Book of Extremes: Why the 21st Century Isn’t Like the 20th Century 2014th Edition by Ted G. Lewis (PDF)

Description

What makes the 21st century different from the 20th century? This century is the century of extremes — political, economic, social, and global black-swan events happening with increasing frequency and severity. Book of Extremes is a tour of the current reality as seen through the lens of complexity theory – the only theory capable of explaining why the Arab Spring happened and why it will happen again; why social networks in the virtual world behave like flashmobs in the physical world; why financial bubbles blow up in our faces and will grow and burst again; why the rich get richer and will continue to get richer regardless of governmental policies; why the future of economic wealth and national power lies in comparative advantage and global trade; why natural disasters will continue to get bigger and happen more frequently; and why the Internet – invented by the US — is headed for a global monopoly controlled by a non-US corporation. It is also about the extreme innovations and heroic innovators yet to be discovered and recognized over the next 100 years.Complexity theory combines the predictable with the unpredictable. It assumes a nonlinear world of long-tailed distributions instead of the classical linear world of normal distributions. In the complex 21st century, almost nothing is linear or normal. Instead, the world is highly connected, conditional, nonlinear, fractal, and punctuated. Life in the 21st century is a long-tailed random walk – Levy walks — through extreme events of unprecedented impact. It is an exciting time to be alive.

User’s Reviews

Editorial Reviews: From the Back Cover What makes the 21st century different from the 20th century? This century is the century of extremes — political, economic, social, and global black-swan events happening with increasing frequency and severity. Book of Extremes is a tour of the current reality as seen through the lens of complexity theory – the only theory capable of explaining why the Arab Spring happened and why it will happen again; why social networks in the virtual world behave like flashmobs in the physical world; why financial bubbles blow up in our faces and will grow and burst again; why the rich get richer and will continue to get richer regardless of governmental policies; why the future of economic wealth and national power lies in comparative advantage and global trade; why natural disasters will continue to get bigger and happen more frequently; and why the Internet – invented by the US — is headed for a global monopoly controlled by a non-US corporation. It is also about the extreme innovations and heroic innovators yet to be discovered and recognized over the next 100 years.Complexity theory combines the predictable with the unpredictable. It assumes a nonlinear world of long-tailed distributions instead of the classical linear world of normal distributions. In the complex 21st century, almost nothing is linear or normal. Instead, the world is highly connected, conditional, nonlinear, fractal, and punctuated. Life in the 21st century is a long-tailed random walk – Levy walks — through extreme events of unprecedented impact. It is an exciting time to be alive. About the Author Ted G. Lewis is an author, speaker, and consultant with expertise in applied complexity theory, homeland security, infrastructure systems, and early-stage startup strategies. He has served in both government, industry and academe over a long career, including, Executive Director and Professor of Computer Science, Center for Homeland Defense and Security, Naval Postgraduate School, Monterey, CA. 93943, Naval Postgraduate School, Monterey, CA., Senior Vice President of Eastman Kodak, President and CEO of DaimlerChrysler Research and Technology, North America, Inc. and Professor of Computer Science at Oregon State University, Corvallis, OR. In addition, he has served as the Editor-in-Chief of a number of periodicals: IEEE Computer Magazine, IEEE Software Magazine, as a member of the IEEE Computer Society Board of Governors and is currently Advisory Board Member of ACM Ubiquity and Cosmos + Taxis Journal (The Sociology of Hayek). He has published more than 30 books, most recently including Book of Extremes: The Complexity of Everyday Things, Bak’s Sand Pile: Strategies for a Catastrophic World, Network Science: Theory and Practice and Critical Infrastructure Protection in Homeland Security: Defending a Networked Nation. Lewis has authored or co-authored numerous scholarly articles in cross-disciplinary journals such as Cognitive Systems Research, Homeland Security Affairs Journal, Journal of Risk Finance, Journal of Information Warfare and IEEE Parallel & Distributed Technology. Lewis resides with his wife and dog, in Monterey, California.

