving entirely aside the modern tangle of IP issues where it can be literally forbidden for everyone on the team to study the topic together—yeah, that helps a team…/sarcasm)

In the end, ‘government’ innovation usually involves picking the best brains from the private sector and financing their creativity together (as in the Manhattan Project) to fill a tech pipeline with a new nascent technology or subsidizing deployment by private sector actors (massive government financing --through various tricks-- of industrial plant or kit) of privately developed tech ALREADY IN THE PIPELINE.
This is not written to depreciate government per se but strictly with an eye to determining what really works in what circumstances to generate maximal national growth and tech power for use in a Maslow Window context.
We know that during a Maslow Window things can move quickly. I am searching for an explanation as to how that happens.
There may be the equivalent of government cloisters of gifted minds (national laboratories, great university labs) but these come from the private sector (recruitment) and return there (at least for collaborative purposes). Their output is often good but expensive relative to what it would be in the private sector. (Not that waste is not possible in the private sector—it particularly is a problem in massive favored government contractors—but in a way this is a perversion of government spending itself, as influential firms are a part of the government in all but name. (If you doubt this, try cutting favored corporations’ allocations, or yearly tax credits, or see how many former government people land as if by golden parachute to lucrative private jobs…) For many years the great aerospace companies kept the government product sections walled off from the private product sections lest bad habits of over documentation (mil-spec disease) and overspending spread. That itself is proof that the cost structure in government is higher.
So during wartime a sudden flood of wealth from the government enables deployment of long deferred (thus many-iteration debugged) private worker or user developed innovations (including, surprisingly, hobbyists—who was the Frenchman who allegedly said that ‘A hobby is the most intensive form of study’?)
This is literally unbelievable to most people, who see the impressive facade of NASA or the NSA (National Security Agency) and leave shaking in their boots at how cool they are, but you don’t suppose they raise their personnel in Matrix-like incubators do they? If a person does sufficiently good work outside, or shows sufficient academic or hobby (hacker) progress, he is hired. If an innovation shows enough promise, it is duplicated, or even contracted for from the sea of privately nurtured expertise (The giant tracked crawler transporter http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crawler-transporter for the Saturn V and the Space Shuttle was not the result of an internal NASA program but a contracted-for (by Marion Power Shovel) adaptation of best mining practice with some NASA-added tweaks.) NASA itself never claimed sole ownership of many developments but always referred to the “government industry team” of 300,000 people.
But the ‘private companies’ themselves are often as inefficient as government because they too are (too often) large bureaucratic organizations. My claim is, contrary to Eisenhower’s famous Farewell Address,



What President Eisenhower understandably believed (after industry tours) to be task forces of scientists were really, in my understanding, working groups assembled from smaller ‘cells’ of individuals who had developed the facility of working together productively. But there is no doubt what is more impressive to a distinguished visitor—the lone inventor or the buzzing corporate laboratory workshop. Corporate management would have wanted him impressed that the Federal dollars keep flowing..

To defeat any claim that I am making mystical claims for the efficiencies of large government contractors—observe independent testimony from
a wonderful work: DEMOCRATIZING INNOVATION- by Eric Von Hippel
freely downloadable at, http://web.mit.edu/evhippel/www/books/DI/DemocInn.pdf Von Hippel makes this point:
“an early study of innovation in scientific instruments documented that
nearly 80 percent of the major improvements commercialized by instru-
ment manufacturers had been developed by users (von Hippel 1976). When
sample had been developed within manufacturing firms. They could be
convinced otherwise only when supplied with actual publications by user-
scientists describing user-built prototypes of those instrument improve-
ments—prototypes developed from 5 to 7 years before any instrument firm
had sold a functionally equivalent commercial product.”
In retrospect it should be obvious that a small focused team can move quicker.

Even Rudyard Kipling could have told us that:
Down to Gehenna or up to the Throne,
He travels the fastest who travels alone.

