Emergent Economics Book

This book seeks to end the war between micro- and macroeconomics that has raged for eighty years. It introduces a fundamental approach to economics based on emergence, the study of properties that appear as systems reach high levels of complexity. Emergent Economics avoids both the localism of microeconomics and the artificial constructs of macroeconomics, producing a coherent system that embraces both the source of economics in human motivation and end of economics in understanding complex real-world markets.Emergent Economics is, like microeconomics, grounded in the actions of individual market participants who seek to maximize their benefit in a world where others attempt to do the same. But it overcomes the tendency of microeconomics to ignore the complexity of real economies and so miss the system-wide properties that govern them. Unlike some schools of microeconomics (particularly the Austrian), it does not eschew testing the theory against real-word data.Emergent Economics, like macroeconomics, understands that the governing properties of an economy are those of the system as a whole and not those of the individual players. Unlike the dominant Keynesian approach, it does not lose sight of the origins of economic behavior in individual choice. Nor does it attempt to simplify away the fundamental complexity of real economies with artificially constructed system properties. It embraces that complexity, showing how the governing properties of economic systems are irreducibly emergent. This emergent approach reveals and corrects several fundamental problems in Keynesianism, including its submergence of economic complexity in averages and aggregates, its frequent reverses of cause and effect, and its loss of the ability to study critical variations of economic factors across industries and markets.This book does not contain the economics of academia. This is the economics of the trenches where real people live real lives. So if I fail to twist English into professional jargon, and if I expect my readers to use their brains instead of cringing in awe at obscure and impenetrable arguments, it is because we have had quite enough of mystical economics these eighty years. It is time for some clarity. It is time to speak the language in which intelligent people think.