Yeah - to be frank whenever I hear complexity cited I can't help but think the whole meme-thesis is really a proud and intellectually lazy freak out - the world

Yeah - to be frank whenever I hear complexity cited I can't help but think the whole meme-thesis is really a proud and intellectually lazy freak out - the world is too complex for them to understand without effort so rather than try to improve their understanding insist that because they personally don't understand it that it has to be fundamentally bad or wrong in some way. That sort of anti-intellectualism can be seen in marketing quite a bit with "natural" products, "localism" as a fear of logistics. Not the sole factor of course but certainly plays a role (someone may just like freshness for instance). Not to mention complexity is peripheral to stability even in something relatively simple compared to a nation like electrical grids. They both gain resilence from interconnection and be taken down by them in chain reactions and there is a difference in complexity from say adding in a distributed series for reserve power, redundant power lines and say playing Enron with their "death star" fraud. It is kind of a silly metric to try to play oracle with as a proxy.