13 Building non-physical infrastructure is hard

Key Concepts

In this chapter we will:

• Provide examples of human, social and soft infrastructure
• Explore the vulnerabilities of underinvestment in human, social and soft infrastructure

13.1 Introduction

Humans invest time and energy to acquire knowledge and skills, build relationships, and develop rules and norms. In this chapter we will dig deeper into these three types of infrastructures and see an integrated perspective of sociality. We then discuss the implications for building and maintaining other types of infrastructure. As we will see in the next part of the book, there might be many technological solutions possible for a sustainable transition, but we may underestimate the effort needed to maintain these non-physical infrastructures.

13.2 Gaining Knowledge and Skills

Humans have to acquire a lot of knowledge to function in society. We learn by imitating behavior of others and individual experimentation. Cultural evolution happens in many species, but the infrastructure we have created to facilitate cultural knowledge transmission enables humans to be uniquely successful in creating complex societies on a sufficient scale to generate global impacts and user humanity into the Anthropocene (Henrich, 2020).

In early history, people learned in informal ways from family and community members to hunt, make artifacts, to prepare food, understand geography, identify poisonous plants, etc. During the last few hundreds of years, we have created educational systems that employed professionals to teach complex skills like reading, writing and arithmetic. Learning takes place during the whole lifetime, but tends to be concentrated in childhood. In contemporary societies children go to school from kindergarten to university and receive standardized education to prepare them for participation in the workforce.

There are various problems with creating those formal educational infrastructures. The schooling system we use today had its roots in early industrialization when there was a need to train a large population basic skills to participate in production systems. One may wonder whether those education factories are still adequate for contemporary times, where it might be more important that people learn how to learn during their whole life with constantly changing technologies. As demonstrated during the COVID-19 pandemic, schools function not just as a place to learn skills, but also as a daycare facility for working parents, and a place for children to socialize. In contemporary society where family members often do not live closeby, schools take over tasks which were done by the community historically. We also have to recognize the increased amount of mental health problems among children due to the pandemic, which may indicate that contemporary schools may not provide the support structure needed in times of crisis.

Human infrastructure needs to be maintained and continuously updated, especially in contemporary societies where we get confronted with new technologies and bureaucratic procedures. Nowadays one needs to be computer literate to manage your bank account, pay your taxes, etc. In a previous generation, you had to go to a physical bank and send a form via snail mail. The rapid advances of technologies causes older generations to be left out if they are not able to maintain their human infrastructure.

Skills that were taught in schools in previous generations might not be the best preparation for the next generation. With calculators, artificial intelligence, google, and other technologies, memorizing historical events or doing comprehensive arithmetic by hand becomes of questionable value. But how to use those new technologies in a proper way, and to recognize “bullshit” generated by those new technologies becomes essential.

Does the current coupled infrastructure system that is enabling the investment in human infrastructure well functioning? As we have seen with hard and natural infrastructure, there is a lot of standardization to scale up investments in human infrastructure. On the one hand, children around the world learn the same basics of arithmetic, language, science and art, enabling them to participate in the global economy. On the other hand, we may lose diversity of human knowledge and skills, to produce novel solutions for the challenges we face at the local and global level.

However, new technologies (computer based instruction) allow us to access individualized instruction to learn new languages, play guitar, and computational thinking. The provision of human infrastructure is in flux, and it is unclear what is the desired configuration for the future may be, and whether we are moving in the right direction.

13.3 Building Relations

Social infrastructure relates to the relationships people have. To build and maintain relationships takes time. Even though now you can have hundreds of “friends” on Facebook, actual meaningful social connections require investment of time, not just a click on a button. Increasingly physical places to socialize, whether they are bars, sport clubs, churches or other physical community building infrastructure, are being replaced by virtual alternatives. Where in the past people met their future partners at churches, dance halls, or bars, one is now swiping left and right to make connections. This might be more efficient, but it impacts the kind of social relationships we may build up.

Humans are social beings and we are wired the way we are by a long cultural and physical evolution going back millions of years. Technological advances and institutional changes allow us to interact globally in real-time, but that might not replace traditional ways of making and maintaining social connections. As demonstrated by the COVID-19 pandemic, the lack of face-to-face interaction has caused substantial mental health challenges. Zoom meetings allow for information exchange, but might be limited in other ways.

The benefits and opportunities that accrue to individuals from social infrastructure are becoming increasingly privatized. In past times, individuals relied more heavily on social connections. It took a village to raise a child, but the village also provided a safety net for care and food sharing. Nowadays, we purchase insurance to outsource the role of social connections. As such, there may be fewer incentives to maintain all those social connections. However this comes at a (social) cost. In a study we did in rice producing villages in China, Nepal, Thailand and Colombia we found that in communities more integrated with the market economy, there was less cooperation in public good dilemmas, especially when we included uncertain outcomes from the public good (Cardenas et al., 2017).

