Transcript
Transcript: Reflections by Thomas Homer-Dixon
[00:00:00 A series of images of people walking along busy urban streets; a Canadian flag flying on the side of a building; an aerial view of Parliament Hill and downtown Ottawa; the interior of a library; a view of Earth from space. Text on screen: Leadership; Policy; Governance; Innovation.]
Narrator: Public servants, thought leaders and experts from across Canada are reflecting on the ideas shaping public service – leadership, policy, governance, innovation and beyond. This is the Review and Reflection Series produced by the Canada School of Public Service.
[00:00:34 Thomas ("Tad") Homer-Dixen appears full screen. Text on screen: Thomas ("Tad") Homer-Dixon, Founder and Executive Director of the Cascade Institute at Royal Roads University.]
Taki Sarantakis: Thank you so much for joining us again today for another interesting conversation with another Canadian Luminary. Today, we are talking to, who is a Canadian gem. He is one of Canada's top academic thinkers. He is engaged in real-world stuff, and he was interdisciplinary before interdisciplinary was a thing. Welcome, Tad.
Tad Homer-Dixon: Hi. Great to be with you.
Taki Sarantakis: Now, first thing we have to ask is – Tad, where does that come from?
Tad Homer-Dixon: Okay. This is the first time I've been asked that question at the beginning of an interview. It's a funny story. My parents were huge fans of Pogo.
[00:01:18 Overlaid image of the comic strip "Pogo".]
Tad Homer-Dixon: The comic strip Pogo, from Walt Kelly, I think. That comic strip, it was sort of an early Doonesbury. It was very political. It took place in the Florida Everglades. The protagonist was an opossum by the name of Pogo. He often talked about the tads in the swamp, the little animals that were around him in the swamp. When I was born, I was this little thing in the crib, and my parents started referring to me as "the Tad in the crib" and it stuck, for better or for worse.
Taki Sarantakis: That is so amazing. Basically, from child, from birth, almost.
Tad Homer-Dixon: Yes, and I've had a very conflicted relationship with the name, to be frank. My mom could tell. She passed away when I was fairly young, but she told me at one point, Abraham Lincoln had a son by the name of Thomas Lincoln, and he was called Tad. I felt better about that. She didn't tell me that Tad Lincoln passed away of consumption when he was 17 or something like that.
I actually changed my name to Fraser. I used my middle name for about 15 years between the time I started high school until I got to graduate school. But it just didn't feel right. I ended up going back to Tad when I started graduate work in my late 20s.
Taki Sarantakis: Now, I think you grew up in British Columbia?
Tad Homer-Dixon: Yes.
Taki Sarantakis: Tell us a little bit about that.
[00:02:48 Overlaid aerial photo of Victoria, BC.]
Tad Homer-Dixon: I grew up on Vancouver Island.
Taki Sarantakis: Around Victoria?
Tad Homer-Dixon: Yes, in the rural area outside of Victoria. My parents were extremely outdoorsy.
[00:02:56 Overlaid image of Professor Homer-Dixon's parents leaning against a car, with two bucks and their rifles displayed on the trunk of the car.]
Tad Homer-Dixon: My father was a forester. He was responsible for all the forestry within the Greater Victoria Water district. He kind of pioneered sustainable forestry. My mother was an amateur scientist, an artist, and she was really quite a remarkable person. But we spent an enormous amount of time outdoors when I was young, hunting and fishing and camping and exploring Vancouver Island, which is just an extraordinary ecosystem, and the landscape is just so amazing there.
Taki Sarantakis: And you enjoyed the outdoors so much I think you ended up financing part of your university working on oil rigs and things like that.
Tad Homer-Dixon: I didn't go straight to university. I had kind of a rocky process through high school. I think that's partly because my mom passed away when I was 13, and it was a pretty unstable period. Then I spent about three years working in outdoor industries,
[00:4:00 Overlaid images of an oil derrick; Professor Homer-Dixon standing by the controls of an oil derrick.]
Tad Homer-Dixon: like in the forestry industry, and on the oil rigs, drilling in northeastern British Columbia. Then I finally ended up in university. It's when things started to click together at that point, and I decided – I'd had at that point about 15 different jobs doing all kinds of things, from working in a department store, to pumping gas – I decided, okay, there's got to be another pathway to life here.
Taki Sarantakis: I think some of those experiences impacted you, and we'll talk about them in turn. You found your way to university, and you started at Carleton, I think.
[00:4:38 Overlaid image of the entrance sign at the University of Victoria.]
Tad Homer-Dixon: At UVIC, actually.
Taki Sarantakis: Oh, UVIC.
Tad Homer-Dixon: I did two years of UVIC, and it was a great place to start. I was still getting my feet under me, and I did two years there. Started a very general degree, studied everything from Latin to astronomy. At that point, I finished high school a bit young. I was about a year younger than everybody, but I'd started university about a year later than everybody. Because I'd been away for a while, I was just so enthusiastic, and I was really excelling in my courses.
