Complexity: The Emerging Science at the Edge of Order and Chaos

by M. Mitchell Waldrop

By the way, he said, he'd recently been up in New York at a meeting of the board of the Russell Sage Foundation, which gives away a lot of money for social science-type research. And while he was there he'd talked to a friend of his, John Reed, the new chief executive officer of Citicorp. Now, Reed was a pretty interesting guy, said Adams. He had just turned forty-seven, which made him one of the youngest CEOs in the country. He'd grown up in Argentina and Brazil, where his father had worked as an executive for Armour and Company. He had a bachelor's degree in liberal arts from Washington and Jefferson University, another bachelor's degree in metallurgy from MIT, and a master's degree in business from the Sloan School at MIT. He was very knowledgeable about science, and he genuinely seemed to enjoy kicking around ideas with the academic types at the Russell Sage board. Anyway, said Adams, during one of the coffee breaks he'd told Reed about the institute, as best as he could explain it, and Reed had been very interested. He certainly didn't have $100 million to give away. But he was wondering if the institute might help him understand the world economy. When it came to world financial markets, Reed had decided that professional economists were off with the fairies. Under Reed's predecessor, Walter Wriston, Citicorp had just taken a bath in the Third World debt crisis. The bank had lost $1 billion in profits in one year, and was still sitting on $13 billion of loans that mi...