Albert-László Barabási, Linked: The New Science of Networks, Cambridge, Mass., Perseus Pub., 2002.
The construction and structure of graphs or networks is the key to understanding the complex world around us. Small changes in the topology, affecting only a few of the nodes or links, can open up hidden doors, allowing new possibilities to emerge. [12]
Random network theory tells us that as the average number of links per node increases beyond the critical one, the number of nodes left out of the giant cluster decreases exponentially. That is, the more links we add, the harder it is to find a node that remains isolated. Nature does not take risks by staying close to the threshold. It well surpasses it. Consequently, the networks around us are not just webs. They are very dense networks from which nothing can escape and within which every node is navigable. [19]
Stanley Milgram awakened us to the fact that not only are we connected, but we live in a world in which no one is more than a few handshakes from anyone else. That is, we live in a small world. Our world is small because society is a very dense web. We have far more friends than the critical one needed to keep us connected. [30]
The number of social links an individual can actively maintain has increased dramatically, bringing down the degrees of separation. Stanley Milgram estimated six. Frigyes Karinthy five. We could be much lcoser these days to three. [39]
Our ability to reach people has less and less to do with the physical distance between us. Discovering common acquaintances with perfect strangers on worldwide trips repeatedly reminds us that some people on the other side of the planet are often closer along the social network than people living next door. Navigating this non-Euclidean world repeatedly tricks our intuition and reminds us that there is a new geometry out there that we need to master in order to make sense of the complex world around us. [40]
Hubs appear in most large complex networks that scientists have been able to study so far. They are ubiquitous, a generic building block of our complex, interconnected world. [63]
The power law distribution thus forces us to abandon the idea of a scale, or a characteristic node. In a continuous hierarchy there is no single node which we could pick out and claim to be characteristic of all the nodes. There is no intrinsic scale in these networks. ... With the realization that most complex networks in nature have a power-law degree distribution, the term scale-free networks rapidly infiltrated most disciplines faced with complex webs. [70]
Nature normally hates power laws. In ordinary systems all quantities follow bell curves, and correlations decay rapidly, obeying exponential laws. But all that changes if the system is forced to undergo a phase transition. Then power laws emerge - nature's unmistakable sign that chaos is departing in favor of order. ... They are the patent signatures of self-organization in complex systems. [77]
The scale-free topology is a natural consequence of the ever-expanding nature of real networks. ... Thanks to growth and preferential attachment, a few highly connected hubs emerge. [87]
Growth and preferential attachment can explain the basic features of the networks seen in nature. [91]
In networks that display fit-get-rich behavior, competition leads to a scale-free topology. Most networks we have studied so far - the Web, the Internet, the cell, Hollywood, and many other real networks - belong to this category. The winner shares the spotlight with a continuous hierarchy of hubs.
Yet Bose-Einstein condensation offers the theoretical possibility that in some systems the winner can grab all the links. When that happens, the scale-free topology vanishes. [107]
Most systems displaying a high degree of tolerance against failures share a common feature: Their functionality is guaranteed by a highly interconnected complex network. ... It seems that nature strives to achieve robustness through interconnectivity. Such universal choice of a network architecture is perhaps more than mere coincidence. [111]
Similarly, in scale-free networks, failures predominantly affect the numerous small nodes. Thus, these networks do not break apart under failures. The accidental removal of a single hub will not be fatal either, since the continuous hierarchy of several large hubs will maintain the network's integrity. Topological robustness is thus rooted in the structural unevenness of scale-free networks: Failures disproportionately affect small nodes. [114]
For scale-free networks the critical threshold to break break apart disappears in cases where the degree exponent is smaller or equal to three. Amazingly, most networks of interest, ranging from the Internet to the cell, are scale-free and have a degree exponent smaller than three. Therefore, these networks break apart only after all nodes have been removed - or, for all practical purposes, never. [115]
The response of scale-free networks to attacks is similar to the behavior of random networks under failures. There is a crucial difference, however. We do not need to remove a large number of nodes to reach the critical point. Disable a few of the hubs and a scale-free network will fall to pieces in no time. [117]
The removal of the most connected nodes rapidly disintegrates these networks, breaking them into tiny noncommunicating islands. Therefore, hidden within their structure, scale-free networks harbor an unsuspected Achilles' heel, coupling a robustness against failures with vulnerability to attack. [118]
When a network acts as a transportation system, a local failure shifts loads or responsibilities to other nodes. If the extra load is negligible, it can be seamlessly absorbed by the rest of the system, and the failure remains effectively unnoticed. If the extra load is too much for the neighboring nodes to carry, they will either tip or again redistribute the load to their neighbors. Either way, we are faced with a cascading failure. [120]
Most cascades are not instantaneous: Failures can go unnoticed for a long time before starting a landslide. Attempting to decrease the frequency of such cascades has inevitable consequences, however, as those cascades that do succeed are then more disruptive. [121]
The Pfizer study of how physicians adopt a new drug demonstrated that innovations spread from innovators to hubs. The hubs in turn send the information out along their numerous links, reaching most people within a given social or professional network. [129]
In scale-free networks the epidemic threshold miraculously vanished! That is, even if a virus is not very contagious, it spreads and persists. Defying all wisdom accumulated during five decades of diffusion studies, viruses traveling in scale-free networks do not appear to notice any threshold. They are practically unstoppable. [135]
While you could persuade an institution to close down the portion of the network under its authority, no single company or person controls more than a negligible fraction of the whole Internet. The underlying network has become so distributed, decentralized, and locally guarded that even such an ordinary task as getting a central map of it has become virtually impossible. [148]
While entirely of human design, the Internet now lives a life of its own. It has all the characteristics of a complex evolving system, making it more similar to a cell than a computer chip. Many diverse components, developed separately, contribute to the functioning of a system that is far more than the sum of its parts. [150]
Like architects' buildings, the Web's architecture is the product of two equally important layers: code and collective human actions taking advantage of the code. The first can be regulated by courts, government, and companies alike. The second, however, cannot be shaped by any single user or institution, because the Web has no central design - it is self-organized. It evolves from the individual actions of millions of users. As a result, its architecture is much richer than the sum of its parts. Most of the Web's truly important features and emerging properties derive from its large-scale self-organized topology. [174]
As research, innovation, product development, and marketing become more and more specialized and divorced from each other, we are converging to a network economy in which strategic alliances and partnerships are the means for survival in all industries. [208]
In a network economy, buyers and suppliers are not competitors but partners. The relationship between them is often very long lasting and stable.
