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Thinking Dialectically About Complexity

A simple statement about the world is that it is complex. Another simple statement is that we must learn and listen to diverse voices about that complexity. That is why institutions that strive to master the unknown, like universities, are important. When we give up on learning and listening, we step into traps complexity sets for us. We have seen that simple solutions for managing complexity can make substantial contributions; but then we must move on to more complex and nuanced capabilities. Sometimes they are informed by science that tells us which variables are most important and what are the most important interactions among those variables, so we know that X works, but only if we do Y and Z as well, and only if we sequence the doing of these three things in a particular order. We know that as well from experience as cooks following good recipes.

Obviously as that kind of scientific knowledge moves beyond three variables, it quickly gets very complex indeed. What helps us with that is a turn to very local forms of contextual knowledge. In health care, we turn to the clinical experience of our family doctor. She knows the health histories of members of our family; she knows I am not good at sticking to diets and that my particular body has an adverse reaction to this drug that most people do not have, the drug that evidence-based medicine says should normally be prescribed in my circumstance. So she crafts a suggested alternative treatment program ‘with’ me rather than ‘for’ me or ‘to’ me.

One of the great evidence-based discoveries in the science of human development is that being evidence-based about applying a ‘best practice’ is often not the best practice. The recurrently better practice is to be locally attuned. So in a village where children suffer malnutrition, yet eat cheap processed food, it is not the best practice for a nutritionist to enter the village and try to introduce nutritional best practice by changing what is grown in the village and how it is cooked. Randomized controlled trials suggest that ‘positive deviance’ is a better development practice. So the nutritionist does better to work ‘with’ the village by first listening to villagers and observing their existing practices. From this, identify champions of better slow food cooking practices that deliver joyful eating to villagers that supplants processed foods. Identify a corner of the village where a farmer is a champion at growing more nutritious crops more plentifully than in other corners of that village. Lionize that cook and that farmer as champions. Encourage others in the village to learn from them by sharing some of the joy of their farming, their cooking. That locally attuned practice of searching with the village for ‘positive deviance’ works better than doing best practice ‘for’ the village. Duncan Green’s (2016) How Change Happens is a resource on how encouraging modelling of locally attuned better practices out-performs ‘best practicitis’.

For all of that, there is compelling evidence that some simple, bright-line rules, some simple principles and simple institutions designed to help us avert complexity’s traps do indeed help. Driving automobiles through the traffic of large cities is complex. Although the day arrives soon when AI helps humans better master its challenges, AI currently available is safer than human drivers on highways but still does not satisfy the demands of auto safety law for suburban driving that might hit a child. We do know that, whether the car is steered by a human or by AI, a bright-line rule must be that all cars drive on a particular side of the road. This is a simple rule that contributes greatly to averting collisions. It works imperfectly as a rule that serves interests of travelers. Non-compliance is easy to detect and punish. Drivers do doze off, however, causing collisions by crossing that line. So a simple, cost-effective way to reduce fatalities further is to separate streams of traffic with sufficient space for barriers that engineer impossibility of veering into incoming traffic at proven accident-prone places.

We must move on from a limited number of simple principles and simple institutions to a larger number of simple rules that evidence points to for reducing complexity’s traps. Chapter 2 showed that a large number of simple rules can be like a large number of simplifying apps on an old person’s phone, however. An overly large clutter of apps, simplifying though they may be, can overwhelm an older person, taking them beyond requisite variety for the improved operation of their communication. We have seen that organizations can also be overwhelmed by too many good rules, each of which is useful standing alone. The aggregation of too many rules has crippled the effectiveness of corporate tax law, allowing smart lawyers to benefit the rich by playing a thicket of frequently contradictory rules against one another. The consequence of that contrived complexity is that the rich often pay no tax and poorer people a high portion of their income in tax. Chapter 2 showed how a thicket of too many rules undermined the integrity of the system of rules for regulating aged care in the United States. The limits on capability of bureaucracies to cope with a vast swathe of rules means compliance with each rule is assessed with low reliability and validity.

One thing needed therefore is intermittent pruning of Apps on a phone and rules of a bureaucracy in pursuit of the requisite variety discussed in Chapter 2. It is easier said than done. Whenever national tax authorities embark on tax simplification projects, they accomplish less than hoped. They struggle with the discovery that there is some circumstance where most rules are useful. The problem is less rule by rule, more a problem of there being too many rules to make sensible management of complexity possible. This is the crux of the case for a limited number of fundamental tax principles that are legally privileged to trump rules. Principles can simplify endless clever conflicts within the morass of rules. The judge and the tax authority can rule that in this circumstance, rule A applies, but not rule B with which it conflicts, because this choice gives superior overarching compliance with the fundamental principles of tax law.

A third remedy recognizes that to live in a society where every applicable rule is enforced is to live under tyranny. Social life is less dominating with optimum consistency and minimally sufficient deterrence than with maximum consistency and maximum deterrence. So this third remedy is to move decisionmaking away from the arena of the consistent enforcement of every applicable rule. Resolve more policy dilemmas by what I have called restorative diplomacy. When two countries are at war, a peace agreement is unlikely to be settled if either side argues that a pre-condition for agreement is that every war criminal on the other side must first be prosecuted. There has never been a war where anything remotely like this has happened because in every war there are thousands of unpunished war crimes on all sides. The best that can be approached is prosecution of the most egregious and senior criminals. This was more or less achieved on the side of the losers of World War II, though victor’s justice allowed impunity to prevail on the winner’s side. In an insurgency war, the best we do is to give amnesties to tens of thousands of low-level insurgents even though they are all involved in illegal killing of people. A new leadership on the insurgency side might agree to terms that allow some leaders to be prosecuted. Positive outcomes that often do much of the work in persuading the other side to sign the peace accord include an end to the killing monitored by international peacekeepers, return of agreed territory from one side to another, an internationally monitored election, and promises of aid to rebuild the country. Individuals who have lost a leg in a war crime usually do not get prosecution of the culpable criminal who planted the mine, but often get humanitarian assistance to get them walking again, working again, with a bit of victim compensation cash. Tragically, we accept that restorative diplomacy makes peace possible by simplifying to a big picture of recovery that neglects much impunity (Marsavelski and Braithwaite 2020). Note that the effective UN peace operation that facilitates this with locals is not the Leviathan enforcing peace that realists insist is missing in the anarchy of international relations. It is a temporary international coalition of helpers and facilitators of local problem-solving conversations, yes with some enforced civilian protection from fighters with guns, some enforced cantonment and disarmament of armed units as well.

Environmental and pandemic protocol inspectorates share many of the foregoing features in common with peace operations. When they go on the beat, they see dozens of things they could prosecute. Mostly they do not. They might simply say, ‘You are entering a hospital madam, please put on a mask’; ‘Please clean up that minor oil spill before I come back to finish the inspection tomorrow’. If inspectors do not do that, they spend too much of their time tied up in court enforcing tiny matters; they fail to prioritize limited enforcement capabilities onto serious non-compliance where enforcement might change the way powerful organizations think about their environmental obligations, the way hospital systems think about infection control systems. So restorative inspection must be responsive to where structurally important risk resides.

In sum, the three principles for a dialectics of requisite variety here are: 1. Prune rules; 2. Transform jurisprudence so fundamental principles trump rules; 3. Shift away from automaticity of enforcement of rules, algorithmic or human, to a restorative diplomacy of rule enforcement, peace agreements, motivation of environmental stewardship, virus containment, and stewardship of the financial system’s integrity.

There is a fourth principle that the book so far has only implicitly addressed. It is to design the separation of bureaucratic powers so that the highest priority risks get the funding, the autonomous power requisite to regulation of them, and the focused attention required. I illustrated this simplicity with Taiwan’s action plan of 124 discrete measures overseen by its National Health Command Centre and by local preparedness teams. On a regular basis, good governments prune bureaucracies and create new ones that focus on the big risks. An essential ingredient for making this growth of new bureaucracies work is well-crafted enforcement of a separation of powers. This means judges have one job to do and legislators another (important jobs they must stay focused upon). A poorly crafted separation of powers creates inefficiency and injustice by allowing legislators to interfere in decisions of judges in ways they are poorly trained to do, or worse because of political corruption. There are perhaps 150 countries in the world that fail to craft a wise separation of powers that keep both the judges and the legislators hard at work on what is their specialized function. Another 40 odd societies do a reasonable job of that separation.

