Dr. Paul Shotton

For almost the entire existence of humanity our life experience has been what Thomas Hobbes described as: nasty, brutish and short. All of the progress we have made has occurred during just the last few hundred years and has occurred thanks to the mutually reinforcing developments of liberal democracy, capitalism and scientific enlightenment. It is therefore a tragedy that, in recent years, surveys of people’s satisfaction have shown a marked loss of faith in the ability of democracy and capitalism to deliver fair outcomes. Whilst I empathize with those who have been victims of the hollowing-out of the middle classes due to globalization, and who have suffered from increasing wealth disparity since the Global Financial Crisis of fifteen years ago, I fear that the alternatives to democracy and capitalism would be far worse.

Because people have individual agency, human society is a complex adaptive system (CAS). CAS have several important properties: they are highly non-linear, tending to obey power laws, and are deeply interconnected, rendering invalid classic techniques such as breaking a system down into individual components, having experts solve each component separately, and then reconstituting the whole. As in the world of quantum mechanics, there is no independence between the system under observation and the people doing the observing, resulting in these systems exhibiting the property of adaptivity; they change over time in ways which are unpredictable, rendering invalid forecasting techniques based of the analysis of historical data.

Collectively these properties are the reason why, in respect of human affairs, the future is fundamentally unknowable, and this is precisely why democracy is the best form of political organization, free-market capitalism is the best form of economic organization, and why true diversity is imperative for the long-term health and well-being of any organization.