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Tag Archives: complexity
How Do You Know When Society Is About to Fall Apart?
How Do You Know When Society Is About to Fall Apart? Meet the scholars who study civilizational collapse. When I first spoke with Joseph Tainter in early May, he and I and nearly everyone else had reason to be worried. A few days earlier, the official tally of Covid-19 infections in the United States had […]
Today’s Contemplation: Collapse Cometh VII
Today’s Contemplation: Collapse Cometh VII Pompeii, Italy (1993) Photo by author Ha! It’s poetry in motion Now she’s making love to me The spheres are in commotion The elements in harmony She blinded me with science (She blinded me with science!) And hit me with technology -Thomas Dolby, 1982 (She Blinded Me With Science) *** […]
The Four D’s That Define the Future
The Four D’s That Define the Future When the money runs out or loses its purchasing power, all sorts of complexity that were previously viewed as essential crumble to dust. Four D’s will define 2020-2025: derealization, denormalization, decomplexification and decoherence. That’s a lot of D’s. Let’s take them one at a time. I use the word derealization to […]
J.M. Keynes: The Time He Had A Point
J.M. Keynes: The Time He Had A Point John Maynard Keynes once said: “Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist. Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years […]
Nothing Can be Reduced to a Single Cause & Effect be it Markets or Nature
Nothing Can be Reduced to a Single Cause & Effect be it Markets or Nature QUESTION: Dear Mr. Armstrong, Thanks for the Socrates forecast. Just a question. What will possibly happen to existing Tropic Belt countries like my region South East Asia when the world is turning into global cooling? Any forecast? Regards, SS ANSWER: I […]
Society As Platform — A New Frontier in Complexity Science
Society As Platform — A New Frontier in Complexity Science Cities are profoundly complex incarnations of cultural evolution. Image Credit: Vincent Laforet Humanity is now confronted with new challenges unlike anything we have experienced before. Our evolved history as a species has not prepared us for what is happening now. It is time to start seeing culture as […]
Connected and vulnerable: Climate change, trade wars and the networked world
Connected and vulnerable: Climate change, trade wars and the networked world The increasing connectedness of the global economic system has long been touted as the path to greater prosperity and peaceful relations among nations and their peoples. There’s just one hitch: Complex systems have more points of failure and also hidden risks that only surface […]
Why Economists Can’t Understand Complex Systems: Not Even the Nobel Prize, William Nordhaus
Why Economists Can’t Understand Complex Systems: Not Even the Nobel Prize, William Nordhaus The “base case” scenario of “The Limits to Growth” 1972 report to the Club of Rome. The strong non-linearity of the behavior of complex systems — including the global economy — is nearly impossible to understand for people trained in economics. William […]
Fishtailing into the Future
Fishtailing into the Future The opening chapters of Michael Lewis’s new book, The Fifth Risk, detail the carelessness of the Trump transition team in the months leading up to his swearing-in as president. Former New Jersey governor Chris Christie led the team, with its binders full of possible agency chiefs, before he was summarily canned […]
The Telltale Signs of Imperial Decline
The Telltale Signs of Imperial Decline Nothing is as permanent as we imagine–especially super-complex, super-costly, super-asymmetric and super-debt-dependent systems. Check which signs of Imperial decline you see around you: The hubris of an increasingly incestuous and out-of-touch leadership; dismaying extremes of wealth inequality; self-serving, avaricious Elites; rising dependency of the lower classes on free Bread […]
Time For Some Climate Honesty
kienyke.com Time For Some Climate Honesty Half-truths are doing no good Let’s assume that you have doubts about ‘global warming’. Some people do and, truthfully, we utterly lack the ability to accurately model how much warming will happen, where and by when (emphasis on accurately). The reason is not for lack of trying or continual learning […]
