It's a small world after all...

A hot topic these days is about "economic development" and its associated strengths and ills. Unfortunately, much of these debates on social media or mass media degenerates into mudslinging between opposing camps, and at the end of it, an esoteric entity called people's "attitude" is blamed for all our ills. From the way I see the debates going, we have almost zero understanding of an important element of any kind of economic or social change -- that of "non-linearity." Non-linearity is used in systems theory to indicate phenomena of positive feedback, where the effect of some cause in turn affects the cause itself. For instance, a large city is likely to have more job opportunities than a small town, which in turn attracts more migrant population to the large city over the small town. Phenomena like rich getting richer, 80-20 rule and such, are all the outcomes of underlying non-linear processes. Non-linearity is the reason why many aspects o...