ACtioN Briefing: How Can Complexity Economics Give More Insight Into Political Economy

This ACtioN Briefing will summarize and explore the most “practitioner-relevant” insights from SFI’s recent How Can Complexity Economics Give More Insight Into Political Economy Working Group, and will explore the implications of complexity thinking on political and economic issues including the intersection of power relationships, labor and financial markets, climate change, and international trade.

In this one-hour ACtioN briefing, J. Doyne Farmer (Director of Complexity Economics at the Institute for New Economic Thinking at Oxford and External Professor at SFI) will join us to introduce a number of ideas and insights surfaced during the Working Group. We will then hear from Penny Mealy (World Bank economist) on a novel methodology for mapping out countries’ ‘adjacent possible’ climate policies and demonstrate how it can be applied to improve the policy design process and increase the probability of successful climate policy implementation in the future, and R. Maria del Rio Chanona (Complexity Science Hub in Vienna, Austria) on the current landscape of the labor market in terms of occupational mobility and skills and possible bottlenecks in adaptation towards labor transformations, and non-financial factors such as mental health and work-related distress impacted the labor market and their role in the Great Resignation.