Sublime

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.

Realistically, agents not identical, don’t know other agents’ circumstances or likely behavior; or situation complicated and not fully known. There is fundamental uncertainty: Therefore “the problem” is not well-defined; Therefore “rationality” is not well-defined; Therefore “optimal” behavior is not well-defined; Behavior and outcome unlikely to b

would be a mistake to assume that microfinance is the holy grail solution to the problem of global poverty, any more than is Hernando de Soto’s property rights prescription.

“I do not think that unemployment is among those evils which, like poverty, capitalist evolution could ever eliminate of itself.”

So, optimizing utility changes over many parallel worlds actually also optimizes wealth itself over time. That’s sort of the message.

Amartya Sen – work for which he won a Nobel-Memorial prize. The focus of development, Sen argues, should be on ‘advancing the richness of human life, rather than the richness of the economy in which human beings live’.20 Instead of prioritising metrics like GDP, the aim should be to enlarge people’s capabilities – such as to be healthy, empowered a