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Markets in Vice, Markets in Virtue from Climate to Covid

We have seen that crises cascade outside boundaries within which they were more contained in the past. Uncontained vigor and reach of capitalist markets drive many of the dangerous cascades of modernity. The climate crisis careers toward catastrophe because even in 2024 many investors make so much money from oil, coal, and natural gas. State power has been corrupted by that wealth. Politicians were captured by it when fossil fuel lobbyists made campaign contributions or obtained political support by putting money straight into politicians’ pockets. Carbon giants funded social media campaigns to cascade lies about climate science.

One simple institutional response to these markets in vice has been markets in virtue. Markets are increasingly responsive to truths about what is protecting or destroying the environment. Investment in renewables is proving cheaper as well as cleaner. Those who shunned the propaganda to shift their pension fund investments to environmental opportunities in renewables enjoyed unusually high returns for more than a decade after the Global Financial Crisis, something that became less true after the Ukraine War pushed up prices and profits from carbon. Those who invested tangibly and directly in the energy market in a local way through solar panels on land they controlled and to community batteries also benefit by that contribution to a market in virtue.

Although markets in virtue are among simple solutions to markets in vice, Peter Drahos points out that too many decades of investment in brown markets before they tipped to favor green markets mean that ecosystems are already on the precipice of tipping points. Markets in green virtue, even with the aid of regulation that puts an extra market price on carbon, have moved too slowly and too late to save the planet. Hence Drahos (2021b) argues that decisive, urgent, leverage from state action by major economies, especially China, is also imperative. State regulatory action should close all coal-fired power plants immediately, ban development assistance for coal-fired power, ban sale, then use of all internal combustion vehicles in this decade, then in aircraft in the next. States must also invest with the private sector in R&D for air travel fueled by hydrogen or other alternatives. State R&D investment in green circular city designs of various kinds becomes more common. Many kinds of green innovation need more support.

Covid had similar imperatives. The Trump Administration’s Operation Warp Speed assisted many corporate R&D efforts on covid. It was good policy; some investments were big winners. Markets would not have moved fast enough without the state and philanthropic investment (as in the seed funding at Tennessee universities by Dolly Pardon without which the Moderna vaccine would not have got off the ground when it did). Many governments made investments not only in vaccines but on covid tests, treatments for patients already with covid, and more. The early Chinese government investment in Wuhan, with collaboration from Western universities, identified the genomic sequence of COVID-19 with amazing speed, an accomplishment that laid a foundation for subsequent Western accomplishments. As we have learnt from space programs and defense infrastructure like the internet that transformed economies, the big, fast changes require simultaneous effort from markets, governments, and universities. It is a simple lesson that gets lost when the propaganda of tech giants and neoliberal ideologues claim that the private sector accomplished everything. Likewise, authoritarian states claim they did (with the Sputnik Vaccine, for example).

Collaboration among states quickly corroded to finger pointing as the covid crisis deepened. The poison was political efforts to harness racism (the ‘China’ Virus); and blame foreigners to bluster at cover-up of our failings. Vital collaboration with the World Health Organization corroded alongside international collaboration. Innovation became less oriented to cosmopolitan containment. From 2020, Western universities started pruning a huge proportion of their collaborations with Chinese and Russian universities. Vaccine nationalism, indeed vaccine apartheid, prevailed. Major economic powers, particularly the United States and Germany, jostled to secure monopoly rights and financial advantage for their Big Pharma champions. This was a tragically different story from that finest moment of the American century, the time of the Marshall Plan, when the United States was doing so much to help countries more devastated by World War II than itself. At the beginning of the 1950s, America did not patent the Salk polio vaccine that America developed. It gave away the intellectual property for polio prevention as a gift to the children of the world who were dying or surviving with twisted limbs. Polio was a more devastating disease for humankind than covid, but its ravages were more totally conquered, thanks to American generosity and sidelining of commercial preferences and political lobbying of Big Pharma.

With covid, the African petri dish for diverse virus variants was left dangerously unvaccinated for more than a year longer than other continents. The sums were simple. At the time vaccines were proven acceptably safe and effective, IMF research concluded that states chipping in $50 billion to a comprehensive vaccination campaign and other virus control efforts could deliver a dividend to the world economy of $9 trillion in extra global output by 2025 (Tooze 2021). Vaccine nationalism drove denial of the simple arithmetic of economically rational collaboration to fix the crisis quickly. The harvest reaped included at least two variants that swept the planet after taking off in Africa during that lost African year. One did make the crisis worse, but another was Omicron, which while more contagious, fortuitously was less deadly. In the future, the world might not be so lucky, especially if that future world is one where enemies, be they states or terrorist groups, design pathogens to be more voraciously adaptive through biological weapons programs.

