1 00:00:12,860 --> 00:00:21,890 Hello, everyone. My name is Charles Gun-Free, I'm director of the Oxford Martin School, and let me welcome you to the Oxford Martin School. 2 00:00:21,890 --> 00:00:27,260 When I buy a book, I scribble in the book the date that I bought it and where I bought it. 3 00:00:27,260 --> 00:00:32,750 So I know where I first became aware of aware of and former speaker. 4 00:00:32,750 --> 00:00:35,810 And it was, and I've just looked it up, saw myself down below. 5 00:00:35,810 --> 00:00:45,320 It's July 1998 and I was in Seattle at the time and the book was James Gleeks book on Chaos. 6 00:00:45,320 --> 00:00:54,830 And it has a whole chapter on the dynamical systems collective Santacruz, of which Darwin was one of the one of the members. 7 00:00:54,830 --> 00:00:57,860 This was an extraordinary group of people in the late seventies. 8 00:00:57,860 --> 00:01:06,860 And you all before you eyes then weren't you who it just expanding work and bringing forward the field of complexity science? 9 00:01:06,860 --> 00:01:12,620 I have to say I find it deeply depressing because I was just doing just out of my Ph.D. myself, 10 00:01:12,620 --> 00:01:16,820 and no one was going to write a chapter on what I had done in my day. 11 00:01:16,820 --> 00:01:25,820 So that was one of the founders of the field of complexity science and has gone on to do very many major things at Los Alamos. 12 00:01:25,820 --> 00:01:35,360 And then most recently in Oxford, which he joined nearly 10 years ago and then today is the co-director of the Oxford Martin programme on Post Carbon 13 00:01:35,360 --> 00:01:42,980 Transition and a principal investigator in the Oxford Martin programme on 10 Technological and economic change. 14 00:01:42,980 --> 00:01:51,830 He's also a professor in the Mathematical Mathematics Institute here in Oxford and external professor at the famous Santa Fe Institute. 15 00:01:51,830 --> 00:01:57,470 And then going to be talking this evening on how complexity can resolve the crisis in economics. 16 00:01:57,470 --> 00:02:07,040 Then. So thanks, everybody for coming. 17 00:02:07,040 --> 00:02:10,640 When I was invited to give a lecture on an evolving economic thought, 18 00:02:10,640 --> 00:02:16,220 I couldn't resist trying to impart what I've learnt in my twenty five years 19 00:02:16,220 --> 00:02:20,960 or so of working in economics as a physicist who sits in a maths department, 20 00:02:20,960 --> 00:02:24,930 who does economics, who's also dabbled in biology and a few other areas. 21 00:02:24,930 --> 00:02:32,600 And and so I'm trying to to sort of distil the main things I've learnt during those twenty five years. 22 00:02:32,600 --> 00:02:35,930 This is also, by the way, sort of a I'm writing a popular book. 23 00:02:35,930 --> 00:02:42,290 And so this is the first test run to try and present what I'm trying to say in the book. 24 00:02:42,290 --> 00:02:48,440 So economic thought changes through time. You know, when we're in high school, 25 00:02:48,440 --> 00:02:55,670 we're taught the scientific method and the retarded as though it's just cast in stone and everybody does it that way. 26 00:02:55,670 --> 00:02:58,070 But in my experience, that's not at all true. 27 00:02:58,070 --> 00:03:04,880 It's vastly different in different disciplines, and it evolves through time and economics is evolving through time. 28 00:03:04,880 --> 00:03:10,280 It's becoming more empirical science. I've really seen that in the last decade, 29 00:03:10,280 --> 00:03:20,120 but it's experiencing tension because the changes it's finding are not completely compatible with the theoretical framework that's been set up. 30 00:03:20,120 --> 00:03:26,930 It's also had some problems where there have been voices of protest that the 2008 financial crisis, 31 00:03:26,930 --> 00:03:32,960 where the models were completely abandoned during the crisis because it was clear they weren't relevant to what was going on, 32 00:03:32,960 --> 00:03:39,110 and there were a lot of criticism that they should have done a better job of being ready for something like that. 33 00:03:39,110 --> 00:03:49,550 Inequality, actually, we were at the OECD a few weeks ago, and Gabriela Ramos said that bad economics led to bad politics. 34 00:03:49,550 --> 00:03:57,110 So we're experiencing, you know, a period where people are sceptical about experts because they feel like they got 35 00:03:57,110 --> 00:04:01,820 bad advice from them or the experts in many areas don't agree with each other, 36 00:04:01,820 --> 00:04:11,180 which never looks good. And and we're, you know, we're experiencing the consequences of layers of society. 37 00:04:11,180 --> 00:04:15,500 We never thought we were going to see them from are significantly caused by bad 38 00:04:15,500 --> 00:04:20,750 economic models and bad economic policies being put into practise as a result. 39 00:04:20,750 --> 00:04:27,170 And then the big one is climate change, which is, after all, caused by the economy, and we need to figure out how to fix it. 40 00:04:27,170 --> 00:04:33,620 So we really need guidance from economics, and I would argue we're not getting the guidance we need. 41 00:04:33,620 --> 00:04:38,720 So this is these are these are the factors that led me to say that there's a crisis. 42 00:04:38,720 --> 00:04:40,460 But even more specifically, 43 00:04:40,460 --> 00:04:47,480 there is there is a cognitive dissonance within economics because there's a theoretical machinery that's based on rational expectations. 44 00:04:47,480 --> 00:04:51,200 Behavioural economics says this is wrong. OK. 45 00:04:51,200 --> 00:04:56,450 You may not know what this means. I'll explain in a bit. Can adding friction save it or a bigger change is needed? 46 00:04:56,450 --> 00:05:02,930 So I'm going to try and discuss this during the course of my talk. I'll come back and explain what these words mean now. 47 00:05:02,930 --> 00:05:03,710 But before I do, 48 00:05:03,710 --> 00:05:10,910 I want to talk a little bit about what the economy is because I think if we if we if we think the right way about what the economy is, 49 00:05:10,910 --> 00:05:14,960 then we set the scope and the goals of what we're trying to do differently. 50 00:05:14,960 --> 00:05:22,370 And that affects the way we talk about things. Now I'm going to argue that if I had to describe the economy in three words, 51 00:05:22,370 --> 00:05:29,900 it's the metabolism of civilisation and that it converts natural resources and human effort into goods and services. 52 00:05:29,900 --> 00:05:37,250 It provides us with things we need and don't need, but it provides us with all the stuff that processes a lot of information to make that happen. 53 00:05:37,250 --> 00:05:42,890 And it's very much like a metabolism in a biological organism, which takes some form of food, 54 00:05:42,890 --> 00:05:47,930 breaks it down into different components, and then reassembled it in the stuff that we need. 55 00:05:47,930 --> 00:05:51,980 That's just what the economy is doing. The difference is, instead of chemicals, 56 00:05:51,980 --> 00:05:58,340 it's happening in a much larger scale level with material stuff and that the 57 00:05:58,340 --> 00:06:02,420 economy is a truly remarkable thing that I don't think we properly appreciate. 58 00:06:02,420 --> 00:06:10,100 It coordinates, and I will argue it coordinates and amplifies the activities of ecologies of specialists. 59 00:06:10,100 --> 00:06:14,750 Now what do I mean to that? Well, we're all specialists. OK. I am a physicist. 60 00:06:14,750 --> 00:06:16,090 I'm working in economics. 61 00:06:16,090 --> 00:06:21,560 I'm sure if we went around the room, we'd see lots of different specialities and what people are doing and you go more broadly. 62 00:06:21,560 --> 00:06:29,270 I mean, there's there's tens of thousands of occupations and skills, and we all know how to do a specific thing. 63 00:06:29,270 --> 00:06:36,530 But we're all interacting with each other, just like, say, in a biological ecology animal specialise in doing a certain kind of activity. 64 00:06:36,530 --> 00:06:47,470 And then ecology is about the study of how those interactions happen in a more holistic way and how those interactions take place. 65 00:06:47,470 --> 00:06:53,500 It allows us to do things that we could never do on our own. Imagine that each of us had our little plot of land. 66 00:06:53,500 --> 00:06:59,650 We divided the Earth up. We all got our little plot of land. The rule was You can interact with anybody. 67 00:06:59,650 --> 00:07:06,490 You've got to survive. How many of us would survive? Probably close to none. 68 00:07:06,490 --> 00:07:13,390 You know, we owe our lives to the planet. Could never support the population has not by a factor of a thousand or 10000. 69 00:07:13,390 --> 00:07:19,000 Even if we didn't have the economy to boost what we're doing now, 70 00:07:19,000 --> 00:07:26,560 just to give a little spot a view of richness of just one thing take the laptop that I have sitting here in front of me. 71 00:07:26,560 --> 00:07:35,120 Here is the physical supply chain of a laptop is constructed by some fellow named Leo, and a lot of hard work went into this. 72 00:07:35,120 --> 00:07:41,770 And you can see with the little numbers and the arrows showing how the basic raw materials get taken out of the ground. 