We can't engineer the result we want in Ivory Coast

William Easterly writes in the Guardian:

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A popular topic in the aid blogosphere this week was not about Haiti or Ivory Coast or south Sudan but about complex systems, ie systems that cannot be reduced to a simple mathematical or statistical model, where actions often have unintended effects. Yet this seemingly abstruse topic has surprising relevance to the Ivory Coast debate (and perhaps the others as well). One would want to be very careful making aggressive recommendations in a complex system whose principles are not very well understood.
Civil conflict is a great candidate for such an irreducibly unpredictable system. Civil conflict features political and military leaders on both sides, the general population is divided, and each side of the population contains an array of different interest groups. For every move by one player, there will be counter-moves by the other players, then counter-moves to the counter-moves, and so on...[continue reading]