Blog: Complexity Trips Up Economists, Again.
When is a probability not a probability?
Complexity is all around us, but its hard to grasp. Economics, derived from the old scientific method, has a particularly hard time with complexity. The scientific method considers a system to be like a machine. To understand a system you break it down into individual components which are strung together as a chain of events. But a complex system is a net, not a chain. Studying or forecasting one component will not necessarily help you with the whole. Forecasting the probability of a specific outcome in a complex system is an impossibility.
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