The stability of these links allows companies to concentrate on their core business. If these partnerships break down, the effects can be severe. Most of the time failures handicap only the partners of the broken link. Occasionally, however, they send ripples through the whole economy. [209]
In reality, the market is nothing but a directed network. Companies, firms, corporations, financial institutions, governments, and all potential economic players are the nodes. Links quantify various interactions between these institutions, involving purchases and sales, joint research and marketing projects, and so forth. The weight of the links captures the value of the transaction, and the direction points from the provider to the receiver. The structure and evolution of this weighted and directed network determine the outcome of all macroeconomic processes. [209]
If we view the economy as a highly interconnected network of companies and financial institutions, we can begin to make sense of these events. In such networks the failure of a node has little effect on the system's integrity. Occasionally, however, the breakdown of some well-selected nodes sets off a cascade of failures that can shake the whole system. [211]
Cascading failures are a direct consequence of a network economy, of interdependencies induced by the fact that in a global economy no institution can work alone. [211]
A me attitude, where the company's immediate financial balance is the only factor, limits network thinking. Not understanding how the actions of one node affect other nodes easily cripples whole segments of the network. ... Hierarchical thinking does not fit a network economy. In traditional organizations, rapid shifts can be made within the organization, which any resulting losses being offset by gains in other parts of the hierarchy. In a network economy each node must be profitable. [213]
1.01.2002
1.01.1996
Michael J. Sandel
Michael J. Sandel, Democracy's Discontent: America in Search of a Public Philosophy, Belknap Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1996.
The republican conception of freedom, unlike the liberal conception, requires a formative politics, a politics that cultivates in citizens the qualities of character self-government requires. [6]
On the republican view, liberty is understood as a consequence of self-government. I am free insofar as I am a member of a political community that controls its own fate, and a participant in the decisions that govern its affairs.
To put the point another way, the republican sees liberty as internally connected to self-government and the civic virtues that sustain it. Republican freedom requires a certain form of public life, which depends in turn on the cultivation of civic virtue. [26]
Madison took rights seriously - more seriously than the Anti-Federalists - but thought that structures of government, not 'parchment barriers,' would best protect them. [36]
Given its hostility to human reforms, the Lochner Court's service to contemporary liberalism may not be readily apparent. Armed with the doctrine of substantive due process, it had defended the excesses of industrial capitalism and frustrated progressive reforms. In the process, it discredited both the economic theory if favored and the constitutional doctrine it used to enforce it. Later liberals would enforce different rights, but not without the worry that they, like the Lochner justices, were failing to let the majority rule.
...
For the first time in American history, rights functioned as trumps. Liberty no longer depended on dispersed power alone, but found direct protection from the courts. Where fundamental rights were seen to be at stake, even the principles of federalism and state sovereignty no longer impeded judicial intervention. The Lochner Court thus offered the first sustained constitutional expression of the priority of the right over the good, at least in the sense that certain individual rights prevailed against legislative policies enacted in the name of the public good. [42]
[what is the court (and legal system) but one branch (subsystem) in the dispersal of constitutional power?]
In Madison's view, the Constitution would make its contribution to moral and civic improvement indirectly, by empowering the national government to shape a political economy hospitable to republican virtue.
Madison's and Hamilton's contrasting visions of civic virtue explain why these allies in defense of the Constitution parted company on matters of political economy. As soon became clear, they had different ends in mind for the national government they helped create, and for the kind of citizens they hoped to cultivate. Madison sought national power to preserve the agrarian way of life he believed republican government required. Hamilton rejected the ideal of a virtuous agrarian republic. He sought national power to create the conditions for the advanced commercial and manufacturing economy that Jefferson and Madison considered inimical to republican government. Hamilton did not despair at the prospect of a modern commercial society, with its social inequalities and rampant pursuit of self-interest. To the contrary, he regarded these developments as inevitable conditions of the powerful and prosperous nation he hoped to build.
From the standpoint of twentieth-century politics, the issue between Hamilton and his republican opponents might appear a familiar contest between economic growth on the one hand and fairness on the other. But these were not the primary terms of the debate. The arguments for and against Hamiltonian finance had less to do with prosperity and fairness than with the meaning of republican government and the kind of citizen it required.
Hamilton did believe his plan would lay the basis for economic growth, but his primary purpose was not to maximize the gross national product. For Hamilton, as for Jefferson and Madison, economics was the handmaiden of politics, not the other way around. [138]
[For Sandel, character not constraint is the focus of early debates on political economy; political economy shapes the character of the citizenry.]
Many Americans objected that encouraging large-scale manufactures would make for a political economy inhospitable to republican citizenship. They feared that manufactures on a scale beyond that of the household or small workshop would create a propertyless class of impoverished workers, crowded into cities, incapable of exercising the independent judgment citizenship requires. As Jefferson wrote in his Notes on the State of Virginia, 'Dependence begets subservience and venality, suffocates the germ of virtue, and prepares fit tools for the designs of ambition.' Factory life breeds a 'corruption of morals' not found among farmers. 'While we have land to labour then, let us never wish to see our citizens occupied at a work-bench, or twirling a distaff.'
In a letter to John Jay, Jefferson's civic argument was even more explicit. 'Cultivators of the earth are the most valuable citizens. They are the most vigorous, the most independent, the most virtuous, and they are tied to their country and wedded to its liberty and interest by the most lasting bonds.' If ever the day came when there were too many farmers, Jefferson would rather Americans become sailors than manufacturers. 'I consider the class of artificers as the panders of vice and the instruments by which liberties of a country are generally overturned.'
Jefferson's objection was not to manufacturing as such, but to enterprises that would concentrate men and machines in cities and erode the political economy of citizenship. He drew sharp distinctions between household manufactures, which he favored, and extensive manufactures, which he opposed. Household manufactures did not pose a threat to the political economy of citizenship, for two reasons. First, dispersed in the country, they did not create the concentrated wealth and power of highly capitalized factory production in large commercial cities. Second, househould manufactures did not for the most part draw on the labor of citizens, but on the labor of women and children. It left able-bodied yeomen to work the land, their independence unimpaired. [143]
The economic debates of the Jacksonian era differ from our own in ways that go beyond the parties' stance toward government and display the persistence of republican themes in the 1830s and 1840s. Although Jacksonians and Whigs did invoke arguments of economic growth and distributive justice, these considerations figured less as ends in themselves than as means to competing visions of a self-governing republic. The Jacksonian objection to the growing inequality of wealth had less to do with fairness than with the threat to self-government posed by large concentrations of wealth and power. The Whig case for promoting economic development had less to do with increasing the standard of living or maximizing consumption than with cultivating national community and strengthening the bonds of the union. Underlying the debates between Democrats and Whigs were competing visions of a political economy of citizenship.
