Eric Beinhocker

University of Oxford | OX · Oxford Martin School

This paper defines the ‘2°C capital stock’ as the global stock of infrastructure which, if operated to the end of its normal economic life, implies global mean temperature increases of 2°C or more (with 50% probability). Using IPCC carbon budgets and the IPCC’s AR5 scenario database, and assuming future emissions from other sectors are compatible w...

The current model of economic growth generated unprecedented increases in human wealth and prosperity during the 19th and 20th centuries. The main mechanisms have been the rapid pace of technological and social innovation, human capital accumulation, and the conversion of resources and natural capital into more valuable forms of produced capital. H...

The article focuses on how to resolve the tension between a prosperous world and a moral one. The Tories will fail to acknowledge the truth in Labor's argument - that despite annual GDP growth recently ticking up above three per cent, real household disposable income dropped around two per cent under their watch and is not likely to reach pre-crisi...

In 1987, George Soros introduced his concepts of reflexivity and fallibility and has further developed and applied these concepts over subsequent decades. This paper attempts to build on Soros’s framework, provide his concepts with a more precise definition, and put them in the context of recent thinking on complex adaptive systems. The paper propo...

What prosperity is, where growth comes from, why markets work—and how we resolve the tension between a prosperous world and a moral one.

The rise of rentier capitalism in America, its relationship to inequality, and the need to re-invigorate the middle class.

New developments in economics, in particular the application of ideas from complexity theory, have the potential to contribute new insights to major public policy challenges and to re-frame long-standing political debates.

Lasting reform to the financial sector will not be achieved without tackling the price rigging and anti-competitive behaviour that is rife in the industry. The financial sector is one of the UK's great historic, globally competitive clusters. In 2010 the sector directly contributed 9 per cent of the UK's gross value added, paid £63 billion in taxes...

Generalized Darwinism and self-organization have been positioned as competing frameworks for explaining processes of economic and institutional change. Proponents of each view question the ontological validity and explanatory power of the other. This paper argues that information theory, rooted in modern thermodynamics, offers the potential to inte...

After a full year in heads-down crisis mode, business executives are looking again to the future. As they reengage in strategic thinking, many are struck by a sense that the world has changed: The turmoil was not merely another turn of the business cycle but a restructuring of the economic order. Is that impression accurate?

Prior research on competitive strategy in the presence of increasing returns suggests that early entrants can achieve sustained competitive advantage by pursuing Get Big Fast (GBF) strategies: rapidly expanding capacity and cutting prices to gain market share advantage and exploit positive feedbacks faster than their rivals. Yet a growing literatur...

Over the next two decades, the country's middle class will grow from about 5 percent of the population to more than 40 percent and create the world's fifth-largest consumer market. India's rapid economic growth has set the stage for fundamental change among the country's consumers. The same energy that has lifted hundreds of millions of Indians out...

Most companies are far better at executing their current activities than at adapting to long-term changes in the business environment. Very few can do both well. Three barriers to adaptability are deeply rooted in the nature of organizations: inflexibility in the mental models of their managers; organizational complexity, driven by the demands of e...

The goal of a strategic planning process should not be to make strategy but to build prepared minds that are capable of making sound strategic decisions.

Many companies get little value from their annual strategic-planning process. It should be redesigned to support real-time strategy making and to encourage ‘creative accidents.’

Companies should not rely on strategies that assume they can predict the future. Strategy needs to be robust against highly uncertain outcomes and needs to adapt to changing conditions. By understanding the economy as a complex adaptive system and viewing strategy as an evolutionary learning process, firms can create strategies built around continu...

Managers can form populations of strategies using lessons learned from complexity theory and evolution.

During the past few decades, work by evolutionary theorists and others on evolution as a form of computation has yielded important insights in fields ranging from biology, to computer science, information theory, and physics. Yet this research stream has had relatively little impact on evolutionary views of the economy and institutions. This paper...

In using C-ROADS, it is important to remember that the simulation is a sensitivity tool, rather than a tool to provide precise quantitative estimates of projected emissions, CO 2 concentrations, and temperature and sea level responses. To ensure effective communication on the capabilities of the model simulations, we recommend that the simulations...