Efforts of the World Health Organization to push for open-source biotechnology and other means of breaking down monopolization of knowledge, so that all scientists share breakthroughs widely, failed during covid, as they failed with the SARS, HIV-AIDS, all dangerous epidemics this century (Drahos 2010, 2021a). Corporate champions were backed by their states to defend patent walls around their innovations, making therapies unaffordable to poor people in many rich countries and almost all people in the poorest countries. Even tests for the presence of covid were unaffordable in poor countries during the early years of the crisis.

It is still early for a well-rounded evaluation of which states and cities steered more and less effective responses to covid. There will be decades of analysis of a stupendous data base. Which cities introduced which regulatory and welfare responses at which times, with what effects on covid containment, deaths, and on long covid? One plausible set of hypotheses will go to the regulatory capitalism literature (Levi-Faur and Jordana 2005). They will assess the paradox that states which mobilized early against covid with large regulatory infrastructures almost certainly did better at keeping their markets strong. Probably they fared better at averting long lockdowns that devastated markets, as well as long shutdowns of education and of face-to-face civil society. New York, London, Milan, and Madrid may come to be seen as experiencing less decisive early regulatory escalation than East Asia, but also more total deprivation of freedom of movement and other liberties such as access to education than the overwhelming majority of East Asian cities and towns. An exception was the Chinese continuation of certain city lockdowns for China’s late surge into 2022. In spite of that, the Chinese economy clearly grew much faster than all Western economies between 2020 and 2023, though that is not the impression communicated by Western media. Where simple infrastructures of regulation and welfare were strong and rapidly deployed, perhaps the data will come to show that markets and freedom remained stronger in the medium term. It remains to be seen what the depoliticized assessment of the less responsive performance of China in dealing with the Omicron variant in 2022 will be compared to communist Vietnam for example, and compared to superior rollout of superior vaccines in many Western societies.

East Asian societies like Vietnam, even though they were much more densely connected to the original site of the outbreak (Wuhan) than the West, likely will be shown to have suppressed covid more successfully at the national level. This, even though Wuhan authorities covered up disgracefully for three weeks as they started quarantine and contact tracing. We do not yet know whether it could have been possible to contain covid to this region of China during those three weeks? Taiwan was an example of successful early containment, even though it hosted many direct flights to Wuhan, strong business interconnections, 850,000 citizens living, and 400,000 working in China and more mainland China visitors per capita than other countries (Wang et al. 2020). Other nearby East Asian societies that kept the death rate and economic disruption comparatively low included Singapore and South Korea, which had a severe early infection shock, as did Japan with its large elderly population, later compounded by cruise ship disasters and hosting an Olympic Games mid-pandemic.

East Asian authoritarianism or paternalistic Confucian deference to the state were popular 2020 tropes around Western dinner tables and media chatter to explain patterns of Eastern virus containment. A month into their covid crisis, Australian policymakers asked if they were mistaken in their normal pattern of following North Atlantic leads of policy diffusion. Australia, with its huge population of Chinese citizens and visitors, decided that North Atlantic societies were squandering their advantage in lead time to prepare for the pandemic. For example, Australia moved to the idea that shorter, sharper, early East Asian regulation was the way to defend both welfare and markets in the long term. The evidence that mask mandates were prudent existed prior to covid. Inaction on masks was rare in East Asia but widespread in the West for many months into 2020. Health bureaucrats covered up their poor preparedness in scaling up manufacturing for mask availability with dangerous arguments that laypeople who used masks improperly might do as much harm as good. Capability to manufacture masks and other items of PPE is a good example of a simple institutional capability that is one essence of responsiveness to complex crises. Masks were so simple that people coped initially by sewing them at home. For future epidemics, developing countries must acquire a foundation for surging their capacity to manufacture their own vaccines in light of what we learnt about how rich countries and corporations profit from pandemics at the expense of the poor (Drahos 2010, 2021a).

Singaporean and Taiwanese schools were open during the early months of the pandemic when US schools were closed. The freedom deficit was the opposite of the way it was frequently portrayed in the Western press. Every child arriving at those East Asian schools during those peak early months of the pandemic was having their temperature checked and hands sanitized on arrival. School days were punctuated with 20-second disciplined handwashing and education about why this was important. In Australian schools, when mandated handwashing finally commenced somewhat later in 2020, social distancing was risible as children jostled and splashed one another during perfunctory hand washing. Soap ran out in unprepared schools. Providing kids with school soap during a pandemic is a simple institutional challenge for education departments. It was a challenge schools did not adequately rise to for many weeks.

