Complexity Explorables

Recovery from the Covid-19 crisis provides a chance to implement economic measures that are also beneficial from environmental and social perspectives. While ‘green’ recovery packages are crucial to support economies tracking a low-carbon transition in the short-term, green measures such as carbon pricing are also key to improving welfare in the long-term. This commentary specifies the need for carbon pricing, outlines its implications for our everyday lives, and explains how it works alongside value-based change in the context of climate action and societal well-being.

What does the financialization of housing, weakened pension rights, and land grabbing have in common with 2020's post-pandemic crisis? David Harvey explains how these are all results of the increased tendency of accumulation by dispossession, where profits today are mostly generated by dispossession after a crisis and not by production. Will governments in every part of the world be able to prevent that pattern from happening again in the near future?

Jason Smith takes a stab at blind faith in the efficiency of the price mechanism to provide market information. To do so, he calls upon Information Theory and Generative Adversarial Networks to argue the price mechanism is faulty and skewed towards supply.

Hartmut Kliemt first traces the concept of the homo oeconomicus back to the philosophy of Spinoza and Hobbes. Then he addresses criticisms of this concept in particular by discussing the ultimatum game as a strong piece of counterevidence. After this, he outlines a difference in the behavioural sciences between internal perspectives that seek to understand actors' cognitive processes and external perspectives, which look at observed behaviour only.

Max Krahé explains the role of economic planning for a green transition.