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This chapter provides an overview of the book’s main themes. It discusses the notion of a complexity frame, which is a fundamentally different policy frame provided by complexity science. The central policy choice in a complexity frame is not the market or the government. The goal of policy in the complexity frame is not to choose one or the other. Instead, policy is seen as affecting a complex evolving system that cannot be controlled. But while it cannot be controlled, it can be influenced, and policymakers have to continually think how to work with evolutionary pressures, and try to guide those pressures toward desirable ends. Within the complexity frame, top-down control actions are a last resort. Their use suggests that you have failed in your previous attempts to get the ecostructure right.

This chapter spells out the complexity policy frame in more detail. It begins with a brief introduction to complexity science, since it is the basis for the policy frame itself. It then outlines the complexity policy frame that sees the entire social system as a complex evolving system, and spells out a role for government within that frame. While this new frame agrees that the system cannot be controlled, it does accept that government policy is crucial for the system to work and sees government as playing a role in the system’s evolution. One aspect of policy involves attempting to make that role better—people, through government, and in partnership with private institutions, help influence the evolution of the economy in ways that they believe will be positive. This is a much more difficult policy role for government than any envisioned by the standard policy model, which sees government as outside of the system correcting for market failures.

This book has discussed new techniques and methods to address the societal challenges we face. These new approaches change the way policy is framed. The book is an attempt to provide a new compass for policy discussions. This chapter discusses why the complexity frame matters; the evaporation of the optimism that existed in the twentieth century about our ability to deal with major societal challenges; the need for the government to create an ecostructure conducive to allow people the institutional space to self-organize in new ways to solve social problems; and how the complexity policy frame encourages individuals on all sides to be civil.

The complexity frame leads to a number of changes in the way we think of economic policy. This chapter considers norms policy because it is expected to be the most controversial. It argues that, as part of its economic policy, a society should have a norms policy through which institutions are developed to better allow people to express their collective choice about what norms and tastes should be encouraged and discouraged by society, and that such a policy should be integrated into the institutional structure of society. The essential trick is to design such policies so that they allow norms to emerge from the bottom up and not impose them from the top down. That is difficult and complicated to do.

This chapter argues that the duality of market versus government is a product of the standard economic policy frame itself. That duality disappears in the complexity frame—but inevitably other contrasts appear. Within a complexity frame, both the more active top-down “government” solution and the less active bottom-up “market” solution are seen as having evolved from the bottom up. Within this frame, the policy solution is an element of the system, not outside it. Thus, if the solution includes direct government involvement, it is as “natural” a solution as one with less government. More government control simply reflects a more primitive bottom-up choice of society. The policies incarnate in that choice may well ossify and become a locked-in way of governing, but they do not exist outside of society. The existing government is simply a bottom-up solution to previous problems.

In the complexity frame, governmental policy is best thought of as operating in ecostructure space where institutions are designed. Its goal is to foster the creation of an ecostructure space that encourages creativity and bottom-up initiatives that create the institutions within which incentives are created and goals are formalized. The goal in the complexity frame is not to foster any specific ecostructure, but to let the ecostructure emerge, adapt, and evolve, and that includes changing government itself. This chapter discusses alternative forms of government, and how if one is going to use top-down policies, the structure of government institutions might be changed to better achieve the desired results.

People who believe in the free market are generally much closer to a complexity frame than are those who primarily put their faith in governmental planning and control. In fact, complexity may well often be loosely equated with pure laissez-faire, but complexity includes government, seeing it not as planner or controller, but as a natural partner with existing institutions in a search for useful parameters of action. This joint search is called an “activist laissez-faire” policy. While the terms “activist laissez-faire” and “laissez-faire” may look similar in the standard policy frame, they are quite different in terms of how one envisions the role of government. Hence, we need to distinguish our complexity frame from the free market frame espoused by supporters of unadulterated laissez-faire policy. This chapter illustrates this distinction by revisiting a well-known market story. It is the ode to the market told by I Pencil to Leonard Reed, a free-market newspaper columnist.