Sublime

foundations were laid in Victorian times. Now it is changing radically. Standard economics is suddenly being challenged by a number of new approaches: behavioral economics, neuroeconomics, new institutional economics. One of the new approaches came to life at the Santa Fe Institute: complexity economics.

Agent_Zero. Geoff’s work is so fantastic in this space. Cities, just like ecosystems, are more diverse as they get bigger. Why is that? Well, if you think about it from a biological perspective, there’s just more diversity carrying capacity, right? Like if I’m interested in European soccer and I live in a town of 500 people, there’s just no one to

For example, economist George Steckel and anthropologist Jerome Rose (2002) examined health indicators for Prehispanic New World societies and found that the median health of individuals declined as societies grew more complex. This suggests social complexity emerges from mechanisms that promote coordinated behavior even if it is not in the best in

Big Idea Two: Good Institutions Align Self-Interest with the Social Interest

Cooperation…is its own evolutionary force that contributes to an organism’s immediate survival but also creates the possibility for adaptive responses to future challenges.

But human nature was also shaped as groups competed with other groups.

do strive as individuals, but we are also part of something larger than ourselves, with a complex physiology and mental life that we carry out but only dimly understand.

Allen and Sandow’s view of social systems was influenced by the Chilean biologist Humberto Maturana, who is famous for his pioneering studies of cognition in living systems. Maturana says that intelligent action is created in social systems where all the members of a network accept the others as legitimate participants in the network.