Progress

The last time the global economic scorekeeping system ran into trouble because a few players were hoarding all the poker chips (the 1930's) so nobody else could bet, the only thing the folks in charge could come up with as a high enough priority to merit redistributing the chips more equitably was a World War.

This time around, our weapons are advanced enough that a war fought with the same intensity as World War II would probably bring about the collapse of our civilization - so the folks in charge will have to come up with some other solution. Or we could just have a feeble global economy indefinitely, I suppose.

Living in a Material World...

Another one of those articles I just like to highlight as an indicator of where we're at these days.

The New York times writes about how

"The United Nations says that the world is facing the worst extinction crisis since the dinosaurs were wiped out 65 million years ago, driven by a rising human population and spinoffs such as pollution, expanding cities and global warming."

The focus of the article is all about how this might harm the economy from the first line, "Losses of animal and plant species are an increasing economic threat" and all the way through:

"Apart from food production, less obvious sectors such as tourism, medicines or energy production with biofuels all depended upon nature and diversity of species.

"There is an economic opportunity here," said Finn Kateraas, a co-chair who works at the Norwegian Directorate for Nature Management, told Reuters. Protecting species can help safeguard long-term economic growth."

(emphasis added)

I think it says something that the only way people see of preventing humanity from wiping out a huge chunk of the other species we share the planet with is by appealing to our economic (material) self-interest rather than any concern with the survival of other species for their own sake.

More Progress

"CanWest Global Communication Corp's., proposal to transfer the National Post newspaper to one of its subsidiaries which already contains the firm's other assets such as the Vancouver Sun and Ottawa Citizen, has been given approval by both the court and lenders.

In the documents filed by CanWest in the court this week, the company stated that if the required shuffling does not happen, it will have to axe the publication of the National Post. It was revealed that creditors at the parent company were no longer willing to cover any more losses at the newspaper.

After the ruling was passed, Paul Godfrey, president and CEO of the Post, said "The Post has found its logical home, and hopefully these doomsday scenarios we have been hearing for more than a decade will soon disappear. This is another step on the path to profitability".

I guess closing the paper would mean the end of any potential 'path to probability' so a move that staves off closure of the paper technically is on the path to profitability - assuming there is one, of course. Given that the primary purpose of the National Post's existence is to further the policies and the political party that are supported by the convicted felon that founded it - a party and policies that I personally oppose and consider harmful to the country, I'd naturally be happy enough to see the National Post just disappear.

Progress

I see that Bank of Montreal just completed spending a pile of money to renovate their Vancouver Main branch, moving the teller lines from the basement to the main floor. Meanwhile, two blocks away, HSBC is spending a pile of money to move the tellers from the main floor to the basement...

The Paperless Office

...has finally arrived. For me, anyway. Other than the odd long document that I need to review in depth, I'm pretty much paper free these days. Still no flying cars though.

Good News For People Who Like Bad News

"‘Well sure as planets come
I know that they end
And if I'm here when that happens
Will you promise me this, my friend,
Please - Bury me with it!
I just don't need none of that Mad Max bulls**t"¹


Post Holiday book review #2: "Our Final Century"² by Martin Rees

For the last few years, I've had this gradually growing sense that the laws of probability are working against mankind and the continued existence of our current civilization.

While the capacity of the system which sustains us (the earth + all our inventions and institutions) to withstand damage is relatively static, our capacity to inflict large scale damage is growing rapidly (exponentially, arguably).

Looking back 200 years, the only real threats to our entire civilization were things like (natural) viral outbreaks, an object from outer space hitting the earth, or an enormous volcanic eruption - that is, the same threats we have always faced.

Those threats are still with us, but we now face added risks like nuclear annihilation and deliberately engineered viruses. On top of that, our growing integration and ever greater sophistication leave us more and more vulnerable to severe computer viruses, economic crises and any number of other threats.

The odds of any one of these things occurring (severely enough to threaten our civilization) are all very small. But as you keep adding more and more things which could potentially go wrong, the probability steadily rises.

So, what about the book? Rees' contention is that, because of the argument I just outlined, we are unlikely to survive to the end of the century. At least not unless we find a way to send life to other planets or we give up much of our freedom to a totalitarian government. Rees devotes chapters to the various threats we face such as biological agents and nuclear threats as well as more esoteric stuff like universe threatening physics experiments while throwing out various depressing thoughts such as the idea that in any field of science the most pessimistic and negative people tend to be the ones who know the most - i.e. the true experts.

But when I got to the end, to tell the truth, I found it a bit disappointing. The writing is clear and concise and not alarmist in tone at all but I think if you just spend five minutes and close your eyes and imagine all the things which could go catastrophically wrong with our entire world that couldn't have gone wrong one or two centuries ago, then you probably don't need to bother reading it, but maybe it's just me. Still, if you find bad news interesting, or you think what I wrote above is just a bunch of bs, or if you want to see it spelled out thoroughly in book form by someone with actual credibility, it's worth a read.