73 00:07:41,770 --> 00:07:48,460 They get shipped around the world to other places and processed. They get smelted assembled into larger parts. 74 00:07:48,460 --> 00:07:55,450 Those parts could ship to new places. Those get assembled a laptop, get shipped somewhere, you know, and the tax bill goes to Ireland. 75 00:07:55,450 --> 00:08:00,160 And so. So it's a remarkably complex thing. 76 00:08:00,160 --> 00:08:05,350 And if you think about it, compare it, say to a human birth, which is a remarkable process. 77 00:08:05,350 --> 00:08:12,130 I mean, the closest thing we have to a miracle. But it does all happen inside of a fairly small place takes place in about nine months. 78 00:08:12,130 --> 00:08:16,870 This takes a couple of years from the stuff getting dug out of the ground, the laptop getting assembled, 79 00:08:16,870 --> 00:08:21,550 and it's coming from all over the world and miraculously coming together in one place. 80 00:08:21,550 --> 00:08:25,540 Now imagine we had a Google economics. 81 00:08:25,540 --> 00:08:30,850 So what do I mean by that that instead of just having, you know, map you could like, 82 00:08:30,850 --> 00:08:37,990 take your phone and you can point pointed at a building and it would tell you about the economic activity that was going on there. 83 00:08:37,990 --> 00:08:41,330 Imagine that you could see the flow of the goods and services in and out of the building. 84 00:08:41,330 --> 00:08:46,690 So, you know, if it was the Apple headquarters, you'd see some some part of this picture. 85 00:08:46,690 --> 00:08:51,670 You can see the stocks and flows of capital because of course, to make all this stuff, 86 00:08:51,670 --> 00:08:57,100 you've got to have money flowing in because money is like 8p in biology. 87 00:08:57,100 --> 00:09:01,390 It's the energising thing that makes stuff happen. 88 00:09:01,390 --> 00:09:07,660 People that have money can just wave their wand and people will start working and doing stuff. 89 00:09:07,660 --> 00:09:11,260 There's a web of contracts that is to produce all this stuff. 90 00:09:11,260 --> 00:09:15,100 All of these providers have contracts for their workers, have contracts with each other. 91 00:09:15,100 --> 00:09:23,770 These contracts link their activities together and and tell us, interact through time because contracts have conditions. 92 00:09:23,770 --> 00:09:30,040 And if this happens, then that happens. There's demography and occupational capabilities. 93 00:09:30,040 --> 00:09:36,010 There's a heterogeneous population on the globe that's doing very different activities to make this happen. 94 00:09:36,010 --> 00:09:39,370 It tells us it would tell us about wealth and poverty. Who's getting rich? 95 00:09:39,370 --> 00:09:44,980 Who's getting poorer? Tell us about ownership. Well, we know it's very concentrated. 96 00:09:44,980 --> 00:09:52,660 It could tell us about the ecology of innovation. Who are the thinkers that are that are influencing the people that are doing this stuff? 97 00:09:52,660 --> 00:10:02,170 It would tell us about the physical and environmental impacts, how much carbon is getting emitted, how poorly are they doing at recycling materials? 98 00:10:02,170 --> 00:10:07,210 It would tell us about the regulatory constraints that are shaping what's going on, which is also an essential part. 99 00:10:07,210 --> 00:10:13,030 And I put Typekit because this is just the beginning of the story. Now, how complicated is it? 100 00:10:13,030 --> 00:10:17,560 Or at least let's put some numbers on how big it is. Well, the production network. 101 00:10:17,560 --> 00:10:26,320 So if we really look at this for all the production of everything on the globe, we're talking about the order of 50 50 million firms. 102 00:10:26,320 --> 00:10:34,210 Those firms have billions of physical links to each other because each firm, as we see in this picture, is getting inputs from the other firm. 103 00:10:34,210 --> 00:10:41,770 So each firm is profiting from the innovations the other firms making the whole thing's very closely linked together. 104 00:10:41,770 --> 00:10:48,520 There's there's a network of households, the order of two billion of them, the order of three and a half million workers. 105 00:10:48,520 --> 00:10:53,680 There's trillions of links to the things they consumed, the people they work for, the contracts they make. 106 00:10:53,680 --> 00:11:00,130 And there's a web of contracts. There's probably the order of a trillion contracts. They're active on the Earth at this point in time. 107 00:11:00,130 --> 00:11:03,940 And it's a dynamic contract expires. A new contract gets made. 108 00:11:03,940 --> 00:11:07,600 It might be different, OK, the economies heterogeneous. 109 00:11:07,600 --> 00:11:15,790 So this is a picture of how prices have changed for various goods in the United States over the last 20 years. 110 00:11:15,790 --> 00:11:24,760 So at the top, you look at hospital services, which have gone up by a factor of two hundred and twenty five percent or so in the US during 20 years. 111 00:11:24,760 --> 00:11:29,110 And you look at the bottom and television sets that have dropped in price so much that it's 112 00:11:29,110 --> 00:11:33,550 actually hard to tell just how close they were getting to being free from this picture. 113 00:11:33,550 --> 00:11:41,740 And there's a lot of stuff in between. So it's a very heterogeneous process. Take. 114 00:11:41,740 --> 00:11:47,830 So let me just say so if you read in the newspaper that inflation is two per. 115 00:11:47,830 --> 00:11:58,990 Well, what does that really mean? That means that for hospitals, it's a whole lot more than two percent, and for televisions, it's minus 15 percent. 116 00:11:58,990 --> 00:12:07,810 So it's a very heterogeneous number, and the average inflation actually tells you only a very crude thing about what's actually going on. 117 00:12:07,810 --> 00:12:11,590 Take another figure. Like unemployment, you read that unemployment is five percent. 118 00:12:11,590 --> 00:12:21,350 What does that mean? Well, here's a histogram down there of in the lower left corner of unemployment rates for different occupations. 119 00:12:21,350 --> 00:12:26,560 So if you divide the world into, say, four hundred and fifty or so occupations, what are the unemployment rates? 120 00:12:26,560 --> 00:12:30,100 Well, if you're a nurse, the unemployment rate's really low. 121 00:12:30,100 --> 00:12:36,820 And if you're an actor or a boilermaker, the unemployment rate's, you know, twenty five percent or more. 122 00:12:36,820 --> 00:12:43,750 And the network picture that we've constructed over there on on the right is showing how if you 123 00:12:43,750 --> 00:12:49,990 organise occupations based on similarity of their tasks to each other and or organise them, 124 00:12:49,990 --> 00:12:54,490 alternatively, we could have organised on job transition probabilities between occupations. 125 00:12:54,490 --> 00:12:56,050 Then you see, there's a very clear structure. 126 00:12:56,050 --> 00:13:02,180 There's some occupations down in the construction industry in the lower left of the picture with very high unemployment rates. 127 00:13:02,180 --> 00:13:08,110 There's occupations in the health industry and the right with very low unemployment rates, 128 00:13:08,110 --> 00:13:12,490 technological progress, essential thing driving economic growth. 129 00:13:12,490 --> 00:13:21,850 If you make a histogram of of of the rate of improvement of different products, you see, it's again extremely heterogeneous and very skewed. 130 00:13:21,850 --> 00:13:24,220 That is a kind of a bell curve in the middle. 131 00:13:24,220 --> 00:13:32,650 And you can see if you look at the x axis, which is showing the average annual growth rate over a close to fifty year period. 132 00:13:32,650 --> 00:13:36,400 Then you're seeing that some technologies are. 133 00:13:36,400 --> 00:13:43,960 Most of them are in the middle of this bell curve. But there are some technologies out on the tail like things relating to computers that have grown 134 00:13:43,960 --> 00:13:49,990 at much faster rates than and have improved at much faster rates than the rest of the economy. 135 00:13:49,990 --> 00:13:56,680 And if you guided even to a more fine grained level, and here are the pictures changed, it's a little you have to. 136 00:13:56,680 --> 00:14:01,510 We're representing things that are in a different way because the y axis is now the improvement rate. 137 00:14:01,510 --> 00:14:08,500 So you start on the left side with optical telecom, which is improving at an astounding sixty five percent per year. 138 00:14:08,500 --> 00:14:15,550 And on the other side, you've got a more, let's say, basic technology like milling machine or electric motor, 139 00:14:15,550 --> 00:14:22,000 things that have been around now for hundreds of years that are improving at rates of a few percent per year. 140 00:14:22,000 --> 00:14:26,800 So there's a huge. Disparity and heterogeneity and these improvement rates. 141 00:14:26,800 --> 00:14:35,270 Now finally, people are heterogeneous, and we have to remember when we think about the economy, we're all different and we think differently. 142 00:14:35,270 --> 00:14:44,200 We have different needs. And that's another important factor that needs to be taken into account whenever we think about economics. 