Search

INSIGHTS Written by historians Fredrik Albritton Jonsson and Carl Wennerlind, Scarcity connects, dissects, and narrates the history of Western economic ideas about the natural limits to human societies, from the deep roots beneath Thomas Malthus's 1798 book An Essay on the Principle of Population to Johan Rockström and Will Steffen's contemporary Planetary Boundaries framework. The book completely ignores two of the most important thinkers on human-nature relations since Malthus - the agricultural economist Ester Boserup and Nobel Prize-winning economist of the commons Elinor Ostrom. Can we understand sustainable governance of common-pool re-sources - like Earth's atmosphere - without Ostrom's polycentric governance?. [Extracted from the article]

The field of artificial intelligence (AI) strives to build rational agents capable of perceiving the world around them and taking actions to advance specified goals. Put another way, AI researchers aim to construct a synthetic homo economicus, the mythical perfectly rational agent of neoclassical economics.We review progress toward creating this new species of machine, machina economicus, and discuss some challenges in designing AIs that can reason effectively in economic contexts. Supposing that AI succeeds in this quest, or at least comes close enough that it is useful to think about AIs in rationalistic terms, we ask how to design the rules of interaction in multi-agent systems that come to represent an economy of AIs. Theories of normative design from economics may prove more relevant for artificial agents than human agents, with AIs that better respect idealized assumptions of rationality than people, interacting through novel rules and incentive systems quite distinct from those tailored for people. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]