The End of Theory: Financial Crises, the Failure of Economics, and the Sweep of Human Interaction

In economics the particles, that is, agents, are endowed with some kind of foresight. Their image of the future affects the present.

Perhaps the greatest “phase transition” in our thinking that such an approach could engender is the maturation in our willingness to live with relatively high levels of uncertainty in the domains of complex phenomena—and thus give up on ideas like complete “cures,” the elimination of “risk,” the design of perfect “stability,” and achieving total “s