Yuji Aruka – författare

This book focuses on how important massive information is and how sensitive outcomes are to information. In this century humans now are coming up against the massive utilization of information in various contexts. The advent of super intelligence is drastically accelerating the evolution of the socio-economic system. Our traditional analytic approach must therefore be radically reformed in order to adapt to an information-sensitive framework, which means giving up myopic purification and the elimination of all considerations of massive information. In this book, authors who have shared and exchanged their ideas over the last 20 years, offer thorough examinations of the theoretical–ontological basis of complex economic interaction, econophysics, and agent-based modeling during the last several decades.

This book thus provides the indispensable philosophical-scientific foundations for this new approach, and then moves on to empirical–epistemological studies concerning changes insentiments and other movements in financial markets.

 This book systematically provides a prospective integrated approach for complexity social science in its view of statistical physics and mathematics, with an impressive collection of the knowledge and expertise of leading researchers from all over the world. The book mainly covers both finitary methods of statistical equilibrium and data-driven analysis by econophysics.

The late Professor Masanao Aoki of UCLA, who passed away at the end of July 2018, in his later years dedicated himself to the reconstruction of macroeconomics mainly in terms of statistical physics. Professor Aoki, who was already an IEEE fellow, was also named an Econometric Society Fellow in 1979. Until the early 1990s, however, his contributions were focused on the new developments of a novel algorithm for the time series model and their applications to economic data. Those contributions were undoubtedly equivalent to the Nobel Prize-winning work of Granger''s "co-integration method". Afterthe publications of his New Approaches to Macroeconomic Modeling and Modeling Aggregate Behavior and Fluctuations in Economics, both published by Cambridge University Press, in 1996 and 2002, respectively, his contributions rapidly became known and spread throughout the field. In short, these new works challenged econophysicists to develop evolutionary stochastic dynamics, multiple equilibria, and externalities as field effects and revolutionized the stochastic views of interacting agents. In particular, the publication of Reconstructing Macroeconomics, also by Cambridge University Press (2007), in cooperation with Hiroshi Yoshikawa, further sharpened the process of embodying “a perspective from statistical physics and combinatorial stochastic processes” in economic modeling. Interestingly, almost concurrently with Prof. Aoki’s newest development, similar approaches were appearing. Thus, those who were working in the same context around the world at that time cametogether, exchanging their results during the past decade. In memory of Prof. Aoki, this book has been planned by authors who followed him to present the most advanced outcomes of his heritage.

This textbook presents a new way to visualize or imagine the evolutionary architecture of economics, to judge both its practical outcomes and its ultimate value. Evolutionary economics employs an Aristotelian architecture. The cognitive value of this imagination[H1]  must be directly relevant to the evolutionary theory and practice of designing the architecture of the economic system. Mainstream economics completely ignores design value in order to concentrate on the ideal, Platonic vision of the economy. The current system is no longer one that converges on a constant entity, because the system is constantly evolving. The advent of the digital economy is an indispensable next step, and computational power and algorithmic rationality are increasingly dominating the economic system—and complicating it.

In today’s society, neither fault nor malice matters in the algorithmic or human system. There is little room left for the effective working of human reason. Correspondingly, the meanings of money, exchange, the market system, auctions, production, consumption, and the currency transaction system are poised to change. In most cases, there will be digital counterparts. A smart contract tied together with DLT, for example, makes it possible to design an economically well-behaved peer-to-peer (P2P) system, which ranges from the micromarket to the international currency transaction system. The introduction of this technology and its architectural design may suggest what a truly decentralized future entails. 

This change may also bring about a new understanding of existing social consensus and practice. Thus, the implementation of these considerations naturally leads to a new style of chapter structuring in this book, from the classical analytical approach to exploring computational methods and digital tools: in many cases, the problems presented in each chapter are combined with discussions of a respective computational method and its practical value. 

This edited volume celebrates  a quarter-century’s anniversary of the foundation of the Japan Association for Evolutionary Economics (JAFEE) and proposes the future perspectives of evolutionary economics on the grounds of its achievements in Japan. When JAFEE was founded in 1997, hundreds of ambitious non-neo-classical economists gathered in this forum to advance new directions of economic research. Succeeding in 2004, JAFEE launched an international academic journal, Evolutionary and Institutional Economics Review (EIER), which is now published by Springer.Evolutionary economics found rich soil for growth in Japan, where non-orthodox directions in economic theory and historical interest in the past masters’ works occupied a solid portion of economics academism. Evolutionary economics in Japan has grown with the collaboration of non-neoclassical economics including Marxian and post-Keynesian economics, agent-based modeling, complexity studies, comparative economic systems, and studies in industrial evolution. Combining the renovation of classical value theory as the micro-foundation of evolutionary economics is one of its most conspicuous achievements. Experimental methods are also used in the artificial domain, regional studies (community currencies), and other domains. Further, evolutionary ideas stimulated comparative analysis of national economies in the development and system transition. 

The variety of chapters in this volume reflects the broad perspective and the multiplicity of approaches to evolutionary economics in Japan, which thus stimulates its worldwide advance.