The Fascinating Story of the Oscillating Epidemic.

I was surprised, today, to find this graph on Google. What struck me was the evident periodicity in the number of deaths in the US. Most of the deaths take place on Thursdays and Fridays. On the contrary, the minima in the curve are almost always on Sundays. Why don't people die on Sundays?

It may well be just a case of bad reporting. I went on, exploring for more data and I discovered that there is something of a worldwide "beat" that generates a weekly periodicity in the deaths. Here are the data.  In this case, instead, people seem to like to die on Fridays and Saturdays, but they stay more alive on Tuesdays.
 

Some regions show clear oscillations, such as the Netherlands, as shown here. In the Netherlands, people die mostly on Wednesdays and survive best on Mondays.

Other countries, such as Italy, don't show a clear periodicity in the number of deaths

So, what can we conclude? Well, I think that the hypothesis that it is a reporting problem is the most likely, yet it is a little strange for various reasons. Possibly it is the bad quality of the data that messes things up

But there is another possibility that I have been considering: that the deaths caused by the coronavirus feel the weekly "beat" of the world activities. In other words, people have a weekly rhythm of working and moving around. It is a periodicity that is reflected in the number of social contacts, then reflected in the number of infections, and finally in the number of deaths. It is an internal "clock" of the system that's reflected on its overall behavior, just like the ice ages of the Pleistocene were clocked by the wobbles and the oscillations of Earth's orbit.


That would explain why the oscillations are clearly detectable in the US and in the Netherlands, where the government implemented a rather light lockdown, but not in Italy, where the lockdown was very strict. In Italy, people lost track of the day of the week -- no more working days, no more weekends. So, no periodicity that would be reflected by the coronavirus cases.

Maybe. More work to be done, more than I can do right now, and I think we need better data. But I thought I could propose this chain of thoughts to the readers of "Cassandra's Legacy" Maybe some readers have different and better ideas? In any case, we keep learning new things with this coronavirus!

The University as a Giant Rube Goldberg Machine

I am not sure I like to be considered a "Collapse Pundit" (as I was recently defined). Surely, however, sometimes I have this horrible sensation that everything is collapsing around me. The world's universities may be a good example of this generalized unwinding of everything. Universities are becoming top-heavy, giant Rube Goldberg machines producing useless paper and bewildered graduates. (image above, from Wikipedia)

Last week, I invited a colleague from the University of Moscow to give a talk at my university, speaking on the geopolitical factors involved in gas pipelines. Not that I expected a crowd coming, but the results were worse than anything I could have imagined. The whole audience at the talk was a grand total of four people (including myself).

I understand that people are busy, that this is exam time for the students, that maybe the talk was not publicized as much as it deserved, and maybe there were other reasons. Yet, this event gave me a chilling sensation. Thousands of students, tens of faculty members, a subject widely discussed in the news and one that, you would think, it should generate at least some interest in a faculty which has "International Cooperation" among its stated subjects of teaching and study. And yet, almost none of them could spare a single hour for this talk.

I was mulling this thing over and then I saw the post published just a few days ago by my friend and colleague George Mobus in his blog "Question Everything" He nails the problem exactly; read that post and you'll understand the situation of universities. Maybe somewhere things go a little better, and maybe somewhere else things are worse. Yet, universities everywhere seem to have become little more than giant Rube Goldberg machines. We study, we teach, we grade students, we fill out forms, we publish papers, but the whole thing is acquiring more and more an aura of unreality. What are doing here, exactly?

To the already excellent synthesis made by George in his blog, I may add that universities could be considered as small scale models of the whole civilization in which they are embedded: they suffer from the same problems. Not only resources are diminishing, but at the same time, the whole structure is becoming top-heavy, burdened by layer after layer of bureaucracy.

It is what Joseph Tainter called the "diminishing returns of complexity" in his classic study "The Collapse of Complex Societies." The cause of societal collapse is not just the lack of resources, but also the appearance of parasitic structures that weigh on society. In my interpretation of the "Seneca Effect" I termed these parasitic structures "pollution," but you may see "bureaucracy" as a form of pollution. The result is this classic curve, from Tainter's book.

