Don’t surrender to uncertainty!

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I hope senior management do not get persuaded to divert their attention to studying ‘complexity’ in the hope of understanding recent economic turmoil.  “‘Power curves’: What natural and economic disasters have in common” argues that “parallels between financial crises and natural disasters–such as earthquakes or forest fires–suggest that the economy, just like complex natural systems, is inherently unstable and prone to occasional huge failures that are very hard or impossible to foresee. Proponents of this school of thinking are ...

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Greenspan, sub-prime and tipping points

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Interesting to hear Alan Greenspan lay the blame for the scale of US troubles right at the door of the sub-prime idiocy. Since I commented on this, others have insisted it’s much more complicated than this – maybe , but don’t underestimate the power of that much misunderstood phenomenon – tipping points.

As commonly understood, and indeed as explained in Michael Gladwell’s popular book, it’s all about the take-off of self-reinforcing effects. But there’s a much more powerful source of tipping points – ...

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