We’ve heard quite a bit recently about the political fundraising practice referred to as “bundling”. The idea behind it is that the Federal law prohibiting large individual donations to any one candidate (the cap is set at $2300) can be skirted by aggregating many small donations into a large “bundle” – sometimes amounting to several hundred thousand dollars. As a result, enterprising fund-raisers and their like-minded contributors are able to gain collective political clout with the recipient. (The most notorious recent example is the indicted fund-raiser Norman Hsu.)
I call it a “synergy of scale” (when many things of the same kind are put together to produce an otherwise unattainable combined effect), and it happens that synergies of scale are a common occurrence in the natural world as well. For instance, many nesting birds congregate into large colonies where the individual birds are able to combine forces and drive off even much larger predators. The practice is known as mobbing. Likewise, small fish like the dwarf herring are able to reduce their joint risk of being eaten by a barracuda or a shark by traveling together in large “schools”.
In politics, bundling is only one of many different synergies of scale. In election processes, it is the aggregate number of individual votes that determines the outcome, and the same thing is true in legislative decision-making. The decisions that result from taking a vote and acting on the outcome can truly be called synergistic effects. Likewise, a politician (like the president) who can draw a large audience (whether in person or on TV) benefits from being able to communicate with many more citizens and attracts more media attention as well. And a lobbyist for a large organization that can raise a sizable war chest or influence a large number of voters (say a trade union) has a sizable advantage in influencing the behavior of legislators. (For more on synergies of scale, see my 2003 book, Nature’s Magic.)
Thought for the day: In politics as elsewhere, if you don’t play by the rules, pretty soon it will turn ugly. To invert the old saying, warfare is politics by other means.
An Introduction
In his path-breaking book, Beyond Reductionism (1969), the famed novelist and polymath Arthur Koestler remarked that "true innovation occurs when things are put together for the first time that had been separate." He was talking about synergy, of course, a phenomenon that is still greatly underrated and vastly more important even than Koestler imagined. I call it "nature's magic."
Synergy is in fact one of the great governing principles of the natural world; it ranks right up there with such heavyweight concepts as gravity, energy, information and entropy as one of the keys to understanding how the world works. It has been a wellspring of creativity in the evolution of the universe; it has greatly influenced the overall trajectory of life on Earth; it played a decisive role in the emergence of humankind; it is vital to the workings of every modern society; and it is no exaggeration to say that our ultimate fate depends on it. Indeed, every day, in a thousand different ways, our lives are shaped, and re-shaped, by synergy.
All of these grandiose-sounding claims are discussed in detail, with many hundreds of examples, in three of my books: The Synergism Hypothesis (McGraw-Hill, 1983), Nature's Magic (Cambridge University Press, 2003), and Holistic Darwinism (University of Chicago Press, 2005), as well as in many of my articles for professional journals. Some of these publications are available at my website: http://www.complexsystems.org/
The purpose of this blog is to provide a continuing update on synergy and an opportunity for some dialogue on this important and still underappreciated phenomenon, along with commentaries on various topics - political, economic, and social -- from a synergy-monger's perspective. The tag-lines for each entry, with a "thought for the day," are the unregulated firecrackers that go off in my mind from time to time.
Peter Corning pacorning@complexsystems.org
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Synergy is in fact one of the great governing principles of the natural world; it ranks right up there with such heavyweight concepts as gravity, energy, information and entropy as one of the keys to understanding how the world works. It has been a wellspring of creativity in the evolution of the universe; it has greatly influenced the overall trajectory of life on Earth; it played a decisive role in the emergence of humankind; it is vital to the workings of every modern society; and it is no exaggeration to say that our ultimate fate depends on it. Indeed, every day, in a thousand different ways, our lives are shaped, and re-shaped, by synergy.
All of these grandiose-sounding claims are discussed in detail, with many hundreds of examples, in three of my books: The Synergism Hypothesis (McGraw-Hill, 1983), Nature's Magic (Cambridge University Press, 2003), and Holistic Darwinism (University of Chicago Press, 2005), as well as in many of my articles for professional journals. Some of these publications are available at my website: http://www.complexsystems.org/
The purpose of this blog is to provide a continuing update on synergy and an opportunity for some dialogue on this important and still underappreciated phenomenon, along with commentaries on various topics - political, economic, and social -- from a synergy-monger's perspective. The tag-lines for each entry, with a "thought for the day," are the unregulated firecrackers that go off in my mind from time to time.
Peter Corning pacorning@complexsystems.org
__________________________________________________
Tuesday, November 27, 2007
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