ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the ratchet using a varied set of more sophisticated tools that provide deeper insight both to the disaster and, potentially, its remediation. It deals with a brief recapitulation of evolutionary formalism, followed by applications to economic process much in the spirit of H. Aldrich et al. and of G. Hodgson and T. Knudsen. The approach represents extension of group symmetry breaking arguments from physical systems to groupoid symmetry breaking/making in economic and other systems. The perspective is that of a highly abstract ‘network’ constituting ‘nodes’ that represent industrial enterprises and ‘edges’ that are taken as ‘open’ with a probability indexed by the fraction of civilian work represented by scientists and engineers. One model of the Pentagon ratchet supposes that the proportion of industrial firms in an economy and the proportion of scientists and engineers in the workforce dedicated to civilian enterprise are synergistic and mutually reinforcing.