The design principle for an efficient and effective separation of powers is that each separated power must have sufficient separated autonomy from other separated powers in a governance system, private or public, to get on with being accountable for doing its job. At the same time, there must be other agencies in the separation of powers that among them can hold every other separated power accountable.

If the head of the pandemic preparedness agency is taking bribes from a health care corporation, an anti-corruption commission working with internal and external audit and the judiciary can hold accountable the corrupted leader of the pandemic preparedness response. To those who have limited experience of the size and complexity of bureaucracies, this seems unworkably complex. Yet there is that lived bureaucratic experience of 40 odd countries doing well enough at pruning old and creating new shoots of bureaucracy to assure optimized autonomy and accountability to tame the most important risks. This is not so different from the complex accomplishments of gardeners who do well enough at optimizing the sweet spot between pruning old shoots and creating new ones. A fourth bureaucratic gardening principle could be prudent crafting of an apt balance between old bureaucratic autonomies to get things done and new bureaucracies that hold them to account in ways that are carefully limited in the crafting of the separation of powers. Good governance is responsively optimized to improve performance, not so unlike the responsive optimization of the apps on our phones customized to our more pressing communication priorities.

The idea of responsive regulation as an iterative practice helps with this seemingly difficult challenge. When a regulatory agency escalates to intervention in another private or public bureaucracy that crushes its autonomous capability to deliver on its risk containment function, the regulator should deescalate from intervening in that way and consider an alternative for future use that better optimizes risk containment. Good practice before de-escalation is to admit the counterproductive overreach. Then negotiate restoratively for innovation into better ideas for voluntary compliance to reciprocate the regulatory de-escalation.

It seems implausible that endlessly adjusting the pruning regimens of our garden, endlessly pruning and growing the apps on our phones, and endlessly pruning and growing new sub-units in corporations and states could be efficient. In each case so much expansion of complexity seems ongoing. My hypothesis, however, is that this is the nature of the path to requisite variety of complexity. It is a learning path, a trial-and-error path. It is a journey of endlessly failing to get the level of complexity right, be it in bureaucracies or apps, yet learning how to fix this and re-optimize. With bureaucracies, we must understand that simply requiring the old Health Department to implement the 124 new Taiwanese pandemic preparedness requirements will overburden it with even more rules that it is failing to enforce. The correct Taiwanese judgment was that pandemic preparedness was important enough to create a new bureaucracy devoted to preparedness with just those 124 requirements, and accountable for them. What we want to do in installing new Apps is to prioritize installation of simplifying Apps that will take over the functions of many old Apps as well as opening new horizons. Likewise, we want legal principles that trump rules in ways that simplify the underlying meaning of countless rules at once as it grows a deeper capability of a state to nurture the ideal of an equitable and efficient tax system or system of environmental law.

Sure, in the old days bureaucracies were smaller and simpler. Today there is such an alphabet soup of them that none of us can remember, let alone use. My conclusion, however, is that iterated growth in the size and complexity of governance can bequeath societies better lives for citizens with more risks under control. But this only happens when the governance of governance is well crafted and locally attuned. Moreover, the evidence is that some states and corporations fail disastrously at this challenge of meta governance. Sometimes the state must take over a bankrupt bank or an aged-care home with catastrophic infection control. Frequently after a devastating war, it can be best for a UN peace operation for some years to help a transitional government to grow new institutions to master the complexities of modern governance. Here we have the central importance of meta governance to optimizing requisite variety in the balance between simple and complex governance.

What is fatal is analysis paralysis. That is the worst option when overwhelmed by many complex challenges. To be effective, we must learn to search for and savor complexity and also learn how to rally people around the simple things that remain clear imperatives. Analysis paralysis is what has happened to UN peacekeeping since its 1990s golden era before it was overwhelmed by the arrival of the wars cascading from Iraq, Syria, Libya, Iran, and Russia, and overwhelmed by the misjudgment of NATO armies that it was more important to have troops committed to wars in Afghanistan and Iraq than to UN peacekeeping. We can conquer analysis paralysis by getting to work on some simple principles and institutions of risk containment. I have urged a jump starting of risk containment by attempting first a pruning principle, a transformation strategy of subordinating thickets of rules to overarching principles, the few that trump the many. Second, I suggested a principle of substituting conflicts in courts or on battlegrounds with restorative diplomacy that improves justice through relational problem-solving agreements. Third is a design principle of growing a complexity of regulatory bureaucracies wherein each separated power of a state has enough autonomy to do its job, but the network of separated state and non-state powers can hold bits of the state accountable for doing their job. No separated power can dominate all other powers, not even the office of the president. The separations of powers are delineated distinctly enough to deliver simple accountability for getting risk containment jobs done.

Histories of flourishing democracies reveals much wisdom in how to iterate at attempting these challenges to reach requisite variety in networked governance of risk, and governance of domination under prudently optimized separations of powers. Wisdom in accomplishing requisite variety in rules and principles, in making states more complex by growing new bureaucratic shoots and pruning older shoots requires cultivation from the reading of history as a habit of statecraft. History supplies lessons of overburdened bureaucracies becoming clunky, sometimes of new shoots quickly taming a risk, sometimes failing to, or interfering in the capability of other bureaucracies to get their risk containment done. In all histories there is a dialectics of struggle between bureaucratic complexity versus simplicity of focused accomplishment. Sometimes the synthesis generated by that dialectic is a discovery of institutional beauty for the connoisseur of bureaucracy. Sometimes it is ugly, despotic. Always there are lessons to learn, dysfunctions to fix. Reading history educates us to think in time about the nuanced, ever-changing character of the requisite variety of challenges of complexity, of networked governance of complexity to render it accountable.

My Controversial Simplifications

My quest has been no more than to explore this approach to cascading crises and coupled complexity. I have identified some useful examples of simple starting principles and institutions that might help. I do not see this quest and method as very controversial. What are controversial are some of the simple principles and institutions I have defended. The lesson of complexity theory as it is taught to soldiers at the street-level in the era of the ‘strategic corporal’ is that if you are pinned down in a foxhole with fire seeming to hail down on you from every side, the worst thing you might do is stay put. An enemy will arrive from one of those directions to kill you. Perhaps better to back a risk, probing to break out in different directions until you find one that works in allowing you to reach your own lines. Sadly, humans often select bad simple solutions about where to head; they perish quickly. Likewise with my selection of starting principles and institutions. A good example of controversial selection is the Chapter 9 suite of principles that are crucially in the interests of international society and of governments that abide by them: Foreign governments should never interfere in the elections of other societies; they should not assassinate foreign leaders; they must not instigate or fund foreign military coups; they should not fund terrorists or proxy insurgents who fragment sovereign consolidation of another country’s territory.

Ethical commentators might nevertheless look with favor upon the US decision to meddle in the Israeli election of 1992 against Yitzhak Shamir because he ignored warnings that the United States would act if he did not stop building illegal Israeli settlements on land defined by international law as Palestinian. Exit polls showed that the meddling worked: voters rejected Shamir because he had lost the confidence of the United States. The US meddling succeeded in bringing to power Prime Minister Rabin, who was more committed to compliance with international law and respect for the rights of Palestinians, and more committed to a peace process than any before him (Levin 2020, 247–52). Yet that peace process was never revived after rabbis issued a halacic verdict that Rabin was a persecutor of Jews who thus was free to be killed. Rabin was then assassinated by an extremist. Whether ethical or not, the meddling’s success proved a ‘catastrophic success’ in the final washup along a violent pathway. Downes's (2021) data show the path from violent interference to catastrophic success to be of a recurrent kind. Hence, the argument was that although there is evidence that such meddling can deliver short-term objectives of the meddler, it is prone to blowback. Blowback tends to be so widely counterproductive that it makes the world less dangerous in the long run to embrace the principle of non-meddling. That is not to deny that it is controversial for the US President to refuse to ‘do something’ in the Shamir circumstance. Nor is it to deny that new and better evidence might be collected in future decades.

