With the expansion of drilling for natural gas in New York through Ohio, the Dakotas, Wyoming, and the southwest, the term “fracking” (or fracing) appears repeatedly—but incompletely—in the news. Fracking means hydraulic fracturing of an oil or natural gas well, but it seems the news media is fractured, delivering incomplete stories. Continue reading
Why is it that laws, regulations, and governmental policies are rarely formed according to the reality of the situation? Rather, a person, interest group, or party creates political pressure and financial rewards for a particular action. Is that why each action creates another problem? Certainly, each new law, regulation or policy creates new interactions among the actors in a complex system—and that’s more complexity. (See Blog 3.) I’m not a Libertarian; I don’t advocate erasure of most laws solely as a matter of principle. However, I do advocate looking before leaping, assessing real causes before applying ideal solutions. Let’s consider three diverse examples. Continue reading
These days, the term “holy war” brings to mind the conflict between Islamic terrorists and western cultures. Although the so-called Islamic Jihad is not the topic of this essay, there are some parallels between Islamic activism and American social movements. Those social movements are the topic, but first we need to distinguish those movements from the Islamic Jihad. I will paraphrase a description of the Jihad as given by James Turner Johnson, an academic scholar who has written several books on Islam and the west. Continue reading
In our society, we create new laws (e.g. Medicare) by legislation as done by congress, state legislatures, county supervisors, or town councils. We create new regulations (speed limits and plumbers’ license requirements) through agencies who get their authority from higher legislation. Each law or regulation is intended to fix a previous problem, and sure enough, each law or regulation generates at least one new problem. Continue reading
(adapted from lectures, 2007-08)
One day a friend remarked to me that he had been talking with a neighbor, when my name came up in the conversation. The second man let out an expression like, “Humph, he’s a liberal.” I found this amusing. I wondered what, exactly, did the second man mean? The media use the terms, “liberal” and “conservative,” or “left” and “right,” without ever defining them. I want to look at the meaning and implication of the terms, because the country is divided politically, socially, and religiously into two camps labeled as “liberal” and “conservative.” States are identified as either blue or red. I see a nation divided not so much by money as by different ways of life that are generated and shaped by beliefs. And if you think this polarity is entirely new, see the epilog at the end. Continue reading
A system is two or more things acting on each other. Like a weight bouncing on a spring. The weight pushes on the spring and the spring pushes back on the weight, with the result that the weight can bounce up and town. That’s a simple system. The scientific concept of complex systems arose during the last twenty years as the advances in computers enabled scientists to investigate nonlinear systems. Continue reading
So what? I see the world changing, largely due to technologies that few people understand and even fewer feel empowered to control. The world has always been changing, but now the rate of change is proportional to the sum of all changes that have occurred before. That’s what we mean by the term, “exponential,” a term used so often in the media that it is accepted as meaning “large,” without the understanding that it means larger than large. The purpose of these pages is to offer an analytical review of where we’ve come, and where we’re going, and why. The WHY is embedded in the unnoticed rules by which humans affect each other. Understanding the rules by which the individual parts affect each other—that’s the key to understanding and to controlling complex systems, about which these pages will say more. Continue reading