THE MOUSETRAP

From The Edge:

Let me begin by asking how it is that modern free market economies are as complex as they are, boasting amazingly elaborate production, distribution and communication systems? Go into almost any drug store and you can find your favourite candy bar. And what's true at the personal level is true at the industrial level. Somehow there are enough ball bearings and computer chips in just the right places in factories all over the country. The physical infrastructure and communication networks are also marvels of integrated complexity. Fuel supplies are, by and large, where they're needed. Email reaches you in Miami as well as in Milwaukee, not to mention Barcelona and Bangkok.

The natural question, discussed first by Adam Smith and later by Friedrich Hayek and Karl Popper among others, is who designed this marvel of complexity? Which commissar decreed the number of packets of dental floss for each retail outlet? The answer, of course, is that no economic god designed this system. It emerged and grew by itself. No one argues that all the components of the candy bar distribution system must have been put into place at once, or else there would be no Snickers at the corner store.

JOHN ALLEN PAULOS is a professor of mathematics at Temple University. His books include A Mathematician Plays the Stock Market and Innumeracy.

More here.

Comments

[Winfield J. Abbe]

I would suggest that Professor Paulos consult some of the writings of the late W. Edwards Deming, Ph.D. (October 14, 1900- December 20, 1993). According to Answers.com, Dr. Deming was "American Statistician and quality control expert." B.S. electrical engineering, University of Wyoming, Laramie, 1921, M.S. University of Colorado, 1925 and Ph.D. Yale University, 1928. "Both graduate degrees were in mathematics and mathematical physics".
"He studied for several years with Dr. Walter A. Shewhart of Bell Telephone Laboratories. Shewhart's theories of statistical quality control became the basis for Deming's own work."
"He advocated the use of closely monitored reports about the state of factory machines to keep production quality high for the least amount of investment. His system was particularly elegant and effective, in that the number of required observations was surprisingly low in order to determine if a machine needed to be adjusted or replaced, or if an entire batch of product should be discarded or accepted."
"Deming developed the sampling techniques that were used for the ffirst time during the 1940 U.S. Census and taught Statistical Quality Control (SQC) techniques to workers engated in wartime production. They were widely applied during World War II, but faded into disuse a few years later in the face of hugh overseas demand for American mass-produced product."
...
"In 1960 Deming became the first American to receive the Second Order of the Sacred Treasure from Prime Minister Nobusuke Kishi. An accompanying citation stated that the people of Japan attributed the rebirth and success of their industry to his work."

Yes, there is an intellgence designing each and every aspect of an industrial engineering system, and genuses like Dr. Deming were its leaders, with others preceding him and others following him. This system, however complicated, did not evolve by accident, it was designed, each and every step of the way, by this remarkable man, whose intelligence has been so often disregarded by many failed corporations in the United States, like General Motors, for example, whose market share has steadily declined to almost zero during the past 25 years! Yes, the system may be complex today, with its "just in time" delivery system ( which eliminated the expensive need to store huge parts inventories, but at great risk, because if a single part to make an automobile is missing, the entire assembly line must be shut down!), but it was designed nevertheless by a genius ( an intelligence) in engineering, along with thousands of other very intelligent engineers, all of whom took the most rigorous physics and calculus courses as physicists and mathematicians do, who studied physics and mathematics, the two most important subjects provided at any university, short of language itself.