Complexity Economics Quotes

“It is true—economics has never really had a good theory of progress and that’s because, I think, progress is fundamentally an evolutionary phenomenon and the equilibrium systems of traditional economics don’t evolve.”
― W. Brian Arthur, Complexity Economics: Proceedings of the Santa Fe Institute's 2019 Fall Symposium

“If we think about information spreading, it’s keeping track of how well-connected my friends are. That might be a better measure than just counting friends. What we thought about was, neither of these are actually designed for understanding information spread. Information spreads in a way that has two different features. One, it’s somewhat probabilistic. And, secondly, it has a finite time horizon. People get tired of it after a while, it decays, and it stops spreading after some time. So, if you look at the half-life of tweets or other things, sometimes they’ll be as short as eighteen hours, sometimes twenty-four hours. There might be a period in which things spread, and then it’s old news and it just dies out. And so what we added was sort of a simple measure that has two dimensions to it. We called this diffusion centrality.”
― W. Brian Arthur, Complexity Economics: Proceedings of the Santa Fe Institute's 2019 Fall Symposium

“In The Human Condition (1958), Hannah Arendt lamented “the absurd idea of establishing morals as an exact science by focusing on things that are easily measurable or quantifiable.” For Arendt, the question is not “whether we are the masters or slaves of our machines, but whether machines still serve the world and its things or if, on the contrary, they and the automatic motion of their processes have begun to rule and even destroy world and things.”
― W. Brian Arthur, Complexity Economics: Proceedings of the Santa Fe Institute's 2019 Fall Symposium

“Part of what we’ve seen in our economics is that elites previously used to appeal to gods, to how our ancestors did it, to the natural order, etc., to make credible their stories that justify their power and privilege. Well, over the last several decades, they found a new source of authority: economics. Economics has been used to justify a lot of very self-serving behavior. Economics has also been used to justify a lot of behavior that we now know is very damaging to the planet. Where social media comes into the picture is it is an incredible mechanism for accelerating the spread of stories, making them go viral. But we know from psychology and cognitive science that the stories that most excite our brains are not the most true or useful; rather, they are the ones that trigger emotions like moral outrage or tribal affinity. By splintering our notion of reality and distorting our stories, social media is doing far more damage to society than just the near-term political stuff. It is really an unwinding of the Enlightenment.”
― W. Brian Arthur, Complexity Economics: Proceedings of the Santa Fe Institute's 2019 Fall Symposium

“Keynes was concerned that rapid change would be incompatible with social equality: “What can we reasonably expect the level of our economic life to be a hundred years hence? What are the economic possibilities for our grandchildren?” And he concluded that the future for the mass of humanity might surprise us: “The course of affairs will simply be that there will be ever larger and larger classes and groups of people from whom problems of economic necessity have been practically removed.” This would transpire as long as we showed a greater willingness “to entrust to science the direction of those matters which are properly the concern of science”
― W. Brian Arthur, Complexity Economics: Proceedings of the Santa Fe Institute's 2019 Fall Symposium

“John Maynard Keynes, writing in his “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren” (1930) suggests that “We are suffering . . . from the growing-pains of over-rapid changes, from the painfulness of readjustment between one economic period and another. The increase of technical efficiency has been taking place faster than we can deal with the problem of labour absorption.”
― W. Brian Arthur, Complexity Economics: Proceedings of the Santa Fe Institute's 2019 Fall Symposium

“Indeed, I once did a little exercise: I took about half a dozen economics books, the big fat ones like Samuelson’s, and so on, and looked up in the index: do the words “energy,” “entropy,” or “thermodynamics” ever occur? Not once in any of them. Energy! You can’t even have a f——king dream at night without energy.

[Quoting physicist Geoffrey West.]”
― W. Brian Arthur, Complexity Economics: Proceedings of the Santa Fe Institute's 2019 Fall Symposium

“In 1999, I was publishing a paper in Science on complexity and the economy. The editor called me from London and said, “You need a name for this approach.” I said, “No, I don’t.” “Yes, you do.” “No, I don’t.” He prevailed, and standing in a corridor on a landline I called it complexity economics. I thought it should have been called nonequilibrium economics afterwards, but it was too late. It’s been locked in.”
― W. Brian Arthur, Complexity Economics: Proceedings of the Santa Fe Institute's 2019 Fall Symposium