Those two components result in us “Thinking fast and slow” (Kahneman (2011)). Information prompts a chemical reaction in the impatient part of the brain. This provides the synaptic spark to re-optimise, to exchange, to transact, to befriend, to change our minds as never before. And change our minds, quite literally, it has. Some have argued that the information flood may have caused a neurological rewiring, the like of which followed previous IT revolutions such as the printing press (Carr (2011)). This may have reduced attention spans, perhaps permanently; it has hardwired myopia. While the neurology of this is new, the point itself is not. In 1971, information theorist Herbert Simon wrote: “In an information-rich world, the wealth of information means a dearth of something else: a scarcity of whatever it is that information consumes. What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention” (Simon (1971)). In other words, an information surplus may cause an attention deficit. An attention deficit is likely to lower the quality of decision-making. For cognitive psychologists, it is a disorder – one whose reported incidence has sky-rocketed over recent years. If short-term reactions are clouding long-term judgements, the doer crowding-out the planner, the immediate the important, then more hurry may be generating less speed. This might be called the “information-rich-yet-attention-poor” property of connected webs. One manifestation is over-trading – over-trading in friends, partners, jobs, stocks.
The financial system’s tail was fattening. When that tail wagged in 2008, almost every country on the planet fell off the cliff-edge at an almost identical time. The world experienced its first-ever truly global financial crisis. This time was different. Unprecedented levels of financial integration made that so. Over the course of a 30-year period, it had transformed the global financial system into a tangled cats-cradle, the ultimate robust-yet-fragile web. While everyone was shocked by the crisis, perhaps no-one should have been surprised by it. If the path of integration – social, economic, financial – continues skyward, next time will be different for other systems too. Information and systemic risk Consider next the link between information and systemic risk. Here again the relationship is far from straightforward. Increased information is generally felt to improve decision-making; it allows us to re-optimise in response to news. Facebook and Twitter allow us to befriend and defriend, to like and dislike, in real time. eBay and Amazon allow us to trade instantaneously. Trading platforms allow us to buy and sell at sub-second speeds. Matchmaking sites allow us to search for jobs and partners in our lunch-break. People, goods, services and money all now swim in a liquid real-time market. Yet high-frequency information and decision-making may be neither costless nor harmless. To understand why, look inside your head. MRI scans now enable us to do just that. What they show is that, neurologically, humans are schizophrenic by design. The brain is part impatient “doer”, part patient “planner”.