I suppose we all remember how, as children, our perception of time stretched or tightened according to the circumstances. In anticipation of an exciting event, time could stretch endlessly. Bored, time could hang heavy. Yet in an exciting game, time could pass in the blinking of an eye. Summer vacation could stretch like an eternity in prospect, and seem to have flashed by in retrospect. All of these are examples of perception of duration – if you will the length of the period between events, or between the present moment and some event. Einstein said it best:
"Put your hand on a hot stove for a minute, and it seems like an hour. Sit with a pretty girl for an hour, and it seems like a minute. THAT'S relativity."
We do have internal clocks. There is a famous story of Galileo measuring the swing of a pendulum using his pulse as a timing device. Many people report feeling hungry or waking up at the same time every day, without use of a clock; some report being able to set an “internal alarm” to alert them to wake at a given moment. But our perceptual clocks seem to be variable speed. Thus when emerges from the state of “flow,” more time will have passed than seems possible. “Bullet time” or the experience of slow motion is reported, usually in emergency situations, where events seem to slow down (or time speeds up).
We think about time, Einstein notwithstanding, as a continuum divided by “now” into “future” and “past”. Things are “early” or “late” according to their position with regard to a “now” point on the time continuum. One event is “before” or “after” another depending on whether it is earlier or later than the “now” of the other event. But the scale of the continuum varies. “Now” can be this instant, this minute, today, this year, or even this epoch according to the context. “A long time ago” in the context of a child’s life, may be “a short time” in the context of his grandfather’s life, and “now” in the context of “geological time”.
As we locate ourselves in space, we locate ourselves in time. It is daytime or nighttime. It is winter, spring, fall or summer. When I owned a sailboat, I was usually aware of whether the tide was ebbing or flowing, even when I was not on the water. We know the day of the week, and the month of the year, and I suspect that in ancient times people knew offhand the phase of the moon. Devote Moslems, I am sure, know which of their five daily occasions for prayer was last and which is next, as medieval Christians knew where they were in terms of the daily liturgy of the hours, or sailors knew their place in the tolling of the watch bells.
Closely linked to the perception of duration are perceptions of the speed with which events occur. Thus many people report that as they get older, “time seems to fly;” that is that the perceived duration between events diminishes. Many people report that the pace of modern life is increasing, again that the perceived duration between events is decreasing with modernization. (This is indeed, the theme addressed in this posting.)
John Bolton has recently pushed for a daily briefing at the UN that would start “on time”. His perception of “on time” is likely to differ from that of representatives to the UN from other countries, since that perception seems to vary widely from culture to culture. My experience with U.N. meetings was that they started hours after their announced times, in part because everyone knew that they would, but I presume in part because many participants came from cultures were “on time” is a very flexible concept. We expect trains and airplanes to be on time, and indeed the effects of two trains or two planes occupying the same space at the same time makes timekeeping critically important. But there is a different perception in my world of whether one is “on time” depending on whether it is for work, for a social occasion, or for an airplane.
There is a closely related question of when two events are sufficiently close in time to be treated as simultaneous. We believe that a causal event must precede the caused event, so perhaps a definition of simultaneity is when two events occur such that neither could be the cause of the other. But again, our perception of when two events happen at the same time is quite flexible. We might consider two events happening in the distant past as happening at the same time if they were in the same century, while we might be very concerned with microseconds in the ordering of signals in a computer.
Perceptions of the “appropriate times” or “appropriate durations” seem very cultural. I find it difficult to realize that an invitation to come by at 7:00 requires more precision if it applies to dinner and less if it applies to a party; arriving at precisely the time indicated is a very bad idea if one is attending a UN event, as one will be alone.
Technological Revolutions
The history of society-changing technological innovations is well known:
· Energy technologies, moving from muscle, water and wind power, and wood burning, to fossil fuels, steam engines, internal combustion engines, jets, electricity, and nuclear power;
· Transportation technologies moving from foot and animal power, to railroads, automotive transportation, from sailing ships to steamboats, to ships powered by internal combustion engines, to nuclear ships;
· Communication technologies moving from telegraph, to telephone, radio (including wireless and television), microwave, fiber optics, satellite, and the Internet.
· Information technologies, with printing bringing us books, magazines and newspapers, photography, and computers.
· Mechanization, bringing the automated factory, robots, etc.
Perhaps less commonly underlined is the evolution of instrumentation, including time pieces, telescopes, microscopes, chemical instrumentation, etc. As the instrumentation changes the range of our perceptions, it also induces changes in our perception of metrics, and specifically of the metrics for the measurement of time.
Clearly we can communicate faster over longer distances than ever before, we can move faster over longer distances than ever before, and we can carry more over greater distances than ever before. These changes affect our perceptions of scale, and in an Einsteinian parallel, our perceptions of time.
