Ergodicity economics is an umbrella term for addressing issues in economics research by carefully considering the ergodicity problem — that’s the problem that the expected value of something may be […]
Readers of this blog will probably be familiar with the Copenhagen experiment. We conducted a similar but much simpler experiment, and we did it in Brussels, so we’re now calling
“Reinforcement learning, a powerful branch of artificial intelligence (AI), has revolutionized the way machines learn and make decisions. From training autonomous robots to mastering complex games, reinforcement learning holds the
A central puzzle in evolutionary biology is that of spontaneous altruism. When two creatures interact, why might one sacrifice something of value in order to help the other? Why, if
The business of insurance, by various measures, is the largest industry on earth. Somewhat surprisingly, mainstream economics struggles to explain its existence. This post is about how ergodicity economics approaches
In 2011 I gave a 15-minute talk to a lay audience in London. The topic I had chosen was ergodicity breaking, and the challenge was clear: how do you get
Growth rates are at the heart of ergodicity economics, and economic news are full of them, too — “GDP grew by 3% last year,” something like that. Sometimes we also
A few weeks ago I was made aware of an experiment that was recently carried out in Copenhagen, by a group of neuroscientists led by Oliver Hulme at the Danish
If we assume that a false proposition is true, we can prove anything (ex falso quodlibet). Bertrand Russell, so the story goes, once mentioned this in class. A student raised
Not all academic fields have a clear starting point, a seminal paper that constitutes the foundation of the entire discipline. But economics does. The paper that defines modern formal economics
The most interesting scientific projects are those that surprise, when the mathematics, or the code, tells us something we didn’t expect. In our study of US wealth dynamics that’s what
Michael Mauboussin recently re-tweeted an article by Jason Zweig in the Wall Street Journal titled “Disturbing New Facts About American Capitalism”. The article summarizes reports of an increasing concentration of
The term “weak ergodicity breaking” helps categorize things by their ergodic properties: ergodic strongly non-ergodic weakly non-ergodic This list is chronological, in that there used to be an implicit belief
