Policy and Complex Systems
dview of economics . Its focus is on what is called self-organization in the context of what is known as emergence in the nascent discipline known as complexity science .
The variety of misinterpretations included the invisible hand simply being a case of Providence . Its operations were in fact based on the idea of free markets . However , that idea was misunderstood then ; and today it is still misunderstood by many . The major shortfall in the free market system comes from not understanding that the key to successful free markets is an equitable structure such as a level playing field .
Smith ’ s ( 2003 ) Wealth of Nations was an interdisciplinary work built from a moral philosophy out of his concern for the detrimental effects of mercantilism . He provided enough in the birth of economics as a discipline to split it from political economy . A major component of his structuring economics was in his use of the phrase the invisible hand . Centuries later , the concept became understood as a metaphor for what is called emergence as it is used in complexity science .
As economics developed , it did so in the tradition of cause and effect analyses and linear models popularized out of the Scientific Revolution . There was a physics envy popular through most of the twentieth century . Then came the beginning of a trend to drawing from the biological sciences to deal with the nonlinearity of the political economy .
We are back to discussing shadows on wall as a source of understanding that fails to come to grips with reality . However , now , centuries after the idea was introduced , we are finally getting a handle on the reality that based upon our current knowledge , invisible hands is simply a metaphor for an emergent process stemming from transactions in a market producing characterizes at a macro level not present at the micro network . This has introduced us to the next section , Twenty-first Century Science .
Twenty-First Century Science
We argue that twenty-first century science provides a much more realistic understanding of the process that is called emergence . The process is present in neurological behavior of the human brain producing the operations of the mind , the brain at work . It is also present in the self-organizational behavior of agents in a societal structure producing the nature of the political economy . A brief overview of society as a complex adaptive system serves as a transition to the discussion of the mind and knowledge that underlies the self-organization of the human agents in the system as individuals and as agents , along with their organizations as agents , in the structure of the societal system .
Complexity Economics
Complexity economics is just one case of the social sciences that started the integration of complexity science into its main discipline . It functions as a branch called complexity economics . It takes a view of economics as a dynamic system with nonlinear relationships . It functions based on the interactions of agents ( entities that are taking action ; also known as nodes in network science ). Those agents have biases , make errors , and learn over time ; so they evolve as the biological entities that they are . The networks they operate in also evolve over time and the structure changes . That changing structure impacts the future decisions of the agents , so the structure continues to evolve influenced by changes in the decisions by agents , especially as influenced by education .
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