James A. Rising

People often assume that since I have background in computers, I must be an enthusiast of blockchain technology. I have never seen much use for it, since anything that blockchains can do, a traditional database can do more efficiently. But I understand that blockchains have an application, a situation in which they are the right tool for the job: if you cannot build a trustworthy institution and want to keep shared records, blockchains will let you.

By institutions, I mean organizations like banks or government, which could keep these records, along with a common understanding of the rules they use. If I, as an individual, want to make a system for distributed, anonymous users to keep records, it is easy to make an interface to a database that provides that. I would define the rules, and my software would follow them. But then you have to trust me to not use my power over the rules to my advantage. Or, in the case of societal institutions, we have to believe in systems of oversight to ensure good behavior and procedures for responding to bad behavior. If you cannot trust a central authority, traditional databases will not work.

The cost to pay for this lack of trust is energy use. The blockchain mining system turns computing power into security, with bitcoin alone consuming more electricity annually than Austria (73 TWh/yr vs. 70 TWh/yr). Blockchain technology is built on plentiful, cheap energy.

I think the excitement about blockchain technology offers some insight into the world today, and the world that we are working to create. The world that blockchains are made for is a world of abundance, but abundance squandered by the lack of trusted institutions. And that is not all.

It is a world not overly concerned with inequality. If there was extreme inequality of mining power, or collusion at the top, blockchain ledgers could be forged. Instead, the fear is against petty theft. We worry about minor actors breaking the law, and no institutions to recognize it and undo the damage.

It is a world where anonymity is supreme. Letting institutions know our identity a necessary condition for allowing them to provide oversight. In a world of corrupt institutions, your identity might be used against you.

It is a world in which you pay to maintain your own security. As mining rewards dwindle, it will be those who have the most to lose who will maintain the system. But in this, it must also be a world of continual competition, because if a single user or cartel effectively paid for the whole system, it would also control the ledgers.

So, when people express such excitement about this or that application of blockchains, I mourn the loss of cooperation and common ground. Only a world of abundance could support blockchains, but only a fragmented world would need them.

The New York Times has an op-ed today about that argues “Psychology Is Not in Crisis, in response to the response to a paper that tried and failed to reproduce 60 of 100 psychology experiments. I have been thinking for a long time about the importance of falsifiability in science, and the role of the many kinds of research we do in light of it.

I was recently re-perusing Collins et al. 2010, which purports to address the need for an integrated approach to environmental science, with a new conceptual framework. The heart of the framework is the distinction between “pulse” and “press” dynamics. I do not want to explain the difference here though. I want to know if we learn something from it.

Knowledge comes in many forms. There’s empirical knowledge, facts about the world that we know could not have known until they were observed; analytical knowledge, resulting from the manipulation of logical constructs; and wisdom, inarticulable knowledge that comes from experience.

The Collins et al. paper uses analysis, but it proves no theorems. But of course analysis can be a powerful tool without mathematical analytics. Recognizing multiple parts of a whole can open doors in the mind, and provide substance to a question. Nonetheless, the criteria for science of the usefulness of analysis is, does it allow us to learn something we did not already know? Knowing that fire is a pulse dynamic while climate change is a press dynamic could come in handy, if these categories added additional knowledge.

I claim that papers like this do not try to teach analytical knowledge, although they focus on a piece of analysis. Their goal is to expand our wisdom, by giving it shape. The distinction is not tied to anything we did not already know about fire and climate change. Like a professor who notices two things being conflated, the paper tries to expand our vocabulary and through it our world. Alas, it is exactly the wherewithal to shape our conceptual world that constitutes the wisdom sought. Pulse and press dynamics are one nice distinction, but there are so many others that might be relevant. Having a distinction in mind of pulse and press dynamics is only useful if I can transcend it.

Knowledge builds upon itself, and naturally bleeds between empirics, analysis, and wisdom. I am not a psychologist, but I presume that they are seeking knowledge in all of its forms. The discovery that 60 empirical building blocks were not as sure as they appeared does not undermine the process of science in psychology, and indeed furthers it along, but I hope that it undermines psychology-the-field, and the structure of knowledge that it has built.

Maybe questions of social science never get truly resolved. The first year of my PhD, I remember John Mutter describing the question of creative destruction. Sometimes, the story goes, a disaster can lead to an unexpected silver lining. By destroying outdated infrastructure, or motiving people to work together, or driving a needed influx of aid, a disaster can eventually leave a community better off than beforehand. Mutter described it almost like a philosophical quandary. In the face of all the specifics of institutions, internal perceptions, and international relations, how will we ever know?

For years now, Solomon Hsiang has been producing insights from his LICRICE model, turning hurricanes into exogenous predictors. As these random shocks echo through societies, he’s been picking up everything that falls out. I got to listen to some of it when news reporters would call his office. His work with Jesse Anttila-Hughes turned up the true mortality threat of disasters, typically 10x the lives lost at the time of the event. Jesse dug further, finding how family assets changed, how meals were redistributed, and how young girls are often the most hurt, even those born after the disaster.

Last month, Sol and Amir Jina produced an NBER working paper that steps back from the individual lives affected. Their result is that a single storm produces losses that continue to accumulate for 20 years. People are not only continuing to feel the effects of a hurricane 20 years down the road, but they additional poverty they feel at 10 years is only half of the poverty that they’ll feel in another 10.

Of course, this is an average effect, and an average of 6415 different country results. But that means that for every country that experiences no long-term effect, one experiences twice the poverty.

