‘Variety’ matters more than you think

and we don’t have enough of it

Imagine you’ve recently received your Commercial Driver’s License, have been checked out and hired by a major trucking firm and have just been assigned to haul a heavy load on a winding route through the mountains – lots of twists, turns, switchbacks and steep inclines ahead. Exciting!

You climb into the cab of your 18-wheeler, turn the key and wait for the plugs to glow, then coax that cold diesel engine into life. Ah… there’s that reassuring rumble!

Then you turn to the controls and dashboard. Oops, something’s obviously off! You have all the forward gears but no reverse; there’s an accelerator but no brakes, a speedometer but no fuel gauge. The right turn signal works just fine, but there’s no left blinker (but maybe that’s OK – turns out your truck only steers to the right.) And just now you see that there are no rear-view mirrors.

You’d be mad taking this rig to the corner store a block away let alone 800 km (500 miles) on high mountain roads.

This simple fantasy serves as a practical introduction to what has been called the First Law of Cybernetics,^[1] W. Ross Ashby’s ‘Law of Requisite Variety’: In the simplest form of cyber-speak: The internal ‘variety’ of a regulatory or control system must be at least equivalent to the variety of the system being regulated/controlled.
In more explicatory English: A regulatory or control system must have a number of possible control mechanisms or systems states at least equivalent to the number of possible challenges or systems states that the intended target system might display.
Obviously, your truck’s control system lacks ‘variety’; there are insufficient indicators and response mechanisms; it would be no match for the challenges that a long, winding haul, up and down steep grades and through high, snowy mountain passes, would throw at it. That vehicle would be a hazard on the road and a threat to life, especially yours.

It fails the test of Ashby’s law. Miserably.

Now let’s up the ante. About as far up as we can go, actually, from a simple mechanical apparatus to a mindbogglingly complex system. Consider the entire human enterprise, modern techno-industrial (MTI) culture, the eight and quarter billion people on earth together with all their overlapping governments, administrative agencies, industrial infrastructure, supportive subsystems, competing corporations and particularly their material economic activities all interacting with each other and the ecosphere – remembering as we go that ‘variety’ will increase exponentially with system size, approaching practical infinity for large complex systems.

First, we should note that the material economy – the economy of real goods and services – should actually be human ecology. The material economy defines H. sapiens’ ecological ‘niche’, the ways and means by which people organize to exploit their supportive ecosystems, dispose of their wastes, and otherwise interact with the biophysical environment. Thus, economic activities comprise all the energy-intensive things humans do to fish the oceans, cultivate arable land, harvest forests, mine the lithosphere for gravel and gold and build-out their habitats (e.g., cities and towns); they also include the processing or refining of raw materials as required for their use in the manufacture of industrial goods and consumer products. Finally, the real economy involves regulation and particularly markets, the means by which goods and services are allocated to different sectors and distributed to final consumers.

Second, it’s clear that the material economy (aka ‘human ecology’) is no longer a trifling matter on this small planet. In just the past two centuries H. sapiens has become the major consumer species in every accessible ecosystem on Earth. But nature’s productivity and livable space are limited, so the eight times increase in human numbers and greater than 100-fold expansion of real gross world product since the early 19^th Century has effectively displaced most non-human mammals from their food supplies and habitats. We humans and our domestic livestock now comprise ~97% of mammalian biomass (weight) on Earth, up from <1% at the dawn of agriculture 8000 – 10,000 years ago; wild mammals cling to the fringe of existence at 3 - 4% and thousands of other species have been extinguished. Permanently. Humans are now, directly and indirectly, the greatest herbivore and carnivore ever to stalk Earthly lands and waters. Moreover, human activities now move several times more material around than all natural erosive forces combined – we have become the major ecological and geological force changing the face of the Earth.

So, how do mainstream (neoliberal) economists and major international institutions regulate/control all this real-world activity? Apart from promoting growth, very poorly – actually, hardly at all.

For starters, humans don’t cognitively live in the real world but rather act ‘out of’ made-up social constructs. Modern techno-industrial society, for example, adheres to the surreal fantasy of human exceptionalism. This is the quasi-religious belief that we humans, with our high intelligence and mortal souls, are not like other species, that we are not part of nature. This exempts H. sapiens from the natural laws that bind other species; i.e., there is nothing ‘human ecological’ about how the modern mainstream thinks.

Consistent with the exceptionalist mindset, our dominant economic theories paint the economy as a self-generating system that operates separately from, and independently of, the ecosphere. Neoliberal economists argue that human ingenuity (e.g., technological prowess) is the greatest resource and capable of finding substitutes for any good or service provided by nature. This reduces ‘the environment’ to mere aesthetic backdrop to human affairs and frees the economy for infinite growth. In this framing, undue government intervention in the mechanics of the market (i.e., regulation) is an inefficient no-no, anathema to the economic faithful. All we need is abiding confidence in market forces to signal imbalances and scarcity, and to assign value (i.e., to self-regulate). This kind of abstract economic reasoning has provided the major stimulant to growth and the quasi-regulation of global development for centuries but particularly since the neoliberal revolution of 1980s.

But here’s the thing: the near-doubling of population, the quadrupling of real gross world product and the 45-fold explosion of global trade volumes since 1980, have enormously increased pressures on the real-world ecosphere. Exceptionalist fantasies notwithstanding, humanity is deeply embedded in nature. Thus, it matters that economic thought makes no useful reference to the temporal and spatial qualities of the ecosphere nor to the structural properties and functional dynamics of the ecosystems within which the economy actually operates. Award-winning economic models do not track affected ecological variables; they make no concession to climate chaos, plunging biodiversity, ocean acidification, soil/land degradation; indeed, there can be no ‘feedback’ whatever from crucially errant environmental variables on our simplistic control system. (There’s an accelerator but no intentional brakes or fuel gauge). In short, neoliberal economics lacks essential variety and is utterly incompetent to regulate MTI society’s interactions with the real biophysical world.

Economics fails the test of Ashby’s law. Miserably.

It gets worse: unlike our 18-wheeler, necro-capitalist MTI culture cannot be ‘fixed’ from within the same set of beliefs, values, assumptions and behaviours that created the problem in the first place. We have landed ourselves in a genuine predicament.[2] Humanity is already far into ecological overshoot: we are learning the hard way that the ecosphere under stress is still immeasurably more complex than even the global human enterprise. It can generate a vastly larger arsenal of negative feedbacks in response to human excesses than any imaginable human control system can match. (Global heating is the best-known example of negative feedback and even it remains unabated.) The ecosphere simply has hopelessly greater ‘variety’ than MTI culture.

This suggests an ominous assessment of future human prospects in the form of an alternative version of Ashby’s law: “When the variety or complexity of the environment exceeds the capacity [i.e., variety/complexity] of a [regulatory] system, the environment will dominate and ultimately destroy that system”.

Returning to our trucking analogy, MTI society’s 18-wheeler is no match for the ecosphere’s high mountain roads. Variety matters and we don’t have nearly enough.

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[1] Cybernetics is the science of communication and control in complex systems.

[2] Problems have solutions; predicaments merely have outcomes.