(So now we reconsider the World War 2 tech boom: The 1940s deployment of dreams now fully mature that sprang from the 1910s to the 1930s) This only works during major wars between major powers, threatening enough that the bureaucracy is panicked into partial withdrawal: The bureaucratic institutional default of “Let’s see” is temporarily switched for “DO SOMETHING—NOW!” But suppose you have a lopsided struggle like the US and (fill in the blank, what one cynic called our ‘Asian enemy of the week’, (really decade) Japanese, Koreans, Chinese, Vietnamese, Cambodians, Iranians, Iraqis, Afghans) on a dramatically lower tech level, then only minor developments (better hot weather or thermal cold weather gear) are deployed, but not transformative cycle-stretching inventions (nuclear power, jet engines) deployed in struggles between major powers. Indeed, wars between major and minor powers may dissipate capital on both sides, enabling effective tech deployment rates LESS than otherwise possible
One way to think of this is that a ‘backlog’ of as yet undeployed inventions exists in the tech pipeline. (first read a concept very similar to this in an essay on predicting futures in the SF magazine Analog, in the 1990s, wish I could give proper attribution, readers please chime in if you know that author--) to be deployed during key boom times (this was before the concept of the Maslow Window was developed and publicized) OR if the ‘deployment rush’ does not happen for whatever historical reason—to lie dormant for decades as each dribbled out into a much narrower tech deployment channel.
But between 1953 and 1963 for example, we went from Mach 2 aircraft being invented to Mach 25 orbital spacecraft being deployed—in 1968 to Mach 35 escape velocity spacecraft—and since then nothing fundamentally new in manned aerospace. (Note that the 1967 Outer Space Treaty removed by agreement with the Russians the prospect of a lunar land rush/arms race that had driven previous Maslow Windows) The urgency went out, and the wind went out of the tech sails.
As Arthur C. Clarke had previously noted in Profiles Of The Future (1962) this tech curve of increased speed from the early ‘50s, to the early ‘60s would if continued till the year 2010, have placed the speed of light itself within man’s grasp. (Clarke called it a discontinuity in the speed curve, but I wonder…). (I remember reading at least 2 cold war science fiction novels that postulated the US-SU (Soviet Union) contest going to the stage of interstellar spacecraft (and presumably rival star empires). Certainly that kind of extended deployment technology race would have been feasible, even if not the literally stellar results obtained. But if they had been…

In the book The Year 2000 by Herman Kahn (Freely downloadable) http://www.hudson.org/files/publications/kahn_yr2000.pdf (WARNING 88 megabyte file, don’t download without knowing what you’re getting into…)
He advanced in one spot the thesis (greatly condensed here) that every 5 years since 1945 a complete generational technology transformation had occurred as complete as that between 1919 (end of first World War) and 1939 (beginning of second World War). Summarizing greatly with the bomber sequence B-29, B-36, B-47, B-52, B-58, B-70 (That last never actually deployed, but “woulda coulda shoulda”) From 1945 to 1970—and then the feeling of urgency and crisis went away, and so did the rapid tech deployment boom.
So the idea of a narrow range of years, a window to deploy tech or have it remain theoretical, is not merely a supposition but in some areas may be demonstratable fact. Yes, after the fact we can play “woulda coulda shoulda” games…but others have pointed out how, for example, a technology like fuel cells may be developed and if not taking off in the next say 10 years or so, gets its industrial ‘niche’ occupied by another development and sits on the shelf for over a hundred years after that as a laboratory demonstration. There is a time and tide to tech as well as the lives of men.

Another way in which the Maslow Window cycle has been uniquely abused this time around (ie the natural state of affairs messed with to the point where aberrations not seen in previous cycles may appear this time) is the extraordinary educational decay in sub-college public education in the USA—(and through academic adminstration gamesmanship, analogous but different distorting effects in the quality output of still functional higher institutions of learning)
Historically, to be fair, there have always been functional illiterates in the USA. But usually these were acknowledged dropouts, not those who actually had ‘done the time’ in the system. Usually those could read at least at a functional level.
(In an old jail closed in the 1980s, for example, the oldest surviving etched graffiti, by accounts I have read, was stunning in its penmanship and even featured original poems. The newer graffiti, in effortless perfect marker, was illiterate, coarse and left the impression on the reader of societal decline. Anecdotal, for sure. But indicative?)
Today, however, for example half the population of Detroit is thought to be functionally illiterate—the vast majority having been through school at high funding rates. This would simply not have been believed in the post 1957 Sputnik educational funding rush. It is not merely that American urban schools are not globally competitive—but rather that their graduates are apparently unable to even maintain the economy of their local area at the same level. Once those a step above functional illiteracy had practical job training and apprenticeship pathways that worked to get a good factory job—enabling a family supporting income at a reasonable rate of effort and output—now such a prospect for someone growing up in a urban school system is rare indeed. More common of the flavor of today (few actually do this) is to study industrial theory for a while in some university courses, find that there is no actual market outside teaching for industrial theory, work in some low-paying retail job for which your university time was non-relevant and when the economy contracts be forced to public support.
But this very decline in educational quality and career training result (coupled with the decline in the industrial sector which sharply limits hiring for those who do succeed) can bring people to a ‘tipping point’ ready to accept otherwise unacceptable ‘whole system package changes’.
Is it possible this is a manifestation of self organized criticality (SOC); emergence of a “critical state” in the US national education system. During the fractal Maslow Window, when system agents (e.g., corporations needing workers, agencies, competing countries, individuals personally squeezed by the collapse of hiring who thus need to upgrade their skill base to reemerge competitive ) interact and evolve most intensely, the system is vulnerable to rapid, major transitions such as (for example) massive training pulses or spreads of new techniques. Also coming with this is the confidence to try new things as a result of previous career steps up. Outside the Maslow Window the system is less fractal (low SOC index), counter-ebullient, and requires several decades to self organize again into a critical state.
Another self-organized criticality possibility might be simply this: We are used to old industries dying and new ones being born to take their place. In this latest, truly messed with cycle, (characterized by unprecedented control of the economy by the government and its contractors) old industries have been dying (Chrysler, GM) but new industries have not been born. We are even used to old cities based on old industries dying (Detroit, East St. Louis) but the new cities and their new industries in many cases have been built (sometimes literally in the case of Las Vegas) on foundations of sand—the so called FIRE (Finance, insurance and real estate) economy, taken as an abstraction for a “transaction economy” which does not create wealth in terms of needed product but transfers wealth around because of direct or indirect government mandates for services AT A NON MARKET PRICE. (ie if schools were better all over and taxes were hugely lower so would be the effective cost of real estate—medical care would be cheaper if allowed to import generic drugs from overseas at 1/20th the price and the emergency clinics not mandated to serve anyone who walks in the door—people might choose to self insure rather than facing a legal requirement forcing you to do business with a car insurance company.) In all these cases, the FIRE economy relies on legal mandates (often literally written by their lobbies and sent to lawmakers as “model legislation”) to force you to do business with them at their price. If you could refuse, the prices would have to decline to be attractive. Ah, but you can’t refuse… full price, please…

