Debate the Issues: Complexity and Policy making
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The OECD’s New Approaches to Economic Challenges (NAEC) initiative invited experts from inside and outside the Organisation to discuss complexity theory as a means to better understand the interconnected nature of the trends and influences shaping our socio-economic environment. Their contributions, brought together here, examine the assumptions, strengths and shortcomings of traditional models, and propose a way to build new ones that would take into account factors such as psychology, history and culture neglected by these models. The authors concentrate on the discipline of economics as such; the financial system; and applications of complexity theory to policy making and governance. They argue that a new narrative is needed to integrate the hopes, values, attitudes and behaviours of people into economics along with the facts and data economists are more used to dealing with.
Applications of complexity theory
The city is humanity’s greatest invention. An artificial ecosystem that enables millions of people to live in close proximity and to collaborate in the creation of new forms of value. While cities were invented many millennia ago, their economic importance has increased dramatically since the Industrial Revolution until they now account for the major fraction of the global economy. All human life is there and so the study of cities crosses boundaries among economics, finance, engineering, ecology, sociology, anthropology, and, well, almost all forms of knowledge. Yet, while we have great knowledge in each of these domains individually, we have little scientific knowledge of how they come together in the overall system of systems that is a city. In brief: How does a city work?
Also available in: French
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