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For those of you who are skeptical that we only have one century left, here's a timely piece of news from the BBC, (brought to my attention by Doug and his dynamic drivel) which provides a great example of the kind of thing me and Rees are talking about.

According to the article, the amount of sunlight reaching the earth has dropped by 10 to 30% in the last few decades. The same amount is reaching the earth's outer atmosphere as ever, but it's not all finding it's way through to the ground.

The leading theory to explain why is that "tiny airborne particles of soot, ash, sulphur compounds and other pollutants" are both reflecting sunlight and 'thickening' clouds so that they reflect more sunlight as well.

Apparently, scientists have been surprised that the increase in greenhouse gases hasn't caused a greater rise in temperatures. But they figure that this loss of sunlight ('global dimming' as it is known) may be offsetting global warming to a large extent.

So it seems possible, perhaps even likely, that the only reason we haven't suffered either a painful cooling or warming so far is that our activities have caused two large impacts on our climate, and they just happened to cancel each other out to a fair extent. i.e. We were lucky.

Now we're not making too much progress on reducing our emission which cause global warming, but the pollutants which cause global dimming are more and more coming under control because they are the cause of the visible air pollution which prematurely kills off so many in our large cities (not to mention blocking out the sky).

But if the dimming effect recedes, we may end up facing a much more severe warming trend. From the article:

"We're going to be in a situation unless we act where the cooling pollutant is dropping off while the warming pollutant is going up.

"That means we'll get reducing cooling and increased heating at the same time and that's a problem for us," says Dr Cox.

Even the most pessimistic forecasts of global warming may now have to be drastically revised upwards.

That means a temperature rise of 10 degrees Celsius by 2100 could be on the cards, giving the UK a climate like that of North Africa, and rendering many parts of the world uninhabitable."

Final century? I wouldn't bet against it.


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¹Despite taking it's name from a song lyric, this site isn't really a good source for musical info (especially on anything current), but I have to take a moment to mention the album "Good News for People Who Like Bad News", by Modest Mouse which is probably the best thing I've heard in quite a while and (obviously) provided the title for this post as well as the quote at the top which is from track 6, 'Bury Me With It'.

²In North America, the book was given the title, The Sorcerers StoneOur Final Hour, but I don't see why you would replace the literal 'Final Century' which is what the book is about with a metaphorical 'Final Hour' which just sounds like the hyperbole that it is.

The Complexity of Progress

Dave Pollard has an interesting post up at How to Save the World about moving beyond the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) to the Genuine Progress Indicator (GPI). Like they say in business, what gets measured gets done and with GDP, what gets measured is (roughly) the sum total of all goods and services purchased: without regard for whether what has been purchased is good for us or not and without regard for those transactions which weren't done for money.

The problem with attempting to replace GDP as the primary indicator of our success as a society is that the GDP is based on an economic framework in which everything is reduced to a common denominator of dollars in order to allow everything to be numerically combined. So far, to my knowledge, we have not developed any alternate 'currency' or set of units which we can use to measure ourselves and our society.

So if you want to construct a 'Progress Index' you need to arbitrarily choose what gets measured, arbitrarily choose how to measure it (in what units), and then arbitrarily choose how to translate it into a standard unit of measure.

For example, when the United Nations wants to measure progress based on more than just GDP, they add in life expectancy (measured in years), along with literacy rates (measured in percentage of adults) and school enrollments (measured in percentage of children). Then they calculate a life expectancy index (out of 100), an education index (out of 100) and a GDP index (out of 100). Then they take the average of those 3 scores to get a final number.

An alternate strategy, used by the GPI, is to accept the premise that money is the best unit to use for comparisons and to try and convert all the non-monetary factors (such as the value of housework, or biodiversity) into dollars. But what value do you place on being able to see a blue sky (instead of smog) during the summer, or on knowing that polar bears still exist outside of a zoo? Again we are reduced to making subjective judgments.

The pragmatist in me says, so what, we should just construct the best index we can and go with it - it's bound to be way better than the one-dimensional GDP figure.

But the theorist in me can't help wondering if there is some alternate currency we could use (based on energy and entropy perhaps), or at least some sensible framework for deciding what to include in the index and how important it is (besides dollars), or if maybe even the question we're asking (how do we measure our progress?) is ill-formed and we need to take a step back and re-evaluate why we are trying to progress or what the concept of progress even means.

I'm leaning more towards my pragmatic side on this one. At any rate, next time you hear that the GDP went up 3%, it's worth wondering how much of that increase was depletion of non-renewable resources, how much came at the expense of other sectors (like volunteer work) that we don't measure, how much was due to people working longer hours, how much was spent cleaning up pollution, how much depended on increased debt for consumers, how much was spent in fighting crime, depression, traffic jams, and on and on and on.