Lawry wrote:
> [John Warfield's "A Science of Generic Design"] came out at a time
> when a dozen first-rate books appeared linking design to societal
> change. Many of the them were based on cybernetics, systems
> analysis, and the still-faltering but ever fascinating fields of
> chaos and complexity. Names (sp?) like: Abrahamson, von Forrester,
> Miller, Aikens, Kaufmann, Bateson, Beer, Fuller, etc. etc.
Another paper relevant to "complex systems":
http://arxiv.org/pdf/1108.2455v1.pdf
with commentarty here:
http://motherboard.vice.com/2012/9/10/we-are-now-one-year-and-counting-from-global-riots-complex-systems-theorists-say--2
and here:
http://www.technologyreview.com/view/425019/the-cause-of-riots-and-the-price-of-food/
I don't see much in the PDF reflecting application of complexity
theory, general systems theory or the like, though. From the PDF:
We identify a specific food price threshold above which protests
become likely. These observations suggest that protests may
reflect not only long-standing political failings of governments,
but also the sudden desperate straits of vulnerable
populations. If food prices remain high, there is likely to be
persistent and increasing global social disruption. Underlying the
food price peaks we also find an ongoing trend of increasing
prices. We extrapolate these trends and identify a crossing point
to the domain of high impacts, even without price peaks, in
2012-2013.
This looks like a fairly straightforward model based on plotting from
past data. The problem with "complex" systems is that thresholds,
inflection points, trends etc. roughly predictable from past data can
be egregiously misleading. Complex systems exhibit (something like)
thresholds that are intrinsically unpredictable, un-identifiable,
because of the nature of complex systems [1] and such thresholds are
represent sudden transitions to whole new regions of the phase space
representing the system.
Interesting paper, though. Their predictions seem clear enough and
well supported by events. The real-politik jousters for global
dominance of energy resources and finance should be paying attention
to it. "Looking for work" may come down to looking for a gun (or some
rocks or just a pointy stick) if you and everybody for 50 miles around
you is weak with hunger.
BTW, I think Burkina Faso was absent from the list of countries, given
in that PDF, where food riots had occurred. Is that country perhaps
still largely feeding itself with local and subsistence farming rather
than with imports from global agribiz?
- Mike
[1] Viz. a very large number of elements or variables with an
exponentially larger number of connections between them.
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