by David Steven | Apr 29, 2008 | Climate and resource scarcity, Cooperation and coherence
Last night I was at Gresham College where their Professor of Commerce, Michael Mainelli, was lecturing on global risks (read his lecture here).Mainelli concluded his lecture with this neat throwaway line:
I sometimes think global risks keep us from attacking each other by providing a common enemy. So, if we get started attacking global risks collaboratively, perhaps we can save the planet from us, and us from ourselves.
It’s an interesting argument – part true, and part wishful thinking (as Michael of course recognises). In the face of a threat, people either round up a posse and drive it out of town, or they abandon Main Street to the bad guys and cower in shuttered houses. There’s a knife edge, in other words, between atomisation and collective action.
We can see this happening at the moment, where the food crisis is (mostly) driving countries towards a narrower view of their self interest – as they block exports and build up reserves, even if this is leading to a less effective collective outcome. The UN, meanwhile, is trying to round up the posse…
This is classic Prisoner’s Dilemma territory – where players make a rational decision to compete, even though co-operation would make more sense in the grand scheme of things. They treat a non-zero-sum game like a zero-sum one.
An iterated prisoner’s dilemma (where the game is repeated with the same players), however, has a different logic. Robert Axelrod:
What makes it possible for cooperation to emerge is the fact that players might meet again. This possibility means that the choices made today not only determine the outcome of this move, but can also influence the later choice of players. The future can therefore cast a shadow back upon the present and thereby affect the current situation.
This ‘shadow of the future’ argument reminds me of the controversy over the use of discount rates in the Stern review. Stern’s critics argued strongly for a higher discount rate – they wanted to shrink the shadow of the future. As John Quigley explains:
Nordhaus and Boyer propose an even higher rate of 3 per cent, which is tantamount to saying that the future (certainly anyone more than two generations away from us) can go to hell for all we care, since the welfare of our great-grandchildren has about a tenth of the weight we accord the current generation. Not surprisingly, this translates into a ‘do-nothing now’ approach to global warming.
In his talk, Mainelli identified four types of glue that can hold together a collaborative response: knowledge (or shared awareness, as Alex and I refer to it); markets (mechanisms for pricing risk and rewarding response); standards (which frame choices); and policies (which regulate them).
But the stickiness of the glue is determined by how much of the future we mix in. Given narrow horizons, there’s little chance that a communal response to a risk can emerge. This quote, from the conservative philosopher Michael Oakeshott, captures the challenge well:
The politics of our society are a conversation in which past, present and future each has a voice; and though one or other of them may on occasion properly prevail, none permanently dominates, and on this account we are free.
by Charlie Edwards | Apr 29, 2008 | Conflict and security, UK
Last year I held a seminar at Demos on Silent Risks Tackling organised crime in the 21st century. A central argument put forward by the panel of experts was that as much of the harm done by organised crime remained hidden from the public eye the scale of the threat was still not widely recognised by society. As such the seriousness of organised crime relative to terrorism, for example, was consistently underplayed.
There was also much concern about the serious organised crime agency (SOCA) – not about its role per se but rather more seriously where the organisation had disappeared to. Almost overnight Stephen Lander (ex DGSS and now Chair of SOCA) had drawn a blanket of secrecy around the organisation, but not before he had announced that serious criminals had roughly a 5% chance of being caught.
So it was interesting to read Sean O’Neill in The Times today asking the question – are we ignoring organised crime? He makes an unhelpful but nevertheless interesting comparison – more than 700 people are killed by heroin in Britain every year while terrorism in Britain, by contrast, killed no one, nor the year before and has not claimed a life since July 7, 2005. But as O’Neill suggests
Yet it is terrorism that Gordon Brown says we must fear above all else. There are, he and his ministers and security officials keep telling us, 30 active plots against Britain – although keen observers might note that the number never seems to change no matter how many conspiracies are foiled.
It took 9/11 to force Britain to take the Islamist terrorist threat seriously. Since then the counter-terrorism agencies have turned Britain into a hostile environment for terrorists. Organised crime, however, doesn’t do spectaculars. The men behind it are interested in profits, not propaganda and, as a result, their reach into our society is much more insidious and unchecked than that of terrorism.
The mismatch between the resources devoted to fighting organised crime compared with those directed towards counter-terrorism is unnerving. Government says that there are millions of pounds in police budgets that should be devoted to dealing with organised crime. In truth, only a handful of British police forces know how to tackle it.
But surely it is a good thing to keep your head down and get on with the job? Well not if you need to justify your organisation’s role to Ministers and senior officials in the system… something that all Whitehall departments understand they must do if they are to secure funding.
So what has been the result of so much secrecy? (more…)
by Charlie Edwards | Apr 29, 2008 | Climate and resource scarcity
I admit I have never heard this but will now shameless use it… in answer to a question about what impact an individual can really have on climate change:
If you think you’re too small to be effective, you have never been in bed with a mosquito
by Charlie Edwards | Apr 29, 2008 | Africa, Climate and resource scarcity, Conflict and security, Cooperation and coherence, Economics and development, Global system, South Asia
What are the connections between climate change and migration? Not as obvious as one might think… one of the conversations we’ve been having in the coffee break is the lack of hard evidence when it comes to the relationship(s) between development, conflict, and climate change and the increasing difficulty to demonstrate cause and effect. Rhetorically making the connections between cause and effect (between climate change and migration) is pretty easy and serves a useful purpose – it highlights an issue and a set of tangible actions that the government can either deliver on or think further about. But there two things we need to take into account.
Firstly, everyone seems to agree there is a real dearth of evidence on the causal links between risks and issues. Much of what we know rests on stories, specific observations, estimates (or in some cases guesstimates) and anecdotes. All of these are time and context specific and yet they can have a major effect on the system often resulting in superficial and perverse actions. For one thing it is much easier for governments and international institutions to focus on ‘food bombing’, ‘blanket throwing’ and ‘water distribution’ than identifying and managing root causes which demands sophisticated, process driven approaches based on a shared awareness of the problem and a common agenda.
This leads to a second issue – that we don’t have a standard approach across the system to conflict or fragile and failing states and as we don’t always agree on the scale and nature of the problem we (government’s, international institutions and NGOs) end up taking quite differing approaches (so for example we focus on public education when we should be thinking of risk reduction)… this doesn’t mean we should be looking for a unified theory of development, as one NGO person scoffed at but it does mean evidence becomes a key factor in how we manage the problems in the future.
by Daniel Korski | Apr 29, 2008 | Conflict and security, Economics and development, UK
Despite having practically invented modern counter-insurgency, today Britain is woefully ill-equipped for this kind of complex, mosaic-style warfare. The Times, echoing David’s post from a few days ago, has picked up on the problems Britain has in spending money in places like Afghanistan.
As readers will know, even though the Labour government sought to overcome the problems of “departmentalism” in 1997 with the promotion of “joined-up” government and the creation of cross-departmental funding mechanisms, through the Global Conflict Pools, one of its main innovations – the creation of a stand-alone Department for International Development – militated against the kind of close civil-military cooperation necessary in post-conflict operations.
This stands in sharp contrast to the U.S, which – led by David Petraeus and his band of “neo-coins” – has revamped its approach entirely.
How to solve the problem in Britain is contentious issue, which I debated on the Guardian website a few weeks ago (see here and here).
The only way to resolve it is to rewrite the International Development Act. Yes, I know that the Act itself does not prevent DfiD from spending funds, but it creates a cultural ethos inside the department, which militates again the necessary kind of flexibility and cooperative links with the military.
(more…)