Another controversial principle is to contain the biggest risks but desist from temporary containment of states as promptly as is possible. This is not what the United States does. It can be quick to impose sanctions on states and people it dislikes, but slow to lift them. Others are the principles of restorative diplomacy as an alternative to realist diplomacy and to covert foreign meddling. Strategic balance is an example of a simple concept in realist international relations theory that is also embraced by Hedley Bull’s British school of IR theory, grounded in the idea of international society, indeed embraced by many thoughtful liberal institutionalists. An argument of this book has been that the considerable explanatory power of the balance concept for explaining past histories of conflict is muddied and muddled by technological complexity and the complexity of coupled crises that technological change forebodes. A balance in the number of nuclear weapons means little if one side secretly develops hypersonic AI weapons of such speed and stealth that adversaries have no hope of stopping them before they wipe out all their missiles and cities. It was a great accomplishment to halve and then halve again the number of nuclear weapons on our planet. But it became less of an accomplishment once current nuclear missiles were developed that are three hundred times as devastating as the first generation of nuclear strike capabilities. Nor might there be hope of discovering whether it was enemy X or enemy Y that launched the hypersonic missile until all has been lost. Nor might we ever discover before we perish that we started a nuclear exchange by mistakenly hitting a dual use missile that was carrying a conventional weapon, or no explosives at all (a training launch), and not carrying the nuclear weapon indicated by our false intelligence. Thinkers about technological trajectories are likely to agree that during the next 200 years there will be many moments when the world suffers conjunctures when we do not have the intelligence to target deterrence accurately. There will also surely be conjunctures where pandemics, financial crises, and ecological crises cascade and couple beyond our control.

Hence my simple proposition is that the planet’s ecosystems will not survive unless states proceed promptly on a trajectory toward total WMD bans. Concurring with that proposition involves no dismissal of the empirical claim that strategic balance can help avert war. Nor does it dismiss the hypothesis that it will prove impossible to achieve total WMD disarmament. We can simply lay out a pathway toward total WMD disarmament that makes the world a little safer with each tiny step along that path. Humankind cannot delude itself that, once invented, WMDs and AI can be uninvented. We can agree that total abolition opens an opportunity to a despot who covertly seeks to dominate the world through reinvention of WMDs. This book’s counter to that is that at every point along a policy pathway to WMD abolition, the world’s states and institutions can lock into a sufficiently multilateral and multidimensional response to ensure that the tyrant fails to benefit from holding the world hostage.

I have argued that there are reasons for optimism that invaded countries tend to become ungovernable, and therefore unattractive to invade. That is about combinations of domestic resistance from bullied countries, saboteurs, coalitions of willing conventional military supporters of them, diplomatic mobilization at the United Nations and through sanctions, reputation loss, and credibility loss. Consequently, no country has sustained outcomes that proved in their interests by launching a militarily major invasion of another country in the past seven decades. This has been true even though the world has seen in recent history seven cases of a nuclear weapons state rather unsuccessfully attack a weaker state without nuclear weapons (the US + v. North Korea + ; US + v. Vietnam and Cambodia; USSR v. Afghan tribes; US + v. Afghan Taliban; US + v. Iraq; Russia v. Ukraine+). Then there are more complex invasions like that of Gaddafi’s Libya that cascaded south perhaps to become even more disastrous than these. During this period the world has also seen the weaker party prevail against an invader that was not a nuclear weapons state, but an invader that was a powerful player in the world system that had 200 times the population of the weaker state, more than 200 times its GDP, 1000 times its military budget and its number of troops (Indonesia v. Timor-Leste). Both Indonesia and Timor-Leste were winners from ending their drain of blood and treasure (20 percent of the population of the invaded country died; almost all buildings of the invaded country were razed; both economies were so hobbled that both regimes were propelled toward transformation). Indonesia benefitted greatly by deepening its democracy in the washup. It rehabilitated its diplomatic reputation as it withdrew to allow a UN-supervised independence referendum and UN peacekeeping.

A modernity in which both parties benefit from ending wars of invasion in all the cases we know can deliver hope of the world improving its peacemaking architecture. International society can deliver a safer world that gradually makes progress with unilateral WMD disarmament in every country where this can be accomplished. The desirable endgame is not another unipolar world. January 6, 2021 in Washington is proof enough that a world where the United States was the moral exemplar of democracy that could be trusted to be the only WMD power is now an untrustworthy settlement. What we need is the greatest powers to do as they were beginning to do at the time of President Kennedy’s assassination and President Reagan’s retirement to enjoy his old age. We can want China, the United States, and Russia to monitor one another and all be monitored by UN institutions like the International Atomic Energy Agency as they reduce WMD arsenals. IAEA is an example of a simple institution with a complex task. So is WHO for the globalization of disease. The simple policy of strengthening, legitimizing these institutions advances a helpful response to the risk of catastrophe. Along the journey of these simple ideas, the hope is to inject into the conversation some new ideas about how to make this pathway safer. An example is many state legislatures enacting a law to nullify extradition treaties in cases where a person blows the whistle on a WMD program that is in breach of international law.

Such a simple law is no panacea. The hope is that the more policy scholars ponder this idea, the more they see how institutions could be crafted by international society to become potent at undermining the covertness of covert WMD programs. Many of the scientists responsible for WMDs suffer such profound remorse that they might contemplate well-paid positions in prestigious non-WMD universities where they and their families could be secure after they blow the whistle. This is a simple idea that could grow in importance upon deeper reflection.

States can be like a US government that does not believe in disarmament yet does believe that it is possible to refine and develop nonviolent means of civilian resistance that torment a domestic despot or an invading army to the point of crippling an illegitimate Leviathan (Lee 2020). I am not advocating US meddling by, for example, urging Iranian nonviolent resistance aimed at rendering Iran ungovernable. Better advocacy is for R & D at Western and Iranian universities on pathways for nonviolent resistance. Then leave the students alone to agitate in defense of their society without foreign meddling. Invaders and domestic despots can be disabled by patient slow-food cooking of resistance campaigns. It is universities rather than states that are more critical to this simple ambition not only because universities are better at basic and innovative R & D on social change than states, but because most successful civilian resistance campaigns at crisis moments of modern history are led by university students who imbibe insights from international society with support from wise heads within university communities. My Peacebuilding Compared data to date supports this conclusion, though many cases remain to be researched and coded.

The Ambulance Metaphor Revisited

Ambulance services were pondered as an exemplar of a simple solution to complex crises. During the covid crisis, ambulance services performed reasonably well worldwide, with courageous dedication. They saved countless lives by getting people onto ventilators in time, though not as many as could have been saved with better pandemic preparedness institutions of the kind evident for Taiwan. A major reason for homicide declines and war death rate declines during the past century or two has been ambulance support before victims bleed to death from stab and bullet wounds. This accomplishment in prevention of war deaths has been growing since early strides taken during the Crimean War with germinal leadership from Florence Nightingale.

For many ambulance services, covid was the worst crisis they had confronted. Mostly they adapted admirably. In some covid hot spots effective staffing was doubled by soldiers with some first aid training driving ambulance vehicles and helping, with the hands-on care led by an experienced paramedic. Militaries supplied supplementary ambulance cars, as did surrounding rural areas and provincial cities that were little affected by early covid waves. Safer regions surged their ambulances into cities that were hot spots. Long shifts were worked. Many recently retired ambulance staff answered appeals to return to service. When ambulances were struggling to arrive at all the places needed, public service messages advised families how they could comfort their loved ones and when they should get them to a hospital in a private car. Great things were accomplished in these ways to get us through. For all that, the story was not rosy worldwide; countless covid victims died who could have been saved by a functioning ambulance service that was less overwhelmed.

Although ambulance managers learnt from covid about a range of things they could do to scale up their service by multiples of capability, policymakers should continue to fear that paramedics might give up in despair during the more overwhelming crisis when most cities, including most hospitals, are wiped out in a nuclear attack, or the kind of attack afflicting Gaza as I write. Post-covid, our ambulance services should be supported to undertake lessons-learned exercises. During the frugal post-covid years when societies seek to run down covid debt levels for their recovering economies, it is an important gift to our grandchildren to provide ambulance services the resources to do their training and lessons-learned reports well. Adequate infrastructure development is not enough for a simple institution like an ambulance service. It must also do scenario planning in which it plugs in those lessons and imagines the diverse ways it might scale up its capability in the face of different kinds of future crises, including mega ones like nuclear devastation.

