Here today, gone tomorrow -- could the United States fall that fast?
Bipin Gautam
Here today, gone tomorrow -- could the United States fall that fast?
By Niall Ferguson
February 28, 2010
<http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-oe-ferguson28-2010feb28,0,2697391.story>
For centuries, historians, political theorists, anthropologists and
the public have tended to think about the political process in
seasonal, cyclical terms. From Polybius to Paul Kennedy, from ancient
Rome to imperial Britain, we discern a rhythm to history. Great
powers, like great men, are born, rise, reign and then gradually wane.
No matter whether civilizations decline culturally, economically or
ecologically, their downfalls are protracted.
In the same way, the challenges that face the United States are often
represented as slow-burning. It is the steady march of demographics --
which is driving up the ratio of retirees to workers -- not bad policy
that condemns the public finances of the United States to sink deeper
into the red. It is the inexorable growth of China's economy, not
American stagnation, that will make the gross domestic product of the
People's Republic larger than that of the United States by 2027.
As for climate change, the day of reckoning could be as much as a
century away. These threats seem very remote compared with the time
frame for the deployment of U.S. soldiers to Afghanistan, in which the
unit of account is months, not years, much less decades.
But what if history is not cyclical and slow-moving but arrhythmic --
at times almost stationary but also capable of accelerating suddenly,
like a sports car? What if collapse does not arrive over a number of
centuries but comes suddenly, like a thief in the night?
Great powers are complex systems, made up of a very large number of
interacting components that are asymmetrically organized, which means
their construction more resembles a termite hill than an Egyptian
pyramid. They operate somewhere between order and disorder. Such
systems can appear to operate quite stably for some time; they seem to
be in equilibrium but are, in fact, constantly adapting. But there
comes a moment when complex systems "go critical." A very small
trigger can set off a "phase transition" from a benign equilibrium to
a crisis -- a single grain of sand causes a whole pile to collapse.
Not long after such crises happen, historians arrive on the scene.
They are the scholars who specialize in the study of "fat tail" events
-- the low-frequency, high-impact historical moments, the ones that
are by definition outside the norm and that therefore inhabit the
"tails" of probability distributions -- such as wars, revolutions,
financial crashes and imperial collapses. But historians often
misunderstand complexity in decoding these events. They are trained to
explain calamity in terms of long-term causes, often dating back
decades. This is what Nassim Taleb rightly condemned in "The Black
Swan" as "the narrative fallacy."
In reality, most of the fat-tail phenomena that historians study are
not the climaxes of prolonged and deterministic story lines; instead,
they represent perturbations, and sometimes the complete breakdowns,
of complex systems.
To understand complexity, it is helpful to examine how natural
scientists use the concept. Think of the spontaneous organization of
termites, which allows them to construct complex hills and nests, or
the fractal geometry of water molecules as they form intricate
snowflakes. Human intelligence itself is a complex system, a product
of the interaction of billions of neurons in the central nervous
system.