No matter how you call this, it is exactly what's happening to universities. Largely, it is a self-imposed disaster, but unavoidable nevertheless.

Peak Research

Joseph Tainter's model of decline is based on the idea that civilizations attempt to counter the effect of declining resources by creating more complex structures. That strategy fails to bring the desired results because of the diminishing returns of complexity. The same factors may be causing a decline in the worldwide effectiveness of scientific research, plagued by bureaucracy, strangled by excess of rules and controls, and weighed down by lack of resources. (My detailed interpretation of Tainter's model can be found in a post titled "Tainter's law, where is the physics?")

Life has been very hard for scientists during the last few years. Already, the life of an active scientist was a rat race in which you had to run in circles, trying to get grants that would allow you to pay students and postdocs and they would help you write more papers that then would be used to support proposal that would provide you grants that would allow you to pay students.....  It has always been like that, but in the last few years it has become hell. More and more bureaucracy, tight controls, guidelines to follow, time schedules to keep and less and less money. And, of course, any attempt to do something creative and a little outside the known schemes seems to be becoming impossible to finance.

I think that the situation is like that everywhere in Europe and the US, at least from what I hear from my colleagues: reduced budgets, more paperwork, and the sensation to be running a rat race. I couldn't find data about the worldwide situation, but these data from the US do suggest that we may have peaked in terms of resources available for scientific research or, at least, we are plateauing. (source: Task Force in American Innovation)

But the question of resources may not be the most important one. What I perceive is, rather, a declining quality of the research being performed. I may be wrong, because it is hard to quantify an entity such as "quality of research". But my impression is that it is becoming increasingly difficult to perform original and innovative research within a system that provides resources for doing that only if researchers submit to a series of tight constraints. Not long ago, I was hearing a talk by a well intentioned presenter who endeavoured to teach to young scientists how to successfully apply for research grants. I don't know what the young scientists thought of that. My impression was that the presenter could have been described the rituals of an esoteric cult dedicated to adoring the God Quetzalcoatl; human sacrifices were not requested, but almost.

Don't get me wrong: I am not saying that I don't like to do research any more. I love doing research and I wanted to be a scientist from the time I read my first science fiction novel; I think that was when I was about six. And I am not saying that science is not progressing any more. Absolutely not. I am amazed by the progress being done in many fields, for instance, in climate science. And that is done despite climate scientists being threatened, harassed and insulted for what they are doing.

What I am saying is that the state of scientific research in the world seems to be a nice example of Tainter's interpretation of the diminishing returns of complexity. Tainter had devised his model to explain the fall of civilizations - he had mostly in mind the Roman Empire. His idea is that when civilizations face diminishing resources, they react by building up more and more complex structure to cope with the problem. But there is a diminishing return to complexity; these structures become burdens rather than solutions and help bringing down the whole system (a discussion of mine on Tainter's model can be found here).

Tainter's model has a certain "fractal" quality; that is it applies to subsystems just as it does to the whole system. If you look at the Roman Empire, you see that all its subsectors where declining together. Can you cite a Roman poet after Virgil? Most likely, you can't. Not that there were no poets after Virgil, but  Roman literature declined with the decline of the Empire and we found little or no interest in refined but shallow poems such as those written by Claudian in the 5th century AD.

Something similar seems to be happening in our times with scientific research (and possibly also with literature). It seems that, facing a declining supply of resources, the structures that manage scientific research try to compensate by building up a new layer of bureaucracy aimed at "optimizing" research - just as they are trying to optimize teaching. It means that, when you obtain a research grant, you are told in exquisite detail exactly what you are to do, how, for how long and that any departure from the plan must be justified. It seems that the very concept of "research," intended as looking for something new, is not allowed any more in these plans. You can't get funded unless you already know what you are going to find.

That's the perfect recipe for that "excellent mediocrity" which is the bane of scientific research. It was already a problem with the phenomenon known as "publish or perish", but with the bureaucratization of research it has gotten much worse. I could give you a series of funny (or tragic) examples from my own experience, but let me skip that. It just seems to me the system is becoming innovation-averse; it is like if "research" had become an oxymoron all by itself. The point is, could we do something about that? Don't get me wrong, I am not saying that scientists should be like Dr. Zarkov in the first episode of "Flash Gordon," where he builds an interplanetary spaceship in his basement. Science is a collective task that requires coordination, planning and some degree of control. But how to turn research into something that can change the world for real? Something that may help us to attain sustainability and stop destroying the ecosystem?