The privatization of benefits and opportunities associated with social infrastructure may also increase inequality. Those with financial resources can purchase a better safety net for child care, health care, elderly care, food sharing, etc., than those who have limited financial resources. This may lead to a reduced level of reciprocity from those with more resources to help those without many resources. Governmental policies may avoid some negative consequences by providing public schools, public health and social security programs. Nevertheless, the social dependencies have been reduced in modern society. This may limit our ability to respond to the sustainability challenges in our societies.

Within a globalizing world, investing in social infrastructure comes with additional challenges. With modern hard infrastructure, we get information from all around the world and can communicate with people in real-time who are physically faraway. Those diverse experiences enrich our lives, but not everyone speaks the same language, has the same religion, social norms, is in the same time zones, experiences the same weather, etc. Those differences increase the transaction costs associated with communication. Still there are only 24 hours in a day. Will we invest our time in social infrastructure with our physically local communities, or in our virtual global communities? Given the limited bandwidth we have in investing in social infrastructure, even with effective hard infrastructure, there are tradeoffs and consequences of the choices we make.

In the extreme, we can live physically among strangers, but engage via our hard infrastructure with people all over the world in personal and professional ways. In those circumstances we may have a lot of knowledge about the situations in other countries and cultures, but limited engagement with the physical location one lives in. On the other hand, one can focus investments in social infrastructure locally, and not know what is happening in the rest of the world. But in a globalized world, local economies are impacted by global markets.

Ideally, a community consists of a diverse population where some are more connected with the global community than others, and those diverse connections could help communities to have the appropriate knowledge and connections to flourish in a global economy. Unfortunately, we see frequent polarization between members of local and global communities, having underinvested in the different types of social infrastructure to be an active community member.

13.4 From shared norms to bureaucracies

In small scale communities, soft infrastructure relies on shared norms that are reinforced via shared narratives, religious rituals, and other types of rituals. There is no need in such communities to write up contracts. With the increasing size of societies, shared norms get formalized into written rules. Laws, contracts, and policy documents become increasingly complicated to anticipate or respond to the many situations and conflicts that could occur in large scale societies. This leads to specialized human infrastructure (lawyers, politicians), who may not necessarily may not share the experiences or have a deep understanding of the people they represent.

Archaeologist Joseph Tainter (1988) studied the collapse of societies and found that as societies become increasingly complex, they spend an increasing share of their resources to maintain the functions of this complexity. This may eventually become too taxing for a complex society and lead to its downfall. Tainter was especially influenced by the demise of the Roman Empire that became so big that it became too costly to maintain it’s borders. Increasing complexity in a society refers to more bureaucracy, and more defense and policing to maintain order.

We do not want to suggest a collapse of contemporary societies but the insights from Tainter could provide some lessons for our times. The success of our societies depends on the complex coupled infrastructure system we have built. We depend on physical infrastructure that brings us water, energy, information, and removes our waste. The schooling systems that prepare us to effectively function in the complex societies we have created, and the health systems that keep us healthy and allow us to have a longer expected lifetime are critical for our wellbeing. Clearly, the critical importance of these infrastructures suggests that planning and investing in all of them is worthy of our increased attention.

The increasingly complex coupled infrastructure systems that we are building require that humanity keep up the investments in human, and social, and soft infrastructure so that all humans have the proper knowledge to participate, the social connections to reciprocate efforts if needed, and the institutional arrangements that enable us to coordinate our activities and that fit the context of those activities. The increasing polarization and distrust in government we observe around the world might be signs that many people do not feel engaged with the society they live in. This is unfortunate since, for the challenges humanity is facing, we need cooperation and engagement.

13.5 Critical reflections

Humans have a long history of living in small scale societies that structure the way we interact with each other. We rely on building trusting relationships within local communities, and are good at identifying people who are different from us. This tribal behavior was important in ancient times but in a globalizing world they hinder us. We increasingly have to rely on hard infrastructure (communication technology) and formal regulations, to interact with an increasingly diverse community. Despite all the advances in technology, there is still limited time to invest in social relationships and, as such, we may struggle with building and maintaining non-physical infrastructure in contemporary societies. This might be the Achilles heel that may hinder or prevent potential transitions to a sustainable society.

13.6 Make yourself think

1. How much do you invest in the social infrastructure of local and global communities? Do you use social media for those investments?

2. Did you read all the details of the syllabus, which contain the many rules and regulations universities ask instructors put into the syllabus?

13.7 References

Cárdenas, J.C., M.A. Janssen, M. Ale, R. Bastakoti, A.M. Bernal, J. Chalermphol, Y. Gong, H.C. Shin, G. Shivakoti, Y. Wang, J.M. Anderies (2017) Fragility of the provision of local public goods to private and collective risks, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA 114(5): 921-925.

Henrich, J. (2020). The WEIRDest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Tainter, J. (1988). The Collapse of Complex Societies. Cambridge University Press