A Couple of Examples of the Temporal Effects of Technology
The mobile or personal phone has changed perceptions of time. In the past, with land lines, there were office and home phones. We used each at specific times. You could communicate with a colleague at the office during only those hours in which he/she was actually in the office. (The answering machine, which made asynchronous communication possible, made one way communication possible at any time.) The personal phone blurs the distinction between “office time” and “home time”, allowing colleagues to communicate about work at any time, (or for family members to communicate any time). The technology had dramatically changed our perception of acceptable delays in communication.
Email has been the first “killer app” of the Internet, and it has introduced a new sense of time to asynchronous point-to-point communication. In the past snail mail may have been faster than it is today, but it was still very slow compared to email. In the 18th century, weeks or months might pass between a major event, and its news reaching world capitals. With the railroad and steam ships, mail moved faster, and with the telegraph it could move very fast indeed. But today, with much broader channel capacity, we can watch the Olympics in real time, or indeed view a thousand landscapes in real time using online webcams. Internet technology has again changed what we consider to be happening now, and what we consider to be an acceptable delay in communication.
Institutional Responses
Institutions change in response to the technological changes. Thus large organizations were created to manage the railroads and factories, and eventually to manage other social systems. There seems to be evidence now that the largest organizations are utilizing the Internet to outsource functions, enabling them to downsize.
Markets have expanded. Once the image that the word “market” created was that of a town market, with venders hawking their wares in the town or market square. With the advent railroads and the telegraph, organizations could and did market to regions. Advertising was institutionalized to enable large organizations to reach large numbers of consumers in these regional markets. During the first period of globalization (before World War I) and the current period (since World War II) some markets reach worldwide. Today our prototypical image might well be the global stock market, with trades happening in milliseconds, and happening somewhere on the globe any hour of the day or night.
I would suggest the proliferation of international and multinational organizations like the United Nations or the World Bank is another symptom of institutional response to the growth that technology enabled of the global infrastructure and of global traffic over that infrastructure. There are now thousands of international and multilateral organizations, forming an institutionalized global web that simply did not exist before the 20th century.
People seem to have migrated as long as we have history, and before. Migration has increased with the change in technology. Emigration from Ireland was so great in the 18th century that Irish culture evolved specialized forms, including departure wakes for departing family members who presumably would never be seen again, (and whose letters might cease to arrive at any time). The departing were literally mourned as dead. Kinship institutions again changed in the 20th century, as visits home became more affordable in both time and money, enabled by the ongoing technological revolutions. I have heard the Irish say that the typical Irish family is a father, a mother, two children, and a visiting American cousin! Kinship institutions are again changing in the Internet era.
World religions, once widely decentralized, have seen the center reach out more to interact with the periphery was travel and communications have improved. The death of Pope John Paul II triggered not only a global television event, but the travel of hundreds of thousand of people to Rome to participate directly in the ceremonies – something that would not have been possible in earlier times. Moreover, the Pope’s travel and global visibility would not have been possible in earlier times; the technological revolutions allowed him to play a symbolic role in the church never before possible, and thus to touch the lives and hearts of huge numbers of people to an unprecedented extent.
Institutional Time
I would suggest that different institutions institutionalize the ideas of time differently. Thus we may think of “organizational time”, “market time”, “kinship time” or “religious time”.
Large organizations are the natural habitat of the time clock. “On time” in large organizations tends to mean precise adherence to announced schedules. Indeed, the assembly line introduces a regimentation of time unknown to previous generations. But organizational time also depends on the size of the organization, with small organizations often much less focused on timekeeping. It also depends on organizational culture.
I was involved for many years in a program bring post-doctoral scientists for a year or two each into a government bureaucracy. It was interesting that the scientists worked long hours, but not necessarily the bureaucratic hours of the colleagues in their new setting. A difference I think between the academic scientific setting in which they had learned the rules of work time, and the bureaucratic setting which determined the rules for the rest of us.
Different markets work on different times. I have gone to markets (in developing countries) where one bargained over the price of each item. To accept a first offer would have been foolish, and indeed a rude rejection of the sellers expectations. In the United States, one buys at a fixed price, and the transactions are much faster (albeit, less fun). On the other hand, in the computerized trading on international financial markets, transactions occur in a tiny fraction of a second, making the fixed-price transactions described above seem extremely long.
In the Catholic Church, the time scale of greatest concern is probably millennial. A papal encyclical is issued every few years, and there is a Vatican Council every few decades. Other religions have quite different views of time and the critical cycles of time.
Some Examples
Once, I would suggest, people didn’t pay much attention to time. Even in the Middle Ages, people had few clocks. People probably worked pretty much when they pleased during the day. Days changed in length with the seasons, and so too did the daily chores. People counted time in days, weeks, months and years.
Farm time probably hasn’t changed much. Crops still take a season from planting to harvest. Livestock still take years to mature, and are governed by an age old reproductive cycle.
