James Schlesinger said once that humans have only two modes of operation: complacency and panic. This bimodal kind of functioning seems to be applied also to the oil market, where everything is judged on the base of a simple binary rule: high prices: bad; low prices: good. So, with oil prices falling rapidly during the past few days, the general attitude seems to be mostly of rejoicing. All worries about peak oil are being swept under the carpet and SUV owners seem to be happily expecting the fall of gas prices that will allow them to fill up their tanks on the cheap. Unfortunately, the bimodal perception of the world makes people blind to the fact that nothing happens in isolation in the world. It is the basic law of complex systems: you can’t do just one thing. If something changes in a complex system, it is […]