Globalization from cotton

This page describes the organizational forces that limit change. It explains how to overcome them when necessary.

This page uses an example to illustrate how:

A business can gain focus from targeting key customers,
Business planning activities performed by the whole organization can build awareness, empowerment and coherence.
A program approach can ensure strategic alignment.

This page uses the example of HP's printer organization freeing itself from its organizational constraints to sell a printer targeted at the IBM pc user.
The constraints are described.
The techniques to overcome them are implied.

We are products of complexity, but our evolution has focused our understanding on the situation of hunter gatherers on the African savanna. As humanity has become more powerful we can significantly impact the systems we depend on. But we struggle to comprehend them. So this web frame explores significant real world complex adaptive systems (CAS): Assumptions of randomness & equilibrium allowed the wealthy & powerful to expand the size and leverage of stock markets, by placing at risk the insurance and retirement savings of the working class. The assumptions are wrong but remain entrenched. The US nation was built from two divergent political views of: Jefferson and Hamilton. It also reflects the development of competing ancient ideas of Epicurus and Cyril. But the collapse of Bretton Woods forced Wall Street into a position of power, while the middle and working class were abandoned by the elites. Housing financed with cash from oil and derivative transactions helped hide the shift. Most US health care is still operating the way cars built in the 1940s did. Geisinger is an example of better solution. But transforming the whole network is a challenge. And public health investment has proved far more beneficial. Helping our children learn to be effective adults is part of our humanity, but we have created a robust but deeply flawed education system. Better alternatives have emerged. Spoken language, reading and writing emerged allowing our good ideas to become a second genetic material. The emergence of the global economy in the 1600s and its subsequent development; It explains how the examples relate to each other, why we all have trouble effectively comprehending these systems and explains how our inexperience with CAS can lead to catastrophe. It outlines the items we see as key to the system and why. Example systems frame
Dietrich Dorner argues complex adaptive systems (CAS) are hard to understand and manage. He provides examples of how this feature of these systems can have disastrous consequences for their human managers. Dorner suggests this is due to CAS properties psychological impact on our otherwise successful mental strategic toolkit. To prepare to more effectively manage CAS, Dorner recommends use of: Effective iterative planning and Practice with complex scenario simulations; tools which he reviews. Complexity catastrophes
E. O. Wilson reviews the effect of man on the natural world to date and explains how the two systems can coexist most effectively. Adaptive ecology
Barton Gellman details the strategies used by Vice President Cheney to align the global system with his economics, defense, and energy goals. US vds alignment
Kevin Kruse argues that from 1930 onwards the corporate elite and the Republican party have developed and relentlessly executed strategies to undermine Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal. Their successful strategy used the credibility of conservative religious leaders to: Demonstrate religious issues with the New Deal. Integrate the corporate elite and evangelicals. Use the power of corporate advertising and Hollywood to reeducate the American people to view the US as historically religious and the New Deal and liberalism as anti-religious socialism. Focus the message through evangelicals including Vereide and Graham. Centralize the strategy through President Eisenhower. Add religious elements to mainstream American symbols: money, pledge; Push for prayer in public school Push Congress to promote prayer Make elections more about religious positions. Following our summary of his arguments RSS frames them from the perspective of complex adaptive system (CAS) theory. Strategy is the art of the possible. But it also depends on persistence. Inventing Christian America
Charles Ferguson argues that the US power structure has become highly corrupt. Ferguson identifies key events which contributed to the transformation: Junk bonds, Derivative deregulation, CMOs, ABS and analyst fraud, Financial network deregulation, Financial network consolidation, Short term incentives Subsequently the George W. Bush administration used the situation to build a global bubble, which Wall Street leveraged. The bursting of the bubble: managed by the Bush Administration and Bernanke Federal Reserve; was advantageous to some. Ferguson concludes that the restructured and deregulated financial services industry is damaging to the American economy. And it is supported by powerful, incentive aligned academics. He sees the result being a rigged system. Ferguson offers his proposals for change and offers hope that a charismatic young FDR will appear. Following our summary of his arguments, RSS comments on them framed by complex adaptive system (CAS) theory. Once the constraints are removed from CAS amplifiers, it becomes advantageous to leverage the increased flows. And it is often relatively damaging not to participate. Corruption and parasitism can become entrenched. Financial WMD
Matt Taibbi describes the phenotypic alignment of the American justice system. The result he explains relentlessly grinds the poor and undocumented into resources to be constrained, consumed and ejected. Even as it supports and aligns the financial infrastructure into a potent weapon capable of targeting any company or nation to extract profits and leave the victim deflated. Taibbi uses five scenarios to provide a broad picture of the: activities, crimes, policing, prosecutions, court processes, prisons and deportation network. The scenarios are: Undocumented people's neighborhoods, Poor neighborhoods, Welfare recipients, Credit card debtors and Financial institutions. Following our summary of his arguments, RSS comments on them framed by complex adaptive system (CAS) theory. The alignment of the justice system reflects a set of long term strategies and responses to a powerful global arms race that the US leadership intends to win. Aligned justice
Jonathan Powell describes how the government of, the former UK Prime Minister, Tony Blair, actually operated. Powell was Blair's only chief of staff. Mechanics of power
H. A. Hayek compares and contrasts collectivism and libertarianism. Libertarianism
John Doerr argues that company leaders and their organizations, hugely benefit from Andy Grove's OKRs. He promotes strategies that help OKR success: Focus, Align, Track, Stretch; replaces yearly performance reviews, and provides illustrative success stories. Doerr stresses Dov Seidman's view that employees are adaptive and will respond to what they see being measured. He asserts culturally supported OKRs/CFR processes will be transformative. Following our summary of his arguments, RSS comments on them framed by complex adaptive system (CAS) theory. Doerr's architecture is tailored for the startups KPCB invests in. It is a subset of the general case of schematic plans, genetic operators and Shewhart cycles that drive all CAS. Doerr's approach limits support of learning and deemphasizes the association to planning. Startup PDCA
David Bodanis illustrates how disruptive effects can take hold. While the French revolution had many driving forces including famine and oppression the emergence of a new philosophical vision ensured that thoughtful leaders were constrained and conflicted in their responses to the crisis. Voltaire's disruptive network
An epistatic meme suppressed for a thousand years reemerges during the enlightenment. It was a poem encapsulating the ideas of Epicurus rediscovered by a humanist book hunter. Greenblatt describes the process of suppression and reemergence. He argues that the rediscovery was the foundation of the modern world. Complex adaptive system (CAS) models of the memetic mechanisms are discussed. Constraining happiness
Isaacson uses the historic development of the global cloud of web services to explore Ada Lovelace's ideas about thinking machines and poetic science. He highlights the value of computer augmented human creativity and the need for liberal arts to fulfill the process. Complex adaptive system (CAS) models of agent networks and collaboration are discussed. Arts technology & intelligence
Haikonen juxtaposes the philosophy and psychology of consciousness with engineering practice to refine the debate on the hard problem of consciousness. During the journey he describes the architecture of a robot that highlights the potential and challenges of associative neural networks. Complex adaptive system (CAS) theory is then used to illustrate the additional requirements and constraints of self-assembling evolved conscious animals. It will be seen that Haikonen's neural architecture, Smiley's Copycat architecture and molecular biology's intracellular architecture leverage the same associative properties. Associatively integrated robots
Good ideas are successful because they build upon prior developments that have been successfully implemented. Johnson demonstrates that they are phenotypic expressions of memetic plans subject to the laws of complex adaptive systems (CAS). Developing ideas
A government sanctioned monopoly supported the construction of a superorganism American Telephone and Telegraph (AT&T). Within this Bell Labs was at the center of three networks: The evolving global scientific network. The Bell telephone network. And The military industrial network deploying 'fire and missile control' systems. Bell Labs strategically leveraged each network to create an innovation engine. They monitored the opportunities to leverage the developing ideas, reorganizing to replace incumbent opposition and enable the creation and growth of new ideas. Once the monopoly was dismantled, AT&T disrupted. Complex adaptive system (CAS) models of the innovation mechanisms are discussed. Strategic innovation
Roger Cohen's New York Times opinion about the implications of BREXIT is summarized. His ideas are then framed by complex adaptive system (CAS) theory and reviewed. BREXIT
Scott Galloway argues that Apple, Amazon, Facebook and Google are monopolists that trade workers for technology. Monopolies that he argues should be broken up to ensure the return of a middle class. Following our summary of his arguments, RSS comments on these arguments assuming they relate to a complex adaptive system (CAS). While Scott's issue is highly significant his analysis conflicts with relevant CAS history and theory. Monopoly job killers
The IPO of Netscape is defined as the key emergent event of the New Economy by Michael Mandel. Following the summary of Mandel's key points the complex adaptive system (CAS) aspects are highlighted. New economy
Ed Conway argues that Bretton Woods produced a unique set of rules and infrastructure for supporting the global economy. It was enabled by the experience of Keynes and White during and after the First World War, their dislike of the Gold Standard, the necessity of improving the situation between the wars and the opportunity created by the catastrophe of the Second World War. He describes how it was planned and developed. How it emerged from the summit. And he shows how the opportunity inevitably allowed the US to replace the UK at the center of the global economy. Like all plans there are mistakes and Conway takes us through them and how the US recovered the situation as best it could. And then Conway describes the period after Bretton Woods collapsed. He explains what followed and also compares the relative performance of the various periods before during and after Bretton Woods. Following our summary of his arguments RSS comments from the perspective of Complex Adaptive System (CAS) theory. Conway's book illustrates the rule making and infrastructure that together build an evolved amplifier. He shows the strategies at play of agents that were for and against the development and deployment of the system. And The Summit provides a key piece of the history of our global economic CAS. Bretton woods
A key agent in the 1990 - 2008 housing expansion Countrywide is linked into the residential mortgage value delivery system (VDS) by Paul Muolo and Mathew Padilla. But they show the VDS was full of amplifiers and control points. With no one incented to apply the brakes the bubble grew and burst. Following the summary of Muolo and Padilla's key points the complex adaptive system (CAS) aspects are highlighted. Housing amplifiers
Satyajit Das uses an Indonesian company's derivative trades to introduce us to the workings of the international derivatives system. Das describes the components of the value delivery system and the key transactions. He demonstrates how the system interacted with emerging economies expanding them, extracting profits and then moving on as the induced bubbles burst. Following Das's key points the complex adaptive system (CAS) aspects are highlighted. Derivative systems
Johnson & Kwak argue that expanding the national debt provides a hedge against unforeseen future problems, as long as creditors are willing to continue lending. They illustrate different approaches to managing the debt within the US over its history and of the eighteenth century administrations of England and France. The US embodies two different political and economic systems which approach the national debt differently: Taxes to support a sinking fund to ensure credit to leverage fiscal power in: Wars, Pandemics, Trade disputes, Hurricanes, Social programs; Starting with Hamilton, Lincoln & Chase, Wilson, FDR; Low taxes, limited infrastructure, with risk assumed by individuals: Advocated by President's Jefferson & Madison, Reagan, George W. Bush (Gingrich); Johnson & Kwak develop a model of what the US government does. They argue that the conflicting sinking fund and low tax approaches leaves the nation 'stuck in the middle' with a future problem. And they offer their list of 'first principles' to help assess the best approach for moving from 2012 into the future. They conclude the question is still political. They hope it can be resolved with an awareness of their detailed explanations. They ask who is willing to push all the coming risk onto individuals. Following our summary of their arguments RSS frames them from the perspective of complex adaptive system (CAS) theory. Historically developing within the global cotton value delivery system, key CAS features are highlighted. National debt
Robert Gordon argues that the inventions of the second industrial revolution were the foundation for American economic growth. Gordon shows how flows of people into difficult rural America built a population base which then took the opportunity to move on to urban settings: Houses, Food in supermarkets, Clothes in department stores; that supported increasing productivity and standard of living. The deployment of nationwide networks: Rail, Road, Utilities; terminating in the urban housing and work places allowing the workers to leverage time saving goods and services, which helped grow the economy. Gordon describes the concomitant transformation of: Communications and advertising Credit and finance Public health and the health care network Health insurance Education Social and welfare services Counter intuitively the constraints introduced before and in the Great Depression and the demands of World War 2 provide the amplifiers that drive the inventions deeply and fully into every aspect of the economy between 1940 and 1970 creating the exceptional growth and standard of living of post war America. Subsequently the rate of growth was limited until the shift of women into the workplace and the full networking of voice and data supported the Internet and World Wide Web completed the third industrial revolution, but the effects were muted by the narrow reach of the technologies. The development of Big Data, Robots, and Artificial Intelligence may support additional growth, but Gordon is unconvinced because of the collapse of the middle class. Following our summary of Gordon's book RSS frames his arguments from the perspective of complex adaptive system (CAS) theory. American growth
Carl Menger argues that the market induced the emergence of money based on the attractive features of precious metals. He compares the potential for government edicts to create money but sees them as lacking. Following our summary of his arguments RSS frames his arguments from the perspective of complex adaptive system (CAS) theory. With two hundred years of additional knowledge we conclude that precious metals are not as attractive as Menger asserts. Government backed promissory notes are analogous to: Other evolved CAS forms of ubiquitous high energy transaction intermediates and Schematic strategies that are proving optimal in supporting survival and replication in the currently accessible niches. Emergence of money
Eric Beinhocker sets out to answer a question Adam Smith developed in the Wealth of Nations: what is wealth? To do this he replaces traditional economic theory, which is based on the assumption that an economy is a system in equilibrium, with complexity economics in which the economy is modeled as a complex adaptive system (CAS). He introduces Sugerscape to illustrate an economic CAS model in action. And then he explains the major features of a CAS economy: Dynamics, Agents, Networks, Emergence, and Evolution. Building on complexity economics Beinhocker reviews how evolution applies to the economy to build wealth. He explains how design spaces map strategies to instances of physical and social technologies. And he identifies the interactors and selection mechanism of economic evolution. This allows Beinhocker to develop a new definition of wealth. In the rest of the book Beinhocker looks at the consequences of adopting complexity economics for business and society: Strategy, Organization, Finance, & Politics & Policy. Following our summary of his arguments, RSS explores his conclusions and aligns Beinhocker's model of CAS with the CAS theory and evidence we leverage. Economic complexity
Globalization from cotton
The structure and problems of the US health care network is described in terms of complex adaptive system (CAS) theory. The network: Is deeply embedded in the US nation state. It reflects the conflict between two opposing visions for the US: high tax with safety net or low tax without. The emergence of a parasitic elite supported by tax policy, further constrains the choices available to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of the network. The US is optimized to sell its citizens dangerous levels of: salt, sugar, cigarettes, guns, light, cell phones, opioids, costly education, global travel, antibacterials, formula, foods including endocrine disrupters; Accepting the US controlled global supply chain's offered goods & services results in: debt, chronic stress, amplified consumption and toxic excess, leading to obesity, addiction, driving instead of walking, microbiome collapse; Globalization connects disparate environments in a network. At the edges, humans are drastically altering the biosphere. That is reducing the proximate natural environment's connectedness, and leaving its end-nodes disconnected and far less diverse. This disconnects predators from their prey, often resulting in local booms and busts that transform the local parasite network and their reservoir and amplifier hosts. The situation is setup so that man is introduced to spillover from the local parasites' hosts. Occasionally, but increasingly, the spillover results in humanity becoming broadly infected. The evolved specialization of the immune system to the proximate environment during development becomes undermined as the environment transforms. Is incented to focus on localized competition generating massive & costly duplication of services within physician based health care operations instead of proven public health strategies. This process drives increasing research & treatment complexity and promotes hope for each new technological breakthrough. Is amplified by the legislatively structured separation and indirection of service development, provision, reimbursement and payment. Is impacted by the different political strategies for managing the increasing cost of health care for the demographic bulge of retirees. Is presented with acute and chronic problems to respond to. As currently setup the network is tuned to handle acute problems. The interactions with patients tend to be transactional. Includes a legislated health insurance infrastructure which is: Costly and inefficient Structured around yearly contracts which undermine long-term health goals and strategies. Is supported by increasingly regulated HCIT which offers to improve data sharing and quality but has entrenched commercial EHR products deep within the hospital systems. Is maintained, and kept in alignment, by massive network effects across the: Hospital platform based sub-networks connecting to Physician networks Health insurance networks - amplified by ACA narrow network legislation Hospital clinical supply and food production networks Medical school and academic research network and NIH Global transportation network Public health networks Health care IT supply network Health care
Deaton describes the wellbeing of people around the world today. He explains the powerful benefit of public health strategies and the effect of growth in material wellbeing but also the corrosive effects of aid. Following our summary of Deaton's arguments RSS comments from the perspective of complex adaptive system (CAS) theory. The situation he describes is complex including powerful amplifiers, alignment and incentives that overlap broadly with other RSS summaries of adaptations of: The biosphere, Politics, Economics, Philosophy and Health care. Improving wellbeing
Donald Barlett and James Steele write about their investigations of the major problems afflicting US health care as of 2006. Problems of US health care
Glenn Steele & David Feinberg review the development of the modern Geisinger healthcare business after its near collapse following the abandoned merger with Penn State AMC. After an overview of the business, they describe how a calamity unfolding around them supported building a vision of a better US health care network. And they explain: How they planned out the transformation, Leveraging an effective governance structure, Using a strategy to gain buy in, Enabling reengineering at the clinician patient interface. Implementing the reengineering for acute, chronic & hot spot care; to help the patients and help the physicians. Geisinger's leverage of biologics. Reengineering healing with ProvenExperience. Where Geisinger is headed next. Following our summary of their arguments RSS comments on them. We frame their ideas with complex adaptive system (CAS) theory. E2E insured quality care
Robert Pearl explains the perspectives of a health care leader and son who know that the current health care network interacts with human behavior to induce a poorly performing system that caused his father's death. But he is confident that these problem perceptions can be changed. Once that occurs he asserts the network will become more integrated, coordinated, collaborative, better led, and empathetic to their patients. The supporting technology infrastructure will be made highly interoperable. All that will reduce medical errors and make care more cost effective. Following our summary of his arguments RSS comments on them. We frame his ideas with complex adaptive system (CAS) theory including synergistic examples of these systems in operation. The health care network is built out of emergent human agents. All agents must model the signals they perceive to represent and respond to them. Pinker explains how this occurs. Sapolsky explains why fear and hierarchy are so significant. He includes details of Josh Green's research on morality and death. Charles Ferguson highlights the pernicious nature of financial incentives. Bad medical models
US healthcare is ripe for disruption. Christensen, Grossman and Hwang argue that technologies are emerging which will support low cost business models that will undermine the current network. Applying complex adaptive system (CAS) theory to these arguments suggests that the current power hierarchy can effectively resist these progressive forces. Disrupting health care
Atul Gawande writes about the opportunity for a thirty per cent improvement in quality in medicine by organizing to deploy as agent based teams using shared schematic plans and distributed signalling or as he puts it the use of checklists. With vivid examples from a variety of situations including construction, air crew support and global health care Gawande illustrates the effects of complexity and how to organize to cope with it. Following the short review RSS additionally relates Gawande's arguments to its models of complex adaptive systems (CAS) positioning his discussion within the network of US health care, contrasting our view of complexity, comparing the forces shaping his various examples and reviewing facets of complex failures. Complexity checklists
Friedman and Martin leverage the lifelong data collected on 1,528 bright individuals selected by Dr. Lewis Terman starting in 1921, to understand what aspects of the subjects' lives significantly affected their longevity. Looking broadly across each subject's: Personality, Education, Parental impacts, Energy levels, Partnering, Careers, Religion, Social networks, Gender, Impact from war and trauma; Friedman and Martin are able to develop a set of model pathways, which each individual could be seen to select and travel along. Some paths led to the traveler having a long life. Others were problematic. The models imply that the US approach to health and wellness should focus more on supporting the development and selection of beneficial pathways. Following our summary of their arguments RSS comments from the perspective of CAS theory. The pathways are most applicable to bright individuals with the resources and support necessary to make and leverage choices they make. Striving to enter and follow a beneficial pathway seems sensible but may be impossible for individuals trapped in a collapsing network, starved of resources. Promoting longevity
Gawande uses his personal experience, analytic skills and lots of stories of innovators to demonstrate better ways of coping with aging and death. He introduces the lack of focus on aging and death in traditional medicine. And goes on to show how technology has amplified this stress point. He illustrates the traditional possibility of the independent self, living fully while aging with the support of the extended family. Central planning responded to the technological and societal changes with poorly designed infrastructure and funding. But Gawande then contrasts the power of bottom up innovations created by experts responding to their own family situations and belief systems. Gawande then explores in depth the challenges that unfold currently as we age and become infirm. He notes that the world is following the US path. As such it will have to understand the dilemma of integrating medical treatment and hospice strategies. He notes that all parties involved need courage to cope. He proposes medicine must aim to assure well being. At that point all doctors will practice palliative care. Complex adaptive system (CAS) models of agency, death, evolution, cooperation and adaptations to new technologies are discussed. Agent death
Sonia Shah reviews the millennia old (500,000 years) malarial arms race between Humanity, Anopheles mosquitoes and Plasmodium. 250 - 500 million people are infected each year with malaria and one million die. Malaria
Peter Medawar writes about key historic events in the evolution of medical science. Medical science events
Using John Holland's theory of adaptation in complex systems Baldwin and Clark propose an evolutionary theory of design. They show how this can limit the interdependencies that generate complexity within systems. They do this through a focus on modularity. Modular designed systems
Lou Gerstner describes the challenges he faced and the strategies he used to successfully restructure the computer company IBM. Compartmented systems
Grady Booch advocates an object oriented approach to computer software design. Object based systems
Bertrand Meyer develops arguments, principles and strategies for creating modular software. He concludes that abstract data types and inheritence make object orientation a superior methodology for software construction. Complex adaptive system (CAS) theory suggests agents provide an alternative strategy to the use of objects. Software construction
Tools and the businesses that produce them have evolved dramatically. W Brian Arthur shows how this occurred. Tools
Matt Ridley demonstrates the creative effect of man on the World. He highlights: A list of preconditions resulting in Additional niche capture & more free time Building a network to interconnect memes processes & tools which Enabling inter-generational transfers Innovations that help reduce environmental stress even as they leverage fossil fuels Memetic trading networks
E O. Wilson argues that campfire gatherings on the savanna supported the emergence of human creativity. This resulted in man building cultures and later exploring them, and their creator, through the humanities. Wilson identifies the transformative events, but he notes many of these are presently ignored by the humanities. So he calls for a change of approach. He: Explores creativity: how it emerged from the benefits of becoming an omnivore hunter-gatherer, enabled by language & its catalysis of invention, through stories told in the evening around the campfire. He notes the power of fine art, but suggests music provides the most revealing signature of aesthetic surprise. Looks at the current limitations of the humanities, as they have suffered through years of neglect. Reviews the evolutionary processes of heredity and culture: Ultimate causes viewed through art, & music The bedrock of: Ape senses and emotions, Creative arts, language, dance, song typically studied by humanities, & Exponential change in science and technology. How the breakthrough from our primate past occurred, powered by eating meat, supporting: a bigger brain, expanded memory & language. Accelerating changes now driven by genetic cultural coevolution. The impact on human nature. Considers our emotional attachment to the natural world: hunting, gardens; we are destroying. Reviews our love of metaphor, archetypes, exploration, irony, and considers the potential for a third enlightenment, supported by cooperative action of humanities and science Following our summary of his arguments RSS frames these from the perspective of complex adaptive system (CAS) theory: The humanities are seen to be a functionalist framework for representing the cultural CAS while Wilson's desire to integrate the humanities and science gains support from viewing the endeavor as a network of layered CAS. Evening campfire rituals
Brynjolfsson and McAfee explore the effects of Moore's law on the economy. They argue it has generated exponential growth. This has been due to innovation. It has created a huge bounty of additional wealth. But the wealth is spread unevenly across society. They look at the short and long term implications of the innovation bounty and spread and the possible future of technology. Following our summary of their arguments RSS comments from the perspective of CAS theory. Brilliant technologies
Salman Khan argues that the evolved global education system is inefficient and organized around constraining and corralling students into accepting dubious ratings that lead to mundane roles. He highlights a radical and already proven alternative which offers effective self-paced deep learning processes supported by technology and freed up attention of teams of teachers. Building on his personal experience of helping overcome the unjustified failing grade of a relative, Khan: Iteratively learns how to teach: Starting with Nadia, Leveraging short videos focused on content, Converging on mastery, With the help of neuroscience, and filling in dependent gaps; resulting in a different approach to the mainstream method. Assesses the broken US education system: Set in its ways, Designed for the 1800s, Inducing holes that are hidden by tests, Tests which ignore creativity. The resulting teaching process is so inefficient it needs to be supplemented with homework. Instead teachers were encouraging their pupils to use his tools at home so they could mentor them while they attended school, an inversion that significantly improves the economics. Enters the real world: Builds a scalable service, Working with a real classroom, Trying stealth learning, At Khan Academy full time, In the curriculum at Los Altos, Supporting life-long learning. Develops The One World Schoolhouse: Back to the future with a one room school, a robust teaching team, and creativity enabled; so with some catalysis even the poorest can become educated and earn credentials for current jobs. Wishes he could also correct: Summer holidays, Transcript based assessments, College education; Concludes it is now possible to provide the infrastructure for creativity to emerge and to support risk taking. Following our summary of his arguments RSS frames them from the perspective of complex adaptive system (CAS) theory. Disruption is a powerful force for change but if its force is used to support the current teachers to adopt new processes can it overcome the extended phenotypic alignment and evolutionary amplifiers sustaining the current educational network? Education versus guilds
