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."

"The neoclassical era in economics has ended and has been replaced by an unnamed era.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."

"Mechanical methods and models of simple causal explanation are increasingly inapplicable as we advance to such complex phenomena. In particular, the crucial phenomena determining the formation of many highly complex structures of human interaction, i.e., economic values or prices, cannot be interpreted by simple causal or nomothetic theories, but require explanation in terms of the joint effects of a larger number of distinct elements than we can ever hope individually to observe or manipulate."

"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."