Many of the problems we are facing, such as The Great Recession and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, are spectacularly complicated, David Segal wrote in an article in last Sunday’s NY Times. They are like puzzles that even their designers can no longer fathom, let alone operate or dismantle.
“When we have understood this slide,” General Stanley McCrystal, who heads the U.S. effort in Afghanistan said not long ago, pointing at a PowerPoint slide – a labyrinth of cross-thatching lines – we’ll have won the war.”
Here are some of Segal’s main points:
1. Some of the phenomena are deliberately impenetrable, such as synthetic collateralized debt obligations.
2. Complexity lurks behind the most expensive and intractable issues of the day, like the healthcare debate and the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.
3. There is a lot of end-of-days talk when it comes to this subject.
Joseph Tainter, the author of The Collapse of Complex Societies, examines the collapse of three societies and explains how complexity drove them to ruin – essentially by bankrupting them.
4. Most Americans have a fondness for complexity, or at least for ideas that are hard to understand. In part this is because they assume that complicated products come from sharp, impressive minds.
5. What we need, suggests Brenda Zimmerman, a professor at the Schulich School of Business at York University, is a distinction between the complicated and the complex. It’s complicated, she says, to send a rocket to the moon. It requires blueprints, math, and carefully calibrated hardware and expertly written software. Raising a child, on the other hand, is complex. It is an enormous challenge, but math and blueprints won’t help. Running a healthcare system is complex. It’s not enough to get the right people and the right equipment.
“We get educated by the complicated,” Ms. Zimmerman says. “We’re in awe of it and we pull away from the duty to ask simple questions, which we do whenever we deal with matters that are complex.”
It takes a set of simple principles that guide and shape a complex system.
Eric Koch’s book, The Weimar Triangle, is available at Indigo-Chapters and in your local bookstore. 
The distinction between complex and complicated is intriguing. Etymologically, complex = twisted together, whereas complicated = folded together. This seems less helpful than I imagine it ought to be. I’ll chew on it.
We see a cultural rise in the search for simple solutions, hence the desire to give conspiracy theories greater credence. Journalism feeds into the “quest for cozy” by avoiding both foreign reporting (it’s “over there” and can be ignored) and investigative journalism (aka contextualizing). Not a comforting time…
Today’s (Friday’s) posting has a simple solution: Return to the Ancient Virtues.
All journalists would support this and, after the next election, the Ancient Virtuous would form a majority government.
Whatever the difference between complex and complicated, were the world and life ever free of complexity or complication? Can they ever be?
I assume that was a rhetorical question. If it wasn’t I would say “You are of course right. When Socrates said I KNOW THAT I KNOW NOTHING he surely meant that the world was too complex for him to grasp and that the gods were of no help.”
I am ready to join those who are stumped. I never knew of any difference between complex and complicated. All the problems mentioned are both, I think.
What about this: physical problems – including high-tech machines – are complicated but a blueprint will help explain them. As soon as you add a psychological or spiritual element they become complex and nothing can help you. Therefore you may be tempted to take refuge in vague, but not necessarily misleading, explanations.
I don’t think Brenda Z’s distinction is helpful without more definition – and then she has a term that she is using in a way that most people don’t. There is a useful distinction between complicated and rational, on the one hand (like flying to the moon), and complicated or complex but subject as well to irrationality on the other.
The irrationality may be desirable – people’s love for their children, the joy of competing – or undesirable – the hatred of people who are different. (You can decide where religious belief fits.) But emotional content makes problems harder to solve rationally, and people are more likely to disagree (it seems to me off the cuff) about problems that require emotional (or faith-based?) solutions (at least in part) than those that are purely rational.
I am not sure that leaves one less stumped faced with the problems that Eric mentions! Another term one hears these days is “wicked problems” i.e. not only complicated/complex, but where solving part of them seems to make other parts worse, or at least advancing one value hurts other values that one would also like to advance. (But is choosing the lesser of two evils a new problem for people? Maybe choosing the least of a score of evils is, sometimes, and in a democracy – e.g. climate change, health care…)
I agree: the complicated-complex distinction is not very helpful as such.
But I find Dahrendorf’s reminder of Ancient Virtues (see today’s posting) intriguing. The erosion of the Protestant Work Ethic (for which, according to Tawney there are equivalents in the Catholic world) is a simple explanation that everybody can understand and which might help us resolve some of the complexities that stump us.
Tyranny is the absence of complexity.
Andre Gide
Very neat – but is it true? No doubt what he means is that simplicity is ONE of its characteristics – and perhaps the one that makes it possible.
The article I cite says Americans have a weakness for complicated/complex things, i.e, for puzzles. Not only Americans. A complicated Bach fugue wears better than a nursery rhyme.
I’d say that in recent years, Americans have a serious weakness for simple solutions – starting about Ronald Reagan, indeed. Do voters for simplistic politicians like complicated puzzles?