Scale-Free Networks

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Some networks are very easy to break down but others are robust kind of like fabrics like the the netting that you see on like a wedding veil. A scale-free network comes across like a piece of of ripstop or Gore-Tex it seems unbreakable but if you know about the properties of the fiber you can find ways to break it. There's some gene editing networks in animals that work the same way so scale- free network has this really interesting property that it it's robust to random attacks. If you know where the vulnerabilities are which which are these highly connected nodes like hubs like in a like an airport hub and spoke system then you can make either the whole thing fall apart

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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