The Age of the Unthinkable: Why the New World Disorder Constantly Surprises Us And What We Can Do About It
by Joshua Cooper Ramo
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Book Summary Information
Author: Joshua Cooper RamoEdition: Hardcover
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2009-03-23
ISBN: 0316118087
Number of pages: 288
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
Product features:
- New Global Order and the Challenges Ahead
Book Reviews of The Age of the Unthinkable: Why the New World Disorder Constantly Surprises Us And What We Can Do About It
Book Review: Great Lessons to Better Thinking
Summary: 5 Stars
In 1970, a book by Alvin Toffler blew my mind: 'Future Shock'. I was 14 years old and it made me aware of the revolutionary changes and shifts taking place around the world, a world that was speeding into the future.
40 years later, Joshua Cooper Ramo updates the context, and like Toffler, guides us to an objective and revolutionary way of viewing the world to help us make better decisions in the faster shifting environment. The old way of thinking, the old models taught in the best schools around the world are outdated and have failed us miserably in recent history; they no longer apply to our complex environment. The centralized controls should no longer be the holders of our destinies, but us, the individuals, must expand our view, filter our intents with empathy to make better decisions. To succeed we must develop this revolutionary thinking, to be able to cope with the complicated world in this age of the unthinkable.
Joshua Cooper Ramo advises us to re-learn how we think.
States got it wrong, they got in the way and made the same mistakes over and over. Governments, the Pentagon, intelligence organizations and world leaders have failed on the international scene because they have not used empathy to get the right view of the problems they were facing.
I loved this book, and I recommend it. It is inspiring, uplifting. Within its analysis, it makes correlations between science research and events in history, politics, technology, investment, psychology, art, entertainment, etc. and arranges them into something I found extremely exciting: pieces in a constantly shifting puzzle of the world that comes to light once we understand the complex correlations, grain by grain. Some of the systems will be more difficult to read, and they may come closer to the snapping point because of it, but Ramo tells us how to avoid this or at least prepare better for these events.
Ramo traveled the world to meet some of the most interesting people. He interviewed them. Some have directly affected the history of the world, others have broken with the status quo of the scientific community thinking to understand the world overcoming the fear of being cast out. Business people have breached the conventional wisdom and saved their companies, their employees and themselves by adapting fast to all individuals needs in this critical context. Others have discovered and invented things by bringing new solutions, a mashup of different technologies to change the game in their industries. Yet others have correctly read the signs of a crashing financial system, changed their behaviour just in time to save their fortunes. Many more heroes of our times are featured in the exciting narrative of Ramo's book. I have only scrached the surface of his bold, revolutionary thinking.
Ramo asks: how we can best navigate the increasingly complex international order?
There are dozens of captivating sub-chapters in his book, important lessons and facts I was not aware until I read it. I have learned tons of lessons and the book has had a major positive impact on the way I think now.
I am not a good reviewer of books to do any justice to Ramo's book. I want to bring a few teasers, randomly. Just a few grains of tremendous information, but in a different order from the book, starting with a puzzle piece somewhere from the middle.
Ramo tells us one reason we think in a linear, narrow-minded way is due to our cultural upbringing. He is describing the research of the experimental psychologist Richard Nisbett.
The research was prompted by a debate Nisbett had with a Chinese graduate student in the early 1990s. Nisbett was frustrated because the debate came to a standstill when he realized that there were surprising FUNDAMENTAL differences of how the two of them thought. His student told him: "The Chinese believe in constant change". "Westerners live in a simpler, more deterministic world. They think they can control events because they know the rules that govern the behavior of objects."
Until then, Nisbett believed in the universality of human thought, that everyone basically thought and reasoned in the same way, and that any differences were due to quirks in education, family and experiences.
In late 2004, Nisbett together with two graduate students, Hannah Faye Chua and Julie Boland recruited 50 graduate students from University of Michigan campus in Ann Arbor to run a cultural experiment.
