Overview:

After food and labor, the biggest physical factor affecting our swarm’s growth is our material resources. This chapter and the next divide them into materials and energy. Those resources limit how we must live. How do they change, and how do we share them amongst ourselves? This chapter outlines answers to those questions while describing the third stage of our industrial revolution: our development of mass production in the mid-nineteenth century. That was a huge change for us and it led to many changes in our resources, including our access to fundamental resources, like clean water. The chapter then introduces the complex system behavior of closure while discussing today’s resource differences between our rich and poor nations. Closure refers to the way that certain complex systems tend to become self-supporting. The chapter then begins to clarify the structure of our swarm by analyzing another swarm—that of termites—and in so doing it introduces the complex system behavior of stigmergy. That captures the idea that whatever we create then goes on to affect what we can next create. Together with earlier complex system behaviors, those two ideas, closure and stigmergy, then suggest a swarm explanation for how we come to have what we have today.

Insolubles

She’s out at daybreak in Egypt’s Nile Delta. Bloated in the morning sun, a dead donkey floats in the stagnant, algae-scummed water of the irrigation canal. A man urinates into the canal as she dips her pail to get the day’s water. Back at home, she pours her water into a big earthenware jar, then adds rose petals, alum, or fragrant seeds to give it a fresh taste. She waits while evaporation cools the water, which clears as its visible insolubles settle to the bottom. Then, ignorant of microbes, parasites, pesticides, heavy metals, and other invisible insolubles, she’ll use the cool, fresh-smelling, pure-looking water to wash with, to cook with—and to drink.

Today, many of our families in Egypt’s Delta drink that canal water. Clean water, not oil, is our number one resource in short supply. We squabble over oil, and sometimes go to war because of it, but the number of us who die in such disputes is nothing compared to the two million of us who die each year because of dirty water. Fifty countries on five continents share water supplies limited enough to perhaps lead to war. Over two-thirds of the earth’s surface is covered with water, but only 11 percent of it is fresh. Over two-thirds of that is locked up as ice. Most of the rest is spread out in the soil, or is in deep aquifers. Of the one percent that’s left, we pollute much of it with our wastes. About one in five of us lack safe water today. Two in five lack adequate toilets. Changing any of those numbers is hard, as Egypt shows.

In 1990, half of all Egyptian deaths occurred among children under five. It was one of the highest child deathrates in the world. It was also mostly due to dirty water. Egypt then tried to solve the problem by piping chlorinated water to the Delta’s villages. But how to do it? The capitalist’s way would be to sell clean water to only a few villages at a time. That would’ve been political suicide. The technologist’s way would be to build many water and sewage treatment plants, plus lay hundreds of miles of pipe. That would’ve cost too much. So Egypt’s leaders did the only thing left. They simply promised free clean water for every village in the Delta. That’s the socialist’s way—declare every resource free. It overextended the system before it was even built.

The government, and the foreign aid workers they consulted, thought the problem was simple, but put yourself in that villager’s place as she fetches water each morning. No one asked you about putting in pipes. No one owned them. They were public property, the government man said. But months after he left, a spigot broke and water flowed all day and all night. What is it to you? Your village elders have had no ka’eda to discuss the matter. It is a problem for the government. You hear that spigots broke in other villages too. Maybe that is why water no longer gushes as before. It is surely too low for you to wash clothes at the standpipe.

Besides, the government did not put in any concrete tubs, so how could you wash clothes there anyway? Your kids could not bathe there either. At the canal, you could talk and laugh with your sisters and friends while washing clothes. You all could also watch over your children as they frolicked in the canal to make sure they were safe. Everyone was happy and everything was done at once. But when you tried to get water from the pipe you had to line up with the other village women. Long lines in the hot sun led to bad feelings, then fights. Then when your husband came home from the fields in the evening and heard that Faiza had slapped you, he went to fight with Farouk, her husband. You do not like the new pipes.

What is wrong with drinking canal water anyway? You asked your sisters, but all they knew was what the government radio and TV programs said. There were bad things in canal water, they said. But how could there be? You have been drinking it all your life. All fellahin have. You would like to ask a nurse or doctor, but your village has none. The nearest one is two hours away, on foot. Doctors and nurses are people you do not see often. Only when the government sponsors a health drive do they visit your village. Normally they live in the cities. You hear that wages are good there, and water is clean. But your water is clean too. You put alum and fragrant seeds in it. You would never give your children dirty water to drink. So the government must be wrong.

But your youngest is sick, so you tried giving her the magic water. But your husband will not let you switch. It tastes of ‘chemicals,’ he says. The government is secretly trying to reduce his sex drive, he says. He is sure that is why there are so many radio and TV programs on birth control. Besides, he says, everyone knows that Nile water makes you more potent. Each year the Nile brings miraculous life to the desert. It must do the same for all who drink it. Your parents and grandparents are also suspicious. They say that babies are often sick, and some just die. That is how things are. They say that Allah has made the canal to quench thirst. It has been the water source for the people since the days of the pharaohs. So how could it be bad for you?

You watch to see what the rich family does, but Ameera Ibrahim does not line up for pipe water. She has water running in her own kitchen. She even lives in a cement house. She tells you that canal water is dirty and pipe water is clean. She has her own pump and water tank and metered pipe—but then, she can afford it. Haajj Mahmoud, her husband, has a bee hive, three cows, and four sons in Cairo. Her eldest son is a taxi driver and he sends money home. Her first cousin works in Saudi Arabia and he also has a good job. He has a university degree. She says he says that the piped water is better for her. Plus her husband is the village imam. He washes with the piped water five times a day before prayer. He says that he wants to be as clean as possible before Allah. But even he still likes the taste of canal water. In any case, in summer, water demand is high and the pipes run dry. A few days later, even his water tank empties. So in high summer everyone must still rely on the canal anyway.

Egypt’s problems are many, and its options are few. To begin with, it is water-poor. It has the Nile, but it’s also 96 percent desert. Plus, it shares the river and various aquifers with neighbors. The average Egyptian is thus 15 percent below the World Bank’s water-poverty line.

Efforts to change that often result in further problems. For example, to electrify the country, and thus drag everyone out of peasantry, and thus grow to be able to afford things like water treatment plants, Egypt built the Aswan High Dam. It yields 2.1 gigawatts of power. Plus it’s curtailed droughts and floods. It’s also made year-round cultivation possible. But then richer farmers, reacting to lower water levels, imported diesel engines. They over-pump groundwater wells, particularly from coastal aquifers. That brings up water for their fields, but the water is also saltier. As salinity rises, crop yields fall. Further, the dam stopped the summer floods, which also reduced crop yields. To compensate, farmers use more fertilizer, but that takes energy to make, plus it causes more pollution. The dam has also slowed nutrient flow into the Mediterranean. Fisheries there nearly died. They’re now being replaced by fish stocks caught behind the dam. But those fish are being sent to Cairo in non-refrigerated trains, so any delays result in spoilage. The dam even throttled the housing industry. Most Egyptian homes are made with mud brick, but making mud bricks had begun to consume nutrient-rich topsoil. That happened because the dam stopped silt from flowing downriver with each flood. Plus, the silt, with nowhere to go, is choking the dam. At some point it’ll be useless.

In addition, through villager ignorance, overuse of pesticides and fertilizers adds to water pollution. City dwellers too add to the water-famine. They use treated water to wash cars, clean streets, and water gardens and parks. Industrial users compound the problem by dumping wastes into the river. Many farmers also overstress the water supply by growing profitable but water-needy crops, like sugarcane and farmed fish.

Perhaps the core problem is a legal one? If only Egypt passed the right laws it could both protect and equably share its water supply. But in Egypt we already have many such laws. It’s illegal, for example, to farm water-needy crops. In Egypt we do it anyway because our government lacks the manpower to enforce such laws. Every new law merely raises the ratio between the number of laws and the number of enforced laws. As the number of unenforced laws rises, the number of us who ignore them also rises. Average law enforcement drops. As it does, the number of scofflaws rises further. So does police corruption. Thus, laws multiply while lawlessness rises. More laws only make our problem worse.

Farm size, too, affects water-use efficiency. Ever since land-reform laws in the 1950s and 1960s, when Egypt turned socialist, average holding size has dropped by two-thirds. It’s now around 2.5 acres. Average plot income is now around $71 U.S. a month. That money must support two adults and an average of 4.7 kids—not counting grandparents and cousins. Often, more than one family must live in a small mud-brick house roofed with straw. Many families must thus switch to illegal, water-needy, but lucrative crops. Or they must somehow find the space to add livestock to their tiny farms. Or they must hire out surplus child labor, sell their kids into near-slavery, or flee to Cairo or Alexandria and beg.

Maybe the core problem is a political one then? If only Egypt abandoned socialism it could hand its water-management problem to the private sector. The market would then do its thing. Plus, that would also expose more of us in Egypt to today’s cure-all, capitalism. But no matter how we in Egypt change politically we can’t easily privatize our water supply. Aside from a few recent pilot studies, our government bars private companies from water management. That’s partly thanks to our socialist past, but even before we turned socialist in 1952 we had no body of property law to let even our government charge for water. Even today, with new agrarian laws passed in 1992 and put in place in 1997, our government still can’t charge for water. Our canals are uncovered and unmetered. Plus, many villages share them. Even were that not so, our government still couldn’t charge for water. Many of us couldn’t afford it, no matter the price. Over half the country is still rural, and a third of the peasantry is below the poverty line. Finally, as of 2007, Egypt is still a one-party state. (There are 14 other parties, but they have no power.) Twenty-five government agencies spread over seven ministries are involved in water-quality monitoring. And none of the fiefs talk to each other. An attempt at central control plus miscommunication among the supposed controllers ties the last knot in the synergetic tangle that is Egyptian water economics.

