e-book

Discovering artificial economics: how agents learn and economies evolve

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W e live in an astonishingly complex world. Yet what we do in our everyday lives seems simple enough. Most of us conform to society's rules, pursue familiar strategies, and achieve reasonably predictable outcomes. In our role as economic agents, we simply peddle our wares and earn our daily bread as best we can. So where on earth does this astonishing complexity come from? Much of it is ubiquitous in nature, to be sure, but part of it lies within and between us. Part of it Comes from those games of interaction that humans play-games against nature, games against each other, games of competition, games of cooperation. In bygone eras, people simply hunted and gathered to come up with dimer. Today you can find theoretical economists scratching mysterious equations on whiteboards (not even blackboards) and getting paid to do this. In the modern economy, most of us make our living in a niche created for us by what others do. Because we've become more dependent on each other, our economy as a whole has become more strongly interactive.

A strongly interactive economy can behave in weird and wonderful ways, even when we think we understand all its individual parts. The resulting path of economic development is packed with unexpected twists and turns, reflecting the diversity of decisions taken by different economic agents. But an understanding of economic outcomes requires an understanding of each agent's beliefs and expectations and the precise way in which the agents interact. In a strongly interactive economy, the cumulative pattern of interactions can produce unexpected phenomena, emergent behavior that can be lawful in its own right. Yet this is far from obvious if we study economics.

Most of twentieth-century economics has been reductionist in character. Reductionism tries to break down complex economies ilito simpler parts, like industries and households, and those parts, in turn, into even simpler ones, like jobs and persons. Although this approach has enjoyed some success, it has also left us with a major void. Reductionism can never tell us how our economy really works. To find this out, we must combine our knowledge of the smallest parts, the individual agents, with our knowledge of their interactions to build up a behavioral picture of the whole economy. To date, macroeconomics has not devised a convincing
way of doing this.

Almost thirty years of research have convinced me that the conventional wisdom in economics fails to explain kcow economies behave collectively and develop over time. There are several reasons for this. First, the key elements of our economy, human agents, are not homogeneous. They're amazingly diverse. Second, human reasoning is not just deductive, it's often inductive, intuitive, adaptive. Third, geographical and economic patterns that we take for granted have not been forged by economic necessity alone. They're the outcome of a highly evolutionary interplay between two different architects: the expected and the unexpected. Yet it's the world of the expected, where necessity rules, that dominates our classical views about social and economic behavior. This classical economic world is a fully deterministic one, a world of stasis resting at a stable
equilibrium.

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Ketersediaan

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Informasi Detail

Judul Seri

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No. Panggil

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Penerbit

Colorado : Westview Press., 2000

Deskripsi Fisik

HB97.3.B38

Bahasa

English

ISBN/ISSN

0-8133-9770-7

Klasifikasi

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Tipe Isi

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Tipe Media

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Tipe Pembawa

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Edisi

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Subjek

EKONOMI

Info Detail Spesifik

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Pernyataan Tanggungjawab

agus

Versi lain/terkait

Lampiran Berkas

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