"A complex system is a system composed of many interacting parts, often called agents, which displays collective behavior that does not follow trivially from the behaviors of the individual parts. Examples include condensed matter systems, ecosystems, stock markets and economies, biological evolution, and indeed the whole of human society. Substantial progress has been made in the quantitative understanding of complex systems, particularly since the 1980s, using a combination of basic theory, much of it derived from physics, and computer simulation. The subject is a broad one, drawing on techniques and ideas from a wide range of areas. Here I give a survey of the main themes and methods of complex systems science and an annotated bibliography of resources, ranging from classic papers to recent books and reviews."

abstract: "We show how text from news articles can be used to predict intraday price movements of financial assets using support vector machines. Multiple kernel learning is used to combine equity returns with text as predictive features to increase classification performance and we develop an analytic center cutting plane method to solve the kernel learning problem efficiently. We observe that while the direction of returns is not predictable using either text or returns, their size is, with text features producing significantly better performance than historical returns alone."

"Turner argues that the faults of theory and policy that led to the crisis were integral elements within a broader set of simplistic beliefs about the objectives and means of economic activity that dominated policy thinking for several decades. This dominant discourse cast economic growth as the objective, markets as the universally applicable means of achieving it, and inequality as inevitable and necessary. Turner takes on these assumptions point by point, arguing that more rapid growth should not be the overriding objective for rich developed countries, that inequality should concern us, that the pre-crisis confidence in financial markets as the means of pursuing objectives was profoundly misplaced, and that these conclusions have broad implications for the case for economic freedom, for specific areas of public policy (including financial regulation and climate change), and for the discipline of economics itself."

"These top economists discuss future directions for monetary policy, fiscal policy, financial regulation, capital account management, growth strategies, and the international monetary system, and the economic models that should underpin thinking about critical policy choices. Among the new realities they consider are the swing of the pendulum toward regulation; the need for new theoretical approaches, incorporating advances in agency theory, behavioral economics, and understanding of credit markets and finance based on theories of imperfect information; and the importance for macroeconomic policy to target not just inflation but also output and financial stability."

Wonderful and thought-provoking response to T/S.

From a public policy analyst’s perspective, the question is often: how to “nudge” the political decision-maker away from making politicized decisions that are disturbances to a system.

Score. Much of the material that Bryan presented to us two weeks ago.

"The structure of the control network of transnational corporations affects global market competition and financial stability. So far, only small national samples were studied and there was no appropriate methodology to assess control globally. We present the first investigation of the architecture of the international ownership network, along with the computation of the control held by each global player. We find that transnational corporations form a giant bow-tie structure and that a large portion of control flows to a small tightly-knit core of financial institutions. This core can be seen as an economic "super-entity" that raises new important issues both for researchers and policy makers"

Looking forward to this: " Donald MacKenzie’s Material Markets: How Economic Agents Are Constructed will be published by Oxford."

The opinions of Greenspan and Persaud. I sort of miss Calmo.

To be read in conjunction with Gigerenzer & Hoffrage's paper.

"We give a short proof of a strengthening of the Maximal Ergodic Theorem which also immediately yields the Pointwise Ergodic Theorem. "

Classifications of behaviour like, active, purposeful, extrapolative, negative feedback of the first order; teleology (in a good way); "servomechanisms"; spatial, temporal coordinates

Proposal of "asset-based redistribution, drawing in novel ways on markets, competition, state regulation and community governance."

It _does_ look interesting!