We usually use the word ‘synergy’ only when we like its effects, but it’s a more general idea than that. (We use ‘vicious circles’ or ‘downward spirals’ for synergies we dislike, and ‘virtuous circles’ or ‘upward spirals’ for ones we like, but they’re all synergetic reaction network cycles.) Whereas autocatalysis refers to only one self-helping reaction, synergy means the interlocking of many such reactions, each of which both aid and depend on the rest to function. So synergy acts like an inertial device—like a spinning gyroscope—it keeps a network stable because everything in it ties together.

As a result of that synergy, our water problem in Egypt isn’t simple. None of our major problems are. Plus, even after those of us in Egypt finally solve our water problem other problems will remain. For example, reverse-osmosis desalinators or vapor-compression evaporators could give us clean water. But they cost money. No one will lend us that much money, so we need foreign investment to afford all that high-tech. To attract that money, we can supply cheap and plentiful labor. But with 46.3 percent illiteracy, that labor is also mostly unskilled. With world population in the billions, unskilled labor is hardly scarce. To make more skilled labor, we need more resources per child. We can’t get more resources without war, and when we last tried that, we lost. So we must make fewer kids. To do so, we must educate women more and give them more power. To do that, we must first bring them into the paid labor force more. To do so, we must first urbanize them. Which takes resources. Which means attracting foreign investment. Which closes our synergetic cycle.

Even if we in Egypt had the money to attract foreign companies, they won’t come if we don’t have reliable power, water, and phone networks. Or good roads or port facilities. Or cheap credit and an educated workforce. Nor can our local industries earn much foreign credit. They can’t compete globally unless they too have access to the same toolbase. Plus with our poorly educated people, low urbanization, and weak financial tools, money has nowhere to stay in our country. Even foreign aid enters the country at one end, benefits a few in the middle, then flows out the other end. It’s as if charitable governments had chosen to come to Egypt to pay their own countries’ consultants and construction companies. Plus that foreign aid often comes with strings attached. Such strings can cause unrest at home. Our government must thus work on all its problems together, or risk being overthrown. But even if it were, our next government would face exactly the same problems.

In sum, in Egypt we have no simple way out of our state. We can’t simply pass laws, change our ideology, beg for charity, borrow money, educate ourselves, invade somebody, or tart ourselves up for rich foreigners. However, tools keep improving and we in Egypt are rising with them, just as all other countries are. Living conditions in Egypt have changed a lot in just in the last half century. In 1952, life expectancy at birth was 39 years. By 1989 it was 59 years for men and 60 for women. By 2005 it was 66 for men, 70 for women. Such changes would’ve made the Egypt of 2005 the world’s richest nation—in 1905. With each passing decade, richer nations get still richer and make more new stuff. Egypt’s tiny middle class want all those rich imports now. The government heeds that demand because that middle class staffs its bureaucracy. Thus, as Egypt injects each new piece of infrastructure, its economic engine coughs and starts to purr. Then, overwhelmed by its synergetic network problems, it sputters and dies.

No matter what country we live in, solving our major resource allocation problems is never a simple matter of passing some laws. For major change to happen many things have to come together in synergy to supplant the synergies we already live with. Our leaders can’t control all of that. Even if they could—as nations like the Soviet Union tried to do—they aren’t smart enough to figure out how to make it work. However, in Egypt, rising oil income, policy changes, cheaper technology, spreading literacy, and more money sent home from expats, have now brought many of those factors together. Egypt is now phase changing from rural to urban, from peasant to industrialist, from unlettered to educated. Farming as a share of national income fell from more than 38 percent in 1975 to 16 percent in 1995. As of 2006, its population is still growing, but only by 1.75 percent a year—far below its peak of 2.7 percent in the 1980s. Its economy is rising at 4.5 percent a year. Its middle class is growing. About 43 percent of its population is now urban. Female literacy and paid employment are also rising. Thus, from 1990 to 2005 its birthrate fell from 4.3 to 3.1 births per woman. Its child deathrate also plunged 68 percent—the biggest drop in the world. Both literacy and new tools are spreading. Many villages now have both clean water and electricity. Roads are being paved. Clinics are spreading. So are schools. But the quality of such services isn’t yet high. There still isn’t enough money, nor enough skilled people. In Egypt, two in every five of us still are below or just above the world poverty line—$2 U.S. a day. In the Arabic world as a whole, life for us is changing fast as well. Since 1970, female literacy has tripled. But our problems are still vast. Today, 43 percent of all Arabic women still can’t read. And 35 percent of men can’t either.

But that won’t last forever. In Egypt, our new tools are adding up and beginning to work synergetically with each other. Nor is that process special to Egypt. Today, our material welfare is changing everywhere. Since 2000, over 82 percent of us around the world have safe water. Over 61 percent of us have adequate toilets. In 1990, those figures were 78 percent and 51 percent, respectively. Our resources do change, but it takes time for our tools to cheapen and spread. That needn’t be because our leaders are fools or knaves. Whether they are or not, they have little control. They have more power than the rest of us do, granted, but they’re only in control of what little can be controlled, and that’s not much. Everything is synergetically linked to everything else so nothing is easy to control. Today, not just Egypt, but many other of our countries in Asia, Africa, Oceania, and South America, from India to Sudan, from Indonesia to Peru, are all in the same fix. They’re all facing the same synergetic network of presently insoluble resource problems.

Around the world, unsafe water is today our single greatest cause of disease and death. Nearly 5,000 of our children under five will die of unsafe water today—and tomorrow—and the next day. That’s as many children a day as all the children under five who live in London and New York combined. In all, nearly two million of them will die of dirty water this year. They’ll continue to die at about that rate for many years. It might be decades before that changes. But it’s not for lack of trying. It’s also not because of stupidity. Nor will it last forever. In the 1980s, unsafe water killed about 8,200 of our children under five every single day. That changed largely because we have better and cheaper technology today, and that changed because of something that happened two centuries ago. That something was the coming of mass production.

The King’s Last Argument

In Britain in 1851, water-borne diseases killed tens of thousands of us a year. Around then in Manchester, a typical industrial city, 57 percent of the kids born to working-class mothers died before reaching five years old. In Liverpool, within its laboring population, 62 percent of all deaths occurred before the age of five. In London, despite living in the richest, most populous city of our richest and strongest nation at the time, perhaps 640,000 of us had no piped water supply, clean or otherwise. And those of us who did weren’t always happy with it. Eels, living and dead, sometimes poured from our taps. Dead bodies, from mice to babies, sometimes floated in our cisterns. Cesspits overflowed into our water supply. Street standpipes supplied water for at most one hour a day, just three days a week. Nor was that water always pure. One of our water companies even took its supply from the Thames next to a sewage outflow. In our poorest streets we had no standpipes at all. There we lived lived from bucket to bucket, buying water at one to three ha’pennies a pail. We used it to wash ourselves, then reused it for clothes, then floors. Most of us didn’t wash anything short of faces, hands, and necks. We all announced our class by our clothes and speech—and smell. There was a good reason why the rich called the poor the Great Unwashed. As in Egypt today, many things had to change before all that could change. First off was knowledge of the problem. Then there were political battles over who would control the water supply—private companies or the state. But it also mattered that most of us in London were uneducated and that better water supplies cost too much. In Egypt today we have the same problems. In Britain, both of those limits changed over the next century with the third stage of our industrial phase change. It’s a story whose beginnings stretch over at least a century and at least three countries, Britain, France, and the United States. It starts with Britain’s pride.

In 1851, Britain, despite its water problems, was top dog on the planet and it wanted to bark. It controlled about a quarter of our species. It spoke for Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and India. It held chunks of the Mediterranean, Western Asia, and Eastern Asia. It owned or leased bits of Africa, South America, the Caribbean, and many Pacific islands. It had also just ended its overseas slavery and was soon about to end its penal slavery. Its exports were booming. Its navy was twice everyone else’s. Its world power was never greater. Its prestige was equally high. The world saw Shakespeare not as a great British writer, but as the world’s premier literary superbright. Newton was the very definition of genius. And Walter Scott was the world’s first international best-selling novelist. In 1851, Britain was the world’s sole superpower. So it invited 77 nations, colonies, and principalities to show off their wares alongside its own. They were all to be displayed that summer at a Great Exhibition. It was to be but one more proof that Britain would forever rule the world.

