Blog
Whatever happened to all those miners? Shocks and economic resilience
Where have all the miners gone? To judge by the rhetoric of the BBC and other media outlets, whole swathes of Britain lie devastated, plagued by rickets, unemployment and endemic poverty – nearly thirty years after the pit closures under Lady Thatcher! The reality is different. There is indeed a small number of local authority areas where employment has never really recovered from the closures in the 1980s. But, equally, there are former mining areas which have prospered. Thirty years ago, in 1983, there were 29 local authority areas...
read moreGoogle as God?
Opportunities and Risks of the Information Age by Dirk Helbing (ETH Zurich) “You’re already a walking sensor platform… You are aware of the fact that somebody can know where you are at all times because you carry a mobile device, even if that mobile device is turned off. You know this, I hope? Yes? Well, you should… Since you can’t connect dots you don’t have, it drives us into a mode of, we fundamentally try to collect everything and hang on to it forever… It is really very nearly within our grasp to be able to...
read moreInnovation in Dynamic Networks
By Greg Fisher This is the second of two blog articles that follow on from NESTA’s roundtable on Systemic Innovation. The previous blog focused on systems, whereas this one is about innovation. How we view social systems has been fundamentally challenged in recent decades by the emerging science of complex systems. Stuart Kauffman described this well in his book Re-Inventing the Sacred where he contrasted the Laplace view of a clockwork universe with one of an inherently creative and uncertain universe. In the Laplace-inspired view,...
read moreDynamic Versus Static Systems
By Greg Fisher Recently, Paul Ormerod and I were invited to a round-table at NESTA to discuss systemic innovation. After that meeting, we were invited to write a blog reflecting on this issue. I thought I might be neat to write two articles, one on systems and one on innovation. Here I will tackle systems and, more specifically, I want to draw attention to the differences between static and dynamic systems. This is often under-emphasised when thinking about whole systems. How we make sense of, or cognitively frame, a problem is...
read moreThe Emergence of Niceness
By Thomas Grund, Christian Waloszek, and Dirk Helbing The body of economic literature will have to change, suggests new research. In their computer simulations of human evolution, scientists at ETH Zurich find the emergence of the “homo socialis” with “other-regarding” preferences. The results explain some intriguing findings in experimental economics and they call for a new economic theory of “networked minds”. Economics has a beautiful body of theory. But does it describe real markets? Doubts have come up not only in the...
read moreChinese Thinking and Complexity
By Greg Fisher Last week I attended an excellent conference in Singapore, which had the intriguing title of “A Crude Look at the Whole”. The title was attributable to Murray Gell-Man who was one of the founding fathers of the Santa Fe Institute and also the winner of the 1969 Nobel Prize in Physics. Gell-Man is famous for a few things, including being the first to postulate the existence of quarks. Another is the idea of coarse-grained cognition. This is the (to me sensible) idea that reality is extremely fine-grained in terms of...
read moreSocial versus natural complex systems
By Greg Fisher Last week I referred to the differences between natural and social complex systems in a blog article about FuturICT. I received an email from an esteemed colleague who questioned (paraphrasing) whether this distinction was useful and whether in so doing I was putting humans on a pedestal. In this article I want to expand on what I meant because I do think there are fundamentally important difference between these two types of system. My argument centres on two main points: emergent domains & principles and...
read moreLies, Damned Lies and Big Data
By David Hales Almost everything we do these days leaves some kind of data trace in some computer system somewhere. When such data is aggregated into huge databases it is called “Big Data”. It is claimed social science will be transformed by the application of computer processing and Big Data. The argument is that social science has, historically, been “theory rich” and “data poor” and now we will be able to apply the methods of “real science” to “social science” producing new validated and predictive theories which we can...
read moreThe Empire Didn’t Strike Back… The Demise of FuturICT
By Greg Fisher Last week the European Commission chose not to invest in FuturICT, which was a massively ambitious project to integrate ICT and complexity science. The aim was, as their website puts it, “understand and manage complex, global, socially interactive systems” and in so doing to “create a paradigm shift”. Driven mainly by ETH in Zurich and UCL in London, a stellar consortium of universities was created across the entire European Union, and had the active support of MIT in the US. Millions of Euros,...
read moreBranding Heterodox Economics
By Rory Sutherland Those of you who are, like me, only dimly familiar with the writings of Peter Drucker will at least know one of his most famous pronouncements. “There are only two things in a business that make money – innovation and marketing. Everything else is a cost.” I always liked this assertion, and have probably quoted it once or twice. But, to be perfectly frank, I had never used it very confidently. It always seemed so contrary to the prevailing business culture of the moment (where the highest end of business...
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