Half of the students have been raised and educated in United States; the other half, though now students at UM, had been raised in China. The lab setup was a table, a computer screen at one end and a chin rest at the other. Another device would track the students eye movements. The student would place the chin on the plastic rest, and the lights would be turned off. The picture of a small cross on a blank screen was beamed in front of them between 36 images at 30 seconds intervals. The images were of a large object in a complex background: a tiger in a forest, a horse in a field of flowers, a car on a street. The eye tracker silently recorded where they looked and for how long.
Chua sorted the eye movement data and found a clear pattern. The American students looked at the foreground objects - the horse, the tiger, the car, etc. The Chinese students looked instead at the environment around the main object, the field, the forest, etc. There was no time point where the Chinese students looked more at the focal object. Nisbett said this was like showing someone a picture of your kids and they would compliment you on the furniture. Later, the Americans were able to recall the objects: horse, car, dolphin, tiger, etc. The Chinese forgot the objects but recalled the backgrounds in detail. By changing the backgrounds, the researchers were able to fool the Chinese students into saying they had not seen a particular object before: horse, car, dolphin or tiger.
Conclusion? Asians live in relative complex social networks with prescribed role relations. For functioning effectively, attention to context is important. Living less constrained socially, stressing independence, the Americans pay less attention to context. But in today's complex world, where context matters, our Western style seeing might be a liability. Ramo tells us about the Chinese shanshui paintings, where the mountains and water images with peaks, clouds, and oceans occupy the entire painting. People and animals only figure as brushstrokes, accidental features dwarfed by nature.
In the Chinese philosophy and art, the environment is colliding, evolving and much more powerful than the individual, actually intimidating to the individual. The American emphasis is on 'me-first'. Western science looks at the world as something that could be understood and dominated. The foundation of the Chinese philosophy, I-Ching or Book of Changes, emphasising that we live in an environment of constant motion, and the desire to know when the change is going to begin. This sense is known as a mastery of INSIPIENCE, and the skill is praised as the highest form of wisdom. The Americans, spend their time looking at the focal object, which they think is the essential element. Western's cult of individual power, the self determination of man, is the fundamental feature. We stare. And in doing so we miss crucial details around the object. Most of the American students missed the experiment shifts of environment, even when the focal object remained the same. If the horse stayed the same but the field around it went from spring flowers to a fall environment, most of the American students missed the shift. When it came to the environment, Americans were almost completely "change blind". Ignoring 75 % of the picture of a fast changing world could lead to some horrible decisions. When you focus on one object: Sadam or bank bailouts, to the exclusions of the rest around them, like clan rivalries or homeowners, your understanding becomes limited.
One of the studies Nisbett liked to mention was by Masako Watanabe, a Japanese historian who examined the differences between the way Japanese and Western teachers taught history. The Americans emphasised the outcome of the historical event, condensing it into a recipe list of reasons someone lost or won battles or wars. Japanese teachers started with the context, pressed students to picture themselves in the shoes of the participants, to understand how they felt, of their options and pressures. The Japanese students were graded by their degree of empathy to the historical figures, while the Americans were graded on the knowledge of the reasons for a specific event. Empathy.
Take another study, of Japanese and American and French mothers. The conclusion was of distinct approaches: the American 'look at the cute doggie' vs. the Japanese 'I give you this toy, now give it back to me', and have translated to Japanese kids assimilating verbs twice as much as nouns, while Americans and French kids were learning noun after noun.
One way or another we constantly add input to a seemingly stable world. At least we see it stable and hope for the best.
Ramo introduces the concept of 'organized instability', that a complex 'critical' state of matters could be severely shaken by a small event or matter.
Ramo invites us to meet Per Bak, a magnificent Danish scientist, who said that complex systems may exhibit catastrophic behaviour when one part can provoke a domino effect over the others, like cracks in the earth's crust could propagate into tremendous earthquakes.
Bak observed that most meaningful discoveries were done by a single or two scientists working together, and not by big 'cash furnaces' set up by the government at multi-billion dollar tax payer expense.
Science, in his mind was taking a hammer to the glass walls of old, wrong ideas, and open to constant radicalism, creative imaging that inspired great scientific leaps throughout history. The attitude in the science world, their commonly held ideas by scientists who agree with each other only because they want to be part of the scientific community more than they want to be right - is blinding, slowing the search for new discoveries. Ramo clarifies everything for us.
