Sharing a well thought out LinkedIn post from a colleague, Jawahar Bhalla, who is a leading Systems Engineer and Systems Thinker in Australia, regarding modelling efforts during the pandemic. Many who have a systems background have bemoaned the global approach of narrow, single point solutions to address the pandemic.
The hubris of power arises from looking not just at complex, but phenomenally complex problems and taking a reductive view first by reducing them to an apparently complicated set of problems or issues which are seemingly more manageable, and then further reducing those into more simplistic problems which give rise to the plausibility of a power that might control or solve the problems.
This is probably best illustrated by the dismal science of economic sand central banks which although they can never be fully aware or conscious of the entire economy and its phenomenally complex and shifting interactions in the known and unknown or black economy sectors - then for decades central bankers have laboured under the ridiculous and simplistic assumption that they can control or steer the economy via a monthly meeting of the BoE and decisions made about the micro-adjustment of a single basic interest rate which bear little or no relation to real world interest rates.
Most recently we have problems with inflation which arise from under-investment in energy sources and supply chain issues arising from two years of pandemic restrictions. Nothing in the 'toolbox' of central bankers can fix such issues, neither printing money nor raising interest rates. Yet they are the only hammers they possess so they keep seeing everything as simplified nail.
The hubris of power arises from looking not just at complex, but phenomenally complex problems and taking a reductive view first by reducing them to an apparently complicated set of problems or issues which are seemingly more manageable, and then further reducing those into more simplistic problems which give rise to the plausibility of a power that might control or solve the problems.
This is probably best illustrated by the dismal science of economic sand central banks which although they can never be fully aware or conscious of the entire economy and its phenomenally complex and shifting interactions in the known and unknown or black economy sectors - then for decades central bankers have laboured under the ridiculous and simplistic assumption that they can control or steer the economy via a monthly meeting of the BoE and decisions made about the micro-adjustment of a single basic interest rate which bear little or no relation to real world interest rates.
Most recently we have problems with inflation which arise from under-investment in energy sources and supply chain issues arising from two years of pandemic restrictions. Nothing in the 'toolbox' of central bankers can fix such issues, neither printing money nor raising interest rates. Yet they are the only hammers they possess so they keep seeing everything as simplified nail.