143 00:14:44,200 --> 00:14:48,100 Now there's a caricature of economics as being a counting plus behaviour. 144 00:14:48,100 --> 00:14:53,200 This leads some things out. Maybe come back and say a bit about it, but let's just start there. 145 00:14:53,200 --> 00:14:59,350 And so the accounting is, in a sense, the easy part because of accountings. 146 00:14:59,350 --> 00:15:06,850 Accounting is mechanical. And you know, every household, at least conceptually has a balance sheet. 147 00:15:06,850 --> 00:15:12,100 And on that balance sheet, as the assets and liabilities, the things they own, the things they owe to other people. 148 00:15:12,100 --> 00:15:20,620 And as I already said, there's the order of two billion balance sheets in the world and there are thousands of entries, 149 00:15:20,620 --> 00:15:27,160 I would guess, on the average balance sheet. Certainly, people in the developed world have thousands of entries on our balance sheets, 150 00:15:27,160 --> 00:15:32,230 and that means that when you add everything up, we have, you know, 151 00:15:32,230 --> 00:15:33,070 what's already said, 152 00:15:33,070 --> 00:15:41,950 there's trillions of contracts and our balance sheets are interlinked because my liabilities or somebody else's assets in general. 153 00:15:41,950 --> 00:15:48,400 So every time you have an asset liability relationship, those balance sheets get linked together every time you have a contract. 154 00:15:48,400 --> 00:15:55,570 Those balance sheets are linked together. So you have this vast network with two billion links and lots of with two billion nodes, 155 00:15:55,570 --> 00:16:02,260 trillions of links and a complicated interacting structure that's changing dynamically in time. 156 00:16:02,260 --> 00:16:06,680 So accounting is pretty complicated thing, but at least it's straightforward. 157 00:16:06,680 --> 00:16:12,610 It's clear, it's like physics because there's conservation laws, they're very clear rules about how things work. 158 00:16:12,610 --> 00:16:19,960 Now behaviour. Now we get to the sticky part because behaviour is harder to understand. 159 00:16:19,960 --> 00:16:24,460 I guess I don't know if you can read the caption down there. 160 00:16:24,460 --> 00:16:29,920 The This is a Gary Larson cartoon. Yes, they're all fools. 161 00:16:29,920 --> 00:16:34,690 Yes, they're all fools, gentlemen. But the question remains What kind of fools are they? 162 00:16:34,690 --> 00:16:42,310 No, actually, that's not quite what how economist model behaviour, but I couldn't resist putting it in there the way they model behaviour. 163 00:16:42,310 --> 00:16:46,300 At least the typical model is in terms of rational expectations. 164 00:16:46,300 --> 00:16:51,700 So the concept is there's a rational agent who can compute everything that is a rational agent. 165 00:16:51,700 --> 00:16:57,610 Can you know how well you might? You might or might not have all the information or whatever information they have. 166 00:16:57,610 --> 00:17:03,970 They can do all the computations they need to decide the consequences of that information. 167 00:17:03,970 --> 00:17:14,950 And now, in modern macro and the rational expectations model began in a circa 1960 with John Meuthen had some antecedents before that. 168 00:17:14,950 --> 00:17:20,710 But in modern macro, rational expectation is layered on with frictions. 169 00:17:20,710 --> 00:17:26,830 Now what does that mean? It means that. And by the way, I'm going to I might refer to this as constrained rationality. 170 00:17:26,830 --> 00:17:33,130 So it means that each agent has a utility function that tells them what they like and don't like in a macroeconomic model. 171 00:17:33,130 --> 00:17:40,330 That would mean always that what they want to do is maximise their discounted consumption. 172 00:17:40,330 --> 00:17:47,290 So I want to consume as much as possible so the rational agent will maximise the utility taking others into account. 173 00:17:47,290 --> 00:17:54,160 But the world imposes constraints which are called frictions, which make this harder to do and make that the, 174 00:17:54,160 --> 00:17:58,390 you know, full rationality of this in a sense, less complete. 175 00:17:58,390 --> 00:18:03,850 But it actually makes the problem even harder because it just means there are more constraints they have to take into account. 176 00:18:03,850 --> 00:18:11,740 They can still do all the computation they need to do everything they need to do, and you then call this an equilibrium. 177 00:18:11,740 --> 00:18:15,340 If you're in the state where everybody has maximised their utility, 178 00:18:15,340 --> 00:18:20,590 so everybody finds this place and they go to that state and they stay there, and that would be the equilibrium. 179 00:18:20,590 --> 00:18:28,840 But then stuff happens. So things come in from the outside world economies that the equilibrium zus flows down 180 00:18:28,840 --> 00:18:32,860 a lightning bolt and hits the economy with a shock and knocks it away from equilibrium. 181 00:18:32,860 --> 00:18:39,280 And it's like this rocking horse that sets the horse rocking and it starts to move back towards equilibrium, 182 00:18:39,280 --> 00:18:41,980 but then just throws another shock and knocks it away. 183 00:18:41,980 --> 00:18:48,070 So the world is constantly, never quite at equilibrium because it's constantly getting hit by these shocks. 184 00:18:48,070 --> 00:18:54,280 And now if you look in a production macro model like, say, the nuts and bolts model, 185 00:18:54,280 --> 00:19:03,100 which is one central banks used to think about the economy of you pick a country, they actually had seven different kinds of shocks. 186 00:19:03,100 --> 00:19:07,690 So zoo sector has seven different colours of lightning bolts he can throw out so he can say, 187 00:19:07,690 --> 00:19:15,460 Let's change labour productivity now, let's change the risk perception. Let's change technologies, wages, prices, spending and monetary policy. 188 00:19:15,460 --> 00:19:20,470 Now these are shocks in the sense that no one can know them in advance. 189 00:19:20,470 --> 00:19:28,110 They come from somewhere else outside. It's not the economists job to understand where these come from and this kind of model. 190 00:19:28,110 --> 00:19:32,820 Now, so what's the research programme of modern mainstream macro? 191 00:19:32,820 --> 00:19:41,280 It's basically you take one of the core models, you add a new friction, you solve that model with a new friction, which is hard. 192 00:19:41,280 --> 00:19:47,010 Then you test does that improve the match to empirical facts and then you go back and do it again? 193 00:19:47,010 --> 00:19:54,210 And each one of these steps might take you a year or something. Now what are the problems, in my view and this approach? 194 00:19:54,210 --> 00:20:02,070 First of all, experiments don't support the foundational assumption. You know, they show beyond a shadow of doubt that people aren't very rational. 195 00:20:02,070 --> 00:20:06,720 It's been difficult to match empirical facts. I mean, I've said they are getting better at it. 196 00:20:06,720 --> 00:20:11,820 There's been a lot of work that's gone into this and matched to experimental facts is getting closer. 197 00:20:11,820 --> 00:20:20,250 Still not quite there. And there are debates about whether the frictions that have to be put in or sensible in order to get those matches to happen. 198 00:20:20,250 --> 00:20:28,350 A lot of people think they're not. But in a sense, an even bigger problem is these models are really hard to solve. 199 00:20:28,350 --> 00:20:33,600 And that's not surprising because rationality is a hard thing to do if if you 200 00:20:33,600 --> 00:20:38,170 want to be completely rational and understand everything that can happen to you. 201 00:20:38,170 --> 00:20:45,960 And and what the right thing to do would be in response to those things then and think about everybody else and what they're thinking. 202 00:20:45,960 --> 00:20:49,590 Then you you really have to solve a pretty serious problem. 203 00:20:49,590 --> 00:20:53,460 So what does it mean? It means you have to simplify the assumptions of the model. 204 00:20:53,460 --> 00:21:00,360 You take those two billion balance sheets and you crunch them down into one balance sheet, or maybe a few balance sheets. 205 00:21:00,360 --> 00:21:09,270 But there's no way you can deal with the complexity of the real world in that kind of a setting because it's just too hard to do the calculations. 206 00:21:09,270 --> 00:21:14,070 The other thing that I'll come back to and say more about is rationality suppresses endogenous dynamics. 207 00:21:14,070 --> 00:21:21,180 That is, the reason that the framework is set up this way is because that's what you see emerge in these models. 208 00:21:21,180 --> 00:21:29,010 These models want to sit at rest. Now there are examples of models that have that spontaneously change, but those models are not the norm. 209 00:21:29,010 --> 00:21:33,840 Ninety nine point nine percent of models you find are more are models that sit at risk. 210 00:21:33,840 --> 00:21:43,110 So if you want to explain the dynamics of the economy because the economy is changing all the time, you have to assume that it's coming from shocks. 