[00:05:09 Overlaid image of the entrance sign at Carleton University.]
Tad Homer-Dixon: At that point, I switched to Carleton University and spent about five years in Ottawa.
Taki Sarantakis: Then you found your way at some point to MIT. Tell us a little bit about that.
Tad Homer-Dixon: When I was in Ottawa, I did a degree in political science here at Carleton University. I also got involved – I was very interested, and this interest started in Victoria – I was very interested in the causes of human conflict and especially the mechanisms behind the strategic arms race between the United States and the Soviet Union. Why is it that they were building all these weapons to kill so many people? Just enormously perplexed by that. I started studying that issue when I was at UVIC, and I continued when I was here at Carleton.
I got involved with an organization called the "Pugwash Movement". Which is named, of course, after the town of Pugwash in Nova Scotia, which was an international movement of scientists to try to bring scientists from the East and the West block together to try to cool down the arms race and build bridges between the two sides and reduce the risk of nuclear war. I went to a student Pugwash conference in 1979 down in California, and I decided to create a Canadian equivalent student Pugwash organization in Canada. I did that for a number of years before I went on to graduate school, based here in Ottawa.
[00:06:44 Overlaid image of the exterior of Massachusetts Institute of Technology.]
Tad Homer-Dixon: Through that process, I came in contact with a number of scholars and scientists who worked at MIT, because MIT was probably the leading institution in the United States looking at the dynamics of the strategic arms race. Very, very deep study of weapons systems, of the strategic balance, the causes of the arms race, of the discord between the United States and the Soviet Union. When I applied to graduate school, they knew me, and they were very happy to have me as part of their program. I spent six years in Cambridge, in Massachusetts, and it was a marvelous time.
[00:07:26 Overlaid image of the exterior of the University of Toronto.]
Taki Sarantakis: Now, after your doctorate, you found your way to the University of Toronto, and you started making a name for yourself. This is where I first encountered your work. I think you were writing – I don't know if it was regularly – you were writing a little bit in the Globe and Mail. And I remember reading a profile of you. This is in the '90s, and it was just these fascinating things. They were talking about this young academic who was rethinking climate change, environmental stressors, population movements, conflict.
But you were looking at them, as I said at the beginning, holistically in an interdisciplinary manner, and you were making fascinating linkages that today people might look at and go, Yes, that makes a lot of sense. But you were on the forefront of that. Tell us a little bit about that time.
Tad Homer-Dixon: Well, it's a good thing we've talked a bit about my deep history, because really what happened is I went to MIT and I used the opportunity to try to get a really deep understanding of the causal mechanisms that drive mass violence and war, civil war, genocide and the like. I had some marvelous teachers. In fact, my dissertation was focused. It was titled "A Theory of Conflict", and for a period of five years, I was deeply, deeply embedded in that literature and that research.
But as I approach the end of my dissertation, I realized that I had another deep interest, too, and that was in the environment in the natural world, going back to my childhood on Vancouver Island. When I finished my doctorate – in fact, in the last part of my dissertation, I talk about this. I say, This is really what I want to do. I stayed for another six months.
I was very fortunate to get a doctoral fellowship, a postdoctoral fellowship, from the Social Science Humanities Research Council in Canada, and I was able to stay a little bit longer in Cambridge, and I decided to bring the two interests together. I started to focus on what are the possible relationships between environmental stress of various kinds, and resource scarcities, and conflict.
There had been a little bit of work on that going back over the decades, but nothing really rigorous. I was really in a completely new territory. I was really pioneering stuff. I do a lot of causal diagrams, and I started by doing causal diagrams. We had a wonderful group of postdocs and doctoral students at MIT and Harvard and Boston University who were coming together every week or two in something that we called the "International Environmental Issues Study Group". This was 1988, '89.
[00:10:23 Overlaid image of James Hansen. Text on screen: James Hansen is a renowned American climate scientist and former NASA researcher known for his influential work on global warming.]
Tad Homer-Dixon: It was right at the time when James Hansen had gone in front of Congress to say, Global warming is here. We have to start paying attention to this. We felt that our faculty members at MIT and Harvard were really not paying much attention, so we decided to come together. I presented some of these ideas, and my first diagrams were just a mass of spaghetti. Everything was connected to everything else.
And then, you're quite right, I had a chance to come to the University of Toronto to work to try to build a Peace and Conflict program at the University College at University of Toronto. And I made this relationship between environment and environmental stress and conflict the core of my research for about a decade or so.
I built the Peace and Conflict program working in collaboration with Anatol Rapoport, who was one of the world's greatest mathematical psychologists who was there at the time, and who had been a giant in my field. At the same time, I did this work on environment conflict. The Berlin Wall had collapsed, and people were scrambling for other ways of looking at the way the world was working. How do we make sense of this international order now?