Expert commentators now increasingly opine that East Asian preparation and planfulness about how schools and other institutions like aged-care facilities should respond to the crisis were more important than Confucian authoritarianism. Why might this be so? East Asia had learnt from the SARS epidemic that next time their education system, their welfare state, and their state and civil society regulatory institutions would be ready for rapid escalation. Market responsiveness was readied to scale up medical material and personnel. This preparedness was crystallized in East Asian regulatory institutions whose task was rapid coordination of all institutions of the society for epidemic response from January 1, 2020. This was not totally state institutions, but hybrid governance; professional institutions from civil society and volunteerism were prominent. Vietnamese responses were locally highly variegated in response to urban geography interpreted by Communist Party members who led highly localized residents’ committees. Taiwan was prepared with an action plan of 124 discrete measures overseen by its National Health Command Centre (established as a SARS lesson learned) and by local preparedness teams (Wang et al. 2020). We might conceive these through Foucauldian biopolitics as 124 capillaries of power (Lorenzini 2021). Regulatory scholars are more likely to see them as a long list of micro regulatory measures that previous experience with epidemics had proven might be helpful. For the regulatory theorist, the lesson of greater interest might be that no grand theory of how to regulate worked (like British PM, Boris Johnson’s premature 2020 infatuation with herd immunity as the complete laissez-faire fix). Rather, outcomes flowed from as large a number of simple capillaries of regulation as Taiwan’s 124.

Regulatory theorists are interested in the infrastructure of responsive mobilization that could deliver this number of capillaries. East Asia faced the bigger, more immediate, surprise than the West, but was better prepared with plans to minimize disruption to markets, to maximize welfare mobilization (especially in the health and education sectors), and for bigger, faster escalations of regulation that were therefore of shorter duration. China also coordinated its vast society for surge capacity to hot spots that hit the peak of the infection curve earlier, a capability late in arriving to the West. Regulatory studies might therefore stand ready to learn from East Asia about rapid capabilities for scaling up regulatory infrastructure, strategic redundancy of multiple capillaries of regulation, selection strategies for adding new capillaries as new learning comes in, and learning about coordination to shift regulatory and treatment capabilities from one part of the state and of the planet to another (with coordination from WHO, civil society mobilization by organizations like Médecins Sans Frontières, to sequentially surge medical capabilities into the countries that hit early pandemic peaks). This might mean a global gift economy where gifts are given to pandemic peak economies by pre-peak and post-peak economies, gifts of knowledge from open-source research architectures, gifts of medical equipment and personnel, as happened in the 1950s with polio. Meta regulation of states through the WHO, of national macroeconomic policies through the G-20, of education systems and private firms by states, strategic dedication to finding ways to regulate the problem without shutting down markets, might be guided by centralized and decentralized learning from other places about options for selecting and sequencing regulation. Meta regulation by the WHO means, among other things, the WHO regulating state regulation. All these forms of meta regulation are germinal topics for regulation and governance research (Parker 2002; Morgan 2003; Sørensen 2006; Grabosky 2017).

Probably when all the data are in, my simple suggestions will prove too simple. These incipient patterns might be exaggerated; cultural Confucianism might prove a more potent explanation than meta regulation and path dependencies of capillaries of preparedness after all. All I have shown is that simple institutional thinking supplies evocative, plausible hypotheses to guide future evaluations of responses to crises. A key one is that the paths East Asia learned to take in response to the SARS epidemic created a virtuous path dependency of regulatory preparedness, welfare preparedness, and market preparedness for epidemic responsiveness. More than that, the path dependency was institutionalized through nodes of governance like Taiwan’s National Health Command Centre. The covid crisis shows that all societies were forced to think in new ways about strengthening regulation, expanding welfare, and strengthening measures to preserve jobs and markets. In the moment of crisis, those who thought they were neoliberals found themselves to be practitioners of regulatory welfare capitalism, as did many communists (Benish and Levi-Faur 2020).

Covid is an illustration of how a crisis can demand a larger welfare state and a more formidably regulatory form of capitalism. It highlights imperatives to get better at putting markets, regulation, and welfare more strategically in harness for crisis management. Such system solutions are not simple, but nor are they impossibly complex, and they yield to evidence-based policy science. Consider the profound new risks of accidental nuclear war posed by cyberwarfare and cybercrime capabilities that can, for example, disconcert satellites in outer space that control doomsday machines (Ellsberg 2017; Beebe 2019). These risks demand stronger investments in nuclear non-proliferation and strategic arms reduction regimes, and international collaboration on regulation of cybercrime. They require special inspection teams to check offensive cyber-ops proposals to ensure that they are unlikely to accidentally trigger a nuclear war. These risk assessments should never be done by those who design cyberoffense proposals. Mostly they are in those less safe hands, sad to say (Levinte 2021). Descriptively, the most massive growth in regulation during the past decade has been regulation of cyber-threats. This is mostly private sector regulation by IT personnel, though state regulation is also burgeoning, as is university research investment in regulating cybercrime and cyberwarfare. We might think of regulatory welfare capitalism as not only a descriptively accurate tendency in the trajectory of capitalism, but normatively as one that societies must accelerate in directions that are helpful to surviving existential threats.

Sadly, path dependencies that sustain markets in carbon and markets in destabilizing new weapons systems that threaten mass destruction have their own resilient path dependencies that keep the planet on extinction paths. Hence, the steering of path dependencies toward more regulation to contain them and more welfare to soften their impacts might be worthy topics. Neoliberal ideologies have certainly shifted the shape of welfare states. Yet there is quite a lot of evidence that crises and path dependencies mean that, at the macro level, societies have resisted ideological pressures and have expanded welfare states and regulatory states, notwithstanding much neoliberal contraction (Braithwaite 2008).