As we think of global warming, we consider the history of climate over millennia. We project changes out a century in the future. We think of changes in the rates of production of greenhouse gasses in terms of decades. I don’t think our ancestors tried to understand things on this scale, nor to change things over such periods of time.
I have a scientist acquaintance who studies chemical reaction times, using supercomputers to simulate reactions, and doing experiments that seek to measure changes in tiny fractions of a second. His clock runs fast!
Other scientists seek to understand the evolution of the universe from the Big Bang, and think in terms of tens of billions of years.
We now use a much wider variety of time scales in our thinking.
Economic Time
Once we thought that a job in a big corporation gave lifetime security. That no longer seems to be true. Giant firms do change, and firms in the automotive and airline businesses that have had stabile workforces for decades now find they are downsizing in a big way. The time scale for change in these organizations has become shorter than the time scale for the careers of skilled and unskilled workers.
So too, it was once assumed that building heavy industry assured the economic success of the nation. Now too, that idea is being adjusted or discarded.
I was impressed by an Israeli agricultural viewpoint. We think of farmers as having a very long time frame. You plant an orchard, and your children are still selling the fruit when they inherit the farm. Israeli farmers export into the European market. They have advantages of a Mediterranean climate and relatively good supply routes to that market. At one time they had a strong position in citrus exports, and more recently in ornamentals and cut flowers. But they face strong competition from high tech (greenhouse) agriculture in some European countries, and from other Mediterranean countries with even shorter supply lines and cheaper labor. So Israel competes for export markets on the basis of innovation. If it develops a new agricultural product, and a market for that product in Europe, it can expect only a few years of domination of that market until competitors seek to use their competitive advantages to muscle in.
A friend told me recently that he was advising low income countries interested in entering the ICT export industries not to bother with fabrication plants, since if they were successful their advantages of low wages would melt away, and the plants would move to countries with still lower labor prices. I think the suggestion may have been wrong.
In today’s global economy, poor countries are going to have to develop industries based on their low cost labor. A plant that provides jobs for people for a few years or a decade is an asset, and after all those people are probably doing (much) better economically than they would otherwise. But such a plant is more, it offers a basis for development of a follow-on enterprise that can provide more employment and more economic growth later. That basis may be in the skills developed by workers, in the development of an industrial cluster of mutually supportive enterprises, or in the development of financial, managerial, educational or physical infrastructure that can be used for other purposes.
Some Policy Implications of Thinking in Economic Time
One policy implication would seem to be for poor countries to grab the opportunities that they can, and to utilize the competitive advantages that they possess as best they can.
A second it that such countries should recognize that their small companies and their new industries have little inertia in the international markets. Consequently, rapid change is likely to be a fact of life. The country should always be on the lookout for the next opportunity, always on the lookout for the next threat from competitors.
I think a policy domain is needed that allows firms that have lost their edge to fold, and that encourages entrepreneurs who sense a new opportunity to venture. Legal and administrative structures should be built to allow this.
I think the workforce should be educated with a breadth of knowledge and skills that allows workers to change jobs, to change employers, and to change fields of work when it becomes necessary (or advantageous) to do so.
Churning of the economy will produce a lot of short term losses as well as gains. Educating people so that they can seize more of the opportunities, and cultural adaptation to change are only part of the answer. The social safety net has to be strong and universal, assuring that the losers don’t lose too much.
Managers should be trained to manage change, and to develop organizations with the flexibility to adapt and grow, but also to close down organizations and start new ones when such becomes appropriate.
Technology policy is called upon to promote innovation and to enhance productivity. Maintenance of productivity in a developing country involves not only changing technology to adapt to changing factor costs (as wages increase, capital becomes more or less scarce, etc.), but deepening technology mastery for those technologies in place.
Environmental Time
It is, I think, only with the development of satellite remote sensing, computer models, and technology capable of organizing and analyzing huge data bases that scientists have had the ability to perceive environmental changes on a global scale. In the past, such change would have been too diffuse and too slow to notice. The signal of anthropogenic change would have been too hard to detect in the noise of natural environmental variation.
The human population of the earth has grown on the average at a few percent per year for a couple of centuries, but over that time period it has increased several fold. Similarly, per capita income of the world’s population has increased on the average at a few percent per year for a couple of centuries, but over that time the total economic activity of mankind has grown several fold. Our technologies have enabled mankind, during this period of growth, to increase its footprint on the earth greatly.
It is fortunate that we now have the technology to perceive and begin to measure global environmental change, because mankind is now in the process of screwing up the global environment big time. The global environment involves huge systems with enormous inertia. They take huge inputs to change, and react over centuries. It seems clear that anthropogenic inputs made over a couple of centuries are changing these systems in the current century. Undoing the damage can be expected to take a comparable period, and in some cases the changes may not be possible to undo.
