Macromyopia

I’ve long feared society’s over-specialization. As society and technology have grown increasingly complex, each human’s knowledge has grown increasingly narrow. Given society’s division of labor, virtually no one has as their job perceiving the big picture and anticipating risks caused by complexity.

Sadly, even when humans perceive risks, we often fail to reduce those risks, esp. when risk reduction requires sacrifices in the present. Two years ago, as every new piece of environmental data pouring in exceeded the most pessimistic climatologists' worst fears, National Academy of Sciences president Ralph J. Cicerone asked, “Does it take a crisis to get people to go along a new path or can they respond to a series of rational, incremental gains in knowledge?”

On this all-important question, like many, I’m hoping for the best but expecting humanity will put in place only half-measures (or, more likely, 10% measures) that merely slightly delay environmental catastrophe.

New York Times reader Sailesh Rao suggests (probably aptly but hopefully inappropriately) that our looming environmental crisis mirrors our current financial crisis:

Financial blogs are all abuzz over the phenomenon of “Macromyopia”. This is the inability of self-interested individuals to see beyond the next quarter and thus to have played along with the fiction that sub-prime No-Income-No-Job-No-Assets (NINJA) mortgages can be mashed up to form AAA rated financial securities forever.

Perhaps, Macromyopia is equally at play in all our environmental problems as well, and it might take a catastrophe for the majority of people to clamor for action. It is up to our world leaders and the media to use their bully pulpits to mitigate risks for life on earth. Surely, they can muster the intellect to understand these charts and act accordingly?

“Macromyopia” is a great name for something that has worried me for many years.

Unfortunately — and ironically — identifying humanity’s Achilles' heel may not prove sufficient to rouse us into (appropriate levels of) action… because our Achilles' heel is our inability to rouse ourselves sufficiently when confronted with future dangers.

Posted by James on Friday, February 27, 2009