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

everyone’s preferences, and feed all this data into a “single mind”—a giant economic optimization algorithm that would run continuously to “work out the implications”? Because, Hayek explained, that algorithm would never get all the data it actually needed; it could never “secure the best use of resources known to any of the members of society, for

This does not mean you devolve into chaos. The study of most complex systems shows that disparate goals can lead to harmony despite conflict; alignment in the absence of clearly imposed goals, organizational or systemic, is clearly possible. For example, capitalism, at its best, uses competition to harnesses the desires of individual

some form of complexity theory is required if we are to understand many of the intimate, and patently uncertain, interactions found in modern society.