In different ways, both parties shared Jefferson's conviction that the economic life of the nation should be judged for its capacity to cultivate in citizens the qualities of character that self-government requires. [157]
As Keynesian fiscal policy rose to prominence after World War II, the civic strand of economic argument faded from American political discourse. Economic policy attended more to the size and distribution of the national product and less to the conditions of self-government. Americans increasingly viewed economic arrangements as instruments of consumption, not as schools for citizenship. The formative ambition gave way to the more mundane hope of increasing and dispersing the fruits of prosperity. Rather than cultivate virtuous citizens, government would take people's wants and desires as given, and pursue policies aimed at satisfying them as fully and fairly as possible.
From the standpoint of the republican tradition, the demise of the political economy of citizenship constituted a concession, a deflation of American ideals, a loss of liberty. Republican political theory teaches that to be free is to share in governing a political community that controls its own fate. Self-government in this sense requires political communities that control their destinies, and citizens who identify sufficiently with those communities to think and act with a view to the common good. Cultivating in citizens the virtue, independence, and shared understandings such civic engagement requires is a central aim of republican politics. To abandon the formative ambition is thus to abandon the project of liberty as the republican tradition conceives it. [274]
Despite the expansion of rights and entitlements and despite the achievements of the political economy of growth and distributive justice, Americans found to their frustration by the 1970s that they were losing control of the forces that governed their lives. At home and abroad, events spun out control, and government seemed helpless to respond. At the same time, the circumstances of modern life were eroding those forms of community - families and neighborhoods, cities and towns, civic and ethnic and religious communities - that situate people in the world and provide a source of identity and belonging.
Taken together, these two fears - for the loss of self-government and the erosion of community - defined the anxiety of the age. It was an anxiety that the reigning political agenda, with its attenuated civic resources, was unable to answer or even address. This failure fueled the discontent that has beset American democracy from the late 1960s to the present day. [294]
Americans began to think of themselves less as agents than as instruments of larger forces that defied their understanding and control. [296]
Despite the success of the liberal project, and perhaps party because of it, Americans found themselves the victims of large, impersonal forces beyond their control. Robert Kennedy linked this loss of agency to the erosion of self-government and the sense of community that sustains it. [300]
Robert Kennedy's case for decentralizing political power reflected the insight that even a realized welfare state cannot secure the part of freedom bound up with sharing in self-rule; it cannot provide, and may even erode, the civic capacities and communal resources necessary to self-government. In the mounting discontents of American public life, Kennedy glimpsed the failure of liberal politics to attend to the civic dimension of freedom. [300]
Respecting persons as free and independent selves, capable of choosing their own ends, meant providing each person as a matter of right a certain measure of economic security. Robert Kennedy disagreed. Unlike many liberals, he did not draw his inspiration from the voluntarist conception of freedom. His primary concern was with the civic dimension of freedom, the capacity to share in self-government. On these grounds, he rejected welfare and a guaranteed income as inadequate.
Although welfare might alleviate poverty, it did not equip persons with the moral and civic capacities to share in full citizenship. [302]
The anxieties of the 1980s concerned the erosion of those communities intermediate between the individual and the nation, such as families and neighborhoods, cities and towns, schools and congregations. American democracy had long relied on associations like these to cultivate a public spirit that the nation alone cannot command. As the republican tradition taught, local attachments can serve self-government by engaging citizens in a common life beyond their private pursuits, by forming the habit of attending to public things. They enable citizens, in Tocqueville's phrase, to 'practice the art of government in the small sphere within [their] reach.' [314]
The triumph of the voluntarist conception of freedom has coincided with a growing sense of disempowerment. Despite the expansion of rights in recent decades, Americans find to their frustration that they are losing control of the forces that govern their lives. This has partly to do with the insecurity of jobs in the global economy, but it also reflects the self-image by which we live. The liberal self-image and the actual organization of modern social and economic life are sharply at odds. Even as we think and act as freely choosing, independent selves, we confront a world governed by impersonal structures of power that defy our understanding and control. [323]
As affluent Americans increasingly buy their way out of reliance on public services, the formative, civic resources of American life diminish. The deterioration of urban public schools is perhaps the most conspicuous and damaging instance of this trend. Another is the growing reliance on private security services, one of the fastest-growing occupational categories of the 1980s. So great was the demand for security personnel in shopping malls, airports, retail stores, and residential communities that by 1990 the number of private security guards nationwide exceeded the number of public police officers. [332]
Civic conservatives have not, for the most part, acknowledged that market forces, under conditions of inequality, erode those aspects of community life that bring rich and poor together in public places and pursuits. [332]
A more civic-minded liberalism would seek communal provision less for the sake of distributive justice than for the sake of affirming the membership and forming the civic identity of rich and poor alike. [333]
Confronted with an economy that threatened to defy democratic control, Progressives such as Theodore Roosevelt and Herbert Croly and their New Deal successors sought to increase the powers of the national government. If democracy were to survive, they concluded, the concentration of economic power would have to be met by a similar concentration of political power. But this task involved more than the centralization of government; it also required the nationalization of politics. The primary form of political community had to be recast on a national scale. Only in this way could they hope to ease the gap between the scale of social and economic life and the terms in which people conceived their identities. [340]
The nationalizing of American political life occurred largely in response to industrial capitalism. The consolidation of economic power called forth the consolidation of political power. Present-day conservatives who rail against big government often ignore this fact. They wrongly assume that rolling back the power of the national government would liberate individuals to pursue their own ends instead of leaving them at the mercy of economic forces beyond their control. [346]
The republican conception of freedom, unlike the liberal conception, requires a formative politics, a politics that cultivates in citizens the qualities of character self-government requires. [6]
On the republican view, liberty is understood as a consequence of self-government. I am free insofar as I am a member of a political community that controls its own fate, and a participant in the decisions that govern its affairs.
To put the point another way, the republican sees liberty as internally connected to self-government and the civic virtues that sustain it. Republican freedom requires a certain form of public life, which depends in turn on the cultivation of civic virtue. [26]
Madison took rights seriously - more seriously than the Anti-Federalists - but thought that structures of government, not 'parchment barriers,' would best protect them. [36]
Given its hostility to human reforms, the Lochner Court's service to contemporary liberalism may not be readily apparent. Armed with the doctrine of substantive due process, it had defended the excesses of industrial capitalism and frustrated progressive reforms. In the process, it discredited both the economic theory if favored and the constitutional doctrine it used to enforce it. Later liberals would enforce different rights, but not without the worry that they, like the Lochner justices, were failing to let the majority rule.
...