Amy Chua and Jed Rubenfeld's New York Times opinion based on The Triple Package is summarized. Their ideas are then framed by CAS theory and reviewed. What drives success
Peter Turchin describes how major pre-industrial empires developed due to effects of geographic boundaries constraining the empires and their neighbors' interactions. Turchin shows how the asymmetries of breeding rates and resource growth rates results in dynamic cycles within cycles. After the summary of Turchin's book complex adaptive system (CAS) theory is used to augment Turchins findings. Warrior groups
Through the operation of three different food chains Michael Pollan explores their relative merits. The application of complex adaptive system (CAS) theory highlights the value of evolutionary testing of the food chain. Natural systems
E. O. Wilson & Bert Holldobler illustrate how bundled cooperative strategies can take hold. Various social insects have developed strategies which have allowed them to capture the most valuable available niches. Like humans they invest in specialization and cooperate to subdue larger, well equipped competitors. Insect superorganisms
Computational theory of the mind and evolutionary psychology provide Steven Pinker with a framework on which to develop his psychological arguments about the mind and its relationship to the brain. Humans captured a cognitive niche by natural selection 'building out' specialized aspects of their bodies and brains resulting in a system of mental organs we call the mind. He garnishes and defends the framework with findings from psychology regarding: The visual system - an example of natural selections solutions to the sensory challenges of inverse modeling of our environment; Intensions - where he highlights the challenges of hunter-gatherers - making sense of the objects they perceive and predicting what they imply and natural selections powerful solutions; Emotions - which Pinker argues are essential to human prioritizing and decision making; Relationships - natural selection's strategies for coping with the most dangerous competitors, other people. He helps us understand marriage, friendships and war. These conclusions allow him to understand the development and maintenance of higher callings: Art, Music, Literature, Humor, Religion, & Philosophy; and develop a position on the meaning of life. Complex adaptive system (CAS) modeling allows RSS to frame Pinker's arguments within humanity's current situation, induced by powerful evolved amplifiers: Globalization, Cliodynamics, The green revolution and resource bottlenecks; melding his powerful predictions of the drivers of human behavior with system wide constraints. The implications are discussed. Computationally adapted mind
The stages of development of the human female, including how her brain changes and the impacts of this on her 'reality' across a full life span: conception, infantile puberty, girlhood, juvenile pause, adolescence, dating years, motherhood, post-menopause; are described. Brizendine notes the significant difference in how emotions are processed by women compared to men. Complex adaptive system (CAS) theory associates the stages with the evolutionary under-pinning, psychological implications and behavioral CAS. Evolved female brain
The complexity of behavior is explored through Sapolsky developing scenarios of our best and worst behaviors across time spans, and scientific subjects including: anthropology, psychology, neuroscience, sociology. The rich network of adaptive flows he outlines provides insights and highlight challenges for scientific research on behavior. Complex adaptive system (CAS) theory builds on Sapolsky's details highlighting the strategies that evolution has captured to successfully enter niches we now occupy. CAS behavior
Carlo Rovelli resolves the paradox of time. Rovelli initially explains that low level physics does not include time: A present that is common throughout the universe does not exist Events are only partially ordered. The present is localized The difference between past and future is not foundational. It occurs because of state that through our blurring appears particular to us Time passes at different speeds dependent on where we are and how fast we travel Time's rhythms are due to the gravitational field Our quantized physics shows neither space nor time, just processes transforming physical variables. Fundamentally there is no time. The basic equations evolve together with events, not things Then he explains how in a physical world without time its perception can emerge: Our familiar time emerges Our interaction with the world is partial, blurred, quantum indeterminate The ignorance determines the existence of thermal time and entropy that quantifies our uncertainty Directionality of time is real but perspectival. The entropy of the world in relation to us increases with our thermal time. The growth of entropy distinguishes past from future: resulting in traces and memories Each human is a unified being because: we reflect the world, we formed an image of a unified entity by interacting with our kind, and because of the perspective of memory The variable time: is one of the variables of the gravitational field. With our scale we don't register quantum fluctuations, making space-time appear determined. At our speed we don't perceive differences in time of different clocks, so we experience a single time: universal, uniform, ordered; which is helpful to our decisions Emergence of time
Consciousness has confounded philosophers and scientists for centuries. Now it is finally being characterized scientifically. That required a transformation of approach. Realizing that consciousness was ill-defined neuroscientist Stanislas Dehaene and others characterized and focused on conscious access. In the book he outlines the limitations of previous psychological dogma. Instead his use of subjective assessments opened the window to contrast totally unconscious brain activity with those including consciousness. He describes the research methods. He explains the contribution of new sensors and probes that allowed the psychological findings to be correlated, and causally related to specific neural activity. He describes the theory of the brain he uses, the 'global neuronal workspace' to position all the experimental details into a whole. He reviews how both theory and practice support diagnosis and treatment of real world mental illnesses. The implications of Dehaene's findings for subsequent consciousness research are outlined. Complex adaptive system (CAS) models of the brain's development and operation introduce constraints which are discussed. Conscious access
Reading and writing present a conundrum. The reader's brain contains neural networks tuned to reading. With imaging a written word can be followed as it progresses from the retina through a functional chain that asks: Are these letters? What do they look like? Are they a word? What does it sound like? How is it pronounced? What does it mean? Dehaene explains the importance of education in tuning the brain's networks for reading as well as good strategies for teaching reading and countering dyslexia. But he notes the reading networks developed far too recently to have directly evolved. And Dehaene asks why humans are unique in developing reading and culture. He explains the cultural engineering that shaped writing to human vision and the exaptations and neuronal structures that enable and constrain reading and culture. Dehaene's arguments show how cellular, whole animal and cultural complex adaptive system (CAS) are related. We review his explanations in CAS terms and use his insights to link cultural CAS that emerged based on reading and writing with other levels of CAS from which they emerge. Evolved reading
Read Montague explores how brains make decisions. In particular he explains how: Evolution can create indirect abstract models, such as the dopamine system, that allow Life changing real-time decisions to be made, and how Schematic structures provide encodings of computable control structures which operate through and on incomputable, schematically encoded, physically active structures and operationally associated production functions. Receptor indirection
Daniel Goleman and Richard Davidson describe a scientific investigation of meditation's impact on the brain. They introduce the book by describing their experiences with meditation, science and the research establishment, their friendship, how meditation is now used in two distinct ways: deep - leading to altered traits & wide - that can reach the multitudes; which the book reviews as it critiques the claims and research used to back them up. Goleman and Davidson describe meeting as Harvard psychology graduate students, interested in consciousness, and how minds work. They rebel against the behavioral orthodoxy, visit Asia and discover the Eastern tradition of exploring and altering the mind. Goleman had travelled to Sri Lanka to understand an Asian model of the mind, which he presented to the undergraduates at Harvard. Goleman and Davidson developed it into a shared vision of consciousness. It took over twenty years for scientific theory and experimental data to catch up and align with this model. Much of the prior experimental data had to be abandoned. They introduce meditation's impact on the amygdala responding to pain and stress. They look at the changes in: Stress Compassion Attention Self-awareness; and the potential for use of mediation in psychiatry. And they warn of the occurrence of dark nights. They detail how scientists were able to study the brains of Tibetan meditation masters, starting with Mingyur Rinpoche, and detect meditation altering traits. Finally they discuss the potential benefits of meditation and strategies to distribute it broadly to a busy America. Meditating neurons
Tara Brach was worried from a young age that there was something terribly wrong with her: she like many others felt unworthy. She responded by developing Radical Acceptance. Brach then explains the steps in applying it: pause, greet what happens next with unconditional friendliness; allowing us to: Initially attend to the sensations of our body, Accept the wanting self and discover its source of boundless love. Welcome fear with a widening attention, accept the pain of death and become free. Use adversity as a gateway to limitless compassion for ourselves and others. Focus on our basic goodness to counter Western culture turning anger, at being betrayed, towards ourselves. Extend observing this goodness in everyone. This enables the use of loving-kindness. Leverage friendships to understand more about our shared nature and strengthen Radical Acceptance. Realize our Buddha nature. Complex adaptive system (CAS) theory describes the emergence of the dualistic self and the tree of life linked by the genetic code and machinery. It provides an analog of the Buddhist presence. Compassionate CAS
The influence of childhood on behavior is significant. Enneagrams define personality types: Reformer, Helper, Achiever, Individualist, Investigator, Loyalist, Enthusiast, Challenger and Peacemaker; based on the impact of childhood driven wounds. The Enneagram becomes a tool to enable interested people to transform from the emotionally wounded base, hidden within the armor of the type, to the liberated underlying essence. Childhood leaves each of us with some environmentally specific Basic Fear. In response each of us adopts an induced Basic Desire of the type. But as we develop the inner observer, it will support presence and undermine the identification that supports the armor of the type. The Enneagram reveals three sets of relations about our type armor: Triadic self revealing: Instinctive, feeling, thinking; childhood needs that became significant wounds Social style groupings: Assertive, compliant, withdrawn; strategies for managing inner conflict Coping styles: Positive outlook, competency, reactive; strategies for defending childhood wounds Riso and Hudson augment the Enneagram with instinctual distortions reflected in the interests of the variants. The Enneagram also offers tools for understanding a person's level of development: unhealthy, average, healthy, liberation; including their current center of gravity, steriotypical social role, wake-up call, leaden rule, red flag, and direction of integration and disintegration. Complex adaptive system (CAS) theory associates the models presented by the Enneagram with evolved behaviors and structures in the mind: feelings, emotions, social behaviors, ideas; driven by genetic and cultural evolution and the constraints of family and social life. Emergent evolved amplifers can be constrained by Riso and Hudson's awareness strategies. Enneagram strategies
Antonio Damasio argues that ancient & fundamental homeostatic processes, built into behaviors and updated by evolution have resulted in the emergence of nervous systems and feelings. These feelings, representing the state of the viscera, and represented with general systems supporting enteric operation, are later ubiquitously integrated into the 'images' built by the minds of higher animals including humans. Damasio highlights the separate development of the body frame in the building of minds. Damasio explains that this integration of feelings by minds supports the development of subjectivity and consciousness. His chain of emergence suggests the 'order of things.' He stresses the end-to-end integration of the organism which undermines dualism. And he reviews Chalmers hard problem of consciousness. Damasio reviews the emergence of cultures and sees feelings, integrated with reason, as the judges of the cultural creative process, linking culture to homeostasis. He sees cultures as supporting the development of tools to improve our lives. But the results of the creative process have added stresses to our lives. Following our summary of his arguments RSS frames his arguments from the perspective of complex adaptive system (CAS) theory. Each of the [super]organisms discussed is a CAS reflecting the theory of such systems: Damasio's proposals about homeostasis routed signalling, aligns well with CAS theory. Damasio's ideas on cultural stresses are elaborated by CAS examples. Emergence of feelings
Robert Coram highlights the noble life of John Boyd. John spent a lot of time alone during his childhood. He: excelled at swimming and was a lifeguard, enlisted in the Army Air Corp while at school which rejected him for pilot training, was part of the Japan occupation force where he swam; so the US paid for him to attend University of Iowa, where he: joined the Air Force Officers' training corps, was accepted to be an Air Force pilot, and got engaged to Mary Bruce. Boyd trained at Nellis AFB to become a combat ready pilot in the Korean War. While the US Air Force focused on Strategic bombing, Boyd loved dogfights. His exceptional tactical ability was rewarded with becoming an instructor. Boyd created new ways to think about dogfighting and beat all-comers by using them in the F-100. He was noticed and enabled by Spradling. As he trained, and defeated the top pilots from around the US and allied base network, his reputation spread. But he needed to get nearer to the hot spring in Georgia, and when his move to Tyndall AFB was blocked he used the AFIT to train in engineering at Georgia tech. While preparing to move he documented his FWS training and mentored Ronald Catton. While there he first realized the link between energy and maneuverability. At Eglin, in partnership with Tom Christie, he developed tools to model the link. They developed comparisons of US and Soviet aircraft which showed the US aircraft performing poorly. Eventually General Sweeney was briefed on the theory and issues with the F-105, F-4, and F-111. Sent to the Pentagon to help save the F-X budget, Boyd joined forces with Pierre Sprey to pressure procurement into designing and building tactically exceptional aircraft: a CAS tank killer and a lightweight maneuverable fighter. The navy aligned with Senators of states with navy bases, prepared to sink the F-X and force the F-14 on the Air Force. Boyd saved the plane from the Navy and the budget from Congress, ensuring the Air Force executive and its career focused hierarchy had the freedom to compromise on a budget expanding over-stuffed F-X (F-15). Boyd requested to retire, in disgust. Amid mounting hostility from the organizational hierarchy Boyd and Sprey secretly developed specifications for building prototype lightweight fighters with General Dynamics: YF-16; and Northrop: YF-17; and enabled by Everest Riccioni. David Packard announced a budget of $200 million for the services to spend on prototypes. Pierre Sprey's friend Lyle Cameron picked a short takeoff and landing transport aircraft and Boyd's lightweight fighter to prototype. Boyd was transferred to Thailand as Vice Commander of Task Force Alpha, inspector general and equal opportunity training officer; roles in which he excelled. And he started working on his analysis of creativity: Destruction and Creation. But on completion of the tour Boyd was apparently abandoned and sent to run a dead end office at the Pentagon. The power hierarchy moved to protect the F-15, but: Boyd, Christie, Schlesinger, and the Air Force chief of staff; kept the lightweight fighter budgeted and aligned with Boyd's requirements in a covert campaign. The Air Force threw a phalanx of developers at the F-16, distorting Boyd's concept. He accepted he had lost the fight and retired from the Air Force. Shifting to scholarship Boyd reflects on how rigidity must be destroyed to enable creative new assemblies. He uses the idea to explain the operational success of the YF16 and F-86 fighters, and then highlights how the pilot can take advantage of their infrastructure advantage with rapid decision making he explains with the O-O-D-A Loop. Boyd encouraged Chuck Spinney to expose the systemic cost overruns of the military procurement process. The military hierarchy moved to undermine the Spinney Report and understand the nature of the reformers. Boyd acted as a progressive mentor to Michael Wyly, who taught the Marine Corps about maneuver warfare, and Jim Burton. Finally, after the military hierarchy appears to have beaten him, Boyd's ideas are tested during the First Gulf War. Following our summary of his main points, RSS frames the details from the perspective of complex adaptive system (CAS) theory. Boyd was Darwinesque, placing the art of air-to-air combat within a CAS framework. Air warrior
Alfred Nemeczek reveals the chaotic, stressful life of Vincent van Gogh in Arles. Nemeczek shows that Vincent was driven to create, and successfully invented new methods of representing feeling in paintings, and especially portraits. Vincent worked hard to allow artists like him-self to innovate. But Vincent failed in this goal, collapsing into psychosis. Nemeczek also provides a brief history of Vincent's life. Following our summary of his main points, RSS frames the details from the perspective of complex adaptive system (CAS) theory. Vincent creates
Reginald Dwight, better known as Elton John, writes a hilarious memoir, full of anecdotal and sometimes morbid humor and gossip, which describes his immediate family, upbringing, development as a singer songwriter, stardom and its support for his problems, collapse and eventual recovery. Elton stresses the serendipitous nature of his emergence as a musician. He describes the contributions of his parents, Stanley & Sheila, mother's sister, and her mother Ivy; who formed his early childhood proximate environment which prepared him for a job in entertainment: he developed his performance in the club circuits, setup a commercial partnership with Bernie Taupin to write songs; entering a network based around Dick James Music. And he almost got married. DJM focused Elton and Bernie's initial song writing while they studied the songs they admired and Elton did session work, tightening his performance skills and paying for the food. A first album supported touring and the formation of a band. A second one sent them to the US where Elton became an overnight sensation. And during this period of time Elton's testosterone level ramped. Life changed dramatically. Stardom provided many rewards but there were still life's problems to deal with. Elton was befriended by his idol, John Lennon; he achieved new heights of success but, sensitive to any hint of failure and fraud, suicidally disassociated. His career crested, he struggled with loneliness and drugs, and foresaw a fearful vision of his future, as fame caged him idly in hotels between concerts. His hair abandoned him. But he was saved by the challenge of transforming the collapsed Watford football club. He retired from touring which allowed him the time to reconstruct his life. Empowered by success, supported by the removal of constraints, Elton dominates - limiting feedback, doing whatever he hopes will bring him happiness: trying new options, expanding the range and increasing the quantity of mind altering substances; eventually hitting John Reid and marrying Renata. He allows his drug use to enter the recording studio. Problems stress him. He is frightened by a cancer scare, AIDS, inspired by Ryan White, angered by the Sun, and saddened at breaking Renata's heart. But he was there for Ryan White's final days. And his lover Hugh Williams confronted Elton about his string of addictions. Elton finally agreed he had a problem. He went to rehab, stopped hating himself, gave up his current addictions, accepted the influence of a higher force, and began admiring the everyday world and other people. It seemed the higher force was supporting Elton's progress: he wrote the music for the Lion King, met David Furnish who accepted Elton warts and all; they both enjoyed a friendship with Gianni Versace; until Gianni was murdered. Princess Diana died soon after, and Elton performed at the funeral. He toured with Billy Joel and aimed to do the same with Tina Turner. While his new records sold well he found himself in debt and terminated the management relationship with John Reid Enterprises. Elton and Bernie improved their situations: Elton started writing film scores, he helped turn the film Billy Elliot into a musical, Bernie lobbied Elton to improve the way they were making records, Elton and David entered into a civil partnership, and Elton made a record with his seminal influence: Leon Russell. Elton and David became parents of two boys: Zachary and Elijah; using their sperm a surrogate mother and network in California. They quietly get married when the UK allows. Elton's mum remains difficult and cruel to him, but he is sad when she dies, and many at the funeral recall her fun side with him. Being parents increases the long-term stresses on their lives, forcing them to adjust, so they can be there for their boys. But Elton needs to go out with a bang! And everyone helps. Following our summary of his main points, RSS frames the details of the creative process from the perspective of complex adaptive system (CAS) theory. My song
Richard Feynman outlines a series of amusing vignettes, as he reviews his life story. Richard's personality encouraged him to patiently seek out fun: performing Shewhart cycles with electricity, in his childhood laboratory, and aligning theory, and practice through building and fixing radios. Leonardo's life inspired him to try innovation, which he concluded was hard. He played with the emotion in communications, a skill which he used later at Caltech. And he made a game of avoiding following orders at MIT. Working during the holidays revealed the benefit of joining theory and practice. Feynman enrolled as a graduate student at Princeton, where the successful approach to science was just like his. His approach was based on patience and fun: he used his home lab and other tools for qualitative exploration. Overtime he added experimental techniques. He would test the assertions in articles with amusing investigations; with his mind aligned by feelings of joy. Everyone at Princeton heard he would want to be hypnotized. He was driven to compare the challenges of complex subjects being taught at Princeton to his current pick. In his summer recess he explored biology. Gathering problems in challenging areas of science, and then picking one to solve, supported his creativity. And his practical orientation and situation when growing up in Far Rockaway, supported his desire for choices and adolescent dislike for purely intellectual and cultural pursuits. Being mostly self-taught, he developed different approaches to problems than the standard strategies provided by mass education. Richard saw his skill set as very different to that exhibited by his father. But are they very different? While Richard was at Princeton, America became concerned about the implications of the European war. After a friend enlisted he decided to dedicate his summer holiday to helping the war effort. Feynman got involved in the Manhattan Project, and went to Los Alamos where he experienced constraints, applied by: the military, the physics of the project, him on Niels Bohr; but was freed from them by Von Neumann. The records & reports of the project were kept in filing cabinets. Richard explored the weaknesses of the locks and safes deployed to secure these secrets. Just after the war he was called up by the draft board for a medical but was rejected for being mentally unfit. After the war, Richard was asked to become a professor at Cornell. He initially struggled in this role: Too young to match expectations, stressed by the demands of his new job and his recent experiences; until he adopted an approach that focused on fun. He enjoyed knowing about numbers: using, learning about them and the tools to use them, and competing with others; to calculate, interpolate and approximate a value the fastest. Traveling to Buffalo in a light plane once a week to give a physics lecture before flying back the next morning wasn't much fun for Richard. So he used the stipend to visit a bar after each lecture to meet beautiful women. Richard liked bars and nightclubs, spending a summer in Albuquerque frequenting one, and later ones in Las Vegas, as he explored how to get the girls he drank with to sleep with him. Richard reflects on various times when he made government officials obey their parts of contracts: patent fees, limits on red tape; Richard became frustrated with his life at Cornell, seeing more things that interested him on the sunny west coast at Caltech. Both institutions, and Chicago, offered him incentives to help his decision making, but Richard began to find reevaluating the alternatives a waste of time and he saw risks in a really high salary, deciding he would move to Caltech and stay there. Richard is invited to attend a scientific symposium in Japan. Each of the US attendees is asked to learn a little Japanese. Richard takes lessons, persists, can converse effectively, but stops when he finds the cultural parts of the language conflict with his individualism. Richard was unhappy with his achievements in physics. He felt: slower than his peers, not keeping up or understanding the latest details, fearful that he could not cope; as the community worked to understand the laws of beta decay. But Martin Block pushed him to question the troubling parity premise. Encouraged by Oppenheimer the community focused on parity and failures were discovered in a cascade of reports. Richard attended a meeting where Lee & Yang discussed a failure and a theory to explain it. Richard felt terrified and could not understand what they said. His sister pushed him to change his attitude: act like a student having fun, read every line and equation of their paper; he would understand it. And he did, as well as developing additional insights about what was happening and what still seemed conflicted. He reported his ideas back to the community. After Richard returned from Brazil he reviewed the confusion of facts with Caltech's experimental physicists who made him aware of Gell-mann abandoning another former premise of Beta decay. Feynman realized his ideas were consistent: fully and simply describing the details of beta decay. He had identified the workings of a fundamental law. Years later he was awarded the Nobel prize for physics. He was conflicted about the prize and attending the ceremony, but eventually enjoyed the trip, where he discussed cultural achievement with the Japanese ambassador. Richard was interested in the operation of the brain, modeling it on a digital computer. He explored hallucinations and the reality of experiences. Richard lobbies for integrity in science. In aspects of his life that weren't focused directly on science, Richard was quirky. He would tease those who asked for his help: pushing bargains to their logical conclusion; insisting on everyone keeping to their part of the agreement. And he paid no attention to the logistical details of planning. He loved percussion, playing: drums, bongos, baskets, tables, Frigideira; and became quite a success. He eventually discovered art could be fun, and tried to express his joy at the underlying mathematical beauty of the physical world. He had a great art teacher. But he discovered although he could eventually draw well he did not understand art. Many of the artists he met were fakers, and even the powerful, who were interested in integrating art and science, did not understand either subject. He found the situation was similar in other complex adaptive systems: philosophy, religion and economics; which he dabbled in for a while but found the strategies of other people practicing the study of such subjects made him angry and disturbed, so he avoided participating in them. It seemed ironic that he was eventually asked to help in bringing culture to the physicists! He discusses issues in teaching creative physics in Brazil. He gets involved in the California public school text book selection process which he concluded was totally broken, but also reveals how his father provided him with a vision of how our world works, inspiring his interest in experimentation and physical theory. Following our summary of his main points, RSS reviews how his personality, family and cultural history supported his creative development from the perspective of complex adaptive system (CAS) theory. Richard draws
Desmond & Moore paint a picture of Charles Darwin's life, expanded from his own highlights: His naughty childhood, Wasted schooldays, Apprenticeship with Grant, His extramural activities at Cambridge, walks with Henslow, life with FitzRoy on the Beagle, His growing love for science, London: geology, journal and Lyell. Moving from Gower Street to Down and writing Origin and other books. He reviewed his position on religion: the long dispute with Emma, his slow collapse of belief - damnation for unbelievers like his father and brother, inward conviction being evolved and unreliable, regretting he had ignored his father's advice; while describing Emma's side of the argument. He felt happy with his decision to dedicate his life to science. He closed by asserting after Self & Cross-fertilization his strength will be exhausted. Following our summary of their main points, RSS frames the details from the perspective of complex adaptive system (CAS) theory. Darwin placed evolution within a CAS framework, and built a network of supporters whose complementary skills helped drive the innovation. Darwin emerges
Richard Dawkin's explores how nature has created implementations of designs, without any need for planning or design, through the accumulation of small advantageous changes. Accumulating small changes
Russ Abbott explores the impact on science of epiphenomena and the emergence of agents. Autonomous emergence
Terrence Deacon explores how constraints on dynamic flows can induce emergent phenomena which can do real work. He shows how these phenomena are sustained. The mechanism enables the development of Darwinian competition. Constraint based phenomena

