Jessica Flack and Melanie Mitchell write:

We’re at a unique moment in the 200,000 years or so that Homo sapiens have walked the Earth. For the first time in that long history, humans are capable of coordinating on a global scale, using fine-grained data on individual behaviour, to design robust and adaptable social systems. The pandemic of 2019-20 has brought home this potential. Never before has there been a collective, empirically informed response of the magnitude that COVID-19 has demanded. Yes, the response has been ambivalent, uneven and chaotic – we are fumbling in low light, but it’s the low light of dawn.

At this historical juncture, we should acknowledge and exploit the fact we live in a complex system – a system with many interacting agents, whose collective behaviour is usually hard to predict. Understanding the key properties of complex systems can help us clarify and deal with many new and existing global challenges, from pandemics to poverty and ecological collapse.

In complex systems, the last thing that happened is almost never informative about what’s coming next. The world is always changing – partly due to factors outside our control and partly due to our own interventions. In the final pages of his novel One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967), Gabriel García Márquez highlights the paradox of how human agency at once enables and interferes with our capacity to predict the future, when he describes one of the characters translating a significant manuscript:

Before reaching the final line, however, he had already understood that he would never leave that room, for it was foreseen that the city of mirrors (or mirages) would be wiped out by the wind and exiled from the memory of men at the precise moment when Aureliano Babilonia would finish deciphering the parchments.

Our world is not so different from the vertiginous fantasies of Márquez – and the linear thinking of simple cause-effect reasoning, to which the human mind can default, is not a good policy tool. Instead, living in a complex system requires us to embrace and even harness uncertainty. Instead of attempting to narrowly forecast and control outcomes, we need to design systems that are robust and adaptable enough to weather a wide range of possible futures. [Continue reading…]