I'm looking for examples or just ideas about how to even roughly quantify the complexity and/or difficulty of manufacturing and maintaining two different products.
There is a school of thought in environmental discourse that believes in a coming "simplification" or even collapse of modern civilization, following e.g. Joseph Tainter's studies about how societies have shedded their more complex interactions as a response to reduced energy supply. One of the central tenets of this school of thought is that some products are just too complex to be produced if society "de-complexifies." However, to me it seems that this school of thought categorizes products quite arbitrarily to those that are deemed too complex and those that are deemed "appropriate technologies" etc.
Is anyone aware of any attempts at quantifying these complexities? I'm aware of Harvard's Atlas of Economic Complexity (http://atlas.cid.harvard.edu/), but to me it seems that these rankings do not really tell much about actual complexity of manufacturing or maintaining the products listed.
Please read this Prof.'s work that deals with your topic:
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Krishnan_Umachandran
Best regards,
Debra
No problem Debra, I will look into this and will update you in due course,
My initial reaction would be to suggest that different measures of complexity would all be very subjective and context dependent, like "radicality". Thus, someone might find X to be more complex than Y because of the way it is manufactured while someone else might say that Y is more complex than X because of how it is used, or distributed, or something else.
However, you might try looking at it backwards to see if there are any definitions of simplicity. For example, https://www.ted.com/talks/george_whitesides_toward_a_science_of_simplicity?language=en
Thank you all, and my apologies for not thanking you guys earlier! To be frank I haven't logged in to Researchgate for a while and forgot I even asked this question...
But now that my thesis is done, I just might look into this a little bit further. The problem is still an interesting one and these resources have been really helpful.
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