Primary Navigation

In this page we:

Introduce some current problems of complexity for humanity
Explain how to use the site.

There are two main starting points:

The example systems frame and
The presentation frame.
And then there is how we use the site.

The site uses lots of click through. That's so that you can see the underlying principles that are contributing to the system being discussed. We hope that as you internalize and reflect on the principles the system should appear in a new light. At this site clicking is good!

Opportunities

This page introduces the complex adaptive system (CAS) theory frame. The theory provides an organizing framework that is used by 'life.' It can be used to evaluate and rank models that claim to describe our perceived reality. It catalogs the laws and strategies which underpin the operation of systems that are based on the interaction of emergent agents. It highlights the constraints that shape CAS and so predicts their form. A proposal that does not conform is wrong.

John Holland's framework for representing complexity is outlined. Links to other key aspects of CAS theory discussed at the site are presented.

Theory

We are products of complexity, but our evolution has focused our understanding on the situation of hunter gatherers on the African savanna. As humanity has become more powerful we can significantly impact the systems we depend on. But we struggle to comprehend them. So this web frame explores significant real world complex adaptive systems (CAS):

Assumptions of randomness & equilibrium allowed the wealthy & powerful to expand the size and leverage of stock markets, by placing at risk the insurance and retirement savings of the working class. The assumptions are wrong but remain entrenched.
The US nation was built from two divergent political views of: Jefferson and Hamilton. It also reflects the development of competing ancient ideas of Epicurus and Cyril. But the collapse of Bretton Woods forced Wall Street into a position of power, while the middle and working class were abandoned by the elites. Housing financed with cash from oil and derivative transactions helped hide the shift.
Most US health care is still operating the way cars built in the 1940s did. Geisinger is an example of better solution. But transforming the whole network is a challenge. And public health investment has proved far more beneficial.
Helping our children learn to be effective adults is part of our humanity, but we have created a robust but deeply flawed education system. Better alternatives have emerged.
Spoken language, reading and writing emerged allowing our good ideas to become a second genetic material.
The emergence of the global economy in the 1600s and its subsequent development;

It explains how the examples relate to each other, why we all have trouble effectively comprehending these systems and explains how our inexperience with CAS can lead to catastrophe. It outlines the items we see as key to the system and why.

Examples

This page presents a search result list covering each linked region of rob's strategy studio.

Search

Rob's Strategy Studio aims to celebrate and illuminate complex adaptive systems (CAS) just as an art studio does art.

By way of introduction it notes the complex interactions that led to the partnership that discovered the DNA double helix and genetic code.

The page introduces the RSS vision 'I act, therefore I think' approach and the RSS mission.

It describes how many key aspects of the world are CAS including businesses.

Finally the page explains each of the framed pictures displayed at the studio including the other aspects explored in this vision frame.