The exhibition was housed in the purpose-built Crystal Palace, itself proof of Britain’s immense power. It was the world’s first building constructed of identical, mass-produced parts. Made with over 4,000 tons of iron and almost a million square feet of glass, it sprawled across 19 acres of London’s Hyde Park. But while intended as overwhelming proof of Britain’s superiority, it was to host a subtle message of changing times. As over six million visitors gawked at the wares of over 14,000 exhibitors in the giant glass building that summer, most made fun of the paucity and plainness of the United States exhibit. Only a thoughtful few were struck by the quality of its locks, watches, harvesters, and, especially, guns. Their parts were so finely made, and fit so well together, how could they be handmade? The Times sniffed that “The most popular and famous invention of American industry, is a pistol which will kill eight times as quick as the weapon formerly in use. It has been reported upon by committees, and sanctioned by Congress, and so keen is the national appreciation of this great discovery, that the Republican Government of Washington does not hesitate to pay about three times as much for cavalry pistols as England pays for infantry muskets.” Ahh, those silly Americans.

A smug Britain had no idea that it was about to be outdone by a ragtag ex-colony. Yankee ingenuity was about to shine—or so the story would later go, anyway. By the end of the century, the United States would trampoline onto the world stage with a wholly new method of production. It was a method that for a time we would call ‘the American system of manufacture,’ a method based on a new and amazing idea—interchangeable parts—a method that today we call mass production.

Well, that sounds like a fun yarn, with plenty of rips to be roared and swashes to be buckled. We all like tales of ragged urchins making good through sheer pluck—or, in today’s terms: mild-mannered nations entering nearby phone booths and swiftly changing into.... But wait, that’s not how it happened at all. The method was real, and it did have those effects. But it was neither new nor American. It was French, and it went back at least as far as 1785. That July, Honoré Blanc, a French gunsmith, showed its results to high-ranking officers and diplomats. Thomas Jefferson, a future United States president, was among them. He was then in Paris as his country’s new ambassador. Trouble was, he was a total flop.

In 1785 only the Prussians took his nation seriously. The United States was a big fat nobody. In fact, ‘the United States’ didn’t even exist yet. Its Revolutionary War had ended just two years before. Its Constitution was still two years away. Connecticut and Pennsylvania were at war. North Carolina was at war with someplace called ‘the State of Franklin.’ Massachusetts and New York were squabbling. So were New York and Virginia. Kentucky was drifting into Spain’s power. And, as usual after a war, everyone was broke. Further, the whole population was just 2.5 million—four times smaller than Britain’s, and little more than just twice London’s alone. So Europe saw the small settlement, with its savages and slaves and wild animals, as an unruly British splinter. Clinging to a 100-mile-wide, 1,000-mile-long wedge of the northeast coast, obviously it would soon be swallowed by North America’s real powers: Britain and France. Or maybe even sickly Spain, or perhaps even, one day, feudal Russia. The shaky union knew that war was bound to come with each of them (and it did). And that’s to say nothing of its native wars and slave revolts. It needed guns.

Living in a wilderness so unlike the tamed English countryside (with its man-eating rabbits and feral poodles) it also needed guns for food and safety. Plus its population, freed of land-constraint, was nearly doubling every 20 years. It also had to find money to keep buying off Barbary pirates, who were attacking its Mediterranean trade. (It would soon go to war with them, too.) All in all, the infant country didn’t have enough guns. Nor did it have the money to buy enough of them from Europe. Nor even a government strong enough to collect such money.

The central problem was this: at the time all guns were handmade, and badly. So when Jefferson saw Blanc assemble the locking mechanism of several guns from bins of identical parts, he went bananas. Here was something that he as an ambassador could do for his country. At the time, and all over the world, all our tools and machines, including the latest high-tech steam engines, were handmade. Precision and quality control were unknown. No two parts could work together. Yet here was Monsieur Blanc, casually assembling finely made parts into guns—guns the United States needed to survive.

Five years later Blanc gave another demo. By then, with money from the French artillery service, he’d trained men, built machines, and started a workshop. This time he assembled about 1,000 gunlocks from bins of precision parts. That stunned everybody. By 1801, when he died, he’d shipped 11,500 gunlocks. By then, about five percent of all new French guns had swappable parts.

So France went on to become our first mass-producing nation, right? Wrong. Here’s the situation: A few decades before, France had lost a big war with Britain. Humiliated, its newest generation of artillery engineers vowed not to let that happen again. Trained in the then young scientific method, they then tried to reform gunmaking. Firearms at the time were more works of art than guns—crude and unreliable for the poor, richly adorned but just as crude and unreliable for the rich. France’s new technocrats wanted to change all that. For instance, to reduce weight, their new method of making guns got rid of all ornament, including the brass motto added to all French cannons: Ultima Ratio Regis—Latin for ‘The King’s Last Argument.’ Long before Mao wrote that power grows from the barrel of a gun, every general knew that happiness was a warm, well-made gun.

In the 1700s, every army in the world wanted guns they could repair in the field. But they didn’t have the technical skill to do so. No one did. Part-swappability needed precision parts and those would be costly in a handmade world. Plus, making gun parts precisely would first mean disrupting France’s age-old piecework system of gunmerchant investment and artisan hand work. And its gun makers and gun merchants fought any change. Then too, the new precision guns cost twice as much as the old shoddy ones. All in all, it was too alien a change for the government’s grayer heads. So although young engineers keen on the idea found favor in pre-Revolutionary France, they lost the political fight after the Revolution. France promptly forgot how to make precision parts. Ahh, those silly French.

But the precision-parts idea lived on in the small, young, scrappy—and scared—United States. Jefferson, for one, kept trying. First he tried to get Blanc to emigrate. Blanc, tired of the infighting in France, agreed. But Jefferson’s government, as wobbly as a newborn foal, couldn’t raise the money in time. So when Jefferson got back home he kept pushing the gun idea, trying to induce home production. Then came the French Revolution.

Everyone panicked. Fear of war with France spread. All Europe armed. Weapon prices soared. The infant United States was petrified. It didn’t have enough skilled men to make the guns it needed. With its puny navy, it couldn’t even rely on overseas gun shipment—the French Navy was making threatening noises everywhere. The system we know today as mass production then arose in the United States through a decades-long effort. It was funded with, essentially, government loans and grants.

Thus, by 1851, when Britain’s Great Exhibition finally rolled around, the United States showed up there with some of the early fruits of the long development and all that effort—mass-produced guns.

But all that effort yielded results far beyond its original aim, first in the United States, then Britain and France, then everywhere else. Besides guns, the United States ended up with precision-made harvesters, locks, clocks, then, over time, steam engines and cars and hair dryers and just about everything else. In a later age that same kind of government investment followed by an explosion of unexpected applications would happen for the road system, nukes, jets, rockets, satellites, computers, and computer networks. Government midwifed them all, and all for the same reason—fear.

But fear alone was hardly enough. We’ve been plenty afraid before 1800, yet we didn’t then have a production revolution. In particular, fear didn’t do much to speed the same production revolution in Europe at the time. Europe’s clotted layers of artisans wouldn’t stand for it. Fear was only able to break the back of the piecework tradition in the United States because, unlike Europe, the little ex-colony didn’t have much of a tradition to begin with. There, skilled labor was rare. Even unskilled labor was both scarce and unreliable. So it welcomed machines. That tool change then supercharged it precisely because it was land-rich but labor-poor.

Yet even being land-rich and labor-poor wasn’t enough by itself either. Canada, Australia, and New Zealand (and Argentina and Uruguay) were also land-rich and labor-poor, yet mass production didn’t happen first there. Usually, being poor in any resource, including labor, imposes limits. Why didn’t it in the case of the United States? Various events made the nation peculiarly suited to ingesting new machines quickly, but the main reason it could ingest those new machines was that there were new machines to ingest. Machines and machine tools were only just then becoming reliable and powerful enough to begin to replace our labor, thanks to the steam engine. Thus, without the precision tools that British machinists were then creating—mostly thanks to the steam engine—mass production in the United States still would’ve been impossible, no matter how land-rich and labor-poor it was. So the United States then did what Britain and France couldn’t, but were it not for France and Britain it would’ve remained stuck in the same labor and resource trap as they were.

Like France, Britain, too, had a system in place to mass-produce machines long before the United States. Rather than intricate metal gunlocks, those machines were simple wooden blocks—that is, 3-for-1 pulleys for use on ships. That idea was also French. Marc Brunel, fleeing the French Revolution, first landed in the United States, then sailed for Britain just as the United States and France started fighting an undeclared war. Brunel then presented his idea for a block factory to the British Navy. The new factory opened in the Portsmouth dockyards in 1803. Soon it was making 130,000 blocks a year. That was more than the output of Britain’s six leading block factories put together. One steam engine, ten unskilled men, and 44 precision machines, had come together in the world’s first mechanized assembly line.

So Britain went on to become the world’s first mass-producing nation, right? Wrong again. As in France, Britain’s cottage artisans fought back. They still lived in the piecework system and they had zero interest in changing. Further, Brunel’s pulley factory was too specialized to spread into other markets. It either made wooden pulleys or it made nothing. For example, Brunel had tried assembly-line bootmaking for the army, but the end of the Napoleonic wars dried up demand. Soon after that he was in jail for debt. Britain promptly forgot how to build assembly lines. Ahh, those silly Brits.

So after Britain’s Great Exhibition in 1851, both France and Britain had to reimport from the United States the ideas, methods, and tools that grew into today’s mass production. But it took decades of fighting. For instance, in 1852, half a century after Blanc’s and Brunel’s first factories, Samuel Colt opened a revolver factory in London. He wanted to match his five-year-old Hartford plant. But the British arms workers he hired repeatedly sabotaged it. So he fired them and imported Connecticut staff. By 1854 his factory was operational. As with Blanc’s, and Brunel’s, it was wildly successful—for a while. You see, Britain and France had just declared war on Russia in the Crimea so, once again, everyone wanted guns. By December 1856 though Colt closed his London factory. The Crimean war had ended. British gunsmiths were still making nearly everything by hand in their cottages. And after the shooting war against Russia ended, they won the propaganda war against Colt with ‘buy British.’

