A tropical forest is a complex system, but a suburban garden is not. The reason is the the former is deeply interconnected, and it is the interconnected links that define it. A tropical forest will likely collapse if you disturb the natural balance too much, while in a suburban garden you can generally safely remove entire flower beds without affecting its overall health or integrity.
The standard way of doing policy considers our social system as a suburban garden. It tills, plans, and cultivates as if the parts are not interrelated.
That is David Colander and Roland Kupers, writing in Complexity and the Art of Public Policy: Solving Society’s Problems from the Bottom Up.
I am only part way through the book (by the time this post goes up I may be nearly finished). My initial reaction is that it is either more or less Austrian economics. It could be more if I decide that the explicit complexity theory really adds something to what otherwise is a very Austrian critique of mainstream economics. It could be less if I decide that I am disappointed by what I fear will be a treatment of government that I find unsatisfying.
In any case, it looks like one of the better books of 2014. In fact, relative to a very weak 2014 crop, so far this is looking like the best. I first became aware of the book here, but Tyler Cowen never gave it more than an “arrived in my pile” mention, which suggests that he did not find it worthwhile.
Coincidentally, Jason Collins points to an essay by Brian Arthur, who coined the term complexity economics. Arthur also has some sentences that I might have written.
think of the agents in the economy – consumers, firms, banks, investors – as buying and selling, producing, strategizing, and forecasting. From all this behavior markets form, prices form, trading patterns form: aggregate patterns form. Complexity economics asks how individual behaviors in a situation might react to the pattern they together create, and how that pattern would alter itself as a result, causing the agents to react anew.
…It views the economy not as machine-like, perfectly rational, and essentially static, but as organic, always exploring, and always evolving – always constructing itself.
It really depends on how you define collapse, disturb, natural balance, health, and integrity. Since a suburban garden is supposed to be whatever the gardener wants, it loses no “integrity” if she removes everything that’s there and puts in heather instead. And of course, since almost all gardens require constant inputs by the gardener, they really have no “natural balance.”
Have you heard of the book “The Gardens of Democracy” that made a splash a couple of years ago?
http://www.amazon.com/Gardens-Democracy-American-Citizenship-Government-ebook/dp/B0061S3UMA/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1415985131&sr=1-1&keywords=gardens+of+democracy
It exactly and completely embodies the concept “the standard way of doing policy” mentioned in the post.
“A tropical forest will likely collapse if you disturb the natural balance too much.”
I think Roger Sweeny is on the right track, just too cautious. What does “collapse” even mean here? Really I think the most obvious reading of the passage is just meaningless Green pious nonthink goodfeel ritual genuflection. But if I try to be charitable about reading a literal rational meaning instead of just a cynical maneuver in a holier-than-thou coalition game, the obvious interpretations I can think of — that living biomass, energy processing rate, biomass production rate, genetic diversity, or some other obvious summary metric will decrease by a factor of 2 or more — seem unlikely to be factually correct. Or at least they’re not correct without interpretations of “disturb … too much” that are so stretched that the point becomes too trivial to support his argument.
Sure, if you hit the jungle hard enough in a vital niche — a potent insectide to exterminate all the pollinating insects, maybe — it could have a dramatic impact all out of proportion to the mass of pollinating insects that you wipe out. But that doesn’t do much to support the point he’s trying to make, because you don’t have to hit the garden much harder than that to stomp it at least as hard. (A potent herbicide that targets a vital plant enzyme…you don’t need to disable very many grams of that enzyme before your ex-garden will become a very serviceable backdrop for your amateur film “Slaves of Mordor”.)
I’ve been a fan of Complexity Economics ever since I read a book 7 or 8 years ago called The Origin of Wealth, which referenced a lot of work done by the Sante Fe Institute and elsewhere.
Glad to hear this is another good one on the subject.