211 00:21:43,110 --> 00:21:48,540 And finally, it doesn't take advantage of 21st century technology now. 212 00:21:48,540 --> 00:21:57,210 I already said it's hard. I mention that you simplify things down to only looking at a few balance sheets. 213 00:21:57,210 --> 00:22:04,470 So you take all these people on the left and you say, Well, it's too hard to think about all their balance sheets. 214 00:22:04,470 --> 00:22:08,190 So let's do something like make a representative agent like the one on the right. 215 00:22:08,190 --> 00:22:14,150 That's sort of a polyglot mixture of everybody and assume that's the only person in the world or, if you will, 216 00:22:14,150 --> 00:22:19,590 there's seven billion clones of that person and they work for one firm and that 217 00:22:19,590 --> 00:22:24,150 one firm makes one product and that would be the economy and a baseline model. 218 00:22:24,150 --> 00:22:28,200 Now you start to build it back up and the frontier and modern market. 219 00:22:28,200 --> 00:22:35,880 This was, I have to say, the state of the art 30 years ago. The models from 30 years ago have been put into operation of central banks. 220 00:22:35,880 --> 00:22:39,120 Central banks are still using models that are like this. 221 00:22:39,120 --> 00:22:48,480 But if you open, you know, top economics journal and look at the major activity now to try and build models that have heterogeneous agents, 222 00:22:48,480 --> 00:22:53,070 though you also might get a little nervous because those heterogeneous agents sort 223 00:22:53,070 --> 00:22:58,050 of tend to look like more or less educated versions of the guy on the right or, 224 00:22:58,050 --> 00:23:01,590 you know, richer and poorer versions of the guy on the right. 225 00:23:01,590 --> 00:23:07,860 It's a kind of monochromatic notion of diversity, and you might put in a diversity of households, 226 00:23:07,860 --> 00:23:13,200 but you're not going to have a diversity of firms and products and all the other stuff in that same model. 227 00:23:13,200 --> 00:23:18,930 Or you might have a model with some diversity of firms and products, but you're not going to have a diversity of of agents. 228 00:23:18,930 --> 00:23:27,310 So it's still and it's because it's so hard to solve these models. Technology is tough. 229 00:23:27,310 --> 00:23:34,780 Now, this leads to a kind of catch 22, which is I hope I convinced you in the first part that the economy is complex. 230 00:23:34,780 --> 00:23:40,000 It's a complicated two. It's evolving, so it's changing in time all the time. 231 00:23:40,000 --> 00:23:45,370 And that means that data from the distant past isn't very useful from the data in the present. 232 00:23:45,370 --> 00:23:53,020 And that means historical time series or sure, it is also true that it's not very well recorded as you go further back. 233 00:23:53,020 --> 00:24:04,480 So we don't have that much data. In fact, I estimate that the data that goes into calibrating one of these models is about five hundred bytes. 234 00:24:04,480 --> 00:24:16,540 I notice I didn't say megabytes or even kilobytes bytes, not much data that's determining this is the state of the whole world over a 50 year history. 235 00:24:16,540 --> 00:24:20,890 I estimate there's about five hundred bytes of useful information and in those time series. 236 00:24:20,890 --> 00:24:28,390 So there's very little data. So of course you can't. Any statistician knows you can't then estimate a complicated model. 237 00:24:28,390 --> 00:24:35,650 You have too many free parameters. So that means you can only have a simple model, but the economy is complex, so it's a catch 22. 238 00:24:35,650 --> 00:24:43,960 You know, you're damned if you do and damned if you don't. Now, I also mentioned that the standard macros based on old technology, 239 00:24:43,960 --> 00:24:50,620 I've showed a picture there of the computers that existed at the time as basic machinery was getting set up. 240 00:24:50,620 --> 00:24:55,090 So, you know, the data wasn't being collected by the computer is being collected by hand, 241 00:24:55,090 --> 00:24:59,800 and the whole process that set up in national accounting is oriented around 242 00:24:59,800 --> 00:25:05,080 the thinking that was happening like during World War Two and shortly after. 243 00:25:05,080 --> 00:25:12,610 And. And if you look at the way these models are run now, I mean, OK, the computers, 244 00:25:12,610 --> 00:25:17,950 this giant thing in the background, by the way, is vastly less powerful than my iPhone here. 245 00:25:17,950 --> 00:25:25,720 But you know, you can run most macro models on a laptop, and the computing that's actually done is all spin and find this equilibrium. 246 00:25:25,720 --> 00:25:33,730 It's not tracking all the flows of stuff around the globe and the interactions, so it's not staying up to date with technology. 247 00:25:33,730 --> 00:25:40,810 Now what's the alternative? I would argue it's thinking about the economy as a complex system, which has emergent behaviour. 248 00:25:40,810 --> 00:25:44,380 So that's the definition of a complex system, meaning that you have qualitative, 249 00:25:44,380 --> 00:25:48,640 qualitatively different behaviour than that of the individual components. 250 00:25:48,640 --> 00:25:56,230 The classic example would be the human brain, which is made up of neurones actually so many different kinds of neurones, 251 00:25:56,230 --> 00:25:59,020 but each neurone is still a pretty simple device, 252 00:25:59,020 --> 00:26:07,780 and you would never say, Oh, this neurone is conscious or this neurone is, you know, capable of appreciating a poem or something like that. 253 00:26:07,780 --> 00:26:12,400 Somehow, these eighty six billion neurones interact with each other. 254 00:26:12,400 --> 00:26:19,900 And, you know, many trillions of synapses and we end up with thought. 255 00:26:19,900 --> 00:26:25,060 So there's a clear qualitative difference between the lower level component, my level. 256 00:26:25,060 --> 00:26:30,760 You can show that that a necessary condition for that to happen is nonlinear behaviour, the whole it. 257 00:26:30,760 --> 00:26:34,030 That's what allows the whole not to be equal to the sum of the parts. 258 00:26:34,030 --> 00:26:40,180 And you've got to have that if you you're going to get emergence and across lots of fields. 259 00:26:40,180 --> 00:26:47,530 If you want to understand emergence, you have to you have to model on a small scale to see how that emergence comes up for the larger scale. 260 00:26:47,530 --> 00:26:50,860 Now what's the emergence in the economy? That's what I was saying before. You know, 261 00:26:50,860 --> 00:27:03,100 we collectively act in ways that remarkably amplify our ability to do things and and that I would argue the traditional models are not not capturing. 262 00:27:03,100 --> 00:27:10,880 We're not even equipped to talk about in a sensible way. After all, if you're rational when you have to bother. 263 00:27:10,880 --> 00:27:20,930 Evolving and everything else now completes the economics, which is a field I'm working on now, applies complex systems to and methods to economics. 264 00:27:20,930 --> 00:27:27,230 The conceptual model we would argue for is bounded rationality that is saying that reasoning capabilities are limited 265 00:27:27,230 --> 00:27:31,970 and that's very different than constrain rationality because we're not saying that we're perfectly rational. 266 00:27:31,970 --> 00:27:36,950 We're just constrained by stuff. We're saying, actually, there's a limit to how much we can. 267 00:27:36,950 --> 00:27:45,860 We can solve problems and when we're really limited by that and we have to really think collectively about how we collectively solve problems. 268 00:27:45,860 --> 00:27:52,100 Especial is taking that into account, and I'm showing a picture of Herb Simon, who was one of the first people to articulate that idea. 269 00:27:52,100 --> 00:28:00,210 Now I played a bit of a trick on you and my earlier slide when I said I said rationality and I showed you a picture of Bobby Fischer. 270 00:28:00,210 --> 00:28:04,940 Now, in addition, the fact that if you know anything about chess, you know, Bobby Fischer is a nutcase. 271 00:28:04,940 --> 00:28:09,950 But but chess players are, by definition, guardedly rational. 272 00:28:09,950 --> 00:28:14,030 Why? Because nobody can foresee everything in chess, not deep blue. 273 00:28:14,030 --> 00:28:21,530 Not Bobby Fischer. Not anybody. Because chess is too hard. I think there's a lesson there now. 274 00:28:21,530 --> 00:28:29,090 But on the other hand, there are situations where, say, older children say playing the game of knots and crosses can become rational. 275 00:28:29,090 --> 00:28:34,340 Like, I remember when I was about 10 OK, in America, we call it Tic TAC Toe. 276 00:28:34,340 --> 00:28:38,840 We were playing Tic TAC Toe. It seemed like a lot of fun. You know, when sometimes it was really fun. 277 00:28:38,840 --> 00:28:44,300 And then I figured out that there was a strategy that I could always at least get a draw. 278 00:28:44,300 --> 00:28:50,870 And then my friends figured it out, maybe a day later and it became hopelessly boring and we quit. 279 00:28:50,870 --> 00:28:54,500 Now what happened? We found an equilibrium. We became rational. 