Should the 'constructal law' restore our faith in progress?

‘Everything that moves, whether animate or inanimate, is a flow system. All flow systems generate shape and structure in time to facilitate this movement across a landscape filled with resistance (for example, friction). The designs we see in nature are not the result of chance. They arise naturally, spontaneously, because they enhance access to flow in time.’

The quote is a statement of Adrian Bejan’s ‘constructal law’ and is from ‘Design in Nature, How the constructal law governs evolution in biology, physics, technology and social organization’ (2012, p 3). Bejan, a professor of mechanical engineering, has co-authored the book with Peder Zane, an assistant professor of communications.

A basic point that the authors are making is that it is no accident that treelike patterns emerge throughout nature, e.g. trees, river systems, lightning bolts, blood capillaries and dendrites of neurons in brains. The treelike pattern is an effective design for facilitating flows – both from areas to points (as in the flow of water through the root system of a tree to its trunk) and from points to areas (as in the flow of water from the trunk of a tree to its leaves).

When I began to read the book I felt as though I had always believed that the design of flow systems in nature would evolve to facilitate the flow of the stuff that is flowing through them. It seemed intuitively obvious that that should be so, even though I could not claim to have thought much about the matter previously. (In fact, insofar as I had previously thought about it I would probably have been inclined to the view that the evolution of design in nature must be largely random because it is largely a consequence of random events.) After reading a few pages of the book, the main question in my mind was how the authors would justify the claim in the sub-title that the constructal law governs the evolution of technology and social organization as well as natural phenomena.

It seems to me that the authors’ application of the constructal law to technology and social organization is analogous to the application of the theory of evolution to economics (evolutionary economics) and culture (e.g. Hayek’s theory of group selection). The flow perspective actually helps to promote an understanding of social evolutionary processes as being about much more than just survival of the fittest – whether in terms of crude social Darwinism, or more sophisticated concepts relating to survival of ideas, firms, forms of economic and social organization, and social norms.

In my view the authors make a strong case that the accumulation of scientific knowledge can be viewed as a process in which the stuff that is flowing (new ideas) determines design (the organization of knowledge). In their words:

‘Indeed, all the great discoveries, from Newton’s laws of motion to the laws of thermodynamics, didn’t just tell us something new, they organized and streamlined our knowledge’.

The authors explain that scientific discoveries allow disorganized pieces of empirical information to be replaced by summarizing statements (laws). They suggest:

‘A hierarchy of statements emerges naturally because it facilitates the flow of information. It is an expression of the never-ending struggle of all flow systems to design and re-design themselves’ (p 163).

The application of the constructal law to social organization provides insights similar to those provides by the ‘new institutional economics’.  Institutional designs tend to evolve to facilitate transactions – i.e. to reduce transactions costs (which are analogous to friction in physical systems). Unfortunately, the authors don’t provide an explicit discussion of path dependency – in particular the potential for some societies to remain locked in to inferior institutions involving high transactions costs and poor social outcomes. Perhaps a flow perspective provides us with greater grounds for optimism that all people suffering under inferior institutions will eventually obtain the freedom they need to better their condition.

So, should the constructal law restore our faith in progress? The constructal law has not changed my view that it is better to think in terms of conditions for progress than faith in progress (see my last post). We can only be optimistic about progress if conditions are favourable. It makes more sense to ask whether the constructal law provides grounds for greater optimism than to ask whether it should restore our faith in progress. It seems to me that the constructal law provides an appropriately optimistic frame of reference for thinking about progress. Progress isn’t inevitable, but we have strong grounds to view it as a natural or normal phenomenon.

Postscript:
Adrian Bejan has responded as follows:

'Thank you very much for reading our book Design in Nature and writing about it.

I can respond to your call for "how the authors would justify the claim in the sub-title that the constructal law governs the evolution of technology and social organization as well as natural phenomena".

This is actually discussed in ch. 10, and it pivots on Fig. 57. The long version of this response is in the review article published last fall in Physics of Life Reviews (read the comments on Figs. 1, 5, and 20-24.

In our book Design in Nature, the justification is best illustrated by the story of how nature (not man) invented the wheel (Ch.4). Technology is all the contrivances that we make and attach to ourselves to in order to move farther, faster, more efficiently, and for longer (i.e. to live longer). This is no different than the morphological changes that stick as the river basin evolves

So, everything that looks good and we adopt and we acquire is helpful in this constructal flow direction, which is for the whole to flow more easily.. It sounds simple, and it is. Think about the evolution of the technology for power generation, for example. The same with transportation technology, science, language, communications, and currency, and bank tellers, and English as the global language. They all help us go with the flow.'

The article to which Professor Bejan refers in Physics of Life Reviews is also available at the constructal theory web site.

