Haute Lumière · The reading

The economy is not a machine. It never was.

Equilibrium was a modelling convenience that became a belief. What is actually there is an adaptive system with memory, and it behaves nothing like the diagram.

Treat a market as an ecosystem and the awkward facts stop being anomalies. Fat tails, cascades, regime changes, the way a correlation holds for a decade and then inverts in a week — none of that is noise around an equilibrium. It is what adaptive systems with feedback and memory do, and complexity science has the instruments for it: agent-based models, network topology, resilience analysis, the mathematics of cascade.

This series takes that apparatus through the whole field rather than as a chapter of caveats. Theory, then instruments, then the places the difference is expensive — regulation, systemic risk, crisis, development policy — and then the practitioner's end, where a model has to survive contact with a desk.

It is written to be usable by someone who has to defend a position in front of people who were taught the other thing.

Fat tails are not noise around an equilibrium. They are what the system does.

Start here

• Living Systems Economics — the series Every volume of the series in one place, from foundations through to the practitioner's handbook. The reading below is where most people start. The whole series, on its own shelf · 36 volumes · Free to read, and free to hear
• Economic Systems as Living Systems The founding move: what changes when an economy is modelled as a living system rather than a mechanism seeking equilibrium. 13 chapters · Free to read, and free to hear
• The Complexity of Financial Markets Markets as complex adaptive systems — the empirical case, and where standard finance quietly stops describing what is measured. 13 chapters · Free to read, and free to hear
• Agent-Based Modeling in Finance The instrument. Building models from the behaviour of the participants up, and the honest account of what those models can and cannot tell you. 13 chapters · Free to read, and free to hear
• Systemic Risk in Economic Systems How risk propagates through a network, why the connections matter more than the nodes, and what that implies for anyone holding a portfolio. 13 chapters · Free to read, and free to hear
• Complexity-Informed Financial Regulation Regulating a system that adapts to being regulated — which is the whole problem, stated properly. 13 chapters · Free to read, and free to hear
• Markets as Ecosystems The ecological reading: niches, predators, keystone species and diversity as a stability property rather than a virtue. 10 chapters · Free to read, and free to hear

Reading is free. Keeping the file — the EPUB, the PDF, the press edition — is what a price is for, on the 6 volumes here that have one:

And the next thing

If the interest is operational rather than analytical — running an organisation as a living system rather than modelling one — the first door below is that. The second is the developmental literature the whole series leans on.