280 00:28:54,500 --> 00:28:59,510 We learnt enough because the game simple to actually be rational with respect to this game. 281 00:28:59,510 --> 00:29:03,680 So there are situations where rationality makes sense to explain things. 282 00:29:03,680 --> 00:29:12,080 But the problem gets harder. It doesn't happen. Now I'm going to give an empirical test, so I'm going to ask you all to play a beauty contest game. 283 00:29:12,080 --> 00:29:16,700 So the idea is to get a number between zero and 100. 284 00:29:16,700 --> 00:29:22,020 That's two thirds of the average guess. And I expect there's a few wise guys that understand that. 285 00:29:22,020 --> 00:29:28,040 So keep your mouth shut. But I want you to all think about this because I want everybody to get the number. 286 00:29:28,040 --> 00:29:33,110 So thing I'll remember. Everybody's going to pick a number between zero and 100, 287 00:29:33,110 --> 00:29:38,000 and the winner will be the one that gets two thirds of the average guess of everybody else in the room. 288 00:29:38,000 --> 00:29:44,870 Now the little bit, while you think about it for a minute, little picture on the side is say this is inspired by Canes, 289 00:29:44,870 --> 00:29:52,330 who pointed out that the stock market is like a beauty contest because in that day there were beauty contests where you would enter a lottery. 290 00:29:52,330 --> 00:29:55,430 You would have to pick one of these women as the most beautiful, 291 00:29:55,430 --> 00:29:59,810 which actually means the one you think other people will think is going to be the most beautiful. 292 00:29:59,810 --> 00:30:03,290 And that's what's important if you want to win the contest. So it's not beauty. 293 00:30:03,290 --> 00:30:07,790 That's there's no objective standard for that. It's a question of understanding what people perceive as beautiful. 294 00:30:07,790 --> 00:30:11,810 So it's a subjective game. Now everybody have their guests. All right. 295 00:30:11,810 --> 00:30:17,030 Now I'm going to show the next slide so you can see what a large group of people tend to do on this. 296 00:30:17,030 --> 00:30:27,440 And this was a survey done by a Danish newspaper. And so you see on the x axis the frequency of the various guesses of 19000 respondents 297 00:30:27,440 --> 00:30:31,700 to this daily Danish newspapers query had more time to think about it than you did. 298 00:30:31,700 --> 00:30:34,880 And so you can see the guesses that everybody made. 299 00:30:34,880 --> 00:30:45,470 Now, when you look at this, you'll notice some disturbing things like if you go over here, there's a bunch of people that just more than two thirds. 300 00:30:45,470 --> 00:30:50,600 But just think about this for a minute. Let's suppose everybody in the room had just one hundred. 301 00:30:50,600 --> 00:30:55,070 What would the and what would the winner be? It would be sixty six. 302 00:30:55,070 --> 00:30:58,370 OK, so the answer's got to be less than that. All right. 303 00:30:58,370 --> 00:31:03,110 No. If everybody guessed it random, so everybody just picked a number out of the hat. 304 00:31:03,110 --> 00:31:07,550 Then the average would be 50. And so the winner would be a third. 305 00:31:07,550 --> 00:31:11,540 And actually, you see the most people voted for a third, so people aren't. 306 00:31:11,540 --> 00:31:16,340 The reasoning here? Right. More than six percent of the people voted for a third. 307 00:31:16,340 --> 00:31:21,080 But then there were those people who said, Let's go one more level because I'll bet that, 308 00:31:21,080 --> 00:31:25,820 you know, let's go to level two because if they're guessing a third. 309 00:31:25,820 --> 00:31:32,270 Then let's take two thirds of a third. So they just said, What is that two nights? 310 00:31:32,270 --> 00:31:36,230 And so they guessed two nights or so. And in fact, that's the winner. 311 00:31:36,230 --> 00:31:42,830 But then it goes down and there's the people here who just 0.2 percent of the people just rule, which if you think about it, 312 00:31:42,830 --> 00:31:50,660 if you'd kept carrying that process through, you would have ended up at zero, which is the Nash equilibrium for this game. 313 00:31:50,660 --> 00:31:54,500 And because this set of decisions that everybody had gone to zero, 314 00:31:54,500 --> 00:32:01,310 then if everybody's a winner at that point and if anybody deviates, they're going to, they're not going to be a winner anymore. 315 00:32:01,310 --> 00:32:07,400 So that's the whole idea of a national government. Equilibrium economics tend to have this flavour now. 316 00:32:07,400 --> 00:32:21,480 OK, so how useful was that idea? So the game theorists and economists just zero with a losing get right is a bad model of human behaviour. 317 00:32:21,480 --> 00:32:25,320 Now, of course, the sceptic could say What if we kept playing this game? 318 00:32:25,320 --> 00:32:33,540 Let's play it again and again. Well, in fact, it would start moving towards zero because you can see here already people are, you know, 319 00:32:33,540 --> 00:32:39,870 there's enough intelligence in the room that there are a lot more maths on this side of the histogram than on that one. 320 00:32:39,870 --> 00:32:47,130 And so if we played this game again and again, your guesses would start going down and we might actually well converge on zero. 321 00:32:47,130 --> 00:32:48,840 But what about other games? 322 00:32:48,840 --> 00:32:58,980 So I devoted the last ten or not all of it, but off and on for 10 or 15 years with some really great collaborators who are listed there. 323 00:32:58,980 --> 00:33:03,340 And we've written about four or five papers studying this and lots of other kinds of games. 324 00:33:03,340 --> 00:33:09,450 We've actually now exhaustively studied normal form games, and we've shown which is a particular kind of game. 325 00:33:09,450 --> 00:33:15,990 You don't need to worry about it here. But we've shown that equilibrium becomes unlikely when the games are complicated and competitive. 326 00:33:15,990 --> 00:33:20,160 That is, as soon as you have more than two players and more than a few possible actions. 327 00:33:20,160 --> 00:33:25,680 And when the incentives of the players aren't lined up so that if I win, you tend to lose and vice versa, 328 00:33:25,680 --> 00:33:31,320 then you don't go to equilibrium anymore under, you know, well, substantiated learning algorithms. 329 00:33:31,320 --> 00:33:36,540 And instead, I'm sorry, everybody can't see danger of two screens. 330 00:33:36,540 --> 00:33:44,370 But as the game gets more complicated when the game's competitive, we quickly go up to a place where we will almost never go to equilibrium. 331 00:33:44,370 --> 00:33:48,840 And instead, what do we see? We see chaotic dynamics happening. 332 00:33:48,840 --> 00:33:55,890 So right now complex the economics, we try to take behavioural economics seriously. 333 00:33:55,890 --> 00:33:59,730 Now I'm embarrassed to say that Sanjay Dummy was giving us the talk today, 334 00:33:59,730 --> 00:34:04,320 and he kind of said, Well, look, you guys aren't really taking it seriously. Well, we at least intend to. 335 00:34:04,320 --> 00:34:06,600 And me too. And I think I'll come back in a minute to say why. 336 00:34:06,600 --> 00:34:17,040 I think that maybe isn't as good as it could be, you know, but we do believe in models where the agents reason and in a empirically justifiable way, 337 00:34:17,040 --> 00:34:21,870 they follow heuristics, they do some myopic reasoning, just like the people who won that game. 338 00:34:21,870 --> 00:34:30,030 Did, they update the heuristics that recently are working well and they may or may not converge to equilibrium? 339 00:34:30,030 --> 00:34:33,300 Now, in order to do this, we have to simulate the world, 340 00:34:33,300 --> 00:34:40,110 meaning we actually use a computer to simulate what people are doing because it's too complicated to do. 341 00:34:40,110 --> 00:34:46,710 Using standard, you know, close to maths like you get taught in in a maths course in college. 342 00:34:46,710 --> 00:34:52,680 And so we mimic the world on a computer and. 343 00:34:52,680 --> 00:34:58,860 Bounded rationality is actually essential for us because it means we can still simulate things in complicated situations, 344 00:34:58,860 --> 00:35:04,020 just like real people can make decisions in complicated situations. 345 00:35:04,020 --> 00:35:12,330 It's not true for constrained rationality. There's also a difference in philosophy because in complexity economics, we we reject as if reasoning. 346 00:35:12,330 --> 00:35:16,750 I mean, even if rationality with frictions isn't literally what people do, 347 00:35:16,750 --> 00:35:24,600 maybe it's the economy behaves as if they did to say, Well, actually, let's just use the principle of Earth similitude. 348 00:35:24,600 --> 00:35:30,480 Let's try and make things kind of like the real world and at least the essential features and are. 349 00:35:30,480 --> 00:35:35,430 And so we should have assumptions that are plausible and that we can empirically verify following, 350 00:35:35,430 --> 00:35:40,480 of course, Einstein's dictum that everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler. 351 00:35:40,480 --> 00:35:46,340 And now I don't have a lot of time left, and I want to make sure I leave plenty of time for discussion, but I'm going to give you. 352 00:35:46,340 --> 00:35:53,830 So I first want to give an example of how you immediately get endogenous dynamics as soon as you deviate from the standard model. 