In the 1950s, Australian civil society did a better job of preparing for a future nuclear war than it does today. My mother was our local volunteer civilian defense coordinator. As she was learning how to cook big pots of pooled food in a metal garbage bin for neighborhood survivors, I remember we kids protesting to mum that there was no way we would eat from a garbage bin. Not many years after the Cuban Missile Crisis, this form of civilian preparedness dropped away. War concerns became more immediate, focused offshore on young people in the neighborhood conscripted to fight in Vietnam. This was also a time when confidence increased that nuclear war could be averted because Presidents Kennedy and Krushchev were talking to each other in the constructive way discussed earlier, after their Cuban fright.

For the sixty years since, the nuclear non-proliferation regime has performed remarkably in containing the number of nuclear weapons states to nine. It now seems possible that we will reach the milestone of a century without another nuclear weapon exploding over a city. This is a remarkable testimony to human capabilities to build simple institutions, however flawed and fractured, that might see out a century of protecting the planet. Sadly, this regime today is not enjoying one of its golden eras. Mothers no longer prepare their older children to help their younger siblings survive nuclear war in the way my mother did, and mothers did across North America, Europe, Russia, China, Korea, and Japan. This is because of denial and refusal to acknowledge why we will be lucky if we do survive a century without cities razed again by nuclear attack. When I did a Google Scholar search on ‘Ambulance services nuclear war’, hardly any useful recent publications came up. The most useful ones were:

Hammond, Marguerite M. 1958. Mass Casualties from Nuclear War. British Medical Journal.

Jones, Tim. 2000. A comparative study of local authority preparations for nuclear war in North-Eastern Wales, 1948-1968. Welsh History Review.

Grant, Matthew. 2009. After the bomb: Civil defense and nuclear war in Britain. London: Springer.

The third publication has just passed a hundred Google Scholar citations; the first two had only five between them. My impression of a scholarly and public policy politics of denial was confirmed by the search. Ambulance services are part of the politics of Hiroshima denial. The politics of denial has served interests of political leaders who defend their people with nuclear weapons combined with that politics of denial. Denial means one day if a nuclear cloud appears on the horizon, parents will be asking themselves belatedly at the last second if they have taught their children in what part of a building they should shelter, wherever they are at the moment of fate.

Perhaps ambulance services do not discuss what lessons Japanese ambulance services learned from Hiroshima and Nagasaki about how to scale up services to maximize lives saved. I am a baby boomer scholar of peacebuilding, yet the wider politics of Hiroshima denial is such that I did not learn until I was 69 from the writing of a friend who is a distinguished Japanese historian of Australian troops’ shameful actions around Hiroshima in 1945 as occupation proceeded. The Australians were particularly feared because of the frequency and brutality of their rape of young women who survived because they were working away from the center of the city. This is definitely not part of our Greatest Generation narrative of World War II. The reasons for our politics of Hiroshima denial are various. When the next nuclear war occurs, we should fear that no lessons will be learnt from how the world could have done better at preserving shattered lives in Hiroshima.

Many Disparate Simple Institutions

My purpose in selecting ambulances is to choose a micro institution that is marginalized in macro debates about improving human survival in the face of global crises. Ambulance scaling up illustrates the fundamental point of this chapter: that there are many simple institutions that are crucial to crisis prevention and amelioration. We need to encourage all of them to do their lessons-learned work on past crises to prepare themselves for future ones. What is required is not so much a grand national strategy, nor global strategic planning exercises, as it is many little lessons-learned exercises in already existing ambulance services, police services, fire brigades, hospitals, schools, universities, banks, finance departments of many local governments across a galaxy of locales. National and global strategic planning have important roles to play in ticking off whether all the kinds of local lessons-learned exercises are occurring with the energy required for future preparedness for prevention of preventable suffering from diverse cascading crises.

There is a reason why the United States lost more lives to covid than all of East Asia and all of the Pacific societies to the West of the Americas combined, even though the pandemic took off in East Asia. There are reasons why the UK economy shrunk by 10 percent during 2020 and 2021 combined, the United States and continental Europe by 5 percent, while China grew by 10 percent (Goldin 2021, Chapter 11). Among them is that East Asia was better prepared with national strategic plans and past reflection from local institutional lessons learned. There was some East Asian overreaction as well, notably in China during 2022 when it persisted with lockdowns and mask mandates for too long, when it should have been more focused on vaccine and covid treatment rollouts.

All societies can be like Taiwan instead of Boris Johnstone’s Britain, Bolsonaro’s Brazil, or Trump’s America in preparing for future pandemics. The number of institutions that must be readied not just for pandemics, but for cybercrime, cyberwarfare and cyberterrorism epidemics, climate crises, preventive peacemaking and war, and financial crisis prevention is huge in number. Every one of them is important, and more important at the local level than in global and national capitals that will be cut off from local institutional preparedness during the worst of crises.

Critics of this book will rightly say it fails deplorably to consider root cause X of crises, and solution Y. My purpose is not to be synoptic but to move from the ambulance preparedness metaphor to illuminate how there are many simple institutions like ambulance services that do vital work collaboratively with other institutions in readying a planet for what is coming. The kind of slow-food civil defense preparation my mother did is worthy of revival. There is merit in parents disgusting their children as they prepare themselves on how to clean and cook whatever could be thrown into a metal rubbish bin to feed neighborhood survivors! These are meta-lessons, lessons about lessons, about preparing neighborhoods, workplaces, and long lists of institutions to be crisis-ready, readying resilience in many simple ways do matter. Getting these mentalities in place is a social structural thing and a policy culture accomplishment. Details of the long lists of simple institutions that matter is important work, all 124 of them on Taiwan’s pandemic list are worthy of evaluation. That is not the work of this book.

Yet we might see that fundamental to social structures of preparedness is a politics of hope and purpose. We can understand what not to do when rapid, tightly coupled crises overwhelm us the morning we open curtains to a mushroom cloud on our horizon. When this quickly cascades to a climate crisis, famine, nuclear winter, radiated rain, a massive hole in the ozone layer, a pandemic of unemployment, drug abuse, and cascading disease pandemics, we can push on to help other survivors with a sense of purpose. Best not to think these cascading crises are so unexpected and complex as to be beyond our comprehension. That might be better than opening our best bottle of wine to muse upon earth’s end. Survivors do better with simple preparedness to put their shoulders to the wheels of many simple institutions that they must get to turn again as best they can in horrific circumstances. To prevent that day dawning we also do well to be active in the peace movement, to be the kind of advocates of peace diplomacy, environmental diplomacy, regulation of financial domination and the crises it can engender, and public health diplomacy in ways many of our dear mothers were.

Early Detection; Early Response

Epidemiologist of smallpox eradication, Larry Brilliant (2006), suggested two simple crisis prevention principles: ‘early detection, early response’. That is not rocket science. Foregoing chapters argued that movements toward desk audit and away from field inspections, toward risk analysis and algorithmic regulation can obstruct early detection, even though they can add value in specific ways. This is because data collection for entry into algorithms takes so long after data cleaning, waiting for laggard entries to come in, even if data analysis is quick. In my experience of regulatory agencies, staff are often exhausted or have moved on to a new challenge by the time the data analysis is complete. A new management flavor of the month arrives and the risk analysis results are sometimes never written up or shared. The risk revolution in regulation is a beautiful theory, but frequently so far, unresponsive as a practice.

Early detection requires shifting resources away from deskbound risk scanners to reinvest in field inspectors with a more detective mentality and an orientation to local dialogue for contextual on-the-spot fixes. We have seen that when inspectors get out into the field, insiders quietly tell them where to look for something scandalous that scares the insider. Sometimes the risks revealed this way are so scary that on that very day when the inspector reveals to top management that she has just discovered it, management panics that the regulator has discovered it, and gets it fixed immediately. In other cases when the risk is a big deal and accompanied by management recalcitrance, the inspector might refer it to her prosecution unit.

