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CHAOS, PLANNING AND ORDER
Fernando Alcoforado *
We live in a chaotic world that, despite attempts at economic and social planning in
various capitalist and socialist countries, there has been no success in finding their
ordering and economic and social stability. The Soviet Union inaugurated the
centralized state planning effort that brought extraordinary economic growth for the
country until the 1970s, but could not prevent its decline and disintegration in the late
1980s of the twentieth century. Some central and peripheral capitalist countries, like
Brazil, have planned their economies based on the Keynesian model after World War II
obtaining high economic growth that did not become sustained.
With the demise of the Soviet Union and the socialist countries of Eastern Europe and
the victory of neoliberal model throughout the world from the 1990s, government
planning was abandoned throughout the capitalist world as a tool for promoting
economic and social development. With the crisis of 2008, the state has adopted
monetary and fiscal policies with the sole purpose of avoiding bankruptcy of the
capitalist world system. Still prevails in the operation of the world capitalist system in
several countries the thesis that the state should not intervene in economic planning
economic and social development.
Throughout history, the development of capitalism has always gone hand in hand with
the economic and social chaos in all regions of the world. The economic history of
several countries, including Brazil, demonstrates that while capitalism intervene at
national borders with the adoption of policies of economic and social planning does not
succeed in ordering their economies and their sustainable economic and social
development, and less will enable the ordering of the world economy. In other words,
no matter what you plan on each country's, economic and social chaos will prevail in its
economy and also in the world economy.
All that has just been reported demonstrates that the ancient belief in determinism, in
the control and predictability of economic models do not hold in the contemporary era.
The chaos and complexity of the business environment mean that governments,
businesses and people feel a sense of being swept away by a tornado that permeates the
political, economic and social life. This means that to understand and manage a
complex social and economic system we must think and act in complex ways using
concepts and practices, at least comparable to the complexity of this system.
The classical sciences in the past, offered a series of methods to understand the reality
and build economic and organizational models no longer meet the needs of the
contemporary era. We live and work in a world that can no longer be considered based
on the concepts of Newtonian mechanics, the rationalism of Descartes and the
determinism of Laplace. We cannot continue with economic and organizational models
in which everything related to them is treated in isolation and disconnected from the
whole.
Every country on the planet and the world we live in are made of chaotic political,
economic and social systems, unpredictable and sensitive to initial conditions are
characterized by the inability to predict its future stages because a small change in the
initial conditions of the system can cause large implications on its future behavior. One
can take as an example the market of the stock exchange. After the purchase of shares in

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the capital market, we can estimate the future price of these shares in the short term. An
estimate for the value of these shares however, as time passes, ie, long-term yields, very
probably wrong. It can be stated that each country and the world operate according to
Chaos Theory that is one of the most important laws of this Universe in essence almost
everything around us.
The central idea of Chaos Theory is that a tiny change in the beginning of an event can
bring any huge consequences and absolutely unknown in the future. Therefore, such
events would be virtually unpredictable - chaotic, so. The air of unpredictability gained
serious scientific study in the early 1960s, when the American meteorologist Edward
Lorenz discovered that apparently simple phenomena are behaving as chaotic as life.
Edward Lorenz came to this conclusion when testing a computer program that
simulated the movement of air masses. One day, Lorenz spoke a number of calculations
that fed the machine with some less decimal places, hoping that the results changed
little. But the insignificant change completely transformed the pattern of air masses.
Over time, scientists concluded that it appeared unpredictability in almost everything,
the rhythm of heartbeats to quotations from the Stock Exchange. In the 1970s, the
Polish mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot gave a new impetus to the theory by noting
that the Lorenz equations corresponded with what he himself had done when he
developed the fractal figures generated from mathematical formulas that depict the
geometry of nature, as relief ground or ramifications of our veins and arteries.
A joint experiment of the Lorenz with Mandelbrot math indicates that chaos seems to be
the essence of everything, shaping the universe. Recent research showed something
even more surprising: the same equations appear in chaotic phenomena that have
nothing to do with each other. The Lorenz equations for the chaos of air masses also
arise in experiments with laser beam, and the same formulas governing certain chemical
solutions are repeated when studying disordered rhythm of drops from a faucet.
Prigogine developed the theory of dissipative structures that are those far from
equilibrium. In some stages, system elements behave in a deterministic way and other
phases - near bifurcations - works not deterministic manner (See Article Order Order
Out of Chaos of Ilya Prigogine & Isabelle Stengers published on the website
<http://www.mountainman.com.au/chaos_02.htm>). Economic models of deterministic
simulation widely used today do not respond to the challenges of the contemporary era
as it has no random variables. In this model, for a known input data set will have a
single set of output results. You need to consider the use of probabilistic, stochastic
models that have one or more random variables as input, which lead to random outputs
too.
In the twentieth century, scientific determinism created by the Classical Science is in
crisis. The Theory of Relativity and Quantum Mechanics rejected Mechanics of Newton
and the rationalism of Descartes. From the 1960s, new scientific discoveries such as
Chaos Theory, which eliminated the Laplacian fantasy of deterministic predictability,
and Complexity Theory, which eliminated the idea that the world is simple and can be
studied by isolated disciplines, demonstrated that the world is a multi-and
transdisciplinary phenomenon. Sciences, from the mid-twentieth century, began to deal
with what is real in the world, that is, considering complex and unpredictable most of
the phenomena that take place in it. Therefore, human systems as business, economies
and societies must be considered as complex systems.

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For the above, make mistakes not just technocrats formulators of economic models that
do not work and also the politics that envisions transforming society without taking into
account the nature of economic and social system. The nature of the economic and
social system is not subject to any proactive political or economic project. Attempts to
force the economy with goals that contradict the economic logic does not have the long-
term stability. This is evidenced in the economic failure to industrialize some peripheral
regions, as a failure of real socialism, which had to recognize their own economic
irrationality.
* Fernando Alcoforado , member of the Bahia Academy of Education, engineer and doctor of Territorial
Planning and Regional Development from the University of Barcelona, a university professor and
consultant in strategic planning, business planning, regional planning and planning of energy systems, is
the author of Globalização (Editora Nobel, São Paulo, 1997), De Collor a FHC- O Brasil e a Nova
(Des)ordem Mundial (Editora Nobel, São Paulo, 1998), Um Projeto para o Brasil (Editora Nobel, São
Paulo, 2000), Os condicionantes do desenvolvimento do Estado da Bahia (Tese de doutorado.
Universidade de Barcelona, http://www.tesisenred.net/handle/10803/1944, 2003), Globalização e
Desenvolvimento (Editora Nobel, São Paulo, 2006), Bahia- Desenvolvimento do Século XVI ao Século XX
e Objetivos Estratégicos na Era Contemporânea (EGBA, Salvador, 2008), The Necessary Conditions of
the Economic and Social Development-The Case of the State of Bahia (VDM Verlag Dr. Muller
Aktiengesellschaft & Co. KG, Saarbrücken, Germany, 2010), Aquecimento Global e Catástrofe
Planetária (P&A Gráfica e Editora, Salvador, 2010), Amazônia Sustentável- Para o progresso do Brasil e
combate ao aquecimento global (Viena- Editora e Gráfica, Santa Cruz do Rio Pardo, São Paulo, 2011)
and Os Fatores Condicionantes do Desenvolvimento Econômico e Social (Editora CRV, Curitiba, 2012),
among others.