Sublime

There is thus a recursive, reflexive loop at the heart of the economy.4 Complexity economics asks how this loop drives the behavior of the system over time, i.e., how will the pattern of the system today shape individual decisions which will then collectively create the pattern of the system tomorrow.

Kleinberg was trying to understand network behavior. Page and Brin were building something.

This sort of a situation where each individual trajectory in the long run does something different from the average over a large ensemble is called non-ergodicity. So, this is a non-ergodic system.

The adaptiveness of the human organism, the facility with which it acquires new representations and strategies and becomes adept in dealing with highly specialized environments, makes it an elusive and fascinating target of our scientific inquiries—and the very prototype of the artificial.

At the most basic level, Schumpeter believed that innovation and economic growth are one and the same. Countries that innovated would grow wealthier; those that did not would stagnate.

For more on the large-batch death spiral, see The Principles of Product Development Flow: Second Generation Lean Product Development by Donald G. Reinertsen: http://bit.ly/pdflow

New strategies, new things are coming and going and striving to survive and do well in a situation they mutually create. We can describe this algorithmically, but not easily by equations, not just because the situation is complicated to track but because new behaviors and categories of behavior are not easily captured by equations.

These data make a strong case that, as human social networks grow, they necessarily lead to systems that require fewer resources per person, and produce more per person. In other words, the benefits of scale for human groups have always been there.