ABSTRACT
This chapter defines a Smithian growth as the process of economic growth based on division of labour, envisaged by Adam Smith in the Wealth of Nations (WN) and subsequently developed by Alfred Marshall, Allyn Young and Nicholas Kaldor. It presents an example of a model of Smithian growth developed following the insights of the complexity approach from Lavezzi. The chapter argues that Smithian growth has been misclassified as an equilibrium process, as Beinhocker argues that the economy as a whole misclassified as equilibrium system by traditional economics. Philip Anderson, the Nobel laureate physicist: complexity is the science of emergence; that is, it is about how large interacting ensembles exhibit collective behaviour that is very different from anything one might have expected from simply scaling up the behaviour of the individual units. On the basis of the characteristics of Smithian growth and complex systems, we claim that the former represents an example of the dynamics envisaged by the complexity approach.
