I have suggested that, when daily living becomes sufficiently chaotic, people will look for simple solutions and welcome dictatorial control that promises simplicity. There’s some ancient Greek wisdom to support this view, although the Greeks didn’t have our mathematical notion of complexity that emerged during the last thirty years. Continue reading
When it comes to your theater, don’t miss it.
Robert Reich is a professor who teaches public policy at the University of California, Berkeley. He was President Clinton’s Secretary of Labor. Now he’s also the witty star of an entertaining new film released this week to theaters across the country. The film was directed by Jacob Kornbluth.
In earlier blogs of this sequence, I outlined how the society and the economy are complex systems—and how, if you want to change a complex system, you must adjust one or more of the rules by which it operates. Reich expands on this in regard to the increasing disparity of wealth in our economy. Continue reading
Complex systems are collections of many actors interacting by nonlinear rules. In this post, we’ll examine Looking Good and Being Right as two of those rules of interaction among the persons and institutions in the complex system that is society.
I detect a public malaise. When the discussion turns to today’s politics or business or and government, the comments all sound similar. Continue reading
In Blog 20, I described the Citizens United decision of the Supreme Court, which gave corporations the constitutional right to free speech and to make unlimited monetary donations to political advertising and commentary. Reportedly, Senator (and previous presidential candidate) John McCain (R-AZ) said Citizens United is “one of the worst decisions I have ever seen.”
Business fails without profits. Profits make business work. But should business be concerned only with profits? Milton Friedman, winner of a Nobel Prize in economics, said yes in an article that has now become famous. Continue reading
As Blog 1 discussed, society is changing faster every year, with the rate of change driven by the accumulation of prior changes. My frustrated colleagues issue complaints like this:
A model is an abstraction, a physical abstraction of an object or a conceptual abstraction of a situation. An architect might use a cardboard physical model to illustrate a proposed building. Conceptual models can represent complex systems like population dynamics, economics, or schooling fish. By “complex systems” I mean the things described in Blog 2 and Blog 3, situations with many independent agents governed by nonlinear rules of interaction among the agents and their surroundings. A conceptual model often takes the form of a set of equations with which the system can be simulated by computer, thereby becoming a “computer model.” Note I said simulated by computer, not solved by computer. Continue reading