That very week, the whistleblower might leak to the financial press that a criminal investigation into their organization is underway. This can happen when the whistleblower takes cover with the narrative that it must have been someone working for the regulator or an NGO who leaked. The potency of criminal punishment of corporations that is not embedded in a more complex regulatory mix is surprisingly weak. One of many reasons is that stock prices of firms almost always rise the day the judge announces a corporate sentence. The market reaction is relief that the fine is so small compared to the market value of this firm. On days when commencement of a criminal investigation hits the media, however, stock prices tend to fall quite a bit (Braithwaite 2022, 483). Who knows what will happen? This is the simple conclusion again that detection and remedial action has more power than punishment, even though we cannot do without some punishment that is just tough enough.

In the pages that follow I discuss and build upon empirical research conclusions that are documented in detail in earlier work (Braithwaite 2022). Early detection and early response are why I (Braithwaite 2022, 291–298, 477–487, 538) lauded learning of lessons from 1970s US Securities and Exchange Commission Director of Enforcement, Stanley Sporkin. He got early response by making it clear that unless major corporations retained independent counsel to promptly, fully disclose their slush funds and the recipients of bribes from them, and then respond with independently monitored compliance reforms, prosecution would result. A key to sustaining Sporkin’s early germinal enforcement successes is a track record of genuine escalation to prosecution after past repeat offending. This was the journey to the paradox that deferred prosecutions can be more capable of delivering early detection and response in many circumstances more than actual prosecutions (Braithwaite 2022, 456–492). There are comparable lessons on why early detection and response have proved the main game of covid responsiveness that minimized deaths, of response to the climate emergency, and of preventive diplomacy to avert wars.

Ian Goldin (2021) reflected on Brilliant’s (2006) principles of early detection, early response. Let me contribute an addition: early detection, early response, redundant simplicity of evidence-based responses. This is different from that part of Goldin’s (2021, Chapter 13) conclusions where Goldin argues systemic problems require systemic solutions and ‘Networked problems require networked solutions... [and this] requires transformation in all parts of the system’. Goldin is right that complex understanding and complex multidimensionality in responses is needed. Yet we can adjust this aspect of his analysis with the insight Goldin shares at other points in his writing that we will often be incapable of understanding the complexity. A fog of complexity should not curse us with analysis paralysis. What we can do is sequentially seek to prevent crisis escalation with one simple strategy after another that has some (usually weak) evidentiary grounding until some of the interventions start to make a difference, perhaps in combination. Our family doctor does something similar. Redundancy means accepting that we make many mistakes. With covid, for example, there was all that fumigating and washing walls of schools with disinfectant in early 2020. This likely had little impact; the virus was being transmitted by inhalation. But East Asian mask wearing that initially was disparaged in the West empirically proved somewhat effective. Western societies slowly (too slowly) turned to learn from Eastern wisdom born of their more grounded experience of past virus epidemics. Later the West prematurely moved away from mask wearing after peak crisis death rates passed. Here we have two simple responses, one mostly wrong, one mostly right, that produced one small piece of the long list of simple things that needed to be done in the face of limited early understanding of the complexity of covid.

Crises can be extinguished by actors who have a dim understanding of their complexity. This happens when they start restorative diplomacy by simply saying, let's be careful with each other here. That is, the complex system of a potential world war can be extinguished with help from simple restorative means that ultimately enables a complexly systemic response. Most crises that could escalate to war are extinguished that way before they escalate to war. It is a flaw of historiography to be methodologically relentless in selecting on dependent variables like war occurrence, systematically devoting slight attention to sequences of events that lead to no important historical events, just uneventful continuation of peace.

As attracted as I am to the Ian Goldin analysis in broad terms, I want to query it on his home turf of financial crises where he has such greater wisdom and experience than me. Interdisciplinarity has value, on the other hand, and I bring a different perspective because I am a criminologist. Goldin, on my analysis, has too pessimistic an account of the preventability of financial crises. Because we are still in the grip of a dangerous financialization of capitalism serious financial crises will certainly continue to come and go in human history. I agree with Goldin that both financial crashes and pandemics are accelerating in speed, frequency, and ferocity for a set of comprehensible reasons. Goldin rightly diagnoses the global financial crisis of 2008 as a consequence of a complex set of factors. They included: light-touch regulation; bonus culture on Wall Street; competitive European responses with settings in European markets that mimicked Wall Street; innovation in derivatives with poorly understood consequences that included risk shifting with bad loans; misplaced emphasis on risks for banks that banks could be trusted to self-assess; a US subprime mortgage crisis when a housing bubble burst; and freezing of interbank lending when banks could not guess which of their counterparties were and were not hobbled by bad housing loans. I agree with Goldin that the connectivity of internationally significant banks was fundamental to understanding the unpredictability of what happened day to day during the crisis. I share Goldin’s pessimism that the reforms put in place since the crisis have preventive value, but are utterly insufficient to prevent future crises. We should be disappointed in the transformation they have been able to apply to the pathologies of the financialization of capitalism. I am not wise enough to judge, but also willing to accept, that Goldin may be right when he says that systemic problems require systemic solutions and networked problems networked solutions that transform all parts of the system.

In this part of my analysis, however, all my reasoning about why Goldin is right is about why we agree that there will be more and more, perhaps worse and worse, financial crises. Where I am tempted to take a different fork in the road is in seeing that the 2008 global crisis was a particular crisis that was preventable by simple means by a limited range of regulatory actors in one country, the United States. This is of a piece with thinking that World War I might have been prevented by Archduke Ferdinand’s security staff doing their job competently by preventing his assassination, notwithstanding the deep structural complexity of the onset of World War.

My research argues that the Deepwater Horizon disaster was preventable by demands of Australian regulators for a root cause analysis of the Timor Sea deep ocean rig blow-out a year earlier to be applied to the dozens of oil rigs served by the same contractor, including Deepwater Horizon. Then the Australian regulator, or the court in the Timor Sea spill criminal trial, should have required the operator and its contractors to publish an audit of comparable risks across all the rigs these companies had worked on in similar ways. That would have revealed that the Caribbean was gravely at risk of the same catastrophe as happened in the Timor Sea, and at the hands of the same rig base concreting contractor, Halliburton (Braithwaite 2022, 489–90; 542–543). A deferred prosecution in the Timor Sea case that mandated global dissemination of a Timor Sea case root cause analysis and audits of whether the same repairs were needed around the world would have better saved the environment and served humankind than a fine of a few million dollars.

In the financial arena I argued that Enron, Arthur Andersen and associated 2001 US crashes might likewise have been prevented by regulators in just one other country, Australia (Braithwaite 2022, 485–490, 523–540). I argued that today’s epidemic of money laundering for mega-criminals by major ‘reputable’ banks was preceded by the collapse of the dirty money bank (The Bank of Credit and Commerce International) that used to specialize in this kind of money laundering for the likes of the Mafia, terrorist groups, Saddam Hussein, secret international nuclear weapons programs, Saudi intelligence, the CIA, Oliver North’s Iran-Contra deals and other illegal international weapons deals. All this might have been better controlled (producing less devastating crises) had Australia’s predecessor to BCCI, the Nugan Hand Bank, benefitted from early detection and catalyzed early response by Australian financial regulators and also globalized learnings from the debacle.

This argument, in short, is that simple future prevention work of cosmopolitan regulation can by simple means in a weaker country protect a strong country from complex financial and environmental risk. Braithwaite (2022, 288–323, 482) argues this is part of the more general phenomenon that complex organizational wrongdoing is exposed to an overdetermined capability to prevent wrongdoing by simple means. When whistleblowing laws make the world genuinely safe for whistleblowers, which they rarely do but could do, there are many potential whistleblowers in a complex organization with the power to stop the wrongdoing by blowing the whistle. This is an example of the power to prevent being overdetermined, as the philosophers say. Yes, the corporation and its wrongdoing is complex, but the simple thing is that there may be a hundred insiders who know enough to blow the whistle and stop the wrongdoing by exposing it to sunlight that delivers early detection and early response by a network of actors. Now I demonstrate how the global financial crisis might have been prevented by many actors with overdetermined simple capacities to prevent it, followed by their capacity to prevent the counterproductive war on terror and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Citigroup’s Richard M. Bowen testified before the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission that by 2006 60 percent of mortgages purchased by Citibank from 1,600 different mortgage companies were ‘defective’. By 2007, ‘defective mortgages (from mortgage originators contractually bound to perform underwriting to Citi’s standards) increased... to over 80% of production’.1 In its testimony to the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, Clayton Holdings—the largest residential loan due diligence and securitization surveillance company in the United States and Europe—testified that Clayton's review of over 900,000 mortgages issued from January 2006 to June 2007 found that only 54 percent of the loans met originators’ underwriting standards. Clayton's analysis further showed that 39 percent of loans that did not meet any issuer's minimal underwriting standards were nevertheless subsequently securitized and sold to investors (Morgenson 2010).

