Sublime

“toy” models of economies—simple models that are so abstract they bear little resemblance to reality.

The “laws” of physics are not universal, because on small scales things behave differently from the way they do in the everyday world. Energy can express itself either as a wave or a particle, and sometimes as both. The consciousness of the observer determines how energy will behave.

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,

we cannot assume that everything interesting is at the same scale as ourselves.