International Relations

Many examples of technical disasters have been provided in Understanding Society , along with efforts to understand the systemic dysfunctions that contributed to their occurrence. Frequently those dysfunctions fall within the business organizations that manage large, complex technology systems, and often enough those dysfunctions derive from the imperatives of profit-maximization and cost avoidance. Andrew Hopkins' account of the business decisions contributing to the explosion of the ESSO gas plant in Longford, Australia illustrates this dynamic in  Lessons from Longford: The ESSO Gas Plant Explosion . The withdrawal of engineering experts from the plant to a remote corporate headquarters was a cost-saving move that, according to Hopkins, contributed to the eventual disaster. A topic we have not addressed in detail is the occurrence of ethical disasters -- terrible outcomes that are the result of deliberate choices by decision-makers within an organization that are, upon inspecti...

Lower image: Eugenio Ceroni and Luca Cozzi,  Ponte Morandi - Autopsia di una strage A recurring topic in Understanding Society is the question of the organizational causes that lie in the background of major accidents and technological disasters. One such disaster is the catastrophic collapse of the Morandi Bridge in Genoa in August, 2018, which resulted in the deaths of 43 people. Was this a technological failure, a design failure -- or importantly a failure in which private and public organizational features led to the disaster? A major story in the New York Times on March 5, 2019 ( link ) makes it clear that social and organizational causes were central to this horrendous failure. (What could be more terrifying than having the highway bridge under your vehicle collapse to the earth 150 feet beneath you?) In this case it is evident from the Times coverage that a major cause of the disaster was the relationship between Autostrade per l'Italia, the private company that manages t...

We often speak of government as if it has intentions, beliefs, fears, plans, and phobias. This sounds a lot like a mind. But this impression is fundamentally misleading. "Government" is not a conscious entity with a unified apperception of the world and its own intentions. So it is worth teasing out the ways in which government nonetheless arrives at "beliefs", "intentions", and "decisions". Let's first address the question of the mythical unity of government. In brief, government is not one unified thing. Rather, it is an extended network of offices, bureaus, departments, analysts, decision-makers, and authority structures, each of which has its own reticulated internal structure. This has an important consequence. Instead of asking "what is the policy of the United States government towards Africa?", we are driven to ask subordinate questions: what are the policies towards Africa of the State Department, the Department of Defense,...

When we discuss the ontology of various aspects of the social world, we are often thinking of such things as institutions, organizations, social networks, value systems, and the like. These examples pick out features of the world that are relatively stable and functional. Where does an imperfection or dysfunction of social life like corruption fit into our social ontology? We might say that �corruption� is a descriptive category that is aimed at capturing a particular range of behavior, like stealing, gossiping, or asceticism. This makes corruption a kind of individual behavior, or even a characteristic of some individuals. �Mayor X is corrupt.� This initial effort does not seem satisfactory, however. The idea of corruption is tied to institutions, roles, and rules in a very direct way, and therefore we cannot really present the concept accurately without articulating these institutional features of the concept of corruption. Corruption might be paraphrased in these terms: Individual X...

Since the beginning of the industrial age the topic of regulation of private activity for the public good has been essential for the health and safety of the public. The economics of externalities and public harms are too powerful to permit private actors to conduct their affairs purely according to the dictates of profit and private interest. The desolation of the River Irk described in Engels'  The Condition of the Working-Class in England in 1844  was powerful evidence of this dynamic in the nineteenth century, and need for the protection of health and safety in the food industry, the protection of air and water quality, and establishment of regulations ensuring safe operation of industrial, chemical, and nuclear plants became evident in the middle of the twentieth century. (Of course it goes without saying that our current administration no longer concedes this point.) A fundamental problem for understanding the mechanics of government is the question of how the will and i...

There is a new exciting and valuable contribution from the research group around Raj Chetty, Nathan Hendren, and John Friedman, this time on the topic of neighborhood-level social mobility. (Earlier work highlighted measures of the impact on social mobility contributed by university education across the country. This work is presented on the Opportunity Insights website; link , link . Here is an earlier post on that work; link .) In the recently released work Chetty and his colleagues have used census data to compare incomes of parents and children across the country by neighborhood of birth, with the ability to disaggregate by race and gender, and the results are genuinely staggering. Here is a report on the project on the US Census website; link . The interactive dataset and mapping app are provided here ( link ). The study identifies neighborhoods of origin; characteristics of parents and neighborhoods; and characteristics of children. Here are screenshots of metropolitan Detroit re...

