ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that we live under just conditions. More exactly, we’re both spectators and participants in a dynamic, pluralistic economy. Patterns of economic evolution change by way of fluctuations in time and space. The marvelous thing about self-organization is that it can transform a seemingly incoherent system into an ordered, coherent whole. Weakly related grains of sand suddenly become a strongly interactive sandpile. The interesting thing is that a chain reaction of moves never would have happened if class consciousness had been slightly weaker. Schelling fine-tuned his rules very carefully. The theory of punctuated equilibria melds together stasis and adaptive change associated with speciation. Stasis recognizes that most species hardly change at all once they show up in the fossil record. But these quiet periods are interrupted occasionally by shorter periods, or punctuations, during which their attributes change dramatically.
