Book chapter
Complexity and Productivity: The Task Approach
Routledge International Handbook of Complexity Economics, pp 305-315
2025
Abstract
Complexity is always a challenge for theorists. Simplicity and predictiveness are criteria for good theories, but it is also important that theories help us to answer important questions, and the subjects of those questions may be complex and unpredictable. One strand of research in the later 20th century and the current century has produced a striking insight: that nonlinear interactions among objects that are simple in themselves, subject to numerical measurement, may give rise to dynamic processes that are complex and unpredictable. But complexity may also arise, and is less surprising, when the objects of interaction are not numerically measurable. Human language is an instance. It is understood that language use is creative (e.g. Chomsky, 1965), and unpredictability is one aspect of creativity. Complexity is also related to the limits of human cognitive capacity. In some recent economic theories, a key assumption is that more complex productive processes demand greater cognitive capacity (e.g. Acemoglu and Restrepo, 2019). Much of this literature recognizes that a group may be able to accomplish what an individual cannot, through division of the complex productive process into a sequence of less complex tasks; that is, through the division of labor. This, of course, is an insight we may trace to Adam Smith; but the recent literature extends this notion in important ways. This chapter (i) surveys the 21st-century literature on the task approach and (ii) proposes a model of complex production via simpler tasks that is itself linguistic (compare McCain, 1991). After all, a plan of production is itself a linguistic object. If we limit our framework to feasible plans, that is plans for courses of action that can be carried out, the structure of such a plan is still the structure of language. This approach, linking the creativity of technology via division of labor to the creativity of language, is offered as the major contribution of this paper. This formalism is sufficiently broad to provide a taxonomy of the various task approaches we find in the literature.
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Details
- Title
- Complexity and Productivity
- Creators
- Roger A. McCain
- Contributors
- Ping Chen (Editor)Wolfram Elsner (Editor)Andreas Pyka (Editor)
- Publication Details
- Routledge International Handbook of Complexity Economics, pp 305-315
- Publisher
- Routledge
- Edition
- 1
- Resource Type
- Book chapter
- Language
- English
- Academic Unit
- Economics (School of Economics)
- Scopus ID
- 2-s2.0-105002891120
- Other Identifier
- 991021959779604721