Deglobalization in a hyper-connected world
File(s)s41599-020-0403-x.pdf (546.33 KB)
Published version
Author(s)
Balsa-Barreiro, José
Vié, Aymeric
Morales, Alfredo J
Cebrián, Manuel
Type
Journal Article
Abstract
In the age of hyperconnectivity, we are undergoing an explosive increase in the interdependence of the political, commercial, financial, and social spheres. The recent rise of deglobalization movements across the world highlights the local negative externalities of poorly designed networked structures at the global scale: high social complexity derived from immigration shocks, elevated risk of contagion in financial downturns, as well as increasing inequality and social polarization. While global interdependencies on networks enable opportunities for cultural and economic growth, they also establish channels for unresolved conflicts and design errors to propagate across social systems. We analyze failure propagation on networks as a function of density and centralization of inter-dependencies. We show that the risk of failure in both overly distributed and centralized systems behave similarly when the number of connections exceeds a system-dependent threshold number. The scale of interdependencies matters and must be considered for the design of policies targeted at increasing or decreasing the connectivity of social systems.
Date Issued
2020-02-25
Date Acceptance
2020-01-21
Citation
Humanities & Social Sciences Communications, 2020, 6
ISSN
2662-9992
Publisher
Springer Nature
Journal / Book Title
Humanities & Social Sciences Communications
Volume
6
Copyright Statement
© The Author(s) 2020 Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.
License URL
Publication Status
Published
Article Number
28
Date Publish Online
2020-02-25