June 17, 2019 Monday
Bedtime Story
Economy on the "Edge of Chaos"
Now that you are on into the secret of
banking (at least the most basic but fundamental aspect of it) and its policy
of credit creation it should not be surprising therefore that how vulnerable
they are to insolvencies or bankruptcies.
As Ferguson puts it most pithily (I
apologize for keep coming back to him but some writers such as him, Dawkins,
Asimov, and many more have that innate flair for choosing the apt words and
construct immortal sentences that convey and transmit the ideas from one mind
to another exactly as intended):
“The West may collapse very suddenly.
Complex civilizations do that, because they
operate, most of the time, on the edge of chaos.”
To me this is hardly surprising as I have
seen the mighty and at one time invincible Soviet Union literally crumble to
pieces in front of my very eyes.
Soviet Union was, in some sense, far less
sophisticated economy that ran on the top-down and hierarchical command and
control management principal that generally is less vulnerable to disruptions
either political or economical.
You can take the case of a disciplined army
and compare it against the chaotic liberal democratic system of any Western
country that often throws up surprises and hodgepodge of political parties with
often conflicting ideologies in power that are forced to run a government
together.
You would naturally express an army to be
more stable than politically and democratically elected governments by large
group of diverse people.
It is for the same reason that the cellular
machinery is believed to be a critical network lying on the verge of resilience
and adaptability.
Oddly enough this idea of biology or that
any complex system operates at the edge of chaos came from an American computer
scientist by the name of Christopher Langton in 1980s.
But the term itself “edge of chaos” came
from a mathematician by the name of Doyne Farmer (both these men had in the
1980s spent some time at the Los Alamos National Laboratory situated at Santa
Fe, New Mexico and is legendary for its Manhattan Project when it drew the best
European – I am also add European Jewish – minds into it.
In today’s sciences the “edge of chaos” has
a more general connotation and is used as a metaphor.
It signifies that any or perhaps many
complex systems – may they be biological, economical, social or even physical –
operate in a region between order and complete randomness where the complexity
is maximal and stability always shaky.
The western capitalism and modern banking
system is indeed something that operates on the “edge of chaos”.
And it is exactly what the banks do in
their normal working that was done by the Continental Congress (also a form of
unrecognized government and Mint combined in one) during the beginning of the
American War of Independence in 1775 and by the United States government and
the Confederate States of America in 1861.
Stay tuned to the voice of an
average story storytelling chimpanzee or login at http://panarrans.blogspot.com
Good night Mon Ami and my fellow cousin ape.
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Another great educator and a teacher that I am aware of is
Professor Subhashish Chattopadhyay in Bangalore, India.
While I narrate stories, Professor Subhashish an electronic
engineer and a former professor at BARC, does and teaches real mathematics and
physics.
He started the participation of Indian students at the
International Physics Olympiad.
Do visit him here:
All his books can be downloaded for free through this link:
For edutainment and English education of your children, I
recommend this large collection of Halloween Songs for Kids:
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