Does belief in technological progress have to involve faith?

In an essay entitled ‘The Idea of Progress’ (published in 1979) Robert Nisbet, an American sociologist, suggested:

 ‘Disillusionment with science and technology is very much a part of the intellectual landscape, and it would be a rash soul indeed who declared it a purely peripheral and transitory thing’.

It would probably be fair to say that disillusionment with science and technology is now fairly common among the general populace of high income countries. Data from World Values Surveys conducted in 2005-08 show that the percentages who completely agree with the proposition that science and technology are making our lives healthier, easier and more comfortable are only around 14% in Australia, 11% in the US and 6% in Japan. The corresponding percentages are much higher for countries with lower incomes: 31% for Mexico and China and 40% for Indonesia.

Nisbet argued that the idea of progress was born of Greek imagery and is central to Christianity with its emphasis on hope - to be given gratification in this world as well as the next. He observes that rationalist-secular confidence, once so great in Western society, has been fast-diminishing as a result of boredom with the goods, material and psychic, provided by modernity as well as disillusionment with science and technology. In his concluding paragraph he speculates that a renascence of religion might ‘fill the vacuum brought on by those elements of modernity … and with this, a shoring-up of the idea of progress from past to future’.

Nisbet seems to be suggesting that belief in progress involves faith. It arose from religious faith and may return to those roots as enthusiasm for science and technology wanes.

    

Does belief in progress have to involve faith? For a couple of centuries in western countries enthusiasm for technological progress did involve faith. It was akin to religious faith, with doctrines about the inevitability of progress – in some accounts even according to laws of evolution or laws of history. It is possible, however, to believe that, on balance technological advances are beneficial, without having much confidence that they will necessarily make our lives healthier, easier and more comfortable.

Data in the World Values surveys on whether it would be a good or bad thing if there was more emphasis on technology in future may reflect a widespread belief that, on balance, technological advances are beneficial. Despite their reluctance to agree completely that technology is making their lives better, only a small percentage of people in high income countries say that more emphasis on technology would be a bad thing – and the percentages don’t differ in any obvious way from those for low income countries. (The relevant percentages for Australia, US, Japan, Mexico, China and Indonesia are 6%, 7%, 5%, 7%,1% and 14% respectively.)

It seems to me that Karl Popper’s institutional theory of scientific and technological progress provides an appropriate framework in which to consider the possibility of progress. The basis of Popper’s theory is that there are ‘conditions for progress’ and hence conditions under which progress may be arrested. Popper emphasized that science is based on free competition and thought:

‘If the growth of reason is to continue, and human rationality to survive, then the diversity of individuals and their opinions, aims, and purposes must never be interfered with (except in extreme cases where political freedom is endangered). Even the emotionally satisfying appeal for a common purpose, however excellent, is an appeal to abandon all rival moral opinions and the cross-criticisms and arguments to which they give rise. It is an appeal to abandon rational thought’.

Popper concluded:

‘The mainspring of evolution and progress is the variety of the material which may become subject to selection. So far as human evolution is concerned it is the 'freedom to be odd and unlike one's neighbour'--'to disagree with the majority, and go one's own way'. Holistic control, which must lead to the equalization not of human rights but of human minds, would mean the end of progress’ (‘The Poverty of Historicism’, 1957, Chapter IV).

How does the United Nations view social progress?

I have previously expressed the view on this blog that if progress is to have any meaning from a public policy perspective it must mean movement toward a good society or movement from a good society to a better society. The improvement of society can, of course, be referred to as ‘social progress’.

When I did an internet search on ‘social progress’, the second item listed was the United Nations Declaration on Social Progress and Development adopted in 1969. This Declaration stands in stark contrast to the resolution sponsored by Bhutan and adopted in July last year calling on Member States ‘to pursue public policy steps that would better capture the importance of pursuing happiness and well-being in development’.

   

As might be expected, the 1969 UN declaration begins by asserting the value of humans and the rights of everyone to enjoy the fruits of social progress. Without attempting to define social progress it then goes on to assert that social progress requires the ‘full utilization of human resources’ and giving everyone the ‘right to work’. The declaration then proclaims the importance of economic growth to social progress:

‘The rapid expansion of national income and wealth and their equitable distribution among all members of society are fundamental to all social progress, and they should therefore be in the forefront of the preoccupations of every State and Government’.

I guess the authors were trying to make the point that growth in productivity and technological progress are central to meeting the aspirations of people to improve their living standards. In the preamble to ‘Part II Objectives’ it is asserted that ‘progress and development shall aim at the continuous raising of the material and spiritual standards of living of all members of society’. The recognition of spiritual needs is interesting, but the authors gave no hint of what they meant by ‘spiritual standards of living’. Considered as a whole, the document has the appearance of having been drafted by economic planners to foster greater recognition of their own importance.

