>Surprisingly, several mathematical models of free-market economies display features of complex macroscopic physical systems such as ferromagnets, including pha

>Surprisingly, several mathematical models of free-market economies display features of complex macroscopic physical systems such as ferromagnets, including phase transitions, symmetry breaking and duality. I'm always super skeptical of claims like this (disclaimer: haven't actually read the paper), because they seem to make clearly overextended analogies between dissimilar fields. If you're used to studying "phase transitions, symmetry breaking, and duality" in ferromagnetics, then when you look at economics you're likely to see similar patterns - but at face value, we're comparing replicable features of (relatively) simple physical systems to non-replicable macroeconomic behavior. If we could rewind time and run a bunch of population level counterfactual scenarios, then it might be worth taking seriously, but I have yet to see a convincing case for making conclusions about population level systems based on unrelated physical models. CAVEAT: this isn't to say that models aren't useful. Neither am I claiming that we can't take some insights from other fields. I just think we tend to sometimes forget that the map is not the territory. For example, I could certainly imagine populations undergoing changes between states which we could roughly analogize to be "phase transitions", but I wouldn't therefore conclude that those states were, in fact, fundamental - I'd expect similar dynamics to play out differently depending on context. Mandatory SMBC Comic: https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/2012-03-21 https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/2012-03-21