The Paradigm of Social Complexity. Volume I: An Alternative Way of Understanding Societies and their Economies

With the recent developments in computing technologies and the thriving research scene in Complexity Science, economists and other social scientists have become aware of a more flexible and promising alternative for modeling socioeconomic systems; one that, in contrast with neoclassical economics, advocates for the realism of the assumptions, the importance of context and culture, the heterogeneity of agents (individuals or organizations), and the bounded rationality of individuals who behave and learn in multifaceted ways in uncertain environments. The book synthesizes an extensive body of work in the field of social complexity and constructs a unifying framework that allows developing concrete applications to important socioeconomic problems. This one-of-a-kind textbook provides a comprehensive panorama for advanced undergraduates and graduate students who want to become familiar with a wide range of issues related to social complexity. It is also a pioneering text that can support professors who wish to learn techniques and produce research in this novel field. Volume I The first four chapters act as a succinct introduction to the paradigm, presenting a critique of orthodox thinking in economics, the vision of complexity, and several examples of complex systems in natural and social environments. Chapters 5-7 introduce the semantics of the paradigm, describe the pillars on which this vision is constructed, and explain the most basic models of agent-based simulation (cellular automata). Chapters 8-11 develop a meta-theory to analyze social phenomena through the lens of complexity. This meta-theory acquires its distinctive features from formulations developed in analytical sociology and behavioral, institutional, and evolutionary economics. This part of the book focuses on characterizing the set of factors that affect human agency (or people’s ability to learn, decide, and act), and the structure within which individuals are socially embedded.