"more important" than they are for short stints of the lockdown intervention.
I'm not dismissing first order effects. They are important. However higher order effects are where feedback cycles usually reside (ex: whats happening with climate change). So ignoring them is not a good idea even if during the initial phases it might seem like obsessing over details. In poorer countries, we can't ignore the risk of people dying due to hunger triggered by lockdown for covid19, for ex.
Public policy is hard and chock full of higher order effects. Common mental habits of super focused problem solvers don't help and can be downright bad to address such problems (ref: Dietrich Dorner's revealing book "The logic of failure").
Around my locality (Chennai, India) it is a very compelling argument that lack of awareness of local geography can be behind the dire water supply situation. For example, all localities with the name "pakkam" were originally in the vicinity of large water bodies .. nearly none of which are around today. Many localities were named after the dominant vegetation in the area, which you won't see any signs of today.
Yeah the commute is probably not going to help much because the commuters will likely be on their phones or cursing the increased traffic due to the need to be in offices. Feedback loops start that way.
I'm not aware of any particular evidence that "second order effects" are driving climate change or causing feedback cycles. But I suppose it depends how you define it. What do you have in mind here?
Not the OP, but I've got a pretty concrete example of how these effects can potentially slow down human-driven climate change, which is what they were likely referring to.
An immediate first-order effect is a lack of air travel.
A resulting second-order effect will be the eventual shift in aircraft buying trends, pricing, scheduling, etc. to adjust to diminished air travel, something that cements more concretely the travel patterns we're adopting during the pandemic. Examples may include smaller but more fuel efficient planes, but also potentially ordering far less of them (we're seeing this now - https://www.reuters.com/article/us-american-airline-outlook/...) as well as possibly shifting seat availability in favor of business and premium classes to extract more value from people who do fly...
...which loops (to the OP's point) back into keeping more people from flying as a third-order effect.
---
Et voila, significantly reduced air travel and a significant aid in our fight against climate change.
So, to me,the dominant effect here is less demand for air travel->fewer flights. Fewer flights means less carbon emitted. Any knock-on effects seem to pale in comparison because air travel is so carbon intensive.
If fewer flights is a "second order" effect here, I'd struggle to name anything that is a first order effect. I don't really think this is what the person I was responding to was talking about when they mentioned second order effects. But if it was then I question the usefulness of the terminology.
> So, to me,the dominant effect here is less demand for air travel->fewer flights. Fewer flights means less carbon emitted. Any knock-on effects seem to pale in comparison because air travel is so carbon intensive.
> If fewer flights is a "second order" effect here, I'd struggle to name anything that is a first order effect. I don't really think this is what the person I was responding to was talking about when they mentioned second order effects. But if it was then I question the usefulness of the terminology.
I'm confused; I don't see how your interpretation arises from what I laid out.
I'll see if I can rephrase and clarify.
The first order effect is that less people are flying specifically because of the pandemic. This doesn't immediately result in fewer flights because air schedules are meticulously planned in order to maintain specific routes, which is why oftentimes at the beginning of the pandemic many planes were flying almost entirely devoid of passengers. In essence, the airlines were hemorrhaging money because their flight schedules were planned months/years in advance by anticipating certain flight loads, and all of that was turned sideways in less than 6 weeks.
The second order effect is that airlines start factoring in the risk of a protracted outbreak with no foreseeable end and therefore start making longer-term strategic decisions adjusting to the sustained (years-long) impact of less flights being booked. New routes, canceled routes, different purchasing decisions for planes, different decisions around how to equip those planes and for which classes of clients, folding some operations in some cities altogether, consolidating operations, etc., and these changes will likely result in airlines having to extract more value from the fewer passengers who do have to fly....
> ...which loops (to the OP's point) back into keeping more people from flying as a third-order effect.
...and therefore potentially contributes towards sustained reduced impact on the environment due to less flights being flown globally, greater fuel efficiency of new jets, and less fuel being burned as a result of both.
> This doesn't immediately result in fewer flights because air schedules are meticulously planned in order to maintain specific routes
That's all well and good, but in fact the pandemic did essentially immediately result in fewer flights. Flights started getting cancelled within days of lockdowns starting in NYC. If this is a second order effect, then everything is a second order effect. Reduction in travel demand is a second order effect of the pandemic. The pandemic is a second order effect of globalization. Globalization is a second order effect of trade efficiency. Trade efficiency is a second order effect of air travel. Etc. It's not a useful terminology.
Flight cancellations that took place were ones that were required as a consequence of government actions or were able to be done because they didn't disrupt routing, e.g. those planes were not necessarily expected to be at their subsequent destinations.
That's first-order. You can reference my prior post for the distinction between this and long-term re-working of tactical and strategic decisions (second-order)
Not sure how else I can explain this to you mate. The original commenter and I seem to get it.
Plenty of times, multiple people have had agreement on a belief that is ultimately incorrect. Before you crow, see how the air travel landscape looks in five years. I predict, assuming the pandemic is resolved, it will have fully recovered and passed the 2019 peak.
I'm not dismissing first order effects. They are important. However higher order effects are where feedback cycles usually reside (ex: whats happening with climate change). So ignoring them is not a good idea even if during the initial phases it might seem like obsessing over details. In poorer countries, we can't ignore the risk of people dying due to hunger triggered by lockdown for covid19, for ex.
Public policy is hard and chock full of higher order effects. Common mental habits of super focused problem solvers don't help and can be downright bad to address such problems (ref: Dietrich Dorner's revealing book "The logic of failure").
Around my locality (Chennai, India) it is a very compelling argument that lack of awareness of local geography can be behind the dire water supply situation. For example, all localities with the name "pakkam" were originally in the vicinity of large water bodies .. nearly none of which are around today. Many localities were named after the dominant vegetation in the area, which you won't see any signs of today.
Yeah the commute is probably not going to help much because the commuters will likely be on their phones or cursing the increased traffic due to the need to be in offices. Feedback loops start that way.