In sum, at the Great Exhibition in 1851 the United States showed off the fruits of something that neither Britain nor France then had. But it wasn’t because of something it had; mostly it was because of something it hadn’t. Synergetic networks in Britain and France killed an innovation there that flourished in the United States. By 1903 it was far ahead of everyone else in mass production, just waiting for someone like Henry Ford to come along. Its industry by then far outstripped even Britain’s. Even as early as 1852, the year Colt opened his London factory, the New York Times crowed that “We see nothing irrational in the hope of a more dazzling future for [our Anglo-Saxon] race than imagination has yet ventured to outline.... the world—shall be ours.” The next July the United States had its own Great Exhibition, held in a new, even larger, Crystal Palace (in today’s Bryant Park in Manhattan). It was to be but one more proof that America would forever rule the world. Ahh, those silly Americans.

Amalthea’s Recursive Horn

Mass production turned out to be as weighty as both the steam engine and the railroad. The steam engine gave us relocatable power, and that triggered the first stage of our industrial phase change. The railroad linked us, and that brought on industrialization’s second stage. But precision parts gave us factories, and that kickstarted our third stage of industrialization. Linking the mines to the factories and the factories to the consumers created a synergetic network that gave us many new materials, goods, and services. That in turn has already pushed half of us right out of farming. It generated huge new resources and a huge new middle class, which changed everything about our lives, including our water supplies.

But mass production is a slipperier idea than either power or linkage. We often call something ‘mass-produced’ if we can make it in volume. That’s how we made coins, pots, buttons, or cannon balls centuries before we made any precision parts. But mass production doesn’t merely mean production in volume; that’s an effect, not a cause. Mass production is a combination of several things, one of them being division of labor. As Adam Smith noted in 1776, “[Normally a pinmaker] could scarce... make one pin in a day.... [But now] the whole work... is divided into a number of branches.... One man draws out the wire, another straights it, a third cuts it, a fourth points it, a fifth grinds it at the top....” In that way, instead of making just one pin a day, a pinmaker could help make around 5,000 pins a day.

But while you can make more pins by dividing labor, those pins needn’t be precision-made. On the other hand, you can make precision pins, but you needn’t divide labor to do so. So neither volume production, nor dividing labor, nor precise parts alone gave rise to many new synergies. Brunel’s factory, for example, didn’t lead directly to mass production in Britain. Its emphasis was more on the assembly line (sequenced division of labor) than on precision parts. Pulleys don’t have to fit together to do something. Gun parts do. Even as far back as 1452, Gutenberg had made swappable parts (the lead type for his printing press). But, like coins, like pins, like pulleys, none of those parts had to fit together to do mechanical work. Blanc’s parts were the first to do that on a mass scale.

Before Blanc, a lot of us could make guns; but none of us could make a lot of guns. One of the main new ideas behind mass production was that we could make parts precisely, but what’s important is that because they were precise we could then standardize them. (Or, if you like, once we thought to standardize them, we could then make them precisely.) One part is then the same as another. So we could put them in bins and swap them. We could then divide our labor when making them—that is, we could make those swappable parts by hand on an assembly line. We could then simplify each of our hand operations on that line. Once we simplified them enough, we could replace ourselves with machines. That mechanized the whole assembly line. Then we could make new machines that didn’t merely help make swappable parts, they took swappable parts and put them together to make machines. At that point, machines themselves, and not just the parts they were made of, or the parts they made, become swappable. After a time, we could make so many different kinds of swappable parts and swappable machines that what we’d really done was this: we’d accidentally made a spread-out meta-machine that could make any part or machine, including itself. Thus, mass production is a form of volume production that depends on making parts so precisely and to such a standard that we can divide their production into a series of steps so simple that even machines can do them—and we can divide the labor of making those machines in exactly the same way. A mass production system is a general reproducer.

A computer scientist might call such a process recursive; it depends on itself (it recurs in its own definition). Autocatalysis is also recursive, although only weakly. Synergy is more strongly recursive. Mass production is still more recursive. Complex systems give us trouble because we’re used to thinking about things that only depend on other things; it’s harder to think about things that depend on themselves as well. However, that property of self-reference is at the heart of all our self-stimulating production systems, whether in farming or in industry.

Once we stumbled over the above industrial process, which today we call mass production, our entire production cycle went recursive. Machines made parts for machines, which made machines out of parts. We then interlocked such swappable parts and swappable machines into many different reaction networks. Those reaction networks are also machines; their parts work together to do something. A gun is such a reaction network. So is a sewing machine. So is a typewriter, a bicycle, a hairdryer, a hairdryer factory, a steel foundry. If you can make one, you can make all the others—and in mass quantities at ever falling cost. You might say that guns germinate steel foundries.

The early Greeks thought that Zeus gave Amalthea, his childhood nurse, a horn that never emptied, and out of it came fruits and grain. The Romans later called that horn a ‘cornucopia’—a ‘horn of plenty.’ Several thousand years later we finally stumbled into building that horn. It was a lot larger and more spread out than Amalthea’s but out of it came much more than food. As the steam engine, the railroad, and the factory fused and spread into one giant recursive machine we gained a whole new level of resources. With that, our world phase changed. Once our species had both self-powered machines and precision machine tools, the intelligence we needed to build intricate things started flowing from our fingers to our machines. Then with the rise of the recursive machine, the value of manual labor fell. Once it fell far enough, it lost its bargaining power. Its value then went into near free-fall. Factory hands became as swappable as the parts their machines made. Strength, ruggedness, and tirelessness were no longer our labor resources in shortest supply. Sex, age, and height mattered less and less. We then negotiated a new labor contract among ourselves. The divisions of labor we’d introduced between men, women, and children with our shift to farming 11,000 years ago changed as we shifted into industry.

With the new and immense resources showering down on us, men lost their huge labor advantage outside the home. Women grew less economically valuable mainly as baby-makers inside the home. Children grew more economically valuable for what they could learn in school rather than in the fields or on the streets. Suddenly, we ‘invented’ childhood. With our new resources, we could afford to stuff our kids into schools, although the idea was just as much to beat the lust and rebellion out of them as to educate them. Once school had sufficiently molded them, they could work like little robots in the new factories. They wouldn’t even think of stealing from or otherwise molesting their betters. Back then, that was what mass schooling was for. In many ways, it still is.

Mass production changed us in yet other ways. It amplified the value of capital and design talent and that let new changes happen even faster. After we had worked out today’s recursive factory system, we and our machines became more equal inputs to our production system. Changing us is hard, but changing our machines is easy. Capital thus began to matter more than labor—and folks like Karl Marx noticed. After mass production arrived, we could put a new idea, a new design, a new process, in place more quickly than before. Fewer of our minds had to change before a new design idea could lead to sweeping change. And we needed fewer of our hands to implement that change. That then led to more power for an ever shrinking few of us, and more institutional change for more and more of us. Over time, our labor became so mechanized to fit the machine that machines started to replace us entirely. Then, as factory robots took over, they led to even faster change, even more power for an ever smaller few, and even more and ever cheaper goods for ever more of us. One day, our recursive machine might well squeeze us out of the production loop entirely. Only our mental labor and personal services will matter then, and over time even those might lose value.

Mass production also changed our age-old ratio of rich to poor. That’s something that many of us, going back at least as far as Aristotle and his ‘natural slavery’ idea 2,300 years ago, had argued either couldn’t be changed or shouldn’t be changed. The recursive machine flattened many of our nations, giving many of us mass quantities of exactly the same things. That was totally new. For example, in 1771, and for millennia before, it was quite normal to say things like “the lower classes must be kept poor or they will never be industrious.” In all our agrarian nations, even today, both our population distribution and our income distribution are pointy pyramids. Most of us live on farms and can’t read. We’re mostly both young and poor. In our mass-producing nations, both pyramids squeeze into chimneys. Most of us live in cities and must read. We’re mostly both middle-aged and rich. About as many of us are old as are young, and about as many of us have upper-middle incomes as have lower-middle incomes.

In sum, our industrial phase change altered our relations between male and female, young and old, capital and labor, and rich and poor. It also altered our distribution of rich and poor, and it altered how fast we could change. Look at how it worked in Britain. As those of us there switched into industry from 1801 on, our numbers ratcheted up by two million every decade. But even by 1851 only four percent of us were over 65. Nine times as many of us were under 15. Britain then was much as Egypt is today. Today, about as many of us in Britain are under-15s as are over-65s. In Egypt today, however, just as in Britain in 1851, only four percent of us are over 65. Nearly nine times as many of us are under 15. Egypt today is roughly half-urban, poorly educated, and poorly industrialized—as was Britain in 1851, and the United States in 1920. It might be decades before Egypt’s synergies fully turn around, but then its population will stabilize and its economic growth will become self-sustaining. By then it’ll have its own recursive horn of plenty, perhaps giving it Britain’s current income. But Britain won’t be standing still for all that time. When Egypt finally masters the recursive machine, what new machine might Britain have?

