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Woolly complexity
It has taken me a while to get round to reading Stuart Kauffman’s Reinventing the Sacred: A New View of Science, Reason and Religion. Although I was looking forward to reading one of the gurus of...
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Keep it simple, stupid?
In the past few days I have read two brilliant and fascinating articles, pointing to opposite conclusions. One argues that the extent of complexity in the financial domain is so great that effective...
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Simple is difficult
I’ve been mulling over the question I posed a few days ago, about how to reconcile Andy Haldane’s superb Jackson Hole paper (The Dog and the Frisbee) arguing the case for simpler financial regulation...
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From dead-end to dynamism
I’ve been reading an interesting, and non-technical, overview of complexity theory as applied to economics, The Rediscovery of Classical Economics: Adaptation, Complexity and Growth by David Simpson....
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Antifragile, pro and anti
Antifragile: Things that Gain from Disorder, the latest tract from Nassim Nicholas Taleb, left me with mixed feelings. It’s interesting, and I find a lot of his argument intuitively appealing. On the...
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Picturing economic complexity
People often talk about the greater complexity of modern economies in a descriptive sense. Underlying this is the increased diversity of types of goods and services produced in an economy, and the...
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The value at the margins
I’m enjoying The Second Machine Age by Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee, and will review it soon. Meanwhile, though, I was struck by their discussion of the effectiveness of crowdsourcing for...
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Vulnerability and sustainability
John Naughton’s column in today’s Observer about governments’ online spying sent me to Cory Doctorow’s essay of a few days ago about the parallels between a secure internet and public health. Both are...
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Butterflies and hurricanes
I received a copy in the post this weekend of The Butterfly Defect: How globalization creates systemic risks, and what to do about it by Ian Goldin and Mike Mariathasan. I’d read the book in draft and...
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Slow demise of the economist ex machina
A small number of economists have been interested in complexity theory and related approaches – agent-based modelling, network models – for a long time, and a growing number for a shorter time. Complex...
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Serendipity, complexity, and loneliness
No sooner (literally) had I written about the complexity economics of the new book by David Colander and Roland Kupers, Complexity and the Art of Public Policy, than (in one of the many instances of...
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Resources on complexity economics
Following my posts last week on complexity and economics, Professor Leigh Tesfatsion of Iowa State University sent me this very useful website with links to loads of resources on the subject –...
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Economists and humanity
Peter Smith sent me his new book The Reform of Economics: How the complex systems approach is building a realistic and humane alternative to laissez-faire. In a letter accompanying it, he said he has...
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Markets in stories
Yesterday I attended a very interesting conference, on Non-Equilibrium Social Science, which stands for making economics more realistic and interesting – looking at the economy in terms of non-linear...
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The El Farol problem goes digital
I saw this tweet and it immediately reminded me of Brian Arthur’s El Farol equilibrium story. AdamRFisher Please develop an app that simulates Waze recommendations to assess which routes will open up...
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Grass roots
There’s an interesting evaluation of Jane Jacobs in The Architectural Review, arguing that her fabulous book The Death and Life of Great American Cities misses the real target in attacking ‘planners’...
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Information, information, information
Yesterday my dear husband (@ruskin147) interviewed César Hidalgo (@cesifoti) about his new book Why Information Grows: The Evolution of Order from Atoms to Economies for next week’s edition of Tech...
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The information economy
I very much enjoyed reading Cesar Hidalgo’s Why Information Grows: The evolution of order, from atoms to economies. It’s a very original perspective on the process of secular economic growth, bringing...
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On Seeing Like A State
A tweet by @sclopit (Stefano Bertolo), exclaiming that sclopit in other news, I recently spent a couple of days with a large group of budding policy makers who had never heard of http://t.co/vX6k4IxxNE...
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Alone and together in the economy
There is an interesting new summary of the work of the Systemic Risk Centre, whose theme is the idea of endogenous risk: risk created by the interaction of participants in a market or economy, and...
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