COMPLEXITY David Krakauer on Emergent Political Economies and A Science of Possibility (EPE 01)
Tolstoy's Latency Example
- Tolstoy wrote that orders lose meaning by the time they reach front lines, undermining the 'great man' narrative.
- This example illustrates how latencies and multiplicity of causes limit top-down historical explanations.
Reconcile Morality With Institutional Mechanics
- Political economy must link individual moral beliefs to how institutions actually function.
- Debates between Stuart, Smith, and Graeber/Wengrow hinge on differing institutional mechanics.
History Is Not Just Top-Down Or Bottom-Up
- History alternates between centralized commands and decentralized negotiation rather than a single narrative.
- Graeber, Wengrow and Tolstoy all emphasize decentralized, emergent social processes.
The world is unfair — but how much of that unfairness is inevitable, and how much is just contingency? After centuries of efforts to arrive at formal theories of history, society, and economics, most of us still believe and act on what amounts to myth. Our predecessors can’t be faulted for their lack of data, but in 2022 we have superior resources we’re only starting to appreciate and use. In honor of the Santa Fe Institute’s new role as the hub of an international research network exploring Emergent Political Economies, we dedicate this new sub-series of Complexity Podcast to conversations on money, power, governance, and justice. Subscribe for a new stream of dialogues and trialogues between SFI’s own diverse scholastic community and other acclaimed political economists, historians, and authors of speculative fiction.
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.
In this episode, we talk with SFI President David Krakauer about the goals of this research theme and what SFI brings to the table. We discuss the legacy of long-standing challenges to quantitative history and mathematical economics, how SFI thinks differently about these topics, and a brief outline of the major angles we’ll explore in this sub-series over the next year-plus — including the roles of dimension, causality, algorithms, scaling, innovation, emergence, and more.
Subscribe to Complexity Podcast for upcoming episodes with an acclaimed line-up of scholars including Diane Coyle, Eric Beinhocker, Ricardo Hausmann, Doyne Farmer, Steven Teles, Rajiv Sethi, Jenna Bednar, Tom Ginsburg, Niall Ferguson, Neal Stephenson, Paul Smaldino, C. Thi Nguyen, John Kay, John Geneakoplos, and many more to be announced…
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Mentions and additional resources:
Emergent Political Economies and A Science of Possibility
by David Krakauer for SFI Parallax Newsletter, Spring 2022 Edition
Policing stabilizes construction of social niches in primates
by Jessica Flack, Michelle Girvan, Frans de Waal, and David Krakauer in Nature
Conflicts of interest improve collective computation of adaptive social structures
by Eleanor Brush, David Krakauer, and Jessica Flack in Science Advances
The Star Gazer and the Flesh Eater: Elements of a Theory of Metahistory
by David C. Krakauer in History, Big History, and Metahistory at SFI Press
The Cultural Evolution of National Constitutions
by Daniel Rockmore, Chen Fang, Nick Foti, Tom Ginsburg, & David Krakauer in SSRN
Scaling of Hunter-Gatherer Camp Size and Human Sociality
by José Lobo, Todd Whitelaw, Luís M. A. Bettencourt, Polly Wiessner, Michael E. Smith, & Scott Ortman in Current Anthropology
W. Brian Arthur on Complexity Podcast (eps. 13, 14, 68, 69)
Reflections on COVID-19 with David Krakauer & Geoffrey West (Complexity Podcast)
The Dawn of Everything
by David Graeber and David Wengrow at Macmillan Publishers
Mitch Waldrop speaks on the history of SFI (Twitter excerpts)
The Hedgehog and the Fox
by Isaiah Berlin
War and Peace
by Leo Tolstoy
On the Application of Mathematics to Political Economy
by F. Y. Edgeworth in Journal of the Royal Statistical Society
How Economics Became A Mathematical Science
by E. Roy Weintraub at Duke University Press
Machine Dreams
by Philip Mirowski at Cambridge University Press
All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace (TV series)
by Adam Curtis for BBC
Can’t Get You Out of My Head (TV series)
by Adam Curtis for BBC
The Collective Computation Group at SFI
Seeing Like A State
by James. C Scott at Yale Books
Uncertain times
by Jessica Flack and Melanie Mitchell at Aeon
At the limits of thought
by David Krakauer at Aeon
Preventative Citizen-Based Medicine
by David Krakauer for the SFI Transmissions: Reflections series
The uncertainty paradox. Can science make uncertainty optimistic?
by Stuart Firestein (SFI Seminar)
Editorial note: At one point DK mentions "John" Steuart but meant James Steuart, author of
An Inquiry Into the Principles of Political Economy
(a more thoroughly-indexed and searchable version can be found here)