Vital Systems Security

In her recent book Just One Child, anthropologist Susan Greenhalgh traces the origins of China’s infamous ‘one child policy’ to a group of defense scientists who specialized in cybernetics and ‘control theory’. Her book is unabashedly both an analytic project and a criticism of the roots of the policy, that is to say, she begins from the claim that the ‘one child policy’ is an ethical bad and uses her analysis to discover what led to such unethical policy. Her claim that missile scientists were at the route of the policy, in other words, is a denunciation of a particular application of ‘natural science’ in government policy. First, I will tell a little bit of her story, which is incredibly interesting in its resonances with some of the topics we have been following in VSS. Then, I want to show how the perspective we have developed in the VSS research collaboration can productively engage as well as put in perspective her denunciation of cybernetic planning.
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The ongoing crisis in the housing market seems to illustrate how the economy can be thought of as a vital system and how that system and its governing can be conceptualized. The article points to how the labor market and the housing market can interact in unexpected ways and prevent markets to reach equilibrium.

The rapid decline in housing prices is distorting the normal workings of the American labor market. Mobility opens up job opportunities, allowing workers to go where they are most needed. When housing is not an obstacle, more than five million men and women, nearly 4 percent of the nation’s work force, move annually from one place to another — to a new job after a layoff, or to higher-paying work, or to the next rung in a career, often the goal of a corporate transfer. Or people seek, as in Dr. Morgan’s case, an escape from harsh northern winters.

Now that mobility is increasingly restricted. Unable to sell their homes easily and move on, tens of thousands of people like Mr. Kirkland and Dr. Morgan are making the labor force less flexible just as a weakening economy puts pressure on workers to move to wherever companies are still hiring.

In 2007, the inter-state migration dipped at a rate of 27 percent compared to last year, highest decrease in the rate of inter-state migration in the last 15 years! This seems to hint at the re-conceptualization of the economy as an open systems with interacting sub-systems and non-economic domains. In this new way of thinking, the problem of government becomes how to manage these interfaces where different series interact and influence each other. In the last post and in our conversations on the management of the economy, Stephen and I have been arguing for a transformation in the conceptualization of the economy as a vital system that needs to be governed accordingly rather than simply intervened upon. In this perspective, crisis is external to the exogenous to the system, rather than endogenous as Keynesian paradigm would argue. In the Keynesian paradigm, the crisis located at the natural life cycles of capitalism; due to the need for large scale re-investment at the end of each business cycle, the balance of savings and investment gets obscured and unless intervened the economy rather than coming back to the equilibrium point fails to restore the market equilibrium. So, the solution is proactive government intervention with the goal of prolonging the business cycle. The problem is located within the very nature of capitalism. However, as we have been seeing in the housing crisis the problem has nothing to do with fixed costs of re-investment of the business cycle. It rather has to do with the mismanagement of risk, which seems to be an agent of translation between different domains. It is a way to manage an interface, i.e the housing market, and indirectly the labor market, and people’s seemingly non-economic needs of inhabitation. As we have been seeing, miscalculation of risk is posing great vulnerabilities to the economy as a vital system, and the problem of crisis manifests itself in terms of shocks disseminating from one sub-system to an other. Then I presume the problem becomes one of resilience and robustness of the interfaces connecting different domains within the economy: the ability to absorb unexpected, and yet immanent shocks. So, can we actually understand the neoliberal language of regulation, as opposed to intervention, in terms of the management of interfaces? Probably Stephen can tell us more with regard to risk.

Not really, but almost. The Times today has a truly amazing article about an attempt during the Allende administration to use computers to manage the Chilean economy. For those of us who have spent time thinking about OEP, it will all seem familiar, if strangely displaced. Seems that beginning in 1971 the government set out to use a network of telex machines and an IBM 360/50 to manage the Chilean economy. The telex machines were used to rapidly collect information about the “real” economy — daily output, energy use, and labor — in order to manage crises. The system was called Cybersyn.

