Complexity: The Emerging Science at the Edge of Order and Chaos

by M. Mitchell Waldrop

Did British colonists flock to cold, stormy, rocky shores of Massachusetts Bay because New England had the best land for farms? No: They came because Massachusetts Bay was where the Pilgrims got off the boat, and the Pilgrims got off the boat there because the Mayflower got lost looking for Virginia. Them that has gets—and once the colony was established, there was no turning back. Nobody was about to pick up Boston and move it someplace else. Increasing returns, lock-in, unpredictability, tiny events that have immense historical consequences—"These properties of increasing-returns economics shocked me at first," says Arthur. "But when I recognized that each property had a counterpart in the nonlinear physics I was reading, I got very excited. Instead of being shocked, I became fascinated." Economists had actually been talking about such things for generations, he learned. But their efforts had always been isolated and scattered.