Thread by @docrussjackson

#THREAD

The Santa Fe Institute (SFI) is an 'independent, nonprofit theoretical US research institute', dedicated to 'the multidisciplinary study of the fundamental principles of complex adaptive systems, including physical, computational, biological, & social systems.'

The institute is ranked 24th among the world's "Top Science & Technology Think Tanks" & 24th among the world's "Best Transdisciplinary Research Think Tanks" according to the 2020 edition of the Global Go To Think Tank Index Reports, published by the University of Pennsylvania.

In 'The ultimate think tank: The rise of the Santa Fe Institute libertarian', Erik Baker takes a deep dive & raises some interesting questions about its role & influence, asking 'Why do corporations & wealthy philanthropists fund the human sciences?'

journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.117…

Examining the history of the Santa Fe Institute (SFI), a private research institute founded in the early 1980s, Erik Baker shows that funders can find as much value in the social worlds of the sciences they sponsor as in their ideas.

SFI became increasingly dependent on funding from corporations & libertarian business leaders in the 1990s & 2000s. Its intellectual work came to focus on the underlying principles of adaptation, innovation, & decentralized coordination supposedly at work in ‘complex systems’.

The libertarian economist Friedrich Hayek were cast into a new scientific idiom. SFI became a space where figures in business, media, academia, & politics could come to learn to see the world in a particular way—to acquire the subjectivity of ‘the Santa Fe Institute libertarian’.

SFI visitors didn't just learn the principles of neo-Hayekian complex system science. They saw themselves as agents of social evolution - the spark that the free-market system needed to produce new technologies & solutions to social problems without top-down political direction.

For the Institute's corporate & libertarian financiers, SFI was not just a space where intellectuals described the world in favored ideological terms, but a space where elite actors became committed to the project of making a new political-economic order.

Baker develops an explanation for the disconnect between the intense enthusiasm of corporate and libertarian financiers for SFI and the comparative political-economic timidity of many of its official research publications.

In 2006, Jesse Walker, an editor at libertarian web magazine Reason, identified a new political identity forming in his social milieu: ‘Santa Fe Institute libertarians’ - people in Walker's view, ‘who reflexively vote Democratic but are 80% libertarian in their own attitudes’.

Despite loose cultural affinity with Democratic Party liberalism, the values of the SFI libertarians were the same as those of Walker & his Reason colleagues: ‘spontaneous order, entrepreneurship (many of them are entrepreneurs), decentralization, free expression, & peace’.

Walker hoped that the Santa Fe Institute libertarians, with their liberal do-gooder energy, could help the libertarian movement make inroads into a mainstream audience that saw libertarianism as the sole province of Scrooge-like billionaires. ‘It's a big tent’, he insisted.

What is more surprising is that this strategy, & the new political identity it aimed to cultivate, should be associated with an organization that presents itself as a ‘research institute’ focused on the science of ‘complex adaptive systems’, not a political advocacy organization.

Founded in the early 1980s by researchers at Los Alamos National Laboratory, the Santa Fe Institute (SFI) boasts a roster of prestigious scientific affiliates headlined by Nobel-prize-winning physicist Murray Gell-Mann.

Often called a think tank by observers—the ‘ultimate think tank’ (Oprah Winfrey)—SFI has shied away from the label, casting itself instead as a truly academic institution, complete with ‘professors’ & postdocs, that just happens to operate independently of any university.

And yet the SFU libertarians abound. SFI derives most of its funding from donations from corporations, individual philanthropists in industry & finance, & foundation grants—especially the John Templeton Foundation, dedicated to promoting free-market politics and religious values.

The Institute for Humane Studies (IHS), a libertarian group funded by Charles Koch & his late brother David, has regularly provided financial support to students attending SFI's annual ‘Summer School’ program.

One former director of the foundation that publishes Reason, Gerry Ohrstrom, served for years as an SFI trustee. Over the last three decades, the influence of SFI's financial backers has marginalized the research program in the physical sciences envisioned by its founders.

SFI's research programs now take ‘complex’, non-linear physical systems as just one example of the capacity for spontaneous, adaptive, unpredictable, and unplannable self-organization also at work in countless biological, environmental, and social systems.

Such social systems include, as libertarian economist & philosopher Friedrich Hayek maintained, capitalist markets. Longtime SFI economist Brian Arthur once remarked that SFI was at work ‘rediscovering Austrian economics’ as developed by Hayek & his mentor Ludwig von Mises.

The key political accomplishment of corporate & libertarian financing for the human sciences at SFI has not been the creation of a well-codified/easily weaponizable ideology, but rather the creation of a new social world populated by a new political subject: the SFI libertarian.

Donors have prized SFI above all as the nucleus of a social network—as an institution for training, socializing, & connecting individuals to act in a particular social world with a particular worldview.

More important than SFI's production of scientific papers has been its production of ‘thought leaders’ through seminars, fellowships, conferences, educational programming, and alumni networking.

It has never been necessary for these thought leaders—corporate executives, entrepreneurs, public intellectuals, consultants, & so on who find their way to SFI—to grasp all the nuances of complex systems science, or even to commit themselves to an orthodox libertarian ideology.

What matters is they come to inhabit a particular conceptual worldview, seeing society as a system always spontaneously evolving & adapting, with solutions to social problems constantly emerging & gaining traction thanks to the innovative activity of individuals like themselves.

For participants, SFI has offered a passport to an elite world where business leaders, philanthropists, and media personalities congregate at gatherings like the World Economic Forum and promote each other's work.

To the enthusiasm of its funders, SFI has helped populate this elite world with actors who look to themselves and their own problem-solving capacity, rather than to governments or mass social movements, to ‘promote the well-being of humankind and of life on earth’.