That's difficult of course. Bureaucracy is a tool to keep the world as it is, not to change it. So, in perfect Tainter-style, the system works hard to avoid innovation, not to promote it. It is almost impossible to be financed to study resource depletion; that would highlight problems that would require changes and that's a no-no. Instead, it is still possible to obtain research grants as long as there is no risk that the results will threaten the status quo. Hydrogen as a fuel is a good example. It is high-tech, fashionable, sophisticated, popular, environmentally friendly, and it doesn't work. This last characteristic makes sure that its development will bring no changes whatsoever. Absolutely perfect for the bureaucrats who manage the research grant system.

Thinking about that, I feel like the centurion of Kipling's story, the one who dedicated his life to the defense of Hadrian's wall in Northern England.  The Romans could not reform their Empire to survive decline; they fell in the trap of diminishing returns described by Tainter. And if the Romans failed in reforming their empire, who are we to think that we can reform research?  Tainter's law is harsh.

But, if the idea is to make research more creative, we should think creatively. About the problems of the Roman empire, I said that there was only one solution and that was called "Middle Ages". The only way to save the Empire, intended as its culture, art, laws and all what goes under the name of "civilization", was to break it apart. In a way the solution to keep the Empire alive was to kill it. As the Zen Masters say, "when you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him!"

Could we think of something just as drastic for scientific research? Yes, it would mean to leave the tight world of the research grants and find new ways to perform better research - more independent, more creative. Moving, in a way, to an equivalent of "Middle Ages" intended as the break-up of the old, tight structure. And, think about that a moment, maybe there are already examples of this approach. Think of Wikipedia - it was not created by bureaucrats; it is a free sharing of information done by people who work for free. Think of "free and open source software," that has generated the Ubuntu operating system which I am using to write this post. Probably there are more examples of good work that can be performed not because you are paid to do it. It is said, after all, that "things done illegally are done most efficiently."

That doesn't mean that it is illegal to do scientific research without being told to do it by some bureaucrat, at least so far. But I think that some of the best scientific work I've done in my life (or perhaps the least bad work I did) has been done outside the boundaries of the granting system. A couple of examples are the papers on resource depletion that I and my coworkers recently published  (here and here). All done on a strictly zero budget - but so what? Scientific research is about sharing, after all. I think we should at least try this approach.


With the gradual collapse of the Roman Empire, Roman poets such as Claudian could only write elaborate and shallow praises of those who paid them. That wasn't the end of poetry in Europe: at the same time, the great sagas of King Arthur and of Sigfried were being written outside the Empire's borders by unknown poets who knew nothing of the elaborate rules of Latin poetry. So great was their creative energy that their stories were told for millennia after them and are still known today. So, creative energies can survive declining times and that is perhaps true also for scientific research in our times.

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Note: you may wonder why I am citing so much the Roman poet Claudian in this post about scientific research. Well, it is because I am preparing a post on the figure of Galla Placidia, the last Roman Empress who lived in the 5th century A.D. The historical sources from that period are scant and, therefore, even the poet Claudian may be used as a source of data. And perhaps I have been too harsh in my judgement; his poems have some charm.... ahem.... occasionally.  

Tainter's law: where is the physics?

Joseph Tainter's interpretation of the cause of the collapse of civilisations is that social structures generate negative returns when they become too complex; as shown above (fromTainter's 1996 paper at dieoff.com). We could call this relationship as "Tainter's law". But what is exactly that generates this behavior? In this post, I'll try to make a simple model that explains the law.

 

Joseph Tainter has written a fascinating interpretation of the collapse of human civilisations in his book "The Collapse of Complex Societies" (1988) (see also his 1996 paper) Collapse is a common event: it is the stuff history books are made of. The mighty empires of the past; from Sumeria to the Soviet Union, have all collapsed at some point. Yet, we don't seem to be able to understand the reasons why collapse is so common.