Knowledge of this epidemic of dud loans was not limited to corporate insiders like Clayton’s and Citibank. A 2006 federal Financial Crimes Enforcement Network report showed a 1,411 percent increase in mortgage-related suspicious activity reports between 1997 and 2005, 66 percent of them involving material misrepresentation or false documents. Then there was a further 44 percent increase between 2005 and 2006 (Nguyen and Pontell, 2010). BasePoint Analytics (2007) work on 3 million loans suggested 70 percent of early payment defaults had fraudulent misrepresentations on original loan applications. The fraudulent loans were five times as likely to go into default (Nguyen and Pontell 2010). There were public warnings from the FBI starting in 2004 that they detected a spike in mortgage fraud (Black 2013). With so much evidence of this quality from sources as authoritative as FBI press releases, with hindsight how unsurprising it is that smart money began to short the market well in advance of the crisis, as recounted in the book and film, The Big Short (Lewis 2010).

As with FBI agents reporting suspicious behavior of the Al Qaeda operatives who wanted to learn how to fly a plane without wanting to know how to land it, local FBI agents did their job in detecting the tidal wave of mortgage fraud that was the proximate cause of the global financial crisis. In both cases, the FBI as an institution failed in its preventive imagination. Instead of seeing the suspicious flight training as an opportunity to prevent something catastrophic, FBI leaders could not see how this intelligence could lead to conviction of individuals. Their 2001 regulatory imagination focused on whether there was an opportunity to lock up bad guys rather than prevent harm by a terror organization. In 2004 their intelligence on fraudulent loans where mortgage brokers and local banks encouraged people to misrepresent their financial circumstances was read as evidence of minor individual criminality. Conviction of these individuals would be difficult because the borrower of fraudulent loans could blame the bank for the misrepresentations and the bank could blame the borrower or broker.

In the onset of America’s two greatest pre-covid crises of the twenty-first century, the FBI should have connected the dots of systemic risk to the physical security of America (with 9/11) and its financial security (with the mortgage fraud epidemic). The FBI in the 2000s should have initiated a dialogue with banking regulators on the need for a systemic regulatory remedy, as opposed to a prosecutorial approach to fraud on loan applications. This could have involved regulators meeting one by one in 2004 with the banks that had the worst incidence of loan defaults in their city or state. Regulators could have required them to demonstrate that their loan portfolios were not infested with fraud. When bank self-investigation reports revealed in most cases that they were producing bundles of fraudulent paper, the bank could have been required to craft a plan to prevent the issuance of further fraudulent loans combined with a management plan to regularize as many dubious loans as possible. These plans should have been published with fanfare in the financial press so that European banks could begin their journey of early detection to limit their exposure to bad US loans. Instead of putting a risk control plan in place, what bad US banks did was slice and dice their bad loans into securitized financial products that played a game of pass the parcel, globally diffusing systemic risk. Then those bundled risks were hedged. Because regulators allowed them to pass those parcels, banks shifted their risks onto other banks instead of managing them. This regulatory failure created a risk-shifting culture. It was a systemically devastating cascade of risk.

The terror of September 11 2001 was a big spark compared to amateurs firing that fatal shot at Archduke Ferdinand. Both were sparks that cascaded to much bigger catastrophes. Both were preventable, by Habsburg Empire close personal security in one case, and by the FBI doing what should have been bread and butter preventative work (as the 9/11 Commission Inquiry concluded in the latter case). Without the cascade to World War I there would have been none of the humiliation of Germany at Versailles and crippling of their economy with reparations that so worried Keynes. Therefore, Keynes’s suspicion was that there would have been no Hitler winning power with his appeal to struggling Germans overwhelmed with depression and hyperinflation. On the Keynes’ analysis, there would have been less creation of the economic and political conditions to underwrite the appeal of Hitler to so many Germans. The 9/11 attack cascaded to an invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq and later to the cascade of war and terrorism from Libya. The evidence is now clear that these wars did more to spread terrorism than to reduce it, especially after mercenaries cascaded Gaddafi’s arsenal into Syria and south across two-thirds of Africa to support Islamic State or al Qaeda affiliates in more than a dozen countries (Braithwaite and D’Costa 2018; Braithwaite 2022).

The trillions in treasure lost to fighting these wars left North Atlantic states with weakened war chests for the stimulus packages that were imperative after 2008 and 2020 economic crises. The FBI error was failing to intervene preventively against Saudis who triggered appropriate suspicions from alert civilians and street-level FBI operatives when the Saudis asked to learn how to fly a plane, but not how to land it! The FBI as an institution failed to extinguish a spark that cascaded to catastrophe. The propensity of one kind of crisis to cascade into other kinds of crises is a macro dynamic that is complex, nonlinear. Yet simple preventive means that we know can work in extinguishing sparks is important micro work. That preventive capability was in the hands of actors at many levels of the FBI bureaucracy who shared in the overdetermined power to prevent the cascade of wars.

Recent summers in eastern Australia saw megafires of a scale we did not experience before global warming passed tipping points. One mega-fire can kill billions of vertebrates. We hope that our bush fire brigade volunteers can detect fast, respond fast, to extinguish the sparks ignited by human carelessness, willful arson, electricity line malfunctions, or lightning. During most fire seasons, fireys accomplish this before the countless little fires merge into unstoppable megafires. Our bush wisdom of iterated experience of these catastrophes is to understand the importance of the spark-extinction work of alert civilians and firefighters. This is true even though we know that the root cause of declining safety is global warming that has unusual complexity as it passes tipping points. The simple institutional response needed is comparable to the imperative to scale up ambulance services. It is a simple solution when fire services scale up with huge numbers of trained volunteers. When it works it is profoundly preventive. It is facile to say that these simple micro solutions are not the answer. What we need is macro shifts in the shape of economies away from growth in consumption of goods to growth through consumption of services, especially health and caring services, away from growth smoked by fossil fuels to growth greened by renewables. It is not that we need macro prevention but not micro prevention; we need both macro and simple micro remedies.

Forest fire response services illustrate excellence in the capability we saw with ambulance services to scale up during crises, though in different ways. Recurrent scaling up will be needed as global warming worsens. It does rely to some degree on a global market in rentable water bombing aircraft and crews. This market cannot scale up quickly enough when simultaneous crises occur across the planet. An international gift economy also helps. Many countries fly in gifts of water bombing to subdue threats, as do Eastern Australian state governments gift bush fire-fighting assets to Western Australia when fires rage across the West. Making progress on the problem is ultimately simple in this regard. States and philanthropists can encourage and expand gift economies. Cosmopolitan NGOs that scale up crisis response assets, like Médecins Sans Frontiers across all the catastrophes of concern in this book, are also invaluable.

In the Peacebuilding Compared data set, single crimes like the terrorist attack in Sarajevo, the rape of a nurse in Bougainville, or the corruption and torture chambers of a tyrant, can be important to sparking wars, alongside many deeper root causes, and proximate factors at particular places and times. Linear quantitative social science does not conclude such sparks are good explanations of war because 99.9 percent of rapes, assassinations, and terrorist incidents ignite no wars. Yet criminologists do have that macro understanding of how important it is to apprehend perpetrators of shocking terror and rapes quickly and bring them to trial. They understand that in the centuries before there was a principled and functioning criminal law such incidents regularly cascaded to never-ending blood feuds. Sometimes blood feuds in turn cascaded to small town wars that then occasionally cascaded to international wars. Simple micro-criminal enforcement that is widely available is a reason for declining homicide rates and blood feuds across human history. Crime during all historical periods has been a far larger cause of violent human deaths than war and one that has been this kind of initial spark of many wars (Braithwaite 2022).

