Free The Age of the Unthinkable by Joshua Cooper Ramo Page A

Bak’s sandpiles, collapse under the pressure of a pin. Change in such a system
     would come fast and would be merciless to anyone who was not flexible and prepared. What Browder saw in 2007 was that the
     real dynamics of the world were about to assert themselves.
    By the time most of the planet understood what Browder had realized on that summer morning, however, thirteen crucial months
     had passed.
5. Way out of Balance
    Our world, whether we are looking at financial markets or nuclear proliferation, now resembles Bak’s sandpiles in many nervous-making
     ways. To begin with, it is defined by the two explosive bits of physics that interested him most: increasing numbers of players
     and connections between them. If you’d like, you can think of these two effects as
granularity —
the unstoppable tumbling of fresh grains of sand onto our pile — and
interdependence —
the surprising connections that link one part of the pile with another. But what matters is that these two effects represent
     a revolutionary change in the physics of power, a change that has to inform every strategy or policy we make from now on.
     When Bak described the “tendency of large systems to evolve into a poised ‘critical’ state, way out of balance, where minor
     disturbances may lead to events, called avalanches, of all sizes,” he could have been speaking about the Middle East, relations
     between the United States and China, the oil market, disease, nuclear proliferation, cyberwarfare or a dozen other problems
     of global affairs and security. Every day now, new players and forces are trickling onto the pile of our world order as if
     they were dropping from a beaker in Held’s lab: viruses, NGOs, new inventions, Indian peasants moving to cities. And these
     are all connected one to another by ties of contact and technology that we can’t fully map or monitor. What is true for Bak’s
     piles is true for our world now. We are, in many ways, organized into instability.
    This dynamic sandpile energy demands that we accept the basic unpredictability of the global order — one of those intellectual
     leaps that sounds simple but that immediately junks a great deal of traditional thinking. It also produces (or should produce)
     a profound psychological shift in what we can and can’t expect from the world. Constant surprise and new ideas? Yes. Stable
     political order, less complexity, the survival of institutions built for an older world? No. Recall that Morgenthau’s entire
     calculus of power was based on being able to measure who stood where, who did or did not pick up the hat. But in a fast-changing
     revolutionary world, you can’t map power so easily. Writing about a similar transformation in his field, the economist Brian
     Arthur explained it this way: “In the standard view of the economy, which has an intellectual lineage that goes back to the
     Enlightenment, the economy is mechanistic. It is complicated but can be viewed as a series of objects and linkages between
     them. Subject and object — agents and the economy they perform in — can be neatly separated.” But in a complex order, Arthur
     explains, “subject and object cannot be neatly separated. And so the economy shows behavior that we can best describe as organic,
     rather than mechanistic. It is not a well-ordered, gigantic machine. It is organic. At all levels it contains pockets of indeterminacy.”
     This new physics demolishes the idea that somehow we can use simpler, older tools to manage the international political or
     financial system toward a stable equilibrium. But it doesn’t mean complete chaos either.
    Complex systems are not incomprehensible. If complexity were unmanageable and simply reduced to chaos in the end, we would
     have no Internet, no organized healthy ecosystems, no functioning immune systems or financial markets. In a summary of his
     study of various complex systems, the ecologist C. S. Holling identified dozens of systems