Summary

Abstract

For the past 30 years or so there has been a more or less conscious effort both to make societies more globalized and to foster technological advances that promote social interdependence. But we have not made a concomitant effort to build a science that enables us to understand the strongly coupled systems we have created. To do so, we need to reach out beyond conventional disciplinary borders and to develop tools for exploring the interactions of many aspects of society. This book has argued that, as a result, it is valuable and necessary to consider society as a whole as a complex system that can be explored, explained and to some extent predicted using idealized models.