Corporations, businesses and economies, are conceptualized, by a new order of scientists, as complex systems of interacting elements which resemble living organisms, each one trying to adapt, and to survive, competing in an ever changing environment.
Working at the Santa Fe Institute, Nobel laureates of the caliber of Murray Gell-Mann and Philip Anderson in physics, and Kenneth Arrow in economics; propose the unified vision that disciplines (as seemingly unrelated) as neural networks, ecology, artificial intelligence, complexity, human psychology and chaos theory, offer an untapped potential for the (proper) conduction of economics, business, education, and even politics.
Along these lines, physicist cum economist Brian Anderson (also of the Santa Fe Institute) has dared to propose that the old conception in economic circles, of markets endowed with an in-built tendency to proceed always to preset equilibria and corrections, was a false assumption. He maintains that: "He [Arthur] couldn"t imagine anything less like the real economy, where new products, technologies, and markets were constantly arising and old ones were constantly dying off.
The real economy was not a machine but a kind of living system, with all the spontaneity and complexity that [molecular biologist Horace F.] Judson was showing him in the world of molecular biology". Thus Anderson began to utilize principles from molecular biology to explain markets behaviors.
Equally resonant with these new principles were the ideas of the Belgian physicist Ilya Prigogine (Nobel Price 1977) when he wrote in an article that "…it"s conceivable that the economy is a living (italics ours), a self-organizing system, in which market structures are spontaneously organized by such things as the demand for labor and the demand for goods and services."
Arthur refined much of his conceptual theorizing when he had an opportunity to exchange ideas with Norwegian economist Victor Norman.
He further expressed and expanded on these thoughts: "The important thing is to observe [that] the actual living economy out there. It"s path-dependent, it"s complicated, it"s evolving, it"s open, and it"s organic (our emphasis)."
"If the Santa Fe economists found the prospect (of multidisciplinary collaboration) exciting, however, they also found it vaguely disturbing. And the reason, says Arthur, was something that he didn"t put his finger on until much later. "Economics, as it is usually practiced, operates in a purely deductive mode," he says. Every economic situation is first translated into a mathematical exercise, which the economics agents are supposed to solve, by rigorous, analytical reasoning. But then here were [economist John] Holland, the neural net people, and the other machine-learning theorists.
And they were all talking about agents that operate in an inductive mode, in which they try to reason from fragmentary data to a useful internal model. Induction is what allows [us] to infer the existence of a cat from the glimpse of a tail vanishing around a corner. Induction is what allows [us] to walk through the zoo and classify some exotic creature as a bird, even though we"ve never seen a scarlet-crested cockatoo before. Induction is what allows [us] to survive in a messy, unpredictable, and often incomprehensible world."
We find ourselves, today, with our feet firmly planted in the threshold of a new era, an era of sweeping adaptive changes in the way that we conceive and formulate our future financial courses and predict their outcomes.
A New World wherein quantum dynamics, chaos theory, complexity and artificial intelligence, interact with psychology, ecology, biology and sociology, not to name economy, medicine, pedagogy and astronomy. All these developments constitute on a veritable holistic and original bold approach to the capture of the significance, and of the essence of the world of commerce between peoples, and of peoples themselves within their cosmic spheres.
Thus the inception of the new field of Psychoeconomics with its unlimited possibilities for application in our understanding of chaotic, unpredictable and elusive phenomena in a broad variety of disciplines.
But, this kind of exercise in attempting to control, organize and predict outcomes is not new. Philosophers, warriors, strategists, members of the vast assortment of religions, magicians and politicians, have used their skills through the ages, to try to gain an edge of Darwinian advantage in the universal quest for one"s adaptation and survival. In other words, the evolutionary drama is being played afresh in the corporate office and in the boardroom. Put differently: "Survival of the fittest" in the strictest of economical and human of senses is being redux.
We live in a multifactorial society. We are influenced by events, which do not necessarily originate in our proximity or by events, which are not always under our spheres of control and influence. For example, a crisis involving a superpower in a certain region can choke our vital supplies, impose a hardship on our ability to conduct business "as usual" and deprive us from the opportunity of being able to maintain a competitive edge. This can be a serious threat to our business.
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