Conjecture

The book's title concept is defined in a fragment the author marked as unplaced, and it is the strongest paragraph in the method core. The argument runs: economies are path dependent because how they can develop depends on the pools of knowledge and knowhow they already hold, and economic complexity is highly predictive of future growth, so what we choose to focus on today selects the pools that will underlie the economy tomorrow. Therefore the question of where we are going cannot be separated from what we treat as valuable now. The conclusion is the thesis of the whole work: if society is path dependent, then a credo that whatever generates economic growth is good and whatever generates most is best can select an undesirable future for the sake of marginally better short-term returns. Not all growth is good; only growth that moves us closer to our goal as a society is good, because that growth is self-reinforcing. Part I names this teleological, goal-oriented capitalism.

Coordination architecture