Swimming with Barracuda

Today our species as a whole is about where Britain was in 1813, or where the United States was in 1880. We’re still half-villagers and half-farmers. Many women are still mostly baby-makers. Many children are still mainly old-age insurance. Still, our species is phase changing just as Britain and the United States once did. Mass production is rising everywhere. That’s creating new middle classes everywhere. Our new cities and factories and robots are emptying the countryside. They’re emptying the homes too. They’re forcing women into jobs and children into schools. Literacy is rising and child mortality is falling. As the factories spread like acne across the face of the planet, they’re making many new cheap goods, and many new kinds of jobs. Our middle classes are everywhere eating our peasant classes. In a few decades, they’ll be the dominant parts of most of our countries.

Those big middle classes will bring greater literacy, more economic stability, child unemployment, female political power. That will then bring lower population growth, higher levels of education and skill, and larger and more stable incomes. That’s what happened in Britain and the United States. That’s what’s happening today in Egypt—and India and China and Brazil and elsewhere. In 1950, India was 17 percent urban. Today it’s 29 percent—which is about where Egypt was in 1950 (32 percent urban). Today, Egypt is 43 percent urban. By 2023 it’ll be 50 percent urban. By then, more than 600 million more of us will have scaled the middle-class wall—that is, we’ll be earning over $8 U.S. a day, which is a middle-class income for our species today. Like an amoeba oozing out of a gutter, we’re crawling our way out of poverty. But we’re not doing it evenly.

Thanks largely to mass production, in terms of access to resources today we’re a highly skewed species. Kids in some of our countries are overfed while in others they’re dying from dirty water. Today, 10.7 million of our children a year don’t see age five. Today, more than a billion of us live on less than $1 U.S. a day. Today, the richest fifth of our species, about 22 percent, make up 1.4 billion of us. That fifth gets at least 75 percent of all our goods and services. It also gets at least 75 percent of all our energy. The poorest fifth of us gets about 1.5 percent of each. In other words, our richest nations are about 50 times richer than our poorest nations. Will that ever change?

In 1851, smug Britons, as citizens of sole superpowers are wont to do, thought they were rich because they were better people. British genius plus British bulldoggedness had given them the globe. Hilaire Belloc later suggested an older truth: “Whatever happens, we have got / The Maxim Gun, and they have not.” By then, The King’s Last Argument included the world’s first machine guns. Britons in 1851 believed in the better-people theory but to today’s eyes, life there was still quite alien. For example, until the 1840s, over 400 criminal offenses in Britain carried the death penalty. From the age of seven, kids convicted of pickpocketing, stealing a spoon, stealing bread, stealing a pork pie, could be jailed or hung. Or they could be transported—sent to a colony for hard labor, effectively enslaved. Of the transported, some of those “little depraved felons” went for life. Others went for 7 or 14 years. One boy stole 21 umbrellas and was transported to today’s Tasmania for seven years. He was 11. Another boy also got seven years in Tasmania. He stole three boxes of toys. He was nine. At the time of the Great Exhibition, perhaps 100,000 children roamed the streets of London alone. Child labor, starvation, disease, near-slavery, harlotry, illiteracy, crime, and bastardy were normal. Kids as young as five were bought and sold, brutalized and exploited, and put to work up narrow chimneys, down dank coal mines, or in the factories and fields. Universal free education for under-13s started only in 1891. ‘Baby farming,’ the paid murder of unwanted infants, was an industry. The ‘farmers’ might have dozens of babies at once—supposedly to raise, but mostly to kill ‘accidentally.’ Such ‘farmers’ even advertised in the newspapers. Baby farming wouldn’t end until the next century. Looking back, the King’s Last Argument seems a somewhat more persuasive argument for Britain’s power than its better-people theory.

But if Britain could change so much since 1851, why is Egypt today roughly still at that stage? More generally, why haven’t many of our poorer countries phase changed into industry? To a logician, many of our popular answers to that question are restatements of the same old better-people theory, which might be (over)simplified to: ‘Good implies rich.’ Some of our answers amount to saying that our presently poor nations are packed solid with lazy or corrupt people. (‘Poor implies bad.’) Others amount to saying that our presently poor nations have crappy ideologies or politics. (‘Poor implies bad.’) Yet others amount to saying that our presently poor world can’t phase change because our presently rich world stole too many of their resources—and in some cases millions of their bodies. (‘Rich implies bad.’) And yet others amount to saying that our presently rich nations are deliberately keeping the goodies to themselves with some kind of worldwide conspiracy. (‘Rich implies bad.’) The first two use words like capitalism and democracy. Their gang motto is ‘Free Market.’ The other two rely on words like colonialism and imperialism. Their gang motto is ‘Welfare State.’ In short, either our poor are worthless, or our rich are worthless. Perhaps that’s why logicians don’t watch political debates.

Presumably such explanations give us valuable emotional benefits, but they don’t take into account the enormous intricacy and vast power of a recursive machine. It’s a little as if a band of chimps stumbles upon a gleaming machine in the forest. The machine hums to itself and produces an endless supply of oil palm nuts. Another band arrives some years later but by that point the first one has taken possession, fitting itself to a life of maintaining the machine. The second group then tries to build a machine of its own with branches and mud while the two bands hoot angry statistics at each other.

Our currently popular explanations ignore that our presently rich countries started phase changing into industry a couple centuries ago. Back then, they didn’t have to compete with other industrial countries. There weren’t any. But our poor countries today aren’t facing the same blank slate. They’re part of an ecosystem that already includes highly industrialized countries. Take Egypt and Germany. Today they each have about the same population—81 million—but while Egypt is still not yet half-urban, Germany became half-urban in 1900. Today it’s almost 90 percent urban. That alters Egypt’s chances because many resources that Egypt needs to build its recursive machine Germany also needs to keep its recursive machine running.

For instance, in Egypt today you need trained engineers to help solve your resource problems. To train them, you need good schools. For those, you need well-educated teachers. For them, you need good salaries. For that you need an extensive toolbase. And for that you need trained engineers. The cycle closes. Even if you could train up some good engineers, you’d only be making a present of them to a richer country, like Germany. They’ll flee unless you also have good jobs and good schools and good lives for them and their families. (Or armed guards at the border, but that leads to other problems.) Suppose through some miracle you gain engineers, factories, machines, and capital, and it’s all humming along nicely, making some tradegood. Great. But how will you price that good? To whom will you sell it? How will you find them? Why will they trust your workmanship? Why will they believe that you’ll still be in business next year? How will you manage the power outages, flaky phones, bad roads, unreliable water, overcrowded hospitals? What’s your fallback when the next global business slowdown rolls around? How will you defend yourself once your German competitors improve their processes, change their marketing, or reduce their markups? What kind of masochist do you have to be to keep going against such headwinds?

In 1990, while Egypt’s children died from dirty water in world-beating numbers, 88 percent of all our private capital everywhere in the world went to the richest 20 percent of the world. The poorest 20 percent of the world got 1 percent. Money goes where it can make the most profit. Slogans like ‘corporate greed!’ or ‘free trade!’ are all very well, but when it comes down to it, almost none of us—anywhere--risks our money on the strength of slogans alone.

Everything Egypt needs—money, engineers, teachers, machines—gravitates to Germany before Egypt. Even Egypt’s own private capital flees to Germany. Egypt loses because Germany exists. Germans needn’t be especially smart, nor hardworking, nor evil. Egyptians needn’t be especially dumb, nor lazy, nor corrupt. Their synergetic reaction networks will still keep them more or less as they are.

In general, the more densely interlinked any reaction network becomes, the more catalytically interlinked its parts are likely to become. The network nodes that most link themselves catalytically with other nodes in the network are the ones most likely to persist. They’re the most reinforced. Thus, as our network densifies, the more constrained each new thing or thought must be to work with all the things and thoughts we already have. As time passes, barring catastrophe, we end up in a densely interlinked synergetic network. That synergy then acts like an inertial flywheel, keeping all its parts in place and locked together. That network also locks-in its advantage because the mere existence of its interlinked parts locks in most of their resource supplies.

To a mathematician, a system is ‘operationally closed’ or has ‘closure’ if all operations on its parts make other parts that are already in the system. In terms of resources, that might be restated, crudely, to say that everything a system needs, it either already has or can easily fetch or make. So, mathematicians might say that today’s industrial countries have achieved operational resource closure. Leakage of resources vital to their networks is low. Each such resource already has immediate and profitable use within the network. That high resource-attractiveness acts as a membrane around every operationally closed synergetic network. Its closure not only keeps its needed resources available, it attracts new ones too. Once you become synergetically closed, operational closure becomes easier. Then once you’re operationally closed, symbiosis with other operationally closed networks becomes attractive. That operational closure seals off our rich world, even without the existence of tariffs, quotas, and trade barriers.