So, is there creative destruction? It’s very, very unlikely. The most likely situation is “no recovery”: countries will never return to the trend that they were on prior to the event. Things are even more dire under climate change,

For a sense of scale, our estimates suggest that under the “Business as usual” scenario (with a 5% discount rate) the [present discounted value] of lost long-run growth is $855 billion for the United States (5.9% of current GDP), $299 billion for the Philippines (83.3% of current GDP), $1 trillion for South Korea (73% of current GDP), $1.4 trillion for China (12.6% of current GDP), and $4.5 trillion for Japan (101.5% of current GDP).

That’s what we should be willing to pay to avoid these costs. In comparison to the $9.7 trillion that just additional hurricanes are expected to cost, the $2 trillion that Nordhaus (2008) estimates for the cost of a climate policy seems trivial. That’s two big, seemingly unanswerable questions as settled as things get in social science.

Here’s a draft of the short talk I gave at the Multi-Level Governance plenary at the Earth System Governance Tokyo Conference:

Fisheries are an ideal example of the need and potential for multi-level governance.  For decades, governments have struggled with overfishing and degradation of marine and inland waters.  Small fishing communities, fish stocks and food chains, factory ships, and policy-makers all act on different scales.  The various components of fisheries policy—gear and catch restrictions, protected areas, and monitoring—also act on idiosyncratic scales.

Despite decades of experience, fish stocks continue to collapse.  This is the consequence of multi-level complexity, and in many ways, the result of a deep tragedy of the commons, playing out across scales and across boundaries.  Fisheries are constantly confronted with multi-level issues: multiple stressors, from acidification to invasive species; environmental and human variability; cross-scale issues driven by the scale of fish ranges, environmental forcing, and foreign fleets; and failures of traditional management.  Governance of fisheries that is focused on a single scale cannot effectively manage resources that have their dynamics playing out on multiple levels and multiple scales.  Fishery contexts have many of the characteristics that make commons management difficult: ownership rights are weak, dynamics are unpredictable, stocks are mobile and widely dispersed, and outside pressures are strong.  Many effective traditional management practices fail when confronted with modern demands.  These are many of the same problems confronted in other areas of sustainable development, for example around climate change, water use, and biodiversity loss.

However, multi-level governance exposes possibilities for management that do not exist at any single scale.  The basic approach in fisheries multi-level management is called “co-management”: regional and national government acts on a large scale with policies explicitly designed to support local fishing communities acting on small scales.  The effective functions of large-scale government include monitoring of fish stocks, setting targets and allotments, identifying ecosystems for protection, enforcing boundaries, capacity building and legitimization, and facilitating communication across boundaries.  The local management level, then, is free to ensure fair fishing practices, coordinate amongst stakeholders, identify community needs, and monitor fisherman compliance and boundaries.

More generally, the fishery is an example of a multi-level commons, and I think that many of the lessons from fisheries are applicable to other commons.  The potentials for management in the multi-level commons are greater than the traditional commons in a number of ways.

First, regime shifts, and tipping points and resilience, are concrete, measurable phenomena.  We see them all the time in fisheries, and they manifest in multi-scale ways.  They can be very difficult to reverse, but sometimes they heal far better than we could expect when allowed the room to do so.  Strong management can ensure sustainability—we see it in some of the fisheries in California and elsewhere.

Second, uncertainty and unpredictability are a norm of fish ecosystems, and the multi-scale perspective will not diminish that problem.  We need robust institutions that can coexist with chaos and catastrophe.

Third, in multi-level situations, spatial organization matters.  Models that ignore spatial structures, spatial heterogeneity, spatially-mediated resilience, neighborhood effects and teleconnected regions typically miss important dynamics.  Policies that do not support spatial choices or recognize the importance of spatial arrangements can miss important opportunities.  Key dynamics play out differently in different areas, and how areas interact with each other is important for governance.

Fourth, boundaries within multi-level environments are not predetermined and where they are drawn can make a huge difference.  The divisions that seem natural at one scale can be integral components of another scale, which highlights the opportunities to make important choices.  Boundaries create institutions, and they can be formed to delineate groups with common interests and or areas with coherent dynamics.  Boundaries allow groups the space to self-organize local institutions.   Boundaries can carve out healthy areas to be maintained, which, through cross-boundary effects, can support sustainability throughout a region.

The construction of institutional boundaries and other government policies has also been at the heart of much harm in fishery commons, by undermining traditional regimes.  The process of boundary construction needs to be married to a deep political process that engages both stakeholders and scientists.

Fifth, cross-boundary effects are the norm in multi-level commons.  Whether they are in the form of the benefits beyond boundaries of protected areas, or cross-boundary pollution, or the impact of exploitation of resources on scales greater than that of a given community, when a commons is situated within a large area, the larger scale dictates the constraints of the local commons.

A wide range of empirical questions remains to be addressed, but there are two challenges that ahead that are most central.  First, we need to better understand how multi-level and multi-scale perspectives can be incorporated into our quantitative models, to form new techniques of asking multi-level research questions, and to bring those results into the policy realm.

Second, inequality is a core factor and a key challenge for multi-level governance.  The history of local fisheries management is centered around transfers of power, often across levels of exploitation—either through centralization, or to the much larger players that come with greater market forces.  Early critiques of the privatization of the commons focused on the inequality that it created.  The measurement of success in fisheries—whether by maximum yield or maximum economic benefit—is politically charged.

I recently attended a talk by E.O. Wilson, where he gave “Wilson’s Law”: “If you save the living environment, the biodiversity that we have left, you will also automatically save the physical environment too. But if you save only the physical environment, you will ultimately lose both.”

We need to find a place in our world for healthy relationships with our ecosystems and the people who rely on them.  Thank you.