the global economy is orders of magnitude more complex than any other physical or social structure ever built by humankind.

Keynes wrote in the conclusion of his General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, “The ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed, the world is ruled by little else.”

scientific inquiry does not advance through steady, even progress. Rather, as one scholar of Kuhn’s work described it, science moves forward through “a series of peaceful interludes punctuated by intellectually violent revolutions … in each of which one conceptual world view is replaced by another

just as biology became a true science in the twentieth century, so too will economics come into its own as a science in the twenty-first century.

It’s the best possible time to be alive, when almost everything you thought you knew is wrong.

Take a look out your window. No matter where you are, from the biggest industrialized city to the smallest rural village, you are surrounded by economic activity and its results. Twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, the planet is abuzz with humans designing, organizing, manufacturing, servicing, transporting, communicating, buying, and

During the 1970s, as scientists came to know more about the behaviors of complex systems, they became increasingly interested in systems in which the particles were not simple things with fixed behaviors like water molecules, but were things with some intelligence and the capability of adapting to their environment. Water molecules cannot adapt

Businesses are themselves a form of design. The design of a business encompasses its strategy, organizational structure, management processes, culture, and a host of other factors. Business designs evolve over time through a process of differentiation, selection, and amplification, with the market as the ultimate arbiter of fitness. One of the

But why does the fashion industry go through this iterative, and in many ways, wasteful, process? The reason that your shirt was evolved rather than designed is that no one could predict exactly what kind of shirt you would want out of the almost infinite space of possible shirt designs. The old Soviet Union tried this kind of rational prediction