New supply chain data allows us to literally observe how the economy works. By tracking virtually every supplier–buyer interaction among hundreds of thousands of firms over a decade, we are able to reconstruct the networks that form the backbone of every economy. Supply chain networks are highly dynamic and reconfigure at remarkable rates. This dynamism lies at the heart of economies’ innovation capacity, efficiency, robustness, and resilience. With these data, we can calibrate full-scale (1:1) models of the economy that help us understand how they function and reconfigure. Within this new framework, we revisit the classic questions of economics: Are resources allocated optimally? Where is wealth created? How is wealth distributed? Are markets efficient? Where does inflation come from? And where do systemic risks originate? At the same time, entirely new questions become addressable, such as: How fast is the green transition progressing? What is the level of resilience to natural or logistical disruptions. These developments raise the question if economics would have developed in the way it has if we had access to the kind of “atomistic view” that is possible today?
About the speaker
Stefan Thurner is an Austrian physicist and economist studying the nature of complex adaptive systems. He is a co-founder and the president of the Complexity Science Hub, which has been advancing the field since 2016. Since 2009, he has held the chair of Science of Complex Systems at the Medical University of Vienna and is an external professor at the Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico.
His current work focuses on the foundations and fundamental principles of complex systems with applications in medicine and healthcare, systemic risks in financial and supply chain networks, as well as in social dynamics. He published more than 300 scientific articles; his work has been covered in more than 1,000 newspaper, radio, and television reports by media such as The New York Times, BBC World, NZZ, Die Zeit, Arte, Nature, New Scientist and Physics World.
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