Saturday Snippet: Order, counter-order, disorder

 

We have a new political crisis in this country to go with all those that have already plagued us.  This time, Texas (supported by 25 other states) is in open conflict with the Biden administration over the influx of illegal aliens into the USA.  Texas regards it (rightly, IMHO) as an invasion that threatens its security as a state.  The Biden administration maintains that Texas has no right to interfere in national affairs.  There have already been court rulings, actions, retaliations, and (I'm sure) a great deal of behind-the-scenes maneuvering.  Where will it end?  Who knows?

The problem is, this may be "the last straw that breaks the camel's back", and precipitates a major constitutional conflict between federal and state's rights . . . or it may not.  Nobody knows.  I'd say it's more likely than not, but I could be wrong.  I also think (and have said before in these pages) that our national debt, and the spendthrift policies in Washington D.C. (by both parties), are likely to precipitate a financial crisis - but that hasn't happened yet.  (I'm pretty sure it will, but when is the question.). The question is, what makes something into such a crisis, a "last straw"?

In his book "Ubiquity:  Why Catastrophes Happen", Mark Buchanan takes a closer look at that conundrum.

The blurb reads:

Critically acclaimed science journalist, Mark Buchanan tells the fascinating story of the discovery that there is a natural structure of instability woven into the fabric of our world, which explains why catastrophes-- both natural and human-- happen.

Scientists have recently discovered a new law of nature and its footprints are virtually everywhere-- in the spread of forest fires, mass extinctions, traffic jams, earthquakes, stock-market fluctuations, the rise and fall of nations, and even trends in fashion, music and art. Wherever we look, the world is modelled on a simple template: like a steep pile of sand, it is poised on the brink of instability, with avalanches-- in events, ideas or whatever-- following a universal pattern of change. This remarkable discovery heralds what Mark Buchanan calls the new science of 'ubiquity', a science whose secret lies in the stuff of the everyday world. Combining literary flair with scientific rigour, this enthralling book documents the coming revolution by telling the story of the researchers' exploration of the law, their ingenious work and unexpected insights.

Buchanan reveals that we are witnessing the emergence of an extraordinarily powerful new field of science that will help us comprehend the bewildering and unruly rhythms that dominate our lives and may even lead to a true science of the dynamics of human culture and history.

It's not a comfortable book to read, because it makes it clear that we can't predict problems, disasters and turmoil with any certainty - we can only predict uncertainty with confidence, meaning that if our plans and predictions for the future are too fixed, too dogmatic, too certain, we're almost bound to be confounded by what actually happens.

Here's how Mr. Buchanan applies the "sandpile analogy" to events in the world around us.

The physics research journals are now stuffed with papers about the workings of simple mathematical games: some meant to explore the basic historical process behind crystal growth, others to mimic that which lies behind the formation of rough surfaces, and so on. There are hundreds, each slightly different in its details, but all sharing a deeply historical nature. These games offer a way to proceed in the face of history and its messy strings of accidents. In effect, they permit scientists to greatly simplify the things they’re studying, whether an economy or an ecosystem, and to focus on the fundamental processes at work without being distracted by myriad confusing details.

And of all these games, one stands out as a kind of archetype of simplicity, and has been central to the discovery of the underlying cause of a vast range of tumultuous events. To understand this “sandpile game,” a focal point for our story, imagine dropping grains of sand one by one onto a table and watching the pile grow. A grain falls accidentally here or there, and then in time the pile grows over it, freezing it in place. Afterward, the pile feels forever more the influence of that grain being just where it is and not elsewhere. In this case, clearly, history matters, since what happens now can never be washed away, but affects the entire course of the future.

“All great deeds and all great thoughts,” Albert Camus once wrote, “have ridiculous beginnings.” And so it was in 1987 when physicists Per Bak, Chao Tang, and Kurt Weisenfeld began playing this sandpile game in an office at Brookhaven National Laboratory, in New York State. As it turns out, this seemingly trivial game lies behind the discovery of the widespread importance of the critical state—the discovery that can help us to make sense of upheavals.

The Sand Men and the Critical State

Theoretical physicists enjoy posing seemingly trivial questions that, after a bit of thinking, turn out not to be so trivial. In this respect the sandpile game turned out to be a real winner. As grains pile up, it seems clear that a broad mountain of sand should edge slowly skyward, and yet things obviously cannot continue in this way. As the pile grows its sides become steeper, and it becomes more likely that the next falling grain will trigger an avalanche. Sand would then slide downhill to some flatter region below, making the mountain smaller, not bigger. As a result, the mountain should alternately grow and shrink, its jagged silhouette forever fluctuating.

Bak, Tang, and Weisenfeld wanted to understand those fluctuations: What is the typical rhythm of the growing and shrinking sandpile? Of course, they didn’t really care about sandpiles. In studying this silly problem, they were really chasing some insights regarding the general workings of nonequilibrium systems. The sandpile seemed like a nice, simple starting point, and with luck, they hoped, they might discover in this setting some patterns of behavior that would apply to a lot more than just sandpiles.

