The Friedman Flat

We are in divergent times. A part of Europe is on the football field watching the Euro cup, while another part is protesting on the streets. I don’t know if Thomas Friedman would have seen it coming. Despite his vision of virtues linked with flatness, the world has somewhere descended into a vicious un-flatness. Not because the flattening drivers (like outsourcing, off-shoring, in-sourcing, personal digital devices, etc) have not brought in efficiency, but because flatness runs on bumpy Time.
The great leveller, the Internet, is itself not enough to hedge the cycles of inflation, or ease the cycles of consumption, or balance the allocation of resources. Mandelbrot’s fractal coastlines had an amazing geometrical rule attached with it. The geometrical rule of proportion said the more the number of neighbours a country has, higher the chances of a conflict. In the context of what’s happening in Europe today, one wonders how the flatness did not ease Europe’s geometric propensity to disagree. The idea of a consensus on spending or currency models was geometrically flawed, from the start.
Moreover, at the end of the day, do we really have to go to war to prove discontent? Society has evolved. Now, we can find new ways of disruption. Let’s destroy value of money by pumping more or let’s teach people how to consume. Flatness was always a utopia. If only efficient systems, sharing information, sharing workflow, objective and robust processes could have taught society to build on the virtues of flatness, there would be no need for risk management. A society is prone to vices. The phenomenon is called hyperbolic discounting. We humans are too myopic in our approach to really value tomorrow. We discount tomorrow more than today.
There is no way you can teach a society. A society learns by hit and trial. It falls, gets up and moves on, gets overconfident and falls again. This is the reason why capitalism is also known as a journey from one crisis to another.
Organic life was chaotic and will remain chaotic. Chaos is the only way a society can thrive on. Just like an efficient system of today will become inefficient in time, the most efficient model snaps at a later day. And, what are we talking about flatness drivers? Are they really efficient? Or, should I say, are they still efficient? Like Friedman pointed out. “What percentage of efficiency do they bring to the world? One or two per cent?
When we get too busy idealising collaboration, the suckers come in and the cycle starts again. Philip Ball explains the patterns of game theory in detail in his book Critical Mass. I am not saying idealising isn’t helpful and foundations and non-governmental organisations don’t work. What I am saying is virtue always remains in the system, it never dies and that’s why it competes with societal vices. But to expect a complete virtuous system that leaves orbit and moves into higher evolved flatness state, it just does not work like that.
Edward R Dewey used to say till humans will live, they will speculate and war. He said this in the 1940s and we are still struggling with the redundancy of the doctrine of three ‘nos’ (no loose nukes, no new nascent nukes and no new nuclear states). Flatness, with all its merit, failed to reduce societal risk. I think it increased it. The Dell theory of conflict resolution and the symphony of supply chain are weaker ideas compared to self-sustainability.