[asia-apec 943] flawed paradigm that led to the Y2K problem

[Roberto Verzola]

This is my follow up message on the GKD list that relates the Y2K
crisis with other crises that modern societies face today. I do hope
NGOs and other groups manage to prepare early for the coming
millennium crises, debates and soul-searching.

Obet Verzola

* Original is in : GKD
* Original date  : 30 Nov 98  22:17:01
* Original is by : rverzola                           (6:751/401.1)
* Original is to : gkd at tristram.edc.org               (6:751/401)
* Full text below: 

This is my contribution to the paradigm debate:

The flawed mindset that blinded a whole generation of designers and
their employers to the Y2K problem is due to the adoption of
efficiency (or what I prefer to call gain maximization) as the
overriding criterion for economic decision-making.

Efficiency probably got its biggest boost with Adam Smith, when he
convinced everybody that an economic agent which maximizes its own
gain is also maximizing gain for society as a whole, providing it with
moral justification. Then it took off when we allowed in our laws the
creation of a special kind of legal person, one which is not a
confusing bundle of mixed motivations and emotions like a natural
person is, but a person whose one and only motivation was to maximize
its own gain. (I have suggested elsewhere that ecologists study this
gain-maximizing legal person as if it were a separate species and see
what insights we might derive from this fresh approach. Perhaps, we
would find out that this "species" is in fact blindly transforming the
world into its own "Gaia"?)

Our lives took another turn for the worse as these pure agents of
gain-maximization acquired increasing economic and political rights,
protected by our laws, and as their power to create an environment
more conducive to their survival and further growth expanded. (Note
that this environment is not necessarily an environment that is
likewise conducive to the survival, health and happiness of natural
persons.)

Using their acquired rights as foothold, these gain-maximizing agents
gradually expanded their powers until they could disentangle
themselves from suffocating social and legal restrictions. Later on,
they even managed to take over many of functions originally reserved
for others societal structures and institutions. Today, we are often
ruled by these gain-maximizing agents more than we rule over their
behavior.

One effect of this relentless pursuit of efficiency is the breaking
down of modular barriers which had earlier served to improve
reliability and minimize risks. These were either economic barriers,
cultural and linguistic barriers, territorial barriers, geographic
barriers, and even biological barriers between species. Since breaking
down these barriers increased gains and improved efficiency, broken
down they were. There is enough in the theories of systems analysis
and design to explain why this would increase the number of potential
interactions in a system, and why the exponential increase in
side-effects that this leads to, creates a system which is
problem-ridden and failure-prone.

Let us look beyond the M-bug at other global problems which threaten
us and our environment: global warming, toxic proliferation (a
superset of the tobacco problem), loss of habitats leading to massive
species extinction, wealth concentration, etc. Behind these problems,
we will usually find the visible hand of these pure agents of gain-
maximization and the effects of loss of modularity due to their
pursuit of efficiency.

We would obviously find others flaws, in our search for deeply-flawed
behavioral patterns within modern society, but I am prepared to argue
that the gain-maximizing paradigm is truly a major one.

If there is still time and space for more Y2K-related discussion on
this list, my next post would be about alternatives to the efficiency
and gain-maximizing paradigms.

Regards to all,

Roberto Verzola