Related papers: Science and the Future: Introduction
We discuss the large-scale structure of the universe in inflationary cosmology and the implications that it may have for the long-term future of civilizations. Although each civilization is doomed to perish, it may be possible to transmit…
Cooperation is a persistent behavioral pattern of entities pooling and sharing resources. Its ubiquity in nature poses a conundrum. Whenever two entities cooperate, one must willingly relinquish something of value to the other. Why is this…
In the pursuit of ever increasing efficiency and growth, our economies have evolved to remarkable degrees of complexity, with nested production processes feeding each other in order to create products of greater sophistication from less…
The primordial confrontation underlying the existence of our universe can be conceived as the battle between entropy and complexity. The law of ever-increasing entropy (Boltzmann H-theorem) evokes an irreversible, one-directional evolution…
Growth rate of the world Growth Domestic Product (GDP) is analysed to determine possible pathways of the future economic growth. The analysis is based on using the latest data of the World Bank and it reveals that the growth rate between…
Company mergers and acquisitions are often perceived to act as catalysts for corporate growth in free markets systems: it is conventional wisdom that those activities lead to better and more efficient markets. However, the broad adoption of…
All economies require physical resource consumption to grow and maintain their structure. The modern economy is additionally characterized by private debt. The Human and Resources with MONEY (HARMONEY) economic growth model links these…
The world is changing at an ever-increasing pace. And it has changed in a much more fundamental way than one would think, primarily because it has become more connected and interdependent than in our entire history. Every new product, every…
Mounting evidences are being gathered suggesting that income and wealth distribution in various countries or societies follow a robust pattern, close to the Gibbs distribution of energy in an ideal gas in equilibrium, but also deviating…
Sex is considered as an evolutionary paradox, since its evolutionary advantage does not necessarily overcome the two fold cost of sharing half of one's offspring's genome with another member of the population. Here we demonstrate that…
The claim that life is an emergent phenomenon exhibiting novel properties and principles is often criticized for being in conflict with causal closure at the microscopic level. I argue that advances in cosmological theory suggesting an…
The quantitative aspirations of economists and financial analysts have for many years been based on the belief that it should be possible to build models of economic systems - and financial markets in particular - that are as predictive as…
Central to the official "green growth" discourse is the conjecture that absolute decoupling can be achieved with certain market instruments. This paper evaluates this claim focusing on the role of technology, while changes in GDP…
The use of equilibrium models in economics springs from the desire for parsimonious models of economic phenomena that take human reasoning into account. This approach has been the cornerstone of modern economic theory. We explain why this…
It is widely assumed that increases in economic productivity necessarily lead to economic growth. In this paper, it is shown that this is not always the case. An idealized model of an economy is presented in which a new technology allows…
Traditionally evolution is seen as a process where from a pool of possible variations of a population (e.g. biological species or industrial goods) a few variations get selected which survive and proliferate, whereas the others vanish.…
We discuss the problems of consensus and unity in science. The natural sciences seem to contrast with many other areas of endeavor in that a high level of consensus seems to exist in them. However, a careful analysis of the structure of…
Are the sciences not advancing at an ever increasing speed? We contrast this popular perspective with the view that science funding may actually see diminishing returns, at least regarding established fields. In order to stimulate a larger…
With a steadily growing human population and rapid advancements in technology, the global human network is increasing in size and connection density. This growth exacerbates networked global threats and can lead to unexpected consequences…
In the context of a large class of stochastic processes used to describe the dynamics of wealth growth, we prove a set of inequalities establishing necessary and sufficient conditions in order to avoid infinite wealth concentration. These…