Many of our poorer countries have tried to defend themselves. First with cutlasses, and when that failed against cannon, more recently with laws. They artificially close their economies with red tape and tariffs, but that ‘political closure’ rarely works as well as operational closure. For example, India from independence in 1947 to 1991 was ‘politically closed.’ It kept foreign involvement out by limiting it legally and binding it with red tape. That was supposed to operationally close its economy, thus giving local firms a chance to grow. For example, instead of importing cars it made its own cars. it worked for a while—in the 1950s—just as it had worked for a while in Russia (in the 1920s). But growth didn’t persist. After 1991, in response to a financial crisis, and while watching other East Asian economies speed up, India partly opened itself to foreign investment and foreign trade. The economic gains have been dramatic, yet India today is still largely politically closed, compared to our rich countries. Our poor countries thus face a choice: impose political closure by putting guards on the borders, as North Korea does, or by dousing everything with red tape, as India does, and you limit your resource losses to richer countries. But you also limit your possible gains from trade with richer countries. On the other hand, keep yourself politically open and you grow faster but you also lose more resources to richer countries, which are more politically open but much more operationally closed.

Today, foreheads in rich countries furrow over talk of a ‘loss of competitiveness’ and of a ‘flat world.’ It’s hard to know why. India and China, in particular, are indeed growing fast now, but they also started from far behind. From 1990 to 2003, per person income in China leapt 196 percent while in rich nations it went up 24 percent—yet income in rich lands is today still over five times higher than income in China. Similarly, India’s economy is now surging at 9.4 percent a year—yet even if its torrid growth persists, it would still take until 2106 to catch up with our rich countries. More than a fourth of all our poor live in India.

Our industrializing countries are minnows trying to survive in a sea full of barracuda. Those barracuda don’t have to be mean or lying. Those minnows don’t have to be lazy or dumb. The current resource distribution between them will still persist regardless. Resource leakage from the minnows’ half-closed industrial synergetic networks is high. They haven’t yet achieved operational closure. There’s always blood in the water.

Once upon a time, our current barracuda used cannons to open our current minnows. India, China, Latin America, and Africa all have several centuries of experience with that. But now that our present barracuda are operationally closed, they’ve less need to point guns. Our minnows can’t keep themselves closed anyway. Because of closure differences, in dollar terms barracuda mostly trade with each other. (For example, in dollar terms the European Union mostly trades with the United States and Japan). They’ve been doing so ever since the nineteenth century, when the railroad and the steamship started linking their goods together at high volumes. (Taking trade as a form of sex, a biologist might refer to that as ‘assortative mating.’ After all, who’s going to buy your plasma TVs and jumbo jets? Not dirt farmers.)

So when barracuda trade with minnows today they often have huge bargaining strength—except for hard-to-substitute resources, like oil. Lots of us want fighter jets, silk bras, and bananas. But while lots of us can make bananas, fewer of us can make silk bras, and even fewer of us can make fighter jets. (Plus, who’s going to buy those jets?) So barracuda can force minnows to open up more easily than minnows can force barracuda to do likewise. Meanwhile, they yell an encouraging ‘Keep up!’ Thus, ‘free trade’ is what barracuda say they offer. And free trade is what minnows say they want. But free trade is just what they’re least likely to get.

There are exceptions of course, particularly today’s China, which can now strongarm rich countries to move more research centers there. On the other hand, rich countries can still strongarm China to buy more jumbo jets in return. Up to about five centuries ago, India and China led the world in nearly every respect. One day, that will again do so. In the long run, most of our productivity will move to our biggest population centers. That’s where most of our brains are. But those brains will also need reliable and sophisticated tools to perform at their best. Thus, India and China will become our biggest barracuda of all—eventually. But for the next few decades at least, if you want a picture of which countries will do well, take the derivative of the length of immigration lines at embassies around the world. When a country’s derivative turns negative, it means the lines are shrinking. Invest elsewhere.

Many of our presently poor countries, not just India and China, will fully industrialize once their populations finally phase change into literacy and more female control of reproduction. But by then some vital resource, like cheap oil, may have run out. By then, our current barracuda will have converted that resource into other advantages that they’ll mostly keep. So although many of our nations will rise, and a few will change position, don’t look for major change anytime soon. South Korea might be a decade away from becoming a barracuda, but Egypt surely isn’t.

That barracuda-minnow divide might partly dissolve one day, but it would take something huge. If there’s any real change over the next 30 or so years, the most likely one is already underway. All our barracuda are aging. Only the United States isn’t—and it only props up its falling birthrate with immigration. Japan is already our world’s eldest nation. With 22 percent over-65, it has the highest proportion of old relative to young. Most women in our rich countries have stopped being baby-makers. Most of our rich nations are now trying to bribe them to have babies. Birthrates keep tumbling anyway.

By about 2030 to 2040, the presently rich world’s baby boom—those born between 1946 and 1964—won’t be working; they’ll be retired. That’ll be a big change for our species. Before 1890 or so we had essentially no retirees. We all had to work until we died. Nowadays, with mass production, retirees are common, and getting more so. Plus, the length of time they hang around before conveniently dying off is growing. Take the United States. In 1950 it had 16.5 workers to every beneficiary—which includes retirees, the disabled, children, and non-working spouses. By 1960, that ratio was 5.1 to 1. By 1970, it was 3.7 to 1. Today, it’s 3.3 to 1. By 2032, it’ll be 2.1 to 1. And the United States is in a relatively good position compared to other barracuda.

Starting by about 2010, as today’s rich nations age, their debt load will grow heavier and heavier. Servicing that debt will mean huge transfer payments. By itself, that won’t change our barracuda-minnow divide. Most of that money will go to other rich countries, since they’re the main creditors of each other. If rich nations plan ahead, they can probably handle those transfers fairly smoothly. Of course, foresight has never been our species’ strength. We think short term—usually just till the next election.

All our rich nations have borrowed heavily to overfund their boomers. So the next, smaller, generation may well face higher taxes. They’ll also likely get less government support. They won’t be happy about that. Benefits to the old would then fall. They won’t be happy about that. Rich governments will likely then borrow even more to keep the lights on. With everyone borrowing, interest rates would climb. Investment would then slow. Debt payments would then stutter. So by about 2040 or so, tensions may peak. Governments, both rich and poor, may then try to either inflate or devalue their way out of debt. They may even default their way out of debt. Either way, even today’s most stable currencies will likely jitter around a lot. Global trade would then slump. And in a world of beggars, war would grow more attractive.

China is also facing a population-based problem. It’s growing richer quickly, but it’s also growing both older and more male quickly too. That’s thanks to a strong family planning policy started in 1979. China is missing perhaps 40 million females. So 40 million males will lack mates during their prime reproductive years. That imbalance will peak by 2025-2030. Further, 71 percent of China is currently aged between 15 and 64. Only 20 percent is under 15. By 2030 they will have to shoulder most of the burden of caring for their elders. And by then China will be 20 percent over-60, doubling the percentage since 2000. Finally, China’s working-age population will peak in 2020, then decline. As it shrinks, the young will have more to do to give the old the lives that they will by then have become accustomed. Having tasted meat more than once a week will make it hard to give up.

Maybe we’ll find some political solution to our age-related problems, perhaps by increasing the retirement age, slowly cutting back on geezer benefits, or allowing greater immigration, but to a technocrat it seems that only one thing might soften those problems—yet more technology. As our labor pool shrinks, if our tools continue to expand to compensate then our rich nations will maintain, and likely increase, their lead, and places like China will continue to grow rich enough to support its aging population. But if they don’t, then they won’t augment enough our next, smaller, generations. So those generations won’t be able to continue massive transfer payments to the old, plus massive debt service. So, it’s possible that if our new tools don’t keep appearing more and more rapidly, over the next few decades our whole economic house of cards might totter. If our technology fails us, we’re probably headed for tough times.

On the other hand, the game itself is changing as our newest computer tech cheapens and spreads. It’s growing a little easier for some minnows to compete a bit more evenly with barracuda. Some barracuda may thus lose some of their current resource closures since many newly rich players will be competing for the same resources. Resource prices will then go up and competition will intensify, thus driving yet more new tech. Further, although our species is aging, our global working-age population—those aged between 15 and 59—is rising. It’ll keep rising until around 2045. So if our tech cheapens and spreads fast enough, our minnows might add production faster than our barracuda lose it. Also, as time goes by, our reproductive rates might well change again. Once our tech has improved enough so that you no longer have to go to a physical place to work, many women in rich countries might well go back to being homebodies. In the United States today, 15 percent of the non-farm workforce, about 21 million people, already work from home at least part of the time. So our birthrates in rich countries might well spike again in the future. However, the number of such babies likely won’t be as high as during our farming era, or the early stages of our industrial revolution, since our deathrates are now so much lower and industrial children cost so much more to rear.

In sum, in both our rich world and our poor world, we’re still reacting to massive phase changes in food, labor, and industry that we started entering two centuries ago. Mass production is still changing us. Today, by borrowing so much against our future, we’re all betting that our species will continue to grow economically. So if our already furious technological pace falters anytime in the next few decades—perhaps because of an energy crunch—the hiccup may be serious. Likely though we’ll continue to invent our way out of serious trouble. Today’s barracuda-minnow divide will likely continue to exist. Most of today’s barracuda will remain barracuda, although their relative order will change. Most of today’s minnows will likely remain minnows too. But over time some of today’s minnows will become new barracuda. Another billion or so of us will grow well-off. By the time that more than half of us live in barracuda nations, more and more minnows will be transitioning, but also by that time, our top tier of barracuda will already be entering our next phase change, whatever that may be. Whatever it is, the process we go through as we change again will likely be the same as the process we’ve always gone through because we’ve always built on our past, with little idea of what we’re doing or where we’re going.

