As our world knits together, economic interdependencies change in both shape and nature. Supply chains, finance, labor, technological innovation, and geography interact in puzzling nonlinear ways. Can we step back far enough and see clearly enough to make sense of these interactions? Can we map the landscape of capability across scales? And what insights emerge by layering networks of people, firms, states, markets, regions? We’re all riding a bucking horse; what questions can we ask to make sure that we can stay in the saddle?

Welcome to COMPLEXITY, the official podcast of the Santa Fe Institute. I’m your host, Michael Garfield, and every other week we’ll bring you with us for far-ranging conversations with our worldwide network of rigorous researchers developing new frameworks to explain the deepest mysteries of the universe.

This week on Complexity, we speak with two SFI External Professors helping to rethink political economy: newly-appointed Science Board Co-Chair Ricardo Hausmann (Website, Wikipedia, Twitter) is the Director of the Harvard Growth Lab and J. Doyne Farmer (Website, Wikipedia) is Director of the Complexity Economics program at the Institute for New Economic Thinking at the Oxford Martin School. In this episode we zoom wide to try and find a way to garden all together, learning limits that can help inform discussion and decisions on the shape of things to come…

If you value our research and communication efforts, please subscribe, rate and review us at Apple Podcasts, and consider making a donation — or finding other ways to engage with us — at santafe.edu/engage. You can find the complete show notes for every episode, with transcripts and links to cited works, at complexity.simplecast.com. Heads up that our online education platform Complexity Explorer’s Origins of Life Course is still open for enrollment until June 1st! We hope to see you in there…

Thank you for listening!

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Podcast theme music by Mitch Mignano.

Mentions and additional resources:

The new paradigm of economic complexity
Pierre-Alexandre Balland, Tom Broekel, Dario Diodato, Elisa Giuliani, Ricardo Hausmann, Neave O’Clery, and David Rigby
in Research Policy

How production networks amplify economic growth
James McNerney, Charles Savoie, Francesco Caravelli, Vasco M. Carvalho, and J. Doyne Farmer
in PNAS

Productive Ecosystems and the arrow of development
by Neave O’Clery, Muhammed Ali Yıldırım, and Ricardo Hausmann

Horrible trade-offs in a pandemic: Poverty, fiscal space, policy, and welfare
Ricardo Hausmann and Ulrich Schetter
in ScienceDirect

Historical effects of shocks on inequality: the great leveler revisited
Bas van Bavel and Marten Scheffer
in Nature Humanities & Social Sciences Communications
(Twitter thread)

Complexity 56 - J. Doyne Farmer on The Complexity Economics Revolution

The Multiple Paths to Multiple Life
Christopher P. Kempes and David C. Krakauer
in Journal of Molecular Evolution

Scaling of urban income inequality in the USA
Elisa Heinrich Mora, Cate Heine, Jacob J. Jackson, Geoffrey B. West, Vicky Chuqiao Yang and Christopher P. Kempes
in Journal of The Royal Society Interface

Complexity 12 - Matthew Jackson on Social & Economic Networks

Complexity 81 - C. Brandon Ogbunu on Epistasis & The Primacy of Context in Complex Systems

Pitchfork Economics
by Nick Hanauer (podcast)

Complexity 15 - R. Maria del-Rio Chanona on Modeling Labor Markets & Tech Unemployment

Will a Large Complex System be Stable?
by Robert May
in Nature

Investigations
by Stuart Kauffman

The Collapse of Networks
by Raissa D’Souza (SFI Symposium Talk)

Democracy Now! 2025-12-01 Monday

Democracy Now! Audio

Dana Frank on Hernandez Trial and U.S. Hypocrisy

Democracy Now! 2025-12-01 Monday

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