Sublime

There are, however, on this planet phenomena that are hidden in plain sight. These are the phenomena that we study as complex systems: the convoluted exhibitions of the adaptive world—from cells to societies.

urban social networks have two interesting properties: they are modular and searchable.

New strategies, new things are coming and going and striving to survive and do well in a situation they mutually create. We can describe this algorithmically, but not easily by equations, not just because the situation is complicated to track but because new behaviors and categories of behavior are not easily captured by equations.

Eric Schmidt, chairman of Google’s parent Alphabet, explains: I would like to tell you that the Internet has created such a level playing field that the long tail is absolutely the place to be. Unfortunately, that’s not the case. What really happens is something called a power law. A small number of things are very highly concentrated and most othe

These data make a strong case that, as human social networks grow, they necessarily lead to systems that require fewer resources per person, and produce more per person. In other words, the benefits of scale for human groups have always been there.

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.

understand under what circumstances networks generate superlinear scaling effects.