The Tangled World: Understanding human connections, networks and complexity

Publishing details

HARRIMAN HOUSE LTD

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Petersfield

Hampshire

GU32 2EW

GREAT BRITAIN

Tel: +44 (0)1730 233870

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Website: www.harriman-house.com

First published in Great Britain in 2011

Copyright © Harriman House Ltd

The right of Gerald Ashley and Terry Lloyd to be identified as the Authors has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Design and Patents Act 1988.

ISBN: 978–0857–191–74–8

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A CIP catalogue record for this book can be obtained from the British Library.

All rights reserved; no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior written permission of the Publisher. This book may not be lent, resold, hired out or otherwise disposed of by way of trade in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published, without the prior written consent of the Publisher.

No responsibility for loss occasioned to any person or corporate body acting or refraining to act as a result of reading material in this book can be accepted by the Publisher, by the Authors, or by the employer(s) of the Authors.

Acknowledgements

We would both like to thank Jon Norton and John Thirlwell for their thoughts, ideas and observations, and we should also like to thank everyone at Harriman House for their help and encouragement.

Terry Lloyd & Gerald Ashley, London, November 2011

Introduction

When you can measure what you are speaking about, and express it in numbers, you know something about it; but when you cannot express it in numbers, your knowledge is of a meagre and unsatisfactory kind; it may be the beginning of knowledge, but you have scarcely, in your thoughts, advanced to the stage of science, whatever the matter may be.

William Thomson, Lord Kelvin, mathematical physicist and engineer (1824–1907)

People interact with each other in many different ways, and so can be grouped under many general headings: by salary, by religion, by race, by age, by sex, by political allegiance. Various social studies have arisen to study and understand these groupings.

Economics examines people as wealth creators, by studying how they produce, distribute and consume goods and services. Social welfare examines people’s wellbeing and attempts to provide support to raise all citizens to an acceptable level. Political science examines how people in states, corporations and other organisations make collective decisions, covering the regulation of group affairs and the methods and tactics used to formulate and apply policy.

The interactions between people and between overlapping groups are complex. They have been investigated throughout history by philosophers and artists – from Plato, Luther, Shakespeare, Dickens, Hogarth and Gillray in the past, to the commentators, satirists and cartoonists of today.

In the 20th century a collection of disciplines often called social sciences developed to match these generally unstructured comments. These sciences examine the relations within and between groups of people in a formal, quantitative way, but the complex behaviour of the humans at their heart has meant that progress has been slow. Until now, they have always lagged behind