Endogenous Complexity, Specialisation and General Education

Dilger Alexander


Zusammenfassung
Purpose – Complexity is endogenous for humans and increasing at an accelerating rate. At the same time individual lives become better and even simpler. This seems to be a paradox for which this paper aims to offer a solution. 

Design/methodology/approach – The paradox and its solution are explained in some detail. 
Findings – Specialisation is the missing link which fuels overall complexity and shelters individuals from it. Specialisation is a good solution for most problems arising from increasing complexity, although it results in some problems of its own and general knowledge is still needed as well as general education to obtain this knowledge. 
Research limitations/implications – The presented argument is quite general in itself and needs further elaboration and empirical testing. 
Practical implications – Aims and limits of specialised as well as general education are discussed. 
Social implications – The right kind and amount of general education increases welfare and efficiency. 
Originality/value – This connection between complexity, specialisation and education has not been shown before (at least to the best of knowledge of the author, who has the same problems to deal with the complexity of all human knowledge as everybody else).



Publikationstyp
Forschungsartikel (Zeitschrift)

Begutachtet
Nein

Publikationsstatus
Veröffentlicht

Jahr
2012

Fachzeitschrift
On the Horizon

Band
20

Ausgabe
1

Erste Seite
49

Letzte Seite
53

Sprache
Englisch

ISSN
1074-8121

DOI