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> Summary of Readings > 5. Thom Homer Dixon, "The Upside of Down"
5. Thom Homer Dixon, "The Upside of Down"In "The Upside of Down," political scientist and award-winning author Thomas Homer-Dixon argues that converging stresses could cause a catastrophic breakdown of national and global order " a social earthquake that could hurt billions of people. But he shows that this outcome isn't inevitable; there's much we can do to prevent it. And after setting out a general theory of the growth, breakdown, and renewal of societies, he shows that less severe types of breakdown could open up extraordinary opportunities for creative, bold reform of our societies.
Homer-Dixon contends that five "tectonic stresses" are accumulating deep underneath the surface of today's global order:
energy stress, especially from increasing scarcity of conventional oil;
economic stress from greater global economic instability and widening income gaps between rich and poor;
demographic stress from differentials in population growth rates between rich and poor societies and from expansion of megacities in poor societies;
environmental stress from worsening damage to land, water forests, and fisheries; and,
climate stress from changes in the composition of Earth's atmosphere.
Of the five, energy stress plays a particularly important role, because energy is humankind's master resource. When energy is scarce and costly, everything a society tries to do, including growing its food, obtaining enough fresh water, transmitting and processing information, and defending itself becomes far harder.
The effect of the five stresses is multiplied by the rising connectivity and speed of our societies and by the escalating power of small groups to destroy things and people, including, potentially, whole cities.
Drawing parallels between the challenges we face today and the crisis faced by the Roman Empire almost two thousand years ago, Homer-Dixon argues that these stresses and multipliers are potentially a lethal mixture. Together, they greatly increase the risk of a cascading collapse of systems vital to our wellbeing, a phenomenon he calls "synchronous failure." Societies must do everything they can to avoid such an outcome.
On the other hand, if people are well-prepared, they may be able to exploit less extreme forms of breakdown to achieve deep reform and renewal of institutions, social relations, technologies, and entrenched habits of behavior. This is likely our best hope for a prosperous and humane future.
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John Howkins, "Creative Ecologies: Where Thinking is a Proper Job"What is the nature of creativity?
What is the nature of creative work and the creative economy?
What is their relation to other factors of change, such as innovation?
How does a market in ideas operate?
What should governments do, if anything?
These are the questions that John Howkins addresses in "Creative Ecologies." As the title suggests, Howkins uses concepts from the science of ecology to find his answers. He shows how the key drivers of natural ecologies--diversity, change, learning, and adaptation--also drive creative ecologies. He shows that cities are the best habitat for creativity because they are the places where these four drivers are strongest.
Howkins has deep knowledge of creativity, not just as a long time thinker about the creative economy, but also as an active practitioner in it. He is a key player in the world of digital media, splitting his time and business interests between the UK and China. He was also the leader of the Adelphi Charter, an attempt by the UK to modernize its intellectual property rules to improve the flow of ideas.
"Creative Ecologies" comes at a propitious moment for Stamford. Creativity is already a significant pillar of the Stamford economy; it will likely become the dominant one in the next decade. John Howkins will join us December 8th as we seek to mobilize the creative energies of Stamford to exploit the emerging conditions we have been probing in the Reinventing Stamford town meetings over the past eight months. Four points from the book are particularly relevant to that conversation:
1. Creative versus Repetitive Systems. Creative systems are diverse, implicit, unstable, fluid, networked, accessible, autonomous, complex, self-organizing, whole, and cyclical. Repetitive systems are unified, explicit, stable, rigid, hierarchical, controlled, dependent, fragmented, and linear. The shift in developed economies from manufacturing to services in the latter half of the 20th century did not at first substantially change the repetitive nature of most work. But in the past two decades, virtually all sectors in developed economies, including what is left of manufacturing, are becoming more creative in nature. Therefore, it is not so important to specify which enterprises are creative, as to recognize that creative work is becoming more prevalent in all types of enterprise. Creativity exists as part of an individual's work wherever the primary input and output is ideas. And, of course, that includes creative activity outside of any enterprise.
2. Learning versus Education. Howkins notes that "Learning is what we do in order to understand; education is what someone else does to us... Education helps but only if it teaches us to learn...The symbol of education is a school classroom with one teacher and rows of pupils at desks. The symbol of learning is the brain, because learning is an attitude of mind...The creative mind that does not learn from others or from itself will wither away just as certainly as an animal will die without food or an engine without fuel will stop...A group's learning capacity will increase as it has a wider variety of people to learn from...In the same way that individuals want to learn, so organizations want to become learning organizations. The best way to do this, whether in the R&D lab, office, studio or cafe, is conversation and dialog."
3. The City is the Creative Habitat. Howkins states that "Cities have always been the most visible and most concentrated arenas for creativity and innovation...In ecological terms, cities are prime energy exchangers. They attract people who are both producers and buyers: people who want to learn, adapt and explore new perceptions and who are discriminating and spend above-average amounts on novelty and style (smart demand)...Cities score high on the four indicators of a creative ecology: diversity, change, learning and adaptation. One measure is the number of people who are foreign-born, because foreignness is a mark of diversity...Cities need nooks and crannies, small informal, private places to experiment."
4. Creativity is Not a Project. Howkins suggests that "A government's job is to know and control, but creativity is often not knowable and never controllable. Governments that are accustomed to financing large-large scale infrastructure projects have difficulty in understanding individuals and companies whose meanings, outputs and values are uncertain." As an example Howkins notes that "The transgressive, dangerous Berlin of the 1920's, with its world-class Bauhus design, Fritz Lang's films, outstanding painters and cartoonists and Kurt Weil's music and cabaret, as well as the philosophy and writings of C. J. Jung and Walter Benjamin, has gone forever, unlikely to be resurfaced or, if it did, be welcomed. Today, twenty years after the wall came down, Berlin is once again a likeable city, but it looks unlikely to match its disorderly predecessor in diversity, genius or impact."
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