Andrew Hopkins is a much-published expert on industrial safety who has an important set of insights into the causes of industrial accidents. Much of his career has focused on the oil and gas industry, but he has written on other sectors as well. Particularly interesting are several books:  Failure to Learn: The BP Texas City Refinery Disaster ; Disastrous Decisions: The Human and Organisational Causes of the Gulf of Mexico Blowout ; and  Lessons from Longford: The ESSO Gas Plant Explosion . He also provides a number of interesting working papers here . One of his interesting working papers is on the topic of safety culture in the drilling industry, "Why safety cultures don't work" ( link ). Companies that set out to create a �safety culture� often expend huge amounts of resource trying to change the way operatives, foremen and supervisory staff think and feel about safety. The results are often disappointing.  (1) Changing the way people think is nigh impossible, but sett...

David Sanger's very interesting recent book, The Perfect Weapon: War, Sabotage, and Fear in the Cyber Age , is a timely read this month, following the indictments of twelve Russian intelligence officers for hacking the DNC in 2015. Sanger is a national security writer for the New York Times , and has covered cyber security issues for a number of years. He and William Broad and John Markoff were among the first journalists to piece together the story behind the Stuxnet attack on Iran's nuclear fuel program (the secret program called Olympic Games), and the book also offers some intriguing hints about the possibility of "left of launch" intrusions by US agencies into the North Korean missile program. This is a book that everyone should read. It greatly broadens the scope of what most of us think about under the category of "hacking". We tend to think of invasions of privacy and identity theft when we think of nefarious uses of the internet; but Sanger makes it...

One of the important reasons that we value scientific knowledge is the possibility that it will allow us to intervene in the world to solve problems that we care about. Good climate science allows us to have high confidence in the causes of global climate change; and it also provides a sound basis for policy interventions to help to mitigate the pace of climate change. Good cellular biology permits a better understanding of autoimmune disease; and it also suggests avenues for prevention and treatment. There is thus an important component of pragmatism in our esteem for scientific knowledge. In the social sciences we would like to assume that something similar is possible. If we have good sociological understanding of the causes of teen pregnancy or gang violence, perhaps that understanding will also provide a basis for designing effective interventions that reduce the incidence of the social problems we study. In other words, perhaps we can count on social science to provide a valuable...

We know what is meant by saying that a physical system is resilient : for a given range of shocks, the system has the ability to recover its structural integrity. This does not mean that a resilient system is impervious to shocks, but rather that it is capable of recovery from a given range of shocks at a given level of severity (through redundancy, decentralized systems, or repair mechanisms). (Here is a discussion of urban resilience and fragility in face of natural disaster by Kathleen Tierney in  The Social Roots of Risk: Producing Disasters, Promoting Resilience ;  link .) We also think we know something about individual resilience. It is a complex capacity of personality and character that permits the individual to regain equanimity after some of life's common hazards -- loss of a job, onset of a serious illness, death of a loved one. Here is how the American Psychological Association defines resilience ( link ): Resilience is the process of adapting well in the face of ...

The Southern Poverty Law Center documents that hate groups and hate-based mobilization are on the rise in the United States ( link , link ). Here is a current map of hate-based groups monitored by SPLC: Through provocative epithets, slogans, and extremist demonstrations a variety of hate groups -- white supremacists, neo-Nazis, anti-muslim bigots, anti-immigrant activists, anti-LGBTQ extremists, and others -- are seeking to establish a broader foothold in various parts of the country. They seek to build distrust, hate, and antagonism towards various groups and to undermine the bonds of community that hold together the multi-ethnic, multi-racial communities that exist all over the country. We have also seen that social media can be used very intentionally by hate groups to cultivate mistrust, fear, and antagonism. This is an unsolved problem: Twitter, Facebook, and other social media are deliberately used to spread and cultivate hate. These facts are easy to observe. The question here i...

In the dystopian vision of the future described in William Gibson's Sprawl novels, there are few people with normal jobs, regular sources of income, retirement plans, and health insurance. Instead, there are hackers, freelance security guards, software traffickers, criminals at many levels, and a few distant corporations with scientists and managers. It is a grim picture. But how distant is that future from our current trajectory? Is that pretty much where we are heading? With the effort to shed 24 million Americans from health insurance; with the disappearance of "good" industrial jobs; with the rise of the gig economy; with the super-extreme development of inequalities of income and wealth, based on privileged positions in the financial and tech economies -- do these trends not seem like early-stage Gibson? Philippe van Parijs has long been an advocate for a very fundamental change to the legal and economic structure of a capitalist democracy, the establishment of a uni...