Unfortunately, dropping sand one grain at a time is a delicate and laborious business. So in seeking some answers concerning the rhythm of the pile’s growth, Bak and his colleagues turned to the computer. They instructed it to drop imaginary “grains” onto an imaginary “table,” with simple rules dictating how grains would topple downhill as the pile grew steeper. It was not quite the same as a real sandpile, and yet the computer had one spectacular advantage: a pile would grow in seconds rather than days. It was so easy to play the game that the three physicists soon became glued to their computer screens, obsessed with dropping grains and watching the results. And they began to see some curious things.

The first big surprise came as the answer to a simple question: What is the typical size of an avalanche? How big, that is, should you expect the very next avalanche to be? The researchers ran a huge number of tests, counting the grains in millions of avalanches in thousands of sandpiles, looking for the typical number involved. The result? Well…there was no result, for there simply was no “typical” avalanche. Some involved a single grain; others ten, a hundred, or a thousand. Still others were pile-wide cataclysms involving millions that brought nearly the whole mountain tumbling down. At any time, literally anything, it seemed, might be just about to happen.

Imagine wandering into the street, anticipating how tall the next person might be. If people’s heights worked like these avalanches, then the next person might be less than an inch tall, or over a mile high. You might crush the next person like an insect before seeing him or her. Or imagine that the duration of your trips home from work went this way; you’d be unable to plan your life, since tomorrow evening’s journey might take anything from a few seconds to a few years. This is a rather dramatic kind of unpredictability, to say the least.

To find out why it should show up in their sandpile game, Bak and colleagues next played a trick with their computer. Imagine peering down on the pile from above, and coloring it in according to its steepness. Where it is relatively flat and stable, color it green; where steep and, in avalanche terms, “ready to go,” color it red. What do you see? They found that at the outset the pile looked mostly green, but that, as the pile grew, the green became infiltrated with ever more red. With more grains, the scattering of red danger spots grew until a dense skeleton of instability ran through the pile. Here then was a clue to its peculiar behavior: a grain falling on a red spot can, by dominolike action, cause sliding at other nearby red spots. If the red network was sparse, and all trouble spots were well isolated one from the other, then a single grain could have only limited repercussions. But when the red spots come to riddle the pile, the consequences of the next grain become fiendishly unpredictable. It might trigger only a few tumblings, or it might instead set off a cataclysmic chain reaction involving millions. The sandpile seemed to have configured itself into a hypersensitive and peculiarly unstable condition in which the next falling grain could trigger a response of any size whatsoever.

This may seem like something that only a physicist could find interesting. After all, in other settings, scientists have known about this condition for more than a century; they have referred to it technically as a critical state. But to physicists, it has always been seen as a kind of theoretical freak and sideshow, a devilishly unstable and unusual condition that arises only under the most exceptional circumstances—in liquids, for example, when held at precise temperatures and pressures under extraordinarily well controlled laboratory conditions. In the sandpile game, however, a critical state seemed to arise naturally and inevitably through the mindless sprinkling of grains.

This led Bak, Tang, and Weisenfeld to ponder a provocative possibility: If the critical state arises so easily and inevitably in a simple computer model of a growing sandpile, might something like it also arise elsewhere? Despite what scientists had previously believed, might the critical state in fact be quite common? Could riddling lines of instability of a logically equivalent sort run through the Earth’s crust, for example, through forests and ecosystems, and perhaps even through the somewhat more abstract “fabric” of our economies? Think of those first few crumbling rocks near Kōbe, or that first insignificant dip in prices that triggered the stock market crash of 1987. Might these have been “sand grains” acting at another level? Could the special organization of the critical state explain why the world at large seems so susceptible to unpredictable upheavals?

A decade of research by hundreds of other physicists has explored this question and taken the initial idea much further. There are many subtleties and twists in the story to which we shall come later in this book, but the basic message, roughly speaking, is simple: The peculiar and exceptionally unstable organization of the critical state does indeed seem to be ubiquitous in our world. Researchers in the past few years have found its mathematical fingerprints in the workings of all the upheavals I’ve mentioned so far, as well as in the spreading of epidemics, the flaring of traffic jams, the patterns by which instructions trickle down from managers to workers in an office, and in many other things. At the heart of our story, then, lies the discovery that networks of things of all kinds—atoms, molecules, species, people, and even ideas—have a marked tendency to organize themselves along similar lines. On the basis of this insight, scientists are finally beginning to fathom what lies behind tumultuous events of all sorts, and to see patterns at work where they have never seen them before.

Critical World?

So the ubiquity of the critical state might well be considered the first really solid discovery of complexity theory—or of what I have been calling historical physics. This is a discovery with implications, and not only for physicists and other scientists. If the laws of physics didn’t allow “frozen” accidents, the world would be in equilibrium, and everything would be like the gas in a balloon, resting forever in the same uniform and unchanging condition. But the laws of physics do allow events to have consequences that can become locked in place, and so alter the playing field on which the future unfolds. The laws of physics allow history to exist, and to play a crucial role in the way our world works. The discovery of the ubiquity of the critical state, then, is also the first deep discovery concerning the way that historical processes usually work, which brings us back to the point from which we started this chapter.

