Complexity economics

“The features of complexity economics are clear. The economy is not necessarily in equilibrium; in fact it is usually in nonequilibrium. Agents are not all knowing and perfectly rational; they must make sense of the situations they are in and explore strategies as they do this…In this way the economy is organic, one layer forms on the top of the previous ones; it is ever changing, it shows perpetual novelty; and structures within it appear, persist for a while, and melt back into it again.”

“Right after we published our first findings, we started getting letters from all over the country saying, "You know, all you guys have done is rediscover Austrian economics"… I admit I wasn't familiar with Hayek and von Mises as the time. But now that I've read them, I can see that this is essentially true.”

“In complexity economics one is not searching out the truth; one is simply searching for a statistical fit that can be temporarily useful in our understanding of the economy.”

“The neoclassical era in economics has ended and has been replaced by an unnamed era. We believe what best characterizes the new era is its acceptance that the economy is complex, and thus that it might be called the complexity era.”

“The other thing was an open problem: How does economics really look like when you recognize it as the prototype of a new kind of science of complex phenomena which could not employ the simple model of mechanics or physics, but had to deal with what then I described as mere pattern predictions, certain limited prediction. That was so much more fascinating as an intellectual problem.”