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Escalation: The Strength of Fear

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Managing Complexity in Social Systems

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Abstract

Sir Edward Grey, who had been the United Kingdom’s foreign secretary in the run-up to the Great War, wrote in 1925:This rather bold statement was refuted by Leo Amery on July 20, 1936, in the House of Commons when he said:Be that as it may, Lewis Richardson (1939) was inspired by these points of view. Richardson was an English mathematician who pioneered modern mathematical techniques of weather forecasting, and the application of similar techniques to studying the causes of wars and how to prevent them. His book—Generalized Foreign Politics—was a pioneering attempt to bring mathematical modeling to social sciences and a forerunner to cybernetics. Bateson (1976) recalls:In the semasiographic language of stock and flow diagram (SFD), the statement of Grey (1925) can be translated into Fig. 16.1.

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Mandl, C.E. (2019). Escalation: The Strength of Fear. In: Managing Complexity in Social Systems. Management for Professionals. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-01645-6_16

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