Many of these crises, such as care crises associated with population aging are beyond the scope of this book. There are connections, however. Australia did comparatively well in suppressing excess deaths during the covid epidemic. It had an unusually high percentage of deaths, however, from its first three waves in aged-care homes (over 80% of deaths). Britain had an unusually high proportion of deaths among welfare beneficiaries with a disability. These societies learned that they had suffered simple and remediable regulatory failures during the pandemic. In Australia a Royal Commission Into Aged Care (2020) found that, unlike police who stayed on the beat, aged-care inspectors stopped inspecting aged-care homes. As a result, a minority of homes failed to implement infection control plans, with thousands of preventable deaths as a result. At the same time, the 90% of aged-care homes that had zero deaths during 2020 were prepared to meet their regulatory obligations to implement infection control. It was not rocket science to understand that if you took all cops off the aged-care beat, older citizens would die.

Our responsibility is to understand the dynamics of regulatory welfare states and how to diagnose their meta governance, governance of governance that secures simple guarantees of effectiveness. Societies might then learn to steer interdependent threats that include the globalization of disease, economic crises, ecosystem collapse, proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, and other existentially dangerous path dependencies. It may be that these path dependencies are cascading so relentlessly toward complex catastrophes that confronting them with containment by simple institutions will not cut it. I simply say that an analysis of data patterns such as those becoming evident from Australian aged-care homes suggest that simple institutional thinking can make a massive difference even as it fails to provide many of the answers.

Crises may ultimately move most species from path dependencies of survival to paths of rapid extinction. In the covid era, the new equilibrium we head for is an unfolding mystery. It can make sense to grapple with meta governance strategies that might ‘flatten the curve’ for somewhat improved conditions of catastrophe until cures are discovered. War and financial crises are well studied examples where interventions often work in flattening crisis curves; yet they are hard to predict, hard to end, and tend to cascade into each other. United Nations peacekeeping repeatedly fails to end wars. Yet we will see that the evidence is strong that when peacekeeping is multidimensional in helping to nurse many different kinds of institutions back to health, it can flatten the curve of cascades of killing. This in turn helps economies resume growth path dependencies and helps democracies that lapsed into despotism to reboot democratic institutions (Braithwaite and D’Costa 2018, 494–497). The World Health Organization and the United Nations Department of Political and Peacebuilding Affairs are nodes of meta governance that matter when they partner with local nodes of governance to steer path dependencies of epidemics of disease or violence. This meta governance is a messy business. Path dependencies recurrently slip out of any policymaker’s control. That does not make having a strong, internationally supported World Health Organization and other simple forms of meta governance to contain cascading path dependencies less worthy of policy learning.

Nuclear Weapons and Covid Cannot Be Unmade

Two crises that began to cascade out of control during World War II were nuclear armaments and polio. During World War I, worrying cascades were chemical and biological weapons and a completely novel influenza virus that took at least 50 million lives. It was particularly devastating, and most undercounted, in South Asia and Africa. The next chapter explains that these were coupled crises: the critical site of global spread of the Great Influenza of 1918 was a troop reception area with a huge hospital at Etaples, France that treated gas victims, receiving 100,000 troops a day. These four catastrophes for humankind shaped institutional history, mercifully in many good ways, in the decades after both these wars. Each of these catastrophes destroyed millions of lives, but the simple institutional responses to them after the two wars prevented cascades to hundreds of millions more lives that would have been lost without them.

What the world learnt was that once these challenges were out of the bottle, it was difficult to put them back in. A cascading risk normally cannot be completely unmade, regardless of whether it is a form of financial engineering on Wall Street, the engineering of drones, space warfare, cyberwarfare, or AI. Worse than that, once a new virus jumps from some other animal to humans, if humankind fails to contain it, the virus will adapt into ever more variants that tend to become even harder to contain. Sadly, viruses adapt more quickly to exponentially grow their power than human bodies or human social systems adapt.

Once nuclear weapons or poisonous gas have been created as weapons of war, if we do not contain their proliferation, great powers will compete to develop ever more deadly weapons of these kinds until finally one is discovered by some brilliant scientist that delivers mass extinctions. That is why universities need a simple rule that neither our brightest and best, nor our greediest and worst, should be permitted to deploy the knowledge-creation infrastructure of universities to invent weapons of war. Period. A simple rule against any future Manhattan Projects that engage descendants of Einstein under any circumstances, ever. University by university, academics would do well to go on strike until such a policy is implemented.

