Human Adaptability and Economic Surprise

Abstract

We cannot understand society without understanding people. The ways in which humans behave, including their adjustments to each other and to their communities, contribute to the complex interactions from which all activity arises. Attempts to think coherently about economic phenomena must incorporate, at least implicitly, some image of human motivation and epistemics, and of the skills by which accommodation between people is achieved. Only then can one gain insight into the individual’s emergence as a socially integrated creature responding to, and attempting to influence, events.