(Image from the website of Eden Medina)

One success, the article claims, was management of a strike by truckers and retailers in 1972:

Cybersyn’s turning point came in October 1972, when a strike by truckers and retailers nearly paralyzed the economy. The interconnected telex machines, exchanging 2,000 messages a day, were a potent instrument, enabling the government to identify and organize alternative transportation resources that kept the economy moving.

The strike ended within a week. While it weakened Mr. Allende’s Popular Unity party, the government survived, and Cybersyn was praised for playing a major role. “From that point on the communications center became part of whatever was happening,” Mr. Espejo said.

On the one hand, this is a classic logistics problem of the type many economic planning organizations inherited from military planning: identify bottlenecks in a system of material production and flow, and find ways to overcome them. This was economic planning as in WWI, as in the Soviet 1920s, as in WWII, with different levels of technical formalization, of course, in each case. It also resonates with the kind of economic crisis management through an information system that was imagined by OEP in the wage-price freeze, which precisely relied on a dispersed network of data collection points to inform centralized decision-making.

One interesting contrast that might be worth thinking through more is the difference between managing “real” flows (physical output, labor, etc.) versus “nominal” flows — i.e. prices. OEP was actually trying to deal with inflation, of course, not production bottlenecks, and the object domain was prices (particularly of labor). In this sense, although the information network sounds very much like what OEP tried to produce, it was actually closer to Soviet planning in its substance. What the different experiences shared was the informatics system, and, no doubt, much of the underlying math. Onur can tell us more.

A couple more notes of interest. First, apparently the group of specialists operating the system did not have a specific political orientation. Despite the purportedly “leftist” orientation of the Allende government, this was a very technocratic operation. A good reminder that this kind of planning was not a political project of left or right per se:

Most of the Cybersyn team scrupulously avoided talking about politics, and some even had far-right-wing views, said Isaquino Benadof, who led the team of Chilean engineers designing the Cybersyn software.

Second, it is useful to bear in mind what happened after Allende. After the coup, Pinochet and the military leadership actually did not have very clear ideas about economic policy. But as we all know, a group of economists from the Catholic University, trained at and supported by the University of Chicago (and notoriously aided directly by Milton Friedman), soon gained the ear of the military government and sent Chile on the path of a very early experiment in “neoliberal” economics (for details a good book is Pinochet’s Economists by Juan Gabriel Valdez). This economics, of course, inherited from Hayek and others an emphasis on the price system in a market economy as a system for communicating the “subjective” preferences of economic agents. From this perspective, the kind of “substantive” planning being attempted under Allende was incoherent, both because the computational challenges were overwhelming, and, more importantly, because it inevitably rested on an incoherent theory of value.

Third, a key figure in this story is a guy named Stafford Beer, a British Cybernetician, the key figure in the field of management cybernetics. This would be a very interesting example of something that we have talked about a lot: namely, that techniques used for modeling and managing “the economy” are discredited in this function, but continue to become incredibly significant in other domains. Clearly the area of disaster modeling is one example of this, and more continue to emerge.

For more on this, someone named Eden Medina, who is an Assistant Professor of Informatics at Indiana University, has written on Cybersyn, including a recent article in the Journal of Latin American studies on the Cybersyn project, and an upcoming book on computing and government in Chile from the 1960s to the early 1970s. (Chris Kelty may be familiar with Medina, who has written on free software in Chile as well.)

DemfromCT — a blogger on DailyKos — has another interesting post on school closure and pandemic preparedness. It is about many things, among more information on exercises that show that in the US school closure may not be in time to help much, and an interesting comparison with a recent minor outbreak in Hong Kong, where, apparently, parents held students home from school in a “precautionary” fashion before a decision was taken to close schools. Also interesting is the mention of the role that blogs and the internet more generally would play in a pandemic.

I am teaching a class this semester called Governing International Emergency. A ton of interesting stuff is beginning to come out, as we move from theoretical work and work focused on the United States to international questions. I will try to blog on issues of particular interest for VSS questions as they emerge, and may be able at some point to post some web pages that are being produced in connection with four ongoing projects in the class on humanitarian response, natural disasters, climate change, and global pandemic preparedness. Here is a first installment.

