Why Society is a Complex Matter: Meeting Twenty-first Century Challenges with a New Kind of Science

Why Society is a Complex Matter: Meeting Twenty-first Century Challenges with a New Kind of Science

Philip Ball

Language: English

Pages: 80

ISBN: 3642289991

Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub


Society is complicated. But this book argues that this does not place it beyond the reach of a science that can help to explain and perhaps even to predict social behaviour. As a system made up of many interacting agents – people, groups, institutions and governments, as well as physical and technological structures such as roads and computer networks – society can be regarded as a complex system. In recent years, scientists have made great progress in understanding how such complex systems operate, ranging from animal populations to earthquakes and weather. These systems show behaviours that cannot be predicted or intuited by focusing on the individual components, but which emerge spontaneously as a consequence of their interactions: they are said to be ‘self-organized’. Attempts to direct or manage such emergent properties generally reveal that ‘top-down’ approaches, which try to dictate a particular outcome, are ineffectual, and that what is needed instead is a ‘bottom-up’ approach that aims to guide self-organization towards desirable states.

This book shows how some of these ideas from the science of complexity can be applied to the study and management of social phenomena, including traffic flow, economic markets, opinion formation and the growth and structure of cities. Building on these successes, the book argues that the complex-systems view of the social sciences has now matured sufficiently for it to be possible, desirable and perhaps essential to attempt a grander objective: to integrate these efforts into a unified scheme for studying, understanding and ultimately predicting what happens in the world we have made. Such a scheme would require the mobilization and collaboration of many different research communities, and would allow society and its interactions with the physical environment to be explored through realistic models and large-scale data collection and analysis. It should enable us to find new and effective solutions to major global problems such as conflict, disease, financial instability, environmental despoliation and poverty, while avoiding unintended policy consequences. It could give us the foresight to anticipate and ameliorate crises, and to begin tackling some of the most intractable problems of the twenty-first century.

Philosophy and the Sciences for Everyone

Essentials of Geology (11th Edition)

New Theories of Everything: The Quest For Ultimate Explanation

The Making of Modern Science: Science, Technology, Medicine and Modernity 1789-1914 (Polity History of Science series)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

stop-and-go waves appeared (left), and, for still denser crowds, earthquake-like turbulent motion could be seen (right). (Credit: Courtesy of Dirk Helbing, ETH Zurich.) The onset of this hazardous turbulence happens when a parameter equal to the crowd density multiplied by the variation in speed of motion exceeds a certain threshold value. Real-time monitoring and analysis of video data on dense crowds can give advance warning of when this highly dangerous state is about to develop, so that

overgrown trees. As a result, less than three hours later the problem had cascaded to shut down 256 power plants over the east coast region. In 2003 a massive power blackout on the east side of North America affected one third of Canada’s population and one in seven people in the USA. The cause was disputed – some sources blamed a lightning strike in the Niagara region, others a fire at a power plant in New York or an alleged breakdown at a nuclear power plant in Pennsylvania. A report in 2004

alarming repercussions. Moreover, the crisis shows the true financial and social cost of ignoring these considerations. If massive investment in a science of economic complexity were to relieve the consequences of events such as the 2008 crisis by only a percent or so – let alone predicting and avoiding them – then the expenditure will have been justified many times over. The Problem with Economics Traditional economic theory makes several fundamental assumptions that seem now to be excessively

2008 crisis that such crises had been banished for good. Conventional models make additional over-simplifications. At their most basic, they state that all agents in the economy are identical, and that all have access to total information about the economy, on the basis of which they make the rational choices that will optimize their ‘utility’: maximizing revenue or profits, say, or finding an ideal work/leisure balance. These assumptions have been relaxed in various ways by more sophisticated

complex nature as a result of the strongly interconnected patterns and structures of life. Strongly connected, dynamical systems have a number of characteristic properties, for example:Even the most powerful computers cannot perform an optimization of the system behaviour in real time, when the number of interacting system elements is large. Most real-life complex systems behave probabilistically rather than deterministically, i. e. their behaviour cannot be exactly predicted. Strongly

Download sample

Download

About admin