When Edward Lorenz an American mathematician and meteorologist, and a pioneer of chaos theory was due to give a talk in 1972 at the 139th meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science he failed to give the title of his talk on chaos theory, Philip Merilees concocted Does the flap of a butterfly’s wings in Brazil set off a tornado in Texas as a title.
In October 1987 violent storms hit the UK, and it was suggested that if you could get a satellite photograph of that storm, and say track it back in time across the Atlantic, in theory, this devastating storm could have been started of by a van just passing along a coastal road in Newfoundland.
This got me thinking, of that other poem that starts with, “For want of a horseshoe nail” and ends with loosing a battle. This reminded me the other day of when I was walking past a certain sandwich shop. For a moment I thought about buying a tuna salad baguettes, however I decided to save money and stick to my Bovril sandwiches.
Suppose though, that the shop was just teetering on the brink of bankruptcy and my buying a sandwich would have just been enough to save them. But I walked out, so they fold.
But there is a supplier, on the brink, and because they have lost a customer, who may owe them money, they fold. People get thrown out of work and a number of people default on mortgages in a bank that is just on the edge and can you see where this going.
My failure to buy a baguette resulted in a butterfly effect of bringing down a sandwich shop, a supplier a bank leading to more of this bad economy.
We hear about Sub Primes, whatever they are, but how much of the bad economy has been made by little people, as economic butterflies, flapping our wings and causing economic storms by the decision we make on a day to day level feeding into one fiscal feedback fire?
The moral is clear – buy that baguette, the economy may depend on it.