Passive containment of viruses or weapons of mass destruction cannot work; active containment is required. Consider the tragedy of university scientists developing nuclear weapons systems. Once invented, the implications of it being impossible to uninvent them became profound. It meant that it can never be a complete solution for all states to sign a treaty to never produce nuclear weapons, though that is one incomplete but valuable UN solution that was put in place in 2017 and must acquire more flesh and force. ‘So long as any state has nuclear weapons others will want them; so long as any state retains nuclear weapons they are bound one day to be used’.1 In a world where these weapons have been invented, and long since mutated from atomic bombs to more dangerous weapon variants, but in which everyone swears not to produce them, an opportunity is created for a criminal state or a sophisticated terrorist organization. A criminal state might then produce nuclear weapons and dominate a world in which all others have dismantled nuclear weapons programs. ‘In the valley of the blind, the one-eyed man will be king’ is the somewhat ablest poetic evocation of this argument. It is of uncertain provenance, but oft quoted. I argue that in the valley of the blind, blind citizens can swarm resistance to contain collectively a one-eyed pretender to despotism.

In response to the limitations of abolition of Weapons of Mass Destruction, one imperative is reinforcement and return to active forms of containment by rights to inspect the military bases of other countries. These are inspections to ensure that nuclear weapons are not being hidden, and rights to inspect nuclear plants to ensure that weapons grade material is not being produced or secreted there. Even more active inspection is needed than the older inspection regimes abolished in recent decades. Containment requires regulatory institutions like the International Atomic Energy Agency to have robust powers for surprise inspections that are connected up with the combined intelligence capabilities of many cooperating members of the United Nations. Then the UN must be institutionally capable of imposing severe consequences on states or terrorist organizations that have violated the nuclear non-proliferation regime. This must have the effect that non-compliers become economically and militarily weak states or fatally weakened terror organizations.

During the first 80 years of the history of nuclear weapons, more than twenty states and terror organizations have set out to build a nuclear weapon. Less than half of them succeeded. Many who tried did not get far. None of them got far before their deep, tightly held secret, was discovered. Even Israel, which might have the most impressive intelligence infrastructure for securing state secrets, could not keep its nuclear weapons program secret. Nor could Apartheid-era South Africa, which also had formidable security services. Fifteen of the efforts to develop a secret nuclear weapons capability were very well funded and subject to rigorous secrecy enforcement. None of them were kept secret; none escaped the simple regulatory pressures that the nuclear non-proliferation regime managed to mobilize. In the regulation literature, it is impossible to find any other detection regime that has a 100% record of successful detection of a compliance breakout. This is a result of so many capable intelligence agencies putting huge resources into proving that they are more capable of detecting this existential risk than competitor intelligence agencies. We can learn from this 80 years of intelligence agency capability to design a future enforcement system that makes a decision by all states to ban nuclear weapons stick.

The disintegration of the Soviet Union was a time of heightened concern because former Soviet states inherited nuclear weapons – with Russia and Ukraine containing the overwhelming majority. They also inherited ideologically communist militaries from the Soviet military that had both commercial and ideological reasons to betray these newly capitalist states by black market sales of nuclear technologies. Mercifully, the world’s intelligence organizations worked well enough together with the UN’s nuclear non-proliferation institutions, and private sector self-regulatory institutions of the Nuclear Suppliers Group, to suppress the unusually elevated level of risk of this decade. I will argue that restorative diplomacy between Presidents Reagan and Gorbachev laid the political foundation for that accomplishment.

Most of us believed President George W. Bush and Tony Blair when they said in 2003 that their intelligence indicated that Saddam Hussein could not be trusted to eliminate his programs for weapons of mass destruction. Their intelligence indicated no such thing; their assertions were political lies, willful misinformation. International society should have been listening to the nuclear surety inspectors from organizations that included the International Atomic Energy Organization. Prominent in the leadership of these inspectorates were inspectors from the United States, United Kingdom, and Australia, the very states that led the illegal charge into Iraq. The inspectors effectively told us that they doubted the pontifications of the Bush and Blair administrations. Vladimir Putin also assured us that Russian intelligence strongly supported the rigorous findings of the inspectors. The inspectors could not see the evidence of any proliferation risk that might justify an invasion, and they said so. The invasion proved that Bush and Blair were wrong; the inspectors were right; the Russians were right. There was no longer a nuclear weapons program in Iraq; nor was there any longer a chemical or biological weapons program. A simple regulatory inspection program mandated by international consensus on the dangers of Saddam’s regime had worked. Inspection often works2 because it is extremely costly to build a nuclear weapons program. Furthermore, the probability of detection is high from a combination of intensive inspection and intelligence agencies turning insiders and suppliers to spill the beans. The costs of defending against what can ensue from detection are also high, including cyber-attacks, bombing from the air by drones or conventional aircraft, foreign intelligence agencies recruiting employees inside nuclear manufacturing sites for sabotage, trade sanctions, and risk of the kind of preemptive war that occurred in Iraq. Most states and terror organizations believe in the nuclear weapon taboo, but they also understand that every other secret program has been discovered by international society.