Vision

This page introduces the programs that the Adaptive Web Framework (AWF) develops and uses to deploy Rob's Strategy Studio (RSS).
The programs are structured to obey complex adaptive system (CAS) principles. That allows AWF to experiment and examine the effects.
A production program generates the web pages.
A testing system tests the production program. It uses a framework to support the test programs. This is AWF's agent programming framework as described in the agent-based programming presentation.
An example of the other AWF agent-based programs that are also described in the frame is the virtual robot.
Finally a strength, weaknesses, opportunities and threats assessment is presented.

Perl

This page introduces a series of asymmetries which encourage different strategic approaches.
The differences found in business, sexual selection, gamete structure, as well as in chess encourage escalations in the interactions.
And yet the systems including these asymmetries can be quite stable.

Asymmetries

This web frame includes a set of presentations about complex adaptive systems (CAS)

Presentations

Globalization from cotton

Summary

Sven Beckert describes the historic transformation of the growing, spinning, weaving, manufacture of cotton goods and their trade over time. He describes the rise of a first global commodity, its dependence on increasing: military power, returns for the control points in the value delivery system(VDS), availability of land and labor to work it including slaves.

He explains how cotton offered the opportunity for industrialization further amplifying the productive capacity of the VDS and the power of the control points. This VDS was quickly copied. The increased capacity of the industrialized cotton complex adaptive system (CAS) required more labor to operate the machines. Beckert describes the innovative introduction of wages and the ways found to mobilize industrial labor.

Beckert describes the characteristics of the industrial cotton CAS which made it flexible enough to become globally interconnected. Slavery made the production system so cost effective that all prior structures collapsed as they interconnected. So when the US civil war blocked access to the major production nodes in the American Deep South the CAS began adapting.

Beckert describes the global reconstruction that occurred and the resulting destruction of the traditional ways of life in the global countryside. This colonial expansion further enriched and empowered the 'western' nation states. Beckert explains how other countries responded by copying the colonial strategies and creating the opportunities for future armed conflict among the original colonialists and the new upstarts.

Completing the adaptive in evolutionary biology is a trait that increased the number of surviving offspring in an organism's ancestral lineage. Holland argues: complex adaptive systems (CAS) adapt due to the influence of schematic strings on agents. Evolution indicates fitness when an organism survives and reproduces. For his genetic algorithm, Holland separated the adaptive process into credit assignment and rule discovery. He assigned a strength to each of the rules (alternate hypothesis) used by his artificial agents, by credit assignment - each accepted message being paid for by the recipient, increasing the sender agent's rule's strength (implicit modeling) and reducing the recipient's. When an agent achieved an explicit goal they obtained a final reward. Rule discovery used the genetic algorithm to select strong rule schemas from a pair of agents to be included in the next generation, with crossing over and mutation applied, and the resulting schematic strategies used to replace weaker schemas. The crossing over genetic operator is unlikely to break up a short schematic sequence that provides a building block retained because of its 'fitness'; In Deacon's conception of evolution, an adaptation is the realization of a set of constraints on candidate mechanisms, and so long as these constraints are maintained, other features are arbitrary.
shifts, Beckert describes the advocates for industrialization in the colonized global south and how over time they joined the global cotton CAS disrupting the early western manufacturing nodes and creating the current global CAS dominated by merchants like Wal-Mart pulling goods through a network of clothing manufacturers, spinning and weaving factories, and growers competing with each other on cost.

Following our summary of Beckert's book, RSS is Rob's Strategy Studio comments from the perspective of CAS theory. The transformation of disconnected peasant farmers emerged several times and various places, probably first around 11,000 years ago. It depends on and supports evolved amplifiers which introduce instability and problems with sustainability of the populations that depended on it, unlike the earlier hunting and gathering. Today the uncertainty can be hedged, although third world farmers' businesses are undermined by first world agricultural policy. J.R. McNeill explains the sustainability issue: "all farming is a struggle against the depletion of soil nutrients. Crops absorb nutrients; these are eaten by people or animals; then they spend shorter or longer periods of time in human or animal bodies, before returning to the soil. If these nutrients, in one manner or another, return to farmers' fields, then a nutrient cycle can last indefinitely. If they do not, then those fields gradually lose nutrient and over time produce less and less food - unless some intervention such as fertilizer counteracts the nutrient loss." However, McNeill notes three notable exceptions: Egypt until the Aswan High Dam, Southern China, Medieval Europe; "each ecologically successful over long periods of time." Their success resulted from trial and error and favorable circumstances.
, pastoral warriors and their lands into a supply chain for a highly profitable industrial CAS required the development over time: of military force, global transportation and communication networks, perception and representation control networks, capital is the sum total nonhuman assets that can be owned and exchanged on some market according to Piketty. Capital includes: real property, financial capital and professional capital. It is not immutable instead depending on the state of the society within which it exists. It can be owned by governments (public capital) and private individuals (private capital). stores and flows, models, rules, standards and markets; along with the support at key points of: barriers, disruption, and infrastructure and evolved amplifiers. The

This page discusses the mechanisms and effects of emergence underpinning any complex adaptive system (CAS). Physical forces and constraints follow the rules of complexity. They generate phenomena and support the indirect emergence of epiphenomena. Flows of epiphenomena interact in events which support the emergence of equilibrium and autonomous entities. Autonomous entities enable evolution to operate broadening the adjacent possible. Key research is reviewed.

emergent system demonstrates the powerful constraining influence of extended phenotypic alignment.

Empire of Cotton

In Sven Beckert's book 'Empire of Cotton' he describes and analyses the transformation of cotton farming emerged several times and various places, probably first around 11,000 years ago. It depends on and supports evolved amplifiers which introduce instability and problems with sustainability of the populations that depended on it, unlike the earlier hunting and gathering. Today the uncertainty can be hedged, although third world farmers' businesses are undermined by first world agricultural policy. J.R. McNeill explains the sustainability issue: "all farming is a struggle against the depletion of soil nutrients. Crops absorb nutrients; these are eaten by people or animals; then they spend shorter or longer periods of time in human or animal bodies, before returning to the soil. If these nutrients, in one manner or another, return to farmers' fields, then a nutrient cycle can last indefinitely. If they do not, then those fields gradually lose nutrient and over time produce less and less food - unless some intervention such as fertilizer counteracts the nutrient loss." However, McNeill notes three notable exceptions: Egypt until the Aswan High Dam, Southern China, Medieval Europe; "each ecologically successful over long periods of time." Their success resulted from trial and error and favorable circumstances.
and manufacture over

Carlo Rovelli resolves the paradox of time.
Rovelli initially explains that low level physics does not include time:

A present that is common throughout the universe does not exist
Events are only partially ordered. The present is localized
The difference between past and future is not foundational. It occurs because of state that through our blurring appears particular to us
Time passes at different speeds dependent on where we are and how fast we travel
Time's rhythms are due to the gravitational field
Our quantized physics shows neither space nor time, just processes transforming physical variables.
Fundamentally there is no time. The basic equations evolve together with events, not things

Then he explains how in a physical world without time its perception can emerge:

Our familiar time emerges

Our interaction with the world is partial, blurred, quantum indeterminate
The ignorance determines the existence of thermal time and entropy that quantifies our uncertainty
Directionality of time is real but perspectival. The entropy of the world in relation to us increases with our thermal time. The growth of entropy distinguishes past from future: resulting in traces and memories
Each human is a unified being because: we reflect the world, we formed an image of a unified entity by interacting with our kind, and because of the perspective of memory
The variable time: is one of the variables of the gravitational field. With our scale we don't register quantum fluctuations, making space-time appear determined. At our speed we don't perceive differences in time of different clocks, so we experience a single time: universal, uniform, ordered; which is helpful to our decisions

time. This transformation is of great significance since it is a formative step in the development of our modern industrialized world. Since 1960 most cotton is grown in India, China and then Soviet Uzbekistan, spun and woven in China, Turkey and Pakistan and then turned into finished goods in Bangladesh and Vietnam. But around 1860 slave plantations in the American South grew cotton and then sent it for processing to British factories which provided two thirds of the world's cotton spindles. British workers operated the newly

emergent factories spinning and weaving fabrics that merchants sent to the world's markets.

The newly developed value delivery system (

The complex adaptive system (CAS) nature of a value delivery system is first introduced. It's a network of agents acting as relays.

The critical nature of hub agents and the difficulty of altering an aligned network is reviewed.

The nature of and exceptional opportunities created by platforms are discussed.

Finally an example of aligning a VDS is presented.

VDS) was easily adapted to other products. Beckert stresses that the 1860s VDS was imperial. It depended on huge military expenditures to support the near constant state of war. Protectionist tariffs, high taxes and large accumulation of debt were used by Great Britain, and then other colonizers, to develop the system which united the power of the state with the power of capital is the sum total nonhuman assets that can be owned and exchanged on some market according to Piketty. Capital includes: real property, financial capital and professional capital. It is not immutable instead depending on the state of the society within which it exists. It can be owned by governments (public capital) and private individuals (private capital). .

In the 1500s entrepreneurial use of war allowed the leverage of slavery, genocide and imperial expansion to claim sovereignty over lands and people. The captured wealth is schematically useful information and its equivalent, schematically useful energy, to paraphrase Beinhocker. It is useful because an agent has schematic strategies that can utilize the information or energy to extend or leverage control of the cognitive niche. and knowledge strengthened the nascent European institutions enabling industrialization.

Over

Carlo Rovelli resolves the paradox of time.
Rovelli initially explains that low level physics does not include time:

A present that is common throughout the universe does not exist
Events are only partially ordered. The present is localized
The difference between past and future is not foundational. It occurs because of state that through our blurring appears particular to us
Time passes at different speeds dependent on where we are and how fast we travel
Time's rhythms are due to the gravitational field
Our quantized physics shows neither space nor time, just processes transforming physical variables.
Fundamentally there is no time. The basic equations evolve together with events, not things

Then he explains how in a physical world without time its perception can emerge:

Our familiar time emerges

Our interaction with the world is partial, blurred, quantum indeterminate
The ignorance determines the existence of thermal time and entropy that quantifies our uncertainty
Directionality of time is real but perspectival. The entropy of the world in relation to us increases with our thermal time. The growth of entropy distinguishes past from future: resulting in traces and memories
Each human is a unified being because: we reflect the world, we formed an image of a unified entity by interacting with our kind, and because of the perspective of memory
The variable time: is one of the variables of the gravitational field. With our scale we don't register quantum fluctuations, making space-time appear determined. At our speed we don't perceive differences in time of different clocks, so we experience a single time: universal, uniform, ordered; which is helpful to our decisions

time slaves became wage workers, coercion became contracts and debt based constraints. Persistence and expropriation became property rights. Private factors using genocide and master slave relationships gave way to the rule of law.

As nation states gave workers the vote their conditions and remuneration improved allowing the entry of lower cost labor based alternatives in the global south.

The rise of a global commodity

Aztec farmers emerged several times and various places, probably first around 11,000 years ago. It depends on and supports evolved amplifiers which introduce instability and problems with sustainability of the populations that depended on it, unlike the earlier hunting and gathering. Today the uncertainty can be hedged, although third world farmers' businesses are undermined by first world agricultural policy. J.R. McNeill explains the sustainability issue: "all farming is a struggle against the depletion of soil nutrients. Crops absorb nutrients; these are eaten by people or animals; then they spend shorter or longer periods of time in human or animal bodies, before returning to the soil. If these nutrients, in one manner or another, return to farmers' fields, then a nutrient cycle can last indefinitely. If they do not, then those fields gradually lose nutrient and over time produce less and less food - unless some intervention such as fertilizer counteracts the nutrient loss." However, McNeill notes three notable exceptions: Egypt until the Aswan High Dam, Southern China, Medieval Europe; "each ecologically successful over long periods of time." Their success resulted from trial and error and favorable circumstances.
grew maize, beans, squash, chilies and cotton in mixed cultivations. The women spun and wove the cotton with simple tools to contribute to the taxes levied by the Aztec rulers.

Cotton is able to grow in a variety of niches by adjusting its bloom period including: India, Africa, South America; All lie in a band 32-35 degrees south to 37 degrees north. It requires greater than 50 degrees Fahrenheit in its growing period, 20 - 25 inches of rain and no frost for 200 days.

90% of today's plants are grown from American Upland cotton seed.

The cotton industry developed independently in three key areas:

Indian cloth was of superior quality. From India cotton was transplanted to China. Cotton displaced Ramie was required for tax payments and was used to cloth soldiers.
Peru was the initiator of South American cotton manufacture. A second center developed further north in the Americas. Navajos and Hopi grew cotton as early as 300 BC is Before Christ also reffered to as before common era (BCE).
.
A few thousand years later Sudan initiated the development of African cotton. From Sudan it was transplanted to Egypt between 332 BC is Before Christ also reffered to as before common era (BCE).
and 395 AD is Anno Domini also referred to as common era (CE). . Islam spread cotton further into the Middle East and West Africa teaching spinning to girls and weaving to boys.

In all the areas growing and manufacturing cotton centered on households. It was one of many crops used personally and to support the community and rulers. Different communities allocated the tasks of spinning and weaving differently. But since spinning can be done intermitently it is well matched to the other typical demands on

The stages of development of the human female, including how her brain changes and the impacts of this on her 'reality' across a full life span: conception, infantile puberty, girlhood, juvenile pause, adolescence, dating years, motherhood, post-menopause; are described. Brizendine notes the significant difference in how emotions are processed by women compared to men.

Complex adaptive system (CAS) theory associates the stages with the evolutionary under-pinning, psychological implications and behavioral CAS.

women in these early civilizations: parenting and cooking. The supporting technologies evolved slowly, constrained by poor transport infrastructure, self sufficiency and lack of competitive forces.

Europe had very limited exposure to cotton until Marco Polo reported on fine Indian cotton, Pizarro attacked the Inca empire and Cortes attacked the Aztecs.

Cotton proved an effective store of value and a medium of exchange supporting the development of trade networks on all continents, and stimulating the introduction of workshops resulting in geographic concentration of traders. Merchants invested capital is the sum total nonhuman assets that can be owned and exchanged on some market according to Piketty. Capital includes: real property, financial capital and professional capital. It is not immutable instead depending on the state of the society within which it exists. It can be owned by governments (public capital) and private individuals (private capital). to develop putting out networks enabling investment in new technologies: the spinning wheel saved lots of

Carlo Rovelli resolves the paradox of time.
Rovelli initially explains that low level physics does not include time:

A present that is common throughout the universe does not exist
Events are only partially ordered. The present is localized
The difference between past and future is not foundational. It occurs because of state that through our blurring appears particular to us
Time passes at different speeds dependent on where we are and how fast we travel
Time's rhythms are due to the gravitational field
Our quantized physics shows neither space nor time, just processes transforming physical variables.
Fundamentally there is no time. The basic equations evolve together with events, not things

Then he explains how in a physical world without time its perception can emerge:

Our familiar time emerges

Our interaction with the world is partial, blurred, quantum indeterminate
The ignorance determines the existence of thermal time and entropy that quantifies our uncertainty
Directionality of time is real but perspectival. The entropy of the world in relation to us increases with our thermal time. The growth of entropy distinguishes past from future: resulting in traces and memories
Each human is a unified being because: we reflect the world, we formed an image of a unified entity by interacting with our kind, and because of the perspective of memory
The variable time: is one of the variables of the gravitational field. With our scale we don't register quantum fluctuations, making space-time appear determined. At our speed we don't perceive differences in time of different clocks, so we experience a single time: universal, uniform, ordered; which is helpful to our decisions

time. Growers in the Levant supplied Italian manufacturers via Venician ships. The manufacturers leveraged their prior capital and experience developed from working with wool. Beckert notes that this network was a prototype of the future global system except the Italian manufacturers had no power over the growers in the Levant. Islam constrained and marginalized both Italian and German activities and high taxes futher undermined the Italian efforts.

Building war capitalism

European capitalists and rulers slowly altered the global networks over 200 years from 1600 to 1800:

Armed traders melded the flows into a Europe centric maritime network.
This page discusses the mechanisms and effects of emergence underpinning any complex adaptive system (CAS). Physical forces and constraints follow the rules of complexity. They generate phenomena and support the indirect emergence of epiphenomena. Flows of epiphenomena interact in events which support the emergence of equilibrium and autonomous entities. Autonomous entities enable evolution to operate broadening the adjacent possible. Key research is reviewed.

Emergence of a military-fiscal uses government revenue collection and spending to influence the economy.
state enabled global projection of power.
Invention of financial instruments and enforcement of a legal framework secured global investments and supported the transfer of goods over long distances.
Alliances were formed with distant capitalists and rulers to gain access to their local weavers and cotton growers.
Expropriation of land and deportation of Africans supported the development of low cost plantations operated by slaves.

Following Columbus arrival in the Americas (1492) Cortes made war on the Aztecs persisting from 1518. Portugal followed in Brazil, and French and British entered the New World after 1607.

Vasco De Gama reached India in 1497 obtaining direct trade access to Indian cottons by 1498. Portugal made Goa their trading outpost from which they enforced a monopoly is a power relation within:

A state in which a group has enough power to enforce its will on other citizens. If this is a central authority with a cohesive military, it can overpower other warlords and stabilize the society.
An economy in which one business has enough share in a market segment to control margins to its advantage. An economic monopoly can be broadly beneficial: AT&T monopoly, US patent monopoly rights;

flow. Europeans paid for India's high quality cottons with Gold and Silver mined in the New World.

As the gold and silver mines depleted European settlers focused on growing cash crops: tobacco, indigo, sugar and rice; on plantations using land taken forcibly from the native peoples.

By 1602 Dutch and British joint stock companies were chartered to gain access to global trades. British agreed to split spheres of influence with the Dutch, gaining control of Indian textile flows to Europe. British used projected naval power to control Indian trades with Asia and Africa. The East India Company's 'triangular' operation traded Indian cotton cloth for South-East Asian spices for consumption and to trade in Africa for slaves. The slaves were transported and put to work developing and operating the New World's emergent plantations.

