Link: https://entangle.substack.com/p/the-bottleneck-theory-of-everything

tl;dr

• Bottlenecks are the breakpoints within a complex system, the kinks that have a range of cascading, spillover effects
• Bottleneck Theory suggests that by focusing on identifying the areas where things break down in a complex system, we can find the solutions with the highest leverage benefit overall
• Bottlenecks are everywhere you look, from traffic congestion to critical societal issues like cancer, Alzheimer's, climate change, and wealth inequality
• If we could improve the way we study and identify bottlenecks, we might be able to come up with creative, high-leverage solutions to some of society’s most pressing challenges

Our world is a web of complex systems. These systems, whether functioning well or breaking down, offer clues worth studying. By focusing on the flow within these systems, the movement between interconnected components (information, energy, dollars, etc.), we can better diagnose issues and devise multifaceted solutions.

Bottlenecks are the small kinks where systems break down, where flow stagnates. Every complex system has breakpoints or weak links. These breakpoints within the system are worth studying: while seemingly small, they can often propagate cascading issues throughout the system, a multi-faceted domino effect. But the flip side is also true: if we can find and fix the bottleneck, they are often the points of highest leverage for benefits across the system.

The recent collapse of an overpass on I-95 near Philadelphia is a clear example of this. A small section of the highway collapsed from an oil tanker crash, causing a local failure. I-95 is a critical artery for the entire east coast region, so a small kink can have disastrous effects. The direct impact is increased congestion for commuters and summer travelers within the Philadelphia area, but this breakpoint could take months to repair and in the process create all sorts of ripple effects, impacting supply chains and the regional economy. This kink in the system also exposes all other fragilities in the broader logistics network, such as perhaps insufficient railway capacity to transport gas more safely and cheaply.

Bottlenecks are ever-present in logistics and traffic. We have all experienced the dread of bumper-to-bumper traffic on a congested highway. Our logical intuition might suggest that to reduce congestion, we should build bigger highways: the more lanes, the higher throughput of vehicles. We've invested billions in infrastructure projects expanding highways through massive multi-year projects (which often create more congestion in the process). However, a study from the US Department of Transportation suggests that we might be focused on the wrong solutions. The study argues that small kinks, a local logjam — such as a place where three lanes converge to two on a highway — can be critical bottlenecks that drive downstream congestion miles away. A targeted intervention at the kink can create the highest leverage benefits for the system, often at a fraction of the cost.

Complex systems are characterized by a multitude of interacting components or agents, non-linear interactions, emergent properties, adaptation, and feedback loops. Bottlenecks in such systems can significantly impact the behavior and performance of the system as a whole, and often their impacts are disproportionate to their size due to the interconnected nature of complex systems. Bottleneck Theory prioritizes identifying locations where flow stagnates, seeking small, targeted interventions that can have the most significant leverage impact across a system. Unblocking a bottleneck can rejuvenate flow within a system, and functioning systems maximize this flow.

This perspective on flow and bottlenecks isn't confined to the study of traffic or logistics, but it's also reflected in more personal and organic systems, such as our bodies. I have been studying and practicing Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) and acupuncture over the past seven years and have found remarkable parallels. TCM views the body holistically as a complex system in which the flow of energy, or Qi, is crucial. Stagnation of this energy can lead to a variety of ailments, from digestive problems to chronic pain. The treatment, therefore, focuses on restoring flow, mirroring the need to eliminate bottlenecks in larger, societal systems. From a Western perspective, the concept of Qi in Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) could be understood as the flow of blood, which can be stimulated through acupuncture to bring nutrients and oxygen to under-resourced parts of the body and improve overall function. What manifests itself as knee pain, may really be a muscle cramp in the lower back driven by the hips tightening from sitting too much.

Most things in our world exhibit the dynamics of a complex system. Thus, the concepts of bottlenecks and flow permeate every aspect of our world. Studying them offers a robust problem-solving approach. Effective interventions targeting these bottlenecks rejuvenate the flow within a system, leading to improved overall function.

Some of society's most pressing issues, such as cancer and wealth inequality, could be understood through the concept of bottlenecks. We should focus more of our attention on these societal logjams.

Bottlenecks are persistent throughout society

Cancer Research

Cancer, one of the leading causes of death in our contemporary world, primarily claims lives due to metastasis. Metastasis, or the spread of cancer from one cell to another throughout the body, significantly escalates the likelihood of mortality. However, an astonishingly meager 5-8% of cancer research funds are allocated toward investigating this complex process.¹

We understand very little about what causes a cancer cell to metastasize, but it might be a critical portal of understanding in the fight against cancer.

Our medical system often separates the body into parts, potentially missing how interconnected it really is. Cancer as we are learning is rather stochastic, or random, and its effects are interconnected. This same specialization in our medical systems runs parallel to the way we allocate our research dollars in cancer research, perhaps causing us to miss the 'big picture'.

What if we shifted more of our research dollars towards understanding the interconnected nature of cancer, which is disproportionately responsible for fatalities?

Wealth Distribution

We might think of the economy as an engine of economic value generation and distribution. A company generates value through its sales, and then distributes that value back to a range of stakeholders, in the form of wages to employees, taxes to the government, payments to suppliers, or capital income to shareholders (which may then be the source of income for financial firms).²

But when you consider the growth in wealth inequality over the past few decades, you might start to wonder whether there are some kinks in the system of value generation and distribution. Wealth inequality can also propagate a variety of other complex issues, like political polarization and internal or geopolitical conflict — it is an entangled issue.

Currently, in the United States, the top 10 percent of households by income own 76 percent of all wealth. Predictably economic gains tend to accrue at the top, where ownership in assets, such as real estate and equities, are concentrated. Future wealth inequality is driven by asset inequality today.

