Complex Systems Theory Explains Why Covid Crushed the World

The more complicated and efficient a system gets, the more likely it is to collapse altogether

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Human history is a long saga of people learning to harness ever-increasing amounts of energy to maintain ever more complex, ordered systems, punctuated by periodic collapses. The Romans, the Maya — when civilizations became more complex than they could maintain, with the energy and technologies they had, in the face of changing conditions.

At that point, small stresses sent overstretched social systems into a rapid downward spiral, which ended with major losses of people and social organization, as one stable complex system made a rapid nonlinear descent to a less complex one. But after a setback, humanity always innovated and rebuilt, a little bigger and more complex than before.

This process is integral to how we should understand pandemics. We now live in the most complex civilization the world has ever seen and the first to encompass the entire planet. Many believe that this makes us resilient to shocks. But, say the complexity theorists, the more complex systems get — the more tightly coupled their component parts, the faster and denser the communication and transport links that keep them all coordinated, the more closely each part…