The Economy That Keeps Becoming · Chapter Four

Nobody Designed the Trap

Ammanuel Santa Anna · ORCID 0009-0008-3244-0306

Chapter Four of The Economy That Keeps Becoming: Complexity Economics, Read as a Living System, for Leaders and Households.

Abstract

In 1971 the economist Thomas Schelling published a paper in The Journal of Mathematical Sociology that he had worked out, by his own later account in Micromotives and Macrobehavior (1978), with coins on a board. He placed two kinds of coin on a grid and gave each a single, mild preference: a coin was content as long as some modest share of its neighbours were of its own kind, and it would move to a nearby empty square if they were not. No coin wanted a segregated board. Every coin would have been happy in a mixed one. Then he let them move. A few coins relocated, which changed the neighbourhoods of the coins around them, which prompted a few more to move. Within a handful of rounds the board had sorted itself into large regions of one kind, far more separated than any single coin had wished.

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Cite this chapter

Santa Anna, A. (2026). Nobody Designed the Trap. In The Economy That Keeps Becoming. Luminous Prosperity Inc. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.23989455

@incollection{santaanna2026the4,
  author    = {Santa Anna, Ammanuel},
  title     = {Nobody Designed the Trap},
  booktitle = {The Economy That Keeps Becoming},
  chapter   = {4},
  publisher = {Luminous Prosperity Inc.},
  year      = {2026},
  doi       = {10.5281/zenodo.23989455},
  url       = {https://business.hautelumiere.life/library/the-economy-that-keeps-becoming/04-nobody-designed-the-trap/}
}

References

  1. Schelling, T. C. (1971). Dynamic models of segregation. The Journal of Mathematical Sociology, 1(2), 143–186. https://doi.org/10.1080/0022250X.1971.9989794
  2. Kirman, A. P. (1992). Whom or what does the representative individual represent? Journal of Economic Perspectives, 6(2), 117–136. https://doi.org/10.1257/jep.6.2.117
  3. May, R. M., Levin, S. A., & Sugihara, G. (2008). Ecology for bankers. Nature, 451, 893–894. https://doi.org/10.1038/451893a
  4. Haldane, A. G., & May, R. M. (2011). Systemic risk in banking ecosystems. Nature, 469, 351–355. https://doi.org/10.1038/nature09659

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The licence

Free to read, share, quote, translate and teach, non-commercially, for ever, under the Luminous Library Licence 1.0. Every other right is the Author’s. Deposited on Zenodo in the Luminous Prosperity community.