[00:11:39 Overlaid image of Francis Fukuyama. Text on screen: Francis Fukuyama is an American political scientist known for his work on democracy and political development.]
Tad Homer-Dixon: Francis Fukuyama had come out with "The End of History and the Last Man", and there were good ideas and bad ideas around. The framework that I developed seemed to crystallize a lot of people's thinking at the time. It got attention in particular of the Vice President of the United States. I don't know if that's where you were thinking of going with it.
Taki Sarantakis: I would imagine that would Mr. Gore.
[00:12:03 Overlaid image of Al Gore. Text on screen: Al Gore is an American politician and environmental advocate who served as U.S. Vice President from 1993-2001.]
Tad Homer-Dixon: It was Gore, yes.
Taki Sarantakis: Tell us a little bit about that.
Tad Homer-Dixon: I wrote one major paper. It took me about two years of work. It was grounded in those spaghetti diagrams that I started working on in '88 and '89. Then in '91, this paper appeared in International Security.
Taki Sarantakis: Which is one of the top journals, for our viewers.
Tad Homer-Dixon: Probably. Certainly, at the time, it was probably the world's top journal in security-related international relations and international affairs issues.
[00:12:36 Overlaid image of Professor Homer-Dixon's paper. Text on screen: "On the Threshold: Environmental Changes as Causes of Acute Conflict".
A number of scholars have recently asserted that large-scale human-induced environmental pressures may seriously affect national and international security. Unfortunately, the environment-security theme encompasses an almost unmanageable array….]
Tad Homer-Dixon: It was titled "On the Threshold: Environmental Scarcities as Causes of Civil Conflict", or "as Causes of Violent Conflict", something like that. I heard a few months later, somebody told me that they'd been on Air Force Two. Now, Clinton and Gore were elected in…
Taki Sarantakis: '92?
Tad Homer-Dixon: '92, right. It would have been a little bit later after that. But anyway, I did hear that – this is probably '93 or so, maybe early '94 – that the Vice President was reading my article as he was sitting in the seat on Air Force Two. That was pretty cool.
Taki Sarantakis: That's absolutely cool.
Tad Homer-Dixon: I was like 33 or 35, or something like that. Anyway, the upshot of that was that I was invited twice to Washington to brief Al Gore, and there was a lot of attention. It was about the time that little biographical article came out. It was in MacLean's. It was an explosive interest in the area. I was raising quite a bit of money to hire a team of really phenomenal researchers to try to advance that frontier, so we were producing a lot of case studies and stuff, and it was an incredibly stimulating moment.
Taki Sarantakis: What were you seeing? What things were you linking together that others hadn't yet seen, or hadn't yet anticipated?
Tad Homer-Dixon: Well, I think that's... I could talk all day about that, of course. But the key thing was that most people assumed, up to that point, that to the extent that the resource scarcity or environmental problems would cause conflict, let's say, water scarcity or shortages of forests in places where communities are very dependent upon forests.
For the most part, we were looking at poor countries where there was a lot of dependence on natural resources, that people would fight over the resources directly. You'd have a fight over a local well, or access to a river, or something like that, or over a patch of agricultural land. Now, okay, there's some of that. When you look around the world, you see some of those things.
But I always thought, and this is going back to my work in '88 and '89, I always thought that the relationships would be much less direct, much more attenuated in a sense. That what environmental stresses would do is they'd have a series of what we called first-order social effects. They would make people poorer because they couldn't grow as much food on their cropland, or because they couldn't get access to water, or had to go farther for water.
So, it would make people poorer; would cause them to migrate in large numbers; would weaken institutions, for instance, tax revenues for governments would go down, so the governments would become weaker; would empower incumbent resource owners. In other words, powerful groups that already had access to the water, or the land, or the forest, would become more powerful because the resources were becoming scarce. As they became more powerful, they'd be able to torque the government or the state to their interests to twist things, dominate the political system.
It would be these intermediate social effects, these first order social effects, that would cause the conflict, and that the processes of conflict would be multifactorial. This all relates to my later work because I realized that the processes were complex in a technical sense, that there was non-linearity, there was indirect causation, it was multifactorial. There were a lot of factors that were involved.
This is when I started to become interested in complex systems theory because I realized the conventional tools to understand causation in political science were completely inadequate to the tasks.
Taki Sarantakis: We'll get there a little later. I want to stay on the environmental team for a moment, though. I can't overstate to the people that are listening and watching this, the degree to which what you were saying was not orthodoxy back then.
Back then, it was like the '80s, the '90s. We've won the Cold War. Scarcity was the farthest thing from our minds. We were actually, how are we going to spend the coming abundance? The East and the West have now joined hands, and we're moving forward in a whole new epoch of global peace and prosperity. And it wasn't thus?
