Sublime

Two great problems in Economics Allocation in the Economy Quantities: General equilibrium, international trade, game-theory outcomes . . . Formation in the Economy Processes: Of econ development, discovering novel technologies, structural change, arrival of new institutions, temporary phenomena like bubbles, crashes . . . The former is mathematizab

As Joseph Schumpeter first articulated, the power of recombination is the single greatest force driving increases in societal prosperity over the long term.

Brigham Young, Bill Gore, Malcolm Gladwell, and Robin Dunbar may have been onto something. For typical real-world values of the control parameters there is, in fact, a sudden change in incentives around the magic number 150. At that size, the balance of forces in the tug-of-war changes, and the system suddenly snaps from favoring a focus on loonsho

‘While entirely of human design,’ wrote Barabási, ‘the emerging network appears to have more in common with a cell or an ecological system than with a Swiss watch.’

“In equilibrium systems, everything adds up nicely and linearly. It is trivial to generalize to many agents; this simply corresponds to connecting more glasses of water. The effect on the water level from adding several drops of water is proportional to the number of drops. One does not have to think about the individual drops. In physics, we refer