America is a Rickety Bridge

A big dump truck comes down a country road to a bridge. As it drives out over the bridge, the bridge begins to shake. You look underneath and discover that the bridge is rickety—badly patched over the years. As the truck continues across, the whole thing collapses in a cascade of failures and the truck pitches into the ravine. So what caused the collapse--was it the truck? Or was it the rickety bridge?

We are learning, though our experience of the COVID-19 Pandemic that our country is like that rickety bridge—decades of neglect, bad maintenance, and questionable "improvements" have left us fragile. And then the corona virus is like the dump truck that stresses the bridge and then... collapse. There are a lot of things that could have been that dump truck. The point is that the bridge—our society and our institutions—was rickety in the first place.

As we watch current events unfold, it’s worth asking why some wealthy, sophisticated societies and their institutions sometimes collapse suddenly? Jared Diamond, in his book, Collapse, explores this phenomenon in detail. As a society grows up and faces new problems—internal and external—it must adapt, generally by adding new layers of complexity (institutions, social practices or classes, dogmas and mores, etc.). But, overtime the society gets more complex. And slowly it’s ability to adapt itself grinds to a halt. As new problems rear their heads, instead of adapting, the society starts to break. Generations of increasing complexity have built a rickety bridge—the headline invasion, climate change, plague, etc., that finishes them off is just the dump truck.

So if you see a rickety bridge beginning to collapse... what should you do? Do you try to prop it up while it's falling down? Do you run to safety? Or, after it collapses do you try to rebuild it just as it was? Or do you build a new bridge that is more resilient Do you ask bigger questions--like, do we need this bridge? Will communities on either side be able to survive without it? Do we need more, smaller bridges? Etc.

To answer the question of what should we be building now, I’m thinking a lot about a concept called “anti-fragility” coined by the heterodox risk analyst and trader, Nassim Taleb.

Taleb hates fragile systems and his focus as a trader was on not losing his shirt, rather than maximizing potential gains. He proposed a new concept of anti-fragility—systems which actually get stronger under moderate stress. For example, our bones actually get stronger if we exercise them and weaken if we don’t. It’s not just resilience because we don’t tough out stress and go back to normal, in an anti-fragile system we actually change, adapt, and get better.

Anti-fragility has parallel lessons to those of Collapse for us in reimagining our bridge. First, we Americans, on the capitalist right and the managerial left, tend to prize “efficiency” and seek to cut waste and slack out of the system. This can be great in good times, leading to higher profits and efficient services. But it’s precisely those inefficiencies that we cut out (storerooms, spare capacity, flexibility, etc.) that are most important in a crisis. Maximization leads to fragility, which leads to failure when the game changes suddenly. The second tough lesson, especially for liberals like me, is that complexity often makes the system less flexible, adaptable, and fair. We need to take a hard look when we propose “new programs” and think about how much we can simplify as often as how much more we can do. We should seek systems that fail gracefully. Let’s worry less about how much we can make in the good times and more about how much we can lose in the bad times.

Of course, it's not like no one knew we were a rickety bridge. Plenty of Cassandras have been shouting it from the rooftops. But for just for enough of us the old world was pretty nice—a car, homeownership, AC, sushi take out.... It’s hard to change something that we're used to using every day.

So the question is how are we going to rebuild our economy, society, politics? My guess is that national and even state leaders will try to rebuild something more or less like what we had before—there’s just so much momentum—and we’ll patch together the fragile, rickety bridge again. But maybe, at the scale of an individual, a neighborhood, a city we can instead start building a different kind of bridge—a new social contract and new institutions—so that we won’t be at risk of pitching into a deep hole the when the next crisis inevitably comes along.