[00:17:25 Overlaid image of Robert Kaplan.]
Tad Homer-Dixon: Another factor that went into the explosion of interest in this area was an article that the American geopolitical journalist, Robert Kaplan, wrote. It was a cover story in the Atlantic.
Taki Sarantakis: "The Coming Anarchy".
Tad Homer-Dixon: "The Coming Anarchy", that's right. That article, the cover story in the Atlantic, got the most distribution of any article that the Atlantic had ever published. Tim Wirth, who was the Undersecretary of State for Global Affairs in the Clinton/Gore Administration, and he's since become quite a good friend of mine, but I didn't know him at the time. He faxed in those days. It was a fax. He faxed that cover story to every single American embassy and consulate in the world.
It featured two academics: Sam Huntington, who was a conservative American international relations scholar, and me. Bob Kaplan is an extraordinary writer. Just a wonderful writer. He told the story in a very interesting way, a very personal way. We sat on the lawn outside University College at the University of Toronto, and he described the intellectual content in a very compelling way, and that article got an enormous amount of attention.
Now, he was arguing that the evolution of scarcity in the world – and you're quite right about the dominant zeitgeist of the time was not in this space at all – but he was arguing the contrary, that there were parts of the world that are already starting to exhibit huge scarcity problems, and it was driving very serious social conflict, and that there would be a progressive escalation of this as time evolved.
Again, people are trying to figure out how to see the world. They were the optimists, and this was a much more skeptical, if not pessimistic, at least cautioning way of looking at the world. There's a whole bunch of problems we haven't solved, and some of them relate to things like water scarcity, agricultural and food production, population growth, and ultimately climate change. Climate change was part of the story.
Taki Sarantakis: Now we're seeing manifest many of the things you were talking about. People fighting about rivers; people fighting about dams; people fighting about irrigation; people fighting about access over energy. As you say, we're seeing it everywhere.
Tad Homer-Dixon: But equally, I'd say, sorry to interrupt, but they are fighting over these things. There's no question about it. But we're getting the most pernicious influence of a lot of these problems is the way they're draining wealth from our economies and causing people as a result to be poorer and angrier and less trustful of their institutions. So, climate change is sucking trillions of dollars out of the global economy now. It's just beginning to manifest its really severe impacts.
It's those indirect effects, to go back to what we were saying before, it's those indirect effects that tend to get ignored because you can't point to them so easily and say, Well, climate change is causing this social breakdown. Instead, climate change is causing a whole sequence of things that eventually leads to this, in combination with other factors. And so, it's not as easy to discern, but ultimately, it's those longer-term effects that are more important and more debilitating.
Taki Sarantakis: That's a really nice segue into the concept that I wanted to park for a moment, and we'll now go from park to drive. You are also now one of the world's top thinkers on something called Complexity Theory. What is Complexity Theory?
Tad Homer-Dixon: Well, okay, I have to caveat it a bit. I think there are an awful lot of people out there who are complexity scientists who would probably question that statement about me being one of the top thinkers. But I'm certainly part of the community.
Taki Sarantakis: You are too humble. Keep going.
Tad Homer-Dixon: I'm certainly part of the community. So, Complex Systems Theory is a somewhat disconnected body of work that looks at things that are complex, which include everything from the human brain to ecological systems, to human economies.
Taki Sarantakis: But everything's complex. What is it specifically about?
Tad Homer-Dixon: There's a distinction between complicated and complex. So, a machine, a modern automobile, has an enormous number of components, and it's complex. We can break it down into its individual parts and understand what all the individual parts do. If something's not working, when you put them back together, you can usually attribute the problem to a particular part that's not working.
Taki Sarantakis: Is it complex or complicated?
Tad Homer-Dixon: Excuse me, it's complicated. You're right. You're quite right. That's complicated. Complexity is something different. Complexity is when you put all the pieces together, it behaves in a way that you're not expecting. Or that you couldn't anticipate by looking at the individual pieces. Complicated doesn't have that particular property of emergence, that when you put the pieces together, something novel happens.
The way I often explain this to people is a mechanical clock, like the ones you wind, the thing we used to have on our mantle pieces. You wind it up and it gongs every hour or something like that. That's a complicated device, but you can break it down to all its individual parts. Its bushings, its cog wheels, its springs and stuff. You can understand how they all work, and you can understand how they fit together and how they interact. If you put it back together and it's not working properly, then you can usually attribute it to some part that's either missing or bent or broken or something like that. So, that's complicated.
Complex, it would be a bit like... If it were a complex entity, it would be a bit like you put all the pieces together and you turn the last screw, then this thing grows a couple of legs and a little mouth on it and looks at you and says, Hi, I'm out of here, and walks out the door. It's done something that you would never have expected.
Taki Sarantakis: There's no causal relationship between what you did and what happened?