Plantations were highly profitable with low cost land and labor but required a huge labor force. African slaves from Senegal, Ghana and Benin were paid for with cotton products. The Liverpool merchants financing the plantations captured high profits. They used the accumulating capital is the sum total nonhuman assets that can be owned and exchanged on some market according to Piketty. Capital includes: real property, financial capital and professional capital. It is not immutable instead depending on the state of the society within which it exists. It can be owned by governments (public capital) and private individuals (private capital). to develop an English commercial trade and shifted the center of the cotton trade network from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic. They initially financed the development is a phase during the operation of a CAS agent. It allows for schematic strategies to be iteratively blended with environmental signals to solve the logistical issues of migrating newly built and transformed sub-agents. That is needed to achieve the adult configuration of the agent and optimize it for the proximate environment. Smiley includes examples of the developmental phase agents required in an emergent CAS. In situations where parents invest in the growth and memetic learning of their offspring the schematic grab bag can support optimizations to develop models, structures and actions to construct an adept adult. In humans, adolescence leverages neural plasticity, elder sibling advice and adult coaching to help prepare the deploying neuronal network and body to successfully compete.
of English cotton manufacture developing a putting out network of home workers.

The development of West Indian cotton plantations significantly expanded the supply of raw cotton. The growth of a European market for Indian cotton also stimulated interest in European manufacturing and a desire to understand the high quality processes the Indian manufacturers were using. The British East India Company documented Indian techniques so that England's nascent domestic industry could copy them and improve its competitiveness. As the English cotton manufacturing industry developed it worked with the British government to build tariff barriers (1685) and eventually an import ban on Indian cotton goods (1701). Indian textiles were only allowed for trading for slaves.

The wages of war capitalism

Samuel Gregg was an early example of an English textile factory developer. He owned a sugar plantation in Dominica which used slave labor until 1834 when Britain removed direct involvement by abolition. Gregg was local to Manchester where he used water power, and later steam uses heat to generate steam to do mechanical work. They have an external combustion source that burns wood or coal. Early instances include Newcomen's stationary beam atmospheric engine, and Boulton and Watt's more efficient beam engine. The steam engine was later used in railroads.
, to drive spinning machines thus increasing the productivity is the efficiency with which an agent's selected strategy converts the inputs to an action into the resulting outputs. It is a complex capability of agents. It will depend on the agent having: time, motivation, focus, appropriate skills; the coherence of the participating collaborators, and a beneficial environment including the contribution of: standardization of inputs and outputs, infrastructure and evolutionary amplifiers.
of spinning. He leveraged the global cotton trading network through relatives who were merchants in Liverpool. This provided necessary competitive advantages relative to artisans working in Frankfurt, Calcutta or Rio. For example plantations developed a number of innovation is the economic realization of invention and combinatorial exaptation. Keynes noted it provided the unquantifiable beneficial possibility that limits fear of uncertainty. Innovation operates across all CAS, being supported by genetic and cultural means. Creativity provides the mutation and recombination genetic operators for the cultural process. While highly innovative, monopolies: AT&T, IBM; usually have limited economic reach, constraining productivity. This explains the use of regulation, or even its threat, that can check their power and drive the creations across the economy.
s including cost accounting which he could use. A particularly significant financial innovation he adopted was encouraging the powerless: children and penniless females; to work in his factory as wage laborers.

English manufacturers like Gregg were in a competitive race with the Indian manufacturers. Over

Carlo Rovelli resolves the paradox of time.
Rovelli initially explains that low level physics does not include time:

A present that is common throughout the universe does not exist
Events are only partially ordered. The present is localized
The difference between past and future is not foundational. It occurs because of state that through our blurring appears particular to us
Time passes at different speeds dependent on where we are and how fast we travel
Time's rhythms are due to the gravitational field
Our quantized physics shows neither space nor time, just processes transforming physical variables.
Fundamentally there is no time. The basic equations evolve together with events, not things

Then he explains how in a physical world without time its perception can emerge:

Our familiar time emerges

Our interaction with the world is partial, blurred, quantum indeterminate
The ignorance determines the existence of thermal time and entropy that quantifies our uncertainty
Directionality of time is real but perspectival. The entropy of the world in relation to us increases with our thermal time. The growth of entropy distinguishes past from future: resulting in traces and memories
Each human is a unified being because: we reflect the world, we formed an image of a unified entity by interacting with our kind, and because of the perspective of memory
The variable time: is one of the variables of the gravitational field. With our scale we don't register quantum fluctuations, making space-time appear determined. At our speed we don't perceive differences in time of different clocks, so we experience a single time: universal, uniform, ordered; which is helpful to our decisions

time they became more competitive with:

Expanded customer base.
Low cost growers (slaves) supplying the raw cotton.
Low cost of capital is the sum total nonhuman assets that can be owned and exchanged on some market according to Piketty. Capital includes: real property, financial capital and professional capital. It is not immutable instead depending on the state of the society within which it exists. It can be owned by governments (public capital) and private individuals (private capital). needed to build factories and setup machinery.
state investment in naval weapons required to project power. Institutionalized power replaced aristocratic hierarchies with colonial bureaucracy placing Britain as the central node in a global network.
Machine innovations: Flying shuttle, Water frame, Spinning Jenny, Mule; and use of water and then steam power to drive them. The technologists typically did not benefit much but the capitalists were finally able to apply scale. This allowed them to invest in new markets. In particular those influenced by British warships!
State regulatory alignment allowing access to low cost factory workers from the local poor houses. Legal changes forced artisans and peasants off the land so they had to accept becoming wage laborers.
Competitor information from industrial spies backed by the British government.

After two centuries of slow growth these developments finally resulted in exponential growth for the English manufacturers and their supply networks between 1780 (Cotton was 2.6% of economic is the study of trade between humans. Traditional Economics is based on an equilibrium model of the economic system. Traditional Economics includes: microeconomics, and macroeconomics. Marx developed an alternative static approach. Limitations of the equilibrium model have resulted in the development of: Keynes's dynamic General Theory of Employment Interest & Money, and Complexity Economics. Since trading depends on human behavior, economics has developed behavioral models including: behavioral economics.
value add in England) to 1800 (17%). By 1815 all rivals from non-Europe had been eliminated. In India, which as part of the British Empire was not able to erect protective barriers, the result was extensive famine is declared when:

One in five households in a specific area face extreme food shortages
More than 30% of the population is acutely malnourished
Two people in 10,000 die each day

and death.

Capturing labor, conquering land

Slavery was essential for reducing the plantation systems wage costs. Previously farmers emerged several times and various places, probably first around 11,000 years ago. It depends on and supports evolved amplifiers which introduce instability and problems with sustainability of the populations that depended on it, unlike the earlier hunting and gathering. Today the uncertainty can be hedged, although third world farmers' businesses are undermined by first world agricultural policy. J.R. McNeill explains the sustainability issue: "all farming is a struggle against the depletion of soil nutrients. Crops absorb nutrients; these are eaten by people or animals; then they spend shorter or longer periods of time in human or animal bodies, before returning to the soil. If these nutrients, in one manner or another, return to farmers' fields, then a nutrient cycle can last indefinitely. If they do not, then those fields gradually lose nutrient and over time produce less and less food - unless some intervention such as fertilizer counteracts the nutrient loss." However, McNeill notes three notable exceptions: Egypt until the Aswan High Dam, Southern China, Medieval Europe; "each ecologically successful over long periods of time." Their success resulted from trial and error and favorable circumstances.
had grown cotton and it had been processed in the family home. But for the UK is the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. manufacturing capacity to grow required more land and labor to be dedicated to producing and operating cotton plantations. Forced relocations ensured appropriate land was available. Various sources were tried out:

Africa, India were sampled but their cotton was being traded for Chinese tea.
Brazil - Portuguese encouraged cotton growing. There was ample land and lots of slaves were imported. But competition from sugar and coffee undermined the attempt to develop cotton.
West Indies cotton had to compete with sugar for slave allocation, but with the provision of a quarter of a million slaves, purchased with East India cloth, production was built up. This labor was able to restructure the West Indian countryside, which had been coercively appropriated on a continental scale - that Beckert notes, was a key institutional innovation is the economic realization of invention and combinatorial exaptation. Keynes noted it provided the unquantifiable beneficial possibility that limits fear of uncertainty. Innovation operates across all CAS, being supported by genetic and cultural means. Creativity provides the mutation and recombination genetic operators for the cultural process. While highly innovative, monopolies: AT&T, IBM; usually have limited economic reach, constraining productivity. This explains the use of regulation, or even its threat, that can check their power and drive the creations across the economy.
! However after the rebellion of the slaves in Haiti the UK shifted its focus to the US is the United States of America. encouraging the deployment of the Haitian model there. The result was an expansive and elastic cotton supply network. West African economies is a human SuperOrganism complex adaptive system (CAS) which operates and controls trade flows within a rich niche. Economics models economies. Robert Gordon has described the evolution of the American economy. Like other CAS, economic flows are maintained far from equilibrium by: demand, financial flows and constraints, supply infrastructure constraints, political and military constraints; ensuring wealth, legislative control, legal contracts and power have significant leverage through evolved amplifiers.
focused on supplying slaves to the Americas.

In the US each new plantation had to be provided with supplies. No infrastructure existed prior to 1780. But with the loss of Haitian cotton supply the rising price of cotton encouraged plantation development.

Slavery takes command

The American South had a perfect climate for cotton growing as noted by both Washington and Madison. Development is a phase during the operation of a CAS agent. It allows for schematic strategies to be iteratively blended with environmental signals to solve the logistical issues of migrating newly built and transformed sub-agents. That is needed to achieve the adult configuration of the agent and optimize it for the proximate environment. Smiley includes examples of the developmental phase agents required in an emergent CAS. In situations where parents invest in the growth and memetic learning of their offspring the schematic grab bag can support optimizations to develop models, structures and actions to construct an adept adult. In humans, adolescence leverages neural plasticity, elder sibling advice and adult coaching to help prepare the deploying neuronal network and body to successfully compete.
was encouraged during the revolutionary war with cotton imports from Britain limited. Experience with tobacco, which requires similar techniques also helped. And many Haitian slave owners moved to the South after the revolt in Haiti bringing an understanding of the plantation methods. Finally by 1786 the South was planting long-staple Sea Island cotton. By 1785 the US is the United States of America. started to export high quality raw cotton. It rapidly became intrinsic to the US and UK is the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. economies is a human SuperOrganism complex adaptive system (CAS) which operates and controls trade flows within a rich niche. Economics models economies. Robert Gordon has described the evolution of the American economy. Like other CAS, economic flows are maintained far from equilibrium by: demand, financial flows and constraints, supply infrastructure constraints, political and military constraints; ensuring wealth, legislative control, legal contracts and power have significant leverage through evolved amplifiers.
.

Production was ramped by importing huge numbers of slaves (18% to 60% of the population). Since land used to grow cotton was rapidly exhausted it had to be revitalized with: Guano, which was prohibitively expensive, or switched to, legumes again impacting profits or replaced. So more land was purchased or taken from its current owners with a thrust south and west into upland South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Louisiana (purchased from France in 1803), Mississippi, Arkansas and Texas (annexed in 1845).

The expansion was enabled by:

Access to capital is the sum total nonhuman assets that can be owned and exchanged on some market according to Piketty. Capital includes: real property, financial capital and professional capital. It is not immutable instead depending on the state of the society within which it exists. It can be owned by governments (public capital) and private individuals (private capital). . Barings's loans were viewed enthusiastically by the British Prime Minister Addington. Allowed development is a phase during the operation of a CAS agent. It allows for schematic strategies to be iteratively blended with environmental signals to solve the logistical issues of migrating newly built and transformed sub-agents. That is needed to achieve the adult configuration of the agent and optimize it for the proximate environment. Smiley includes examples of the developmental phase agents required in an emergent CAS. In situations where parents invest in the growth and memetic learning of their offspring the schematic grab bag can support optimizations to develop models, structures and actions to construct an adept adult. In humans, adolescence leverages neural plasticity, elder sibling advice and adult coaching to help prepare the deploying neuronal network and body to successfully compete.
of large plantations which had scale economies in: slave control infrastructure, cotton gins, R&D is research and development.
, and well developed supply chains for obtaining slaves. Planters obtained access to the capital by mortgaging their slaves.
Political power and government agreement
Labor (slaves) which remained a key factor until mechanization in 1940. As demand increased with the development of mainland European manufacturers planters adopted gang labor.
Alignment with goals of: farmers emerged several times and various places, probably first around 11,000 years ago. It depends on and supports evolved amplifiers which introduce instability and problems with sustainability of the populations that depended on it, unlike the earlier hunting and gathering. Today the uncertainty can be hedged, although third world farmers' businesses are undermined by first world agricultural policy. J.R. McNeill explains the sustainability issue: "all farming is a struggle against the depletion of soil nutrients. Crops absorb nutrients; these are eaten by people or animals; then they spend shorter or longer periods of time in human or animal bodies, before returning to the soil. If these nutrients, in one manner or another, return to farmers' fields, then a nutrient cycle can last indefinitely. If they do not, then those fields gradually lose nutrient and over time produce less and less food - unless some intervention such as fertilizer counteracts the nutrient loss." However, McNeill notes three notable exceptions: Egypt until the Aswan High Dam, Southern China, Medieval Europe; "each ecologically successful over long periods of time." Their success resulted from trial and error and favorable circumstances.
in west wishing for access to the sea, manufacturers selling raw materials, Britain's economic is the study of trade between humans. Traditional Economics is based on an equilibrium model of the economic system. Traditional Economics includes: microeconomics, and macroeconomics. Marx developed an alternative static approach. Limitations of the equilibrium model have resulted in the development of: Keynes's dynamic General Theory of Employment Interest & Money, and Complexity Economics. Since trading depends on human behavior, economics has developed behavioral models including: behavioral economics.
and political goals;
Removal of Native Americans from their lands.

Abolition of slavery in the UK is the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. decoupled its political constraints from US is the United States of America. policy while leaving Manchester and Liverpool unconstrained and leveraging US actions.

In the US planters used political power to constrain emancipation. Slave holding Presidents, Supreme Court Justices and Congressmen ensured political support for slavery. And the planters' power over state governments encouraged them to add railroads uses low friction tracks to support an engine and cars which can carry people and goods. Modern railroads began with the Stockton to Darlington railway built by George Stephenson with a steam powered engine Locomotion No. 1 in 1825. Electric power, and telegraph network were later leveraged. Railroads contributed to the colonization of the world, the shift to regimentation with standardized time, maintained the efficiency of the cotton plantation trading network, supported the urbanization of the US, enabled the distribution of Californian lettuce and Midwestern beef with the refrigerated rail car, until government policy drove a shift to road networks, but were dangerous to walk on and supported the distribution of cholera to the US. The monopsonistic network effects were leveraged by John D. Rockefeller, in building his Standard Oil trust.
which expanded the efficiency of plantations increasing their competitive advantage over cotton growers in other countries: Brazil, India.

America became the World's cotton supplier making the UK manufacturers worried that they were again (as with Haiti) becoming dependent on one slave based supplier. But even as the UK tried to increase the supply of Indian cotton the US competitive advantages locked out all other suppliers resulting in the collapse of Asian producers in 1820s.

Industrial capitalism takes wing

Entrepreneurs seeking profits and rulers seeking power responded to the effects of the global cotton network. The Manchester cotton manufacturing model was deployed around the world between 1770 and 1830.

British inventors were described in journals, newspapers and by learned societies. British traders carrying yarn and cloth were seen offering unbeatable prices to the World's consumers who switched from Indian to British goods. Artisans, adventurers, bureaucrats, and entrepreneurs embraced the new machines and techniques.

Places that adopted the new manufacturing:

Had a prior history of textile manufacturing
Core of the old manufacturing base controlled the way in which the region adopted the new industrial methods.

US is the United States of America. blockade and tariffs provided a protected local environment.
US had basic spinning which developed into industrial spinning. Weaving was added and then printing. During the trade embargo of England Frances Cabot Lowell went to get the blue prints of a cotton mill. The Lowell's, Cabot's and Brown's all had expertise in some trade.
Belgium, Russia and Alsace started from their core expertise in printing.

Had merchants that previously organized the putting out networks. They now enabled access to capital is the sum total nonhuman assets that can be owned and exchanged on some market according to Piketty. Capital includes: real property, financial capital and professional capital. It is not immutable instead depending on the state of the society within which it exists. It can be owned by governments (public capital) and private individuals (private capital). necessary to finance and deploy the new infrastructure.
Did not need large amounts of capital so
Kin networks
is a strategy of selfish genes, which aims to maximize gene survival & replication across all the bodies where a copy of the gene probably exists: relatives. Altruism is beneficial to gene replication in this situation. Love supports the agent's prioritization of appropriate altruistic strategies. E. O. Wilson was originally an advocate of kin selection but subsequently concluded that there is no mechanism by which it can operate. He abandoned kin selection and now asserts neo-group selection is responsible for the effects. Sapolsky describes an array of strategies used to identify kin:
- Genetically shaped pheromonal signatures. Rodents leverage the immune systems MHC super variable gene regions to develop unique signals. The more similar the signals are the closer is the relative. Pregnancy triggers adult neurogenesis in the olfactory system of rat mothers to allow them to learn the smell of their newborn.
- Imprinting on the female whose birdsong a chick heard while still in the egg
- Degree of paternalism depending on likelihood of being the father in primates
- Humans use cognition
sufficed.
Were forced to act due to British competition. The British kept expanding and offered the highest quality product.
Had lawmakers sympathetic to industrialization.

