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

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.

Markets become inefficient when one of these conditions is violated, and the most likely condition is almost always lack of diversity. We are social animals. Instead of believing different things, we correlate our beliefs.

She explained that an externality was not irrelevant, but, rather, uncounted—a consequence without a cost.

“They have hired astronomers; they have hired mathematicians; they have hired physicists; they have even hired theologists. They never even interviewed an economist.”

We could model agents who had disparate ideas or hypotheses about the situation they were in. They could base their actions on these, and learn which hypotheses worked and which didn’t, getting smarter over time.

that, contrary to standard belief, the market shares of many technology companies could be predicted with great accuracy, even if the underlying changes in technology changed frequently.

they experiment, they explore, they adjust, they readjust, but not just in terms of having some wondrous mathematical model of the situation and updating a parameter. They form a hypothesis, maybe they have multiple hypotheses or ideas about the situation they are in, and they put more belief in the ones that work over time and throw out hypotheses

A few examples include: Greed is good. Maximizing pleasure from consumption is the goal. A billion acts of selfishness will lead to a prosperous society. The social duty of business is just to maximize its profits. There’s no such thing as society, only individuals—that was Margaret Thatcher’s famous quote. Markets are efficient; other institutions

now? Number of women on the board, and maybe a little bit of diversity within the C-suite. That is not my question. I’m happy to have that data and those are important issues, but they’re so far from answering the question: is this an intellectually robust environment where the company is actually able to adapt to changing circumstances over time?

of larger society. So that’s a very old battle in human history between the self-serving stories of an elite and the stories that can actually help serve a broader society. Part of what we’ve seen in our economics is that elites previously used to appeal to gods, to how our ancestors did it, to the natural order, etc., to make credible their storie