When foresight seems impeccable, things still go wrong. Why?
Purpose – This article seeks to provide a systematic examination of the unanticipated results following the introduction of various types of new policy, process, design, product or service.Design/methodology/approach – A rough taxonomy categorizes the generic kinds of unintentional consequences.Findings – Careless political, technical, commercial, military or even personal decisions often underlie the most problematic of secondary effects.Originality/value – Unscheduled second‐ or third‐order effects have often been attributed to a “law” governing such phenomena. Although no such law exists, there exist indeed the unwanted effects – and sometimes on a grand scale, too often a bane of humankind.
War, Science and Terrorism: From Laboratory to Open Conflict
Part 1 Preparation for conflict: from bows and arrows to missiles and aircraft the real stakes in the space adventure are military slipping the warrior beneath the sea the German and Anglo-American race to nuclear armament Russia and other powers hurry to catch up with the nucleus optimizing human resources -procurement, training, management. Part 2 Warfare and its management: endologistics - forts, food, feed, fuel and freight exologistics - how the natural environment conditions battle communicating, commanding, controlling ... and a little deception from military aviation's radar to computer notebooks military medicine saves fighting strength simulating strategy, operations, tactics. Part 3 Behind the action, and wars to come: who are the scientists working with the military? what role for the scientist in future wars?.
The Present Value of the Past
Abstract : One of the seminal ideas in economics is that future events have a present value (either as costs or benefits), and that this value is calculable (through a private or social rate of interest). Having acknowledged this pivotal role, I will argue that present valuation is nevertheless not of much help in some problems, and can lead to erroneous results in others. To understand and to resolve certain problems, it is as important to have a method for evaluating the past as the future. Actions taken in the present can differentially affect past valuations (either by the actor or by those whom the action affects), and these valuations can influence both actual and preferred choices. The main purposes of this paper are: to elaborate the heuristics of evaluating the past; to formulate an economic model in which valuation of the past is central, and is subject to influence by present choices; and to illustrate the model by applying it to several problems which it can handle, but which the standard approach cannot.