MULTICAUSALITY

Article type: Research Article

Authors: Warfield, John N.

Affiliations: School of Public Policy, George Mason University, Fairfax VA, USA

Abstract: Many explanations of events treat them as unicausal. Most of the major issues of today are multicausal. Multicausal events raise issues of direct and indirect causality, and issues related to cognition. These, in turn, involve structural considerations that cannot be properly dealt with in limited mass media. By attempting to deal with such issues in mass media, congressional debates debase the debaters. The economics crises afflicting the world today illustrate the failure of leaders to apply multicausal analysis to develop a proper understanding of the issues. But more importantly, there is no recognized leadership in the design of economic systems, which is the more fundamental reason why systems have been placed at risk. And still more fundamental is the lack of adequate systems education in those educational institutions that have produced those in positions of economic power today.

Keywords: multicausal events, multicausal analysis, economic systems, systems education

Journal: Journal of Integrated Design & Process Science, vol. 12, no. 2, pp. 27-29, 2008