J. M. Keynes, thinker of economic complexity

Abstract

The paper reconstructs Keynes’s conception of the nature and method of economics focusing on The Theory of Probability and The General Theory and shows that Keynes’s theoretical work as an economist was an attempt to cope with the complexity of the economic world and the organic interdependence of the economic variables. Keynes offers a theoretical framework where the macroscopic outcome of the model is the result of the interaction of heterogeneous and not fully rational agents that revise their behaviour as they accumulate information. In the presence of true uncertainty the interactions of agents generate macro-instability and out-ofequilibrium paths. This approach has much in common with the approaches to complexity that have recently emerged.