Wolf Children

Each time we go through a phase change, whether its caused by mass production or any other new technology, it’s always preceded by a long period where we unwittingly assemble its precursors. It’s much as if we blindly build the makings of a bomb, not realizing that it’s a bomb until we touch off the fuse. Then it explodes, changing all our lives and scattering shrapnel everywhere—which we then start assembling into another bomb. All that really changes is how quickly we go from bomb to bomb. Why do we behave that way? The answer to that might lie at the center of what it means to be human. Inventing mass production wasn’t the first time we changed our resources by changing our tools. We’ve been changing them for much longer than we started farming 11 millennia ago. Invent a spear-thrower 30,000 years ago and suddenly you can kill and eat things that you couldn’t have before. With the new fat and meat you can survive ice age climes that would’ve killed you before. Invent a new kind of oven that can smelt iron 3,000 years ago and much the same thing happens. The same thing again happens when you invent a proto-steam-engine 300 years ago. All our changes over at least the last 50 millennia may have come about in much the same way. ‘Being human’ means more than having a certain bundle of genes, just as ‘being termite’ does. Our two species have much in common; we both rely on our networks and can’t survive without them. Seeing why that’s so starts with a story of feral children.

It’s Saturday October 9th, 1920, in the Bengal jungle in northern India. Armed with bows and arrows, some men are crouched around a hollowed-out, ten-foot-high, deserted termite mound. Led by a missionary, they’re stalking something they called a ghost that ran with a wolf pack. The pack denned in the termite mound. When the men poked it, the wolves rushed out, but one bitch didn’t flee. She stood her ground, baring her teeth, protecting her pups. The men shot her full of arrows. When they dug out the nest, they found her four pups, wrapped into one big-eyed, furry ball of shivers. Two were genetic wolf pups and two were genetically human girls.

One girl was aged about 18 months and the other was about eight years old. The missionary took them to his orphanage and named them Amala (‘pure’) and Kamala (‘lotus’). He thought they were human because they had human genes. But both were covered in masses of hair. Both were four-legged. Neither could walk upright—their tendons had atrophied to fit a life on all fours. Their jaws and teeth were also unusual—they were shaped to cut meat from bone. At first, they could only eat raw meat and milk. Their nostrils were much larger than normal, and they could smell better than any human. Their skin was smooth and supple; their bodies lithe and agile. They never shivered from cold or sweated from heat. After defecation, they cleaned themselves by dragging their nethers on the ground. They hated baths and feared water. Both fire and gunfire scared them. They bit and scratched the human kids they were made to live with, snapping from mildness to ferocity in a moment. When eating, they appeared joyful, but they never laughed. And, except once, neither ever cried.

They couldn’t bear strong sunlight. They drowsed during the day, hiding if they could, then rose with the moon. Their eyes were unusually bright and they saw better at night than during the day. At night, they prowled the orphanage compound, searching for a way out, howling for their lost pack. They tried to escape several times. When left alone, they faced into a dark corner, frozen in place. Never apart, they slept one on the other, like two puppies. The lightest sound roused them, but speech was just noise. Over time, they attached themselves to the missionary’s wife, their nurse and the giver of food. They hid behind her at any fright. A year after capture, both took sick and the younger one, Amala, died. Kamala cried then, one tear for each eye. Over the next eight years, they forced her, slowly and painfully, to walk upright. They also slowly trained her to speak about 30 broken words. (That’s about as many as a three-year-old learns in a week.) Then she too died, aged about 16. In an important sense she wasn’t human. She was a deformed wolf.

Being genetically human needn’t mean being human. Our ancestors millions of years ago shared nearly all our genes, but they probably weren’t human as we understand the term today. Kamala’s short life may give us a (very blurry) picture of what they might have been like when they first walked upright, perhaps five or so million years ago. Our brain size has tripled since then, but perhaps we walk upright today only because they first tottered upright back then. If we do indeed stay on all fours when abandoned as infants, then walking upright back then must have been a huge step. And it may have come only after some brain-meltingly vast amount of time full of tiny changes. Staying upright since then though would’ve been much easier. We had elders to copy. Making a path in the snow is hard. Following it is easy.

Until our last few thousand years, most of our changes were small. Gaps between them were wide. For instance, once we started to settle down in the Fertile Crescent 11 millennia ago, basket weaving took us at least a millennium to perfect. Hand-thrown pottery took another millennium. The potter’s wheel took a further two and a half millennia. Our genes didn’t give us those tools. We made them. And because we found them useful, we kept making new copies of them so that each new generation grew up with them—and took them for granted. Taking things for granted; that’s the human story in brief. Today we forget how hard it was, how long it took, just how much we owe our parents. We forget that we become what we are by copying each other. Even Kamala needed a model to copy, although her first model was a wolf. Without models, we plastic creatures are nothing.

We don’t get those models only from each other. Mostly we get them from our dead via our tools, rituals, and other constructs. A warning roadsign, for example, tells us to slow down. We do so not just because the law says so but because the sign wouldn’t be there if others hadn’t died not obeying it. The road it’s next to is also a sign from our dead. So are the buildings next to that road. So are the books, maps, calendars, and star charts in those buildings. Unlike wolves, we change our world, then react to those alterations. That new world helps us do new things—and prevents us from doing other things. Our changes can also guide us. They can act as a memory of our past generations’ attempts to solve our problems. We make and we mark our world.

Our making and marking is rare, but not unique. Termites also make and mark. Entomologists call their ongoing interaction with their nestmates and their world stigmergy (pronounced ‘stig-murr-gee’). They change their world then those changes alter the set of things they can do next. It changes the shape of the possible.

For example, some termite species are farmers. They grow fungus for food. That fungus needs a certain temperature. It also needs a certain amount of oxygen and carbon dioxide. So do the termite eggs. The millions of termites in a nest also generate a lot of heat. That heat must be dispersed. The termites must thus maintain their nest’s air so that it always lies within a small range of temperature, dampness, composition, and flow. When there’s a breach in the nest, they need to react fast. When one termite finds a new source of water or wood other termites need to know it. When the nest needs a new wing, many termites need to work together to build it. How do they do all those things?

They can smell, but they can’t hear or see well (most are blind). Nor can they ‘say’ much to each other (that is, by tapping each other’s antennae). Their brains have only a million or so neurons, which is tiny. So data transfer between them must be small. Plus it can only travel short distances. They have no nest map and no nest blueprint. They have no leaders telling them what to do. Even if they did, such leaders couldn’t contact enough termites in time to do the job. They do without termite engineers in hardhats clutching nest blueprints. They work sans termite scientists in white coats peering at clay under microscopes. They even manage, somehow, without termite leaders in sharp suits pounding podiums with their endlessly recycled, yet somehow always bold and new, political plans. So how do they build and maintain their complex nests? Simple. They store most of their information in their nest’s structure itself.

Partly they do that by forming a massive reaction network. At first glance, they appear to work alone. But they also lay down scents as they move, chew, or excrete. Those trails mark where they’ve been, or what they’ve been doing. So a termite that finds wood, for example, leaves a scent trail. That trail will decay unless other termites follow it, but the more that other termites follow it—leaving their own scents—the stronger it grows. The stronger it is, the more termites it attracts. Then, when they exhaust the wood source, fewer termites follow the trail. Over time it evaporates. Thus, termites use the existence of the new wood source itself to keep them focused on mining it. They don’t need a boss. Similarly, one termite drops a ball of dung or clay somewhere and that might incite another termite to add another ball to it. The more dung and clay in one pile, the more the pile itself attracts yet more termites to add to it. Over time they build an arch, then a new tunnel. Yet again, if you poke a hole in the nest the nearest termites detect a drop in humidity. They emit an alarm scent. That brings nearby termites scurrying. They each then gather balls of clay or dung and start closing the hole. They also emit more alarm scent, so more termites show up and do the same. As the hole closes, humidity differences drop, so the alarm scent disperses, and with that the termites disperse too. They use the hole itself to close it.

Termites react to various nest changes. Each termite reacts to what all termites (including itself) have done recently. It also reacts to what the outside world does to the nest. As it reacts, it alters the nest. And as the nest alters, the termite again reacts. Thus, termites ‘talk’ to each other to each other indirectly via their nest. Their nest isn’t mrely made of clay and dung and spit. It’s also made of constant data exchange. Their nest runs at least as much on gossip as on fungus. Without either, their whole network falls apart and they all die.

Thus, a termitary as a whole—both colony and nest plus all the scent trails plus any current nest damage—is like one huge entity, separate from any single termite. Some entomologists call it a ‘superorganism,’ but many others laugh at the whole idea. Besides being ugly, that word presupposes that what it describes is an organism, and is thus alive. That’s still unproven. Using the word swarm for the same idea avoids that problem. We usually think of a swarm as composed of living things but not being itself alive.

A termite swarm though is more than just a bunch of termites. It includes their nest as well. So one part of it is a chunk of shaped clay and dung and spit. It’s huge and changes slowly. Another part is the millions of termites. They’re tiny and change fast. But their current scent trails are also part of the swarm. They’re long and thin and change medium-fast. Anything that termites do that other termites can detect is part of their swarm. The swarm is thus a giant reaction network made up of one huge and slowly changing part, thousands of long and medium-changing parts, and millions of small and fast-changing parts. That reaction network acts to preserve itself. It can even be ‘killed;’ so perhaps it’s even alive.

