Place a lit cigarette in an ashtray in a closed room where the air is perfectly still. As everyone knows, the smoke will rise, but not in a simple regular flow; the rising flow is unstable, begins to wobble, and then breaks out into a tangled mess -- turbulence. You don't need any outside cause or shock to the rising smoke to make it happen.
Economies do highly irregular things too, as a rule, going through repeated booms and busts, and yet economists seem quite hesitant to see such fluctuations as the result of similar natural instability. In recent decades, at least, they seem to have greatly preferred the idea that fluctuations around average growth must be caused by "shocks" to the economy of some kind.…
In Bloomberg, I've written about some new work that puts this RBC theory into a very new light. It suggests, in fact, that theories of this basic class, if examined more closely, actually predict the existence of inherent instabilities in economies.…
The Physics of Finance
Economics beyond shocks??
Mark Buchanan
Mark Buchanan
