America, the fragile empire

[David Farber <dave () farber net>]

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From: dewayne () warpspeed com (Dewayne Hendricks)
Date: February 28, 2010 1:04:09 PM EST
To: Dewayne-Net Technology List <xyzzy () warpspeed com>
Subject: [Dewayne-Net] America, the fragile empire

Opinion
America, the fragile empire
Here today, gone tomorrow -- could the United States fall that fast?
By Niall Ferguson
February 28, 2010
<http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-oe-ferguson28-2010feb28,0,2697391.story>

For centuries, historians, political theorists, anthropologists and the public have tended to think about the political 
process in seasonal, cyclical terms. From Polybius to Paul Kennedy, from ancient Rome to imperial Britain, we discern a 
rhythm to history. Great powers, like great men, are born, rise, reign and then gradually wane. No matter whether 
civilizations decline culturally, economically or ecologically, their downfalls are protracted.

In the same way, the challenges that face the United States are often represented as slow-burning. It is the steady 
march of demographics -- which is driving up the ratio of retirees to workers -- not bad policy that condemns the 
public finances of the United States to sink deeper into the red. It is the inexorable growth of China's economy, not 
American stagnation, that will make the gross domestic product of the People's Republic larger than that of the United 
States by 2027. 

As for climate change, the day of reckoning could be as much as a century away. These threats seem very remote compared 
with the time frame for the deployment of U.S. soldiers to Afghanistan, in which the unit of account is months, not 
years, much less decades.

But what if history is not cyclical and slow-moving but arrhythmic -- at times almost stationary but also capable of 
accelerating suddenly, like a sports car? What if collapse does not arrive over a number of centuries but comes 
suddenly, like a thief in the night?

Great powers are complex systems, made up of a very large number of interacting components that are asymmetrically 
organized, which means their construction more resembles a termite hill than an Egyptian pyramid. They operate 
somewhere between order and disorder. Such systems can appear to operate quite stably for some time; they seem to be in 
equilibrium but are, in fact, constantly adapting. But there comes a moment when complex systems "go critical." A very 
small trigger can set off a "phase transition" from a benign equilibrium to a crisis -- a single grain of sand causes a 
whole pile to collapse.

Not long after such crises happen, historians arrive on the scene. They are the scholars who specialize in the study of 
"fat tail" events -- the low-frequency, high-impact historical moments, the ones that are by definition outside the 
norm and that therefore inhabit the "tails" of probability distributions -- such as wars, revolutions, financial 
crashes and imperial collapses. But historians often misunderstand complexity in decoding these events. They are 
trained to explain calamity in terms of long-term causes, often dating back decades. This is what Nassim Taleb rightly 
condemned in "The Black Swan" as "the narrative fallacy." 

In reality, most of the fat-tail phenomena that historians study are not the climaxes of prolonged and deterministic 
story lines; instead, they represent perturbations, and sometimes the complete breakdowns, of complex systems.

To understand complexity, it is helpful to examine how natural scientists use the concept. Think of the spontaneous 
organization of termites, which allows them to construct complex hills and nests, or the fractal geometry of water 
molecules as they form intricate snowflakes. Human intelligence itself is a complex system, a product of the 
interaction of billions of neurons in the central nervous system. 

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