From Catastrophe to Chaos: A General Theory of Economic Discontinuities presents and unusual perspective on economics and economic analysis. Current economic theory largely depends upon assuming that the world is fundamentally continuous. However, an increasing amount of economic research has been done using approaches that allow for discontinuities such as catastrophe theory, chaos theory, synergetics, and fractal geometry. The spread of such approaches across a variety of disciplines of thought has constituted a virtual intellectual revolution in recent years. This book...

"Now, however, weface an Age of Discontinuity in world economy and tech nology. We might succeed in making it an age of great economic growth as weil. But the one thing that is certain so far is that it will be a period of change-in technology and in economic policy, in industry structures and in economic theo ry, in the knowledge needed to govern and manage, and in economic issues. While we have been busy finishing the great nineteenth-century economic ed ijice, the foundations have shifted beneath our feet." Peter F. Drucker, 1968 The A e Qf DiscQntinuity, p. 10 This project has had a lQng...