Economia fora do equilíbrio

The Insupportable Equilibrium of Economic Thought

ByMark Buchanan

".. The upright pencil is in what’s called unstable equilibrium, a state of being that can exist if unperturbed, but that will change rapidly if given the tiniest shock from the physical world. By contrast, a pencil lying on its side is in stable equilibrium....
Outside economics, in areas such as meteorology, the biggest shift in scientific thinking of the last 50 years has been the movement to understand “out of equilibrium” systems...
More technically, we could say that the atmosphere is prone to positive feedbacks, which prevent it from settling into a nice equilibrium. As humans, we’re terrible at imagining how such processes work. Take a piece of paper and fold it, and then take that doubled paper and fold it again, and then again, 30 times in all. Actually, don’t waste your time. You’ll find you can’t do it because the result, if you did, would be about 70 miles thick. This is the power of positive feedback: Each step not only makes things bigger, but also makes them bigger more quickly. This leads to consequences far beyond our expectations...
In one form or another, positive feedback lies behind almost everything that makes our world rich and surprising, changeable and dynamic, lively and unpredictable. It makes seeds sprout and grow into trees, matches burst into flame, and single cells divide and proliferate into living, thinking human beings. It drives political revolutions and new religions. Yet outside of these areas, an intellectual blind spot to the power of positive feedbacks still holds us back. Nowhere is this truer than in the science of human systems, in social science, and especially in economics and finance.
We’ll never understand economies and markets until we get over the nutty idea that they alone -- unlike almost every other complex system in the world -- are inherently stable and have no internal weather. It’s time we began learning about the socioeconomic weather, categorizing its storms, and learning either how to prevent them or how to see them coming and protect ourselves against them.
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