In his book, Tainter examines previous studies and lists at least eleven causes (or "concauses") of collapse that have been proposed by historians. Resource depletion, catastrophes, intruders, social conflict, and others. But is there a single cause of collapse? Or are there several? Tainter looks for a single, common root of the problem and finds it in what he calls "the decreasing returns of complexity".

Starting from a well known concept in economic theory, that of diminishing returns, Tainter builds his case on historical examples. It is clear that several societies have continued to build up and maintain complex and expensive structures even in conditions where it was very difficult to find the necessary resources. An example is that of the fortifications protecting the Western Roman Empire, that must have been such a burden that we may consider them to be of the factors that brought down the Empire. And, in general, we do see that societies, including ours, build up hypertrophic and complex bureaucracies which appear totally useless; an increase of complexity that generates only a waste of resources.

The idea of decreasing returns to complexity looks consistent and reasonable. But, why do societies behave in this way? Tainter does not provide a real explanation; on this point, he seems to follow the tradition of historians to describe rather than interpret. But, if you happen to have a more physics-oriented point of view, then describing what happens is not enough. You want to know what are the inner mechanisms that make civilisations evolve towards higher complexity. What is the physics of collapse?

So, let's see if we can build a model of civilisation growth and collapse. The simplest one that I have been able to put together is the following. It is a "toy model, if you like:

The model is based on the conventions of system dynamics. The rectangles indicate stocks of something. You could say that the box on the left contains fossil fuels, whereas the box on the right contains carbon dioxide. The central box contains all the stuff the economy is made of and that is created from the availability of energy from fossil fuels: people, machinery, building, facilities, you name it.

The fossil fuel stock is processed by the economy and eventually transformed into waste, as indicated by the double edged arrows which show the direction of the flux of matter. The single edged arrows indicate how the amounts stored in the stocks affect the flow; that is also influenced by two constants: how fast the economy can extract resources and how fast resources are transformed into waste.

There are a few more points about the model; the first is that the resource stock is assumed to be finite - that is "non renewable". This is an approximation, but it is a good one and not only for our society. Ancient civilizations were based on agriculture, which is supposed to be a renewable resource. But agriculture is not necessarily renewable; it is more often a way to transform fertile land into a desert by mining a non renewable resource: fertile soil.

Finally, note also that the model assumes a feedback relation between resources and the size of the economy. That is, the more resources there are, the faster they are exploited and - also - the bigger the economy, the faster it exploits resources. These assumptions imply a "positive feedback" between resources and the economy; which is a reasonable assumption. A similar relation holds for the waste and the economy.

Now, let's go on and "solve" the model. That is, let's see how the size of the stocks change as time goes by. Here are the results (obtained using the Vensim software for system dynamics)

As you see, the stock of resources gets depleted while the economy grows. At some point, however, the flow from the resource stock has been so much reduced that the economy can't keep growing and it starts declining. In the end, all the stock of resources has been transferred to the "waste" stock.

Note that the model describes a closed system in terms of mass. There is no flux of matter from or to the outside. And, indeed, mass is conserved in the results: the sum of the mass contained in the three stocks is constant. But the system does exchange energy with the surroundings. Burning fossil fuels generates heat, which is dispersed outside as we may assume that all three boxes maintain at the same average temperature.

The main force behind the transformation is energy potential, in this case the chemical potential of fossil fuels. In other words, the left box (resources) has a thermodynamic potential higher than the right box (waste). As we know from the second principle of thermodynamics, the transformation occurs with the creation of entropy. The economy is a grand machine for creating entropy - it could not be anything else.

If you like to use the term "exergy" (the fraction of energy able to do useful work) you can say that the "waste" stock contains much less exergy than the "resources" stock; while the "Economy" stock has an intermediate exergy content. There is no direct system dynamics convention to express stocks in terms of exergy. It could be taken into account in the model, but let's not go into that - let's keep this model as a "toy" one. The important thing is understanding what makes it move.


Now, let's go back to Tainter's interpretation of collapse. What could we take as "complexity" in the model? There is not an explicit parameter describing that but, as a first approximation, the size of an economy determines its complexity. That has been the rule for all known history and we see it happening even today. With the economic crisis, some structures we could once afford - say, mass instruction, public health care - must shrink and disappear. Society loses complexity in times of decline and gains it in times of growth.

