Is There Something Happening at All Scales?

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i think that a, there are inevitably postive feedbacks at make difficult to have reasonable equality all over the place. But that doesn't mean we shouldn't try. And even if you started off with everything equal in some perfect society, come about in the soviet system, changing into what's now russia in the early nineties, it didn't take very long for fairly flat and reasonably even distribution of wealth and income,. i'm not saying there's any great conspiracies, but if some class gets ahead, then they can educate their children better, get them off to better start. And so it's anomalies and inequalities.

Economies in the modern world are incredibly complex systems. But when we sit down to think about them in quantitative ways, it’s natural to keep things simple at first. We look for reliable relations between small numbers of variables, seek equilibrium configurations, and so forth. But those approaches don’t always work in complex systems, and sometimes we have to use methods that are specifically adapted to the challenges of complexity. That’s the perspective of W. Brian Arthur, a pioneer in the field of complexity economics, according to which economies are typically not in equilibrium, not made of homogeneous agents, and are being constantly updated. We talk about the basic ideas of complexity economics, how it differs from more standard approaches, and what it teaches us about the operation of real economies.

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W. Brian Arthur received his Ph.D. in operations research from the University of California, Berkeley. He is currently an External Faculty Member at the Santa Fe Institute, IBM Faculty Fellow, and Visiting Researcher in the Intelligent Systems Lab at PARC. He was formerly the Morrison Professor of Economics and Population Studies and Professor of Biology at Stanford. He is known for developing the theory of increasing returns in economics. Among his awards are a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Schumpeter Prize in economics, and the Lagrange Prize for complexity.

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