353 00:35:53,830 --> 00:35:59,440 But we're going to start with a standard model. And these are my collaborators at the top led by Ukiah Sano. 354 00:35:59,440 --> 00:36:05,680 I think I over there. And and so we take a standard model with a representative household. 355 00:36:05,680 --> 00:36:10,240 This guy in the picture, we got a household that has to make one decision. 356 00:36:10,240 --> 00:36:15,820 That is, how much should I save and what doesn't get saved, 357 00:36:15,820 --> 00:36:23,200 what gets saved then gets invested in producing stuff for the economy and the rest gets consumed. 358 00:36:23,200 --> 00:36:28,100 So you can either eat your earnings or you can reinvest them to make more stuff. 359 00:36:28,100 --> 00:36:32,830 So you have something the next period and you've got to find the right compromise. 360 00:36:32,830 --> 00:36:38,530 Now in the standard model, and you know, you may not follow this because particularly since I can't point at both things at once, 361 00:36:38,530 --> 00:36:43,720 but there is a there's a this is showing the flow of how things flow around your. 362 00:36:43,720 --> 00:36:48,940 Let's suppose you're making a certain you're using a certain savings rate. 363 00:36:48,940 --> 00:36:56,530 How much capital do you do you have accumulate versus how much are you consuming at each time step? 364 00:36:56,530 --> 00:37:04,210 And how do you move around the space as you make these rational decisions that this agent is doing? 365 00:37:04,210 --> 00:37:14,120 And what you see is that first of all, everything flies off to infinity and there's only one point here, and that's a fix. 366 00:37:14,120 --> 00:37:15,190 Well, there's a fixed point here. 367 00:37:15,190 --> 00:37:21,580 There's a fixed point down here where the whole economy collapses and there's a fixed point here where things don't move, but it's unstable. 368 00:37:21,580 --> 00:37:24,730 Any little perturbation away from that point will set it off. 369 00:37:24,730 --> 00:37:34,240 So how does this work in the standard economics model you assume this household is doing here is so smart that they managed to sit at that place. 370 00:37:34,240 --> 00:37:37,900 And then you can OK, the rest of the model proceed to get hit by a shock. 371 00:37:37,900 --> 00:37:42,720 They move back to the place, gets hit by a shock and move back now. 372 00:37:42,720 --> 00:37:49,950 We changed it to say, well, let's suppose we have a bunch of households and they have some kind of social network. 373 00:37:49,950 --> 00:37:55,860 And what happens is once in a while a household wakes up, looks around at his neighbours or her neighbours and says, 374 00:37:55,860 --> 00:38:01,320 Oh, that neighbour is the one who's consuming the most because everybody's been conspicuous about their consumption. 375 00:38:01,320 --> 00:38:05,700 And and I'll just consume whatever they're consuming. I'll actually know. 376 00:38:05,700 --> 00:38:09,810 I will choose their savings rate because it worked for them. So we do that. 377 00:38:09,810 --> 00:38:12,990 And what happens then? Well, take this picture here. 378 00:38:12,990 --> 00:38:19,860 Instead of sitting at the fixed point, OK, in some cases, we see it sitting at a fixed point that's highly inefficient. 379 00:38:19,860 --> 00:38:26,280 As we lengthen the period out, it gets more efficient, meaning more stuff gets produced and households better off. 380 00:38:26,280 --> 00:38:33,480 But then finally, what happens when it starts oscillating? So here you see an orbit where the the colour is, the savings rate. 381 00:38:33,480 --> 00:38:36,390 You see, we're orbiting around that fixed point now. 382 00:38:36,390 --> 00:38:43,300 So you're getting spontaneous dynamics that's coming out of nowhere because all these agents are doing is waking up and looking at each other. 383 00:38:43,300 --> 00:38:50,700 There's no shocks in the normal sense here, other than a little bit of randomness and when the agents wake up to look at the world. 384 00:38:50,700 --> 00:38:53,970 It just comes out of the endogenous dynamics of this model. 385 00:38:53,970 --> 00:39:00,450 And you see that we get something that looks an awful lot like a business cycle because we see, you know, 386 00:39:00,450 --> 00:39:07,530 the output of the economy now spontaneously fluctuates in time as the average savings rate of all these agents fluctuates. 387 00:39:07,530 --> 00:39:13,050 And as each of them makes their decisions, each agent actually is having their savings rate fluctuate. 388 00:39:13,050 --> 00:39:18,750 Now, one way to think about what's going on here is there's something, I think, a better model than the rocking horse. 389 00:39:18,750 --> 00:39:23,370 It's actually a pull balancing. In the old days, I would have had a pointer that I could use. 390 00:39:23,370 --> 00:39:29,070 But if you imagine trying to balance a pole in your hand, it turns out of the poles shorter than about three feet. 391 00:39:29,070 --> 00:39:32,460 You can't do it. As soon as the pole gets long enough, you can do it. 392 00:39:32,460 --> 00:39:37,620 You can just hold it more or less upright, but it won't sit exactly upright. 393 00:39:37,620 --> 00:39:42,060 And now how does a traditional macro model model this? 394 00:39:42,060 --> 00:39:50,370 This guy assumes it stays exactly vertical unless it gets hit by a shark, which would knock the pole balance or his hand. 395 00:39:50,370 --> 00:39:58,410 The whole the pole balance would make the optimal movement to set the pole back up to being vertical again until the next shock you. 396 00:39:58,410 --> 00:40:03,840 But of course, that's not the way this works. The way it works is that you make a correction. 397 00:40:03,840 --> 00:40:07,440 The corrections imperfect pole overreacts, you overreact. 398 00:40:07,440 --> 00:40:14,620 So there's constantly indigenous populations that are chaotic in nature, just as we saw in our modified model. 399 00:40:14,620 --> 00:40:19,140 Now I'm got to run out of time, so I'm going to go quickly here. 400 00:40:19,140 --> 00:40:26,070 Now I'm just going to give some examples to demonstrate that economics can be done without equilibrium going to fly through these at blinding speed. 401 00:40:26,070 --> 00:40:30,210 The purpose is just to show it so I can make my my final remarks and it will go on. 402 00:40:30,210 --> 00:40:36,630 So these are all done with no utility functions, no rational agents and no perfect maximiser. 403 00:40:36,630 --> 00:40:42,360 So we made a model of the crisis of 2008, where we just model the behaviour that we know that people were doing. 404 00:40:42,360 --> 00:40:43,800 They were following value at risk. 405 00:40:43,800 --> 00:40:51,330 They were using historical average of volatility to compute the risk and adjusting their leverage in the market accordingly. 406 00:40:51,330 --> 00:40:57,390 And we see a spontaneous oscillation come out of our model that has a period of about 10 years, 407 00:40:57,390 --> 00:41:01,890 with the prices in the stock market going up and down and leverage going up and down. 408 00:41:01,890 --> 00:41:05,100 We have models of this financial stability of the European banking system, 409 00:41:05,100 --> 00:41:12,360 where we're literally taking the balance sheets of the 100 most systemically important banks in 410 00:41:12,360 --> 00:41:19,410 the UK and looking at the way they interact when they do things to try and do their risk control, 411 00:41:19,410 --> 00:41:25,900 which can then set up large scale oscillations due to systemic effects. 412 00:41:25,900 --> 00:41:31,260 A team of us are looking at unemployment, making agent based model of job transitions, 413 00:41:31,260 --> 00:41:36,510 where we can predict the effect of an automation shock and and think about questions like which professions are 414 00:41:36,510 --> 00:41:42,420 safest because it might be even though your profession is not likely to get automated or is likely to get automated. 415 00:41:42,420 --> 00:41:46,560 Some professions may have an easy time transitioning other ones that are and vice versa. 416 00:41:46,560 --> 00:41:52,590 And if you come in two weeks, Penny may well at least say something about automation in the job space. 417 00:41:52,590 --> 00:41:57,300 Thinking about technological change and taking advantage of these facts, I have you. 418 00:41:57,300 --> 00:42:02,310 I showed you things that are highly heterogeneous, but I don't know if you noticed this in this picture, 419 00:42:02,310 --> 00:42:07,980 but there are amazingly persistent once you go down to the level of individual technologies. 420 00:42:07,980 --> 00:42:13,740 It's not like hospital services got really more expensive one year and then less expensive the next year. 421 00:42:13,740 --> 00:42:22,620 For 20 years, they got more expensive every year. Televisions got cheaper every year, and these patterns were amazingly persistent. 