Harold Robertson at Palladium Magazine has an essay “Complex Systems Won’t Survive the Competence Crisis” (h/t Andrea Widburg). He starts off:
At a casual glance, the recent
cascades of American disasters might seem unrelated. In a span of fewer than
six months in 2017, three U.S. Naval warships experienced three separate
collisions resulting in 17 deaths. A year later, powerlines owned by PG&E started
a wildfire that killed 85 people. The pipeline carrying almost half of the East
Coast’s gasoline shut down due to a ransomware attack. Almost half a million
intermodal containers sat on cargo ships unable to dock at Los Angeles ports. A
train carrying thousands of tons of hazardous and flammable chemicals derailed
near East Palestine, Ohio. Air Traffic Control cleared a FedEx plane to land on
a runway occupied by a Southwest plane preparing to take off. Eye drops
contaminated with antibiotic-resistant bacteria killed four and blinded
fourteen.
While disasters like these are
often front-page news, the broader connection between the disasters barely
elicits any mention. America must be understood as a system of interwoven
systems; the healthcare system sends a bill to a patient using the postal
system, and that patient uses the mobile phone system to pay the bill with a
credit card issued by the banking system. All these systems must be assumed to
work for anyone to make even simple decisions. But the failure of one system
has cascading consequences for all of the adjacent systems. As a consequence of
escalating rates of failure, America’s complex systems are slowly collapsing.
And here’s his conclusion:
Americans living today are the
inheritors of systems that created the highest standard of living in human
history. Rather than protecting the competency that made those systems
possible, the modern preference for diversity has attenuated meritocratic
evaluation at all levels of American society. Given the damage already done to
competence and morale combined with the natural exodus of baby boomers with
decades worth of tacit knowledge, the biggest challenge of the coming decades
might simply be maintaining the systems we have today.
The path of least resistance will
be the devolution of complex systems and the reduction in the quality of life
that entails. For the typical resident in a second-tier city in Mexico, Brazil,
or South Africa, power outages are not uncommon, tap water is probably not safe
to drink, and hospital-associated infections are common and often fatal. Absent
a step change in the quality of American governance and a renewed culture of
excellence, they prefigure the country’s future.
Read the rest here. It’s a long read, and Mr. Robertson is
not optimistic, but as Ms. Widburg concluded: “If we recognize and address it, maybe it’s still
possible to pull the airplane of state out of its deep dive toward the earth.”
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