Tad Homer-Dixon: There are there are characteristics or properties of this thing, which I'm suggesting it comes alive. It's got the property of life, or something like that. Obviously, it's verbal and it's mobile and a lot of things that you hadn't expected. But there are a whole bunch of properties that, even by looking at all the individual parts, you couldn't understand exactly. You couldn't really anticipate what would happen when you combine them all together into this thing. That clock, which has come alive, has emergent properties of life and mobility and stuff like that. That notion of emergence is a critical part of complexity. That things do things you're not expecting because of the interactions between the parts. But there's another element.
Taki Sarantakis: Okay. Go with that, and then I want to bring it back to public policy.
Tad Homer-Dixon: Where does emergence come from? Well, it comes from a bunch of things. But one of the things that's most important is the underlying nature of causation in the system. I always try to focus on causation.
When we think about causes, conventionally, we think that small causes cause small effects. You do something small to a system, and it causes another small effect. If you do something big to the system, it causes a big effect. You have a proportionality between the size of the cause and the size of the effect.
In complex systems, you get a breakdown in that proportionality. A small tweak or difference can sometimes cause a really big change or effect. Sometimes you can do a really big thing to a system, and it doesn't seem to do much at all. That's what complexity scientists mean by non-linearity. You get this breakdown in the proportionality of cause and effect.
And it turns out that it's that non-linearity that's the source of a lot of the emergence within these systems. There are some other factors, too. But you see non-linearity and emergence in brains, you see them in economies, in ecological systems, in the climate. They all exhibit these properties.
Taki Sarantakis: That's where I wanted to go. In the public policy realm, we tend to have a little bit of a... I don't want to call it an arrogance, but a lack of humility. And there are a lot of public policy thinkers and practitioners around the world who go, Well, I know how to solve this problem. You add a little A, you take away a little B, and there you go. That's your solution. Whether that's your solution to homelessness, or poverty, economic growth, immigration, and on and on and on.
The truth is, I think, in these complex systems, we don't necessarily know what a driver is. We don't necessarily know what one of these things plays in the overall system.
Tad Homer-Dixon: No. There's a tendency, and I think this is a very common, and it's an innate tendency for all of us. It's a function of the cognitive apparatus we developed as hominids and hunter-gatherers to think in bivariate causation or a single cause of a single effect.
Taki Sarantakis: If X, Y. Right.
Tad Homer-Dixon: And maybe you add a couple of extra factors like you were suggesting. But fundamentally, we tend to think of things like machines. We tend to think of as if the world is made up like a clock, but it's more like a cloud. We can't anticipate all the possible interactions. That is an injunction to be much more prudent, to be much more experimental in our involvement with systems. You have to test things out a lot of the time.
We're in a world that the great American economist, Frank Knight, back in the 1920s and 1930s, it's a world of unknown unknowns. He made a distinction between risk and uncertainty.
[00:27:41 Overlaid image of a title page. Text on page: Risk, Uncertainty and Profit, by Frank H. Knight, Ph.D.]
Tad Homer-Dixon: Risk is something where you can generate a lot of empirical evidence and gather a lot of data and actually predict some probabilities. In a world of Knightian uncertainty, you don't know what the probabilities are. Often, you don't even know what questions to ask. "It's a world of unknown unknowns", a phrase that was made famous by the Secretary of Defence, Donald Rumsfeld, during the Iraq war, as a lot of people know.
But it's something, interestingly enough, that's been very common and understood within military establishments for a long time, because when you're in the battlefield, a lot of stuff goes sideways all the time. You prepare for the unexpected. You prepare for the friction of the battlefield, the fog of war, so people operating in that kind of situation get it. Unfortunately, a lot of our public servants and a lot of our corporate leaders and social leaders in general and political leaders still think that the world is a machine.
Taki Sarantakis: Dwight Eisenhower, just to your point, one of my favourite expressions from him is, "Plans are useless. Planning is everything".
Tad Homer-Dixon: Exactly.
Taki Sarantakis: If you think of those two things together, like the noun versus the verb, if you get nothing from this conversation, that'll help the rest of your life.
Now, one last thing on complexity and public policy before we move on to our next topic. Not only do you have these incredibly complex systems like the economy, like weather, like international relations, like virology. But you also have an interface, a connection, a relationship between all of those things and so many more. Do we have any hope with our little biological five-pound processing machine to get any of that?
Tad Homer-Dixon: I think so. In fact, this little five-pound biological processing machine is actually an incredibly good pattern recogniser. When we let those intuitions operate, instead of trying to hammer everything into a simple bivariate model with simple cause, simple effect, I think often we actually do have intuitions for the deep complexity of the world around us and patterns that we see.
