I have just read three “popular science” books that summarize the research in complex systems: Mark Buchanan’s Ubiquity, Philip Ball’s Critical Mass, and Paul Ormerod’s Why Most Things Fail. These three authors present the world of social science as full of power laws, a view with which I most certainly agree. They also claim that there is universality of many of these phenomena, that there is a wonderful similarity between various processes in nature and the behavior of social groups, which I agree with.
