Complexity Economics

Hold the complexity-science toolkit cold: agent-based modeling, emergent distributions, non-ergodic dynamics. This is the half of the room that is already home turf — make it unimpeachable.

• Confirm admission status and secure the seat

  Verify whether the passKey link is an invitation to apply or an admission — the program describes selection through an open call. Submit whatever is required, immediately. Everything else on this page assumes the seat.

• Complete SFI Complexity Explorer: Introduction to Complexity

  Full course with exercises, not audit mode. Keep a running note of every concept that maps to markets — the note becomes vocabulary for the workshop.

• Complete SFI Complexity Explorer: Introduction to Agent-Based Modeling

  NetLogo throughout. The point is fluency in the modeling idiom the room shares, not the tool itself — the real models get rebuilt in Python.

• Replicate the Sugarscape wealth-distribution result

  Epstein & Axtell, chapter II: identical agents, emergent Pareto tail. Own implementation, own writeup of why the skew emerges without any behavioral assumption.

• Build the ergodicity-economics simulation

  Multiplicative wealth dynamics: show time-average growth diverging from ensemble-average growth, and inequality emerging from non-ergodicity alone. This is the single highest-leverage tool in the lane — Peters (2019) as the source.

• Read Axtell on firm sizes and firm formation; write the summary memo

  Zipf distribution of U.S. firm sizes (Science, 2001) plus the 120-million-agent firm-formation model. Canonical inequality-generating ABM — assumed knowledge in the room.

Half the room will be ethnographers. Learn the language they think in — embeddedness, the gift, debt, value — well enough to be argued with, not politely tolerated.

• Polanyi, The Great Transformation — read and memo

  Embeddedness is the vocabulary everyone in the room shares. The memo states the double-movement argument and where valuation conventions sit inside it.

• Mauss, The Gift — read and memo

  Short and foundational. The question to carry: what is the gift-logic residue inside modern capital allocation — reciprocity in analyst access, IPO allocations, information flow?

• Graeber, Debt — read and take a position

  Contested by economists but the lingua franca of the room. The deliverable is a one-page written position: what survives scrutiny, what does not, and what the credit-before-barter claim implies for valuation conventions.

• Ho, Liquidated — read and critique in detail

  The ethnography of Wall Street that shows shareholder value being enacted rather than discovered. The closest existing work to the lane — the critique must identify precisely what it misses at the level of measurement machinery.

• Write the vocabulary synthesis: valuation conventions in anthropological terms

  One essay translating the lane into the room’s language: price targets as conventions, accounting objects as institutions, accumulation as reproduced hierarchy at firm level.

The load-bearing theory: models do not describe markets, they make them. This is where the Armstrong edge thesis becomes a social-studies-of-finance claim with a P&L attached.

• MacKenzie, An Engine, Not a Camera — read closely

  How Black-Scholes made the world it described. The load-bearing text of the entire lane; read with a notebook, chapter by chapter.

• Callon, introduction to The Laws of the Markets — read

  The theoretical statement of performativity. Dense; the memo restates it in plain terms with one worked market example.

• Beunza & Stark, Tools of the Trade — read

  Reflexive modeling inside a trading room — the micro-level mechanism. Directly parallel to how Armstrong actually operates.

• Write the Armstrong performativity essay

  State the fund’s edge thesis — analyst anchoring creates durable mispricings — as a performativity claim, with evidence from the live book. Almost nobody in that room trades; this document is the credential.

The anti-dilettante rule: the lane only counts if it produces something falsifiable. Build the empirical artifact and the model that carry the argument.

• Capex-to-D&A empirical study of the hyperscalers

  Collect the depreciation-schedule extensions (MSFT, GOOG, AMZN, META, 2020–2026), quantify the reported-earnings impact, and trace the analyst-target response. The measurement moves the world — show it in the data.

• Build the performative-convention ABM

  Depreciation convention feeds reported earnings, feeds analyst targets, feeds cost of capital, feeds actual capex, feeds industry capital structure. The Oxford ABM reframed in the room’s language.

• Draft the ergodicity lightning talk

  Dave’s DCA-and-hold-capital-back instinct is a time-average growth argument he lacks the vocabulary for. Five minutes, one simulation, one live-book example.

• Lock the hypotheses and pre-register the tests

  H1 through H3 stated falsifiably, data and method fixed before results are looked at. The pre-registration document is itself an artifact for the room.

Synthesis and delivery. Walk in with a position on every shared text, one falsifiable artifact, and a five-minute talk that no one else in the room could give.

• Finish the lightning talk: capex-to-D&A as a performative convention

  Slides and a five-minute script. Rehearsed, timed, ruthless. One claim, one mechanism, one chart from the empirical study.

• Draft the section for the Michael Ralph paper

  The workshop output lands as a section of the joint paper, not a separate track. Firm-level accumulation mechanism supplied to a literature that works at household and community scale.

• Position statements ready on the shared canon

  One paragraph each, held in memory: Polanyi, Mauss, Graeber, Ho, MacKenzie. The test is being able to disagree specifically at dinner.

• Sequence Oxford → Abu Dhabi and protect the Armstrong book

  Oxford in December, Abu Dhabi January 3–17, roughly ten weeks before the 12-month track record closes. Plan coverage of the book for two residential weeks before committing.