Mission Statement

Environmental crises, traffic congestion, financial crises, poverty, social conflicts and wars - social systems typically feature crises characterized by abrupt, rapid and large-scale changes. Such disruptions are barely predictable andhard to control. Despite the very real risks posed by the aforementioned crises, the conventional social sciences usually steer clear of studying "extreme events" by assumption. When postulating the existence of an equilibrium, the main effort concerns characterizing stable states and studying moderate deviations from them. However, most crises represent dynamics far away from equilibrium. Inspired by non-equilibrium physics and interdisciplinary research on complex systems, we have begun to focus directly on critical phenomena and extreme events in social systems. These phenomena are often characterized by power laws and other skewed distributions that differ dramatically from the Gaussian curve. Under such circumstances, extreme outcomes are much more frequent than is usually assumed, based on the normal distribution. In view of these challenges, the ETH Competence Center "Coping with Crises in Complex Socio-Economic Systems (CCSS) aims at coordinating collaborative research on non-equilibrium processes. The CCSS will contribute to a better understanding of the causes and cures of crises in large socio-economic systems.

In the following we higlighted three examples of crises in complex socio-economic systems: