Economics and ELE/mass-extinction-events

Everything has a purpose, even here.

Big fish die in a mass extinction event:
http://www.biosciencetechnology.com/news/2015/11/ancient-mass-extinction-led-dominance-tiny-fish

Then, the big fish are small fish, but there are still fish.

"Sharks vs. Fish" is textbook, but I don't know that geometric scale vs. multiscale extinction events has been explored.

Candidate inputs:

• variety of fish sizes
• at event kill cells, and if fish are in them, kill them too
• consider damage vs. kill so large "fish" can survive if the damage is "minor"
• look at distribution of fish after a few reproducing generations
• make a "large fishbowl"
• iterate with different densities of "events"
• require fish to eat in proportion to their size to stay alive
• mix carnivores and herbivores

I wonder if the same applies in economics.

• Maybe too big to fail equals guaranteed to fail
• How does size of fish relate to survival
• How does mode of fish relate to survival

Recommendations?

Peter Principle revisited, revisited (draft)

I love the peter principle revisited.

• Arxiv paper
• 2010 Management ig-nobel prize

I revisited it myself.

• my revisit on slideshare

It is possible to "build an organization with higher levels of 'talent' (whatever that means) and end up with lower organizational performance."  I've tried to tell folks, especially in organizational development, about this result but they do not believe me.

Here is an analogous result from other areas:

• (traffic modeling) http://www.uvm.edu/~pdodds/files/papers/others/2005/braess2005a.pdf
• (several locations) http://phys.org/news/2015-05-maths-congestionsprings-traffic.html
• (irrational traffic) http://phys.org/news/2015-02-traffic-choice-behaviour.html

It turns out that you can build a wider street, for more traffic transport, and end up moving less people.  It also turns out that humans are irrational in predictable ways.