elearnspace

The economy is front and centre in most conversations these days. It’s far to early to evaluate the full scope of impact. We’ll see a decade of analysis in movies, books, and journals – what when wrong, who is to blame, what’s the impact of world power relationships, etc. I’ll leave others who are better informed (and hopefully stay away from the current bread of “I told you so’s” – why is it that when people are suffering most, clowns appear centre stage to declare “this philosophy is dead” or “that concept is better”. We don’t even know what we’re dealing with yet) to tackle those questions. An interesting post that resonates with our discussion next week on complexity, chaos, and emergence in CCK08 – The connected economy: “This newly-realized importance of the network reminds me of biology, where we thought we could understand an organism by mapping its genes. Now we realize an organism is a complex mixture of manufactured and transformed chemicals and even other organisms, and the genetic blueprint is necessary but not sufficient for understanding. You can no more understand how an organism works by reading its DNA than you can understand how San Francisco works by reading its phonebook. This “whole organism” multi-level integrative approach is called systems biology.
Nodes often aren’t as important as the connections between them. Reductionist science and analysis from the 19th and 20th centuries focused on nodes. I believe 21st century science, economics, political science, and computer science will use more complex systems theory to understand the interactions between chemicals, speculators, nations, and users.”