Most states comply simply because they believe it is right, a prudent thing for peace that they comply, and therefore rational as well. Great powers with nuclear weapons in addition can and do offer complying states rewards, including security guarantees, if they comply. Guarantees are particularly important with technologically capable near neighbors of Russia and China like Japan and South Korea. Initially, this was important to Australia in the 1950s, a country that then had great nuclear physicists who had been involved in the Manhattan Project and strong political movements to become a nuclear weapons state.

Simple regulatory institutions normally fail for political reasons more than technocratic ones. They get corrupted by political power, as we saw with the way almost all NATO states corrupted the intelligence and inspection evidence on Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction. Regulators like nuclear inspectors are also frequently intimidated by lobbyists, which included foreign lobbyists from Israel in this case, who implicitly threaten to appeal inspectors’ findings and prove them wrong, setting back their careers and their professional reputations, and tying them up in grueling hearings or court cases (a problem that afflicts all kinds of inspectors: Acs and Coglianese 2022).

The Australian Prime Minister during covid created the impression that aged-care facilities were being inspected to ensure they were pandemic ready. This political messaging was misleading; almost no aged-care homes were being inspected up to the second covid wave according to the evidence uncovered by the Royal Commission into Aged Care (2020). I posit this as a law of regulatory corrosion:

Simple regulatory institutions tend to fail politically more than technocratically. The most complex challenges are not about design of inspections, but about capture or corruption, intimidation of inspectors, or political decisions to cut corners on regulatory excellence.

Technocratically, regulatory inspection of nuclear weapons programs is assisted by the fact that nuclear weapons grade material emits not only signals that are highly detectable by inspectors, but signals with a signature. The signature denotes that it was not manufactured here, but there. A challenge of chemical and biological weapons inspection is that stockpiles cannot be detected so readily. Two other factors have saved us to render chemical and biological weapons the lesser danger. One is that the weapons that proved so deadly and debilitating were effectively subject to a total taboo after World War I. This rapid international response greatly reduced investment in grandiose chemical and biological weapons programs. R&D on chemical and biological weapons became morally unacceptable across the world’s great universities from 1918. There were secret programs between the two wars that were quite advanced in Japan. But the brightest and best of the world’s great universities have been minimally engaged with innovation to create next-generation chemical and biological weapons. This is a contrast to the way that great university nuclear physicists at Los Alamos and after World War II did work at scale and with massive state and corporate funding to develop next-generation nuclear weapons. During World War II there were formidable debates about whether chemical weapons would be used, but surprisingly, none of the major powers used them. Churchill was open to doing so if Hitler used them first in his Russian campaign. Intel agencies everywhere were monitoring their enemies on the ban. That was win–win monitoring that constituted risks to reputations that brilliant university scientists did not wish to take by joining biological and chemical weapons research programs. These weapons did not grow in effectiveness as weapons of war in the way that nuclear and conventional weapons did.

With the first invasion of Iraq in 1990, the NATO coalition of the willing was worried about the advantages for Saddam Hussein of his chemical and biological weapons (which he did have in 1990). These weapons delivered zero advantage on the battlefield. Saddam had used them extensively in his 1980s existential war against Iran that cost a million lives. In that war as well, there was no battle in which Iraq’s use of chemical weapons turned the tide of battle in its favor. It was mostly civilians wiped out by chemical weapons. When Syria used chemical weapons in its civil war that started in 2011, chemical weapons turned no battles in their favor. They did cause disfavor from their valued ally, Russia. President Putin prevailed on Syria to dismantle their chemical weapons warfare, creating an opportunity for soft diplomacy with Syria on chemical weapons that worked when President Obama failed with his threats of ‘consequences’ if his red line on chemical weapons use was crossed. Russian firepower, Hezbollah, and especially Kurdish troops made the decisive difference when they fought Islamic State (and other enemies of the Syrian state). Not chemical weapons. Since 2018, after more than a century of many wars subsequent to the chemical and biological weapons genie escaping the bottle, these weapons have won no wars, not even a battle. The lesson is that imperfect inspection, imperfect but formidable moral consensus in universities and foreign ministries, and great power dialogue on the issue to engender consensus on the UN Security Council, can do enough to render seemingly terrifying WMDs useless in practice. Will they remain useless, however, when AI executes millions of ways of adapting and diffusing them?

On September 11, 2001, as I glanced out the window of my New York University office that looked on to Washington Square I glimpsed an aircraft flown by Al Qaeda terrorists whizz by my peripheral vision. Then a muffled crash from the other side of the building, loud screaming from people in Washington Square. Rushing to the street, a woman said what an amazing accident that the plane flew right into the middle of the only building of such height. It did not look like an accident. When a second plane flew into the second tower from the opposite side minutes later, many had the same thought as me: ‘Get off the street behind closed doors because if they are capable of pulling off such destruction, they are clever enough to have biological weapons on board’. It soon became clear that Al Qaeda had not spread chemical or biological weapons across New York and Washington. Nor has their widely believed capability to bring a ship with a dirty nuclear bomb into the harbor of an American metropolis been realized in the 23 years since, even though their network grew hugely after 2001, especially in Africa after 2011. Yes, a significant number of letters and parcels containing anthrax were posted by someone to the mailrooms of politicians in September 2001. This harm was minimal. The postal traces suggest they were probably posted by fringe US supporters or associates of the US national security state to target members of Congress who were tepid in support of an invasion of Afghanistan.