For the first time in American history, rights functioned as trumps. Liberty no longer depended on dispersed power alone, but found direct protection from the courts. Where fundamental rights were seen to be at stake, even the principles of federalism and state sovereignty no longer impeded judicial intervention. The Lochner Court thus offered the first sustained constitutional expression of the priority of the right over the good, at least in the sense that certain individual rights prevailed against legislative policies enacted in the name of the public good. [42]
[what is the court (and legal system) but one branch (subsystem) in the dispersal of constitutional power?]
In Madison's view, the Constitution would make its contribution to moral and civic improvement indirectly, by empowering the national government to shape a political economy hospitable to republican virtue.
Madison's and Hamilton's contrasting visions of civic virtue explain why these allies in defense of the Constitution parted company on matters of political economy. As soon became clear, they had different ends in mind for the national government they helped create, and for the kind of citizens they hoped to cultivate. Madison sought national power to preserve the agrarian way of life he believed republican government required. Hamilton rejected the ideal of a virtuous agrarian republic. He sought national power to create the conditions for the advanced commercial and manufacturing economy that Jefferson and Madison considered inimical to republican government. Hamilton did not despair at the prospect of a modern commercial society, with its social inequalities and rampant pursuit of self-interest. To the contrary, he regarded these developments as inevitable conditions of the powerful and prosperous nation he hoped to build.
From the standpoint of twentieth-century politics, the issue between Hamilton and his republican opponents might appear a familiar contest between economic growth on the one hand and fairness on the other. But these were not the primary terms of the debate. The arguments for and against Hamiltonian finance had less to do with prosperity and fairness than with the meaning of republican government and the kind of citizen it required.
Hamilton did believe his plan would lay the basis for economic growth, but his primary purpose was not to maximize the gross national product. For Hamilton, as for Jefferson and Madison, economics was the handmaiden of politics, not the other way around. [138]
[For Sandel, character not constraint is the focus of early debates on political economy; political economy shapes the character of the citizenry.]
Many Americans objected that encouraging large-scale manufactures would make for a political economy inhospitable to republican citizenship. They feared that manufactures on a scale beyond that of the household or small workshop would create a propertyless class of impoverished workers, crowded into cities, incapable of exercising the independent judgment citizenship requires. As Jefferson wrote in his Notes on the State of Virginia, 'Dependence begets subservience and venality, suffocates the germ of virtue, and prepares fit tools for the designs of ambition.' Factory life breeds a 'corruption of morals' not found among farmers. 'While we have land to labour then, let us never wish to see our citizens occupied at a work-bench, or twirling a distaff.'
In a letter to John Jay, Jefferson's civic argument was even more explicit. 'Cultivators of the earth are the most valuable citizens. They are the most vigorous, the most independent, the most virtuous, and they are tied to their country and wedded to its liberty and interest by the most lasting bonds.' If ever the day came when there were too many farmers, Jefferson would rather Americans become sailors than manufacturers. 'I consider the class of artificers as the panders of vice and the instruments by which liberties of a country are generally overturned.'
Jefferson's objection was not to manufacturing as such, but to enterprises that would concentrate men and machines in cities and erode the political economy of citizenship. He drew sharp distinctions between household manufactures, which he favored, and extensive manufactures, which he opposed. Household manufactures did not pose a threat to the political economy of citizenship, for two reasons. First, dispersed in the country, they did not create the concentrated wealth and power of highly capitalized factory production in large commercial cities. Second, househould manufactures did not for the most part draw on the labor of citizens, but on the labor of women and children. It left able-bodied yeomen to work the land, their independence unimpaired. [143]
The economic debates of the Jacksonian era differ from our own in ways that go beyond the parties' stance toward government and display the persistence of republican themes in the 1830s and 1840s. Although Jacksonians and Whigs did invoke arguments of economic growth and distributive justice, these considerations figured less as ends in themselves than as means to competing visions of a self-governing republic. The Jacksonian objection to the growing inequality of wealth had less to do with fairness than with the threat to self-government posed by large concentrations of wealth and power. The Whig case for promoting economic development had less to do with increasing the standard of living or maximizing consumption than with cultivating national community and strengthening the bonds of the union. Underlying the debates between Democrats and Whigs were competing visions of a political economy of citizenship.
In different ways, both parties shared Jefferson's conviction that the economic life of the nation should be judged for its capacity to cultivate in citizens the qualities of character that self-government requires. [157]
As Keynesian fiscal policy rose to prominence after World War II, the civic strand of economic argument faded from American political discourse. Economic policy attended more to the size and distribution of the national product and less to the conditions of self-government. Americans increasingly viewed economic arrangements as instruments of consumption, not as schools for citizenship. The formative ambition gave way to the more mundane hope of increasing and dispersing the fruits of prosperity. Rather than cultivate virtuous citizens, government would take people's wants and desires as given, and pursue policies aimed at satisfying them as fully and fairly as possible.
From the standpoint of the republican tradition, the demise of the political economy of citizenship constituted a concession, a deflation of American ideals, a loss of liberty. Republican political theory teaches that to be free is to share in governing a political community that controls its own fate. Self-government in this sense requires political communities that control their destinies, and citizens who identify sufficiently with those communities to think and act with a view to the common good. Cultivating in citizens the virtue, independence, and shared understandings such civic engagement requires is a central aim of republican politics. To abandon the formative ambition is thus to abandon the project of liberty as the republican tradition conceives it. [274]
Despite the expansion of rights and entitlements and despite the achievements of the political economy of growth and distributive justice, Americans found to their frustration by the 1970s that they were losing control of the forces that governed their lives. At home and abroad, events spun out control, and government seemed helpless to respond. At the same time, the circumstances of modern life were eroding those forms of community - families and neighborhoods, cities and towns, civic and ethnic and religious communities - that situate people in the world and provide a source of identity and belonging.
Taken together, these two fears - for the loss of self-government and the erosion of community - defined the anxiety of the age. It was an anxiety that the reigning political agenda, with its attenuated civic resources, was unable to answer or even address. This failure fueled the discontent that has beset American democracy from the late 1960s to the present day. [294]
Americans began to think of themselves less as agents than as instruments of larger forces that defied their understanding and control. [296]
Despite the success of the liberal project, and perhaps party because of it, Americans found themselves the victims of large, impersonal forces beyond their control. Robert Kennedy linked this loss of agency to the erosion of self-government and the sense of community that sustains it. [300]
Robert Kennedy's case for decentralizing political power reflected the insight that even a realized welfare state cannot secure the part of freedom bound up with sharing in self-rule; it cannot provide, and may even erode, the civic capacities and communal resources necessary to self-government. In the mounting discontents of American public life, Kennedy glimpsed the failure of liberal politics to attend to the civic dimension of freedom. [300]
Respecting persons as free and independent selves, capable of choosing their own ends, meant providing each person as a matter of right a certain measure of economic security. Robert Kennedy disagreed. Unlike many liberals, he did not draw his inspiration from the voluntarist conception of freedom. His primary concern was with the civic dimension of freedom, the capacity to share in self-government. On these grounds, he rejected welfare and a guaranteed income as inadequate.
