Alternative Worlds

[Bill Moore]

Posted by davidfpo

Since the 1970's, IMHO in most Western democracies, we have seen the power of the state to be effective at home shrink for a number of reasons. Today it is the "fiscal cliff" so I shall stick with public finances being more unpredictable, with vested interests becoming the national interest as political power changes.

How has the power decreased? Economic crisis often makes the state stronger as it did in the U.S. during the depression. Also as it did for Saddam when we applied economic sanctions, which disempowered the people and strengthened the state we were trying to weaken (at least relative to its populace). I suspect the power of states weaken when the populace becomes more wealthy, because the populace isn't as dependent upon the state.

You would have a hard time convincing me that the power of the state in the U.S. has weakened since 9/11. Actually the opposite has happened. The power of state increases when the state is at war.

Lots of factors drive people to revolt, so I doubt you'll find a simple formula that will provide that answer. Most modern nations experience periods of economic decline without violent revolt. I think we over estimate the impact of economic decline. When it is relevant is when a specific group is discriminated against, but when we're all the poor house together who are you going to revolt against?

Derek Leebaert wrote, "Change begets terror. When the world alters, individuals, not nations, fight back." I need to explore this more by applying it to the JRA, IRA, Red Army, Hezbollah, etc. Maybe there is some truth to this, but it isn't self-evident.

[Entropy]

John McCreary of AFCEA wrote a bit of analysis looking at how the first Global Trends assessment turned out: Global Trends 2010:

NightWatch has been spending a lot of time just trying to understand the prolix and vague political science jargon of 1997, not to mention the meanings of judgments or predictions written in that language.


The language is imprecise, centered on the word "agendas" which is used repeatedly without definition. Every nation's agenda was to have been changed by 2010, the report asserts. It never explains to what that metaphor refers.

NightWatch knows from long experience that the only way to improve intelligence judgments is to evaluate their accuracy in hindsight. No one knowingly goes to a doctor who has a 60% cure rate. In that spirit, NightWatch is confident in asserting that it is hard to imagine a trends assessment that could be so wrong as Global Trends 2010.


If the world had not changed much between 1997 and 2010, some of the forecasts in the report might have been marginally accurate. But the world did change, but not fundamentally. The nation-state system did not decline, as the report predicted. The financial crisis of 2007 and 2008 made nation-state safety nets even more important than ever. It was a world-wide catastrophe that made almost every prediction in the report wrong.

More at the link.

[Dayuhan]

I personally fond the phrase "unprecedented levels of uncertainty and complexity" a bit soporific. This is admittedly prejudice, and I suppose I should suppress it and make time to read the thing...

[davidbfpo]

A trenchant critique by Tom Engelhardt:http://www.realclearworld.com/articl...sh_100454.html

Two passages:

Think of Global Trends 2030 as a portrait of an aging, overweight Intelligence Community (and the academic hangers-on who work with them) incapable of seeing the world as it is, let alone as it might be.

As a portrait of American power gone remarkably blind, deaf, and dumb in a world roaring toward 2030, it provides the rest of us with the functional definition of the group of people least likely to offer long-term security to Americans.