Non-Equilibrium Social Science and Policy

Abstract

Between 2011 and 2014 the European Non-Equilibrium Social Science Project (NESS) investigated the place of equilibrium in the social sciences and policy. Orthodox economics is based on an equilibrium view of how the economy functions and does not offer a complete description of how the world operates. However, mainstream economics is not an empty box. Its fundamental insight, that people respond to incentives, may be the only universal law of behaviour in the social sciences. Only economics has used equilibrium as a primary driver of system behaviour, but economics has become much more empirical at the microlevel over the past two decades. This is due to two factors: advances in statistical theory enabling better estimates of policy consequences at the microlevel, and the rise of behavioural economics which looks at how people, firms and governments really do behave in practice. In this context, this chapter briefly reviews the contributions of this book across the social sciences and ends with a discussion of the research themes that act as a roadmap for further research. These include: realistic models of agent behaviour; multilevel systems; policy informatics; narratives and decision making under uncertainty; and validation of agent-based complex systems models.

Using the State Space of a BLV Retail Model to Analyse the Dynamics and Categorise Phase Transitions of Urban Development

“…It is helpful to understand how one state transitions to another, as so-called tipping points represent critical thresholds in dynamic systems [27]. Although the use of state space has been widely applied in the study of system's dynamics in many branches of science, including a wider range of social system behaviour [28], ecology [29,30], management [31], etc., it is not sufficiently generalized and applied in urban science to understand how urban systems change over time. A state space representation of the BLV retail model was presented in the original Harris and Wilson [20] paper and further developed in Wilson [4].…”

Global Systems Science and Policy

“…The systems approach then asks what things can affect the desired outcome, what things can affect those things, and so on. This establishes the components of the system and their interactions [24]. The state of a system is a snapshot of it in time.…”

“…This approach was used in the controversial Limits to growth study [28] whose critics misunderstood the purpose which was to investigate possible futures rather than predict any particular future. System dynamics is an important step towards understanding the possible behaviour of complex social systems [24].…”

Getting the Best of Both Worlds? Developing Complementary Equation-Based and Agent-Based Models

“…ABMs often begin with assumptions on the behavior of economic agents and then derive the systemic dynamics via simulation. But these dynamics are frequently characterized by certain stable attractors that could be characterized as equilibria, and not all ABM lack a general equilibrium (Henderson and Isaac 2017;Johnson et al 2017).…”