Thomas Neuburger, one of my favorite bloggers, has an excellent post on the fact that swathes of types of insurance are going to go extinct because of climate change. Property, fire, home (except from theft, though that may get hit during collapse) and so on. It’s worth a read.
This has already started to happen. Insurance companies are refusing to write new fire insurance policies in parts of California, for example, and no one with sense wants to insure buildings against hurricane risk in Florida. But it will spread: rivers will swell during climate change before they shrink, for example. Acts of God will become more and more common everywhere. Crop insurance, for example, is something that will become more expensive.
But it might survive, because the government may consider it necessary. Insurance is people pooling together money to make sure that when occasional bad things happen, people can be made whole. It relies on three things to be viable:
- You can’ predict who will get hit; and,
- It happens often enough to be worth insuring against; and,
- It doesn’t happen so often it’s unaffordable; and,
- It’s big enough to matter to people.
If any of those four things break down, insurance doesn’t work. If you know who’ll be hit, other people won’t pay for it. Thus insurance companies won’t pay for pre-existing illnesses unless the government forces them to. If it is so rare no one is scared, no one will buy. If it happens too often, it becomes unaffordable and if it’s too small, why bother?
Climate change violates “you can’t predict who will get hit” and “it doesn’t happen so often it’s unaffordable.” If there are so many fires or huge hurricanes or floods that it’s inevitable and everyone in a certain area will be hit, insurance makes no sense. At that point, leave or do something to make it less likely.
Since we’re not going to stop climate change (that decision point has passed) that would mean things like sea walls, creating swamps and wetlands, increasing the capacity of stormwater systems, getting rid of concrete roads and replacing them with material that absorbs water and so on. Homes could be protected from wildfires by various other measures.
There’s going to be a push to have government underwrite insurance in places where it’s no longer really viable, and sometimes that will happen. As with the absurd expansion of credit after the 2008 financial crisis, this will eventually run up against a simple problem: money can only buy what exists. If too many homes and too much property are being destroyed, society will at some point not be able to rebuild it all, or, if sensible, will decide that rebuilding where you know another flood or disaster is coming is stupid.
Insurance was originally fraternal. People would join together and deposit into a pot and in some cases promise to physically help rebuild. Re-raising a barn, for example, with communal labor. In places where insurance is still viable, I would suspect that much of this will come back. (This also used to be how medical insurance worked. A fraternal organization would hire a doctor and a couple nurses and they would care for sick people. A fraternity would have some small apartments or rooms for members rendered homeless, too.)
As government fails, we will be pushed back on what we can do for ourselves, and for that to work we’ll have to be realistic: “what can our group actually do?” Can we source medicines? Can we rebuild? If we can, will it have to be rammed earth or trees we can cut ourselves? How can we get wiring?
We’ve lived in the era of big government and big companies: the era of the cornucopia, where money was the same as having access to almost anything we wanted.
That era is ending.
You get what you support. If you like my writing, please SUBSCRIBE OR DONATE
This Post is by Purple Library Guy, aka Rufus Polson
Ian – this is elevated from the comments on my post, “The Hard Problem of Leadership.” The problems of leadership are scaling (for example, Athenian style direct democracy doesn’t scale, nor do city states), and selecting good leaders.
I have thought about this problem a lot. As a leftist, I come at it largely from noticing the two main strands of left wing thought–the relatively centralized state-oriented socialist strand, and the anarchist variety with its tendency to decentralized direct democracy. Both have fundamental problems of leadership.
But I have concluded that the distinction between the kind of leadership problem which is all about crappy leaders, and the kind of leadership problem wherein the governance doesn’t scale, are not mirror images. They are fundamentally different in kind. And what I have concluded is that the first kind of problem is insoluble: it is essential to any kind of large polity with powerful individual or small group leadership. It comes from the creation of a distinction between rulers and ruled, which results in the rulers having different interests, attitudes and culture, and information from the ruled. Almost inevitably they rule for the rulers (generally including some technocratic group that participates in rulership) rather than for the citizens. Furthermore, just because any civilization is made up mostly of the people, not the rulers, inevitably the rulers’ self-dealing and ignorance about the situation lower down are bad for the polity’s health and will pile up what Marx called “contradictions”. I could argue this at length, but for this discussion I’ll just assume it; I would like to note that individual leaders CAN occasionally resist all these factors and do good things, it’s just really bloody rare and tends to require major popular pressure to also exist. There are just mighty damn few Hugo Chaveses.
But the second kind, the problem that systems along the lines of direct democracy do not scale, is NOT insoluble. It’s a technical problem. And it’s a technical problem which has confronted hierarchical systems as well–they’ve just solved it better. This may be partly because solving this problem for direct-democratic, relatively leaderless systems is harder. It is probably also just that there has been a lot more work put into solving the problem for hierarchies. Just in the time I’ve been alive, organizations have gotten a lot better at doing hierarchy, allowing bigger transnational corporations, incredibly complex “project management” with special software assisting the processes, sophisticated communication technologies and so on. There are masses of software products for helping hierarchies organize, endless “business schools” dedicated to researching and teaching people how to effectively dominate subordinates and make large hierarchies effective, and so on and on.