422 00:42:22,620 --> 00:42:30,510 But to see that persistence, you have to get down to the micro level, and normal models are not doing that. 423 00:42:30,510 --> 00:42:34,140 This allows us to do things like forecast technological progress, 424 00:42:34,140 --> 00:42:39,390 and we can even forecast how good our forecast is and we can put all these forecasts 425 00:42:39,390 --> 00:42:43,380 together and think about how the different components in that picture I showed you are 426 00:42:43,380 --> 00:42:48,690 interacting with each other and how technological progress in one domain is is percolating 427 00:42:48,690 --> 00:42:53,100 over to technological progress in other domains and use this to predict growth. 428 00:42:53,100 --> 00:43:02,970 We can bring in ideas from ecology to organise firms and industries into ecological structures that that use a 429 00:43:02,970 --> 00:43:10,660 totally literal analogy to trophic levels in ecology that actually turns out to be very closely related to growth. 430 00:43:10,660 --> 00:43:16,800 OK, we can make predictions without and and we can use this to compute the cost of the green energy transition. 431 00:43:16,800 --> 00:43:25,860 And one of the results that we hope to release a paper with in the next month is that actually the green energy transition is not just cheap, 432 00:43:25,860 --> 00:43:31,230 it's probably actually when net present value is taken into account at just about any discount 433 00:43:31,230 --> 00:43:35,940 rate likely to be cheaper than the alternative of just sticking with business as usual. 434 00:43:35,940 --> 00:43:36,480 And again, 435 00:43:36,480 --> 00:43:43,990 we can do that because we get down to the fine grain level where we can really think about the individual technologies and put them together. 436 00:43:43,990 --> 00:43:53,200 Now, I also think we can solve a Catch 22 macro by going to what I'm calling global microeconomics that is letting macro 437 00:43:53,200 --> 00:44:01,390 emerge from micro taking advantage of heterogeneity rather than viewing it as something that makes things hard. 438 00:44:01,390 --> 00:44:06,370 Taking advantage of the fact that there's a lot more data micro scales that allows 439 00:44:06,370 --> 00:44:11,710 us to get better statistical significance and deal with the Catch 22 of macro, 440 00:44:11,710 --> 00:44:15,790 I think we will naturally see the emergence of more endogenous dynamics. 441 00:44:15,790 --> 00:44:19,720 We can then model that emergence and because we're modelling in a finer scale, 442 00:44:19,720 --> 00:44:23,830 we have more things to predict, which means we have more ways to validate our model. 443 00:44:23,830 --> 00:44:27,730 Now, just to wrap up, I mean, complexity economics is yawn. 444 00:44:27,730 --> 00:44:31,810 So I'm in that last slide. I'm throwing out a super ambitious programme. 445 00:44:31,810 --> 00:44:37,870 But you know, I estimate there have been the order of five hundred person years of work that's gone into this field. 446 00:44:37,870 --> 00:44:45,880 In contrast to, say, the 50000 that have gone into the mainstream approach, a lot of work remains to be done. 447 00:44:45,880 --> 00:44:50,020 We need to develop new methods. We need to fit models to a time series better. 448 00:44:50,020 --> 00:44:55,030 We need to do better parallelism so we can run big models. 449 00:44:55,030 --> 00:44:58,780 We need to create standard software libraries to gather better data sets. 450 00:44:58,780 --> 00:45:06,130 We need to pay more careful attention to behavioural economists. There's a huge amount to be done, but I think there's a lot of promise now. 451 00:45:06,130 --> 00:45:09,670 The mainstream is resisting this. I think for several reasons. 452 00:45:09,670 --> 00:45:16,810 One is it requires abandoning foundational assumptions that have been used in use since the middle of the 20th century. 453 00:45:16,810 --> 00:45:21,730 So it's a pretty big shift in what has to happen, requires a very different toolkit, 454 00:45:21,730 --> 00:45:25,870 a different set of skills, and it requires a different attitude about science. 455 00:45:25,870 --> 00:45:28,180 It's a different scientific method. 456 00:45:28,180 --> 00:45:36,160 And anybody who wants to learn more, I give the URL for my website where you can see the draught of the introduction of my book. 457 00:45:36,160 --> 00:45:41,050 It's still very hot and in flux. 458 00:45:41,050 --> 00:45:42,670 But if you want to take a look, you can look there. 459 00:45:42,670 --> 00:45:49,990 And if you want to see any details about the papers I flew through at blinding speed, you can look on our website there. 460 00:45:49,990 --> 00:46:08,330 Thank you very much. So that's a real tour de force, other questions for day. 461 00:46:08,330 --> 00:46:12,890 We'd like to go first, Tim, if you could wait for the microphone. 462 00:46:12,890 --> 00:46:19,610 I also remind you that this is being webcast, so when you ask a question, just be aware of that. 463 00:46:19,610 --> 00:46:32,720 Don, I wanted to ask. I just actually picking up on your question whether there is any similarity between your and my field in the following sense. 464 00:46:32,720 --> 00:46:36,830 You know, so I'm a climate physicist, climate modeller. 465 00:46:36,830 --> 00:46:44,600 If you want to know if you know, to model the warming of the planet as a whole due to increase in carbon dioxide, 466 00:46:44,600 --> 00:46:50,870 you can use very simple analytic models, which essentially are looking for new equilibrium. 467 00:46:50,870 --> 00:46:54,770 It's a kind of and it's a reasonably elegant and simple approach. 468 00:46:54,770 --> 00:46:58,010 But if you want to know what's happening regionally, in my view, 469 00:46:58,010 --> 00:47:06,140 there is no substitute than actually modelling the whole climate system with all its complications and interactions and so on. 470 00:47:06,140 --> 00:47:13,280 But there is a there is a subset of my field that views that to be somehow inelegant brute force. 471 00:47:13,280 --> 00:47:19,820 It doesn't have that mathematical panache, that low water, you know, 472 00:47:19,820 --> 00:47:30,110 semi analytic models have an I try to argue to these people that you that that view is very misguided and there is a role for elegant mathematics, 473 00:47:30,110 --> 00:47:34,970 but it's not him. So I'm just wondering, does that play that just sort of sociology? 474 00:47:34,970 --> 00:47:39,050 Does that play a role in your field as well as places to rest like brute force? 475 00:47:39,050 --> 00:47:46,940 It plays a huge role. I mean, I think actually, if I, I should probably added that on here that there's if you if you grow up doing 476 00:47:46,940 --> 00:47:51,560 mathematics and the whole thing you learn how to do is to solve equations, 477 00:47:51,560 --> 00:47:56,750 then somebody says, well, actually forget about that and go to stimulate stuff on a computer. 478 00:47:56,750 --> 00:48:01,730 OK. Fermi might have been, you know, Fermi was one of the first people to reprogramme the first computers, 479 00:48:01,730 --> 00:48:06,290 but but most it's a whole different kind of ballgame. 480 00:48:06,290 --> 00:48:12,170 I think there is an important question of how far can you get within our genius type, you know, aggregate model. 481 00:48:12,170 --> 00:48:18,620 And I don't want to say that you can't do anything with an aggregate macro model, but if there are nonlinear interactions, then you may miss that. 482 00:48:18,620 --> 00:48:26,060 So for example, if it turns out, if it had turned out that we're in serious danger of reversing the Great Atlantic salt current, 483 00:48:26,060 --> 00:48:29,270 then our genius prediction might have been really, really wrong. 484 00:48:29,270 --> 00:48:36,140 Because when you start looking at the structure, you have this big nonlinear effect that sends the system into a whole different state. 485 00:48:36,140 --> 00:48:37,940 And so I think we have to worry about that. 486 00:48:37,940 --> 00:48:44,600 And I think actually in the economy, we're seeing oscillations happening, the system that are going on all the time. 487 00:48:44,600 --> 00:48:49,580 So it's a little bit like, you know, studying business cycles as opposed to saying climate. 488 00:48:49,580 --> 00:48:53,610 I mean, business cycles might be more like weather as opposed to climate. 489 00:48:53,610 --> 00:48:58,340 And so for weather, you really can't use an aggregate model, right? 490 00:48:58,340 --> 00:49:05,450 Weather is all about simulating and fine scale. And as you know, it's limited by how good your computer is and how much data you have. 491 00:49:05,450 --> 00:49:11,930 So but it's a very, very important point. Thank you. 492 00:49:11,930 --> 00:49:17,180 How do you judge? I'm sorry if you could just wait for the microphone. 493 00:49:17,180 --> 00:49:21,290 How do you judge whether or not your models are successful? Yeah. 494 00:49:21,290 --> 00:49:25,820 So I'm a firm believer in empirical judgement of success. 495 00:49:25,820 --> 00:49:32,000 Now that said, you, you often need an incubation period to really get success to happen. 496 00:49:32,000 --> 00:49:38,000 And and there's a question of how much success can you get with small models doing this kind of thing? 497 00:49:38,000 --> 00:49:44,150 I think you can get some and I think I mean, I could have, you know, had a bunch of slides of the things I would rate as successes. 498 00:49:44,150 --> 00:49:49,790 And if you read my book, I spent a lot of time talking about that. But I think there's still relatively small successes. 