Complexity Economics: Proceedings of the Santa Fe Institute's 2019 Fall Symposium

Markets become inefficient when one of these conditions is violated, and the most likely condition is almost always lack of diversity. We are social animals. Instead of believing different things, we correlate our beliefs.

Human nature requires catastrophes to jolt us into change—but with some catastrophes, notably climate change, by the time that happens it may be too late.

While economic systems have important differences from biological ones, they share some deep commonalities—notably, both use energy to create islands of order, stability, and local equilibrium (or homeostasis) in larger seas of disorder, but those islands of local stability are by necessity evolving as their environment evolves, meaning that the sy

rabbit. So you can think of the economy as a series of shocks moving to an equilibrium, shock, moving to an equilibrium.

here: these very actions of agents’ exploring, changing, adapting, and experimenting further change the outcome, and they’d have to then re-adapt and re-adjust.

The primary job of business is to solve human problems, and the primary job of the state, then, is to create the conditions for large-scale cooperation to allow that process to happen. That involves things like promoting inclusion. You can’t have large-scale cooperation if you’re systematically excluding large groups of people. You have to have fai

The reason is, in order for communication to be effective, it has to create what’s known as common knowledge, which is a string of embedded knowledge—you know, if you have two individuals, and I need to know that the other is going to show up to protest, the other needs to know that I’m going to show up to protest, and I need to know that he knows

models. Complexity economics is basically seeing the economy not as a machine, balanced and perfect and humming along, but as an ecology.

So, awareness of the problem, a common knowledge, awareness that others know, you know that the others are aware of the problem, the generation of common knowledge.