The big advantage of physicists—I think Doyne Farmer may have once said this to me—is not what they have learned, the tools. It’s how they have learned to think. In particular, physicists are quite good at being very, very broad, taking tools from all over the place. That is something that economists are very, very remiss in. It is a b—tch to try t

... See more

“In equilibrium systems, everything adds up nicely and linearly. It is trivial to generalize to many agents; this simply corresponds to connecting more glasses of water. The effect on the water level from adding several drops of water is proportional to the number of drops. One does not have to think about the individual drops. In physics, we refer

... See more

So, I agree when you say we shouldn’t categorize the economy. We shouldn’t observe the economy and be like, “Oh, that’s a harmonic oscillator.” Yeah. “That’s an Ising model.” No. But we should absorb the data. We should observe the economy, and think in the physicist way of saying, “Okay, this is what I see. Let me think of a way of describing it.”

... See more