The Economy That Keeps Becoming · Chapter Twelve

The Path Across the Lawn

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

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

Abstract

On most university campuses there is a lawn crossed by a path nobody laid. The paved walks go round the edges at right angles, and across the middle, from the library door to the corner of the street, runs a narrow line of worn earth. Planners call it a desire line. No committee designed it. The first student who cut across did so because it was shorter. The second followed the faint trace the first had left, because a slightly flattened line is easier to walk than unbroken grass. By the hundredth, the grass had given up, and the line had become the way everyone goes. A small advantage, gained by accident, reinforced by every walker who came after: it is W. Brian Arthur's increasing returns written on a lawn, and it is path dependence in the literal sense.

Read the PDFRead the whole bookdoi:10.5281/zenodo.23989467

Cite this chapter

Santa Anna, A. (2026). The Path Across the Lawn. In The Economy That Keeps Becoming. Luminous Prosperity Inc. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.23989467

@incollection{santaanna2026the12,
  author    = {Santa Anna, Ammanuel},
  title     = {The Path Across the Lawn},
  booktitle = {The Economy That Keeps Becoming},
  chapter   = {12},
  publisher = {Luminous Prosperity Inc.},
  year      = {2026},
  doi       = {10.5281/zenodo.23989467},
  url       = {https://business.hautelumiere.life/library/the-economy-that-keeps-becoming/12-the-path-across-the-lawn/}
}

References

  1. Ostrom, E. (2010). Beyond markets and states: Polycentric governance of complex economic systems. American Economic Review, 100(3), 641–672. https://doi.org/10.1257/aer.100.3.641

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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.