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

no more need to have them enforce our contracts.

But overall the profession does not excel at seeing trouble ahead and unlike engineering disciplines it doesn’t have a branch of forward-looking failure-mode analysis or of post-crash forensic analysis.

But if you think in terms of equilibrium, as I said, there’s a subtle bias with all of us economists. If things are in equilibrium, there’s no way to improve on that, otherwise it wouldn’t be an equilibrium, so we don’t think in terms of people gaming such systems.

Those are all well understood. And they have been mathematized, heavily mathematized. They are about quantities and preferences and prices in balance, and this gives itself to the equating of things—to balance and to equilibrium.

The point is that underlying technologies change, but, after a point, technology market shares don’t change and so they’re highly predictable.

Second is an aggregation mechanism, a way to bring that information into one place. Double-auction markets, where buyers bid a price and sellers offer a price, are extraordinarily good at this function. The final condition is properly functioning incentives—rewards for being right and penalties for being wrong. For the stock market, this is measure

We accepted equilibrium because it is so analytically useful, but it gives us a Platonic universe. It’s beautiful, and ideal, and pristine, and lovely, but it’s not really real.

But also what’s interesting, we observe that it seems to be that this type of message is, “Good job, well done, we are a team, that’s the way to do it.” Those kinds of messages tend to help in succeeding, in coordinating, in the better outcome.

probabilities attach themselves to the descriptions of events and not to events themselves.

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?