Adam Smith’s Invisible Foot

This week’s “intriguing passage” comes by way of Ashwin Parameswaran’s blog on macroeconomics, Macroeconomic Resilience. In his post “Evolvability, Robustness, and Resilience in Complex Adaptive Systems” Parameswaran finds reason to quote economist Joseph Berliner’s book, The Innovation Decision in Soviet Industry. Said Berliner: “Adam Smith taught us to think of competition as an “invisible hand” […]

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Notes on the Dynamics of Human Civilization: The Growth Revolution, Part I

The following series is an attempt to make some sense of that most peculiar of subjects: human civilization. My interest lies in the dynamics of civilized societies: their material needs and limitations, the recurring patterns of geography, social organization, and cultural complexity upon which they are built, and the type of interactions that define their […]

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