In contrast India, Japan, and Africa did not have these conditions. India in particular was constrained by:

Empire
Inability to add rule of law, capital, military and superior weapons needed to generate wage workers.
Napoleon's blockade of England (1806 - 14) limited the pressure to change within France and the rest of his Empire and added to Britain's focus on India as a market.

The US is the United States of America. leveraged a hydra like structure to be both the leading cotton grower, in the South and a Manufacturer in the North. They limited, but could not remove, the strategic conflicts by placing barriers between the two parts and encouraging slavery in the South and markets in the North.

Brazil's leaders now aims to develop plans and strategies which ensure effective coordination to improve the common good of the in-group. Pinker notes the evolved pressure of social rivalry associating power with leadership. Saposky observes the disconnect between power hierarchies and wisdom in apes. John Adair developed a modern leadership methodology based on the three-circles model.
viewed cotton as a threat to their traditional operations and discouraged cotton manufacture.
Egypt failed to convert slaves into wage workers and so could not develop internal markets.

Napoleon's invasion of Spain undermined its cotton industry and weakened its control over its New World Empire destroying its old supply advantage. The Dutch and French did leverage their colonies and added infrastructure, markets, laws and property rights. The industrialization supported development of improved methods of making warfare but were not dependent on it.

Mobilizing industrial labor

Wage labor placed workers into an

emergent legal, social and infrastructural framework. It was an additional strategy benefiting industrial societies.

By 1850, millions of workers streamed into factories to operate the machines producing cotton. This was a new phenomenon:

Discipline was maintained by fines and forced forfeiture of contracts. But often the recruits ran away, died or left.
There were tiny numbers of wage laborers in the 1700s; Working had been rhythmed by climate, custom, nature ... not clocks and machines.
Most people had been slaves, indentured or worked for their own subsistence when they had some land rights.

It was essential to the development is a phase during the operation of a CAS agent. It allows for schematic strategies to be iteratively blended with environmental signals to solve the logistical issues of migrating newly built and transformed sub-agents. That is needed to achieve the adult configuration of the agent and optimize it for the proximate environment. Smiley includes examples of the developmental phase agents required in an emergent CAS. In situations where parents invest in the growth and memetic learning of their offspring the schematic grab bag can support optimizations to develop models, structures and actions to construct an adept adult. In humans, adolescence leverages neural plasticity, elder sibling advice and adult coaching to help prepare the deploying neuronal network and body to successfully compete.
of the new cotton industrial

VDS to encourage these people to become wage laborers. This required:

Legal, social and political shifts

Land enclosure removed the subsistence strategies that inhibited adoption of wage labor.

Power resting on statesmen and capitalists.

Increased military, police and judicial power helped force the transition. Pitt the younger's 'two acts' (1795) disallowed gatherings of more than fifty and outlawed trade unions.
New laws forcing people to work (factory acts: 1802, 1833, 1847). 10,000 English workers were imprisoned for breach of contract between 1857 and 1875.

Ability for these powers to penetrate into all aspects of life.

Between 1792 and 1815 British authorities built 155 barracks in industrial areas.

Often workers were trying to survive until farm emerged several times and various places, probably first around 11,000 years ago. It depends on and supports evolved amplifiers which introduce instability and problems with sustainability of the populations that depended on it, unlike the earlier hunting and gathering. Today the uncertainty can be hedged, although third world farmers' businesses are undermined by first world agricultural policy. J.R. McNeill explains the sustainability issue: "all farming is a struggle against the depletion of soil nutrients. Crops absorb nutrients; these are eaten by people or animals; then they spend shorter or longer periods of time in human or animal bodies, before returning to the soil. If these nutrients, in one manner or another, return to farmers' fields, then a nutrient cycle can last indefinitely. If they do not, then those fields gradually lose nutrient and over time produce less and less food - unless some intervention such as fertilizer counteracts the nutrient loss." However, McNeill notes three notable exceptions: Egypt until the Aswan High Dam, Southern China, Medieval Europe; "each ecologically successful over long periods of time." Their success resulted from trial and error and favorable circumstances.
work was needed.
Machines such as power looms undermined artisan work pushing them into wage labor and forcing rural poor into cities.

Skilled artisans from cloth manufacturing took on the best skilled and paid jobs. Manufacturers would recruit them from other cities and countries.

Owners focused first on the weak and poor: orphan children, and in Europe women paid low wages. Egypt and China would not allow women to work.
Following the plantation methods they started time keeping and stretched the work day to 14 hours. Life expectancy is a measure of the average life time of a new born baby. Without public health assistance many children die in the first five years of life significantly lowering the life expectancy of the whole group. There are representational and data capture problems with the model:

Not knowing the risk of dying in the newborn's future, demographers use the risks present at that time to predict impacts in the future of the person. No adjustment can be made for increased wellbeing.
Saving the lives of children has a far larger effect on increasing life expectancy than extending the lives of the elderly
Impacts that occur in a particular year, such as a epidemic or pandemic, are treated as permanent effects for that years life expectancy even though they may be handled by public health strategies and hence be transients. For life expectancy calculations in subsequent years the impact is ignored.
Programs that reduced the impacts of infectious diseases, such as antibiotics and vaccine deployment, have reduced the variability of life expectancy following their introduction.
Vital registration systems gather accurate data for life expectancy. But most countries do not have the infrastructure and instead estimates are generated from demographic and health surveys.

dropped rapidly!
In 1867 the working class obtained the vote (1867 Parliamentary Reform Act). This reduced the pressure from the state to repress workers and unions. But the increased pay and better conditions lowered the competitiveness of British factories.

Wage labor was remarkably well aligned to industrialization. The enlightenment had constrained the elites from enslaving their fellow countrymen. And slavery did not match the boom and layoff business cycle of the new factories.

Making cotton global

Liverpool merchants integrated: Wage labor and slavery, Industrialization and deindustrialization, Free trade and empire, Violence and contract;

Liverpool became the key hub for both trade and information. From the docks cotton unloaded by Irish workers from Atlantic sail/steam shipping was transported by canal, and later rail uses low friction tracks to support an engine and cars which can carry people and goods. Modern railroads began with the Stockton to Darlington railway built by George Stephenson with a steam powered engine Locomotion No. 1 in 1825. Electric power, and telegraph network were later leveraged. Railroads contributed to the colonization of the world, the shift to regimentation with standardized time, maintained the efficiency of the cotton plantation trading network, supported the urbanization of the US, enabled the distribution of Californian lettuce and Midwestern beef with the refrigerated rail car, until government policy drove a shift to road networks, but were dangerous to walk on and supported the distribution of cholera to the US. The monopsonistic network effects were leveraged by John D. Rockefeller, in building his Standard Oil trust.
, to Lancashire (Manchester).

The cotton exchange was the 'brain':

Transmitting information
Trading and setting prices. Cotton was offered to manufacturers. Finished goods were sold to consumers. Ships were dispatched.
Financed cotton manufacture, backed by London and New York Merchants. Advanced capital is the sum total nonhuman assets that can be owned and exchanged on some market according to Piketty. Capital includes: real property, financial capital and professional capital. It is not immutable instead depending on the state of the society within which it exists. It can be owned by governments (public capital) and private individuals (private capital). to allow planters to grow cotton.
Insured shipped goods.

The exchange was required to support the increasing complexity due to transformation of the global countryside to mobilize more labor, resources and markets. The exchange made everything move.

Merchants spent most of their time:

Writing letters,
Talking to suppliers and customers,
Travelling,
Making calculations;

The exchange was built on: Credit, Trade, Information, Trust and distrust are evolved responses to sham emotions. During a friendship where no sham emotions have been detected trust will build up.
, Connections, Profit;

In its early phase between 1760 and 1780 merchants helped manufacturers get access to raw cotton. But with increased volume general merchants specialized on particular bits of the VDS and particular regions. They also switched from using dealers to brokers.

Brokers don't own the cotton they handle but instead charge a commission. They standardized the trades. These changes increased the flexibility of the network and ubiquity of the goods since the cotton could come from anywhere growing the appropriate quality. Standards allowed for the development is a phase during the operation of a CAS agent. It allows for schematic strategies to be iteratively blended with environmental signals to solve the logistical issues of migrating newly built and transformed sub-agents. That is needed to achieve the adult configuration of the agent and optimize it for the proximate environment. Smiley includes examples of the developmental phase agents required in an emergent CAS. In situations where parents invest in the growth and memetic learning of their offspring the schematic grab bag can support optimizations to develop models, structures and actions to construct an adept adult. In humans, adolescence leverages neural plasticity, elder sibling advice and adult coaching to help prepare the deploying neuronal network and body to successfully compete.
of futures markets once information and samples could be sent ahead of the main crop. Bills of lading supported transfer of ownership.

Import merchants purchased cotton abroad or shipped it for a commission from distant ports to Europe. These merchants imparted the power of a hub to Liverpool. It was based on:

Liverpool's geographic position for supporting the Atlantic slave trade.
Returning ships could be loaded with cotton.
As cotton growing shifted from Mediterranean to USA Liverpool benefited.
Nearness to Manchester (spinning) manufacturers with direct canals and later railways uses low friction tracks to support an engine and cars which can carry people and goods. Modern railroads began with the Stockton to Darlington railway built by George Stephenson with a steam powered engine Locomotion No. 1 in 1825. Electric power, and telegraph network were later leveraged. Railroads contributed to the colonization of the world, the shift to regimentation with standardized time, maintained the efficiency of the cotton plantation trading network, supported the urbanization of the US, enabled the distribution of Californian lettuce and Midwestern beef with the refrigerated rail car, until government policy drove a shift to road networks, but were dangerous to walk on and supported the distribution of cholera to the US. The monopsonistic network effects were leveraged by John D. Rockefeller, in building his Standard Oil trust.
.

Eventually import merchants faced competition from US is the United States of America. firms. The largest was Browns. Browns based in Baltimore originally specialized in Irish linens. But by 1820 it was among the biggest traders between US and Liverpool. From 1820 to 1850 Browns expanded into all aspects of the cotton trade: ships, Finance (Banking: Brown brothers & Alex Brown which is now part of Deutsche Bank), Sold cotton on commission, and purchased it outright.

Bankers such as Barings invested in cotton in 1812 advancing loans to exporters. They built an information gathering

This page discusses the effect of the network on the agents participating in a complex adaptive system (CAS). Small world and scale free networks are considered.

network, speculated and advanced loans. By 1842 Barings was the largest importer of cotton.

Credit allowed merchants the leverage to get land cleared, planted and picked by slaves. They further invested in local banks that could further catalyze business. They used 'factors' to connect directly with planters in the US. The factors provided planters with supplies and food.

Between 1800 and 1860 cotton became the major trade item for most 1st world economies is a human SuperOrganism complex adaptive system (CAS) which operates and controls trade flows within a rich niche. Economics models economies. Robert Gordon has described the evolution of the American economy. Like other CAS, economic flows are maintained far from equilibrium by: demand, financial flows and constraints, supply infrastructure constraints, political and military constraints; ensuring wealth, legislative control, legal contracts and power have significant leverage through evolved amplifiers.
leveraging the merchant's global network - A highly specialized

VDS of networked

Plans are interpreted and implemented by agents. This page discusses the properties of agents in a complex adaptive system (CAS).
It then presents examples of agents in different CAS. The examples include a computer program where modeling and actions are performed by software agents. These software agents are aggregates.
The participation of agents in flows is introduced and some implications of this are outlined.

agents.

A war reverberates around the world

Beckert explains that cotton agriculture catapulted the US is the United States of America.   into the center of the world economy is a human SuperOrganism complex adaptive system (CAS) which operates and controls trade flows within a rich niche. Economics models economies. Robert Gordon has described the evolution of the American economy. Like other CAS, economic flows are maintained far from equilibrium by: demand, financial flows and constraints, supply infrastructure constraints, political and military constraints; ensuring wealth, legislative control, legal contracts and power have significant leverage through evolved amplifiers.
. Cotton was 61 percent of all US products exported in 1860-61. And Britain was dangerously dependent on these US exports: 77% of the 800 million pounds of cotton processed in Britain, 90 percent of the supplies to France and 92 percent to Russia. The global system depended on slavery.

Capital is the sum total nonhuman assets that can be owned and exchanged on some market according to Piketty. Capital includes: real property, financial capital and professional capital. It is not immutable instead depending on the state of the society within which it exists. It can be owned by governments (public capital) and private individuals (private capital).   risk, is an assessment of the likelihood of an independent problem occurring. It can be assigned an accurate probability since it is independent of other variables in the system. As such it is different from uncertainty.
premium was set higher for the South than the North of US since it was assumed that there could be a slave rebellion as previously occurred in Haiti. The North resented the South's dependence on Britain. The Southern leaders now aims to develop plans and strategies which ensure effective coordination to improve the common good of the in-group. Pinker notes the evolved pressure of social rivalry associating power with leadership. Saposky observes the disconnect between power hierarchies and wisdom in apes. John Adair developed a modern leadership methodology based on the three-circles model.
argued that it was best to improve links to Europe and to secede from the Union.

The civil war induced dramatic shifts in the global cotton system: Aimed at forcing a British diplomatic recognition of the confederacy. The confederate government banned cotton exports and the North applied a blockade resulting in no exports in 1862. With ample stocks in the supply chain the initial effects were to increase profits and reduce over production. But by the end of 1861 shortages were reducing imports into Britain 50%. Manufacturers shut 6 percent of factories, laid-off workers and reduced shifts. By 1863 a quarter of Lancashire's workers (500,000) were out of work resulting in riots that required that the military be deployed. The effect was similar across Europe. Merchants were able to speculate for longer. UK is the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland.  , France governments became involved. Without slave based competition India could finally grow cotton competitively. Rapidly increased prices lubricated the Indian growers who switched land used for food to cotton. Massively expanded production and diverted cotton from other markets. UK manufacturing supplied seed, cotton presses and planned railways uses low friction tracks to support an engine and cars which can carry people and goods. Modern railroads began with the Stockton to Darlington railway built by George Stephenson with a steam powered engine Locomotion No. 1 in 1825. Electric power, and telegraph network were later leveraged. Railroads contributed to the colonization of the world, the shift to regimentation with standardized time, maintained the efficiency of the cotton plantation trading network, supported the urbanization of the US, enabled the distribution of Californian lettuce and Midwestern beef with the refrigerated rail car, until government policy drove a shift to road networks, but were dangerous to walk on and supported the distribution of cholera to the US. The monopsonistic network effects were leveraged by John D. Rockefeller, in building his Standard Oil trust.
. But India's inability to complete infrastructure, or report the situation accurately undermined the efforts. The UK government looked at improving contract law and investing in Railways to enhance the competitive effect.   But the British government also feared is an emotion which prepares the body for time sensitive action: Blood is sent to the muscles from the gut and skin, Adrenalin is released stimulating: Fuel to be released from the liver, Blood is encouraged to clot, and Face is wide-eyed and fearful. The short-term high priority goal, experienced as a sense of urgency, is to flee, fight or deflect the danger. There are both 'innate' - really high priority learning - which are mediated by the central amygdala and learned fears which are mediated by the BLA which learns to fear a stimulus and then signals the central amygdala. Tara Brach notes we experience fear as a painfully constricted throat, chest and belly, and racing heart. The mind can build stories of the future which include fearful situations making us anxious about current ideas and actions that we associate with the potential future scenario. And it can associate traumatic events from early childhood with our being at fault. Consequent assumptions of our being unworthy can result in shame and fear of losing friendships. The mechanism for human fear was significantly evolved to protect us in the African savanna. This does not align perfectly with our needs in current environments: U.S. Grant was unusually un-afraid of the noise or risk of guns and trusted his horses' judgment, which mostly benefited his agency as a modern soldier.
another 1857 rebellion - India was too big to subdue.

Similar increase in production occurred in Egypt, Brazil, Algeria, Argentina, Mexico and China. But it depended on unsustainably high prices. The production techniques were based on the post slavery US framework. Brazilian cotton was of the same quality as US cotton and its volume ramped as the US blockade was enforced. Egyptian cotton was of the highest quality. Egypt coerced labor into growing the crop. Capital was supplied by Europe and North America who viewed increasing competition for growers as ensuring low prices. The net result was the transformation of the global countryside.

Europe looked to the US is the United States of America.   to rebuild a low cost production platform is agent generated infrastructure that supports emergence of an entity through: leverage of an abundant energy source, reusable resources; attracting a phenotypically aligned network of agents.
knowing that it is labor - not land which is the constraint. Cotton capitalists looked for levers to ensure free blacks would continue to produce low cost cotton.

Global reconstruction

Emancipation initially freed large amounts of labor from the cotton plantations in the US is the United States of America. South. The UK is the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. was very concerned. Capitalists and government used credit, private ownership of land, contract law, and Jim Crow to push labor into share cropping and debt.

Initially Andrew Johnson pushed for the land to be transferred back to its 'original' white owners. But after the top union generals, and Northern allies of the former slaves interceded land was made available to the freed blacks who became share croppers. But after a cotton business down cycle they were trapped again by contractual debt.

Capitalists in Europe and the North of US agreed with the Southern States fully constraining the 'free' labor by making:

Mobility and vagrancy offenses.
Cotton pickers' children go to second rate schools.
The power structure white only - police, judiciary and legislatures; and they allowed unpunished lynching. Legislatures removed the share croppers' rights even as poor white farmers emerged several times and various places, probably first around 11,000 years ago. It depends on and supports evolved amplifiers which introduce instability and problems with sustainability of the populations that depended on it, unlike the earlier hunting and gathering. Today the uncertainty can be hedged, although third world farmers' businesses are undermined by first world agricultural policy. J.R. McNeill explains the sustainability issue: "all farming is a struggle against the depletion of soil nutrients. Crops absorb nutrients; these are eaten by people or animals; then they spend shorter or longer periods of time in human or animal bodies, before returning to the soil. If these nutrients, in one manner or another, return to farmers' fields, then a nutrient cycle can last indefinitely. If they do not, then those fields gradually lose nutrient and over time produce less and less food - unless some intervention such as fertilizer counteracts the nutrient loss." However, McNeill notes three notable exceptions: Egypt until the Aswan High Dam, Southern China, Medieval Europe; "each ecologically successful over long periods of time." Their success resulted from trial and error and favorable circumstances.
were driven into share cropping.

