16 thoughts on “Hatching Giant Black Swans”

  1. [[[The answer, he argues, is that the elites won’t see them coming rather than that they can’t. Part of the problem is the consequence of their own damping. By attempting to centrally manage systems according to some predetermined scheme they actually store up volatility rather than dispersing it. By kicking the can down the road they eventually condemn themselves to bumping into a giant pile of cans when they run out of road.]]]

    Nothing new here. This pretty well sums the U.S. behavior towards Japan in the 1930’s, an appropriate analogy given that the 50th anniversary is just a couple days off. Gen. Mitchell predicted the outcome of Japan’s expansion, but was ignored.

    Of course if you wish to reach further back in history also have the Civil War as an example.

    The reason is simple, breaks in continually like this require rethinking everything and folks prefer to muddle along then change radically how they view the world. Just look at space advocates, still clinging to NASA to open the space frontier (COTS, CCDev, CCCP) after 40 years of failure to do so, instead of trying to think beyond NASA. Then they will wail when it crashes down again and will go back again to arguing how to “reform” NASA to open the “space frontier” with their next scheme.

    1. There was a significant period where people tried to go around NASA.. it was called “the 90s”, maybe you remember it.. there was even some bleedover into the next decade. What happened there? Oh that’s right, NASA killed it. Even when you keep NASA as far away as you possibly can – for example, by going all the way to Russia to buy a space station – they still screw you.

      1. Trent,

        Yes, I do. I was working on the Southwest Regional Spaceport, now Spaceport America then. I proposed like a local bond issue or sales tax surcharge to get it going and did reports on the potential of suborbital markets other then tourism. But instead they bought into the hype being put out by the advocate community on tourism after DC-X flew.

        The New Space Advocates, who called themselves Alt.Space Advocates, were indeed looking to NASA then. They pushed through the Launch Purchases Act that required NASA to buy commercial launches and not fund a Shuttle Replacement. The advocated for the DC-X to be given to NASA from DOD. Advocates pushed for a NASA SSTO demonstrator (X-33). Advocated the end of Shuttle so NASA could be a customer for the private SSTO’s that would soon be “filling the skies”, funded by NASA contracts. In theory VentureStar was supposed to be looking for private funds, but the folks on the project I talked to at Lockheed during that time didn’t look very hard as they simply assumed it would be NASA’s Shuttle replacement and NASA would come up with money for it. And I mustn’t forget the COMET program. Or the constant campaign by Space Advocates to get NASA to obey the Space Settlements Act of 1988

        So you must have been in a different 1990’s in thinking that space advocates weren’t fixated on NASA as the guiding light for space commerce and settlement.

        1. So you must have been in a different 1990′s in thinking that space advocates weren’t fixated on NASA as the guiding light a potential source of funding for space commerce and settlement that was otherwise being largely wasted.

          FTFY to match up with reality and history.

          1. Rand,

            So space advocates were not pushing the same old model that NASA should bankroll their schemes? And they didn’t blame NASA when their view graph schemes went wrong because NASA didn’t fund them?

          2. So space advocates were not pushing the same old model that NASA should bankroll their schemes? And they didn’t blame NASA when their view graph schemes went wrong because NASA didn’t fund them?

            I have idea how to respond to such nebulous questions. Which “space advocates” did that? Under what circumstances? Can you provide some actual examples, with real people? This is like Mark Whittington’s imaginary “Internet Rocketeer Club.”

          3. Rand,

            Examples? Just go back in your archives and read the old begging letters and press releases from the Space Frontier Foundation, the news letters from the Space Access Society, Rick Tumlinson’s Congressional testimony, the begging letters from Prospace… Its all about NASA budgets, NASA policy, NASA needing to lead the way, like NASA was the only organization in the world involved with space.

          4. Its all about NASA budgets, NASA policy, NASA needing to lead the way, like NASA was the only organization in the world involved with space.

            So you don’t have any actual quotes, just your own blinkered mischaracterizations?

          5. Rand,

            Just in case you don’t have the link, here is the archive to the old Space Access Society archive. Check out the updates from the 1990’s. All about NASA, NASA budgets, the need for NASA to build demonstrators,…

            http://www.space-access.org/

            The SFF has purged its old files online, but if you check a good library you will find old issues of Space News with them, as well as Prospace releases… The UC Irvine library has a good space archive.

