 The way I was taught to look at the economy in graduate school years ago was as a very perfect machine, everything well oiled and balanced. And then when everything melted down and crashed in 2008, economics is kind of scratching its head and saying, well, we're looking for new approaches. Many scientists like to view the world as orderly, and then there's imperfections. I'm not one of them. I belong to the other class that says the world is inherently not so orderly and not so perfect. The standard approach to economics requires a huge dollop of negative feedbacks or diminishing returns. Like a ball in a cornflakes bowl, put it to one side a little, the equilibrium is always restored. Standard economics is good. We understand a great deal in standard economics, but it leaves out a lot of things. It leaves out events that propagate through systems. It leaves out whole networks of connections. Complexity economics is looking at the world, same world as standard economics, but looking from a slightly different direction. With complexity, you're always trying to see how these small parts, like starlings in a flock, come together to create what's happening with the economy. Each individual, starling in a flock of birds, is only reacting to its neighbors. And yet all those reactions are somehow summing up to give a flock. It allows the idea that culture and institutions exist. It allows the idea that events can propagate quickly. In the real world, it can make quite a difference. For example, the current crisis that's on in the eurozone were used to thinking of everything arriving in equilibrium, so that if Germans are very well off at the start, then their wage levels will equilibrate with the wage levels in Italy or Greece, and that hasn't happened. If you see the world that way, you tend not to see these large positive feedback or destabilizing forces. So the first thing would be to recognize that such forces are there, and the next thing would be to say, okay, how can we have some sort of situation where we cut some of that particular feedback loop? If we start to see the economy not as an ordered machine and see it rather as something that's vital and alive and not perfect, and we adjust with it and we can re-architect it, then I think we'll be much better off.