Complicato e complesso

What have in common the explosion of a speculative bubble and a hurricane? That they are self-organizing properties of two complex and unstable systems. The economic system, of which financial economics and real economics are two sub-systems, and the atmospheric system, in which hurricanes originate, are complicated, i.e. difficult to understand, but both of them have some properties, like the self- organizing capacity, that makes them complex. Keynesian macroeconomics must have been so complicated that, in order to explain its functioning, sixty years ago Bill Phillips built MONIAC, the Phillips’ Machine. In the same years two economists of the Austrian School, Ludwig von Mises and August von Hayek, Nobel Prize in Economics in 1974, pointed out that learning and experimental activities would generated spontaneous social order, i.e. that the economic system presented some elements of complexity. In the last decades, complexity have been recognized as a new research field in Economics like in Physical Sciences.