Starting the book

1.
Look at the pattern, not the person
Finding Patterns in Complexity! / The Spontaneous Order of Social Atoms / Patterns of Self-Organization / Social Science: A Strange Thing to Call a Science

2.
The problem of 'human'
How Science Explains the World / Theories About Humans Are Absurdly Many / What if Cleopatra's Nose Was Short? / The Elusive Biped: Humans / Humans Are Not the Ultimate Barrier!

3.
human thinking instinct
Economics doesn't know people / Economists don't make money / Errors are instincts! / The Stone Age mind that inhabits the modern human brain / Humans are evolving opportunists

4.
Adaptive atoms
The Thick-Tailed Riddle / The World Can Only Be Understood Through Action / The Irrational Efficiency of Mathematics / Predicting Stock Prices Is Physics, Not Economics! / Reproducing Reality with Social Physics!

5.
Social atoms are imitators
Humans are animals that think on their feet / Humans are not so different from penguins / The 'atomic' physics of social avalanches / Humans are not as free as we think / 'Simplification' is the key!

6.
Cooperative atoms
Selfish altruism / Human sociality is instinctive / The origin of kindness / The dynamics of cooperation and betrayal / Human collectivist individuality

7.
Why do we fall into collectivism?
Do Groups Only Create Unhappiness? / Prejudice for Survival / The Trap of Ethnocentrism / Group Madness and Power / The 'Miracle' of Simplification

8.
Rich Dad's Conspiracy, Poor Dad's Science
Uneven distribution of wealth is a universal human trait. / Where does money flow and how? / What do Martian rivers and the flow of money have in common? / The island of cooperation, why corporations exist / Free riding that erodes cooperation / Chance and prediction

9.
We advance as much as we know
Looking back at the teachings of Hume and Smith / Finding the equation of history / The organizing power hidden behind society / Beyond the separation of knowledge

Acknowledgments / Notes / Translator's Note / Index

Predicting stock prices is not economics, it's physics!

As long as we focus on individual thoughts and actions, we cannot understand why people act and the consequences of those actions.
As Mark Buchanan beautifully demonstrates in this book, there are immense forces that move the world and people.
And the force appears to operate according to the laws of statistical mechanics.
Quantum physics, which was conceived a century ago to describe systems that move almost randomly, appears to explain society, people, and their relationships better than any existing sociological theory.
Through this book, readers will be able to glimpse a new way of understanding human behavior.
- Chris Anderson (author of The Long Tail and Free, editor-in-chief of Weird)

I read this book, turning each page with trembling hands.
This book is a supreme attack on the conventional humanities, which are complacent and sloppy about their understanding of human social behavior and historical patterns.
This book by Buchanan, who possesses the qualities of an outstanding agitator, will bring you fresh shock and enlightenment.
- Mike Davis (author of "Slums Cover the Earth," Marxist environmentalist)

Why do the rich keep making money, while racism, war, and genocide persist?
The mysteries of all mankind that existing philosophy, humanities, sociology, and economics have not been able to solve
Social physics takes on the challenge!

The problem of wealth polarization and unequal distribution has recently emerged as a core issue in modern society.
In the abstract, this is because it is highly likely to act as a factor that eats away at the growth potential of a society or a nation by weakening the purchasing power of workers and ordinary citizens and depriving them of educational opportunities. In reality, it is also because it functions as the cause of numerous social problems and accidents.
However, since the beginning of human civilization, the problem of wealth inequality has never been solved.
No saint, no philosopher, no ideology has ever solved this problem.
The socialist experiment of the last century also ended in failure without solving this problem.


Why is the problem of wealth inequality so persistent? Why does inequality arise? Is it because people have different abilities, as right-wing economists claim? Or is it because a small group of powerful individuals monopolize resources to the exclusion of everyone else, as left-wing activists argue? However, physicists who study society using computer simulations and chaos theory offer a different answer.
They argue that the uneven distribution of wealth, or wealth inequality, is a universal human characteristic, like language ability or culture, and a perfectly natural phenomenon, like the flow of water from top to bottom.
And he claims that this problem can be described and explained by the laws of physics and mathematics.
And he says that physics, not conventional social sciences like economics or fanciful utopian theories, can solve this problem that has dominated human history for thousands of years.

