Thursday, March 25, 2010

How The World Is Connected


One of the main result of globalization has been that most of countries economies are interconnected. The subprime crisis has been a great example of it. The national US real estate market has collapsed, and had lead to the main financial crisis the world experienced since the great depression.

If the world has been bipolar after the second world war, divided in two groups of same strength, the fall of the Soviet Union drove the world into a global market. I have found this great picture, which maps all the different major global risks and how they are interconnected to each other. The fact is that we are in a complex world, composed by thousands of different potential risks of all kind, which makes it difficult to read through and to find simple solutions.

Of course, you may try to find easy solutions for segmented problems, like a sandwich composed by layers you would add on to each others. But as you solve a problem, the component of your solutions have great chances to impact other components. I think this idea of mapping an interconnected world is very interesting.