foundations were laid in Victorian times. Now it is changing radically. Standard economics is suddenly being challenged by a number of new approaches: behavioral economics, neuroeconomics, new institutional economics. One of the new approaches came to life at the Santa Fe Institute: complexity economics.

For example, lawyers’ offices scale superlinearly with city size (like social interactions, k(N); is this a coincidence?). Primary activities, such as agriculture, fisheries, and mining, scale sublinearly, as might have been expected, but are often nevertheless present in large cities.