Ramblemuse Touch Points

The other day I was browsing a post by Chet Richards (Certain to Win) at Defense and the National Interest on 4GW comes to a town near you, 4GW being an acronym for fourth generation warfare. In particular, what caught my eye was a statement Richards makes about disconnection from (or marginalization by) the nominal state, resulting in stronger allegiance to other groups. Richards first notes that the state itself is not disappearing, then adds:

What does appear to be happening, however, is that in some areas, large numbers of people are transferring their primary loyalties to organizations other than the state to which they happen to be citizens. There is nothing new about this: Organized crime is as old as the species itself, and many state boundaries, particularly in areas affected by European colonialism, are arbitrary and don’t reflect ethnic or tribal composition.

While Richard’s immediate focus is the presence of Mexican drug cartel activity in Atlanta, his statement would apply equally to any black market in which legal goods are “redirected” from the normal lines of distribution or illegal goods are sold. The implication in either case is that there are a significant number of people who are willing to “defect” (game theory terminology) from social norms to enable the black market to succeed from the providers’ perspective. While the official state or community considers the activities to be illegal, the activities succeed because there is underlying support (i.e. a market) within the community itself. The “invisible elephant” in the discussion is that drug trafficking, sex trafficking, and black markets are community supported in the sense that the markets are often community based. In sex-trafficking, for example, the aspect of market demand was studied in papers by Julia O’Connell Davidson (Eurozine) and Katri Eespere (Ministry of Social Affairs of the Republic of Estonia). Given the profitability incentive, it remains next to impossible to eradicate such black market activities as long as social and economic factors provide them with significant community-based market demand.

As a computational modeler, my thoughts naturally turn to considering if anyone is doing social modeling, particularly agent-based modeling, of formation of black markets. In doing a bit of searching I didn’t turn up a lot, but did find a few items and throughts. One stone overturned was the research being done by Barry G. Silverman at University of Pennsylvania. Silverman’s papers also added the term “human terrain” to my considerations; a term in use by the military in consideration of cultural and social factors affecting their efforts. That in turn led to the Dartmouth College’s Laboratory for Human Terrain. I also turned up a page on GIS and Agent-Based Modeling, which includes links on agent-based modeling in the Second Life virtual world and agent-based modeling of crime.

Resources for agent-based modeling in the social sciences include Nigel Gilbert’s “Simulation for the Social Scientist” and “Agent-Based Models — Quantitative Applications in the Social Sciences”. Leigh Tesfatsion (Iowa State University) maintains a website on Agent-Based Computational Economics.