Graceful degradation, Population Growth and Jevon's effect, and Classroom Education.
The African Enterprise (02/05/2022)
Hi friends,
Greetings from Abuja. Eid Mubarak to all who are celebrating the Eid-al-Fitr.
I published a new essay on Graceful degradation- a software philosophy for us. As I wrote in last week's email, graceful degradation is a software design philosophy that gives systems the latitude to continue operations as intended, rather than failing completely when some parts of it fail. It is a fault-tolerant design that may be employed in autonomous vehicles to allow the driver to take control when they're hacked.
This system is important in most of the tech systems we are now accustomed to. But it should not be limited to things we use. We could employ such a fault-tolerant operational model in almost every other thing we do, to parts of businesses we build, and so on - whatever it is. The point is that we are able to do these things efficiently when some parts fail.
Graceful degradation is important to us because there are so many things that go into what we do. Most of our thinking is based not only on the knowledge in our heads, but that exists all around us. If the way we operate should be compared to Amazon, it would be the Amazon of today, not of late 1994. As a system, it could be helpful because one box of pizza cannot feed all the faculties we require to function.
In the essay, I try to explain the concept, why it is important, and what could go into the decision to let things gracefully degrade.
Coolest things I learned this week
Population Growth and Jevon's effect
Jevon's paradox, named after William Stanley Jevon, is based on his book from 1865 in which he wrote that “it is wholly a confusion of ideas to suppose that the economical use of fuel is equivalent to a diminished consumption. The very contrary is the truth."
The idea is that, with the example of cars, while it may have been believed that the development of more fuel-efficient engines would mean less consumption of fuel, the reverse was actually the case. More fuel-efficient engines were cheaper and ultimately, more people could afford them. Hence, the total amount of fuel used by more people with more fuel-efficient cars was higher than before.
The same is true for air travel. With more fuel-efficient engines, more people could afford to fly, so there were more flights, hence more consumption itself.
This paradox has gone on to represent every situation where an increase in the efficiency of one-factor results in increased consumption or use of another. Population growth and its relationship with energy consumption is another.
Population growth can itself be a Jevon's effect: the more efficient we become, the more people we can sustain, the more people we sustain, the more energy we consume.
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Connections matter!
In the essay, Rebound, Backfire, and the Jevon's Paradox, Tim Garrett expanded on Jevon's paradox on energy efficiency. In the context of Climate change, he argues that increasing energy efficiency is the driving force for growing global energy consumption and carbon dioxide emissions.
On the macroeconomic implications of this paradox for climate change, he wrote:
Should an economist argue that “There is nothing particularly magical about the macroeconomy, it is merely the sum of all the micro parts” we can be just as dismayed as we would upon hearing a medical practitioner state that “there is nothing particularly magical about the human body, it is merely the sum of all its internal organs”. Connections matter!
The point here is that through technological advances in modern and advanced economies, those countries become more efficient simply because they are able to outsource more energy-intensive aspects of their economies to other countries. So while some of the most advanced countries can appear more efficient, they have just also outsourced their emissions to other countries contributing to global emissions.
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Classroom Education
According to Marshall McLuhan, "When the whole environment is a world of Information", as we live in on the Internet, "then the meaning of classroom education takes on a totally different character." He also wrote, "Classroom education should be more about discovery than instruction."
Using marketing as an example, actionable instruction on marketing can be found on shorter, cheaper platforms on the internet. Hence, the only justification for more pricey, and disruptive, classroom education is whatever discovery means.
What is discovery?
First, there is all the out-of-classroom education and experiences that still make a university education very much worth a lot, as well as the access to materials and so on - which are also out of the classroom. That leaves a crucial aspect of the educational establishment out of the picture of what makes them valuable. In the long run, answering the question of discovery will paint a clearer picture of what classroom education is in the future.
That’s it for this week.
If you have any thoughts or questions, hit reply and we can have a chat. And if you enjoyed it, share it with friends.
Till next week,
Kelvin