David
 James
 Brunner

Nelson and Winter’s respected volume An Evolutionary Theory of Economic Change makes a significant contribution to the development of an algorithmic, symbol system model of economic behavior.  One of my favorite lines from the book:

the idea that “individuals are complex organizations too” has considerable power. (1982: 72)

Minsky provides one interpretation of the individual-organization duality in Society of Mind.  Another perspective surfaced in a recent op-ed piece titled “Your Baby is Smarter than you think” in the New York Times.  The article hints that the dynamics of exploration, exploitation, learning, and maturation, which my colleague Brad Staats and I study in the context of organizations, may also apply to human beings.  From the article:

Adults focus on objects that will be most useful to them. But as the lever study demonstrated, children play with the objects that will teach them the most. In our study, 4-year-olds imagined new possibilities based on just a little data. Adults rely more on what they already know. Babies aren’t trying to learn one particular skill or set of facts; instead, they are drawn to anything new, unexpected or informative.

Part of the explanation for these differing approaches can be found in the brain. The young brain is remarkably plastic and flexible. Brains work because neurons are connected to one another, allowing them to communicate. Baby brains have many more neural connections than adult brains. But they are much less efficient. Over time, we prune away the connections we don’t use, and the remaining ones become faster and more automatic. Moreover, the prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain that controls the directed, planned, focused kind of intelligence, is exceptionally late to mature, and may not take its final shape until our early 20s.

So perhaps individuals also face a “productivity dilemma“?