Sublime

when a set of cities operates as an integrated urban system and what quantitative properties follow for their relative sizes.

Instead of assuming agents were perfectly rational, we allowed there were limits to how smart they were. Instead of assuming the economy displayed diminishing returns (negative feedbacks), we allowed that it might also contain increasing returns (positive feedbacks). Instead of assuming the economy was a mechanistic system operating at equilibrium,

no more need to have them enforce our contracts.

West’s power laws suggested something far more provocative: that despite all the noise and crowding and distraction, the average resident of a metropolis with a population of five million people was almost three times more creative than the average resident of a town of a hundred thousand.

next, to generate exponential (resource) growth.

finite time singularity

Even though it is encouraging to have shown that relatively simple rules can give such phenomena, it in no way explains how a Complex System comprising many interacting parts, manages to produce such phenomena.

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.

urban infrastructure and the spatial extent of cities scale sublinearly with population size.