Ramblemuse Touch Points

My prior comment on the infungibility of scientists reminding me about the work of economist W. Brian Arthur that I’d read about in Mitchell Waldrop’s book “Complexity: The Emerging Science at the Edge of Order and Chaos”. Arthur is noted for his work on increasing returns in economies, and how these increasing returns magnify small, random occurrences in the market place. Arthur had realized that the classical economics of diminishing returns (i.e. negative feedbacks), while suitable to fungible commodity markets, didn’t work in the technology sector. In the latter, a successful early entry could “capture” the market in a scenario of increasing returns (i.e. positive feedbacks), even to the point of eliminating a better solution from the technological standpoint. In other words, the market would choose the early rather than the best solution, contradicting the economic wisdom of the time. This type of “winner take all” scenario also shows up in summary articles and papers by Albert-László Barabási on Bose-Einstein condensation in complex networks. Barabási also provides a summary discussion of this effect in his book “Linked: How Everything Is Connected to Everything Else and What It Means”.

The point for the individuality of scientists is that their influence will depend both on when they entered an area of research and the network connections of concepts and colleagues in which they are immersed. In short, being a scientist is the kind of context-dependent economy/network described independently by Arthur and Barabási. This has profound implications on the type of environment required to both produce and maintain the “best and the brightest” in science. It is not a commodity market, nor is it a military, rule-based environment. In the much discussed push for U.S. competitiveness in the global arena, this may be a lesson only learned the hard way by those creating the current national laboratory environment.