External Professor,
Santa Fe Institute
and Visiting Researcher,
Intelligent Systems Lab, PARC
Schumpeter Prize in Economics 1990; Guggenheim Fellow, 1987-88; Fellow
of the Econometric Society
Dean and Virginia Morrison Professor of
Population Studies and Economics, Stanford; Professor of Human Biology,
Stanford, 1983-1996
Santa Fe Institute: Member,
Science Board 1988-2006; Board of Trustees 1994-2004; Director,
Economics Program, 1987-90, and 1994-95
Ph.D. in Operations Research,
Univ. Calif. Berkeley, 1973; MA in Mathematics, Univ. Mich., Ann
Arbor,1969
Interests
- Technology and Innovation. In the last few
years I have become deeply fascinated with technology and how
it evolves. Technology creates our modern world and our modern
economy and its evolution—innovation—drives all our
hopes for the future. Yet we do not understand technology or innovation
at all well—there is no "-ology of technology."
These challenges intrigue me. I am currently writing a book, The
Nature of Technology, that will look deeply into technology
and its innovation. It will argue that all technologies share
certain principles; these determine the character of technology
and how novel technologies come into being—and hence how
innovation works
- A More Realistic Economics. I have been involved
since its early days in the science of complexity: the science
of how patterns and structures self-organize. My particular interest
here has been in creating a more realistic, non-equilibrium version
of economics. This type of economics assumes that the actors in
the economy do not necessarily face well-defined problems or use
exaggerated forms of rationality in making their decisions. And
they react to the outcomes they together create. Viewed this way,
we find that the economy is not in stasis, but always forming,
always evolving, and always "discovering" fresh novelty.
It contains pockets of indeterminacy and shows properties we associated
with formal complexity
- Increasing Returns. I spent much of my earlier
career developing a theoretical framework for economic allocation
under increasing returns, in particular studying the dynamics
of lock-in to one of many possible outcomes under the influence
of small, random events. (Several of my papers
are collected in my 1994 book Increasing Returns and Path Dependence
in the Economy. ) High technology operates under increasing
returns, and to the degree modern economies are shifting toward
high tech, the different economics of increasing returns alters
the character of competition, business culture, and appropriate
government policy in these economies.
Speaker
I am a well-known keynote
speaker at conferences and meetings. Some recent topics: How is
the digital revolution playing out in the economy? How exactly
does innovation work and how can it be fostered? If manufacturing
and services are heading overseas to China and other countries,
how can the US and Europe retain their national competitiveness?
In what way will the new technologies—IT, genomics, nanotech—unfold
in the economy?
Three Books
The Nature of Technology:
What it Is and How it Evolves. The Free Press,
2007 and Penguin (UK) 2007.
The
Economy as an Evolving Complex System II, edited with Steven
Durlauf and David Lane, Addison-Wesley, Reading, Mass., Series in
the Sciences of Complexity, 1997
Increasing
Returns and Path Dependence in the Economy, Ann Arbor,
University of Michigan Press, 1994
Last Modified:
Dec 27, 2006 |