Although welfare might alleviate poverty, it did not equip persons with the moral and civic capacities to share in full citizenship. [302]
The anxieties of the 1980s concerned the erosion of those communities intermediate between the individual and the nation, such as families and neighborhoods, cities and towns, schools and congregations. American democracy had long relied on associations like these to cultivate a public spirit that the nation alone cannot command. As the republican tradition taught, local attachments can serve self-government by engaging citizens in a common life beyond their private pursuits, by forming the habit of attending to public things. They enable citizens, in Tocqueville's phrase, to 'practice the art of government in the small sphere within [their] reach.' [314]
The triumph of the voluntarist conception of freedom has coincided with a growing sense of disempowerment. Despite the expansion of rights in recent decades, Americans find to their frustration that they are losing control of the forces that govern their lives. This has partly to do with the insecurity of jobs in the global economy, but it also reflects the self-image by which we live. The liberal self-image and the actual organization of modern social and economic life are sharply at odds. Even as we think and act as freely choosing, independent selves, we confront a world governed by impersonal structures of power that defy our understanding and control. [323]
As affluent Americans increasingly buy their way out of reliance on public services, the formative, civic resources of American life diminish. The deterioration of urban public schools is perhaps the most conspicuous and damaging instance of this trend. Another is the growing reliance on private security services, one of the fastest-growing occupational categories of the 1980s. So great was the demand for security personnel in shopping malls, airports, retail stores, and residential communities that by 1990 the number of private security guards nationwide exceeded the number of public police officers. [332]
Civic conservatives have not, for the most part, acknowledged that market forces, under conditions of inequality, erode those aspects of community life that bring rich and poor together in public places and pursuits. [332]
A more civic-minded liberalism would seek communal provision less for the sake of distributive justice than for the sake of affirming the membership and forming the civic identity of rich and poor alike. [333]
Confronted with an economy that threatened to defy democratic control, Progressives such as Theodore Roosevelt and Herbert Croly and their New Deal successors sought to increase the powers of the national government. If democracy were to survive, they concluded, the concentration of economic power would have to be met by a similar concentration of political power. But this task involved more than the centralization of government; it also required the nationalization of politics. The primary form of political community had to be recast on a national scale. Only in this way could they hope to ease the gap between the scale of social and economic life and the terms in which people conceived their identities. [340]
The nationalizing of American political life occurred largely in response to industrial capitalism. The consolidation of economic power called forth the consolidation of political power. Present-day conservatives who rail against big government often ignore this fact. They wrongly assume that rolling back the power of the national government would liberate individuals to pursue their own ends instead of leaving them at the mercy of economic forces beyond their control. [346]
1.01.1995
Athol Fitzgibbons
Athol Fitzgibbons, Adam Smith's System of Liberty, Wealth, and Virtue, New York, Oxford University Press, 1995.
Far from thinking that commerce could solve moral problems, Smith subscribed to that part of the Hobbesian philosophy which identified unrestrained human beings with wild animals, with an inclination 'to extort all they can from their inferiors' (JA 23), and a 'love of dominion and authority over others' (JA 187). But unlike Hobbes, who had thought that human self-love and beastliness could be circumscribed only by an authoritarian state, and unlike Hume, who thought that the solution was commerce and a humane social consensus, Smith argued that each individual had an innate tendency to respect the rules of natural justice. [101]
The virtues of prudence, justice and beneficence, have no tendency to produce any but the most agreeable effects. (TMS 264) [104]
A liberal state could safely maintain a standing army:
Men of republican principles have been jealous of a standing army as dangerous to liberty... But where the sovereign himself is the general, and the principle nobility and gentry of the country the chief officers of the army; where the military force is placed under the command of those who have the greatest interest in the support of the civil authority, because they have themselves the greatest share of that authority, a standing army can never be dangerous to liberty. On the contrary, it may in some cases by favourable to liberty. (WN 706-7) [123]
The libertarian view that Smith 'erected a stupendous palace upon the granite of self-interest' (Stigler, in Skinner and Wilson: 237), trades on a confusion between the two terms. Smith did not regard self-love as the foundation of society; or in modern words the capitalist system was not originally meant to be built on greed. Mandeville had argued, in his Fable of the Bees, that economic life presupposed vanity, greed, and other forms of self-love, from which Mandeville had concluded that self-love was the great prerequisite for civilization. Although that position is often attributed to Smith, he retorted that Mandeville's 'licentious' system was marred by a basic error, despite its recognition of a fundamental truth. Mandeville had not understood that a particular degree of virtue was appropriate to each action. 'It is the great fallacy of Dr Mandeville's book to represent every passion as wholly vicious... in any degree and in any direction; (TMS 312). Smith's argument was that a whole range of actions, including ambition, enterprise, industry, frugality, and abstinence, expressed an inferior virtue or drew on mixed motives. A combination of high an low motives was usually appropriate, and the usual complaint that other people were selfish meant only that there was too much self-love and not enough benevolence in a particular instance:
The cause of this [complaint], however, is not that self-love can never be the motive of a virtuous action, but that the benevolent motive appears in this particular case to want its due degree of strength, and to be altogether unsuitable to its object. (TMS 304) [139]
Higher and lower motives were to be united in self-interest, but self-interest did not mean what the Chicago school of economics commonly supposes. If Smith had really said (which he did not) that self-interest was the foundation of society, it would have meant merely that society would properly be based on self-love and the virtues. What Smith actually said was much more explicit; the foundations of society was justice, 'Justice is the main pillar that upholds the whole edifice', because the whole object of the laws, without which society could not exist, was to constrain the useful motives of greed and self-love. The foundation of Smith's society was legal constraint on excessive self-love, and not self-love itself. [140]
The laws of justice would facilitate the division of labour, but economic growth did not depend entirely on the division of labour or the consequent extent of the market. It was limited primarily by the accumulation of capital, without which the division of labour could not proceed:
As the accumulation of stock must, in the nature of things, be previous to the division of labour, so labour can be more and more subdivided in proportion only as stock is previously more and more accumulated. (WN 277) [145]
But even the acquisition of inferior virtues required the conscious cultivation of impartiality to oneself:
In the steadiness of his industry and frugality, in his steadily sacrificing the ease and enjoyment of the present moment... the [inferior] prudent man is always supported and rewarded by the entire approbation of the impartial spectator.