Perhaps I should view the UN Declaration on Social Progress as a product of its times and be glad that the UN has moved on. I can’t help feeling, however, that the wording of the document is particularly crass, even given views that were prevalent at the time the document was written.

If the authors had wanted to emphasize the aspirations that people have for improvement of their material living standards it would not have been hard for them to come up with an appropriate definition of social progress in those terms. For example, they could have written a definition, along the lines I have drafted below, based on words used by Ludwig von Mises, leader of the Austrian School of economic thought, in his book ‘Theory and History’, which was published in 1957:

Most humans want to live and to prolong their lives; they want to be healthy and to avoid sickness; they want to live comfortably and not to exist on the verge of starvation. Advance toward these goals means progress, the reverse means retrogression.

If the authors had set their sights a little higher they might even have been able to benefit from the thoughts of another famous Austrian economist, Friedrich Hayek:

‘In one sense, civilization is progress and progress is civilization. The preservation of the kind of civilization that we know depends on the operation of forces which, under favourable conditions, produce progress. If it is true that evolution does not always lead to better things, it is also true that without the forces which produce it, civilization and all we value – indeed almost all that distinguishes man from beast – would neither exist nor could long be maintained’ (‘Constitution of Liberty’, 1960, 39-40).

Hayek saw progress as a process of learning, the cumulative growth of knowledge which when achieved becomes available for the benefit of all. He wrote:

‘It is through this free gift of the knowledge acquired by the experiments of some members of society that general progress is made possible, that the achievements of those who have gone before facilitate the advance of those who follow’ (p 43).

How much does personality change over time?

A post I wrote on this topic in 2010 attracted a fair amount of interest. That might be explained by the provocative  title: ‘Once a neurotic always a neurotic?’ The view presented was that while personality is generally fixed by about age 30, there is some evidence of personality change among older adults, associated with such things as use of anti-depressant drugs, cognitive behavioural therapy and meditation.

Recent research has provided evidence that personality is much more variable than it was previously thought to be. The findings of some relevant research by Christopher Boyce, Alex Wood and Nattavudh Powdthavee are summed up in the title of their article: ‘Is Personality Fixed? Personality changes as much as “variable” economic factors and more strongly predicts changes to life satisfaction’. (The article has been published in ‘Social Indicators Research’).

The research uses data from the HILDA surveys, which in 2005 and 2009 asked 8,625 Australians questions designed to measure their personality according to the Big Five criteria: openness to experiences, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness and neuroticism. The authors found substantial variation of all personality criteria between the surveys. The variation of agreeableness and neuroticism for the same individual was about half as great as the variation between individuals.

In their initial analysis the authors corroborated earlier cross-section research showing that some personality factors have large impacts on life satisfaction. They found that emotional stability (the opposite of neuroticism) had the greatest impact, followed by agreeableness and extraversion. The estimated coefficients on the personality variables were generally somewhat lower in the analyses focusing on the effects of changes over time suggesting to me that some of the apparent change in personality might be attributable to measurement error. Nevertheless, the implied impacts of change in personality are still relatively large by comparison with the impacts of the economic variables such as income and employment status.

What are the implications of the finding that individual life satisfaction may change substantially over time as a result of personality changes? The answer depends partly on how important we see life satisfaction in the context of the overall quality of life. For example, it is interesting to speculate that the phenomenon that Carol Graham describes as the happy peasant, frustrated achiever paradox – happiness declining for some people whose wealth is rising – could be attributable to personality change. People may choose to have opportunities for better education and higher incomes, even if this may result in some loss of contentment (perhaps as a consequence of personality changes).

It is difficult to consider the implications of changes in personality without knowing what causes personality to change. I found it surprising that the results suggest that the adverse impact of unemployment on life satisfaction is independent of personality change. (The estimated coefficient on unemployment remains unchanged when the personality variables are introduced into the analysis.)

 

Boyce et al speculate that personality change could be associated with environmental factors and that public policy could foster positive environments. However, the example they give of the possibility of personality change through improved availability of mental health services might have more to do with changing perceptions of experience and of identity than with changes in environmental factors.

It is possible that the effects of individual personality changes might tend to wash out in large samples. Those whose life satisfaction rises as a result of personality changes might be balanced by those whose life satisfaction falls.  But is not inevitable that this will happen. Perhaps pervasive changes in personality at an individual level might be reflected in changes at a national level in the extent of uncertainty avoidance or in the extent to which people are prepared to trust others.

It will be fascinating to see what light further research is able to shed on the causes and effects of personality changes.