But if it’s alive it’s a pretty strange creature. For example, where’s its brain? It isn’t in the termite queen. Kill the queen and the colony makes a new one. Nor is it in the scent trails. Destroying those would be like one of us losing our short-term memory. (Or all of us losing our roads and roadsigns and so on.) It would harm us, but not destroy us. Its brain is nowhere in particular; it’s spread out among all its parts. That includes the clay nest and the scent trails. They act as its memories of what’s important. The nest’s structure ‘remembers’ the deep past; the scent trails ‘remember’ the recent past.

When we see a termite scuttling along we imagine that it’s just like any other animal—like a cow. But that’s wrong. It’s at least as much like a hoof. Its survival depends much less on itself than on its interactions with both its nest and its nestmates. It’s always gossiping with others through their shared world. Without a plastic world to both write on and shape, termites are both powerless and brainless. By writing into their world, they organize themselves. They aren’t doing it intentionally. They have no idea what’s going on. So it’s more accurate to say that they write into their world, then their world writes into them. Without their external ‘memories’ they’d be so disorganized that they’d all soon die. Conversely, without them to act, their ‘memories’ would soon disperse. They and their ever changing nest are together synergetically bound into a single stigmergic being, a swarm.

A termite swarm, then, isn’t an entity that we can see and touch as one unit, like a cow. It’s made of separated parts, including its nest. But those parts still work together to perpetuate themselves. They synergetically link together as if they were parts of one living thing, the non-living parts included. It survives as a whole because if you change any part of it, it reacts to compensate. It’s both self-building and self-maintaining. A tiny-brained creature can thus do far more than its single brain can allow by forming a stigmergic reaction network with others of its kind via its nest. Honeybees, ants, some wasps, naked mole-rats, and a few other species are similar. Although not in the same class, dam-building beavers, trap-digging antlions, web-spinning spiders, and others, are also similar. A spider’s web is like a giant hand. Without its web, it would starve. Without its spider, the web would decay. The web owes its existence to the spider, but the spider owes its life to the web. Neither has much chance without the other.

We’re no different. We’re building a nest too. Of course, it’s not finished yet. (It may never be.) We’re also smarter and more aware than termites. But what we’re building is also far larger and longer-lived than we individually are. It too reacts to compensate for external changes. It too stigmergically binds us. We’re in much the same relation to it as termites are to their nest.

Kamala’s story shows what might happen if one of our young falls out of our nest. If we’re cut off from others of our kind when too young, and if we somehow don’t die, we fall back to all-fours. It doesn’t matter that we have big brains and opposable thumbs and such. We never learn to speak, or to use tools. And if found again, we never really understand what all the things around us are for. We can see, touch, and taste them, but we can’t use, understand, or extend them. So we’re human today not just because of our ancestors’ genes but also because of their tools. They built what it means to be human today stigmergically and synergetically. We keep it all in place with factories and railway companies and banks and rituals, and everything else, physical and mental, that surrounds us today. We walk upright because they walked upright. We use banks because they invented banking. Each thing or thought or process that they cemented into place with supportive tools, like a marriage ritual or a stealth bomber or a postal service, works as an external organ for our species, just as a termite nest works as an external organ for termites. Each such organ alters what we can do and think and be. Like termites, the things we make and mark aren’t part of our surroundings; they’re part of us. Like termites, we plus all our stuff form a single swarm—a very old swarm.

Living with the Dead

A termite swarm shows that our swarm isn’t merely made of us, it’s also made of our nest, our technology. ‘Technology’ doesn’t merely mean something we made in the last half century or so—something shiny you can buy in a store. Dirt roads are technology too. So are shoes and chopsticks. So is a clean water system. Buttons, gum, and eating oranges to prevent scurvy are also technology. Technology is on the farm as well, and not just in the tractor. Today’s corn is ancient technology. So are poodles and cows, and seedless grapes and butter. Much of how we organize ourselves is also technology. A pension plan is something we had to invent. So is a stock exchange. Even in the wilderness we make technology. Building stones into a cairn to cover a dead body is technology. So is kindling a fire. We make all those things to serve our needs, and they wouldn’t exist without us. Most things surrounding us are technology, or the result of technology. Technology is what we do.

Everything that surrounds us, that makes us human, we had to build, forget, build again, then tamp into place so that it would persist. We did that piece by painful piece, starting with the stone axe, over millions of years. We kept each piece in place with tools—branches and stone, plows and swords, roads and buildings, wedding rings and cars, satellites and Mars explorers. Thus, any two of us can mate, but it takes a whole society for us to marry. Each new life has to learn how to walk like a human all over again. We cook our food. We clean ourselves with water. We keep our wastes apart. How to walk and talk, marry and bury, find food and handle wastes—all the knowledge about what it means to be human makes us. If tomorrow we lost every physical thing we have, we’d still marry and bury. Our rituals would persist. Were we to lose even those, we’d cease to be people.

We’re so used to the idea that a brain is a solid thing in one piece in one body that it’s hard for us to notice one that’s spread out over a planet. We’re also so used to the idea that a brain is the only place that thoughts can exist that we don’t see that when we write anything or make anything we’re writing our thoughts into our world. We do the same when we make a road. And put road signs next to it. And buildings next to those. And fill those buildings with books. Our tools and constructs and rituals don’t merely protect us and give us power, they’re also part of our brains and hands. They extend our power and memory and give us guidance, just as a termite nest does for termites. We change our world, then it stigmergically changes us.

We’re in love with our big brain. We think that it’s what sets us apart from other animals. But it’s not so much our brain that matters, it’s that with it we make and mark. Because we do, we’re a highly stigmergic species, far more even than termites. Unlike wolves, we aren’t acted on by external forces alone. We invent ourselves. And as we do, we reinvent what it means to be human. Making and marking our world lets us form reaction networks. Those let us fall into autocatalytic and synergetic cycles. Those give rise to a larger toolbase. That toolbase then acts on us stigmergically. If it piles up enough it can drive the more more operationally closed parts of our network to critical mass, at which point we phase change. Nor is that something we did long ago then stopped doing recently. We’re still reinventing ourselves today. With every new thing we make, whether it’s Tupperware or electron microscopes, we redefine a little of what it means to be human. But we don’t know what that is, nor do we control—or, often, even notice—what we’re doing.

Take glass-making. In Roman times we made flat glass by blowing molten glass into cylinders, cutting them, spreading them into sheets, then grinding and polishing them. Glass quality was poor. Volume was low. Only our rich had good glass. Over the millennia we automated each step of that manual method. We did it in slow stages without any clear idea of what the result would be until today plate glass is cheap, plentiful, and almost hands-free. Many of us, not just our rich, now have good glass. Once a luxury good, glass is now a basic input to more complex things—like spectacles, skyscrapers, and microwave ovens. Thousands upon thousands of us slowly, and often painfully, enlarged our species’ understanding of fuels, brick-making, crystals, metals, and heat flow. All that innovation and pain for all those millennia is etched inside every window we so casually look through today. We don’t even notice it.

Each of our glass-making tool changes combined two or more costly and slow steps into one faster and cheaper one. Making plate glass from scratch became one seamless process. Today we simply pour sand in one end of a glass factory and cheap, high-quality glass flows out the other. That factory represents intelligence. Over millennia we converted our physical labor into intelligence, then we extruded that intelligence into the structures we call glass factories. They then automatically did just what we wanted them to do, just when and where we wanted them done. Then we grew so used to their existence that we forgot them. We took our new glass for granted, just as 50 years ago our rich world started taking clean water on tap for granted. Cheap, flat, clear, glass stopped being ‘technology.’ It became a given, like air or trees. A glass factory became just another ignored external organ in our planetary swarm.

As with everything we are and do and have, dead hands and dead brains run our glass factories. It’s been 5,000 years, but every Phoenician glass-maker is still in there, still working away. So are all the Sumerians, Chinese, Arabs, what have you. Behind them stand unknown armies of us stretching back across the millions of years it took for us to overcome our fear of fire, then to use it to smelt sand and shape and color the melt. Ghosts of many nations haunt our factories, our vehicles, our homes. Dead hands control the machines that dead brains designed to make the steel that goes into the cars we drive, the buildings we inhabit, the vehicles that bring food to our tables. Dead brains are in the foods we eat, the ways we cook them, the plates we put them on, the movies we watch, the books we read. They’re in the words we know, the laws we live by, the jobs we have, the things we own, the decisions about who owns what things, the ideas we can and cannot think. Our dead made our world.

Usually we use the word ‘we’ to mean some small subset of us. Often it’s a group defined by wealth, prestige, education, location, language, or genetics. But that’s not all ‘we’ are. We’re not even just those of us alive now, rich and poor. We’re all of us who’ve ever lived. We’re all the ones who changed the world so that this present world could come to be, no matter how small that change was. Our dead are part of who and what we are. Those of us alive today are just the flowers that grow on all their graves. They imprinted their brains into their world, which then stigmergically shaped our brains today, just as we today imprint our brains into what will become our children’s world. We’re all Kamalas. We’re all feral children. We’re all copying each other, all howling for our pack, all trying to learn from each other as we go, all prowling about, sniffing for new ways out of our resource traps.