Society is complicated. But this book argues that this does not
place it beyond the reach of a science that can help to explain and
perhaps even to predict social behaviour. As a system made up of
many interacting agents people, groups, institutions and
governments, as well as physical and technological structures such
as roads and computer networks society can be regarded as a complex
system. In recent years, scientists have made great progress in
understanding how such complex systems operate, ranging from animal
populations to earthquakes and weather. These systems show
behaviours that cannot be predicted or intuited by focusing on the
individual components, but which emerge spontaneously as a
consequence of their interactions: they are said to be
self-organized . Attempts to direct or manage such emergent
properties generally reveal that top-down approaches, which try to
dictate a particular outcome, are ineffectual, and that what is
needed instead is a bottom-up approach that aims to guide
self-organization towards desirable states.
This book shows how some of these ideas from the science of
complexity can be applied to the study and management of social
phenomena, including traffic flow, economic markets, opinion
formation and the growth and structure of cities. Building on these
successes, the book argues that the complex-systems view of the
social sciences has now matured sufficiently for it to be possible,
desirable and perhaps essential to attempt a grander objective: to
integrate these efforts into a unified scheme for studying,
understanding and ultimately predicting what happens in the world
we have made. Such a scheme would require the mobilization and
collaboration of many different research communities, and would
allow society and its interactions with the physical environment to
be explored through realistic models and large-scale data
collection and analysis. It should enable us to find new and
effective solutions to major global problems such as conflict,
disease, financial instability, environmental despoliation and
poverty, while avoiding unintended policy consequences. It could
give us the foresight to anticipate and ameliorate crises, and to
begin tackling some of the most intractable problems of the
twenty-first century.
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