This week we began to work through some materials on international humanitarian response, focusing on technical protocols and organizational issues in the field. The material was organized by two students, Jen Hill and Nat Katin-Borland, who are working intensively on these problems (and who may do fieldwork on related questions this summer). There are a range of interesting things emerging, including the consolidation of professional norms around early warning, preparedness, situational awareness, and response.

One particularly interesting document that we read was a World Food Program Agenda Item from 2005 updating that organization’s definition of “emergency,” originally laid out in1970. Check out the whole thing, which is short and very much worth the read. Two highlights.

First, the document emphasizes that what has changed is not so much the understanding of emergency as the set of tools that are used to anticipate and respond to emergencies:

“This paper concludes that the existing definition, with minor adjustments, remains largely valid. What has evolved substantially over the past decades is the set of tools used by WFP to identify vulnerable people and determine the most appropriate food-aid intervention. This improved knowledge, especially in the areas of early warning, disaster preparedness, vulnerability analysis, nutritional analysis and emergency needs assessment (ENA) methodology, serves as the basis on which WFP decides whether or not to respond to emergencies. The modifications to the existing definition incorporate more recent thinking on types of emergencies and their causes. The new definition maintains flexibility for the Executive Director to respond to urgent human food needs in diverse and unpredictable situations.”

Second, as with VSS more generally, there is a strong emphasis on an all-hazards approach, one that sees “famine” as the product of multiple different types of emergency that can be understood and managed in the same frame.

“The event or series of events may comprise one or a combination of the following:

a) sudden calamities such as earthquakes, floods, locust infestations and similar unforeseen disasters;

b) human-made emergencies resulting in an influx of refugees or the internal displacement of populations or in the suffering of otherwise affected populations;

c) food scarcity conditions owing to slow-onset events such as drought, crop failures, pests, and diseases that result in an erosion of communities and vulnerable populations’ capacity to meet their food needs;

d) severe food access or availability conditions resulting from sudden economic shocks, market failure, or economic collapse — and that result in an erosion of communities’ and vulnerable populations’ capacity to meet their food needs; and

e) a complex emergency for which the Government of the affected country or the
Secretary-General of the United Nations has requested the support of WFP.”

At one level, all this is obvious, common sense. But what we are clearly seeing in formation now is a common technical space of humanitarian action — anticipation, preparedness, and response — that is consolidating around increasingly stable knowledge forms and modes of authorized expertise.

One last thing that I have been sitting on for a while: The journal Biosecurity and Bioterrorism published in late 2007 an interesting exchange between Lynn Glotz, (her piece is called “Casting a Wider Net for Countermeasure R&D Funding Decisions“) and Gerald Epstein (his response: “Security is More than Public Health.”). Klotz is basically arguing, on c0st-benefit grounds, that the U.S. has been dramatically mis-allocating its counter-measure funding, placing too much focus on bioweapons agents like anthrax and smallpox, and too little focus on other infectious disease, like AIDS and flu. She backs this up by a cost-benefit analysis that looks at likely annual deaths from each, and, thus, the relative priority that should be assigned to each in funding decisions. It is a classic effort at “budgetary rationalization” of the type I analyze in “Enacting Catastrophe.”

Epstein responds, as might be surmised from his title, that “security” cannot be reduced to the number of deaths. A weapon like smallpox, he argues, poses a potentially “existential” threat in the sense that an attack may compromise the U.S. Government’s ability to continue operations in the face of mass panic and total uncertainty about further attacks.

So this debate is a very distilled example of something that lots of us have been working on for quite some time (I am thinking particularly of Lyle and Dale’s work, which Andy and I have been thinking about recently in writing the introduction to Biosecurity Interventions). On the one hand, you have a cost-benefit approach from public health; on the other hand, a national defense view of the world, which is used to thinking about — and acting on — uncertain but potentially catastrophic events. The experts do not agree. Worth a few minutes to read the articles over.

