25 quotes
Perfect order is boring, perfect randomness is boring, but complex systems are interesting.
The Other Side Of The Coin (2008)
Orthodox tools based on a normal distribution therefore fail exactly where they are most needed, at the extremes.
The Other Side Of The Coin (2008)
The market can quickly seize up. Prices don't adjust in a smooth continuous fashion, but instead abruptly reconfigure themselves, like the earth's crust during an earthquake.
The Other Side Of The Coin (2008)
For even money itself has no value if there is no network of people to recognize it.
The Other Side Of The Coin (2008)
A society in which each person is hell bent on maximizing his or her own utility, may therefore have declining overall utility.
The Other Side Of The Coin (2008)
Money, having freed itself from the physical universe, has become number itself, and finance a strange form of mathematical alchemy.
The Other Side Of The Coin (2008)
Advanced technology is great at tasks such as keeping an airliner flying several thousand feet in the air, but is easily crippled by social complications.
The Other Side Of The Coin (2008)
There is something intrinsically upside down and counter-intuitive in the relationship between money and happiness.
The Other Side Of The Coin (2008)
The neoclassical dogma of diminishing returns is completely wrong - success begets success and wealth begets wealth.
The Other Side Of The Coin (2008)
The race to the moon was never really about the moon - its utility didn't rest in samples of moon rock. It was about capitalism versus communism, right versus left.
The Other Side Of The Coin (2008)
To balance the economy, we need first to balance our priorities, and abandon rigid ideologies.
The Other Side Of The Coin (2008)
To build a genuinely sustainable economy, we need to recognize and embrace the dynamic nature of the world, and free ourselves from the dead holds of static dogma.
The Other Side Of The Coin (2008)
Economists often talk about the benefits of choice, but rational economic man doesn't actually have much freedom to chose, because he is a slave to his own preferences.
The Other Side Of The Coin (2008)
Not only is Homo economicus self-centered, he is a murdering psychopath. However, as with much of neoclassical economic thought, there is an element of circularity here.
The Other Side Of The Coin (2008)
Adam Smith's invisible hand does exist, but as an emergent property of a complex system. It has a fuzzy tendency to reduce big price discrepancies, but it acts in a rather haphazard way.
The Other Side Of The Coin (2008)
The economy is crooked not straight; and mainstream economists are like flat-earthers who keep saying the world is flat despite all the evidence to the contrary.
The Other Side Of The Coin (2008)
The invisible hand is an emergent property of this system, which never reaches an optimal equilibrium, but instead is fundamentally dynamic and unstable, with complex effects on society.
The Other Side Of The Coin (2008)
The economy is a nonlinear fractal system, where the smallest scales are linked to the largest, and the decisions of the central bank are affected by the gut instincts of the people on the street.
The Other Side Of The Coin (2008)
Mathematics was not just about keeping track of were the moon was going, but also where the money was going.
The Other Side Of The Coin (2008)
It can be annoying to find out the name of a famous local landmark has no significance other than belonging to some distant relation or drinking buddy of the explorer.
The Other Side Of The Coin (2008)