The Oil Drum

I think Wal-Mart is finding that out.

There are parallels between efficient systems and Tainter's complex systems. I am defining efficiency as getting more useful work per unit of energy input. To use an example, a more efficient car engine is one which gets better gas mileage. For equal weight and power, more efficient engines are more complex. A hybrid is both more energy efficient in operation and more complex in design than a non-hybrid gasoline engine. The consequences in going up the efficiency and complexity curves are the same. They both follow the law of diminishing returns. They both require more specilization, information processing and control.
They have more things which can go wrong.

Note also that significant redundancy in the modern world comes from parallel systems set in competition. That is one reason why "complexity" in the US did not mean the same thing as "complexity" in Soviet central planning. Organization matters.

Don

I don't know your background, but you have said, here, one of the most insightful things I have read in a long time.

(maybe because I agree with it ;-)

The vast emphasis in business is on 'efficiency' and 'lean thinking'. There are merits to this *but*

my original discipline was military history. One of the iron laws of military activity is what you don't expect to go wrong, probably will. In no small part because you have an active, thinking opponent who constantly strives to identify your weaknesses, and exploit them.

(Iraq in 2003, Vietnam in 1965-69, Korea in 195-51, and the Market Garden landings at Arnhem in WWII (1944) are 4 easy examples of this truism. In each case, the US Army (or its British allies) was caught with its pants down by an opponent who responded quickly, and skilfully exploited the deficiencies of the American 'way of war')

Accordingly, military organisations exist with huge amounts of 'waste' and 'redundancy' that are only really tested under stress.

One of the problems with 'optimising' our peacetime military, and cutting the fat, is that the spare capacity that a unit has when the S-H-The-Fan is lost. The British military is the exemplar of this 'managerialist' tendency, over the last 30 years or so.

There is a reason why we have regiments that are 350 years old (although fast disappearing). Because the 'inefficiencies' of the regimental mess, the regimental staff, etc, give that organisation the capacity to be destroyed, and rebuilt, again and again.

By the same token, we have universities which are 1000 years old, which have made relatively little concessions to the 'modern' world. New College Oxford, the 'newer' college, was founded in 1341. Yet Oxford and Cambridge have had as many Nobel Prize winners as the top American universities.

Our National Health Service has a similar problem. We are making it more efficient, but that means we are having trouble dealing with 'superbugs' (because you need brute labour force to clean wards, and contractors don't do a good job relative to employed staff who believe in the mission of universal healthcare). And if we ever have another epidemic like the 1919 flu, we just don't have the coping mechanisms any more.

I see analogies to what happened to many businesses after 9-11: their entire production systems were predicated on 'just in time', yet the planes couldn't fly, and the containers were stopped at the border.

Similarly companies go through rounds of 'business process reegineering' and 'downsizing' and you see the long term deterioration in their market share and position and customer service.

The problem with highly devolved power production and lack of large scale transmission is the much greater skilled labor needed to do it well. Power engineering is necessary and not for dummies---doing it wrong is very dangerous. ... The problem is maintenance.

Does every building superintendent have the knowledge to run an efficient power generator with low cost and low emissions? Except for bone-head-simple PV solar, the answer's no. There's no way I would want all those hands tinkering on things.

I want people who spend their lives doing it for a living working on the power production and distribution.

This kind of argument reminds me of how the priests of the mainframe computer room used to defend their turf:

The problem with highly devolved computation power production and lack of large scale centralized data transmission is the much greater skilled labor needed to do it well. Computer Power engineering is necessary and not for dummies---doing it wrong is very dangerous. ... The problem is maintenance.

Does every building superintendent have the knowledge to run an efficient computer power generator with low cost and low error rate? emissions? Except for bone-head-simple hobbyist micro-computers, PV solar, the answer's no. There's no way I would want all those hands tinkering on things.

I want people who spend their lives doing it for a living working on computer data power production and distribution. :-)