A New Kind of Science

I came across a feature on Stephen Wolfram recently where he talks about his newest service: WolframAlpha, a 'computational knowledge engine'. I was intrigued and dugg a little deeper.

One can always in principle find out how a particular system will behave just by running an experiment and watching what happens. But the great historical successes of theoretical science have tipically revolved around finding mathematical formulas that instead allow one to directly predict the outcome. Yet in effect this relies on being able to shortcut the computational work that the system itself performs.

via Stephen's book: A new kind of science.

Complexity and shortcuts. Reminded me of the current crisis that we're in which in big part is due to shortcuts. So what if you apply this thinking to economics - where we study how societies (made up of many individuals) allocate and manage their resources? Everything that happens in markets, in production or consumption, is determined by the involvement of many individuals, their perspectives on the world and of course the informations that they possess and process when they take decisions. This would be the 'computational work' that the system performs.

Much of economic theory takes shortcuts here. Maybe that's also one of the reasons why the system seems flawed.