But you're quite right. Each of these individual systems that we're trying to understand and work with in the world is linked to other complex systems, and you have nests of them, a bit like a Russian doll, and they're layered, and we don't really understand a lot of those interactions. Fundamentally, that's what we're trying to do in the work at the institute I'm running right now is trying to understand those connections.
I think we can do a lot of the planning that allows us to be better prepared and to see, in a somewhat better way, the probabilities of lie before us. But in a world that's complex, you have to be experimental, and you have to be provisional, and you have to be prudent.
Taki Sarantakis: Now, in addition to being a pioneer in the areas that we've talked about, you're also a pioneer, linguistically and conceptually, in an area that a lot of us are talking about right now, but I'm not sure a lot of us understand it, which is the polycrisis. Talk to us a little bit about… First, tell us the difference between a crisis and a polycrisis, and tell us what you think we need to know about the polycrisis in terms of polycrisis thinking.
Tad Homer-Dixon: Well, a polycrisis is a lot of crises linked together, happening more or less at the same time. It came into widespread use, in particular during the European crisis, multiple crises that occurred in the middle of the last decade, so 2015, 2016 or so, when there was Brexit, and the Greek financial crisis, and the Syrian Civil War that produced a pulse of migrants.
[00:32:10 Overlaid image of Jean-Claude Juncker.]
Tad Homer-Dixon: The head of the European Commission at the time, Jean-Claude Juncker, talked about the polycrisis that Europe was facing. Then in the early 2020s, Adam Tooze, the economic historian at Columbia University, started to use the concept.
[00:32:26 Overlaid image of the Cascade Institute logo.]
Tad Homer-Dixon: At the institute that I'm working at right now, the Cascade Institute, we use this concept as a way of organizing a lot of our research. We're basically asking the question, is the confluence of shocks and crises we see around the world today, the rise of populist Authoritarianism, mass migrations, increasing geopolitical conflict and war, the pandemic a few years ago, is this confluence simply a coincidence? Is it like a perfect storm of just bad things that happen coincidentally to all be happening at the same time? And if we just wait, things will go back to normal because the coincidence will go away? Or are there underlying connections between these things that are causing them to synchronize, to happen simultaneously.
Our hypothesis, within the Cascade Institute, is that they are actually linked together. That the polycrisis is a phenomenon, to go back to the concept I used before, it's an emergent characteristic of the world where we've reached a level of complexity globally, and a level of instability within the various constituent economic and social and technological systems, that we're causing a synchronization across the instabilities in these systems. That's what we're trying to figure out within the Cascade Institute.
Taki Sarantakis: Is it fair to say that the globe, humanity, we're at a moment where we're structurally unsound?
Tad Homer-Dixon: In my more pessimistic moments, I think that may be the case. There was this old management text. It was a bit of a spoof back in the 1960s by a management guru by the name of Peter.
[00:34:17 Overlaid image of Laurence J. Peter. Text on screen: Laurence J. Peter was a Canadian educator and social critic whose 1969 book, "The Peter Principle", satirically argued that people rise in organisations until they reach their level of incompetence.]
Tad Homer-Dixon: I can't remember his first name, but he came out with a book called "The Peter Principle". The basic idea was that in any organization or bureaucracy, people graduate to their level of incompetence because they keep getting promoted while they're still doing a reasonably good job. Then when they stop doing a good job, they aren't promoted anymore. So, everybody at upper echelons is basically incompetent because they've stopped progressing at that point.
Actually, it was an extraordinary insight. It was substantially true in a lot of respects. Sometimes I wonder whether human beings, or the human species, has graduated to its level of incompetence, and that we have finally developed for ourselves, despite this extraordinary ability of this 5 pounds of computational meat that we have in our skulls, that we have generated for ourselves problems we can't solve. And that's in my more pessimistic moments. I'm not quite ready to go there in my everyday moments. This is more like a 3:00 AM thought.
Taki Sarantakis: I'm going to stay on this for a moment because that leads us nicely into one of your books, "The Ingenuity Gap".
[00:35:35 Overlaid image of the book cover. Text on screen: Thomas Homer-Dixon, The Ingenuity Gap: Can we solve the problems of the future?.]
Taki Sarantakis: Tell us about "The Ingenuity Gap".
Tad Homer-Dixon: That was my first major trade book. As we've discussed in the 1990s, I was at the University of Toronto doing this work on environment conflict, becoming a proto-complex systems thinker, starting to understand the nature of complex systems. And I realized that there were a lot of societies that could actually seem to be able to cope reasonably well with scarcities, and other societies just weren't, and I was interested in what the differences were. There was a body of work out there at the time, which went under the label of cornucopianism, led by people like Julian Simon, who was a management theorist at the University of Maryland, who suggested that scarcity would actually stimulate innovation, and that in some ways, the scarcer things were, the more creative we'd be, and that there was really no limit on resources as long as we could apply brain power to solve our problems.