My argument is that international non-proliferation regimes and taboos have been effective international institutions that have protected us more fully from mass murder by chemical or biological weapons because R&D on them never engaged the world’s brightest and best university scientists and was never sufficiently in the open to allow peer review and other institutions of science to build excellence in that R&D. This does not mean that if we neglect the maintenance of these simple, effective institutions of violence control, this WMD horror will never rise from the ashes of the Somme. For the moment, even though secret chemical and biological weapons programs are harder for inspectors to detect compared to secret nuclear programs, nuclear weapons are a far larger threat to humankind.

The nuclear non-proliferation regime has also been a success in terms of containing our worst fears. President John F. Kennedy in 1961 predicted a cascade of 15–25 nuclear weapons powers within a decade. Today there are still only the United States, Russia, China, the United Kingdom, France, Israel, India, Pakistan, and North Korea. This is thanks to civilizing forces in international civil society that finally won a 2017 Nobel Peace Prize for the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons. Dogged regulatory inspectors in places like Iraq under the nuclear non-proliferation regime were the other decisive actors when they lent technocratic strength to the arms of the abolitionists (Braithwaite and Drahos 2000, 318).

We have seen that the great influenza of 1918 was spread by the mass movement of troops from foreign countries back to their homelands. It strengthened R&D on epidemiology and pandemic prevention. While the globalization of travel grows as one of the factors that accelerates the globalization of disease, university epidemiology has been an effective science in discovering the many capillaries of prevention discussed earlier through the example of the covid pandemic. Each epidemic—influenza, polio, HIV, ebola, SARS, MERS, and more—motivated better science to counter accelerating and more tightly coupled risks.

Polio existed in ancient Egypt, but in the 1940s in the United States it cascaded out of control, peaking in 1953. It seemed completely eradicated by 1964 (Williams 2013, 273). There has been near global eradication throughout this century, though the virus survives in areas controlled by the Taliban and other Islamist groups in Afghanistan, North-West Pakistan, and Northern Nigeria. By affecting so widely the country with the best universities in the world, and debilitating a beloved wartime president, polio motivated a level of philanthropic support that was epic as an example to future generations. Two-thirds of America’s great philanthropic society are estimated to have donated to polio research. Seven million participated as volunteers in local fundraising fetes, concerts, and countless other participatory events. Generosity of ordinary Americans funded what one commentator described as ‘the biggest public health experiment ever...The modern era of vaccine evaluation began with the landmark [polio] field trial’ (Oshinsky 2005, 188). No one who lived through the 1940s or 1950s fails to remember the effects of polio on so many we knew. We never forget the fear the disease engendered. On April 12, 1955, when the results of the successful vaccine trial were announced:

Schoolchildren and factory workers got the word over public address systems. Office workers heard it while huddling around radios. In department stores, courtrooms, and coffee shops people wept openly with relief. To many, April 12 resembled another V-J Day – the end of a war. ‘We were safe again’, recalled author Frank Deford, then a fourth grader in Baltimore. ‘At our desks we cheered as if the Orioles or the Colts had won a big game. Outside we could hear car horns honking and church bells chiming in celebration. We had conquered polio’. (Oshinsky 2005, 203)

Viva the grass roots of American civil society and its scientists. In a 1955 Rose Garden reception for Jonas Salk and his vaccine team, President Eisenhower trembled with emotion as he promised to give the Salk polio vaccine to ‘every country that welcomed the knowledge, including the Soviet Union’ because families everywhere must be spared ‘seeing their loved ones suffering in bed’ (Oshinsky 2005, 216). Salk was earlier asked by an interviewer ‘Who owns the patent on this vaccine?’ His reply ‘Well, the people, I would say. There is no patent. Could you patent the sun?’ (Oshinsky 2005, 211). The simple idea was that a surge of public support, a particular variant of The Crowd in History (Rudé 1964) could deliver prevention if the investment were strong and sustained, if the people of the nation that led it had greatness of character. It was another chapter in the story of the finest moments of the American century and a lesson for all humankind.

Negative lessons from this period also loomed. The US government left distribution of the vaccine to a largely unregulated private sector. McCarthyism reinforced the idea that a strong welfare state was communism. The result was worse than an inefficient shambles. Eleven children lost their lives and 250 suffered paralytic illness when the Cutter pharmaceutical corporation distributed dangerous batches of vaccine. This resulted in vaccine testing becoming a major function of the National Institutes of Health and the establishment of what later came to be called the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The further lesson learned was that while people power, philanthropic foundations, and private corporations could do great things, they could do better with support from, and accountability to, simple state public health institutions.