American physicist Glenn Held addressed the Per Bak's puzzle. If you piled sand, grain by grain, until it made a cone about the size of your fist, how would you know when that tiny pyramid would have a little avalanche? Could you predict when, or how much? Simple question, hard to answer.
A single grain will trigger an avalanche.
Bak hypothesised that the stack would organize itself into instability, a state in which adding just a single grain of sand could trigger a large avalanche - or nothing at all. He believed that sand pile energy, poised on the edge of unpredictable change, was one of the fundamental forces of nature. You could see this all around you. You find it in the weather - the grain that makes the clouds 'decide' to rain; you find it in biology - the stutter-step evolution of mammals, in the market bubbles. Just like a random pull after spinning a revolver chamber in a game of Russian roulette.
It is hard to model a system like this, with thousands of grains interacting at the same time. The sand pile is in a continuous state of change an interdependence between grains, shifting and shuffling. They translate order into chaos, and chaos into order, at the same time.
Bak quoted Victor Hugo to summarize: "How do we know that the creations of worlds are not determined by falling grains of sand?"
What if the World was like this, precariously unbalance between stability and chaos? Bak wondered.
If the logic of such complex system can be penetrated, even a little bit, there might be no limit to what you could create. The world is not a slew of senseless randomness; it just requires new and different ways of calculating. Even the most difficult problems would open up.
We are entering a revolutionary age, with unprecedented disruptions and dislocations, but also creating new fortunes and new powers. The old institutions and their old leaders with their old ideas are suited more for a world centuries behind us. Only ten of the fifty world largest cities are in Europe or North America. States matter less.
With their old models from the old school of Hans Morgenthau or Babst or the Democratic Peace Theory, the Pentagon thinkers created a mess, a more perilous world instead of a safer one. They are now learning from their errors and slowly adapt to novel thinking, pressing on shifting levers instead of using head-on collisions with adversaries.
What we need for ourselves and the world we live in, is to act like an immune system, always ready, capable of dealing with the unexpected, as dynamic as the world itself.
Moving away from the 'privacy of states' of the old strategy doctrines, Ramo coins the term "deep security". Deep Security should be set also like an immune system that has a reactive instinct for identifying dangers, adapting to deal with them, and then moving to control and contain the risk they represent. The immune system cannot prevent the existence of a disease, but without one even the slightest of germs have deadly implications.
At the beginning of the last century, Picasso and Georges Braque created paintings that held a multidimensional view or the world. Intentionally distorting what they were painting they created something that was alive and dynamic They succeeded in capturing the movement rather the static details.
Recently, Greenspan understood that the ideology he has used for the last 40 years was no longer working in the new financial context. The American biggest financial expert could not foresee the global financial meltdown. However, an American hedge fund investor, Bill Browder noticed the critical 'little grain of sand' while wanting to attend a New York auction of leveraged buy-out deals. The auction didn't draw enough bidders and was shut down. Browder read into this that the world cannot absorb additional debt. He recognized this minuscule event for the for what it was, an alarm, and advised everyone he knew that "this is it". He also called his friend, the author of this book and told him: "This is the end." Across the world, a Chinese financier also had seen it coming, felt it mostly, and saved himself by taking the necessary precautions. He had also shared his view with Ramo at that critical moment.
In the last ten years, China, a country with an average income of 7 $ a day per person, has amassed 2 trillion dollars of US debt.
Hizb'Allah is the most successful terrorist organization because it adapts fast, use creativity and innovation even if their ends are destabilization and evil. Where they live, they re-build the houses destroyed by Israeli attacks, they fix the plumbing of their neighbours, they gain their trust.
The Israeli bureaucracy cannot defeat them, bombs didn't. One intelligence director, Farkash was more successful because he used his revolutionary thinking and approach.
Maybe building schools, hospitals and hospices may slowly dilute the hate?