But plantation owners lost power as cotton prices fell, never to regain it again consumed by debt and costly supplies. The Northern manufacturers won out as the South had predicted they would.

Destructions

The abolition of slavery 1865 to 1870 catalyzed the connection of cultivators in India, Egypt, Brazil, West Africa and Central Asia allowing competition to keep cotton prices low.

By this time powerful imperial states had the means to reach deeply into once remote parts of the world via: Railways uses low friction tracks to support an engine and cars which can carry people and goods. Modern railroads began with the Stockton to Darlington railway built by George Stephenson with a steam powered engine Locomotion No. 1 in 1825. Electric power, and telegraph network were later leveraged. Railroads contributed to the colonization of the world, the shift to regimentation with standardized time, maintained the efficiency of the cotton plantation trading network, supported the urbanization of the US, enabled the distribution of Californian lettuce and Midwestern beef with the refrigerated rail car, until government policy drove a shift to road networks, but were dangerous to walk on and supported the distribution of cholera to the US. The monopsonistic network effects were leveraged by John D. Rockefeller, in building his Standard Oil trust.
, telegraphs is a point to point signalling system. Electric versions were developed and deployed around 1840s. They were helpful supporting infrastructure for railway networks, banking and rapid news relaying. Each transmitted letter was encoded in the transmissions. Two main types were deployed:

Needle telegraphs which moved a needle to represent the signal. Often multiple needles were used in the encoding requiring multiple wires to be strung between the stations. Cooke and Wheatstone's telegraph was of this type and was widely deployed within the British Empire.
Armature telegraphs where a pulse generates a click at the receiver station. Samuel Morse developed a single wire (low cost) system of this type along with the Morse Code. German railways standardized on the Morse telegraph and it was deployed in the US supporting railway operation.

, and military expeditions.

The result was creative destruction of: The old merchant networks, Hand spinning, Hand loom weaving; Millions (of women) gave up spinning and weaving. They lost the work that had previously structured their societies.

Capital is the sum total nonhuman assets that can be owned and exchanged on some market according to Piketty. Capital includes: real property, financial capital and professional capital. It is not immutable instead depending on the state of the society within which it exists. It can be owned by governments (public capital) and private individuals (private capital). and manufactured goods moved into the world's countryside, including Asia. The port of Bombay was connected through Berar's merchant base where Indian

agents linked in the producers in the countryside. This catalytic, an infrastructure amplifier.
backwards integration of the global network increased the power of the imperial state. It allowed the replacement of the previously constraining Indian brokers by merchants, agents and manufacturers' capital.

Similar integrations occurred in Egypt, and Anatolia. Statesmen leveraging their state's superior weapons, along with manufacturers and dealers broke through the countryside's remaining barriers between 1830 & 1860:

Transport costs had been reduced by globally integrated infrastructure.
Impact of disease controlled.
Tariffs and excise duties leveraged.
Land rights were altered to force transition to wage working consumers of global markets and allow the land to be appropriated by the well connected.

The integration of the vast Indian and Chinese markets resulted in the collapse of the livelihoods of native spinners and weavers. In a social catastrophe is a dramatic breakdown in the operation of a CAS that results in general failure. Dorner in the logic of failure, sees the Chernobyl nuclear disaster as illustrative: typical human strategies were incorrectly applied by experienced operators, because they were overconfident and incorrectly modeled the current and immediate future state of the reactor. Beinhocker asserts positive effects generated in a large inter-connected network induce negative effects at other points in the network. Booch argues that increasing system complexity can overwhelm human designers, inducing catastrophe in software development. He recommends adopting object oriented hierarchy and modularity to limit complexity. But many CAS networks include huge number of agents, responding to internal and external signals, and effectively executing evolved, distributed schematic plans. Eventual loss of control, as in the case of cancers, is notable and highlights the effective agency of the more regular situation. Human developed systems suffer from complexity catastrophe. Democratic processes slowly search for representatives who will solve problems for the citizens, but Diamond in Collapse explains that democracy has struggled to cope with the tragedy of the commons. Cliodynamic cycles operate over multiple lifetimes leaving humans prone to fall into the traps that caught their grandparents. Evolved amplifiers support bubbles incenting dangerous deregulation, and encouraging broad participation, even though the rules ensure additional wealth accumulates to the legislative elite and aristocracy, who safely ignore moral hazard. Parasites undermine the detection of problems. RSS sees catastrophe enabled by a lack of rigorous schematic planning within most developed human systems.
millions of people were forced to become agricultural laborers focused on growing cash crops undermining food security and inducing widespread famine is declared when:

One in five households in a specific area face extreme food shortages
More than 30% of the population is acutely malnourished
Two people in 10,000 die each day

affecting more than twenty million people.

With the shift to growing cotton, producers became impacted by gluts etc. The periodic collapse of prices pushed them into debt.

In the USA is the United States of America. merchants pushed inland displacing factors due to the better transportation and communication infrastructure deployed after the war in the American South. Railroads uses low friction tracks to support an engine and cars which can carry people and goods. Modern railroads began with the Stockton to Darlington railway built by George Stephenson with a steam powered engine Locomotion No. 1 in 1825. Electric power, and telegraph network were later leveraged. Railroads contributed to the colonization of the world, the shift to regimentation with standardized time, maintained the efficiency of the cotton plantation trading network, supported the urbanization of the US, enabled the distribution of Californian lettuce and Midwestern beef with the refrigerated rail car, until government policy drove a shift to road networks, but were dangerous to walk on and supported the distribution of cholera to the US. The monopsonistic network effects were leveraged by John D. Rockefeller, in building his Standard Oil trust.
integrated local towns removing the need for factors' supplies. Manufacturers pushed for reduced transaction costs. By standardization and formalizing the operation of exchanges these market places could support both trades and futures. Formal processes protected buyer and seller and supported arbitration. Trust and distrust are evolved responses to sham emotions. During a friendship where no sham emotions have been detected trust will build up.
and kin networks is a strategy of selfish genes, which aims to maximize gene survival & replication across all the bodies where a copy of the gene probably exists: relatives. Altruism is beneficial to gene replication in this situation. Love supports the agent's prioritization of appropriate altruistic strategies. E. O. Wilson was originally an advocate of kin selection but subsequently concluded that there is no mechanism by which it can operate. He abandoned kin selection and now asserts neo-group selection is responsible for the effects. Sapolsky describes an array of strategies used to identify kin:

Genetically shaped pheromonal signatures. Rodents leverage the immune systems MHC super variable gene regions to develop unique signals. The more similar the signals are the closer is the relative. Pregnancy triggers adult neurogenesis in the olfactory system of rat mothers to allow them to learn the smell of their newborn.
Imprinting on the female whose birdsong a chick heard while still in the egg
Degree of paternalism depending on likelihood of being the father in primates
Humans use cognition

were no longer required. Cotton could be traded as a commodity allowing consolidation down to a small number of high volume market places. A world price allowed speculation in futures contracts and vastly increased trading volume. Planters and factors lost power.

The new cotton imperialism

In 1910 Japan occupies Korea. The Japanese aimed in part to replace Japanese dependency on British Indian cotton. Korean farmers emerged several times and various places, probably first around 11,000 years ago. It depends on and supports evolved amplifiers which introduce instability and problems with sustainability of the populations that depended on it, unlike the earlier hunting and gathering. Today the uncertainty can be hedged, although third world farmers' businesses are undermined by first world agricultural policy. J.R. McNeill explains the sustainability issue: "all farming is a struggle against the depletion of soil nutrients. Crops absorb nutrients; these are eaten by people or animals; then they spend shorter or longer periods of time in human or animal bodies, before returning to the soil. If these nutrients, in one manner or another, return to farmers' fields, then a nutrient cycle can last indefinitely. If they do not, then those fields gradually lose nutrient and over time produce less and less food - unless some intervention such as fertilizer counteracts the nutrient loss." However, McNeill notes three notable exceptions: Egypt until the Aswan High Dam, Southern China, Medieval Europe; "each ecologically successful over long periods of time." Their success resulted from trial and error and favorable circumstances.
already grew subsistence cotton. The Japanese aimed to recast this farming in the British Indian model.

Cloning and mutation of the European colonial cotton CAS occurred across the world. States leveraged power to recast captured countryside. Using the US is the United States of America. cotton meme demonstrated by the Egyptians and Ottomans, Korea, West Africa and Central Africa were captured and transformed.

Using violence and coercion the new subjects were incorporated into the cotton growing complex by:

Constructing infrastructure
Creating new labor regimes
Recasting local social structures

Value captured from cotton then strengthened the colonial state.

But between 1893 & 1913, as worldwide consumption grew (the US consumed more of the product for example) and plants were attacked by boll weevils in 1892, cotton prices rose for the first time in 25 years. Additionally speculators manipulated the market. Colonial states responded by adopting the goal of raw material independence:

Russia pushed into Central Asia in the 1860s, adding: Railroads uses low friction tracks to support an engine and cars which can carry people and goods. Modern railroads began with the Stockton to Darlington railway built by George Stephenson with a steam powered engine Locomotion No. 1 in 1825. Electric power, and telegraph network were later leveraged. Railroads contributed to the colonization of the world, the shift to regimentation with standardized time, maintained the efficiency of the cotton plantation trading network, supported the urbanization of the US, enabled the distribution of Californian lettuce and Midwestern beef with the refrigerated rail car, until government policy drove a shift to road networks, but were dangerous to walk on and supported the distribution of cholera to the US. The monopsonistic network effects were leveraged by John D. Rockefeller, in building his Standard Oil trust.
, Seed plantations, Irrigation projects, Leveraged US seed, Built gins and provided credit.
UK is the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. expanded control of India and Egypt.
US expanded into the hinterlands with new railways, and moved west adding Texas, Arizona and California.
Europeans focused on African expansion adding colonies and cotton growing.

Colonizers had to apply labor to the appropriated land. Unlike the basic US model three methods were used:

Indigenous farmers continued to grow cotton and then sell it to western merchants (India).
Settle formerly nomadic tribes (Central Asia). Initially made them share croppers but eventually shifted them over to wage labor.
Settlers from elsewhere organized plantations of indigenous people (Algeria, German East Africa, Mexico, Argentina).

The colonizers recast the class structure and reduced investment in local food crops resulting in terrible famines is declared when:

One in five households in a specific area face extreme food shortages
More than 30% of the population is acutely malnourished
Two people in 10,000 die each day

and 20% collapse in the populations.

The return of the global south

Beckert explains the impacts of the global network on Ahmedabad. As its export dependent countryside was hit by price reductions during the mid-19th century local bankers could not lend money at low risk. Local merchants were locked out of global markets. So around 1870 they shifted capital is the sum total nonhuman assets that can be owned and exchanged on some market according to Piketty. Capital includes: real property, financial capital and professional capital. It is not immutable instead depending on the state of the society within which it exists. It can be owned by governments (public capital) and private individuals (private capital). into cotton manufacturing. The investors in Ahmedabad were interlinked by caste and religion.

By 1918 this shift to local manufacturing had developed fifty one cotton mills with 35,000 laborers.

And this transformation was replicated across the global south undermining the colonial home manufacturing industry. Manchester reduced from 61% in 1860 to 34% by 1930 having failed to overcome:

Lost markets (India and China between 1918 and 1938).
Higher wages driven by workers having the vote, and focusing their power through trade unions. Beckert notes that union power was a significant part of Russia's 1917 revolution.
Old machines.

The US is the United States of America. and European manufacturing nodes similarly collapsed in the 1930s. The US demonstrated greater flexibility in its response. It's state based structures and market segmentation limited the development of union power. The US shifted cotton manufacturing from the North to the Southern states with their low costs and constrained labor.

The global south included manufacturing strategists who debated how to resist the disruption.

The Chinese argued that industry was the best defense. They aimed to join the game leveraging Western technology. But the goal was difficult to achieve since there were competing elite ideas including slave holding cotton growers.

The abolition of slavery provided the catalyst for a change in Brazil in 1888.

Japan, like Brazil, faced huge cheap cotton textile imports. While the political elite were not industrialists they needed a new strategy to save their wealth is schematically useful information and its equivalent, schematically useful energy, to paraphrase Beinhocker. It is useful because an agent has schematic strategies that can utilize the information or energy to extend or leverage control of the cognitive niche. and power. So the Meiji restoration was aligned to leveraging new technologies. The government promoted cotton industrialization. They switched supply to low cost Chinese cotton. They adopted new labor system that made unmarried women available as low cost labor. They resisted any protections for workers in the cotton industry. They encouraged government bureaucrats to become entrepreneurs. And they provided research and funding. Merchants leveraged the new rules, infrastructure etc. and built factories with huge scale. The government used war to gain colonies with cotton and other valuables used to substitute shipping industry and to replace revenues lost to raw cotton imports.

Economic is the study of trade between humans. Traditional Economics is based on an equilibrium model of the economic system. Traditional Economics includes: microeconomics, and macroeconomics. Marx developed an alternative static approach. Limitations of the equilibrium model have resulted in the development of: Keynes's dynamic General Theory of Employment Interest & Money, and Complexity Economics. Since trading depends on human behavior, economics has developed behavioral models including: behavioral economics.
elites working within colonies had extra inhibitors to overcome. Egypt could not remove these forces until tariffs were reformed in the 1930s to protect the cotton industrialists.

Indian industrialists leveraged merchant capital built up during years of high cotton prices. Indian merchants pushed out of the raw cotton industry by Europeans invested in industrial cotton mills which had explosive growth between 1880 and 1929. But India was still molded by Britain and by 1880 80% of the yarn went to China.

Commercialization of the countryside created:

New markets for industrial goods.
Provided a low cost labor pool.

In response Manchester lobbied for laws to reduce Indian labor competitiveness. Britain was keen to deindustrialize the Indian countryside to increase the market for UK is the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. products. Tata and the other Indian Industrialists were joined by freedom fighters including M. Gandhi. They pushed to limit the forces Britain was deploying:

Stopped the excise duty on cotton goods.
Advocated consumption of domestically produced textiles (1905).

Still, unlike the freedom fighters, the industrialists agreed with the colonial goal of reforming the countryside as a market for cotton products and a source of labor. The industrialists could gain a home market by import substitution.

The 1946-47 decolonizations allowed the radical integration of state and capital:

Egypt added barriers to trade. Nasser nationalized the cotton industry in 1960s.
India,
China post revolution nationalized the cotton industry and massively expanded it.

The weave and the weft: An epilogue

By 1963 Europe's domination of the cotton CAS was over. It was disrupted by US is the United States of America. global VDS is value delivery system. with World Bank was setup as part of the Bretton Woods agreements, as the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development, to repair and reconstruct Europe after the Second World War and as the World Bank continues to provide reconstruction and development resources for projects in developing economies. It includes:

International Finance Corporation

, IMF is the International Monetary Fund developed as part of the Bretton Woods agreements to provide liquidity to national gold denominated reserve banks at times of stress in the global financial network - a shortage of a particular currency which was inhibiting trade; in support of a broader Bretton Woods framework designed so as to ensure that currencies did not become misaligned with one another, and were a fair representation of what things were worth. The IMF removed the need for nations to depend on private loans from commercial banks, such as Britain's dependence on J. P. Morgan during the 1920s and 30s. The agreement required each Bretton Woods signatory to provide a capital investment or 'quota' into the fund which would subsequently correspond to the amount that the country could borrow from the fund in times of financial stress. The top four countries and their quotas were set by IMF architect, Harry Dexter White, to match FDR's priorities:

US - $2.9 billion, an amount the FDR administration could transfer from Exchange Stabilization Fund without any need to ask for Congress for funds.
UK - $1.45 billion
USSR - slightly less than UK quota
China - less than USSR.

, WTO is the World Trade Organization. , GATT the general agreement on tariffs and trades is a legal framework for controlling trading between nations. Part of the world-wide trading infrastructure put in place by the West after World War 2. , Wall Street capital is the sum total nonhuman assets that can be owned and exchanged on some market according to Piketty. Capital includes: real property, financial capital and professional capital. It is not immutable instead depending on the state of the society within which it exists. It can be owned by governments (public capital) and private individuals (private capital). and Merchants leveraging the low cost network of producers. US is the United States of America. and EU is European Union, the 1992 Maastricht Council of Ministers meeting agreed evolution of the ECSC & CAP cartels to include:

A single market across the members' countries supporting the transformation of the ECSC. It maintained the CAP transfers assisting French farmers.
A fixed currency 'snake' that allowed the ECSC to operate, binding the deutschmark to the other currencies of participating members: a mini Bretton Woods exchange rate mechanism; that became a single currency, the euro, managed by an independent ECB (based on the independent German Bundesbank); but tax gathering was allocated to the states whose leaders control the Council of Ministers and no effective mechanism was provided to reallocate revenues. This has left Germany with an advantage supported by the aggregate valuation of the euro and not having to flow tax revenues to the weaker economies of the south.

use subsidies to reduce the price of domestic cotton products which are pushed onto the world market keeping global prices low.

The key players are now:

Growers - China, India, Uzbekistan (forced labor policies), Senegal; Typically growers lack power. Communist states invested in irrigation, fertilizers and machinery.
Spinning and weaving: China, Turkey and Pakistan.
Manufactured cotton goods: Bangladesh & Vietnam.
Retailers (Merchants): Wal-Mart, Metro, Carrefour; which dominate the supply chain using pull to control the flows. The merchants benefited from the global countryside's new dependence on commodity production and consumption. They have developed global brands, sales channels and organization of production.

