Symptoms checker for not healthy societies

Society, as well as human health, is considered a complex system since it is made up of many interrelated variables.

What distinguishes a healthy body from an ill one?

EEG of finance
EEG of finance

The absence of a pathology is too restrictive criterion as definition of a healthy body. And it is unrealistic too.   On the contrary and more realistically, a healthy body is a body which responses smartly to external perturbations, accumulating stresses and toxicity while showing no obvious change until they reach a point where a small stress can trigger a sudden shift to another stable state.

Complex systems exhibit certain symptoms before a state swerve, for example, slower responses to small changes, and a tendency for all elements in the system to behave similarly.

Maybe predicting crashes is not a well-posed question for complex systems, but it seems to be wiser looking for accumulated dangerous levels of toxicity in the system that can trigger a crash.

Uncovering the symptoms of instability may warn societies to reform themselves before a collapse happens.

All this approach follows from the fact that complex systems are not determined by simple sums and averages of their parts. As regards with “financial bodies”, awareness of such behavior among legislators and regulators might help make economic recessions less likely.

This view takes into account of how the simple behavior of individual agents produces something that looks a bit like intelligence in the group as a whole.

The economic world is made up of a series of simple, largely separate transaction-based markets, that’s why large interconnected systems, such as financial systems, can behave in unexpected ways: just that small changes can trigger fundamental shifts from healthy status to a sick one.


signs of a forthcoming crisis?


So it is necessary to determine what are the “safe” normal conditions and what are not. Therefore think about a symptoms checker to prevent complex system crashes.