Complexity Analytics and Public Policy : Cautions and Opportunities Going Forward
that change in complex systems is evolutionary and incremental . That is , given a system in a state , moving that system to a different state is most likely to be accomplished state by adjacent state . Understanding the structure of social space is crucial to understanding the dimensionality of adjacency , which dimensions are most important in a given change process , and which participants are where along each dimension .
Where this discussion is going is toward the suggestion that an “ adjacency analysis ” be constructed for all public policy enterprises . Just as adjacency portends positive evolutionary possibilities , so also does widespread lack of adjacency in intervention design provide an explanation for failure . Haiti , race relations in the United States , failed development strategies , U . S . training of troops in Iraq — these all suffer from the same dislocation : there is insufficient adjacency among the states of all the players , given the scope of the enterprise . Adjacency analyses will minimize the distortions caused by our lack of knowledge about the interactions of the diverse topologies of social space because movement will be from state to state in the case of fitness landscapes and along topological lines in the case of network analyses .
An example might help to clarify the power of this approach . A group of Haitian immigrant boys in Brooklyn displaced by the 2010 earthquake in Haiti were having severe behavioral and academic problems in school . They were brought into a community of other Haitian teenage boys with whom the affinity was that they were all Haitian , not that they had all gone through the earthquake . A normalcy evolved , they were able to rebalance themselves emotionally and their behavioral and academic problems disappeared .
Another story . There is a Harvard – MIT Atlas of Economic Complexity which , operating from what they call the “ product space ” ranks the countries of the world according to economic complexity . The index they use measures the complexity of the products the countries produce . Their objective is to enable countries to be more efficient in the economic development choices they make . If your country is currently functioning at complexity level A and you want to move to complexity level B , this Atlas will tell you what the products are at the next level enabling you to choose a development path that makes maximum use of your existing workforce and physical infrastructure . This was the genius of the move of Akron into plastics when their rubber industry grew legs and walked .
Education in America is another example of “ American Exceptionalism ” ( Lipset , 1996 ). Whereas most countries have one national school system , in America , there are 51 state systems and 13,000 local school districts . The Economic Policy Institute has published a study titled , “ Bringing it back home : Why state comparisons are more useful than international comparisons for improving U . S . education policy ” ( Carnoy , Garcia , & Khavenson , 2015 ). Carnoy et al . ( 2015 ) argues that instead of being riveted by international
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