Reviews from Amazon users which were colected at the time this book was published on the website:

⭐Despite its brevity, I underlined this thing page after page after page. It’s a tour de force of how chaos theory and power laws govern everything.It’s a hard book to find too. I unearthed it because I searched scholar.google.com for books and papers linking fractals to the 80/20 principle. There aren’t many. My own book “80/20 Sales & Marketing” is a niche-specific treatment of this reality, but “Book of Extremes” examines with a far wider lens.Lewis’s observation that the math of the 21st century is *fundamentally different* from the math of the 20th century should make every entrepreneur, policy maker, politician and historian sit up and take notice.This is because the world is connected, and an event from anywhere can cascade into an effect almost anywhere else. Events are no longer isolated. Therefore they don’t follow bell curve distributions. They obey power laws.His analysis of flashmob and networks and weather patterns is fascinating. Ditto market bubbles, biology, recovery from shocks, technology prizes, and history of interesting events like the economic crash in Great Britain in 1815.Quotable quotes:“Some say history repeats itself, but I say history obeys fractals.”“In this century, events obey fractals in all dimensions; size, time and space”“Long-tailed fractals… have no defining parameters like mean value or standard deviation.”“A Carrington Event would wipe out the Internet if it happened today.”“Empirical data analysis isn’t conclusive enough to prove either global warming or cooling.”“When the next great flood hits California with a punch equal to the 1861-62 storm, it will cause $725 billion in damages and affect one-fourth of all homes in California.”“A mere 737 of top holders had accumulated 80% of the control over the value of all transnational corporations on the planet!”“Overall wealth of an economic system increases with inequality and decreases with equality. Equality equals poverty. Inequality equals prosperity.”“The 21st century is about waves, surges, bubbles and leaps. Innovation alone will not be enough in this century. Nothing less than leaps are required.”This book is very short and very dense. Each page packs a lot of insights, and the insights are fractal. They’re similar across disciplines. Hopefully by the time you’re halfway through the book, you’ve acquired the ability to see the pattern. The world now is one domino strikes ten which strike 100 which strike 1000 – a tiny percentage of the time.This is how you get election results that nobody would have possibly predicted in 2015.If you look at the larger scope of Lewis’s work (computer science, mathematics, national security, business, natural disasters), Ted Lewis is a true Renaissance Man and this book is an encapsulation of his genius. May his tribe increase.

⭐This is a thoughtful, insightful, and somewhat depressing assessment of the state of the hyper-connected 21st Century and its potential for the appearance of that most unwanted denizen of anyone’s metaphorical zoo, the black swan, although, the black swans of our current century will be anything but metaphorical; they will be real. Lewis does an excellent job of tying together the notions of SOC, i.e. self-organized criticality, long-tailed distributions, social network structure and function, tipping points, the Gini distribution, the world of the bow tie, and the like to show how different the 21st Century is from the 20th Century and how vulnerable the 21st Century is to extreme events. In the final chapter, he also leaves the reader with a description of the [potential] transitions that these extremes will bring to our existence and the fact that economic power will trump military power as a strategy for the successful polity. This is a worthwhile and in fact necessary read for those who are concerned with the direction of the near future of our species. I have only one criticism, the price, far too high but most characteristic of Springer publications. Regardless of the price, the intrinsic worth of this book speaks for itself, so, buy the book anyway. Hmm, am I playing into Springer’s hand here?

⭐This is a hidden gem. It’s an amazing book that every person should read – especially if you are in business. It makes a very interesting case for how and why this century is ruled by chaos theory and quantum mathematics instead of Newtonian physics and linear mathematics (due to highly optimized, highly connected systems that can be catastrophically disrupted). Very good read.His other book “Bak’s Sand Pile: Strategies for a Catastrophic World” is really good too, but personally, I liked “Book of Extremes” even better.

⭐It is helpful to see several real world behaviors not misfitted badly by assuming a normal distribution from the math discipline.

⭐This is one the best if not the best books on numbers and counting. It was fun to read both times.St

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