Ever since a child, I would tinker with Styrofoam to make
model planes. Once the design issues were kinked out, I would try to expand its
size. But every time I would expand the size, something or the other would fall
apart or malfunction. Back then it confused me as to why a working design would
pose a challenge at expansion. Growing up, I noticed these phenomenon’s in many
different fields where a perfectly well functioning design or an idea would not
work at a different scale, just like my plane design. Let me explain.
Economics: We have been told that Communism does not work.
Soviet Union & North Korea bear witness to this fact in history. And we are
told that Capitalism works. Many countries adopting free-market policies have
prospered (compared to the Communist nations). In a Free-market economy, money
is the means of signal for supply and demand. Communist Economies requires
Central Planning. What I find interesting is structure of a family. A family
runs on communist principles. You do not charge your kids for food. Everyone
works according to his ability and need. This model may even work in large
families. But as the size of the model expands, communism falls apart. Whereas
if Capitalism were applied to a family unit, it would destroy the social fabric
and the human element from relationships.
Knowledge: Pick any
major event in history – Roman Empire, WW1, WW2, the Israeli-Palestinian
conflict. The more you read into its details, the opinionated the information
gets with conflicting point of views. Plus, when we try to granulize details,
we tend to lose sight of the bigger picture. This is very common in the field
of Economics. We tend to mix things between correlation and causation, or the
arrow of causation. The marginal utility of more details goes from beneficial
to harmful. It is important to always keep the larger picture in sight. More
information does not mean more wisdom.
Religion: Religion creates a baseline for morality.
Practicing an old religion keeps us in touch with our history, regardless we
understand it or not. But implementation of religion in its strictest sense
twists matters in reality. Let’s take Pakistan for example. My parents tell me
that Pakistan was one of the most prosperous nations in the region in the 60s
& 70s. It was a very friendly and safe place. I see my parents wedding
pictures and I do not see anyone looking too religious. Today, taking a random
sample from Pakistan would show more people practicing religion. Yet, the moral
sense didn’t improve proportionally. In fact, it’s common that neighbors no
longer interact as much as they did 40 years ago. So what went wrong? I feel
Law of Proportionality comes in handy explaining that we may have overextended
a working principle. Or maybe it’s the ‘Institutionalization of religion’. Who
knows! And that’s the thing with Complex social systems – they aren’t linear.
In Complex systems causation is noise. Correlations & long term trends are
the real signal carrier.
Science: Isaac Newton
and Albert Einstein explained the world of natural laws of gravitation via
mathematical equations. Their discovered laws hold well with celestial bodies.
But these very laws fall apart when applied to Quantum Mechanics, where there
is no such thing as certainty and everything is probabilistic. The Law of
Proportionality prevails even in the purest form of natural science. I am not
arguing against the size as the factor in complex system but the layers of
complexity. The more complexity is layered into a system, the higher its risks
of failure. And there is nothing more complex than a human conscious. We can
predict the durability of machines, we can calculate the half-life of
radioactive materials, energy levels and even molecular processes but we cannot
calculate rational or irrational responses of a conscious being. This very
element of consciousness restricts us from ‘calculating’ future economic
conditions via fancy models. It’s not just that we cannot calculate conscious
irrationality but interpretation of data adds our own conscious abstraction to our conclusion.