In recent weeks a complex humanitarian emergency has been developing in Tajikistan, a former Soviet republic. The crisis was triggered by a severe cold snap, but its impact has been due in large part to its effect on critical infrastructures, including electricity production, food distribution, water distribution, heat, and health infrastructures. A la Beck, modernization made the Tajik population dramatically more vulnerable, especially as critical infrastructures have degraded in the post-Soviet period. The situation has not gotten much attention in the U.S. press, but the international emergency organizations have produced quite a bit of information about it. Here are a couple snippets of things related specifically to some “vital systems” dimensions of the crisis:

• An article from Relief Web about the broad breakdown in infrastructure and public health in Tajikistan, including some stuff about malaria and typhoid outbreaks.
• A post from a blog called Postman Patel about, among other things, the international dimension of the electricity shortage (Tajikistan’s neighbors aren’t delivering electricity, in part due to disputes over non-payments), and the various relief efforts that are getting underway.
• A WHO article about the effect of the blackouts on health systems.
• A UPI analysis comparing Tajikistan and Afghanistan (which is also facing extreme cold) that addresses, among other things, the importance of media coverage of Afghanistan and the increased vulnerability of Tajikistan due to the history of mega-projects in the Soviet period that, first, made people dependent on centralized infrastructures and, second, created new vulnerabilities by diverting water to major agricultural projects etc.
• A UNDP article outlining another dimension of “modernization risk” — namely that people living in apartment blocks and in cities face bigger heating problems because they are dependent on centralized infrastructures that are now breaking down. This, by the way, is something that Lucan Way and I observed when we were doing research on water and heat provision in another former Soviet republic — Georgia — a couple years back.

Stephen Flynn has a new article in Foreign Affairs with a range of familiar arguments. We are vulnerable, but our vulnerability (at least to terrorism) is not strategic, and the most damage that can be done is the result of irrational overreaction to terrorist events. Worth a read, although it is nothing new.

Curiously, the master category for Flynn is resilience. There are four dimensions:

“First, there is robustness, the ability to keep operating or to stay standing in the face of disaster…

Second is resourcefulness, which involves skillfully managing a disaster once it unfolds. It includes identifying options, prioritizing what should be done both to control damage and to begin mitigating it, and communicating decisions to the people who will implement them…

The third element of resilience is rapid recovery, which is the capacity to get things back to normal as quickly as possible after a disaster…

Finally, resilience means having the means to absorb the new lessons that can be drawn from a catastrophe.”

In other words: vulnerability reduction, preparedness, learning. The creeds of vital systems security.

Today, Harvey Molotch and Noah McLain gave a talk entitled “Learning From the Subway: How to Do Security For Example” at Columbia Sociology. Based on 100+ hours of ethnographic research conducted by McLain in the New York subway system, Molotch and McLain made an argument argument for a notion of security that extends beyond counter-terrorism measures. They emphasized the inefficiency of the security measures imposed from top such as FEMA and DHS and argued for security measures that will improve regular use conditions and that can also be used under emergencies, such as a better ventilation system. Furthermore, their focus was also on how in everyday practices the subway personnel bent the formal rules to keep the subway running safe and efficiently. With a Latourian emphasis on the agency of objects, they demonstrated how the personnel found new ways of dealing with the pressing practical everyday problems of operating a subway system. Read the rest of this entry »

In October Dale posted on the release of the National Response Framework (NRF), which at the time was roundly criticized both because it did not give adequate power to FEMA administrators (a major issue during Katrina and Rita response) and because it was weak on specifics and failed to take into account criticism from the emergency management community. At a press conference yesterday a revised NRF was released. And the response has been dramatically more positive thus far. The International Association of Emergency Managers, which derided the original NRF as a “public relations document” that lacked any usable specifics praised the new NRF. Russ Decker, the First Vice President of IAEM said in a press release that:

We are extremely pleased with the final National Response Framework (NRF) product. It is apparent that our counterparts in Washington were listening and genuinely interested in addressing the issues raised by local emergency managers. As result of the improved process, we believe the NRF is a document that local emergency managers will find very useful. This is the greatest compliment a local official can give a Federal document. We get many documents from Washington that go on a shelf, but this one will actually be used. We appreciated being included in the process and look forward to a continued dialogue on this and other issues.

More on this, no doubt, in days to come. But at least in this area it looks like DHS has finally gotten a bit more serious about distributed preparedness. The full range of documents DHS released yesterday can be found here.