New Book: Thinking in Systems

A manuscript by Donella Meadows, the lead author of 1972's Limits to Growth, was published in August as a new book on systems theory called Thinking in Systems: A Primer. It's a posthumous publication (Meadows died in 2001) edited by Diana Wright of the Sustainability Institute.

"In the years following her role as the lead author of the international bestseller, Limits to Growth—the first book to show the consequences of unchecked growth on a finite planet— Donella Meadows remained a pioneer of environmental and social analysis until her untimely death in 2001.

Meadows’ newly released manuscript, Thinking in Systems, is a concise and crucial book offering insight for problem solving on scales ranging from the personal to the global. Edited by the Sustainability Institute’s Diana Wright, this essential primer brings systems thinking out of the realm of computers and equations and into the tangible world, showing readers how to develop the systems-thinking skills that thought leaders across the globe consider critical for 21st-century life."

It's in paperback and available at Canadian booksellers for about $17.00.

Meadow's article, "Places to Intervene in a System" was first published in Whole Earth magazine in 1997, but received little attention. It is available to download here, reprinted by the software developer blog, Developer.dot.star. Software developers picked up on her theory because it has implications for software modelling of complex systems.

UPDATE: I just read "Places to Intervene in a System" and I have to tell you, if you don't have the time or inclination to read anything else about systems theory, you should just read this article. It's 19 pages long, and it's the most brilliant analysis of how to pragmatically change systems, and fundamentally, how they work.

More Blogs for Sociology and Complexity Science

Dr. Castellani, currently a professor of Sociology at Kent State, Ohio, has a blog dedicated to Sociology and Complexity Science. Interestingly, Dr. Castellani's background also includes extensive studies in psychology and visual arts. His Art & Science Factory includes his diverse interests in popular art and the social complexity of public health. The blog itself is loaded with fantastic art. His book on Sociology and Complexity Science looks like a good overview of the field, with a related website that gets into the specifics of complexity theories and models.

A related blog is Aaron Bramson's Complexity Blog that features Agent-Based Modeling.

And don't be embarrassed to take a look at the Wikipedia page on Sociology and Complexity Science. It's really a very good overview of the history of social complexity theory, it's related theories, schools and authors.

Gadgets and the Jevons Paradox

The NYTimes has a nice article describing how increases in the electrical efficiency of consumer electronics is actually leading to an increase in electrical consumption (because the number of gadgets we have is increasing). This trend will only get worse as we move toward the world of ubiquitous computing described in Adam Greenfield's book Everyware.








This same process occurred with automobiles, increases in fuel efficiency and emissions reduction from catalytic converters were offset by increases in the amount driven and, as a result, auto emissions were not reduced. The phenomena is so well know that economists have a name for it, the Jevons Paradox, referring to the tendency for technological increases in the efficiency with which a resource is used to increase, rather than decrease, the rate of consumption of that resource.

The folks over at Workers of the World Relax have put together a video about the paradox, suggesting that the solution is for North Americans to follow the European model and use productivity gains to increase the amount of leisure time rather than to increase production and consumption.