We have a bottleneck in capital ownership, so any system-wide gains will naturally accrue to the top, further perpetuating the issue.

Are there ways to maintain the incentive structures of the system we have while enabling broader access to pre-distributive capital ownership so economic gains can accrue widely, though not necessarily evenly?

Alzheimer’s Disease

Another leading disease in the modern world is Alzheimer’s. Research on Alzheimer’s has made relatively little progress. Without being a deep expert, I have an intuition that Alzheimer’s is a ‘disease of diseases,’ multiple interdependent degenerations, compounding and manifesting themselves as what we would consider Alzheimer’s. Some practitioners consider it a multi-factorial disease, caused by an entanglement of genetic, environmental, and lifestyle factors rather than a single discrete thing. What if Alzheimer’s too was a series of bottlenecks in the grand, evolving system of one’s body?

There is some emerging research that suggests that blood flow, vascular health, metabolic conditions, and sleep could play a big role in Alzheimer’s — and it is quite possible that they are each closely interdependent too. ‘Bottlenecks’ such as impaired blood flow (slowing the flow of oxygen and nutrients to the brain), chronic inflammation (interfering with neuron function and accumulation of damaging proteins), and sleep disruptions (limiting restorative clearing mechanisms for various toxins in the body and brain), all can affect brain health and contribute to neurodegeneration. While it’s only a glimpse, investigating these bottlenecks might not only help mitigate Alzheimer's disease but also enhance overall systemic health, which of course have a variety of cascading benefits on our economy and healthcare system.

Climate Change

Our climate is fraught with bottlenecks, from carbon emissions to structures of the energy economy, which compound our environmental challenges. Yet, many small changes in the right places, may contribute to large structural changes. Saul Griffith developed an excruciatingly detailed chart of the flow of the U.S. energy economy — all the sources and uses of energy throughout the system. It illuminates all sorts of interesting insights and bottlenecks, such as 42% of energy consumption is in the American household, yet the sources are relatively ‘dirty.’ Small shifts within the household to cleaner sources of energy and ‘greener’ equipment (heat pumps, air conditioners, stoves) could have large system-wide benefits.

Daniel A. Gross described this well:

If shipping companies succeed in decarbonizing cargo ships, some of the dirtiest vehicles on earth will get a little less dirty, and the carbon footprint of virtually every consumer will go down. A small advance in cooling technology, like a cheaper heat pump or a superefficient air-conditioner, will be multiplied by the billions of people who will need one as the planet warms. And, given that many machines, from heat pumps to cars, will be in service for decades to come, a dollar spent on research and development is probably worth a lot more today than years from now.

Instead of getting spun up on plastic straws, we might be best suited to focus on the small interventions that have the potential for high-leverage cascading effects.

Bottlenecks have compounding effects

Throughout history, we’ve seen examples of the compounding benefits of addressing bottlenecks:

Semiconductors: Early electronics hinged on vacuum tubes, which were bulky and energy-intensive. The invention of the compact and efficient transistor in 1947 at Bell Labs represented a major advancement. However, producing individual transistors was costly and slow. The 1958 creation of the integrated circuit, capable of hosting numerous transistors on one chip, revolutionized production efficiency. Unlocking these bottlenecks, both in the design and how to mass produce, laid the groundwork for the modern computing era that is still unfolding with far-reaching benefits across the economy and society.

Penicillin: Prior to penicillin, there was no effective treatment for many common bacterial infections, leading to high mortality rates for conditions that would now be considered minor. The discovery of penicillin's antibiotic properties by Alexander Fleming was a major breakthrough, but it was the development of mass-production techniques during World War II that really unlocked this bottleneck. By finding a high-yield strain of Penicillium mold and refining deep-tank fermentation techniques, scientists made it possible to produce penicillin on an industrial scale. This drastically reduced deaths from bacterial infections, transforming medical treatment and significantly improving life expectancy across the globe for decades to come.

Numerous societal breakthroughs illustrate the impact of alleviating bottlenecks. For instance, mRNA technology has streamlined vaccine development, while the adoption of the standard shipping container spurred global trade due to cost reduction and improved efficiency. Today, the integration of attention mechanisms in transformer models shows promise for the advancement of AI models.

One of the world's first general-purpose electronic digital computers: the Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer (ENIAC). The 30-ton behemoth covered about 140 square meters (1,500 square feet), used over 17,000 vacuum tubes, 70,000 resistors, 10,000 capacitors, 1,500 relays, and 6,000 manual switches, with 6 women operators “behind the machine.” (Source: Getty Images via IEEE Spectrum, from 1946)

We need a new science of bottlenecks

We need a new science of bottlenecks in complex systems — not only in identifying them but also in effectively mitigating them. This approach is at the heart of the theory of entanglement and may be an integral part of our journey toward a more resilient and prosperous future.

What if we could build better ways to study bottlenecks? We need systems to help us identify, understand, and diagnose bottlenecks. We need more interdependent ways of thinking to develop effective interventions to these breakpoints within society. Increasingly, technology may help us here: improved tools to aggregate large-scale data so we can “study the flow,” better methods to understand complex systems, or probabilistic models that can solve multi-faceted objectives within a system to generate novel insights.

We need to look for the “Pareto” points, where roughly 80% of the results come from 20% of the causes. These are the bottlenecks. We should try our best to focus on the kinks that matter most.

It could start by reframing these challenges to imagine what it would take if we succeed — what needs to happen for things to go right.

1 See Peter Attia’s book Outlive (Chapter 7) for an excellent discussion of this topic.

2 See McKinsey Global Institute’s research on this topic and its relationship to macro-economy from 2021.