Police services are therefore simple institutions that mostly make small contributions to extinguishing individual violence, but that also occasionally extinguish violence that might otherwise have ignited systemic violence of race riots, religious riots, wars, or indeed ‘wars on terror’. It is also common in our Peacebuilding Compared data set for the police themselves to ignite cascades of violence through their own deeds of racist violence. My hypothesis is that little deeds of spark extinction by police rarely make systemic contributions, but if street-level police go on strike we know violence of many kinds goes up sharply. If street-level police, field-level firefighters, street-level financial regulators, street-level peacekeepers, street-level epidemic contact-tracers cease their work of extinguishing initial sparks, or worse become those who ignite the sparks (as when arsonists infiltrate rural Australian fire services) societies suffer many more systemic crises of diverse kinds that cascade one into the other.

This is not to say that the narrative of this book on simple institutional solutions is most importantly about spark extinction. The main contribution of ambulances is in preventing murders and covid deaths by rushing those at risk to hospital after initial emergency response to stem the blood, restart the breathing. Independent universities are institutions that make their biggest contributions by coming up with good ideas on how to prevent the spread of pathogens, to map the genomic sequence of covid, how to reduce crime, how to prevent financial crises, to reconcile conflicts with alternative paths that reject war, to engineer aircraft that fly on hydrogen, and so on. Scholars who work with a macrosocial institutional imagination can know nothing about the complexity of that engineering of finance or hydrogen or vaccines. But they can know that independent universities make more profound contributions to these things than famous brands like Pfizer or Lehman Brothers.

Effectively regulated markets make vital contributions when they produce start-ups like Moderna and BioNTech that created leading covid vaccines as their very first products to reach the market. These were firms that were yet to come into existence when the global financial crisis hit in 2008, in the case of BioNTech a tiny start-up of a young doctor and her husband who fled Turkey to Germany as refugees. Firms like Pfizer also contributed hugely to scaling up response. Yet they are a complex face of monopoly power that corrupts markets and monopolizes manufacturing. They helped prevent the creation of manufacturing plants around the world that could have pushed the price of vaccines down to help extinguish new variants of covid. Needed simpler mechanisms are scaled-up state investment in prevention R & D. Simple antitrust institutions and more evidence-based intellectual property law are needed to hold monopoly power to account.

We can agree with Ian Goldin that we also need to do better at comprehending complexity and crafting complex systemic responses to systemic problems. It is just that this is the harder challenge. It is a challenge that is not all low-hanging fruit. The hypothesis of this book is that, nevertheless, there are a large number of simple kinds of low-hanging fruit we might pluck as priorities—like adequately funding university science, disentangling it from domination by monopolists of Big Pharma and the military-industrial complex.

Overdetermined Prevention: Simple Versus Complex Dialectics

The overdetermined character of catastrophe prevention is a reason that Goldin might not always be right that networked problems require networked solutions and transformation in all parts of the system. Wars, financial crises, pandemics are things wide swathes of actors wish to avert. By design, there are layers of fail-safe prevention of accidental nuclear launch. This means we can prevent the accident by getting just one of these layers to do their job properly even though the network of prevention is in shocking repair. If we can get three or four of the fail-safe custodians to do their job, accidental Armageddon might almost universally be prevented. At least this can happen if risk analyses are done thoroughly to learn from near misses, learning from how it was possible for three of the fail-safe mechanisms to fail. We can really only learn how to prevent rare-event risks by rigor in near-miss analytics combined with transparent, widely diffused discussion of lessons learned.

Ockham's razor says: ‘Things should be made as simple as possible — but not simpler’. Parsimony might be dialectically opposed to Goldin’s prescription that networked problems require networked solutions across the entire network. My approach is not to referee this contest, but instead to commend a dialectical method that starts with prioritized simple principles and simple institutions, then expand to other useful preventive tools that are shown empirically to add value, but only when each is demonstrated to add value. This dialectical method leads to a different outcome from forms of realism that seek to prevent war with more expenditure on weapons of war. Where is the well-rounded development of evidence that countries that do this experience less war or grow faster in terms of economic or some other form of development? This book argues that passive deterrence does not work well; dynamic concentration of deterrence can if it is embedded in a well-crafted dynamic regulatory mix (see further Braithwaite 2022, 434–499).

Realist theory is much more parsimonious than Goldin’s. Realists have a razor-like focus on states as the actors that matter, states that pursue national interests to gain power. There is something to admire about its parsimony. But my approach is to tame it, confine it to a place only as a very last resort at the peak of a regulatory pyramid in which the overwhelming preponderance of work that matters is done softly, preventatively, and restoratively, lower in the pyramid. I do theory this way because the evidence on the regulation of complex organizations suggests that the size of deterrents does not predict compliance, but the mix of deterrent and non-deterrent (more restorative) regulatory strategies does (Braithwaite 2022, Chapter 10). This approach to the dialectics of deterrence and persuasion, the dialectics of complex and simple solutions, therefore ultimately goes to a synthesis closer to Goldin than to the realists.

With war, my theoretical inclination is that there are good reasons to believe that there probably are a hundred variables that help explain why some countries are more likely than others to suffer wars. One way my team acts on this theoretical bias in the Peacebuilding Compared empirical data collection is to collect data on more than 100 hypotheses concerning which countries are more likely to suffer wars. One kind of analysis is to ask which five of these together offer the better prediction of war compared to any other combination of five preventative variables. The hope is that if at least those five hygiene factors against war are prioritized, war will be greatly reduced.

Goldin would be right to retort, however, that such positivism is not good enough because complex networks are in play. We do need to immerse ourselves in understanding the network of forces that impel conflict or financial collapse in any particular case to discern the most strategic interventions that must be repaired first. One Peacebuilding Compared hypothesis is that multidimensional UN peace operations are often good at just this; we have seen that the evidence is strong that they are statistically effective at preventing wars. Wise and experienced regulatory inspection teams are also effective at protecting safety.

Hence, I also contend that one dialectic of the simplicity versus complexity needed is alternation and synthesis of positive social science insights versus insights from ethnographic study of how whole networks hang together, interact, clash, and fall apart. Randomized controlled trials on single variables are limited in their explanatory power when those variables are differentially embedded in different cases within networks in flux. A synthesis of qualitative causal process tracing of regulatory networks of crisis control and quantitative science tends to be superior to either alone.

Let me give an example of specificity in a network of preventive forces for peace that I know to have been important in only one conflict. In 2006 Timor-Leste was on the brink of civil war. All cash had run out in the only ATMs in the capital city. A brave bank manager walked through streets full of fighting gangs with a large suitcase stuffed with cash. He walked into his bank, filled ATMs with large notes. This helped prevent descent into civil war and loss of life for particular reasons. It meant NGOs that had access to cash from international funding to pay truck drivers could move refugees to safety and get food to the hungry. That was preventive enough, but in a capital where trucks were in short supply, it also meant that trucks were diverted from bringing rural fighters into city battles in order to get better-paid and safer hires with humanitarian cash. This meant that when peacekeeper reinforcements sailed into Dili harbor, they were not overwhelmed by gang fighters. Needless to say, it was only local knowledge of how local networks of risk were expanding that was relevant here; the positive science of peace was only apt concerning the arrival of peacekeepers (which did work in reducing violence).

With catastrophe prevention we must ‘cross the river by feeling the stones’ (as Chinese Chairman Deng Xiaoping endlessly said in speeches). It is a positivist causal lesson that safer places to cross are where the stones are. Feeling those stones is contextually attuned wisdom about each particular stone. A simple solution to the dangers of a rising flood can be throwing a first stone into the river to allow the first step toward crossing. Escalation to complex logistics will be required for a whole town to cross. So I might say that the most important thing about choosing between simple and complex networked solutions is not to choose. Rather, think dialectically about the dynamics of sequencing those choices.

Thinking Systemically About Simple Institutions to Prioritize

The evidence from criminology is strong that neighborhood collective efficacy acts to extinguish sparks of crime effectively. One hypothesis to test in learning from covid is that in societies with strong neighborhood committee structures (Vietnam is a probable case) leaders of local community mediation committees were not only extinguishing little incidents of crime, when covid came they were speaking to citizens who walked in the street without their mask, who forgot social distancing, who failed to get tested, vaccinated. They were responding rapidly when someone was alone at home, sick and stuck, to get them help, prevent them from dying alone. Early on, they were getting masks to people who did not have them.