Inferior prudence required self-command as well as self-love because, instead of providing for a different self in a future situation, the unconstrained ego would opt for immediate gratification:
The impartial spectator does not feel himself worn out by the present labour of those whose conduct he surveys; nor does he feel himself solicited by the importunate calls of their present appetites. To him their present, and what is likely to be their future situation, are very nearly the same. (TMS 215) [146]
[Impartial spectator = rationality / What if planning did not exist, only a different sort of gratification?]
Each action called for its own particular balance of virtue and self-love; the highest degree of virtue was required for the contemplation of moral philosophy and the formulation of the laws, but the same virtue was in a lesser degree required for commerce. Virtue could be expressed in commerce or in public life:
The superior wisdom of the good and knowing man directs others in the management of his affairs, and spurs them on to imitate his industry and activity. (JA 338) [147]
The laws of justice would encourage the extension of a complex web of trade and production, while the other virtues would help augment the capital stock and put the economy into rapid motion. [148]
But both the Lectures and the Wealth warned of the possible moral dangers of commercial life. As the division of labour extended, Smith noted, the variety of commodities and productive processes tended to increase, but the variety of work declined (WN 783). Although the ruling elite would find its life enriched by these innovations, the characters of most people were moulded by their mode of employment, and the enforced specialization of work would have a narrowing effect on the individual's psyche. The whole culture that went with the production of wealth would restrict the individual's intellectual horizons and dilute the spiritedness that war and public life required. [155]
As money values and the division of labour generated alienation within the capitalist system, the growing contradiction between the social and productive forces (commerce without virtue) would eventually produce a revolution that would transform society and the state (Smith's historical cycle). [156]
It was most important for the legislature to pass impartial laws, but the individuals who had to pass these laws were not impartial themselves. The demands of human nature and the 'rooted prejudices of the people' would make political impartiality almost impossible, and yet if the gulf between the impartial ideal and what was politically feasible were too great, society would break down. 'If the two principles coincide and act in the same direction, the game of human society will go on easily and harmoniously,' but otherwise 'society will be in the highest degree of disorder.' (TMS 234) [163]
Instead of conceding that 'the commercial system' was based on values, Smith presented its operation as the very opposite to a true value system. Amoral political systems confuse means with ends; and Smith presented the commercial system as a perverse and paradoxical system of power which really harmed the society whose interests it was supposed to promote. The commercial system aimed at low wages, when the only just and sensible aim of political economy was to encourage high wages, and its ultimate purpose was production, which was absurd because the only rational purpose of economic activity was consumption. The commercial system favoured the rich and powerful rather than the poor, and it made trade a source of international dissension when it should have been a cause for international co-operation. [175]
Far from thinking that commerce could solve moral problems, Smith subscribed to that part of the Hobbesian philosophy which identified unrestrained human beings with wild animals, with an inclination 'to extort all they can from their inferiors' (JA 23), and a 'love of dominion and authority over others' (JA 187). But unlike Hobbes, who had thought that human self-love and beastliness could be circumscribed only by an authoritarian state, and unlike Hume, who thought that the solution was commerce and a humane social consensus, Smith argued that each individual had an innate tendency to respect the rules of natural justice. [101]
The virtues of prudence, justice and beneficence, have no tendency to produce any but the most agreeable effects. (TMS 264) [104]
A liberal state could safely maintain a standing army:
Men of republican principles have been jealous of a standing army as dangerous to liberty... But where the sovereign himself is the general, and the principle nobility and gentry of the country the chief officers of the army; where the military force is placed under the command of those who have the greatest interest in the support of the civil authority, because they have themselves the greatest share of that authority, a standing army can never be dangerous to liberty. On the contrary, it may in some cases by favourable to liberty. (WN 706-7) [123]
The libertarian view that Smith 'erected a stupendous palace upon the granite of self-interest' (Stigler, in Skinner and Wilson: 237), trades on a confusion between the two terms. Smith did not regard self-love as the foundation of society; or in modern words the capitalist system was not originally meant to be built on greed. Mandeville had argued, in his Fable of the Bees, that economic life presupposed vanity, greed, and other forms of self-love, from which Mandeville had concluded that self-love was the great prerequisite for civilization. Although that position is often attributed to Smith, he retorted that Mandeville's 'licentious' system was marred by a basic error, despite its recognition of a fundamental truth. Mandeville had not understood that a particular degree of virtue was appropriate to each action. 'It is the great fallacy of Dr Mandeville's book to represent every passion as wholly vicious... in any degree and in any direction; (TMS 312). Smith's argument was that a whole range of actions, including ambition, enterprise, industry, frugality, and abstinence, expressed an inferior virtue or drew on mixed motives. A combination of high an low motives was usually appropriate, and the usual complaint that other people were selfish meant only that there was too much self-love and not enough benevolence in a particular instance:
The cause of this [complaint], however, is not that self-love can never be the motive of a virtuous action, but that the benevolent motive appears in this particular case to want its due degree of strength, and to be altogether unsuitable to its object. (TMS 304) [139]
Higher and lower motives were to be united in self-interest, but self-interest did not mean what the Chicago school of economics commonly supposes. If Smith had really said (which he did not) that self-interest was the foundation of society, it would have meant merely that society would properly be based on self-love and the virtues. What Smith actually said was much more explicit; the foundations of society was justice, 'Justice is the main pillar that upholds the whole edifice', because the whole object of the laws, without which society could not exist, was to constrain the useful motives of greed and self-love. The foundation of Smith's society was legal constraint on excessive self-love, and not self-love itself. [140]
The laws of justice would facilitate the division of labour, but economic growth did not depend entirely on the division of labour or the consequent extent of the market. It was limited primarily by the accumulation of capital, without which the division of labour could not proceed:
As the accumulation of stock must, in the nature of things, be previous to the division of labour, so labour can be more and more subdivided in proportion only as stock is previously more and more accumulated. (WN 277) [145]
But even the acquisition of inferior virtues required the conscious cultivation of impartiality to oneself:
In the steadiness of his industry and frugality, in his steadily sacrificing the ease and enjoyment of the present moment... the [inferior] prudent man is always supported and rewarded by the entire approbation of the impartial spectator.
Inferior prudence required self-command as well as self-love because, instead of providing for a different self in a future situation, the unconstrained ego would opt for immediate gratification:
The impartial spectator does not feel himself worn out by the present labour of those whose conduct he surveys; nor does he feel himself solicited by the importunate calls of their present appetites. To him their present, and what is likely to be their future situation, are very nearly the same. (TMS 215) [146]
[Impartial spectator = rationality / What if planning did not exist, only a different sort of gratification?]
