The Second Economy: a Neural Model

Aspen Root Systems and a neural system for a second economy.   By W Brian Arthur, who we worked with at the Santa Fe Institute and applied in the enterprise.   It is all about better understanding complexity.   Many real world systems are very complex and in the early days we started with industrial simulations as models to find patterns. Many new techniques, by Arthur and others, are helping us to simplify these sim  models enough to make them usable.  Thanks to colleague Delaine Hampton for pointing me to this.

-  W Brian Arthur is a visiting researcher with the Intelligent System Lab at the Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) and an external professor at the Santa Fe Institute. He is an economist and technology thinker and a pioneer in the science of complexity. His 1994 book, Increasing Returns and Path Dependence in the Economy (University of Michigan Press, December 1994), contains several of his seminal papers. More recently, Arthur was the author of The Nature of Technology: What it is and How it Evolves (Free Press, August 2009).