1/ Short thread on Voltaire's Bastards' Bastards (h/t @johnralstonsaul). If you're an EU energy technocrat and this just happened, *maybe you shouldn't be one*.
https://twitter.com/JavierBlas/status/1445389590894948360
2/ Hold on -- change the y-axis, it got even worse yesterday! 
4/ From VB, "Societies either roll on blindly to disaster or they find the inner strength to stop themselves long enough to find ways for reform from within." If this doesn’t cause technocratic reform, how much worse will Rock Bottom be? 😬
amazon.ca/Voltaires-Bast…
amazon.ca/Voltaires-Bast…
5/ "Nature bats last". And nature designs for resilience. Photosynthesis is well-known for being inefficient. Why? "[...] stability matters more than efficiency". 👇
quantamagazine.org/why-are-plants…
quantamagazine.org/why-are-plants…
6/ I'm no hedge fund guy, but that price spike sure looks like a short squeeze against highly-levered investors. It will collapse. All bubbles do. But does it take down public respect for the modern priesthood of PMCs like me?
7/ A half-century of globalization mainly benefited OECD white-collar folks like me (cheaper goods!) at the expense of OECD blue-collar folks (vanished factories). Now in quick succession ...
8/ A pandemic catastrophic for the working class while professionals bid up assets (stocks, real estate), then chronic shortages (h/t @DoombergT), now soaring energy costs. Strikes and contagion will follow. It’s the “Circle of Strife”.
doomberg.substack.com/p/we-are-runni…
doomberg.substack.com/p/we-are-runni…
9/ In documentaries, this is where authoritarian strongmen ride populist waves into prominence.
When one set of experts can't fix things (shamans, priests, kings in earlier eras; PMCs in ours) societies replace them with people who promise they will.
When one set of experts can't fix things (shamans, priests, kings in earlier eras; PMCs in ours) societies replace them with people who promise they will.
10/ Voltaire's Bastards vilified "the cult of scientific management". 30 years on efficiency fetishists still rule, and probably contributed to Europe's current energy conundrum. h/t @pwrhungry
podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/mar…
podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/mar…
11/ Yes, technocrats (regulators, wonks, other lanyard-bearers) can face public / political pressure to write bad policy. But if you can’t beat back most bad ideas most of the time to most audiences, how useful is your expertise really?
12/ As a pro-renewables guy (I heart nukes too) this is maddening – wind’s getting blamed! Yeah there was a "wind drought" in Europe. They happen. We had one in North America in 2015! These are the whitest of white swans!! 🦢🦢
newscientist.com/article/207837…
newscientist.com/article/207837…
13/ Some professionals with “Versailles thinking”, unworried about our post-crisis credibility, will meet inchoate anger with the snobbery of educationism. That will exacerbate things. sciencedirect.com/science/articl…
end/ All that said, I'm hopeful for chastened technocracy – a humbler approach to expertise – to emerge from this cascading crisis.
Once the cult of scientific management is dead, better paradigms can spread. 👍
Once the cult of scientific management is dead, better paradigms can spread. 👍
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