We live in a world of abundance, but is it really the land of Rainbow Pie? What surprises have we seen? How do we map out the land of abundance to understand the unintended consequences?
Abundance increases the complexity of society as the number of choices people have increase. Increased complexity can be discomforting to many people. We can see this in today’s populist movement in which people ask to return to simpler times–to times of lower abundance.
In 2012, Peter Diamandis presented his classic TED Talk on abundance. He took the position that abundance was a universal problem solver.
Read more in Confronting Complexity by Casti, Jones, and Pennock
Extreme social events (X-Events) can occur when a complexity mismatch occurs in a society and when the social mood is negative. To learn more about how complexity mismatch and inequality, due to abundance and uneven distribution of abundance, lead to drastic social restructuring, check out Confronting Complexity.
Oops! Meant the first two sentences to be one. Like: How does does the world stay resilient, where there is such a wide range of complexity across the globe?.
Our observation is that when the difference in complexity becomes too great, then an extreme events (X-Event) occurs that simplifies the system. If the system is resilient, then the state after the X-Event is stable but not necessarily the same state that existed before the X-Event. In other words, the X-Event restructures the system to one of lower complexity. The complexity difference become smaller.
Here is a video by John Casti that describes the X-Event.
https://thex-presslargeconcepts.com/2018/07/28/how-the-world-works-by-john-casti/
And here is our book that goes into X-Events and resilience in more detail.
http://thex-press.com/portfolio-items/confronting-complexity/