Micro or Macro?

For the last month I've been toying around with an idea that is both old and new for me - how the behavior/actions of individuals leads to contradictory outcomes for the group/whole. For example, I carry a gun for security, but then so does my neighbor, until we are all carrying guns - do we end up with more or less shootings both individually and as a whole? Or, I leave for work at 7:30 to get to work on time (i.e. I've allowed a little extra time in my current commute), but my neighbor does the same and so do a lot of other neighbors - yes, we may all get to work on time, but have we increased both individual commutes from 10 minutes to 20 minutes due to bottlenecks in traffic that would not occur if the departure times were coordinated?

Of course, once you think about it, you start to see this issue in a lot of things, but the first place I recall really thinking about it was working on my thesis regarding housing and school desegregation. As part of my research, I came across Thomas Schelling's book, Micromotives and Macrobehavior (). About that same time, A Beautiful Mind (the movie) was released and addressed similar topics regarding game theory (i.e. generally, the idea the behavior of a given agent results in/is affected by/and affects the behavior of others, which then affects the behavior decision making of the original agent, etc.). Since then, this issue has rattled around in the back of my head a lot but in vague ways.

The issue has some new aspects for me too. The more I've looked into it, the more I realize it has been under serious study for the last 40 years. Threads of this issue are found in Chaos Theory, Complexity, the Sante Fe Institute, etc. My particular interest is in the combination of geography and microbehavior (i.e. how/what we can learn from spatial data and the decisions of households that ultimately drives the formation and change of regions, cities, and neighborhoods). I think this bottom/up approach may shed serious light on policies aimed at desegregation, urban growth and decline, regionalism, and similar topics, perhaps much more than the traditional top/down approach (i.e. we have a city, how/why does it look the way it does).

So, expect to see more on this site as I dig deeper. Right now, I am in the middle of 20 articles, two books, and some serious math refreshing on the subject. If I survive that, maybe I have a new interest. If not, well, there's always gardening.