Twenty-three years ago, on this day, August 23rd, 2002, Stafford Beer died.
Anthony Stafford Beer (25 September 1926 – 23 August 2002) was a British theorist, consultant and professor at Manchester Business School.[1] He is known for his work in the fields of operational research and management cybernetics, and for his heuristic in systems thinking, “the purpose of a system is what it does.”
n mid-1971 Beer was approached by Fernando Flores, then a high-ranking member of the Chilean Production Development Corporation (CORFO) in the newly elected socialist government of Salvador Allende, for advice on applying his cybernetic theories to the management of the state-run sector of the Chilean economy.[9][10]
This led to Beer’s involvement in the never-completed Cybersyn project, which aimed to use computers and a telex-based communication network to allow the government to maximise production while preserving the autonomy of workers and lower management.
Beer also was reported to have read and been influenced by Leon Trotsky‘s critique of the Soviet bureaucracy.[11] According to another senior member of the Cybersyn team, Herman Schwember, Beer’s political background and readings completely derived from works written by Trotsky and Trotskyists. Schwember himself disapproved of Trotsky’s approach.[12]
The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was 373ppm. As of 2025, when this post was published, it is 430ppm. This matters because the more carbon dioxide in the air, the more heat gets trapped. The more heat, the more extreme weather events. You can make it more complicated than that if you want, but really, it’s not. Fwiw, I have a tattoo of the Keeling Curve on my left forearm.
The broader context was Beer was an interesting thinker, and who knows where the experiments in Chile might have led? The whole point is that the technocrats – the “pigs” in the language of Animal Farm, need to stop the chickens and sheep etc from learning to run things for themselves. Experiments in alternatives must be scuppered…
What do you think? Does this pass the ‘so what?’ threshold? Have I got facts wrong? Interpretation wrong? Please do comment on this post, unless you are a denialist, obvs
Also on this day:
August 23, 1853 – first International Meteorological Conference
August 23, 1856 – Eunice Foote identifies carbon dioxide as greenhouse gas
August 23, 1971 – nuggets of ecological wisdom from Nugget Coombs.
August 23, 1971 – the Powell Memorandum
August 23, 1989 – Space Mirrors proposed to combat global warming. I am not making this up.