One of the themes of this website is how our institutions and beliefs of all shapes and sizes are struggling to cope with the way new technology creates complexity at ever-soaring rates.

In other words, the faster our machines the faster they can do things and generate information, which in turn allows us to see new patterns and connections and (therefore) try to have ‘smarter’ policies. Which doesn’t work because our policies are too slow anyway,  often out of date before they begin.

All of which, as we know, gives some advantages to small, fast, determined things who Keep things Simple (such as single-issue busybodies, terrorists, pirates, assorted Occupiers) over clunky big unwieldy things (such as the Eurozone, or even Democracy as currently constituted).

Here is a fabulous article by David Weinberger about what this means for science itself. Take a few minutes out from your busy day to read it and learn something:

The result of having access to all this data is a new science that is able to study not just "the characteristics of isolated parts of a cell or organism" (to quote Kitano) but properties that don’t show up at the parts level. For example, one of the most remarkable characteristics of living organisms is that we’re robust — our bodies bounce back time and time again, until, of course, they don’t.

Robustness is a property of a system, not of its individual elements, some of which may be nonrobust and, like ants protecting their queen, may "sacrifice themselves" so that the system overall can survive. In fact, life itself is a property of a system.

However, just as we realise that we can’t work out what is happening at the most basic level of our own bodies, governments strain to micro-manage almost anything that moves. This way of running things is philosophically doomed to fail, and failing it is around the world.

Hayek was right. Capitalism and free markets are essentially information networks, and need to be treated respectfully as such. This in turn shows why the Eurozone is wobbling. Hundreds of millions of people are now able to examine its deepest practical and moral foundations and are finding them badly designed.

In short, the Eurozone system as a metaphor for the ‘Western Social Model’ is over-complex. But under-robust. It’s science, see?.