Each action called for its own particular balance of virtue and self-love; the highest degree of virtue was required for the contemplation of moral philosophy and the formulation of the laws, but the same virtue was in a lesser degree required for commerce. Virtue could be expressed in commerce or in public life:
The superior wisdom of the good and knowing man directs others in the management of his affairs, and spurs them on to imitate his industry and activity. (JA 338) [147]
The laws of justice would encourage the extension of a complex web of trade and production, while the other virtues would help augment the capital stock and put the economy into rapid motion. [148]
But both the Lectures and the Wealth warned of the possible moral dangers of commercial life. As the division of labour extended, Smith noted, the variety of commodities and productive processes tended to increase, but the variety of work declined (WN 783). Although the ruling elite would find its life enriched by these innovations, the characters of most people were moulded by their mode of employment, and the enforced specialization of work would have a narrowing effect on the individual's psyche. The whole culture that went with the production of wealth would restrict the individual's intellectual horizons and dilute the spiritedness that war and public life required. [155]
As money values and the division of labour generated alienation within the capitalist system, the growing contradiction between the social and productive forces (commerce without virtue) would eventually produce a revolution that would transform society and the state (Smith's historical cycle). [156]
It was most important for the legislature to pass impartial laws, but the individuals who had to pass these laws were not impartial themselves. The demands of human nature and the 'rooted prejudices of the people' would make political impartiality almost impossible, and yet if the gulf between the impartial ideal and what was politically feasible were too great, society would break down. 'If the two principles coincide and act in the same direction, the game of human society will go on easily and harmoniously,' but otherwise 'society will be in the highest degree of disorder.' (TMS 234) [163]
Instead of conceding that 'the commercial system' was based on values, Smith presented its operation as the very opposite to a true value system. Amoral political systems confuse means with ends; and Smith presented the commercial system as a perverse and paradoxical system of power which really harmed the society whose interests it was supposed to promote. The commercial system aimed at low wages, when the only just and sensible aim of political economy was to encourage high wages, and its ultimate purpose was production, which was absurd because the only rational purpose of economic activity was consumption. The commercial system favoured the rich and powerful rather than the poor, and it made trade a source of international dissension when it should have been a cause for international co-operation. [175]
1.02.1994
M. M. Goldsmith
M.M. Goldsmith, "Liberty, Virtue and the Rule of Law", ed. David Wootton, Republicanism, Liberty and Commercial Society, 1649-1776, Stanford, Stanford University Press, 1994.
For Montesquieu, as for Mandeville and Hume, republican virtue is obsolete. It is only appropriate to an earlier stage of history. Liberty becomes what the law permits and those rights which the laws provide; political participation is no longer essential. Nevertheless it must not be supposed that advocacy of republican liberty disappeared. [225]
For Montesquieu, as for Mandeville and Hume, republican virtue is obsolete. It is only appropriate to an earlier stage of history. Liberty becomes what the law permits and those rights which the laws provide; political participation is no longer essential. Nevertheless it must not be supposed that advocacy of republican liberty disappeared. [225]
1.01.1994
Klaus Mainzer
Klaus Mainzer, Thinking in Complexity: The Complex Dynamics of Matter, Mind and Mankind, New York, Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg, 1994.
In system theory, complexity means not only nonlinearity but a huge number of elements with many degrees of freedom. All macroscopic systems like stones or planets, clouds or fluids, plants or animals, animal populations, or human societies consist of component elements like atoms, molecules, cells or organisms. The behaviour of single elements in complex systems with huge numbers of degrees of freedom can neither be forecast nor traced back. The deterministic description of single elements must be replaced by the evolution of probabilistic distributions. [3]
The complex system approach is not reduced to special natural laws of physics, although its mathematical principles were discovered and at first successfully applied in physics (for instance to the laser). Thus, it is an interdisciplinary methodology to explain the emergence of certain macroscopic phenomena via the nonlinear interactions of microscopic elements in complex systems. [11]
The evolution of biological systems is governed by their genes. In Darwinian evolution a new type of individual emerges by the natural selection of mutants which appear spontaneously. In populations of higher animals the new possibility of behavioral change and adaptation by imitation arises. In human societies, there are still more sophisticated strategies of learning, which dominate the behavioral patterns. Societies have developed particular institutions like the legal system, the state, religion, trade, and so on to stabilize the behavioral change for the following generations. [268]
Obviously, nonlinear systems like biological organisms, animal populations, or human societies have evolved to become more and more complex. Our present society, when compared to Aristotle's polis or the political system of the physiocrats, is characterized by a high degree of institutional complexity and information networking. In the last century, Herbert Spencer already maintained that increasing complexity is the hallmark of evolution in general: 'Evolution is an increase in complexity of structure and function... incidental to the... process of equilibration...'. Spencer still argued in the thermodynamic framework of thermal equilibrium. [269]
From a methodological point of view, the question arises of how to represent sociocultural evolution of societies in thee mathematical framework of complex systems. The recognition of attractors and equilibria needs a phase portrait of the sociocultural dynamics which presumes the definition of a 'sociocultural state' and a 'sociocultural state space'. But what is the sociocultural state space of Victorian England or the Weimar Republic? These questions demonstrate obvious limitations. What are the possibilities of the complex system approach in the historical and social sciences?
It cannot be the aim of research to represent a historical period in a complete mathematical state space. The relevant data are often unknown, contigent, and not quantified. In the last section, complex systems with state spaces and dynamical phase portraits were used to model the economic evolution of human societies. Economists do not claim to represent the complete economic development of the Weimar Republic, for instance. [270]
Patterns of cooperation merge from individual choices at certain threshold values. An agent will cooperate when the fraction of the group perceived as cooperating exceeds a critical threshold. Critical thresholds depend on the group size and the social organizational structure emerging from the pattern of interdependencies among individuals. The potential for cooperative solutions of social dilemmas increases if groups are allowed to change their social structure. The advantages of organizational fluidity must be balanced against possible loss of effectiveness. The effectiveness of an organization may be measured by its capability to obtain an overall utility over time. [279]
Any pattern which can spread via communication of information is a meme, even if its human host cannot articulate it or is unaware of its existence. It is important to recognize that the replicators of human culture are memes, not people. Our ability to change our minds allows cultural evolution to proceed not by selection of humans, but by 'letting our theories die in our stead', as Karl Popper has proclaimed. [282]
In human societies, legal systems and governmental activities provide a framework for the market. In the framework of complex systems, they are not protected from evolutionary forces. They evolve within a political ecosystem with its own mechanisms for the variation and selection of laws. Some political memes, like political desires, slogans, or programs, may become attractors in the dynamical phase portrait of a society. In an open democratic society, they may emerge, but also decline, if their attractiveness decreases due to the selection pressure of competing alternatives. [283]
The capability to manage the complexity of modern societies depends decisively on an effective communication network. Like the neural nets of biological brains, this network determines the learning capability that can help mankind to survive. In the framework of complex systems, we have to model the dynamics of information technologies spreading in their economic and cultural environment. Thus, we speak of informational and computational ecologies. [283]
Markets are a form of self-organizing complex ecosystem. [286]
Our models of complex and nonlinear processes in nature and society have important consequences for our behavior. In general, linear thinking may be dangerous in a nonlinear complex reality. We have seen that traditional concepts of freedom were based on linear models of behavior. In this framework every event is the effect of a well defined initial cause. Thus, if we assume a linear model of behavior, the responsibility for an event or effect seems to be uniquely decidable. But what about the global ecological damage which is caused by the local nonlinear interactions of billions of self-interested people? [293]
In a linear model, the extent of an effect is believed to be similar to the extent of its cause. Thus, a legal punishment of a punishable action can be proportional to the degree of damage effected. But what about the butterfly effect of tiny fluctuations which are initiated by some persons, groups, or firms, and which may result in a global crisis in politics and economics? For instance, consider the responsibility of manager and politicians whose failure can cause the misery of thousands or millions of people?
