Saturday, January 15, 2011

Meltdowns: Financial and Nuclear

Here is an excellent article about chaos, complexity, engineering, and economics.

I have long believed that complexity is a kind of pollution, and should be taxed as such.  Anyone who makes the world a more complex place should pay a price for that action.  Sometimes the benefits of the new complex thing outweigh the costs, which is why new things should not be regulated away.  But if the innovation does not produce enough profits to pay a reasonable complexity tax, then it has made the world a worse place.  I am not sure exactly how you would measure complexity in this way, but the tools of psychology and information theory would probably give a decent number.

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