Is the Past Too Evenly Distributed

Here’s some big thinking from Paul Kedrosky:

How many calls to a typical U.S. fire department are actually about fires? Less than 20%. …

Why, then, are they called fire departments? Because of history. …

Everywhere you look you see fire departments. Not, literally, fire departments, but organizations, technologies, institutions and countries that, like fire departments, are long beyond their "past due" date, or weirdly vestigial, and yet remain widespread and worryingly important.

The next point is one of my pets:

One of my favorite examples comes from the siting of cities. Many U.S. river cities are where they are because of portages, the carrying of boats and cargo around impassable rapids. This meant, many times, overnight stays, which led to hotels, entertainment, and, eventually, local industry, at first devoted to shipping, but then broader. Now, however, those portage cities are prisoners of history, sitting along rivers that no longer matter for their economy, meanwhile struggling with seasonal floods and complex geographies antithetical to development—all because a few early travelers using transportation technologies that no longer matter today had to portage around a few rapids. To put it plainly, if we rebooted right now most of these cities would be located almost anywhere else first.

I grew up in the Buffalo suburbs, and lived most of the 90s in New Orleans: two cities whose raison d’etre is long past.

But this is not a list-making game. This is not some Up With Technology exercise where we congratulate ourselves at how fast things are changing. This is the reverse. History increasingly traps us, creating paths—and endowments and costs, both in time and money—that must be traveled before we can change directions, however desirable those new directions might seem. History—the path by which we got here, and the endowments and effluvia it has left us—is an increasingly large weight on our progress. Our built environment is an installed base, like an ancient computer operating systems that holds back progress because compatibility gives such an immense advantage.

I loved the last point. Savor it for a minute … it’s subtle:

Writer William Gibson once famously said that the "The future is already here—it's just not very evenly distributed". I worry more that the past is here—it's just so evenly distributed that we can't get to the future.

Every time I hear Obama I hear “More past … with better windowdressing”. Of course, the Republicans seem to have the most trouble with the windowdressing part. They like the past too.

It seems to me that this is a fundamental problem with the way contemporary governments work. Just about everything they do is about protecting the past.

Think about it.

Social security and Medicare about protecting the past “because we worked for it”.

Our defense systems are perpetually fighting the last war.

Our social safety nets for the young ossify the bad habits and outcomes of the past.

Our urban planning is largely targeted at fixing the decaying cities, not making the newer ones more functional.

Telecommuting becomes easier every day, millions prefer it, and yet we fund money-losing public transportation.

And don’t even get me started about the post office … where Tuesday now seems devoted to bulk mail only.

Lastly, what about the national debt and the debt ceiling – the issue of the season? Is it fair to say that we’re allowing this to cripple us? Having said that, most of what’s going on is the desire for relatively small amounts of new spending that are precluded because of all the old purchases we haven’t paid for yet.

Technorati Tags: past,future,distributed,evenly

Comments

[mike shupp]

Life is short, so I'm not going to tackle every point raised here, but I'll summarize by saying things aren't so bad... there's usually reasons things happen as they do.

Let's consider the firemen. And the paramedics. Consider going this again from scratch. Firemen tend only to fires. You've got an idea for something like mobile medics who respond to health emergencies and accidents and get people to hospitals in a hurry. Sounds great. Now how do you do it? Convince the city council to increase taxes? Good luck! Ask the hospitals to set it up and fund it and coordinate things? You must be kidding! Aha! Persuade a couple of councilmen that there's money to be made in the ambulance trade if the ambulance owners can charge whatever the market will bear for their services -- and that, properly set up, no one will be able to tell who really owns all those ambulances. Now you're cooking!

Still think fireman-paramedics look bad?

Defense departments preparing to fight the last war. Not always. All the services have their visionaries, and those people do get read and respected by other officers. I think you'll find most of the conservatism that constrained the armed forces before WWII was actually rooted in Congress. Post-WWII, the forces shot themselves in the feet a few times --Viet Nam, most memorably -- but I'd argue they were making brand new mistakes in brand new environments rather than old mistakes. (I'm scanting the argument here. Sorry -- but this is a topic for thick dull books rather than a blog comment.)

As for urban planning "fixing the decaying cities" ... Surely you jest. You ever see photos of Detroit? Does it really look look like significant sums are being plowed into that cess? It'd take a couple of hundred billion bucks and coordinated action by aa dozen cabinet level agencies to get Detroit back on its feet. What's actually being spent probably doesn't pay for a few photo ops.

Oh well.

[Dave Tufte]

I don't think things are that bad either. :)

But, in macroeconomics, a lot of the last generation of research has ended up pointing to ossification of "old ways" as a major impediment to growth.

So, yes, I am still concerned about all of these as possible ways our society may be substituting "good enough" for "going to be better".

[mike shupp]

Other stuff is going on. Let me steal a quote from Charlie Stross (http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2013/02/political-failure-modes-and-th.html)

"So the future isn't a boot stamping on a human face, forever. It's a person in a beige business outfit advocating beige policies that nobody wants (but nobody can quite articulate a coherent alternative to) with a false mandate obtained by performing rituals of representative democracy that offer as much actual choice as a Stalinist one-party state. And resistance is futile, because if you succeed in overthrowing the beige dictatorship, you will become that which you opposed."

Governments don't seem to be working very well these days, as both Tea Partiers and Occupy Wall Street groupies (and British equivalents and Egyptian and Russian and Chinese counterparts) would agree. I'll refrain from consideration of their opposing solutions...

My thought is being in a bad, prolonged recession has soured people's attitudes. Ten years of decent world-wide growth would probably improve peoples' tempers and give governments back some of the nerve and determination they had in earlier years.

Beyond that... we're headed towards a wave of genetic (or eugenic) modifications in the last half of the century, I suspect. We WILL "tamper" with the human genome -- in Europe and China, if not so quickly in the USA -- to breed healthier, longer-lived, more intelligent children, and those modified children will eventually make up the human race. Slowly, over centuries, we'll raise average IQs a couple of points per generation, we'll extend healthy life spans a year or so per decade. And many of the cultural/psychological/physiological ailments that trouble us today will be allievated. No doubt, we'll create new problems for ourselves! But our descendents should have the strengths to cope with them.

[Dave Tufte]

Your link doesn't work :( I got this to work (Mike Shupp's link). I hope it's right.

I think you've taken my examples of government policies that protect the past too seriously. I don't think the problem is government. Rather, I think government reflects our own interest in protecting the past at the expense of a better future. In short, we've met the Luddites, and they are us.

I also don't agree with your's or Antipope's position that government is somehow worse. I think it's as bad (or as good) as it's ever been ... and that the common viewpoint you two are buying into is just availability bias.

In fact, I think the biggest victim here may be the honest government officials. In their urge to protect past government mistakes (like social security that isn't tied to life expectancy) they've crippled their ability to do much that's new.

I do agree with you that it's a matter of time before this stuff sorts out. And I'd put it at less than 10 years. But, having said that, these things are cyclical ... so it'll come back around in the 20's, and we'll have this whole debate all over again.

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