As the ecological, economic and political problems of mankind have become global, complex, and nonlinear, the traditional concept of individual responsibility is questionable. We need new models of collective behavior depending on the different degrees of our individual faculties and insights. Individual freedom of decision is no abolished, but restricted by collective effects of complex systems in nature and society which cannot be forecast or controlled in the long run. Thus, it is not enough to have good individual intentions. We have to consider their nonlinear effects. [293]
In system theory, complexity means not only nonlinearity but a huge number of elements with many degrees of freedom. All macroscopic systems like stones or planets, clouds or fluids, plants or animals, animal populations, or human societies consist of component elements like atoms, molecules, cells or organisms. The behaviour of single elements in complex systems with huge numbers of degrees of freedom can neither be forecast nor traced back. The deterministic description of single elements must be replaced by the evolution of probabilistic distributions. [3]
The complex system approach is not reduced to special natural laws of physics, although its mathematical principles were discovered and at first successfully applied in physics (for instance to the laser). Thus, it is an interdisciplinary methodology to explain the emergence of certain macroscopic phenomena via the nonlinear interactions of microscopic elements in complex systems. [11]
The evolution of biological systems is governed by their genes. In Darwinian evolution a new type of individual emerges by the natural selection of mutants which appear spontaneously. In populations of higher animals the new possibility of behavioral change and adaptation by imitation arises. In human societies, there are still more sophisticated strategies of learning, which dominate the behavioral patterns. Societies have developed particular institutions like the legal system, the state, religion, trade, and so on to stabilize the behavioral change for the following generations. [268]
Obviously, nonlinear systems like biological organisms, animal populations, or human societies have evolved to become more and more complex. Our present society, when compared to Aristotle's polis or the political system of the physiocrats, is characterized by a high degree of institutional complexity and information networking. In the last century, Herbert Spencer already maintained that increasing complexity is the hallmark of evolution in general: 'Evolution is an increase in complexity of structure and function... incidental to the... process of equilibration...'. Spencer still argued in the thermodynamic framework of thermal equilibrium. [269]
From a methodological point of view, the question arises of how to represent sociocultural evolution of societies in thee mathematical framework of complex systems. The recognition of attractors and equilibria needs a phase portrait of the sociocultural dynamics which presumes the definition of a 'sociocultural state' and a 'sociocultural state space'. But what is the sociocultural state space of Victorian England or the Weimar Republic? These questions demonstrate obvious limitations. What are the possibilities of the complex system approach in the historical and social sciences?
It cannot be the aim of research to represent a historical period in a complete mathematical state space. The relevant data are often unknown, contigent, and not quantified. In the last section, complex systems with state spaces and dynamical phase portraits were used to model the economic evolution of human societies. Economists do not claim to represent the complete economic development of the Weimar Republic, for instance. [270]
Patterns of cooperation merge from individual choices at certain threshold values. An agent will cooperate when the fraction of the group perceived as cooperating exceeds a critical threshold. Critical thresholds depend on the group size and the social organizational structure emerging from the pattern of interdependencies among individuals. The potential for cooperative solutions of social dilemmas increases if groups are allowed to change their social structure. The advantages of organizational fluidity must be balanced against possible loss of effectiveness. The effectiveness of an organization may be measured by its capability to obtain an overall utility over time. [279]
Any pattern which can spread via communication of information is a meme, even if its human host cannot articulate it or is unaware of its existence. It is important to recognize that the replicators of human culture are memes, not people. Our ability to change our minds allows cultural evolution to proceed not by selection of humans, but by 'letting our theories die in our stead', as Karl Popper has proclaimed. [282]
In human societies, legal systems and governmental activities provide a framework for the market. In the framework of complex systems, they are not protected from evolutionary forces. They evolve within a political ecosystem with its own mechanisms for the variation and selection of laws. Some political memes, like political desires, slogans, or programs, may become attractors in the dynamical phase portrait of a society. In an open democratic society, they may emerge, but also decline, if their attractiveness decreases due to the selection pressure of competing alternatives. [283]
The capability to manage the complexity of modern societies depends decisively on an effective communication network. Like the neural nets of biological brains, this network determines the learning capability that can help mankind to survive. In the framework of complex systems, we have to model the dynamics of information technologies spreading in their economic and cultural environment. Thus, we speak of informational and computational ecologies. [283]
Markets are a form of self-organizing complex ecosystem. [286]
Our models of complex and nonlinear processes in nature and society have important consequences for our behavior. In general, linear thinking may be dangerous in a nonlinear complex reality. We have seen that traditional concepts of freedom were based on linear models of behavior. In this framework every event is the effect of a well defined initial cause. Thus, if we assume a linear model of behavior, the responsibility for an event or effect seems to be uniquely decidable. But what about the global ecological damage which is caused by the local nonlinear interactions of billions of self-interested people? [293]
In a linear model, the extent of an effect is believed to be similar to the extent of its cause. Thus, a legal punishment of a punishable action can be proportional to the degree of damage effected. But what about the butterfly effect of tiny fluctuations which are initiated by some persons, groups, or firms, and which may result in a global crisis in politics and economics? For instance, consider the responsibility of manager and politicians whose failure can cause the misery of thousands or millions of people?
As the ecological, economic and political problems of mankind have become global, complex, and nonlinear, the traditional concept of individual responsibility is questionable. We need new models of collective behavior depending on the different degrees of our individual faculties and insights. Individual freedom of decision is no abolished, but restricted by collective effects of complex systems in nature and society which cannot be forecast or controlled in the long run. Thus, it is not enough to have good individual intentions. We have to consider their nonlinear effects. [293]
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)