How Hard Can It Be?

I read an article recently about the 2 micron thick plastic liners inside Coke cans. One of the key ingredients in the liners was a compound called bisphenol A. It was useful for Coke cans because it is “exceptionally good at linking together other monomer molecules into tough, lightweight epoxy resins.” It took me half an hour just to understand that sentence.

Anyway, due to health risks, bisphenol A liners were banned! So the beverage companies needed to find an alternative. Welcome, then, to bisphenol A non-intent. This is very important if you want a drink of refreshing Coke. Because, without a liner, Coke, the sugary, acidic drink we all know, would devour the metal of its can. They don’t tell us this in their Always Coca-Cola marketing.

Now I don’t usually turn an article into a chemistry lesson, and I promise I won’t do it again because I’m not in my element. But it got me thinking. That’s a whole lot of complex, hidden science for a Coke.

But it’s not only Coke.

To build most things nowadays, you will be relying on a supply chain of people with deep skills. Take Boeing and Airbus, the aircraft manufacturing duopoly. To build a new jet plane, you need (breathe) aircraft designers, aeronautical engineers, aerospace engineers, electronics engineers, systems engineers, software developers, computer scientists, mechanical engineers, structural engineers, industrial and production line engineers (breathe again), logistics support engineers, a fuel systems engineer, an avionics engineer, a painter, a chemicals engineer, consultants, a million technicians and someone to make the tea. That’s simply to build the thing.

And a plane isn’t even the most complex industry there is. What if you want to build a nuclear submarine? Then you need to find a dry dock builder, a propulsion engineer, an electrical engineer … you get the idea. Oh, but you will need a scientist familiar with highly enriched uranium. That might be a hard role to fill. Not sure you’ll get that on Indeed.

The world is complex. With apologies to Jeremy Clarkson, I’m tempted to ask how hard can it be? As it turns out, very.

Tim Maughan talks a bit about this in his article. He notes that many aspects of our day to day lives, such as reading the news on an iPhone, logging onto a Zoom call, or popping into your local Tesco, are made possible by “an almost unfathomably complex, algorithmically calibrated, partly automated … global supply chain.”

Take reading this blog: you might be reading this on a PC or, if you have taste, a Mac. But do you understand a PC or a Mac? Almost certainly not. You need an understanding of Boolean logic and electrical engineering just to get started. Then machine code, compilers, assembly languages, hardware and von Neumann architecture. If you want to know the basics of what you need to understand how a computer works, read the 400 page “love letter to the computer”, The Hidden Language of Computer Hardware and Software by Charles Petzold.

In 2023, to live one day in a modern, developed economy, you will interact with many things you don’t understand. Even something as mundane as drinking a can of Coke. Tim goes on to say: “we’ve ended up with a civilization built on the constant flow of physical goods, capital, and data, and the networks we’ve built to manage those flows in the most efficient ways have become so vast and complex that they’re now beyond the scale of any single human understanding them.” 

When you think about it, it’s quite remarkable that this all works, and we can fly to the other side of the world, like I did, to dart around South America and fly over the Andes.

A nuclear submarine works (unless the Russian Navy is involved). Planes work (unless it was the Boeing 737 MAX). The global supply chain works (unless someone gets their ship stuck in the Suez Canal). But despite these mishaps, the world works.

But as the complexity of the world grows through advancements in science and technology, it gets far too complex for any of us to understand it all. If it seems incomprehensible, then that’s probably because it is. Football is a simple game, but the world is a tad more complex.

Fortunately, the kind folks at Harvard University have created the Atlas of Economic Complexity to help us. They define economic complexity and measure it (for those of you who are mathematically uninclined, get yourself a sugary drink before clicking on that link). Economic complexity is concerned with how diversified and complex a country’s exports are. The diversity of products is simply how many fundamentally different products a nation produces and how many other countries can (or can’t) produce them.

Unsurprisingly, the most complex economies in the world are generally the most developed - although there are a couple of surprising inclusions: Japan, Switzerland, Germany, South Korea, Singapore, Czech Republic, Austria, Sweden, Hungary, the UK, Slovenia and the USA. If you’ve been lucky enough to walk the streets of Tokyo, or Seoul, you’ll know how magically complex it feels.

Is all this complexity a bad thing? Absolutely not. We see rapid growth when an economy produces more sophisticated products and gets more complex. As an economy embraces industrialisation and adopts and exports new tech, the country gets richer. Everyone is happy. As Harvard themselves say, “Economic development requires the accumulation of productive knowledge and its use in both more and more complex industries.” It’s what China has done effectively.

So, next time you find yourself thinking that “it used to be simpler in the old days”, comfort yourself in the fact that not only are you probably right, but that it’s a good thing it used to be simpler.

Thanks for reading, I’ll see you next time!