An old model, that failed completely was USSR. Again, small things have triggered big changes, here, the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Ramo rebukes the accepted theories why Soviet Union tumbled, written by the same people who failed to predict it: unmatchable defense spending, or the new global era of democracy.
Gorbachev himself, never gave a compelling explanation, not in his writings and not during his interviews with Ramo.
David Kotz and Fred Weir, however, interviewed hundreds of senior officials, members of the soviet 'nomenklatura'. Soviet Union did not collapse because of some grass roots popular pressure. The true answer was astounding: the ruthless power math of the soviet elites themselves and some terrible miscalculations by Gorbachev. Gorbachev's politburo was atop on the macro level, but the soviet 'nomenklatura' ran the country: army officers, officials who controlled industries and factories, and ran the day to day work, the professors and intelligence heads who possessed the critical knowledge. They represented a very small percentage in soviet population.
Gorbachev began reforming a system that had protected their rights and privileges. At the critical point they figured that they had more to gain from letting the USSR fracture than by holding it together. They wanted to sit on the top of the pile when it fell down, and PROFIT from it. It was a very cold, and a very selfish decision. Gorbachev, miscalculating the direction of his reforms, could not have anticipated it.
Weir and Kotz wrote: "The ultimate explanation for the surprisingly peaceful and sudden demise of the Soviet system, was that it was abandoned by most of its own elite." There was no revolution, no one was shot, no one was exiled. Two decades later, the top leaders, the richest billionaires, the most powerful politicians are the same who had let the old system fall.
Vladimir Putin is not a revolutionary, he was an elite KGB agent, a prince of the old order. So the short answer to the question, why did Soviet Union collapse is: the nomenklatura sold out their own system for riches, power and privilege. It was an implosion contributed by the shift of small grains of sand that even today we cannot clearly map.
When it comes to brilliance and creativity, Shigeru Miyamoto became a household name with his unusual approaches during his tenure at Nintendo. He created the Super Mario Brothers, a game that earned nearly 20 billion dollars. His mushup of swing and teeter-totter to allow three kids to play. He also perfected Donkey Kong, the biggest arcade game in history. Ramo admires his instinct for strange, impractical and game-changing combinations that will give you the same tingle as from a cubist Picasso painting. Sony and Microsoft were dominating the console games, with realistic images. But they were losing money by selling them for 600 $ a box, making profit only after adding royalties from the games. Enter Miyamoto. Using inexpensive two generation older technology, but by mashing together the microchip used in automobile airbags with the hand held controller of the game, Miyamoto created the Wii. Nintendo made profit on selling the console at less than half the price of XBox 360 and PS3, and passed the others in total sells. Miyamoto mashed up two unrelated items, an accelerometer and a video game to create a revolutionary product.
We must be careful how we choose our leaders. Ramo familiarises us with Deutschlands Geisteshelden, a massive painting by German artist Anselm Kiefer: in the most familiar setting, our own environment could be set on fire, showing us that what is most powerful in nations or men is often what destroys them. We know the tragic story of WW2, but have we learned our lesson?
The 'Cultural Revolution' in China is another page in time. Books were banned: Baudelaire, Plato. The Red Guards did not like any dissent.
Individuals have dissented. It required discomfort, sacrifice, but they were worth the effort.
We can do good. Instead of bombing a place, we could instead build a hospital there, a school and a hospice for the elderly. We could gain the trust one brick at a time. The decisions we make will influence the future for all of us. The power of individuals has never been greater.
We need a leap of faith, that change will produce more good than bad. And each one of us has an important role to play.
Please read this book, make an investment of a few hours of your time to gain tons of great lessons and inspirations for yourself.
With friendship,
Sergio
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Summary of The Age of the Unthinkable: Why the New World Disorder Constantly Surprises Us And What We Can Do About It
Today the very ideas that made America great imperil its future. Our plans go awry and policies fail. History's grandest war against terrorism creates more terrorists. Global capitalism, intended to improve lives, increases the gap between rich and poor. Decisions made to stem a financial crisis guarantee its worsening. Environmental strategies to protect species lead to their extinction.The traditional physics of power has been replaced by something radically different. In The Age of the Unthinkable, Joshua Cooper Ramo puts forth a revelatory new model for understanding our dangerously unpredictable world. Drawing upon history, economics, complexity theory, psychology, immunology, and the science of networks, he describes a new landscape of inherent unpredictability--and remarkable, wonderful possibility.
