Cary Neeper's Blog: Reviewing World-changing Nonfiction - Posts Tagged "plotting"

Add these two books:
for exploring the impact of diversity on complexity Scott E. Page's "Diversity and Complexity"
for exploring the saga of the Chacoans and Puebloans as an example of the staying power of efficiency and the role of complexity in the survival of a culture, add David E. Stuart's "Anasazi America."

Completing the Picture--Adding Ecological Economics and steadystate.org imperatives to Complexity Economics

A little late with a big Aha--it's time to put together a mini-Bibliography to review the new economical thinking that could save the future.

Start with a general overview of problems with classical economics, economics as a complex system, and the role of government, leaving the How of solving problems to citizens. Be sure to read The Gardens of Democracy by Eric Liu and Eric Hanauer, Seattle, WA: Sasquatch Books, 2011.

For tending the economic garden that has become overgrown, go to steadystate.org and see C.A.S.S.E.'s twelve steps to a no-growth economy--how to get over our obsession with growth and its cause, uncontrolled debt.

For the latter idea and a connection to complex systems, see Gaian Democracies by Roy Madron and John Jopling, Devon UK: Green Books Ltd., Schumacher Society Briefing #9, 2003.

Don't forget to stir into your reading Thomas L. Friedman's Hot, Flat and Crowded, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008 as a reminder that nothing can grow forever.

Related studies are found in Lester R. Brown's Eco-Economy, New York, WW Norton and Co., 2001 and Plan B, 2003.

The moral implications of all this and a scathing critique of classical economics is beautifully covered by Herman E. Daly and John B. Cobb Jr. in For The Common Good: Redirecting the Economy Toward Community, the Environment and A Sustainable Future, Boston: Beacon Press, 1994.

Eric D. Beinhocker's The Origin of Wealth, Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 2006 covers such a critique and tells good stories that define economics as complex, giving us a huge bibliography and lots of useful notes. However, he fails to talk about how an overused planet is impacted, hugely, given the reality of economic complexity, with its tendency to do unpredictable amplification. Remember 2008.

Finally, for an understanding of complexity, first read Per Bak's How Nature Works: The Science of Self-organized Criticality, New York, Springer-Verlag, 1996, then Thinking In Systems --A Primer by Donella Meadows,VT: Chelsea Green Publishing Company, 2008. The newest recommended primers I've found are Deep Simplicity, John Gribbin, New York: Random House, 2004 and Diversity and Complexity, Scott E. Page, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011.

Let's do it.

Review and Author Suggestions— Signs of Life: How Complexity Pervades Biology
(Ricard Solé and Brian Goodwing, New York: Basic Books, 2000.)

This book is a comprehensive review, showing biological systems as examples of complexity. As writers, when we understand what it means to be complex, we gain a valuable perspective on human life that can drive our character development and plotting. (Mathematical treatments of the problems are set off in separate boxes from the text, which leaves the book accessible to non-scientists.

Solé and Goodwin define complexity as the difference between two independent systems when they modify each other. They exhibit power laws (few big events and progressively more events as things get smaller), nonlinearity, collective behavior, fractal structure, unpredictability and random fluctuations that result in symmetry-breaking. The authors then review the workings of complexity in everything from genes to traffic jams. the genes' roles, they say, are to stabilize patterns of emergent complexity.

In studying emergence, the authors stress that it is essential to study details of the parts as well as high-level dynamics. One example is the fact that brain patterns and cardiac disease with orderly patterns are indicative of disease. Chaos indicated health, health being an emergent phenomenon of the body.

Another discussion reflects Stuart Kaufmann's observations that natural selection works with self-organization in biology, resulting in evolution. this is a nice analogy for human interactions that could drive a story.

Two mechanisms of the origin of life could also suggest plots--closed chains of reactions among cooperating individuals and random reactions between people who network.

Don't let the scientific jargon throw you. A lot of complexity definitions could be labeled simple common sense. Scientists don't like the fact that unpredictability looms large in complex systems, which is great news for us writers. For more details, definitions and examples of complex phenomena, see my notes compiled from a course for nonscientists I taught a few years ago. There on my web site http://caryneeper.com.