Things Counterintuitive: A Program for Social Entrepreneurs June 21, 2009

Organizer: Foundation for Research on Economics & the Environment. Join us as we explore how just about all the interesting and important truths we know about nature are counterintuitive. For example: Aristotle’s long-accepted but false assertion that heavy objects fall faster than lighter ones. Economics and evolution are counterintuitive. Life looks intelligently designed, so our inclination is to infer that there must be an intelligent designer. Similarly, the economy looks designed, so our natural inclination is to infer that we need a master planner. In fact, emergence and complexity theory explains how the principles of self-organization and emergence cause complex systems to arise from simple systems without a top-down designer. Is Charles Darwin’s natural selection Adam Smith’s invisible hand?

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