One thing neighborhood collective efficacy can help is getting food to children or old people who go hungry during crises of isolation. This goes to another issue that Ian Goldin emphasized. Goldin (2021) shows that systematically inequality tends to be worsened by contemporary crises and vice versa. One model concluded that global inequality became 25 percent higher than it would have been between 1961 and 2010 in a climate-stable world (Beuret 2019). This is the opposite side of the coin from Andrew Mack’s observation that the decades of rising peace after the end of the Cold War were decades of falling inequality. When inequality is worse, the evidence is that the impacts of climate change tend to be worse, as are the impacts of health epidemics and crashes in housing markets. When states and their civil societies are serious about extinguishing all forms of oppressive inequality and domination, the argument (Braithwaite and D’Costa 2018; Braithwaite 2022) is that this reduces prospects of serious wars and crime. According to our analysis, the data are clear at this level, yet also complex.

A problem is the statistical association approach of normal science. It correctly points out that it is rare for a spark to cascade a major firestorm; rarer for assassination of a world leader to cascade to world war. It is rare for solvency problems at a bank to cascade to a global financial crisis. Most rapes do not cascade to civil war, and so on. Our methodological frame must ultimately be more macro in asserting that if societies are systematic with efforts to extinguish all these kinds of sparks, many kinds of crises will be less frequent, even though almost every time we extinguish an individual spark it will make near zero difference. This is also the way most street-level prudential regulators think, the way fire brigades think. Prudence requires us to buy into both the root cause work of the climate activist and the spark-extinction work of the firefighter. Policymakers can be earnest in the way they apply themselves to both policy challenges.

A medieval cathedral mentality can help build the institutions required to contain catastrophes in both ways. One generation starts a cathedral in the village with no hope of finishing it before they die. Yet great foundations are laid. Each generation commits to the institution-building. It is a different kind of pass the parcel than that portrayed in The Big Short (Lewis 2010). Great new universities in developing countries require generations rather than decades of working on their foundations. They could benefit from twenty-first-century ‘missionary’ orders of generous scholars from rich countries, leading world universities that twin with developing country universities in pro bono ways, exchanging students and faculty. Philanthropies with long-term vision can shift resources to building inspiring and independent universities in the financial and governance capitals of poor societies. Lives well spent leave behind a little piece of renewal of the most enduring institutions like great universities.

UNESCO should be better resourced for shape-shifting developing country student markets from commodification that delivers a second-tier education in rich countries to students from poor countries. I mean second tier compared to the education received by the best domestic students. There is no virtue in university education markets that make profits for Western universities at the expense of masters students from poor countries. These students should be patiently developed as future leaders that older generations and richer societies gift with excellence in education in excellent universities that emerge in their own societies. A cathedral approach is required for development of UNESCO and the United Nations system itself, a mentality that we saw kindled in the heart of Eleanor Roosevelt. This book suggests the minor tweak to the architecture of the UN of prioritizing Sustainable Development Goal 17 (Peace, Justice and Strong Institutions). Preventing wars, rebuilding justice and strong institutions after them, opens a wide path to many other UN Sustainable Development Goals concerning health, climate action, and inequality.

UN Framework Conventions on emerging crises like climate change can seem platitudinous at first, but as with foundations of cathedrals, generations of activists over time have filled out symbolism with substance that matters. So long as they are vigilant against ritualism, against spin that triumphs over substance. Simple institutions of vigilance are priorities.

We can take the simple step of joining the social movement for WMD abolition, even if we understand little about how these weapons work and how strategic arms reduction inspections might monitor the details of how societies manage them down to a level where the Doomsday Machine is dismantled, even if small numbers of nuclear weapons remain. The legacies that are simplest to leave can count among those that matter most. Many readers have doubtless devoted large parts of their lives to complex debates about what makes the difference between a great university and a mediocre community of learning. When societies invest generously in universities, a lot of them will turn out to be great even as others wallow in mediocrity. It is hard to judge what universities must do to become greater universities. But it is easy to conclude that a policy of funding universities to compete in competitions for basic research excellence and educational excellence is a profoundly good policy. Conversely a bad government can quickly destroy as fragile an accomplishment as a good university system, as we saw when so many Jewish, communist, and liberal intellectuals fled great German universities as the Nazis consolidated power and university independence collapsed. If states must borrow to fund a strong university system, that is rational borrowing. When they do, the return to productivity, to GDP will continue to be at least several times the interest on the borrowing (Psacharopoulos and Patrinos 2018). Why do I write to make the simple point that such low-hanging fruit are many, neglected, often against the interests of lobbyists who oppose them to keep taxes low for the rich, or to keep universities dependent on rich corporations? Sure the politics is hard, but it is politically important to demonstrate that health research funded by a National Institute of Health produces better health outcomes than research funded by Big Pharma. Goldacre (2012) found industry-funded trials of pharmaceuticals are about four times as likely to report positive results on commercial products compared to independent studies. I write as a corrective to nihilism and disengagement that can cascade to anomie at times of crisis.

Rally Behind Front-Line Workers of Crisis Prevention Institutions

Recovery from the covid crisis may be slow not because economies will fail to bounce back, though that may also be slow in some countries, but because health and aged-care system recoveries may be slow. In the early weeks of the pandemic in China, and then in every country, healthcare workers were lauded as heroes who saved us from the first pandemic wave. Grateful Britons banged pots and pans from their lockdown doorways in praise of their sacrifices and successes. Tenors in Italy serenaded homage from balconies. That faded, jaded with second, third, fourth, and fifth waves. Stressed publics and social media critics blamed healthcare workers for implementing policies imposed by stressed policymakers. Citizens often resented covid controls. Healthcare workers came to be seen by some as functionaries of a carceral state that crushed liberty, confining them. Stories of health workers being abused, assaulted, even spat on filled social media.

The upshot of societies’ soured love affair with their nurses is that around the world a majority of healthcare workers wanted out. They said they were burnt out. A majority also reported symptoms of anxiety, depression, or both, as a result of crisis pressures.2 Many doctors and nurses suffered covid Post Traumatic Stress Disorder from decisions on who would live or die as beds were rationed in Intensive Care Units, and the sheer panic of their struggles to prevent deaths. They worried that the crisis changed them into people who snapped back at colleagues and patients whom they were fond of. This change in them as people troubled them with anxiety. It was an affront to their personal reasons for becoming workers in the care professions.

Caring staff who hung in for decades in poorly paid professional callings in under-staffed institutions finally snapped when they found themselves going home from work each day heartbroken. They could not care for aged-care residents they had come to love. They were broken-hearted because they felt complicit in their neglect. Covid killed the relational, redemptive care that had been hanging by a thread in this frequently exploitative industry. That is, it was the most dedicated, relational, redemptive carers who left because they no longer could cope with betraying frail aged people every day of their work life. Those who hung on were more casualized workers who flitted from facility to facility, never growing special relationships for those they assisted, less haunted by the fact that they betrayed them through the care deficits. Casualization and high turnover became endemic in aged care. It is now hard to reverse in an era of acute labor shortages. Low care sector salaries have been pushed lower by inflation that was another consequence of the crisis. It would have been better to prevent these problems before the institutions of care collapsed. It would have been prudent for the society and their state to recognize how priceless the most dedicated healthcare workers were before they quit. Unprecedented pay rises should have been granted to healthcare workers. That would have symbolized that we, the society, cared. States needed to recruit and retrain most of their health and aged-care system work forces post-covid. It takes a lot of time and money to grow a new nurse to replace them.

Societies must scan their risk environment to invest in the preventive inspection and the preventive staffing of qualified relational staff who genuinely care for people. This must happen before the rot sets in that turns what should be institutions of care into carceral custodians of people. This is imperative because once the managers socialized into a carceral mentality take over, they succeed for decades in characterizing reformers with a caring, relational professionalism as impractical romantics who are out of touch with the hard realities that discipline institutionalized humans in a practical way with carceral controls.

Simple institutions that contain catastrophes require simple kindness to their workforce. That is the simplest lesson of all.

Notes

  1. 1.

    ‘Official Transcript—First Public Hearing of the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission’ (PDF). US Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission. January 13, 2010. Retrieved April 7, 2010.

  2. 2.

    A BBC radio Program (Healthcare Workers Burnt Out: Coronavirus Pandemic: Coronavirum Global Update, February 18, 2022) did a particularly good job of documenting these worldwide patterns through surveys by health professional bodies.