I thought, Well, in some ways, that actually seems to be true, that human beings are stunningly innovative. What are the constraints on innovation? I started to really study theories of innovation, including in economics, in the early days of the work of Paul Romer,
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Tad Homer-Dixon: who later went on to win the Nobel Prize in economics for what's called Endogenous Growth Theory. I had a chance to meet Paul because we were both fellows for a while at the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research. He was a bit of my mentor in this area.
Taki Sarantakis: He was a pioneer, I think, in information theory, too. Like early internet.
Tad Homer-Dixon: He really focused on the role of ideas in economics and the economic power. He was treating ideas as an input to productivity.
Taki Sarantakis: Like land, labour.
Tad Homer-Dixon: Yes, because you go back to conventional production functions. It's land, maybe, although land dropped out, it became labour and capital. And land, it was assumed by later economists after the classic economists Ricardo, and Malthus, and others, that capital could substitute for land.
And so, the production functions that the economists used through much of the 20th century just included capital and labour. Paul brought ideas in. And now people are realizing that land or resources are also a critical input. That's where the whole body of ecological economics basically includes land as an input to production.
But I was really interested in the flow of ideas, which I called within my work, ingenuity. Basically, recipes or algorithms for how you arrange the constituent parts of your world in order to solve your problems. When we solve a problem, any problem, it can be a trivial everyday problem, like putting food on the table, or it can be a very complex problem, like building a laptop. It involves a sequence of steps by which we take constituent things in our world – they can be technologies, they can be resources, they can be people – and combine them in certain ways in order to produce an outcome. It's basically like a recipe, like you're mixing stuff in a kitchen.
So, you can think of the challenges we're facing as a species in terms of our increasing need for increasingly complex recipes and our somewhat limited and constrained ability to deliver those recipes when and where we need them. That's the ingenuity gap.
Taki Sarantakis: The gap is?
Tad Homer-Dixon: Between the rising requirement for these algorithms and the static and sometimes falling ability to deliver them.
Taki Sarantakis: And this is what we're hearing. Could we make a leap to some of the people that are talking today about we're making all these progressions in software, we're making all of these progressions in apps, Internet communications, but we're now, in some cases, fundamentally having challenges feeding ourselves. Or is that a different argument?
Tad Homer-Dixon: No, it's entirely related. As human beings, we seem to be very good at generating recipes or algorithms for certain kinds of problems and really not very good at other kinds. We're not very good at solving a lot of our social problems, especially ones that involve large scale collective action challenges, like climate. But we're really good at making stuff like laptops and phones. Our innovative prowess is really unbalanced at a time when we need a lot more ingenuity of one kind and maybe a little bit less of other kinds.
Now, maybe AI will fix some of this. I'm not terribly optimistic about that, in part because it's being trained on the existing corpus of knowledge that we have, which is unbalanced. The Peter Principle may be that we're generating problems like climate change that we're actually just really bad at solving. These are intractable ingenuity gaps.
Taki Sarantakis: Now we'll go to your non-3 AM self to, I think it's your latest book, "Commanding Hope".
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Taki Sarantakis: You've spent a lot of your career and a good chunk of your real life, too, in things that are not kind of happy, things that are not Alice in Wonderland fairy tales. But you wrote a book called "Commanding Hope", which talks about, not just the importance of hope, but the importance of hope to the continuation of civilization, almost. You talk about it in structural terms. It's not a self-help book. It's more of a, This is structurally necessary for the species.
Tad Homer-Dixon: That's right. There is a somewhat uninformed and amorphous debate about hope out there right now. I think there's an intuition that a lot of people have that we're in pretty bad shape if we lose hope. But there are some folks who think that most of the hope that people espouse in the world today is basically wishful thinking, and it's a distraction, and it contributes to denial. I think that's quite true. I argue in the book for a different kind of hope, a more muscular and more honest form of hope, which I call commanding hope.
The book was motivated by the fact that my wife and I had two children, and I was thinking about the kind of world that they were growing up into. Having spent the last several decades thinking about the potential degeneration of human civilization through the underlying erosion of material well-being, I felt I had to build a story that Ben and Kate could read that would be honest and that would tell them about some possible pathways forward.
So, I became very motivated to become more prescriptive. I'd spent two and a half decades being very descriptive, diagnostic, trying to figure out the underlying mechanics of the challenge humankind is facing, which I felt that no other people, siloed in their specific disciplines, were getting a really good handle on.
Then I switched to thinking about, Okay, what are we going to do about this? What am I going to tell our children about what we're going to do this and what meaningful role they can play in trying to find a better path?
Taki Sarantakis: I read it as almost a Darwinian imperative to pass on hope to the people behind us.
Tad Homer-Dixon: I am on the side of those folks who say that without hope, we're toast. If we don't have hope, as individuals or societies, we lose our agency. We just give up. One of the most powerful attributes human beings have is this self-awareness of their agency, at least in certain circumstances. We need to keep that alive. But the world is rapidly losing hope. It's spiraling into a vortex of despair and denial, especially young people.
