The Butterfly Defect: How Globalization Creates Systemic Risks, and What To Do About it
By Phar Kim Beng
Founder/Chair
Strategic Pan Indo-Pacific Arena
Strategicpipa.com
Twitter: @indo_pan
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Divided into eight chapters, which among others delved into globalization, supply chain risks, infrastructure risks, ecological risks, invariably, pandemic, indeed inequality and social risks, one would immediately know from the word get-go what Professor Ian Goldin, and his main counterpart, Dr. Mike Mariathasan, his Ph.D. student at the University of Oxford, would say: globalization does not only provide the world with all forms of convenience, and decent consumer items, but it comes loaded with huge problems too. Globalization, in other words, is embedded with all forms of demerits, as Moses Naim, another perceptive author has once mentioned.
In other words, globalization subscribes to Murphy’s Law. When things go wrong, they do become abjectly wrong. Although this book was completed in 2014, neither one of the authors could have anticipated the systemic meltdown caused by SARS Cov II, the virus that triggers COVID-19.
With no vaccine in sight, except palliative treatment such as Avigan, produced by Fujifilm Toyama, or, Remdesivir, by Gilead Sciences, SARS Cov II has caused the global economy to crater beyond imagination.
Nor have they anticipated, on a lesser degree, the global effects of the death of George Floyd, or, the resounding campaign of Black Lives Matter (BLM). Neither did this book cover the #Metoo movement that spoke out, and against sexual harassment, and molestation of women.
Yet, abetted by the social media, each of these events has gone viral. Nor can this book explain the persistence, and the seeming recalcitrance of the HK protests movements from June 2019 onwards, some of which involved ghastly moments of Hong Kong students dousing another man with flammable material. Globalization, it seems, is not merely capable of reflecting the essence of chaos theory, but it is precisely that.
As of April 2020, within the United States alone, some 23 million workers have had to claim for unemployment benefits from the federal government, as a result of President Trump’s gross failure to handle the pandemic.
President Donald Trump, one of the worst leaders that the world has ever witnessed, or, has had to experience in full reality TV, seems oblivious to the pain of many.
Instead, with the help of the chairman and other members of the Federal Reserves, the United States has pumped USD 3.5 trillion into the financial system, as of August 2020. Ironically, not until June 12 2020, when Wall Street and other bourses around the world have crashed, did the stock traders and brokers understand the gravity of the risks posed by Coronavirus. Though, lessons are hard to come by. The Wall Street and other stock bourses around the world have become bullish again, sending that the central monetary authorities will keep pumping money into the system
Indeed, given the insight that one has had on the latter, it seems odd that one of the more disconcerting concerns of the authors were the infrastructure of the global institutions.
Despite the shortcomings of the book, especially the failure to equate the causality of Chaos Theory with Murphy’s Law, the authors at least made the effort to explain that the Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich and the Complex-Agents Based Dynamic Network at the University of Oxford, are looking into the systemic perturbations of more, and more, globalization (pg 34).
In fact, in page 169, the authors admitted that they were not alone in identifying the threats posed by globalization. Scholars such as Dani Rodrick, at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government, has written a book in 2011 about “The Globalization Paradox”.
It is interesting to note, that the authors did not point out the works of Ulrich Beck that have highlighted the systemic risks around the world that have significantly increased with more and more globalization.
It is also fascinating to note that the White House, as early as 2012, has commissioned “A National Strategy on Global Supply Chain Security”. It must not have occurred to the team in White House, or the Center for Disease Control in Atlanta, Georgia, that what they do need is a steady surplus of personal protective equipment, not excluding ventilators, if a pandemic were to hit the United States.
But more importantly, on page 192, it is important to note that the authors acknowledged a study that “location amounted to 60 percent of inequality in this world, while class accounted for 40 percent”. Such an admission by the authors is important as they, at least, point to the possibility that social and economic inequality can be due to a variety of factors.
In the early days of the development of modern China, for example, geography and gender have as much to do with how an individual, or, family can escape the jaws of poverty.
Overall, this is an important book, but not the most important one since it has been superseded by a much more cataclysmic event such as the unstoppable spread of COVID-19, that is pointing towards a greater and longer depression, if not larger loss of lives around the world, especially when the virus continues to mutate at an alarming rate. This has defied more than 300 scientific expeditions currently dedicated to producing a vaccine that can ensure a “sterilizing immunity”. The latter is the gold standard of any vaccine, which is to protect one from birth to natural old age.
Meanwhile, before such a vaccine can be found, medicines such as Avigan, whose scientific name is Favipiravir, not excluding Tamiflu, would have to be deployed widely to defend humanity against this RNA-based disease.