The atmosphere is of the earth is big, and although mankind has been putting gaseous waste into the atmosphere in increasing amounts for centuries, it has taken a long time to put enough into the air to make a difference. Technological change, population growth, and economic change have resulted in much more waste pouring into the atmosphere. Some of it is taken up by the oceans, and indeed some by plants, and some washes out in the rain (resulting in some cases in acid rain, with its own problems). We now see a strong likelihood that we will dump enough pollution into the atmosphere to raise temperatures globally significantly by the end of the century.
The results of that happening will be melting of glaciers and polar ice, rising sea level and inundation of coastal zones, changes in ocean circulation patterns, changes in weather patterns, more violent storms (and perhaps more hurricanes, at least in some areas), and changes in the availability of surface water. Some heavily populated places will become uninhabitable. Mankind will be faced by emergence of new diseases and diseases in new places as a result. Agricultural patterns will have to change and crops migrated with the changing weather patterns.
We see deserts advancing, in part due to the effects of human use of the desert margins. We see forests disappearing, largely due to people cutting them down. Coral reefs are threatened in many places. Fisheries are being depleted. Huge amounts of soil are eroding, blowing away, or being polluted by salts or other dangerous contaminants, with a long term negative effect on agriculture. In many cases we don’t have either the science or the technology to reverse the effects, even if we think in century long time scales.
It has been estimated that some 40 percent of the photosynthetic activity taking place on the surface of the continents is being utilized in the service of mankind. If the population keeps growing at the projected rate, and incomes grow at rates that are acceptable politically, there soon won’t be enough photosynthetic activity to satisfy all the demands that the larger, more affluent population will place upon it – we will have to change something. Some of the changes will, of course, be good. People in rich countries, for example, will probably eat less meat (it takes a lot of grass to produce a pound of steak), and go to a healthier diet; many people in Africa and Asia will begin to escape from chronic malnutrition. But, eventually there would seem to be a limit.
Similarly, a significant portion of the surface fresh water of the earth is already being used by mankind, and underground fresh water is being depleted much faster than the aquifers can be recharged. Population increase and increasing affluence both increase demand for water. Again, there won’t be enough, and adjustments will have to be made. Some will, again, be good, as people should learn to use less water. But I grew up in California, where people still remember the Owens Valley war, as Los Angeles and the farming community in the valley fought over water rights. I fully expect to see countries in the Middle East and South Asia fighting over water before the end of the century.
Biological diversity is diminishing. There are some encouraging counterexamples, such as the possibility that the bald eagle can be removed from the endangered species list in the (lower 48) United States. But critical habitats are disappearing all over the globe. Once a species has been reduced past a critical point, the loss it irretrievable. I value the idea of an earth teaming with life, involved in an enormously complex web, as a good in itself. But the loss of biodiversity has cultural and economic implications as well. Thus, we are surely losing species that would have great economic value in the future, were they to remain long enough that we could learn how to exploit them. Probably a greater loss is in the genetic riches that those species contain, which we will lose before we can use biotechnology to transfer into places where it will do us most good.
Policy Implications of Environmental Time
Policy makers must adhere to the “Precautionary Principle”. That is, they must take precautions that present policies, created under conditions of uncertainty, don’t result in irreparable or very difficult to repair environmental damage.
National policy makers, especially in the United States and other countries with large environmental footprints, must stop thinking about the environment nationally, and start instead to think of global environment and its problems. They must be willing to give up short term economic benefits to avert long term environmental costs.
Policy and institutions must make businesses internalize not only the local environmental costs of their actions, but the externalities that those actions contribute to internationally. We need, generally, environmentally sensitive economic policies/
Technology policy will be critical. Thus we need to develop more efficient, less polluting energy technologies. Agricultural technologies will have to be developed, disseminated, and used to protect soils and preserve water. We will need to find alternatives to wood, Recycling technologies must be improved. Transportation efficiency must be improved.
Education policy should help people to understand environmental concerns, and to think about the long term environmental implications of human activity, and the policies that influence the activities. It should prepare people to manage organizations, governments, and technology to preserve, protect and restore the environment.
Policy Makers Must Simultaneously Facilitate Rapid Economic Change and Inhibit Rapid Environmental Degradation
The U.S. House of Representatives faces election every two years, the President every four years. Of course, incumbents have an advantage, and most are reelected, but our politicians often think in terms of the next election. Executives of large corporations, who tend to be politically influential as well, tend to think about the next quarterly profit statement. Their remuneration is often tied to the current year’s stock price increase, and that must influence their orientation to time.
It will be harder for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle, than for politicians and business leaders to act in the ways necessary for continuing success in the evolving economic time or in the ways needed to avoid real problems in our evolving environmental time.
I think therefore we need civil society and the voters to step up to the plate!