499 00:49:49,790 --> 00:49:58,580 We still have no model that can step in and replace the DSG model for, say, modelling the British economy or the world economy. 500 00:49:58,580 --> 00:50:05,540 But so ultimately, it needs to be empirical and it should be asking, what can we predict and how what we do we predicted. 501 00:50:05,540 --> 00:50:09,470 But to get there, we may need an incubation period where we say, Well, 502 00:50:09,470 --> 00:50:16,700 this looks promising and that looks promising to come back to whether, you know, the first physical weather forecast on a computer. 503 00:50:16,700 --> 00:50:24,020 We're done in 1950. But it was 30 years before they can beat subjective weather forecasters who just spoke their periods and said, 504 00:50:24,020 --> 00:50:29,300 This is what I think the weather will do tomorrow. Now, once they beat them, they rocketed past them. 505 00:50:29,300 --> 00:50:34,910 And weather forecasting is now far, far better than it was in 1980. 506 00:50:34,910 --> 00:50:40,940 But it took 30 years of hard work and billions of dollars of investment to get the question there. 507 00:50:40,940 --> 00:50:45,420 And then they. Thank you. I appreciate the question. 508 00:50:45,420 --> 00:50:51,120 Looking at ecological and economic modelling together, what about political modelling? 509 00:50:51,120 --> 00:50:56,910 For example, you might say a macroeconomic trend is income inequity. 510 00:50:56,910 --> 00:51:03,150 And so these representative people that you're creating are going to be more bipolar. 511 00:51:03,150 --> 00:51:07,220 So can you can you model an income inequity into into this complex? 512 00:51:07,220 --> 00:51:13,890 You know what, one of the places that I, to be honest, I don't think this approach is not realised. 513 00:51:13,890 --> 00:51:19,200 Its potential is in thinking about inequality. So it's very easy to just go back to the, you know, 514 00:51:19,200 --> 00:51:24,840 and have as many different groups of people as you want to have match it all up against empirical data. 515 00:51:24,840 --> 00:51:30,570 And now you have to have a model of how those people are going to behave as they as time marches along. 516 00:51:30,570 --> 00:51:38,340 But you can simulate, you know, the economy and the feedbacks and and what different what effect different policies will have on inequality. 517 00:51:38,340 --> 00:51:44,070 And I think this is one of the major unexploited strengths of this approach. 518 00:51:44,070 --> 00:51:50,760 But unexploited because we really haven't done that very well. They're very simple tinker toy models that do show immediately. 519 00:51:50,760 --> 00:51:55,590 I mean, you automatically in these models get inequality. You distort some agents off. 520 00:51:55,590 --> 00:52:00,750 You let them go, boom. You get it. You get a distribution actually even looks more or less right. 521 00:52:00,750 --> 00:52:05,850 You get a log normal out more or less right away. You can even get the tail on the log normal. 522 00:52:05,850 --> 00:52:12,510 But but then if you really want to set it up so you can take a policy and say, what will the policy do to that? 523 00:52:12,510 --> 00:52:22,710 And how will this distribution chain feed back into the global GDP and so forth? 524 00:52:22,710 --> 00:52:26,550 That's a much harder problem and hasn't been done. OK, thank you. 525 00:52:26,550 --> 00:52:34,140 I just wondered what what they might be able said something about the role of technology, because it seems to me that in your graph, 526 00:52:34,140 --> 00:52:45,330 where you have areas of consistent increase in prices or cost, that in actual fact, the more the less you're able to code and automate knowledge. 527 00:52:45,330 --> 00:52:51,510 So the more tacit the knowledge and the more interactive the area, the more you're likely to see increasing prices. 528 00:52:51,510 --> 00:52:55,690 What are your thoughts on that? Well, I don't know. 529 00:52:55,690 --> 00:53:03,450 OK. There is there is a long known fact that, you know, was called balls disease disease kind of named almost at the top of, 530 00:53:03,450 --> 00:53:12,990 you know, what's the long term improvement rate of services versus, you know, manufacturing? 531 00:53:12,990 --> 00:53:23,250 And and it is true that services generally improve at a slower rate than the more or high tech ends of manufacturing like computers. 532 00:53:23,250 --> 00:53:29,490 So that seems to be an empirical regularity. It's interesting to try and understand why. 533 00:53:29,490 --> 00:53:33,930 I don't think there are really good explanations for that, although, you know, 534 00:53:33,930 --> 00:53:39,840 people kind of understand why Moore's law would have a 40 percent per year improvement rate for so long. 535 00:53:39,840 --> 00:53:44,910 But but in general, it's this is a big unknown about how do these different technologies? 536 00:53:44,910 --> 00:53:50,100 Why are televisions improving so much faster than hospital services? 537 00:53:50,100 --> 00:53:54,090 And you can tell individual stories about some of these. 538 00:53:54,090 --> 00:53:59,730 But but actually having a broad theory that tells us about this is one of the objectives of what we're trying to do in our group. 539 00:53:59,730 --> 00:54:04,380 And I'd be lying if I said we understood at this point. 540 00:54:04,380 --> 00:54:12,570 Thank you. I'd say you alluded to the idea that complexity economics recognises that the economy is more networks 541 00:54:12,570 --> 00:54:20,100 than conventional economic approach is a bit like a local social network around investor decisions, 542 00:54:20,100 --> 00:54:29,640 for example. So I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about the extent to which I understand you network dynamics is up to 543 00:54:29,640 --> 00:54:37,110 scratch or what you would like to see in terms of development and network understandings that advance complex economics. 544 00:54:37,110 --> 00:54:47,430 So can I sort of lived through the revolution in networks? You know, when I was a graduate student, there was a field called graph theory. 545 00:54:47,430 --> 00:54:52,230 And, you know, I spent some time staring at books and graph theory, and it looked really cool. 546 00:54:52,230 --> 00:54:56,580 And then people started realising less well. So the sociologists first, actually. 547 00:54:56,580 --> 00:55:04,050 But then physicists jumped in. I'm good friends with several of them and began saying, Look, let's apply this to the real world. 548 00:55:04,050 --> 00:55:13,140 We really need to take this stuff out of the mathematical textbooks and put it to data and develop techniques for things like understanding, 549 00:55:13,140 --> 00:55:18,450 clustering and, you know, getting a clearer picture of descriptive picture of networks. 550 00:55:18,450 --> 00:55:22,740 Then the sort of next step is to start thinking about dynamics on the networks, 551 00:55:22,740 --> 00:55:26,880 like the example I showed you with yuki's model with, you know, the there are there. 552 00:55:26,880 --> 00:55:32,670 We have thousands of households that are forming a network and there are some dynamics on that network. 553 00:55:32,670 --> 00:55:35,790 Very simple because they just copy each other and adjust your savings rate. 554 00:55:35,790 --> 00:55:45,510 But there's a dynamics and agent based modelling as it gets more serious, is essentially just getting more realistic about those processes. 555 00:55:45,510 --> 00:55:52,170 Causation These models typically live on networks because you have a bunch of agents who are the nodes and the links or their interactions, 556 00:55:52,170 --> 00:55:57,120 then they have several different kinds of links and they may move around in time and so on. 557 00:55:57,120 --> 00:56:00,540 But that's really what's going on in an agent based model. And really, 558 00:56:00,540 --> 00:56:10,560 what we're talking about as we develop the whole field is going from just the descriptive network stuff that was developed 15 years ago or so, 559 00:56:10,560 --> 00:56:15,930 20 years ago now to actually dealing with dynamic models that live on these networks. 560 00:56:15,930 --> 00:56:20,970 Now I actually have to mention that I built a model back and started in 86, 561 00:56:20,970 --> 00:56:26,070 and it got published in about 1990, where we literally did have a dynamic network. 562 00:56:26,070 --> 00:56:31,170 We had dynamics on the network. We call this mother dynamics. It was the origin of life. 563 00:56:31,170 --> 00:56:34,800 And so I did put a pole in the ground deck there a long time ago. 564 00:56:34,800 --> 00:56:42,150 The field has come a long way since then. Sorry, but we're going to have to bring things to an end with that, so I apologise for that. 565 00:56:42,150 --> 00:56:49,380 This is the first and several in five talks we're having in this series called Evolving Economics or our next speaker, 566 00:56:49,380 --> 00:56:54,480 which you've heard about several times, is Penny Mealy, and that will be in two weeks time. 567 00:56:54,480 --> 00:56:58,920 And penny, we'll be talking about navigating knowledge, new new tools for the economy. 568 00:56:58,920 --> 00:57:24,564 So please, could you join me for something we're thinking going again for a really?