So the "bell shaped" curve that describes the cycle of the economy should also describe its complexity. Now, let's walk one further step in quantifying Tainter's intuition. What can be the meaning of "benefits of complexity"? Well, it is clear from what Tainter says that the benefit of complexity have to do with the ability of society to solve problems. In our toy model, the only problem for the economy is to produce as much as possible in terms of resources. So we can define benefits of complexity as proportional to production, that is to the rate of exploitation of the natural resources stock.

Now we can replot Tainter's idea from the data of the model, that is, plot production ("benefits") as a function of the size of the economy ("complexity"). And the result is something that looks very much like Tainter's law! Here it is. (note that in the full plot the curve is a complete loop that goes back to zero at the end of the cycle):

To compare, here is again Tainter's original plot: the two graphs are not identical, but the similarity is evident.

Now, of course what we have been doing here is a "toy model" of the economy. When I present this kind of models at conferences, usually there is someone in the audience who stands up and says, "It is too simple; it is not realistic!". The idea seems to be that I am modelling societies using a "spherical cow model" - a term used to disparage the tendency of physicists to oversimplify their model.

This is a perfectly understandable criticism, but it can be answered noting that more detailed models of the same kind provide similar results. For instance, the "world3" model of "The Limits to Growth" study leads to curves that are very similar in shape to the ones shown here.

But I think that is not the point, you can make models simple or detailed, it depends on what is their purpose. The toy model presented here is not meant to describe how real societies behave. It is meant to be "mind sized", that is able to help us understand how physical factors affect the historical cycle of civilizations. It stresses that civilizations must obey the laws of thermodynamics; just as they must obey the law of gravity.

Some consequences of the model are obvious. It tells us that as long as we base our existence on non-renewable resources, we must eventually run out of them. But it gives us also some non-obvious hint on the path we are going to follow in this cycle. In particular, the model tells us that we will likely keep increasing the size and complexity of our society even with a diminishing flux of resources into the economy. In this sense, it confirms Tainter's intuition, but it tells us something more; that is it extends Tainter's curve beyond the limit of the plot shown in his 1996 paper. It says that after the phase of increasing complexity and reduced returns, the curve will loop back and, eventually, both complexity and production will go to zero as is the economy completes its cycle based on non-renewable resources. Here is the complete plot:

But the main point is that, eventually, Tainter's law derives from thermodynamics. As we know (or should know) thermodynamics is not only a good idea, it is the law!

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Tainter's 1996 paper "Complexity, Problem Solving and Sustainable Societies"

A post of mine on Tainter's view of collapse

A paper of mine on modelling resource exploitation

Joseph Tainter: talking about collapse

Joseph Tainter speaks at the conference “Advances in Energy studies” in Barcelona, in October 2010.  Tainter is an outstanding presenter: he speaks slowly, clearly, and in a deep voice. Once you start listening to him, you are hooked; you can't miss a single world of what he says – not even if you don't like it. Indeed, at the end of the talk, we had someone from the back rows shouting, “some more optimism, please!” Understandable, perhaps, but it is said that a pessimist is someone who has had to listen to too many optimists.

At the end of his monumental study titled “Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire” Edward Gibbon discusses the question of whether what happened to the ancient empire could happen in modern times, that in the late 18th century, when Gibbon was writing. His answer is that it could not; new hordes of barbarians couldn't destroy the civilized world because of gunpowder, cannons, modern armies and the like.

It is clear that Gibbon saw the Roman collapse as mainly a military event:  the Romans were overwhelmed by one wave of Barbarians after the other. But, like many other historians before him, Gibbon chronicled events without normally interpreting them in the sense we give today to the term - that is finding social, economic or political reasons to explain what happened.

Gibbon, living in the thriving and expanding world of 18th century Britain, just couldn't see that there was much more in the Roman collapse than a simple military problem. It would take time for historians to see the collapse of the ancient world as something related to our own destiny. With collapse impending, or perhaps already started, we can start seeing that the Roman times are a foggy mirror of our times.