Conclusion

Complex challenges are difficult because they are complex. A slow-food approach to growing simple institutions is possible, however. It can repeatedly, often decisively, be helpful in responding to complexity. This is especially so when institutions are designed for capability to scale up during crises, to be generative, and to be evidence-based learning institutions in the face of complexity. For we fearful individuals, this is a message of comfort at some personal levels in a stressful world. As university researchers we can disappoint ourselves that we have made no great contribution to solving any human problem of import. Perhaps we pursued what we thought was a useful theory, a drug that would save lives, but our data showed our hopes to be false, overblown. Some respond to those disappointments from the failure of their research to impact complexity by becoming a wonderful university administrator. In that role no less than in showing that something did not work, they contribute to sustaining a simple institution that is full of individuals who do luck onto ideas that do make a big difference. When we contribute to institutions of learning at any level—as a supervisor of young scientists, as a teacher in schools or universities, as an early childhood educator, as parents educating our children, aunts our nieces, we do our bit to sustain institutions of learning that are the most important elements of a slow-food approach to responding to complex crises.

As ambulance paramedics, or any kind of health care worker, we might save a great slow-food societal crisis preventer, a great reconciler or peacemaker, or people who know how to infuse others with thinking globally by acting locally. The paramedics who delivered Ronald Reagan to the hospital after he was shot in 1981, the next chapter argues, may actually have saved the lives of most readers. As delightful musicians, exquisite cooks, evocative artists, we might lift the spirits of those who build institutions that tackle complex crises through our tasty soulfood slowly cooked to revive worthy souls.

Simple institutions must be capable of moving quickly to contain crises and the risks that are root causes of crises because global capitalism and global competition drives crises that cascade faster, and more tightly coupled to other kinds of crises. We have seen that institutions for containing the complexity of contagions of viruses in aged care can be simple inspection institutions that enforce simple infection control standards. Future chapters will show how simple nuclear surety inspection systems with simple failings similar to those we saw in aged care are of neglected relevance to containing nuclear catastrophes.

The decisive obstacles to containing crises are most frequently about political and corporate power. Politicians may conclude that there are more votes in giving young people what they want now than old people what they need a bit later because elders are people who die or stop voting soon. The aged are unlikely to understand that the reason they are dying is that an inspector has failed to visit their aged-care facility for more than a year. Likewise, there are no votes in funding competent nuclear surety inspections. Even when at some future date many will lose their lives as a result of such regulatory failure, ordinary citizens also will probably not grasp that this is the reason. Chapter 10 will show that a further problem is that leaders who do not see it as in their political interests to sustain the simple institutions that contain complex crises rarely defend that position publicly. They find that the best way of serving their political interests is to create the impression of sustaining a simple institution people revere. The survey evidence shows that ordinary citizens do tend to respect the institutions we have been discussing: universities, ambulance services, many responsive regulatory institutions. Chapter 10 argues that government inspection and most kinds of business regulatory institutions are like this; the best political strategy is regulatory ritualism—creating the symbolic appearance of regulating crises through respected institutions, but not the substance.

Democracy in the overly narrowed sense of voting in elections is a simple institution that can be structurally helpful in crisis prevention. For example, it gives people a simple pathway to changing the government compared to mounting a revolution, a war, or a coup, to do so. In conditions of modernity where most people value a right to vote for such good and simple reasons, sadly it is not generally in the interests of politicians to sustain democracy in good order. The better political strategy is normally to sustain the appearance but not the substance of democracy. Chapter 10 argues that there are many ways to temper ritualism in democracies with checks and balances. A significant minority of societies have secured sufficient power of the crowd in history to sustain such countervailing institutions.

Before we journey downward to the decisive roles of the crowd in history, the next chapter looks up to the commanding heights of the world system. It is hard not to think of containing crises without considering the success of containing the Soviet Union. It was a success in that Soviet tyranny did ultimately crumble because of the patient slow-food approach of the containment doctrine during the Cold War. However, Chapters 4 and 5 argue that containment of states sets limits on a slow-food approach because containment is normally impossible to sustain for any long period. One reason is that if containment can deliver the geopolitical power to totally contain a state because of one issue, containment can be an unsustainable obstacle to collaborating with them on a host of other crises. Containment of risks and of crises, as opposed to containment of states, is easier to sustain in the longue durée. On that foundation, Chapters 6 and 7 consider containment of our most deadly risks. Chapters 8 and 9 then develop a view on what kind of diplomacy is needed for that kind of containment of cascading crises.

Notes

  1. 1.

    This quote comes from former Australian Foreign Minister Gareth Evans quoting the international blue-ribbon panel of the Canberra Commission on the Elimination of Nuclear Weapons. (Gareth Evans 2022, 66).

  2. 2.

    In the regulatory inspection literature more generally, inspection often works, even when it fails to result in significant penalties because detection deterrence is found by the evidence to do more work than sanctions deterrence (Braithwaite 2008, 2022).