Wednesday May 13, 2009 at 8:58
“I looked at Mother Nature and realized how does Mother Nature—a complex system—counter the dangers of complexity? Well, it kills everything that’s big very early. The largest thing you have out there is an elephant, and if you shoot an elephant, you’re not changing the ecology. Whereas the economic system doesn’t have that resilience, because if I shoot down Lehman Brothers, I’ve shot down the entire financial system, you see? So we eventually need to be organized in a way that resembles Mother Nature, with nothing too big to fail, with products that are much less sensitive to large deviations—namely, just very simple financial products—and, what people don’t like, but I say, “Sorry,” but we can no longer afford debt. Debt doesn’t give you any room for error.”
— Nassim Taleb, on NPR’s Planet Money podcast, April 29
I surely am not qualified to measure the biological or economic accuracy of this statement but I love the idea of looking to nature for advice about complex systems.
When I studied literature in school, the value of bringing history into conversation with literature was well known and more scholars were seeing what could be gained by applying theories from other social sciences (anthropology, for example) to the study of literature. I thought at the time that eventually someone would turn to the hard sciences and find biological and chemical equivalents to the kinds of systems that operate inside works of literature.
Someone a lot smarter than me.
