The Motivation for Borrowing Expertise From Complex Systems Studies

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A lot of the motivation here is very policy driven so you know even though it's complex systems and fun academic intellectual ideas at the end of the day how does this tell us what better policies to implement in particular. We were motivated by the fact that some of these people are from regimes which can be bad actors and we might want to sanction them someday and how do we do that effectively well there's this long tradition of sanctioning the transfer of information and people who can transfer it and then extended to things like bioweapons and so forth. The Swiss for example they are actually prosecuting some Swiss wealth managers who were serving Russian oligarchs so they're implementing this theory right now.

The modern world is large and interconnected, and there are a lot of systems that might be important to how it functions but about which most people are barely aware. One of these is the offshore wealth management network, which wealthy individuals can use both legitimately (to invest and plan their money) and less legitimately (to avoid taxation or hide questionable practices generally). Brooke Harrington is a sociologist who has studied offshore wealth management, including by training to be one. In a recent paper, she and colleagues analyze networks of offshore wealth managers as a complex system, uncovering power-law behavior and interesting nation-dependent network structures.

Web site with transcript: https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2023/05/22/237-brooke-harrington-on-offshore-wealth-as-a-complex-system/

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Brooke Harrington received her Ph.D. in sociology from Harvard University. She is currently a professor of sociology at Dartmouth College. Among her awards are the IPM Outstanding Book Award from the American Sociological Association. She is the author of Capital Without Borders: Wealth Management and the One Percent.

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