Archive
Everything published here, grouped by theme. Sixteen reference pages plus the background pages below.
Complexity economics
Why treating an economy as a system in permanent motion rather than a machine that settles into equilibrium changes what you measure, model and forecast.
- Inequality and Growth: What the Distribution Does 10 March 2026 · Inequality is a property of a distribution, which makes it invisible to models built around a representative agent. What changes when you model the distribution directly.
- Financial Instability as a Structural Property 25 February 2026 · Why financial systems generate their own crises, how network exposure turns a local failure into a systemic one, and what regulators took from the research.
- Non-Equilibrium Economics: What Changes When Nothing Settles 11 February 2026 · Equilibrium is an assumption, not an observation. What economic analysis looks like once you drop it, and what you give up in exchange.
Agent-based modelling
How agent-based models are built, what they are good for, where they fail, and which software people actually use.
- Software and Tools for Agent-Based Modelling 7 April 2026 · The frameworks people actually use, what each is good for, and when writing it yourself is the right answer.
- Validation and Calibration: The Hard Part 24 March 2026 · A model flexible enough to represent adaptive heterogeneous agents is flexible enough to fit anything. What separates a validated model from a fitted one.
- Building Your First Agent-Based Model 20 January 2026 · The design decisions that determine whether an agent-based model teaches you something or just produces motion on a screen.
Social networks
Network structure, how information and opinions move through it, and what the measures actually mean.
- Media, Polarisation and Misinformation 3 March 2026 · What the evidence supports about algorithmic curation, echo chambers and the spread of false information, and where popular accounts run ahead of it.
- How Opinions Spread Through a Network 3 February 2026 · Simple and complex contagion, threshold models, and why the structures that spread news fastest are not the ones that change behaviour.
- Network Structure and What the Measures Mean 6 January 2026 · Degree distributions, path lengths, clustering, centrality and community structure - what each measure captures and how each is misread.
Data and society
What large behavioural datasets can and cannot tell you about a society, and what happens when policy is built on them.
- Digital Health and Access to Medicines 17 March 2026 · What happens to access, price and safety when pharmacy moves online - the European mail-order market as a worked case in digital service transitions.
- Digital Traces and Privacy: Why Anonymisation Fails 17 February 2026 · Behavioural data is far more identifying than it appears. What re-identification research established, and what it means for research using platform data.
- Big Data and Public Policy: What It Changed 27 January 2026 · Where large-scale behavioural data has genuinely improved public decisions, where it has produced expensive dashboards, and how to tell the difference in advance.
Background
What this site is, who runs it and how to get in touch.
- About this site Scope, method and how the notes are written
- Contact Corrections and questions
A note on the older archive
This domain previously hosted an academic newsletter and event archive on non-equilibrium social science, active between 2011 and 2015. That material is not reproduced here. Where an old address had a clear thematic successor it now redirects to the matching note above; where it did not, the address returns a clean “gone” response rather than being pointed somewhere arbitrary.