I am a fan of "big history." Jared Diamond's Guns Germs and Steel taught a younger me how the sociological world as we know it came to be. What particularly struck me was the simplicity of the thesis: people who happened to live near plants that gave better energy, animals that gave more leverage on that energy, and in an environment that allowed more unrestricted east-west expansion advanced more quickly.
Cereals and legumes delivered higher nutrition. More nutrition from each crop powered humans to greater physical strength with less gathering. Put a different way, it offered a higher return on agricultural investment.
Beasts of burden could power even crude plows that otherwise required humans to pull them. This combination of power and tool dramatically increased the amount of land a given set of people could manage, meaning more food available for non-farmers.
A more specialized, non-agrarian labor force arose. The greater complexity of society meant a role for specialization in management: governments. Governments required accounting. Accounting required writing, and so on.
These societies would expand rapidly by foot or hoof. If one were extending north-south, one would have more trouble bringing the crops as one moved from warm climes to cold or vice-versa. Even transplanted crops that could survive in a different latitude would have a disadvantage over those already acclimated.
On the other hand, movement east or west would keep conditions more similar, and one could make footholds more rapidly. The people who happened to hit the fertile crescent first could start this cycle.
The specific mechanics after that were very complex, but these three ideas drove a lot. To take the converse: an island people would not grow as quickly because the sea was a barrier. Water was not an absolute stopper - we could swim or build boats - but there was meaningfully more friction. Those in colder climes or a hot desert would spend more time just trying to survive. Those who showed up generations after gaining the caloric advantages of agriculture in an arable region would have an advantage in energy and decades of technological advancement.
And none of this is moral. The DNA of the people who got to the fertile crescent first was lucky in that it would have an edge in future generations reproducing, spreading, and committing violence on others. Neither how it started nor how they proceeded were right. To explain is not to condone.
I think of all this when looking at complex systems. A few drivers can explain how it generally got here. Understanding them is helpful to get a handle on the system. And understanding is not accepting its ethics.
We have to let go of "root causes" in complex systems. Even a deep knowledge of how we got here does not tell us where to go next. At the risk of endorsing teleology, we need to see the system as it is at this moment so that we might find how to adapt it to the next one.
The "big history" genre helps one see how context drives ideas. Ideas drive events. But both the ideas and the context have changed. Yesterday's ideas came from last week's context; today's events reflect yesterday's ideas. Change over time means that a snapshot of the system as it exists today can bewilder.
So looking back at the simple ideas that put it in motion can give a better feel for the system. One does not see how all the details fall into place, but we can reach an "oh, yeah, I see how that happened" moment.
But then we realize: the origins are no longer relevant. In a complex system that has persisted for any number of turns, the roots no longer drive it. Instead, this retrospective helps us see where it might be going, and now we ask what underlying structure drives where it is going next.
To the extent we want it to go somewhere else - and why else are we spending this energy? - looking for the new levers that will change it matter. The levers to improve the future of the human condition are not in the wild cereals of the fertile crescent. But we can ask what is like that in impact today that will drive the ideas of tomorrow and the events of next week.
The more recent works on systems and evolution in ideas by Matt Ridley, Professor Andrew Lo, and the late Dr. Donella Meadows point me in the direction of thinking about this evolutionary development of systems across even small markets - and people. Their work grounded me.
What amazed me about all three is how they end their works with policy recommendations that seem to toss their structural observations out the window. All three describe evolutionary, complex systems that will resist outside change and require internal, elegant changes at the level of interconnections to affect structure meaningfully.
But all three seem to think there is some big swing that will work. Meadows seems to be looking for a significant educational push but does not discuss how the very system she is fighting would push back against that kind of complicated, expensive solution. Shouldn't these second-order effects be part of the policy discussion? We are poorer for not having her wisdom applied at this next level.
Ridley seems to put a value judgment on certain types of government structures for fomenting more evolution. But isn't the rise of state power to slow evolution itself a response to evolutionary pressures? How does one break this cycle - or steer it a bit?
For every complex problem, there is a solution that is simple, elegant, and wrong. The human condition is a huge problem. I don't pretend to have easy answers.
Studying these extensive systems gives me more hope to understand the little ones around me. The levers I am looking for are simple. They should affect interconnections. They will not be the same levers as those that put the system in motion or even those that drove it years ago.
Understanding the "big history" of a system helps one get closer to the levers that will affect it tomorrow. And making that change, through interconnections and ideas today that drive tomorrow's events, is the work.