Sublime

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

“The Global Economy as an Adaptive Process,” at seven pages and zero equations, is well worth a read. Holland recounts many, now familiar, difficulties in mathematical analysis of economics that assume linearity, exclusively negative feedback loops, equilibria, and so on, before proposing that the economy is best thought of as what he calls an adap

Big Idea Eight: Economic Booms and Busts Cannot Be Avoided but Can Be Moderated

Modern politicians play the role of wheelers and dealers, brokering alliances or negotiating compromises between different constituencies or interest groups. In Nambikwara society this didn’t happen much because there weren’t really many differences in wealth or status. However, chiefs did play an analogous role, brokering between two entirely diff

Scientific models that seek to predict the consequences of human actions with some reasonable accuracy—such as game theoretical models of economic behavior—for the most part ignore human individuality in favor of aggregated outcomes.