The Uses of Diversity. David Ellerman

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СКАЧАТЬ competition—leaving aside any other damages. Enforcing “level playing field” competition between “heavyweights” and “lightweights”—that is, between advanced and underdeveloped countries—would be tantamount to “kicking away the ladder” (Chang 2002) that the developing countries could climb.

      Jacobs’S Ladder as a Scheme of Parallel Experimentation for Social Learning

      In the presence of genuine uncertainty, innovation and learning progresses best by conducting diverse concurrent experiments with a common goal—for instance, toward the most economical car or the most effective mean of treating AIDS.

      The use of a parallel-path strategy for the solution of difficult development problems is standard practice in several of our outstanding industrial laboratories. It is extremely common in agricultural and medical research. And in the atomic-bomb project, one of the most spectacularly successful military projects the United States has ever undertaken, the parallel-path strategy was employed. (Nelson 1961, 353)

      It is the opposite of specializing one’s resources in what is currently considered as the One Best Way. As the parallel experiments score successes, there must be some mechanism so that those successes are transmitted to the other experiments and thus the whole group is ratcheted up.

      The international community of scientists in any field furnishes an excellent example of such scheme of discovery and learning through parallel experimentation. Rather than “avoiding duplication” and “increasing efficiency” by putting all resources on what seems the most promising way, a diversity of centers of research is ideally fostered. As Jacobs writes:

      Development work is a messy, time-, and energy-consuming business of trial, error and failure. The only certainties in it are trial and error. . . . Indeed, development work is inherently so chancy that by the law of averages, chances of success are greatly improved if there is much duplication of effort. . . . Just so, when Pasteur, that wise old man, begged for enlarged support of the biological sciences, he begged for multiplication of laboratories. (Jacobs 1969, 90–91)

      Evolutionary biology provides a natural example of parallel experimentation. There are two opposing moments in an evolutionary process: variation (exploration or diversification) to expand the range of possibilities and selection (exploitation or specialization) to whittle down the given possibilities to the best ones. Thus, specialization and diversification are seen as two opposing moments in one overall process. Think of a species as trying to climb to a higher level of evolutionary fitness on a “fitness landscape” that has multiple peaks. But the species might be on a low hill. From Darwin up until Sewall Wright’s work in the early 1930s, evolutionary theory focused on selection which by itself is only a hill-climbing mechanism. If the main population is climbing a low “dead-end” hill, then there needs to be some alternative way to go downhill against selective pressures, cross a valley of low fitness, and start climbing a higher hill. Mutation in one large interbreeding population was not enough. Sewall Wright was the first evolutionary thinker to focus on that problem of variation, exploration, and diversification. “The problem of evolution as I see it is that of a mechanism by which the species may continually find its way from lower to higher peaks in such a field” (Wright 1932; reprinted in Wright 1986, 163–64).

      The solution¹⁰ was again diverse semi-isolated experiments (subpopulations or “demes” in different niches) run in parallel with enough migration of genes between the subpopulations so that successes would ratchet up the whole population. Since there was always a balance to be struck between the semi-isolation of the subpopulations to encourage novelty, and communication between the groups to share successes, Wright called it the “shifting balance theory.”

      As a general scheme of parallel experimentation for learning under uncertainty (where you really don’t know the One Best Way to go), the “Wright stuff” are different experiments running concurrently

      • with some common goal (rather than focusing resources on what currently seems like the best option),

      • with some semi-isolation from the pressure of immediate success,

      • with benchmarking comparisons made between the experiments, and

      

      • with the “migration” of discoveries between experiments wherever possible to ratchet up the performance of the whole population.¹¹

      The Jacobs’ Ladder mechanism is, of course, an example of a parallel experimentation scheme. The different cities (or countries) within a vibrant trading bloc are each carrying on various experiments and then exporting their successes to others in the group. Each member tries to incorporate and improve upon the “challenging” imports and then to reexport their successes so that they develop “on each other’s shoulders” ratcheting up the level of development (knowledge and productive capacity) of the whole group.

      Such a scheme of mutual challenges and import replacements ratcheting up and continuously improving the whole trading bloc is in striking contrast to the scheme promoted by comparative advantage theory in which each city, region, or country in the trading bloc specializes in “what it does (relatively) best” and then exports that product (perhaps ever-improving through more specialization) to the other specialized trading partners who, in turn, supply their ever-improving specialized products as imports to the others in the bloc. Jacobs sees this scheme of specialization as a recipe for long-term stagnation. People with specialties can further dynamic improvements if they jostle together with people of other specialties within a company. Or companies with specialties can promote dynamics if they jostle together with other companies within a versatile city. But when a whole city specializes and trades with other specialized cities, then that locked-in pattern of static efficiency is a recipe for stasis and long-term decline.

      Jacobs University: A School for Lifetime Learning

      It is not easy to explain Jacobs’s theory in terms of conventional economic models. Perhaps one key is to focus on her theory of development as a type of social learning and then to construct a purely educational analogue as an aid to understanding. That is the purpose of this section.

      Imagine a school of people who are both students and teachers. They earn chits by teaching some topic to their fellow students, and then they can use the chits to pay for courses offered on other topics by their fellow student-teachers. For simplicity, we assume that the student-teachers’ other needs are taken care of by other means, for example they are like students living at home. As students learn and can recombine knowledge and innovate, they may offer new courses to their fellows if they can find enough takers. The student-teachers play the role of the cities with the courses they teach being their “exports” and the courses taken being their “imports.” Thus, Jacobs University is a simplified educational model of the Jacobs’ Ladder mechanism. The student-teachers learn (develop) on each other’s shoulders. Many of her basic arguments can be modeled and perhaps clarified within the Jacobs University model. The arguments are developed in parallel in table 1.1.

Table 1.1 An Educational Analogy for Jacobs’s Economic Theory

Theme	Economic Model:Jacobs’ Ladder Mechanism	Educational Model: Jacobs University for Lifetime Learning
Players	Cities.	Student-teachers.
Inputs	Imports.	Courses taken by students.
Outputs	Exports.	СКАЧАТЬ В начало < 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 > В конец