But in a broad sense, many of these technologies would also be useful for creating a non-hierarchical, direct democratic organization that scaled. I have in fact figured out how to do it.
Before I describe it I’d like to talk briefly about why failing to scale is in fact a crippling problem. There are two reasons. The most important is, if you have a governance type that does not scale and you are opposed by a governance type that does scale, you lose. There’s no point in having lots of lovely little societies which then get assimilated by the Borg, or the Romans, or whoever else out-organized you. The second is that there are actually things that a large organization can do that are useful that a bunch of little ones can’t. For instance, there’s standards: Imagine you have a group of 30 anarchist towns, and they all use different railway gauges and electrical plugs and USB-like-thingies and http protocols. Besides that, there are projects that people might want to do which require mobilizing a lot of resources, like big bridges, or long railways that don’t break off at every town that decided they didn’t want to bother, or space exploration, or co-ordinated action against climate change. But really, the key problem is that decentralized small-scale organizations get eaten by large scale organizations. Anarchists know it’s true, they just can’t hack the leadership problems of centralized socialism so they pretend (centralized socialists know the anarchist critique of socialist leadership issues is true, but they want to win, dammit, so they pretend too).
So, how do you do it? How do you scale direct democracy and break the “iron law of oligarchy” and so on? Well, the fundamental problem with direct democracy as it gets larger scale is that of information/decision overload–people can’t be involved with all the decisions, there are too many. But consider that this is a problem with autocratic/oligarchic rule as well–one man at the top cannot possibly be involved in all decisions all the way to the bottom of the pyramid. There have been an amazing number of schemes dedicated to allowing the general will of rulers to be transmitted, so that all the little individual decisions follow that general will without the rulers having to pay attention to them. None have been perfect, hence the phenomenon of micromanagement and the tendency of organizations to subvert the intent of particularly annoying management decisions. But they work pretty effectively.
I have a group of ideas and principles for getting past this problem. The first is to separate the idea of any given person actually being involved in every decision from their right to be involved in that decision. In my scheme, most people aren’t involved in most decisions–but they could be if they wanted to, so if some group is making a decision that affects a lot of people and pisses them off, they can join that decision-making group and contribute to making that decision different.
The second is distributed, nested decision making and the principle that bigger groups’ decisions trump littler groups’ decisions. So, say there’s a group of people who work in a salmon hatchery on some stream. They’ve got a little decision making group for deciding how to run the salmon hatchery–but note that anyone can join it, they don’t HAVE to be working at the salmon hatchery. There is a broader group that is a decision making group about how to do things about the stream; it has sub-groups like the hatchery group, the sport fishing group, the marina association and stuff. There is a broader group than that for the whole regional watershed. OK, so, say the sport fishing group is deciding to allow some practice which is going to be a problem for the salmon spawning. The majority vote in that group is to allow that practice. But! A minority can vote to kick it upstairs; if say 30% or something think that this decision shouldn’t be made just by the sport fishing people, the proposal gets moved to the stream group–all the subgroups will now see the issue and vote on it. If the stream group think it’s too hot to handle it can get moved to the watershed group. So a vote by the stream group would overrule a vote by just the hatchery group, and a vote by the whole watershed group would overrule a vote by the stream group. Ultimately, a vote by the whole country overrules everything smaller. This turns on its head the autocratic approach in which decisions by smaller groups higher up overrule larger groups lower down.
Related to this, my approach suggests that in general, people should be expected to serve in a few decision making groups, and groups should generally have a few people randomly assigned to them by lot, like jury duty. This helps prevent little closed groups from getting insular about their decisions.
My approach requires substantial use of modern communications technology and software to help decisions get made. This allows for various factors that make even theoretically democratic organization turn oligarchic to be eliminated. Specifically, it escapes the agenda and the ability of someone to literally set the agenda, to define just what decisions get made and how they are framed. So the process at the level of a decision making group goes like this: Someone in the group identifies an issue that needs to be decided on. They submit an issue description and maybe a couple of possible decisions that could get made about it, to the group. A timer starts. There is a conversation thread about the issue, and anyone in the group can add decision options, so you end up with a few proposals of action that could be taken. When the time is up, the proposals are frozen and people can vote (also with a time limit). The vote is some kind of ranked choice setup, and the winning proposal is adopted. This avoids a problem often seen in US state-level voting on issues, where some group gets to carefully define a proposed solution, and you end up either getting their self-serving solution or you get nothing, so whatever issue isn’t dealt with at all. With this kind of software a decision making group needs no leader–anyone can initiate proposals, nobody can control an issue once it is raised. The software doesn’t currently exist, but lots of social software of equivalent or greater complexity does–it shouldn’t be that hard.
With this, it should be possible to have an organization in which small scale or specialized decisions get made at the small scale, but rarer, broader decisions to mobilize social resources on a larger scale can be made by larger groups, with no hierarchies, leadership or class structure required.
You get what you support. Please SUBSCRIBE OR DONATE