making policy on sand-piles

Seed Magazine posts an interview with Joshua Cooper Ramo, strategy consultant and author of The Age of the Unthinkable, offering a handy metaphor for the growing complexity and instability of our world: sand-piles.

If you think back to the pleasure and frustration of building sand hills, castles and sarcophoguses on the beach, you know what he means. Sprinkling sand has a predictable way of accumulating at the top of a pile and rolling down the sides - until an unpredictable fissure results in a mini-avalanche or sand-glacier crumbling your work. When and how the pile reaches its breaking point is not just a mystery to beach-goers; physicist computer models also can't calculate that degree of complexity to make accurate predictions.

In human history, grains of innovation have always built up our sandpile of civilization - while occasional cracks (financial crises, war, famine) set progress back a few years (or centuries). Nothing has changed today, except for the fact that the cycle of build-up and bust has been accelerated via information technology and globalization. Instead of expecting sudden tectonic shifts in the status quo every few centuries, we should be looking for them every couple of decades - or years.

But Ramo doesn't just advise that we be on the look-out for unpredictable changes; he suggests policy advisors factor in ever-shifting systems when designing policy. That is, instead of passing laws to fix problems once and for all, laws may need to be re-visited and tweaked often to adjust to the changing world.

That's wise advice for lawmakers, but advice it's hard to imagine politicians heeding. Preaching complexity and more involved government doesn't get many votes. To give lawmakers that latitude, we either have to convince Americans to embrace complexity - or we have to move to a more technocrat model (with agency work moved from the public eye). Again, it's hard to see that happen in the foreseeable future.