Today the very ideas that made America great imperil its future. Our plans go awry and policies fail. History's grandest war against terrorism creates more terrorists. Global capitalism, intended to improve lives, increases the gap between rich and poor. Decisions made to stem a financial crisis guarantee its worsening. Environmental strategies to protect species lead to their extinction.
The traditional physics of power has been replaced by something radically different. In The Age of the Unthinkable, Joshua Cooper Ramo puts forth a revelatory new model for understanding our dangerously unpredictable world. Drawing upon history, economics, complexity theory, psychology, immunology, and the science of networks, he describes a new landscape of inherent unpredictability--and remarkable, wonderful possibility.
Read an Interview with Joshua Ramo Cooper, Author of The Age of the Unthinkable
It's an age in which constant surprise--for good or for ill--has become a fact of life and in which our old ideas about how to make the world safer and more stable are actually making it more dangerous and unstable.
What compelled you to write this book?It was clear to me that the models we were using to think about the world were wrong--often dangerously so. And I saw that many people who wanted to disrupt the systems we rely on--people as different as terrorists and hedge fund managers--had the upper hand when it came to understanding the nature of our age. I wanted to write a book that would help other people understand what was happening so we could manage what promises to be a very unstable period.
Where are some of the most "unthinkable" hot spots around the world today?These spots are all over the globe. But if I had to name a few of particular relevance I would list them as:
Gaza and Lebanon. Hamas and Hizb'allah not only resist Israeli attack but seem to get stronger and much shrewder the harder they are attacked.
Wall Street, USA. Complex financial products designed to manage risk in fact accelerate the spread of unimagined danger through the financial system.
Kyoto, Japan. A radical inventor named Shigeru Miyamoto remade the global video game business overnight by mixing up two things--video games and accelerometer chips from car airbags--into a new revolutionary game system called the Wii.
South Africa. The most expensive medical campaign ever to stop the spread of TB instead has led to the creation of a new, even more deadly super bug.
Russia. The end of the USSR and great economic booms didn't produce a US and democracy friendly system, as we hoped, but rather has led to an increasingly belligerent nation.
You describe Danish physicist and biologist Per Bak's "sandpile" theory which implies that sand cones, although relatively stable-looking, are actually deeply unpredictable. In Bak's experiments a single grain of sand could trigger an avalanche?or nothing at all. How do you think countries and leaders relate to this theory?The point is that whenever you think the world is stable, it's not. Even the smallest perturbations--home mortgage collapses or computer viruses--can cause tremendous dislocations. The pile in Bak's experiment is always growing in complexity and changing. So the lesson for us is that there are no simple policies or easy solutions; the problems we face rarely end, they just change shape. So we need a revolution in our way of thinking and in the institutions we use to manage the world if we are going to keep up with such a dynamic system.
You espouse that average citizens should take control of their lives and live in a "revolutionary" manner. What do you mean? Can established governments and revolutionaries co-exist?Sure they can. Google and the US government get along fine (more or less). What matters is that we all do three things: first we have to live lives that are very resilient, which means taking care of our selves, our savings, our family and our education so we can adjust to a rapidly changing world. Second, we all have to participate in a caring economy, devoting some of our life to helping others instead of relying on the government to help others for us. And finally we have to be innovative in how we live and think. We have to try to think of new ways to make a difference in the world as individuals, to help prepare our children to manage and control their own lives instead of relying on big corporations or the government to do so.
We are living in a deeply unpredictable moment in history in which things seem to be getting more unstable and it just keeps getting worse. What hopeful prospects do you see in our future?I think that basically what we are living in is a very disruptive moment. And this involves both disruption for bad ends (think 9/11) and for good (think of bio-engineering disease cures.) I'm optimistic because I basically believe more people want to disrupt for good than for bad. The challenge for us is simply to empower as many people to create, and to live as full lives as we can.
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