The Social Atom, by theoretical physicist Mark Buchanan, recently published by Science Books, is a fascinating introduction to the challenges of social physics, which attempts to scientifically explain problems in human society, from wealth inequality to the puzzle of collective behavior and historical change.
From complex systems physics, which was born to explain non-equilibrium systems, to evolutionary psychology, and even neuroeconomics, which seeks to integrate neuroscience and behavioral economics, you can enjoy exploring the cutting edge of interdisciplinary research being fiercely pursued across various fields of natural and social science.


The human world is also governed by laws that have mathematical precision no less than the physical world!
A science nonfiction piece exploring the intense quest of modern scientists to discover the physical laws that govern the human world.

This book is about wealth, power and politics, class hatred, and racial division.
It is also a book about the vagaries of time, fashion, turmoil, the sudden collapse of goodwill and trust in communities, and the ups and downs of financial markets.
Above all, this book is about the events that occur out of the blue and change our lives, and why we are so ignorant about the causes of such events.
-In the text

I believe that understanding collective organization and the laws of its change is clearly a central challenge of our time.
From global warming and environmental pollution to the proliferation of nuclear weapons, the unprecedented and serious problems facing humanity all stem from a lack of understanding of collective behavior.
I don't see all these problems being solved by some great discovery in physics.
If there's a way for us to navigate the future safely, I imagine it will be by "just going with the flow," just as it has been in the past.
But if we properly understand the hidden forces that move groups, our skills at navigating whatever comes our way will also improve significantly.
-In the text

Mark Buchanan, a theoretical physicist who studies complex systems physics and was also an editor of the world-renowned scientific journal Nature, has published two books.
With 『Ubiquity: The Science of History』, he showed that patterns can be read in historical events using the science of complex systems and networks, and with 『Nexus: Small Worlds and the New Science of Networks』, he showed that the world is not as big as we think when we approach it with new scientific methods, which garnered great attention from readers around the world. He also won the Lagrange Prize for introducing the science of complex systems to the general public through excellent scientific writing.

This book argues that if we understand society as a single object and humans as the atoms that make up that object, we can discover the patterns or precise mathematical laws hidden behind the human world.
The title of this book, "Social Atoms," accurately expresses the author's idea that human and group behavior can also be analyzed and explained using natural scientific methods.

Mark Buchanan neatly explains all sorts of social science cases, such as racism, genocide, stock market fluctuations, the spread of rumors and gossip, and wealth inequality, through a physical understanding of society, or "social physics."
The highlight, in particular, is the section explaining that wealth inequality is a kind of "natural phenomenon" that can be reproduced through precise mathematical laws and computer simulations.
(8.
(See "Rich Dad's Conspiracy, Poor Dad's Science")

Buchanan shows how the social atom hypothesis can be powerfully applied to social phenomena through the theories of French physicists Jean-Philippe Bouchot and Marc Mezard.
Bouchot and Mezard created an artificial world using computer simulations and the Pareto Principle (a law discovered by Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto, which states that for every tenfold increase in wealth, the number of people owning that wealth falls by a sixth) and gave people in that artificial world the same investment ability.
And it added the condition that the value of wealth is relative.
As soon as an individual who, by a very fleeting coincidence, gained a little more wealth, the wealth of the entire society was instantly concentrated in the hands of a few.
And the number of rich people according to their wealth followed a power law that applies precisely to complexity theory and network science.
This puts an end to a debate that has lasted thousands of years by precisely showing that wealth inequality is not a result of individual differences in ability or the conspiracy of those in power, but rather a result of the physical processes of chance and repetition.


Understanding of social atoms
It will revolutionize our understanding of humanity and society!