Inflexibility in an economy is like inflexibility in a personal working style—it makes it hard to adapt to changing circumstances —education where you do not have the right to opt out of local taxes if you wish to send your kids to private school—investments where you cannot put IRA money into a friends new tech business informally but must send it through Wall Street tollbooths first--- in each case, rents are extracted and inferior (non custom) quality of service built in. And worse, it eats up funds available for real tech and real change. This is no more a real base for a real economy with good paying, competitive world class output than Detroit is an example of healthy world class auto industry.
Politically connected and ‘good enough’ industries protected for example by arranged government purchases of cop cars or fleet sales cannot compete against world-class auto exporters whose products are greatly preferred by private buyers (and break down less often)
In terms of SOC self organized criticality, this loss of competition also is reaching a critical state and MUST be dealt with soon if the US is to reap the benefits of the Maslow Window (rather than its overseas competitors)
This is not the first time that the US has had powerful rivals during a Maslow Window—France and Britain in the early 1800s, the same in the mid 1800s, Germany in the early 1900s, Russia in the 1960s. But this IS the first time since the 19th century that a rival of the relative size of China is emerging to compete with the USA, and with such an opposite ascending trajectory vs the declining US one
The US must reverse its descent or other nations will reap the primary benefits of the Maslow window.
We will be passed by China unless we get a move on
New York Times (8/15/10) concurs.
Brian Wang of Next Big Future projects China passing in PPP terms (purchasing equivalent) if current trends continue, between 2016-18. The IMF computes 2016. Wiki uses those stats here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_future_GDP_(PPP)_estimates People who have problems with this mostly concede it’s possible a decade later. But by then it could be in absolute dollar vs yuan terms. The point is, there is a huge momentum to getting an economy moving forward—or backward, terribly hard to change, and even more wrenching to attempt going from deceleration to acceleration. President Obama’s call to double exports http://www.soundmoneyproject.org/?p=3913



Bruce Cordell’s articles on Asia’s ascent:



If the USA does not use the Maslow Window, others may do the hard work to become the next tech leading power and the US will be in the position of Great Britain after the Second World War—with a struggling economy, dependent on foreign cash flows, with huge restrictions on what you can buy and import, (including foreign fuels) and in general be a bad place to do business. If people of ability, not wanting to spend their hoped for brilliant careers in a place with no opportunity, decide to leave and work elsewhere, that can only accelerate the path of national decline.

Or, we can choose to fix what needs fixing, clear the decks of what needs clearing, and face the upcoming future—and its’ Maslow Window—with the determination to make the USA the tech leader till the next tech window around 2071. We cannot control the winds of the zeitgeist. But we can control how we choose to angle our sails. I say set course for national success.

In conclusion the USA had better get its act together and change on a national level or face the fact that a Maslow Window comes to the world but once a lifetime, use it or lose it. If so-- AND we can keep out of a major war-- we can benefit from the full potential 10 years of the Maslow Window.


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