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

The first is diverse agents. In markets that means people who have different information, time horizons, and rules of behavior. This explains why behavioral biases are not that important. You can have a lot of little mistakes but the market mechanism deals with them effectively.

It traditionally assumed that firms were independent, and so changes would be independent, and so their sizes and aggregate effects would be distributed normally.

In standard economics, problems are well-defined, solutions are perfectly rational, outcomes are pure, possibly artificial in a way, but above all they are elegant. And by assumption outcomes are in equilibrium. Loosely, the economy is in equilibrium. Standard economics in a word is orderly. To borrow architect Robert Venturi’s phrase, it has “prim

The primary job of business is to solve human problems, and the primary job of the state, then, is to create the conditions for large-scale cooperation to allow that process to happen. That involves things like promoting inclusion. You can’t have large-scale cooperation if you’re systematically excluding large groups of people. You have to have fai

In their view, moral behavior maximizes the most pleasure for the most people and minimizes the most pain. That’s the core idea of utilitarianism. Other things like character or intentions and so on don’t really matter. What matters are consequences, what philosophers called consequentialism. Now, this was quite a major shift in moral thinking and

Physics basically says we’ll understand the universe because we’re going to extremize a function. That’s what physics does—optimization, some least-action principles. So, we’re going to minimize the time, we’ll minimize the energy, we’ll minimize the distance. We’re looking for those functions that we’re trying to extremize and we’re going to repre

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.

It’s important for exchanging information, it’s important for human bonding and culture, but another important role that communication has is in coordinating actions. An example of coordinating actions is protests.

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