Complexity in Economic and Social Systems

There is no term that better describes the essential features of human society than complexity. On various levels, from the decision-making processes of individuals, through to the interactions between individuals leading to the spontaneous formation of groups and social hierarchies, up to the collective, herding processes that reshape whole societies, all these features share the property of irreducibility, i.e., they require a holistic, multi-level approach formed by researchers from different disciplines. This Special Issue aims to collect research studies that, by exploiting the latest advances in physics, economics, complex networks, and data science, make a step towards understanding these economic and social systems. The majority of submissions are devoted to financial market analysis and modeling, including the stock and cryptocurrency markets in the COVID-19 pandemic, systemic risk quantification and control, wealth condensation, the innovation-related performance of companies, and more. Looking more at societies, there are papers that deal with regional development, land speculation, and the-fake news-fighting strategies, the issues which are of central interest in contemporary society. On top of this, one of the contributions proposes a new, improved complexity measure

Business Cycles in Economics

The business cycles are generated by the oscillating macro-/micro-/nano- economic output variables in the economy of the scale and the scope in the amplitude/frequency/phase/time domains in the economics. The accurate forward looking assumptions on the business cycles oscillation dynamics can optimize the financial capital investing and/or borrowing by the economic agents in the capital markets. The book's main objective is to study the business cycles in the economy of the scale and the scope, formulating the Ledenyov unified business cycles theory in the Ledenyov classic and quantum econodynamics

Planetary Improvement: Discourses and Practices of Green Capitalism in the Cleantech Space

There is money to be made in saving the planet. A whole host of actors, such as investors, entrepreneurs, engineers, and policy makers have mobilized around our ecological problems, seeking to innovate new `green\u27 and `clean\u27 technologies that can serve a rapidly changing environment. The presumption that such technologies are both necessary and necessarily profitable anchors visions of a `green\u27 capitalism that can and must be brought into existence. However, just as free markets have never been all that free, why should we presume that green capitalism would be all that green? Instead of attempting to arbit whether or not the greening of capital is or can `work\u27 - this work seeks to understand whether and how `green capitalism\u27 coheres around new justificatory frames, or what Boltanski and Chiapello call a new spirit of capitalism. The emerging spirit of green capitalism is positioned somewhere between the maintenance of the current neoliberal form of accumulation and a desire to return to romanticized visions of more stable, centrally coordinated economic systems. It is an attempt to make sense of capitalism in crisis, and a crisis caused by capitalism. This research focuses specifically upon individuals within the broad field of green capitalism who are actively grappling with the ways in which the infrastructure of global capitalism has irrevocably shaped world ecology, and who are experimenting, in thought and practice, with a wide range of new techno-social configurations intended to mitigate, or even reverse, these negative ecological effects. The project is divided into two parts. The first is grounded by a critical discourse analysis of mass-market texts published over the past 25 years that advocate for green capitalism. Four distinct `motifs\u27 can be found in this literature, each of which is analyzed in turn. These are: Planetary Improvement; Eco-Utopian Socialism; EcoFordism; and Green Developmentalism. This critical discourse analysis then connects with an ethnographic investigation of the `cleantech space\u27 in New York City. Through my ethnographic work I explore the performativity of abstract market imperatives in this field, which encompasses a wide array of technologies that boast some form of material or energetic efficiency over prevailing norms. The cleantech space is filled with innovative entrepreneurs, inventors and investors, all of whom want to see new technologies succeed. And yet, in the eyes of capital (or the fiduciary responsibility of investors) not all innovations are created equal. Only those innovations that promise sizeable and rapid returns are likely to receive support. In other words, there are many good technologies out there that make for bad investments. And so, while it may be the case that we will need new technologies to provide the infrastructure for any ecologically viable future economy, it is not so clear that the specific technologies being produced by the prevailing funding streams will ever be able to get us there