Browsing » July 2011

Recovery is not always smooth

By Paul Ormerod There has been huge media attention about the 2011 Q2 UK GDP growth figures released today. The estimate of 0.2 per cent shows only very weak growth. It is bound to be revised either up or down as more information comes to light. But at the moment, recovery looks very weak, after […]

Keynes & Hayek – A Synthesis?

I want to argue in this post that we are now well placed to go beyond – even synthesise – the over-rehearsed debate between the Keynes and Hayek. The point I want to emphasise here is that Keynes and Hayek did the best they could with the conceptual tools they had to hand… however, we […]

Happiness, Economics, and the Big Society

Should the economics profession care about happiness? And how does happiness fit in to the Big Society agenda? Before delving in to this, it is important to emphasise that an important problem within this subject is – like other areas – people often have different understandings of the same word. Some terms are not “univocal”, […]

Consistency or change?

Consistency or change?

The new science of complex networks emphasises the importance of both the static and the dynamic in social systems. Such systems are in a perpetual state of change; however, patterns can and do emerge in such systems, which persist for a period of time. Since the Enlightenment, social scientists have focused on identifying persist patterns, […]

Nature or machine?

Nature or machine?

Explicitly or implicitly, we often invoke two different metaphors for social systems – natural selection and machines. The study of complex networks offers a conceptual framework that help us to go beyond metaphorical framings. It also offers a toolbox of new concepts, such as emergence and self-organisation, that help us make sense of the world […]

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