Taki Sarantakis: It becomes almost a self-reinforcing prophecy.
Tad Homer-Dixon: Self-reinforcing, yes, that's right.
Taki Sarantakis: Because if you lose hope, then you lose agency and you say, well, what can I do about this?
Tad Homer-Dixon: That's exactly right.
Taki Sarantakis: It just keeps spiraling on and on and on.
Tad Homer-Dixon: But in a bizarre sort of way, maybe this has got something to do with the attrition of my neurons as I get older, but I am actually more hopeful now than I was 10 or 15 years ago.
I think in part because the crisis that, frankly, I've been anticipating for a number of decades is now upon us and people can see it. They are recognizing, or at least there's a beginning of a recognition that a lot of the conventional tools that we've had in the past are no longer up to snuff. To the extent that I've been working with my team and with other groups to actually develop other tools and approaches, it seems like the time is ripe.
The other thing is that I have this concept in one of my books I call cata-genesis, which is this idea of rebirth through breakdown. Collapse, catastrophe, that's a Greek prefix cata-, like for catacomb, catastrophe, and the like. Genesis, of course, is birth. We are going through a process of cata-genesis. We're going through a process of breakdown. And you know the old saw: don't let a good crisis go to waste. Here's an opportunity where there's both the motivation and perhaps the flexibility in systems to try things that are new.
Taki Sarantakis: Some people, and I don't want to close on something so negative, but some people are almost of the view that we're now on the cusp of, as you talk about breakdown, we're on the cusp of breakdown of social orders. We're on the cusp of the breakdown of our social and our political institutions. We're on the cusp of something that we can't articulate, but we feel in our bones that what is coming is not good.
Tad Homer-Dixon: Very, very bad.
Taki Sarantakis: Where do you sit on that continuum? You just said you're more hopeful than you were 30 years ago. But tell us – you have a pretty good track record of being a prognosticator – as you look ahead the next decade or two, what do you see?
Tad Homer-Dixon: Well, I think the chances that things will go badly are very, very high, and we got to be clear about that. There are a lot of truly formidable forces that have been unleashed in the world that are pushing us in a very bad direction and are evoking some of the worst attributes of human beings. The narrow identity attributes where we retreat into our tribal group, the dehumanization of others, things I've studied my whole life.
On the other hand, I'm fortunate to be working with an extraordinary group of scientists within the Cascade Institute, and one of our projects is on the polycrisis. And part of the Polycrisis Research program is an effort to model a global future, which we call Polycrisis Core Model. It's a very big, elaborate model of the global system involving 11 sub models: food, economy, energy, transportation, technology, health, the climate, and the like. We've worked on this for years. We're just about to publish the results.
This is a model that involves a very large number, almost 2,000 discrete causal estimates, of relations between specific parts of global systems and other specific parts of global systems. Each one of these estimates is grounded in empirical research and science. Then you run the model, and you run the math, and it produces basically three distinct outcomes for 2040.
One is very bad. We call it Mad Max. The probability of that outcome is significant, probably about a third, somewhere around 30%. It's a world of significant social breakdown, high violence, ecological degradation, and poverty.
Then there's a group of outcomes which we group together, which we call basically Illiberal Decline. That's another big possibility another 30 to 40%, maybe 50% of the outcomes. That's a world that basically looks like today, but is worse, but kind of a linear projection of today, so it makes a lot of sense.
Then there's this other one which we call the Hope Attractor. We call it an attractor because each one of these things is like a gravity well in the system. It attracts in other possibilities. We weren't expecting this when we ran the model. It's got strong democracy, it's got lots of science, it's got relative economic equality, it's got economic growth, it's got competent governments, it's got high health. It's got just about everything you'd want, and the model is telling us it's a possibility.
The model is also starting to tell us, and we're just working through this now, how we can get there. What we need to do in terms of the policy interventions and the social changes that will get us to the Hope Attractor as opposed to Mad Max or Illiberal Decline.
I have to say, when we ran the model the first time, the first time we did it, the computer crashed. But then we brought the computer back up and we ran the results, and we got this. It was the last scenario that the model generated, and our jaws dropped. We thought, That's really something.
People need to have something to aim for and this scientifically grounded approach is telling us that that possibility still exists. That's a major reason why I'm a little bit more optimistic now. We're writing these results up, and we believe they'll be out in 2026.
Taki Sarantakis: Professor Tad Homer-Dixon, long one of Canada's top intellectual thinkers. The last 30 years of your work have been incredibly stimulating, have been incredibly prescient. I, and the people watching and listening to this, look forward to the next 30 years of your work.
Thank you so much.
Tad Homer-Dixon: Thank you very much.
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