> http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article24874.htm
I somehow overlooked this.
Ed wrote:
> So, while I agree with Ferguson that when an empire (nation,
> economy, whatever) is ready to collapse, almost anything can bring
> it down. Yet I would put far more emphasis than he has on the long
> process that brings the empire to the threshold of collapse.
Ferguson refers to Brian Arthur and others at the Santa Fe Institute,
also the sometime home of Stuart Kauffmann, (whom I quoted in an
earlier post.)
Applying the notions of complexity, both sudden"collapse" and gradual
approach to a threshold are subsumed in one concept. Complex systems
don't stay exactly the same (as, say, simple equilibria do) but they
stay kinda sorta the same, viz. they have attractors, pathways of
evolution that are, overall, stable under many perturbations.
But another characteristic (after stability) is cataclysmic rather
than gradual or linear shift of the attractor to a completely
different region of the phase space in which the "complex system"
model of the real system is described. Stable stable wobble stable
stable ho-hum stable twitch..... catastrophe. Only the nature of
complexity is such that there are just too many variables and too many
relations between them for anybody to know or track the "important" or
"meaningful" ones.
So the right (or rather, wrong) state of the system has to exist, an
excursion into a "normal" and still meta-stable region, followed by
something that changes just the wrong elements of the system. The
result isn't a "collapse" in abstract terms, just a relocation in
phase space. Of course, for people trying to sell widgets or simpley
find lunch, it's a collapse.
Ho hum. It's all so complicated. I just can't be as hard as that,
can it? I hear that there's a growing movement in the US, taking a
clue from places such as Uganda, that says, "It's demons that are
making things bad. We just have to exorcise and cast out the demons
and, at least where we've done that, the Kingdom will rule." Jeez,
and *I* was accusing the *economists* of reducing eveything to a
function of a single variable. But golly, that sure makes it all nice
and uncomplicated, doesn't it? All you need are good old-fashioned
virtues like courage and perseverance and obedience.
- Mike
--
Michael Spencer Nova Scotia, Canada .~.
/V\
[email protected] /( )\
http://home.tallships.ca/mspencer/ ^^-^^
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