September 22, 2023

Colloquium Topic: Understanding society based on its control parameters

Government policies are being set by political considerations rather than by sound scientific and engineering analysis. What is missing is the recognition that we already have the necessary scientific knowledge to achieve desired outcomes if we choose to use it. I will introduce multi-scale complexity analysis that builds on renormalization group in physics and give a few examples including economic regulation by the federal reserve and pandemic control. In each case, the absence of clarity about the macro-scale control parameters undermines policy. Extreme results of this policy inadequacy are all around us, including drastically limited economic growth and poverty on the one hand, and severe failure of pandemic control efforts globally that could have been successful.

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Colloquium Speaker: Yaneer Bar-Yam

Professor Yaneer Bar-Yam is founder of the New England Complex Systems Institute and co-founder of the World Health Network. He is an MIT-trained physicist and complexity scientist. Since the late 1980s, he has contributed to founding the field of complexity science, introducing fundamental mathematical rigor, real-world application, and educational programs for new concepts and insights of this field. His work quantitatively analyzes the origins and impacts of market crashes, social unrest, ethnic violence, military conflict and pandemics, and the structure and dynamics of social networks.