sourceType:: book author:: Niall Ferguson sourcePublication:: The Square and The Tower ref:: noteTitle:: Ferguson, Niall - The Square and The Tower

Ferguson, Niall - The Square and The Tower

Networks

The natural world is made up of ‘optimized, space-filling, branching networks’ (Geoffrey West). These networks have evolved to distribute energy and material from where theyare found at the macroscopic level, to where they are needed at microscopic sites. This transaction takes places over twenty-seven orders of magnitude.

The “progress” of Social Networks is just in greater facilitation of our innate, ancient urge to network. The networking has always been there.

In historical living situations

Most people for most of history were stuck in a small family cluster inside of a small village with few or no links to the outside world.
In such situations, “gossips” are key roles - these people act as diffusion-central individuals.

Connectivity

• when two nodes are linked to a third node, they’ll likely also be linked to each other
  • such a triad is “balanced” when all three members are connected via positive sentiments (the friend of my friend is my friend)
  • a “forbidden triad” is when two members who each know the third don’t themselves know each other (or, when two are amicable but one is hostile: the enemy of my friend is also my friend)

Centrality

Measure of importance in a graph. Individuals with high scores on these characteristics will act as hubs.

• Degree centrality: The number of edges radiating out from a node. captures “sociability” and the simple number of relationships to others.
• Betweenness centrality: Measures the extent to which information passes through a particular node. Important information intersections. Individuals with high betweenness may not have the most connections, but have the most important connections (“it’s who you know”)
• Closeness centrality: Measures the average number of “steps” it takes for a node to reach all other nodes. Can be used to discover who has the best access to information (assuming such information is widely-distributed).

Ties, six-degrees, small world

“The strength of weak ties” (Mark Granovetter). Almost every node is just six degrees away from almost any other node. If all ties were like strong homophilic ones, the world would be fragmented. But the existence of many weak, acquaintance, ties gives rise to the “small world” phenomenon.
In a society with relatively few weak ties, new ideas will spread slowly. Weak ties insure that otherwise disconnected, disparate clusters do in fact remain connected.

Homophily

the tendency to gravitate towards similar people. “Assortativity”. The first law of social networks.

Also narrows an individuals milieu, so has a disadvantageous element. Therefore, there may be an Optimal homophily

Is a form of self-segregation.

Hierarchies

Hierarchical structures with power concentrated at the top.

They came about thus: Family-based clans which incited (either from within or without) the birth of more complicated institutions with divisions and rankings of labor.

Hierarchies were attractive because they made exercising power more efficient by centralizing it. Fewer arguments about “what to do”, as decisions came from single source. Reduced internal factional conflict.

Deficiencies come from a similar place, though: no individual can run a massive, complicated imperial government. Also: few individuals can resist the corruption of absolute power.

Ferguson’s example of various hierarchies in pre-modern period:

• tightly-regulated, commerce-based urban polities
• big monarchical states based on agriculture
• centrally run churches (cults)
• armies and bureaucracies within states
• guilds operating to control access to skilled occupations
• autonomous corporations seeking to exploit economies of scope and scale by internalizing some market transactions
• “academic corporations” like universities
• gigantic transnational states / empires

Networks and Hierarchies

Hierarchies dominated networks in scope and scale for most of history.

Markets

Government-defined markets and bureaucracies are ideal types of information-sharing networks, like fiefdoms (argues Max Boisot).   In contrast to markets and bureaucracies, informal networks work via transactions occurring through networks of individuals engaging in reciprocal, preferential, mutually-supportive actions. These transactions don’t involve explicit market criteria nor hierarchy paternalism (Walter Powell).