          6. Its interesting how of the old material are still on the Prospace and SFF websites. But here is a link to a SEDS publication of the era with a Prospace press release in it bragging of their accomplishments.

            http://seds.org/communication/nova_files/nova-jan97.pdf

            [[[A growing number of Americans are joining this annual campaign to change our national space agenda. It began with relatively humble beginnings in March of 1995, when 9 citizens (or “Friends of the Frontier”) briefed 52 congressional offices. One result of that first week’s activity was the creation of a new $25 million budget for Reusable Launch Vehicle
            technology development in a year of large congressional budget cuts. That first campaign was worth $3 million for each citizen who donated just one week of their time.]]]

            Of course if you are not fixated on NASA but on developing commercial systems you don’t have to change the national space agenda…

  3. The reason is simple, breaks in continually like this require rethinking everything and folks prefer to muddle along then change radically how they view the world.

    As Jefferson put it, “… mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed.”

    As Walter Russell Meade argued in “Special Providence”, the United States was incredibly successful at foreign policy in the 20th century, yet all of the foreign policy elites, including our own, thought we were idiots. We always worked at cross purposes to ourselves in an incoherent mish mish of goals and actions. Due to the nature of our economic system, culture, and government, we wouldn’t pursue just one goal and subordinate all our actions to it, as most countries did.

    Our farmers would lobby for grain exports to our enemies, our missionaries would be stirring up social revolution in friendly governments that our military was supporting. Our businessmen would be cutting deals with everybody (undercutting each other yet expanding trade) in countries where our diplomats were trying to impose trade sanctions. And Hollywood and American culture traveled everwhere, portraying our society in ways no rational government would want.

    Our foreign interactions were rudderless, chaotic, unpredictable, confusing, and the entanglements and relationships were too layered and complicated for anyone to adquately understand them. And that’s why it worked. Instead of a top-down monolithic policy dreamed up by elites, it was a grass-roots interaction across all levels of society, where each actor benefitted by occupying a niche. Where other countries had old school, European style foreign policies, we were an octopus with each arm doing something different, and each arm was being very effective.

    Just as the genius of the free market eludes Marxists, so our messy, non-traditional, grass-roots approach to foreign relations eluded the policy elites who seek to control everything, and think each aspect of our foreign interactions should be subordinated to a master plan. If we had done that, if US foreign policy had been as disastrous as European foreign policy in the 20th century, we’d be back to 13 colonies clinging to the Atlantic coast instead of being the world’s predominant economic, cultural, and military superpower.

  4. Arthur C. Clark said something along the lines that not only is the universe stranger than we imagine, it’s stranger than we can imagine. The same applies to trying to centrally manage even a large national economy much less a global one. Things are just too complex for bureaucrats or anyone else to control everything. Consider the volcanoes in Iceland last year and the earthquake and tsunami in Japan this year and their effects on production and distribution. “Just in Time” inventory schemes are efficient so long as everything is running well but they’re very vulnerable to natural and man-made disruptions.

    The part about storing up volatility is just like what the Forest Service did for decades. They were so aggressive in fighting wildfires that the forests became tinderboxes like what happened in Yellowstone in the 1990s. Then, when a fire gets too big, the damage is overwhelming. Fire is part of the natural lifecycle of forests and bankrupsy is part of the natural lifecycle of an economy. If a company is too big to fail, it should be broken up.

  5. Actually, it’s the NPS that manages Yellowstone. Also, it was well known by 1988 that the park had two classes of forest fires, small ones of less than 1000 acres, and conflagrations of several hundred thousand acres. I still have a copy of the March 1988 Fire Management Plan where this is spelled out. It then goes into great details one what do do in the first case. The second was ignored because they only happen every few centuries, and it was assumed that when the next one happened, it would be someone else’s problem.

  6. A fabulous article that requires, of me, multiple reads. I notice that my liberal friends think of the government as the first resort. They do not trust persuasion and would rather the government create a law backed by force. Little do they understand and/or accept the price paid, the concept of unintended consequences, nor the fact that a government that can make a regulation they like can also make one they loathe and despise.

    But even more importantly, they have no faith…no faith that the “Invisible Hand” works. They point to the Love Canal, 3 Mile Island and mercury in the streams, conclude that everyone and everything is evil and look for another regulation.

Comments are closed.