What is complexity economics, why is it heterodox, and what are its policy implications?

johndavis — Sat, 30 Sep 2017 10:20:53 +0000

Complexity economics has developed into a powerful empirical, theoretical, and computational research program in the last three decades, advancing more realistic economics. It converges with long-standing heterodox schools, and its theoretical and empirical findings are consistent with older heterodox research interests and predictions. Economic complexity is characterized by path-dependence, idiosyncrasies, some self- organization capacity, structural emergence, and certain statistical distributions in economic topologies and motions, as complex economic systems move between building order and phases of sudden disorder. In agent-based systems, underlying ―intentionality of agents includes improving their performance, reducing perceived complexity, and generating social institutions. Boosted by the financial crisis 2008ff., a surge to explore complexity-economics’ policy implications has emerged. This chapter will briefly review the literature on economic
Complex Adaptive Systems (CAS) and derive implications for economic-policy interventions and the state to act upon socio-economic complexity. From an ―evolution-of-cooperation perspective, we exemplarily derive some more specific policy orientations, specified ―framework-policy or ―interactive-policy approaches, embedded in a conception that we call ―new meritorics. We consider some required structures and capacities that a modern effective state, capable of a strong and persistent, but learning and adapting ―complexity policy, should have.

Agent-Based Modeling’s Open Methodology Approach:Simulation, Reflexivity, and Abduction

johndavis — Sat, 30 Sep 2017 10:18:49 +0000

This paper argues that agent-based modeling’s innovations in method developed in terms of simulation techniques also involve an innovation in economic methodology. It shows how Epstein’s generative science conception departs from conventional methodological reasoning, and employs what I term an open rather than closed approach to economic methodology associated with the roles that reflexivity, counterfactual reasoning, and abduction play in ABM. Central to this idea is that improvements in how we know something, a matter of method, determine whether we know something, a matter of methodology. The paper links this alternative view of economics and economic methodology to a social science model of economics and contrasts this with standard economics’ natural science model of economics. The paper discusses what this methodological understanding implies about the concept of emergence.

emergence – Economic Philosophy

What is complexity economics, why is it heterodox, and what are its policy implications?

Agent-Based Modeling’s Open Methodology Approach:Simulation, Reflexivity, and Abduction