Beckert concludes the essential element is the ability to adapt. Civilization and barbarity are linked at the hip. The cotton CAS has been leveraging:

The world's countryside to support its transformations.
Coercion and violence.

CAS theory views the evolution of the cotton trade over time as based on the

This page reviews Christensen's disruption of a complex adaptive system (CAS). The mechanism is discussed with examples from biology and business.

disruptive effects of global interconnection of Europe to the early cotton nodes in Asia, Africa, and the Americas.

Building on John Hawkins's deployment of a superior weapon system - the race-built galleon, England and Holland developed their expertise in rough sea shipping into a global
This page reviews the catalytic impact of infrastructure on the expression of phenotypic effects by an agent. The infrastructure reduces the cost the agent must pay to perform the selected action. The catalysis is enhanced by positive returns.

infrastructure amplifier supporting the
Flows of different kinds are essential to the operation of complex adaptive systems (CAS).
Example flows are outlined. Constraints on flows support the emergence of the systems. Examples of constraints are discussed.

flow and control of goods between Asia, Africa, Europe and the Americas. As is typical superior weapons and accompanying strategic shifts to leverage them reciprocate. Subsequently both the weapon system and amplifier became the basis for
Europe reengineering the cotton trade into an
This page reviews the strategy of setting up an arms race. At its core this strategy depends on being able to alter, or take advantage of an alteration in, the genome or equivalent. The situation is illustrated with examples from biology, high tech and politics.

evolved amplifier: state chartered privateers projected power to:

Constrain the flow of cotton and revenues by use of privateer and British navy race-built galleons with long slim hulls and large gun decks.
Steven Johnson argues that imported high quality Indian finished cotton goods became driving fashion items in London as early as the 1690s, encouraging the development of sales and marketing systems. RSS is Rob's Strategy Studio concludes Europe leveraged
This page describes the consequences of the asymmetries caused by genotypic traits creating a phenotypic signal in males and selection activity in the female - sexual selection.
The impact of this asymmetry is to create a powerful alternative to natural selection with sexual selection's leverage of positive returns. The mechanisms are described.

sexual selection to drive purchasing of highly attractive calico & chintz adornments.
Introduce a disruptive cotton growing system based on flexible supply of African slaves to drive down costs and rapidly expand the plantation workforce as demand required.
Use overwhelming military force to grab native land to add capacity to the plantation system as needed.
Ships provide infrastructure amplifier to triangularly transport labor, and goods.
Superior product (cotton) and low cost drive access to and development of European markets further expanding profitability.
Capital is the sum total nonhuman assets that can be owned and exchanged on some market according to Piketty. Capital includes: real property, financial capital and professional capital. It is not immutable instead depending on the state of the society within which it exists. It can be owned by governments (public capital) and private individuals (private capital). captured by Liverpool merchants builds wealth is schematically useful information and its equivalent, schematically useful energy, to paraphrase Beinhocker. It is useful because an agent has schematic strategies that can utilize the information or energy to extend or leverage control of the cognitive niche. , influence and alignment with English state and flexibility to invest in development of markets and technologies.
New state's laws: enclosure and factory acts; and mechanisms of enforcement: army, police and prisons; were used to encourage and coerce the population into aligning with the needs of manufacturers, through:
Salman Khan argues that the evolved global education system is inefficient and organized around constraining and corralling students into accepting dubious ratings that lead to mundane roles. He highlights a radical and already proven alternative which offers effective self-paced deep learning processes supported by technology and freed up attention of teams of teachers. Building on his personal experience of helping overcome the unjustified failing grade of a relative, Khan:
- Iteratively learns how to teach: Starting with Nadia, Leveraging short videos focused on content, Converging on mastery, With the help of neuroscience, and filling in dependent gaps; resulting in a different approach to the mainstream method.
- Assesses the broken US education system: Set in its ways, Designed for the 1800s, Inducing holes that are hidden by tests, Tests which ignore creativity. The resulting teaching process is so inefficient it needs to be supplemented with homework. Instead teachers were encouraging their pupils to use his tools at home so they could mentor them while they attended school, an inversion that significantly improves the economics.
- Enters the real world: Builds a scalable service, Working with a real classroom, Trying stealth learning, At Khan Academy full time, In the curriculum at Los Altos, Supporting life-long learning.
- Develops The One World Schoolhouse: Back to the future with a one room school, a robust teaching team, and creativity enabled; so with some catalysis even the poorest can become educated and earn credentials for current jobs.
- Wishes he could also correct: Summer holidays, Transcript based assessments, College education;
- Concludes it is now possible to provide the infrastructure for creativity to emerge and to support risk taking.
Following our summary of his arguments RSS frames them from the perspective of complex adaptive system (CAS) theory. Disruption is a powerful force for change but if its force is used to support the current teachers to adopt new processes can it overcome the extended phenotypic alignment and evolutionary amplifiers sustaining the current educational network?
education
, wages, local garrisons, enforcement of contracts and punishment of debtors.

Bootstrapping English manufacturing required protection from the
This page discusses the effect of the network on the agents participating in a complex adaptive system (CAS). Small world and scale free networks are considered.

global network centered on Liverpool's merchants.
Barriers are particular types of constraints on flows. They can enforce separation of a network of agents allowing evolution to build diversity. Examples of different types of barriers: physical barriers, chemical molecules can form membranes, probability based, cell membranes can include controllable channels, eukaryotes leverage membranes, symbiosis, human emotions, chess, business; and their effects are described.

Barriers limit
This page reviews the inhibiting effect of the value delivery system on the expression of new phenotypic effects within an agent.

extended phenotypic alignment allowing local competition to build differentiated
This page discusses the benefits of geographic clusters of agents and resources at the center of a complex adaptive system (CAS).

geographic clusters.
The post revolution US developed into a hydra-like superorganism is a wealthy autonomous entity needing and controlling the richest niches in the proximate environment, that emerges from the bundled cooperation of schematically aligned agents. The term is based on the social insect model, used by: ants, termites, and bees; and identified by Holldobler & E.O. Wilson. These genetically identical insect superorganisms cooperatively limit their reproduction to align with the resources available in the niche. Wilson asserts these insects all developed nests to which they returned to raise their offspring, and when the nest sites were of limited capacity some family members responded by focusing on defending the nest and foraging while their mother became an egg laying queen, enabled by "a single genetic change which silenced the brain's program for dispersal and prevents the mother and her offspring from dispersing to create new nests," Wilson explains. He adds climate control of the nest and disease resistance, just like the human immune system, demand individually focused diversity. So the queen's genome consists of low variety alleles for the extended phenotypic 'robot' worker caste agents and their organization - queen and workers competing as one, with other colonies and individual insects - and other parts which are high where the genome includes significant diversity. For humans it is an evolved cultural strategy used when the environment is supportive, but it is dependent on our imperfect cognitive assessment of kinship as well as group selection driven emotions: other-condemning, other-praising, other-suffering and self-conscious; and group oriented pressures to conform and remain: religions. And the adjacent possible must be recreated and modeled culturally through the emergence of processes such as democracy. It depends on inter-agent signalling. In both insects and humans it allows specialization, and encourages operations and flows that are tightly controlled, limiting waste, leveraging parallel activity, supporting coherence. Superorganisms reflect cliodynamic flows. A superorganism has a development and operational phase. As additional agents are coopted into the superorganism they align, participate in supply and demand activities and so contribute to the evolutionary amplification. Damasio notes that prokaryotes, in rich environments, can similarly operate in a symbiotic fashion expressing cultural behaviors.
.
The Liverpool cotton exchange developed a
This page discusses the interdependence of perception and representation in a complex adaptive system (CAS). Hofstadter and Mitchell's research with Copycat is reviewed. The bridging of a node from a network of 'well known' percepts to a new representational instance is discussed as it occurs in biochemistry, in consciousness and abstractly.

perception and representation architecture. This allowed the exchange to
The agents in complex adaptive systems (CAS) must model their environment to respond effectively to it. Evolution's schematic operators and Samuel modeling together support the indirect recording of past successes and their strategic use by the current agent to learn how to succeed in the proximate environment.

model and then to integrate the
Agents use sensors to detect events in their environment. This page reviews how these events become signals associated with beneficial responses in a complex adaptive system (CAS). CAS signals emerge from the Darwinian information model. Signals can indicate decision summaries and level of uncertainty.

signals and
Plans are interpreted and implemented by agents. This page discusses the properties of agents in a complex adaptive system (CAS).
It then presents examples of agents in different CAS. The examples include a computer program where modeling and actions are performed by software agents. These software agents are aggregates.
The participation of agents in flows is introduced and some implications of this are outlined.

actions from across the global cotton network. This ensured brain like
Consciousness has confounded philosophers and scientists for centuries. Now it is finally being characterized scientifically. That required a transformation of approach.
Realizing that consciousness was ill-defined neuroscientist Stanislas Dehaene and others characterized and focused on conscious access.
In the book he outlines the limitations of previous psychological dogma. Instead his use of subjective assessments opened the window to contrast totally unconscious brain activity with those including consciousness.
He describes the research methods. He explains the contribution of new sensors and probes that allowed the psychological findings to be correlated, and causally related to specific neural activity.
He describes the theory of the brain he uses, the 'global neuronal workspace' to position all the experimental details into a whole.
He reviews how both theory and practice support diagnosis and treatment of real world mental illnesses.
The implications of Dehaene's findings for subsequent consciousness research are outlined.
Complex adaptive system (CAS) models of the brain's development and operation introduce constraints which are discussed.

coordination and focusing of the superorganism.
Rather than oppose the direct thrust of some environmental flow agents can improve their effectiveness with indirect responses. This page explains how agents are architected to do this and discusses some examples of how it can be done.

Indirection was added to improve the
To benefit from shifts in the environment agents must be flexible. Being sensitive to environmental signals agents who adjust strategic priorities can constrain their competitors.

flexibility and throughput of the infrastructure amplifier. It also ensured transactional robustness, using standardization and insurance reduces volatility in standard of living by compensating for losses of income during periods of unemployment, for catastrophic losses from disaster, or death of a family income earner as described by Gordon. Insurance companies must set aside reserves to handle such claims. Britain initially required that insurance buyers also have an insurable interest. That is required in insurance markets to ensure buyers of insurance don't destroy their asset just to obtain the insurance. Health insurance is treated separately being unusual, since the subscriber is likely to know more about their state of health than the insurer is and the subscriber is more likely to purchase the health insurance when aware of their increased risk. This behavior collapses the risk pool by: forcing the insurer to increase the premiums, and encouraging healthy individuals to opt out of health insurance coverage. to build ubiquity of supply and payments.
This page reviews the inhibiting effect of the value delivery system on the expression of new phenotypic effects within an agent.

Extended phenotypic alignment pressured the US to return the freed slaves to low cost cotton growing. The need to borrow
Satyajit Das uses an Indonesian company's derivative trades to introduce us to the workings of the international derivatives system. Das describes the components of the value delivery system and the key transactions. He demonstrates how the system interacted with emerging economies expanding them, extracting profits and then moving on as the induced bubbles burst. Following Das's key points the complex adaptive system (CAS) aspects are highlighted.

merchant capital to purchase crops and supplies soon trapped the growers in debt as competition and weather removed pricing power.
Through the operation of three different food chains Michael Pollan explores their relative merits. The application of complex adaptive system (CAS) theory highlights the value of evolutionary testing of the food chain.

In the USA Earl Butts eventually replaced this corrosive process with oil based fertilizers, food storage and minimum price guarantees. Others within the global network responded to the pressure for alignment. Further strategies layered on top ensured the continued alignment (Aug 2017):

Housing was zoned with actions by Federal and state officials along with realtors across the country limiting access by blacks to housing in other areas. This access constraint later became an amplifier of the resource divide as a Federal
A key agent in the 1990 - 2008 housing expansion Countrywide is linked into the residential mortgage value delivery system (VDS) by Paul Muolo and Mathew Padilla. But they show the VDS was full of amplifiers and control points. With no one incented to apply the brakes the bubble grew and burst. Following the summary of Muolo and Padilla's key points the complex adaptive system (CAS) aspects are highlighted.

housing amplifier provided additional capital to those who owned housing.
Education was funded from local resources ensuring poorly financed, illiterate areas remained so. Bussing appeared to remove the constraint but the funding for the education and bussing was drawn from the local resources to be provided to fund the education and transport. This 'black gold' further reduced the resources of the poor areas ensuring that officials in these areas would work to curtail the bussing programs. This education based strategy is still present in current US public education policy:
ESEA
is the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 signed by LBJ. It is the framework later used to develop 'No child left behind'. ESEA's original titles include:
1. Provides funding to local school districts to improve the academic achievement of disadvantaged students. The original authors worried that local and state authorities might use the federal money to replace rather than supplement their budgets to poor schools. When this was found to be the case Congress amended the act in 1970 requiring districts to spend Title 1 dollars on additional education for poor children (supplement), above and beyond what they already received from other sources (not supplant).
2. Preparing, training and recruiting high quality teachers and principals
3. Language instruction for limited English proficient and immigrant students
4. Educational research and training
5. Grants to strengthen state departments of education
6. Aid to handicapped children
title 1 funding allocation responses (May 2016).
The
Matt Taibbi describes the phenotypic alignment of the American justice system. The result he explains relentlessly grinds the poor and undocumented into resources to be constrained, consumed and ejected. Even as it supports and aligns the financial infrastructure into a potent weapon capable of targeting any company or nation to extract profits and leave the victim deflated.

Taibbi uses five scenarios to provide a broad picture of the: activities, crimes, policing, prosecutions, court processes, prisons and deportation network. The scenarios are: Undocumented people's neighborhoods, Poor neighborhoods, Welfare recipients, Credit card debtors and Financial institutions.

Following our summary of his arguments, RSS comments on them framed by complex adaptive system (CAS) theory. The alignment of the justice system reflects a set of long term strategies and responses to a powerful global arms race that the US leadership intends to win.

justice system was integrated:

Flows of different kinds are essential to the operation of complex adaptive systems (CAS).
Example flows are outlined. Constraints on flows support the emergence of the systems. Examples of constraints are discussed.

Flows of immigrants were controlled.
Agents use sensors to detect events in their environment. This page reviews how these events become signals associated with beneficial responses in a complex adaptive system (CAS). CAS signals emerge from the Darwinian information model. Signals can indicate decision summaries and level of uncertainty.

Sensors were deployed to detect undocumented immigrants. Any detected were
Terrence Deacon explores how constraints on dynamic flows can induce emergent phenomena which can do real work. He shows how these phenomena are sustained. The mechanism enables the development of Darwinian competition.

constrained.
Poor neighborhoods were massively controlled.
Rich neighborhoods were treated differently.
Weapon like financial infrastructure was treated differently.

The global structures:
IMF
is the International Monetary Fund developed as part of the Bretton Woods agreements to provide liquidity to national gold denominated reserve banks at times of stress in the global financial network - a shortage of a particular currency which was inhibiting trade; in support of a broader Bretton Woods framework designed so as to ensure that currencies did not become misaligned with one another, and were a fair representation of what things were worth. The IMF removed the need for nations to depend on private loans from commercial banks, such as Britain's dependence on J. P. Morgan during the 1920s and 30s. The agreement required each Bretton Woods signatory to provide a capital investment or 'quota' into the fund which would subsequently correspond to the amount that the country could borrow from the fund in times of financial stress. The top four countries and their quotas were set by IMF architect, Harry Dexter White, to match FDR's priorities:
1. US - $2.9 billion, an amount the FDR administration could transfer from Exchange Stabilization Fund without any need to ask for Congress for funds.
2. UK - $1.45 billion
3. USSR - slightly less than UK quota
4. China - less than USSR.
,
World Bank
was setup as part of the Bretton Woods agreements, as the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development, to repair and reconstruct Europe after the Second World War and as the World Bank continues to provide reconstruction and development resources for projects in developing economies. It includes:
- International Finance Corporation
, NGO is non governmental organization. s; used to support Haiti after the 2010 earthquake further illustrate the features of alignment. Most of the aid financing is captured by western corporations used by the western NGOs to execute on the aid plan. Underlying the process is a core US is the United States of America. goal of limiting the power and control that will flow to the government in Haiti. The infrastructure of the NGOs was designed with this goal in mind. The development of cotton manufacturing using aid in a special zone should support jobs for Haitians. But these are typically very poorly paid. The low priced cotton goods manufactured help keep the global prices low.

The low cost business model created by the global cotton network
This page reviews Christensen's disruption of a complex adaptive system (CAS). The mechanism is discussed with examples from biology and business.

disrupted the global South's traditional cotton production system.

Beckert's exceptional and detailed book shows how the current world power and financial structures

emerged, and developed into their current states. The transformation catalyzed by cotton is a key demonstration of CAS principles in action.

.
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Politics, Economics & Evolutionary Psychology

Business Physics
Nature and nurture drive the business eco-system
Human nature
Emerging structure and dynamic forces of adaptation

integrating quality appropriate for each market

This page looks at schematic structures and their uses. It discusses a number of examples:

Schematic ideas are recombined in creativity.
Similarly designers take ideas and rules about materials and components and combine them.
Schematic Recipes help to standardize operations.
Modular components are combined into strategies for use in business plans and business models.

As a working example it presents part of the contents and schematic details from the Adaptive Web Framework (AWF)'s operational plan.

Finally it includes a section presenting our formal representation of schematic goals.
Each goal has a series of associated complex adaptive system (CAS) strategy strings.
These goals plus strings are detailed for various chess and business examples.

Strategy | Design |

This page uses an example to illustrate how:

A business can gain focus from targeting key customers,
Business planning activities performed by the whole organization can build awareness, empowerment and coherence.
A program approach can ensure strategic alignment.

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