I devoured this book.
Because this book contains clues that will reveal the secrets of the human condition.
In recent decades, humanity has come to understand its own society better.
However, there are still many limitations.
Anyone who has wondered why recent trends in the humanities and social sciences, and why questions about the nature of humanity and society have remained unresolved for so long, will be drawn to the solutions Mark Buchanan presents in this book.
Buchanan's solution is simple.
To understand society and humanity, we should use the same methods that have been successful in studying nature.
This book presents this method vividly, richly, and clearly.
This book will give you a glimpse of the coming revolution in social science.
- Lee McIntyre (author of "Dark Ages")

This book presents a surprisingly accessible and engaging introduction to how modern science understands how humans relate to and influence one another, and how that understanding will continue to evolve. It is clear, accessible, and free of complex mathematical theories and specialized knowledge.
- Thomas Schelling (Professor Emeritus, Harvard)
2005 Nobel Prize in Economics winner)

Mark Buchanan defines the nature of the social atom in two ways.
“First, man is neither a rational calculator nor a cunning gambler.” “Second, man is an adaptive opportunist.” Just as physicists use the two essential properties of atoms in the material world—mass and charge—to explain their movements and reactions, Buchanan uses these two essential properties to explain the seemingly incomprehensible behavior of “that inscrutable biped, man.”


Topics such as the ups and downs of the stock market, the sudden decline in the birth rate, altruistic acts of sacrificing one's life for a cause or community, the collectivist madness that incites genocide, and the tragedy of the commons where everyone owns and no one takes responsibility - these are all topics that would have been dealt with by different academic disciplines in classical social science. Based on the achievements of psychology, neuroscience, behavioral economics, evolutionary psychology, network science, and complex systems theory that were highly developed in the latter half of the 20th century, this book weaves them together as the subject of a new intellectual challenge called 'social physics.'

In fact, the social physics research stream introduced in this book is emerging as a new mainstream in the global academic world and is replacing traditional economics and social science research, as can be seen in the cases of psychologist Daniel Kahneman, who won the 2002 Nobel Prize in Economics, economist Thomas Schelling, who won the 2005 Nobel Prize in Economics, and physicist Neil Johnson, who became the head of the Department of Econometrics and Finance at Oxford University instead of many other economists and financial scholars.

From Complexity Science to Neuroeconomics
A new explanation summarizing the latest findings in integrative research.

We are now at a critical juncture in the history of social science.
Although we may still be far from finding strict 'laws' that apply to the human world, scientists have discovered regularities that are close to laws in the human world.
It is now known that these regularities do not conflict in any way with the free will of the individual.
We are free individuals, each of us capable of acting as we please, yet the sum total of our actions is predictable.
This is similar to the situation in physics, where sophisticated thermodynamics emerges from a chaotically tangled web of atoms, and even the clockwork-precise movement of the planets.
- In the text

Mark Buchanan battles two views in this book.
One view is that humans, possessing free will, are too complex to be fully understood by science, and that attempting to dissect humans scientifically can harm human dignity. The other is the view of classical economics and existing social sciences, which explain humans as rational beings who act and choose according to their own interests, based on the rational choice hypothesis.


Buchanan uses vivid examples ranging from incidents that show the inherent beastliness of human beings, such as the massacre in the Bosnian War and the abuse of Muslim prisoners in the Abu Ghraib prison camp, to the story of a complexity scientist who mathematically discovered the principles of stock investor behavior while studying the distribution of bar patrons to find a popular bar when it is not crowded. Through these examples, he shows that there are certain patterns and laws behind human group behavior and the society that group behavior weaves that we can and should explain with science.

The idea that the imitative group behavior of people who line up or follow trends can be explained by the physics of magnetic moments, or that the phenomenon of the various ethnic groups in the former Yugoslavia suddenly turning into genocidal killers can be explained by the phase transition phenomenon of condensed matter physics (the phenomenon of a liquid changing into a solid or a gas) is trivial in Buchanan's intellectual outlook.


Of course, Buchanan also acknowledges that it may not be possible to create physical equations that perfectly describe human behavior and the mind.
However, he emphasizes that we should not leave the 'human science' that explains humans to romantic philosophies or ideologies that deify humans as incomprehensible beings, or to false economics that depict humans as cold rationalists who pursue only their own interests.


Broadening our horizons, I propose that we apply the methods and technologies of natural science, which have achieved remarkable success in explaining nature, to humans, who are themselves part of nature, to find ways to resolve wealth inequality, mediate ethnic conflicts, and prevent the collective madness of humanity, in collusion with power, from leading humanity to destruction.


Humans are inherently bound to live in groups, in society, and in communities, adapting, imitating, cooperating, and influencing one another.
If so, there is no need to reject scientifically understanding the method and mechanism.
In Mark Buchanan's new book, The Social Atom, filled with a love of science and inspiration, readers will gain new insights into the reality of the human world.