Joseph Tainter is the historian who, today, has grasped this relation better than anyone in the past. He is well known for his book “The Collapse of complex societies” (1988) and for the articles he has written on this subject. Here, I am summarizing the talk that Tainter gave at the "Advances in Energy studies”  conference in Barcelona, in October 2010. It was not the first time that I heard him speak and I had read his book (and more than once!). But every time you hear Tainter speak, you have this sensation that he is going deeper and deeper into the problem; that he can present more and more evidence of the relevance of the past for the present. History does not necessarily repeats itself, but when facing similar challenges, people of all ages will tend to react in the same way. That's the relevance that history has for us today and, in particular, the history of the decline and fall of the Roman Empire.

Tainter's main point is related to complexity. He does not exactly define the term, but it is clear from the context that he means all the economic, social, bureaucratic, and military structures that societies create. Complexity is the characteristics of what we call “civilization”. Tainter dismisses the view – that he calls the “progressivist” viewpoint – that complexity is the automatic result of the availability of resources; mainly energy. Correctly, he says that complexity creates resources just as resources create complexity. Tainter doesn't use the terminology of system dynamics, but if we see things within that framework, then we can say that complexity and resources are in a feedback relationship with each other. Resources allow the creation of more complex societal structures and these structures help exploiting resources faster and more efficiently.

In earlier works, such as in his 1988 book, Tainter dismissed also the idea that collapse, intended as a rapid reduction of complexity in a society, could be caused by resource depletion. He would define it as related only to the diminishing returns of progressively increasing complexity. In his talk in Barcelona, however, I think that I can interpret his view in terms closer to the “depletionist” viewpoint. In this sense, Tainter's point is that there is a strong relationship between resources and complexity. It is clear that complexity cannot exist without resources - not for a long time, at least. But the relationship is far from being linear: with resources diminishing, complexity does not decrease – on the contrary it keeps increasing. It is the result of the benefits that complexity gives: resource depletion can be counteracted by increasing complexity, but only up to a certain point and with ever-reducing returns. At some moment, returns become negative, society cannot support any longer its complex infrastructures and the result is collapse.

In his talk in Barcelona, Tainter gave the example of the Roman Empire during the 3rd century A.D. At that time, the Empire faced a serious military crisis: invasions of foreign peoples and internal civil wars. The crisis was solved by Diocletian by doubling the size of the army, increasing taxes and enlarging bureaucracy; overall it was a considerable increase in complexity. Transforming the Roman Empire into a sort of an early version of the Soviet Union was a solution – of a kind – that retarded collapse of a couple of centuries but that, in a certain way, made it unavoidable. The Roman Empire could not afford such a large army and, eventually, it destroyed itself in the attempt of maintaining it. Not unlike the modern Soviet Union.

According to Tainter, we are doing more or less the same. Perhaps our society is not so heavily military oriented as the Roman one, but we are reacting to the crisis much in the same way. Despite all the talk of “saving” or “conserving” resources, it is clear that our society is not doing anything like that. We strive, certainly, towards more efficiency, but the resources that are saved in some areas of the economy are used in some other areas. Being more efficient in extracting resources means that we are running out of resources faster. Being more efficient in using resources means that we are able to create more complex structures that use those resources faster. It is the so called “Jevons paradox” in its strongest form.

The Romans could never fully understand what was befalling on them and they went down kicking and screaming, always thinking that a few more legions could solve all the problems. That was also because they had no structures – research centers, universities or the like – that could alert them. We do have such structures and we have had good warnings since the time when “The Limits to Growth” was published, in 1972. But we also have structures built expressly to demonize and destroy those who bring warnings, we call them “media spin" or "media based consensus building". These structures have been efficiently used to play down the warnings we had from “The Limits to Growth” and are being used now to play down the warning about global warming that we are received from climate scientists. So, having computers is not a great advantage for us over the Romans. It seems that we are going their way.

You can read an excellent summary of Tainter's book "The Collapse of Complex Societies" written by Anatoli Karlin. Some (long) ruminations of mine about the fate of the Roman Empire can be found in this post on the oil drum, titled "peak civilization". You can find Tainter's slides for his 2010 Barcelona presentation at this link.
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