Complex System Approaches to 21st Century Challenges: Inequality, Climate Change, and New Technologies

Objective

The global economy is undergoing a series of structural transformations including the transition to net-zero due to climate change, technological change, demographic change, and shifting balances of economic power.  These structural changes raise critical issues of economic justice and political economy, and have contributed to political polarization.  Complexity economics is increasingly providing new ways of understanding these problems.  This workshop reviewed these applications, discussed how they can be expanded, and identified new avenues of research.

For this meeting we issued a call for papers and gathered the best new work in this field.  We also had a few invited talks.  These new results were presented, along with a discussion. Participants for the working group were drawn from a range of social, behavioral, and physical science disciplines.  A significant proportion of the participants were early career scholars. Outputs included original research papers and perspective papers. Original research papers will be published in a special issue of the Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization, while perspective papers will be gathered in a volume to be titled “The Economy as an Evolving Complex System, Part IV”.

Conference organizers and guest editors 

Jenna Bednar (University of Michigan)

Eric Beinhocker (University of Oxford)

Maria del Rio Chanona (Complexity Science Hub Vienna)

J. Doyne Farmer (University of Oxford)

Jagoda Kaszowska (Bank of Poland)

François Lafond (University of Oxford)

Penny Mealy (World Bank)

Marco Pangallo (CENTAI)

Confirmed participants

W. Brian Arthur (Xerox PARC)

Robert Axtell (George Mason University)

Alexandra Brintrup (University of Cambridge)

Tino Cuellar (Carnagie Endowment for International Peace)

Christian Diem (Complexity Science Hub Vienna)

Marion Dumas (London School of Economics)

James Evans (University of Chicago)

Tatiana Filatova (Unversity of Twente)

John Geanakoplos (Yale University)

Cars Hommes (University of Amsterdam)

Ray Iwanowski (SECOR Asset Management)

Alissa Kleinnijenhuis (Stanford University)

David McMillon (Emory University)

Pamela Mishkin (OpenAI)

Irene Monasterolo (EDHEC Business School)

Jose Moran (University of Oxford)

Robert Natzler (Baillie Gifford & Co.)

Chloe Nicole Thurston (Northwestern University)

Scott Page (University of Michigan)

Anton Pichler (Complexity Science Hub Vienna)

Tony Pipa (Brookings Institute)

Jenny Schuetz (Brookings Institute)

Anne-Marie Slaughter (New America Foundation)

Geoffrey West (Santa Fe Institute)

Vicky Yang (MIT)

Muhammed Yildrim (MIT)