The Origin Of Wealth: Evolution, Complexity, and the Radical Remaking of Economics

In this broad-ranging book, Eric Beinhocker defends a vision of the economy as a complex adaptive system. The theory that explains the operation of the economic system he calls Complexity Economics. The Origin of Wealth is a frontal attack on Neoclassical economic theory. Beinhocker recognizes the successes of this theory, but locates them in the past. The combined aridity of classical game theory, in which there have been no new insights for almost twenty years, and general equilibrium theory, which has produced nothing of general interest since the consolidation of existence theorems in the 1950’s, accounts for the current eclipse in the status of pure theory in the eyes of many contemporary economists. For…