In principle, history could unfold far more predictably than it does. It needn’t, in principle, be subject to terrific cataclysms of all sorts. One of our tasks in this book is to examine why the character of human history is as it is, and not otherwise. The answer, I suggest, is to be found in the critical state and in the new nonequilibrium science of games, which aims to study and categorize the kinds of historical processes that are possible. If many historians have searched for gradual trends or cycles as a way of finding meaning and making sense of history, then they were using the wrong tools. These notions arise in equilibrium physics and astronomy. The proper tools are to be found in nonequilibrium physics, which is specifically tuned to understanding things in which history matters.

In the very same year that Bak, Tang, and Weisenfeld invented their game, the historian Paul Kennedy published The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers.

In that book he laid out the idea that the large-scale historical rhythm of our world is determined by the natural buildup and release of stress in the global network of politics and economics. His view of the dynamics of history leaves little room for the influence of “great individuals,” and is more in keeping with the words of John Kenneth Galbraith quoted at the beginning of this chapter. It sees individuals as products of their time, having limited freedom to respond in the face of powerful forces. Kennedy’s thesis, in essence, is this: The economic power of a nation naturally waxes and wanes. As times change, some nations are left clinging to power that their economic base can no longer support; others find new economic strength, and naturally seek greater influence. The inevitable result? Tension, which grows until something gives way. Usually the stress finds its release through armed conflict, after which the influence of each nation is brought back into rough balance with its true economic strength.

If this sounds at all like the processes at work in the Earth’s crust, where stresses build up slowly to be released in sudden earthquakes, or in the sandpile game, where the slopes grow higher and more unstable until leveled again in some avalanche, it may be no coincidence. We shall see later that wars actually occur with the same statistical pattern as do earthquakes or avalanches in the sandpile game. Kennedy could find strong support for his thesis—as well as a more adequate language in which to describe it—in this theoretical idea. He may have been struggling to express in words, and in a historical context, what the concept of the critical state expresses mathematically.

Whatever lessons historians may be able to draw from all this, the meaning for the individual is more ambiguous. For if the world is organized into a critical state, or something much like it, then even the smallest forces can have tremendous effects. In our social and cultural networks, there can be no isolated act, for our world is designed—not by us, but by the forces of nature—so that even the tiniest of acts will be amplified and registered by the larger world. The individual, then, has power, and yet the nature of that power reflects a kind of irreducible existential predicament. If every individual act may ultimately have great consequences, those consequences are almost entirely unforeseeable. Out there right now on some red square in the field of history a grain may be about to fall. Someone trying to bring warring parties to terms may succeed, or may instead spark a conflagration. Someone trying to stir up conflict may usher in a lengthy term of peace. In our world, beginnings bear little relationship to endings, and Albert Camus was right: “All great deeds and all great thoughts have ridiculous beginnings.”

One of the inevitable themes of our story is that if one wants to learn about the rhythms of history (or, shall we say, its disrhythms), one might just as well become familiar with the process by which, say, earthquakes happen. If the organization of upheaval and hypersensitivity is everywhere, one need not look far to find it.

Analyzing Mr. Buchanan's thesis in relation to economics, John Mauldin observed:

We are adding sand to not just one inevitably collapsing sandpile, but dozens and maybe hundreds of them. They won’t keep growing forever.

Which particular sandpile will fall first? It could be many, but it will likely be debt-oriented. And the fingers of instability tell us that it doesn’t matter which grain of sand is the trigger, just that there will be one. Millions of investors think they can continue acting as if today will just be like yesterday, which will be like tomorrow, and then be able to sell when trouble appears.

They’re partly right. They will be able to sell… but well below the prices they expect.

I write often about the connectedness of so many global markets and how the debt crisis, unfunded pension liabilities, and government promises all over the world seemingly keep mounting, yet markets go up more.

I think the mother of all Minsky moments is building. It will not be an instant sandpile collapse but instead, take years because we have $500 trillion of debt to work through. Remember, that debt just can’t be swept away. It is both money somebody owes and an asset on somebody else’s balance sheet. If you are retired, your pension and healthcare benefits are part of your net worth. They are assets on your balance sheet that you count on to cover future spending. We can’t just take that away without huge consequences to culture and society.

But the fingers of instability, the total credit system, are seemingly growing with more red sand dots every month. All are inextricably linked. One day, another Thailand or Russia or something else (it makes no difference which) will start a cascade.

There's more at the link.

The really frightening thing to me is the interrelatedness of crises.  What if the constitutional crisis between Texas and Washington D.C. precipitates an economic crisis?  The Biden administration seems hell-bent on causing one, with its refusal to sanction new natural gas facilities in Texas due to the latter's recalcitrance on illegal aliens.  Texas has many ways in which it can retaliate, being the USA's primary energy producer and distributor.  It can cause grievous harm to the economies of many states, and to that of the nation as a whole, if it wants to.  Could a political dispute cause an economic meltdown?  You bet your boots it could!

Right now, we're in a very parlous situation indeed.  Keep your eyes and ears open, and your head down, and watch carefully.

Peter