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Popular understandings of the financial crisis tend to focus on the rents extracted by elite personnel in the financial sector. Professional discussions, however, have addressed the faulty assumptions underlying theory and practice – in particular, the assumption that returns to financial assets follow the Gaussian distribution, in the face of much empirical evidence that these have power law distributions with far higher kurtosis. It turns out that the power law tails of returns to financial assets are also a feature of the distribution of company rates of profit, a discovery that stems from proposals to ‘dissolve’ the traditional transformation problem by abandoning the condition of a uniform rate of profit and instead considering its distribution.Marx himself was aware of the importance of considering the distributional properties of economic variables, based on his reading of Quetelet. In fact, heavy-tailed distributions characterise a wide range of variables in capitalist economies, the best-known probably being the Paretian tail component in distributions of income and wealth. Nor is this simply an empirical fact – such distributions emerge readily from a range of agent-based simulations.Capitalist economies are, in a particular technical sense, complex self-organising systems perpetually on the brink of crisis. This modern understanding is prefigured in Marx’s discussion of how the compulsive character of social relations emerges from the atomistic exercise of human free will in commercial society. The developing literature of probabilistic Marxism successfully applies these insights to the wider fields of econophysics and complexity, demonstrating the continuing relevance of Marx’s thought.

The origin of the gravity model can he traced as far back as G. W. von Liehnitz in the late seventeenth Century and A. Comte, A. Quételet and H. C. Carey in the nineteenth; it was argued that human behaviour could be treated by analogy to and with techniques derived from the physical sciences, that the influence of one population on another would vary directly with the size of the population and inversely with distance.

The greatest mistakes and delusions of human history have come about through logically drawing conclusions from an omissive set of premisses. Cybernetics, being the science of the study and redirection of feedback, is the science of consequences; its essential task is to recognize and deal with all feedback effects, including the consequences of such omissive conceptions – the so‐called blind spot. Gives some examples of the blind spot as it has manifested itself throughout history in the world of science. Concludes that cybernetics can defuse this blind spot which has perennially plagued human development, individually and societally.

It may be true, as Quetelet declared, that the study of the individual does not conduce to a comprehensive appreciation of psychological laws. It is arguable that individual man must be regarded only as a member of a species, and any personal idiosyncracies must be ruled out if general results are to be obtained. But every aspect of the human creature has its special interest; and in so far as autobiography mirrors the self it has a peculiar fascination and value. Of all forms of literature it is, if we except poetry, the most difficult. The mind and the emotions are at once the vehicle and the subject of the expression, and both are complex and variable. It is the one art in which detachment is essential and yet so near to impossibility. Past and present events become bound up with emotions; the emotions themselves may be artificially acquired; and the man who gazes into himself is likely to see nothing more fundamental than shifting and fracturing reflections. “I am a stranger in my own region”: every autobiographer, every person who has sought to understand his own personality by introspective methods, knows the truth of Thompson's words.

The greatest mistakes and delusions of human history have come about through logically drawing conclusion from an omissive set of premises. Cybernetics, being the science of the study and redirection of feedback, is the science of consequences; its essential task is to recognize and deal with all feedback effects, including the consequences of such omissive conceptions – the so‐called blind spot. Gives some examples of the blind spot as it has manifested itself throughout history in the world of science. Concludes that cybernetics can defuse this blind spot which has perennially plagued human development, individually and societally.