A Brief History of the Emergence of Complexity Economics

Abstract:

For readers new to complexity economics, a brief history of how the field emerged may provide useful context for the chapters that follow in this volume. This is not intended to be a complete historical review (for a more in-depth account, see Beinhocker 2006) but instead its purpose is to give readers an overview of key strands of work that provide the foundations for modern complexity economics, as well as some key entry points into the historical literature (up to the early 2010s). We have also chosen to focus on the social science foundations and only very briefly mention the immense contributions in ideas and methods that complexity economists have incorporated from the physical sciences. As such, we have inevitably omitted numerous important contributors and works, but the chapters that follow cite a much broader base of scholarship, as well as more recent research.

Complexity economics, a label introduced by W. Brian Arthur in Science in 1999, began to emerge as a distinct set of perspectives and methodologies in the mid-1980s, pioneered by a community of scholars associated with the Santa Fe Institute (SFI). As noted in the introduction to this volume, “Complexity economics draws from the science of complex systems to understand the economy as an adaptive system where macrolevel patterns emerge from the interaction of many diverse agents, rather than being imposed from above or derived from representative agents (see Mealy et al. 2026, ch. 1 in this volume; and Arthur 2021 for a more extended definition). While SFI catalyzed the development of the field in the 1980s, the ideas underpinning complexity economics had deep historical roots in both the social and physical sciences.