Steve Keen

The mainstream economics is an instruction to us doing that modeling properly.

Because, again, this is something that's come out of science rather than economics.

The idea you've got to model far from equilibrium systems.

So this became obvious to scientists immediately.

in general, back in the early 1960s, because we're all used to watching weather maps these days and, you know, getting forecasts.

You can sort of trust, you know, you can watch the forecast during the week, what the weekend's going to be and plan your activities accordingly.

You couldn't do that back in the 50s because what they were using was linear techniques and they assumed equilibrium fundamentally.

And a mathematical meteorologist called Hans Edler-Dorens, he said, look, it's just wrong to have linear models of the weather.

The interactions are nonlinear.

So a high level of temperature causes a high level of moisture, which causes another factor and they amplify each other.

And to make his point, he took the Navier-Stokes equations, which are

incredibly, in so far insoluble nonlinear equations that describe fluid dynamics in two dimensions, time and space.

He took those and reduced them to a one-dimensional model, so just in time, with three variables and three parameters.

And you couldn't get a simpler looking model and it generated complex systems behavior.

So that was back in the 1960s.

That's a paper called Deterministic A-Periodic Cycles.

So that's been commonplace in science from the 1960s.

And meteorologists adopted it almost immediately because they didn't have any ideological belief that the weather was in equilibrium.

So consequently, that's not the only way in which meteorology has advanced since the 1960s, but that's typical of sciences in general.

They've got used to handling non-equilibrium systems.