Prologue from “Governing a Liquid Society – How to Save Democracy From Itself” In the past the Earth was populated by numerous civilizations. The Greeks, the Incas, or the Romans are just a few egregious examples. Because the temporal and spatial correlation between those civilizations was often non-existent, or very limited, if one happened…
The North American XB-70 Valkyrie was a (beautiful!) tri-sonic bomber developed in the early sixties. It was, even by today’s standards, an exceptionally sophisticated and advanced machine. What strikes is the short time it took to develop and build – we intentionally omit the information here since, by today’s standards it would make many people…
Every dynamical system possesses a characteristic value of complexity which reflects how information is organized and how it flows within its structure. Like most things in life, complexity is limited. In fact, there is an upper bound on complexity that a given system may attain and sustain with a given structure. This ‘physiological’ limit…
The EU28 Resistance-to-Shocks (RtS) ratings. To navigate the Complexity Maps, click on the corresponding icon. Hover and click the mouse pointer over the squares on the map. The resilience (robustness) ranking is as follows: Analysis performed…
In a 2015 United Nations Trade and Development Conference report “Trade Slowdown” one reads: ‘As of 2014 the trends in international trade were largely driven by the sluggish economic growth and the persisting economic and political turmoil in various part of the world. From 2011 to 2014 world trade grew at a rate of less…
It is known that Deutsche Bank is in trouble and, according to some, it poses a huge threat to the stability of the global financial system. Read here. On October 29-th, 2015, “The Bank announced a series of measures to reduce complexity and costs” and that the strategic goal was to “Make Deutsche Bank simpler and more efficient”.…
The Principle of Ignorance is a ‘corollary’ of the Principle of Fragility, which states: Complexity X Uncertainty = Fragility This principle states that highly complex actions (or business models) lead to situations of fragility in uncertain environments (e.g. markets). For example, a highly articulated portfolio may result to be fragile in a…
Why do most theorems in maths start by saying “let f(x) be a continuous differentiable function…”? Why do so many theorems in statistics assume a normal distribution? Why is it that in mechanics we tend to speak of small-amplitude oscillations around a position of equilibrium? Why is it that we neglect anything that has “epsilon…
Resilience Ratings of major markets are reported in the table below. Analysis performed on 31/12/2015. The results are presented without comments. Resilience is the capacity to absorb shocks or destabilizing events, such as financial contagion, stock market collapses, market bubbles, natural disasters or geopolitical events. Opposite of fragility, resilience provides an indication of…
Corporate sustainability, social responsibility and sustainability in general are trendy subjects nowadays. There exist numerous programmes, institutes and research centers dedicated to the subject of sustainability. One aspect such initiatives have in common is that they don’t provide measures of sustainability. On some occasions an index or a score is defined, whereby experts in different…
