Complexity Explained

studying the collective behaviors of heterogeneous systems of many interacting parts is central to their intellectual mission, is typically beyond the scope of current analytic techniques, and is gradually coming to the fore.

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.

In science complexity is considered a cost, which must be justified by a sufficiently rich set of new and (preferably) interesting predictions of facts that the existing theory cannot explain. This was the challenge we had to meet.

The reason why higher-level subjects can be studied at all is that under special circumstances the stupendously complex behaviour of vast numbers of particles resolves itself into a measure of simplicity and comprehensibility. This is called emergence: high-level simplicity ‘emerges’ from low-level complexity.