Complexity

Complexity, Permissionless Innovation, and the English Dance

Recently on EconTalk Russ Roberts talked with Duke University’s Mike Munger about permissionless innovation. The discussion focused on Mike’s recent essay on permissionless innovation, in which he claimed that “permissionless innovation, a strong presumption in favor of allowing experimentation with new technologies and with new business platforms that use those technologies” is the most important, …

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Complexity, Heuristics, and the Traveling Salesman Problem

Add this one to your long reads queue, because it’s well worth it: Tom Vanderbilt writes in Nautilus about the traveling salesman problem and how algorithmic optimization helps us understand human behavior more deeply. It’s a thorough and nuanced analysis of the various applications of algorithms to solve the traveling salesman problem — what’s the …

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Doing What Seems Like It Should Work: Experiments, Tests, and Social Progress

Michael Giberson My title is a little grand, at least the “and social progress,” but maybe it will be justified in some later, more carefully worked out version of the ideas clashing about in my head. As this is a blog, I’m sharing the more immediate, less carefully worked out version. 😉 I’ve been reading …

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An Example of What Not to Do in Persuasion

Lynne Kiesling Alex Tabarrok has an excellent post this morning at Marginal Revolution: David Warsh and Paul Krugman try to write Hayek out of the history of macroeconomics. … It is true that many of Hayek’s specific ideas about business cycles vanished from the mainstream discussion under the Keynesian juggernaut but what Krugman and Warsh miss is that …

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Resiliency Comes from More Risk of Bank Failure, Not Less

Lynne Kiesling In the always-smart-and-interesting City AM paper from London, Anthony Evans makes an important argument that has been overlooked in financial regulation debates: risk of failure is what creates system resilience, and regulation creates brittle monocultures. He writes in the context of last week’s Independent Commission on Banking (ICB) recommendations for creating regulatory divisions …

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