[An updated treatment of some of this material appears in Chapter 2 of the Energy and Human Ambitions on a Finite Planet (free) textbook, also mirrors a 2022 article in Nature Physics..]
The shape of a knowledge worker
In a recent post, I threw around the term 'cognitive exponent' a bunch. Today I'd like to talk about a thing that might help us frame our investigation of what puts someone on the right side of that exponential graph.
Why the super rich are inevitable
Why some mathematicians argue the economy is designed to create a few super rich people – unless we stop it.
Ergodicity Economics – Formal economics without parallel universes
Does the way we look at a problem – over time or across an ensemble – change what we see? The main insight from Ergodicity Economics is that when ergodicity […]
Maximum power in evolution, ecology and economics
Ludwig Boltzmann suggested that natural selection was fundamentally a struggle among organisms for available energy. Alfred Lotka argued that organisms that capture and use more energy than their competition will have a selective advantage in the evolutionary process, i.e. the Darwinian notion of evolution was based on a fundamental, generalized energy principle. He extended this general principle from the energetics of a single organism or species to the energetics of entire energy pathways through ecosystems. Howard Odum and Richard Pinkerton, building on Lotka, extended this concept to ‘The maximum power principle’ and applied it to many biological and physical systems including human economies. We examine this history and how these ideas relate to concepts from other disciplines including philosophy. But there has been considerable confusion in understanding and applying these concepts which we attempt to resolve while providing various examples from routine life and discussing some unresolved issues. This article is part of the theme issue ‘Thermodynamics 2.0: Bridging the natural and social sciences (Part 2)’.
Power: A Primer for Perplexed Economists
Let's Assume an Unfettered Marketplace of Ideas! Or Actually, Let's Not.
Infinite Researchers | AI-Powered Scientific Discovery
What happens to the speed of discovery if we have infinite researchers? Explore AI experiments accelerating breakthroughs.
« Une minorité privilégiée sacrifie la planète afin de préserver ses richesses et son pouvoir »
TRIBUNE. Le rejet de l’écologie est désormais promu par des gouvernements élus démocratiquement, autoritaires voire fascisants, et soutenus par les milieux d’affaires des énergies fossiles, déplorent trois spécialistes d’écologie politique, dans une tribune au « Monde ».
The Fabric and the Brain
Articulating agent ecologies with high-personality planetary computation
Frameworks v0.2
FRAMEWORKS v0.2 Many of the thoughts in this document draw on and synthesize concepts from economics, math, physics, chemistry, biology, and psychology. Here are a handful of core concepts that are often relied on as inputs: Activation energy Behavioral economics Cognitive biases Darwinism En...
Volume 384 Issue 2320 | Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A | The Royal Society
Influential themed journal issues across the physical mathematical and engineering sciences.
Economics for the future – Beyond the superorganism
Our environment and economy are at a crossroads. This paper attempts a cohesive narrative on how human evolved behavior, money, energy, economy and th…
DISTRIBUTIONS OF MONEY IN MODEL MARKETS OF ECONOMY
We study the distributions of money in a simple closed economic system for different types of monetary transactions. We know that for arbitrary and random sharing with locally conserving money transactions, the money distribution goes to the Gibb's distribution of statistical mechanics. We then consider the effects of savings, etc. and see how the distribution changes. We also propose a new model where the agents invest equal amounts of money in each transaction. We find that for short time-period, the money distribution obeys a power-law with an exponent very close to unity, and has an exponential tail; after a very long time, this distribution collapses and the entire amount of money goes to a tiny fraction of the population.
Tony Feng on Twitter / X
I am a mathematician but I avoided commenting on this because the problems are (far) outside my domain. Even if I sat down to read the technical details (which I have not), it would be hard to appreciate the context of prior work, etc. But I've gotten enough sense of things… https://t.co/VZzosBYFto— Tony Feng (@tonylfeng) August 5, 2026
When is an economist not an economist?
A fraught question that warrants reflection on who gets to be a member of the influential informal guild
Post-growth & Regenerative Economics
Articles, podcasts, papers and books about alternative, pro-social models of finance and economics.
www.sciencedirect.com
Post-growth: the science of wellbeing within planetary boundaries
SEED Founding
Making Business Personal
Think Like a Commoner | A Short Introduction to the Life of the Commons
Design principles for long-lived circular organization: An Ostromian perspective