Through the social world of SFI, corporations have hoped to develop executives, employees and investing partners who view businesses as the mechanism through which the complex economic system solves pressing problems.

And libertarians have hoped to produce ‘social entrepreneurs’ who embody the libertarian promise that new solutions to social problems will emerge spontaneously on the market without central direction.

If SFI is a site of ‘scientific entrepreneurship’, as its former president Geoffrey West maintained in 2007, its product has been people as much as it has been ideas.

On one hand, the history of the SFI is an important chapter in the history of the political economy of intellectual life. SFI is one site where powerful actors in business, media, academia, & philanthropy participate in what two advocates call ‘philanthrocapitalism’. 😬

Elites who might have been engaged in projects of state-building or university-based intellectual production in the mid 20th century are increasingly engaged in ‘independent-sector’ projects that blur the lines between for-profit business, philanthropy, & the ‘ideas industry’.

The history of SFI illustrates and helps to explain this phenomenon. In particular, it shows that this transformation was not a spontaneous process or a product of a shifting zeitgeist but was deliberately encouraged by a right-wing funding infrastructure.

Just as late 20th-century conservative funders such as the Olin Foundation opened up space in the legal profession for a novel conception of lawyers’ vocation—purifying legal structures in accordance with free-market standards of economic efficiency—the right-wing funders...

...who loom large at para-academic institutions such as SFI helped promulgate new understandings of what it means to be a scientist or an intellectual. As many mainstream universities now seek to encourage their faculty and graduate students to become more ‘entrepreneurial’...

& pour resources into their own interdisciplinary research centers (often with help from corporate/libertarian financiers, such as Koch), it is more important than ever to understand the history of the avant-garde para-academic institutions, like SFI, restructuring universities.

The task has been to construct an elite network capable of encompassing entrepreneurs, political advocates, & nerdy scientists meditating on the deep principles of the universe all at once. SFI's ideas have bound the Institute to this emerging network as much as the money.

By forming a node in this network—by producing SF libertarians—the Institute repays its funders. ‘Making up people’ is not just a function of the vernacularizing of human-scientific concepts, but is integral to the material & institutional life of human-scientific practice.

The Institute's founders believed that if the new Institute was governed by scientists themselves, the ‘activity’ of rigorous interdisciplinary collaboration would take precedence over the imperative to produce work that was immediately applicable to social or political concerns.

Though many of the founders hoped the new Institute's work would have a positive social impact, they imagined this impact to flow inexorably if vaguely from the quality of the science performed. ‘useful to humanity, but research is clearly what we can do best’ - Norman Ramsey.

To the extent that Santa Fe work would improve human welfare, it would be by promoting ‘general awareness and sophistication concerning science’, not by inveighing in detail on social or political questions.

Funding difficulties resulted in the founder George Cowan reaching out to the well connected acquaintances he had met in the New Mexico business world & in the Reagan White House. Cowan's friend Art Spiegel, heir to a catalog fortune, became treasurer.

His influence, and that of the network of businessmen to which he was connected, was felt in short order. In January 1986, a friend advised Spiegel that ‘if the Institute is to survive, they better start adding some business leaders as important as their scientists’.

That same day, Spiegel wrote to Cowan that he thought ‘it would be good to diversify our Board & add more businessmen’. Spiegel talked to oil tycoon Robert O. Anderson about SFI in the winter of 1985–6, and Anderson would become chairman of the SFI board by 1988.

SFI leadership considered how to make its activities more palatable to corporate & foundation funding sources: ‘The board needs to take a marketing approach As much as they want to ask “what problems would it be fun to work on” they need to ask “what programs will attract funds.”

‘The Institute needs to develop some corporate ties. A nice way to kill two birds here is to add corporate figures to the board.’ The 1986 ‘Plan for Governance’ had a separate Board of Trustees, including business leaders and be responsible for general governance & fundraising.

A Board of Advisors would focus on the nitty-gritty of specific scientific programs. This bicameral structure had been proposed and explicitly rejected at one of the 1984 founding conferences as a threat to the principle that scientists themselves would govern the Institute.

As SFI went about establishing corporate ties and marketing its usefulness to potential donors, it increasingly emphasized the concept of ‘complex adaptive systems’ as the core subject of its research.

Though absent from the ‘Emerging Syntheses’ conferences, enthusiasm had grown at SFI about the study of those complex systems whose collective behavior somehow mutated to increase fitness in response to external stimuli.

In the summer of 86, the subject earned an entry in SFI's workshop series, whose past installments had included subjects like superstring theory and evolutionary game theory. As the year progressed, however, SFI increasingly presented complex adaptive systems as its calling card.

The ‘Next Steps in Fundraising’ centered around a vision for a ‘Complex Adaptive Systems Research Network’. Hoping to use this new focus to garner foundation attention & funds, SFI leadership developed an easily articulable & comprehensible definition of complex adaptive systems.

While the Institute was once reticent about the policy applications of its work, a late-1987 vision statement document asserted that ‘practical applications of new techniques for understanding complex systems seem almost infinite’.

The tantalizing thought of the vast Citibank coffers that the Institute had barely begun to tap, led Institute leadership to focus their new fundraising efforts primarily on business—and business-conservative—funding sources.

By the end of 1987, SFI had received new unrestricted grants from the H. J. Heinz Company Foundation and the Richard Lounsbery Foundation, a conservative foundation that would later fund the George C. Marshall Institute, a prominent sponsor of climate change denial.

Entrepreneur Stewart Brand was added to the board at the end of 1988 because, as Cowan wrote, ‘He has contacts with a number of corporation executives who may provide us with support after being exposed to his enthusiasm for our programs.’

The Santa Fe researchers who benefited the most from the growing influx of support from corporations and conservative philanthropists were the ones who were most committed to the ‘complex adaptive systems’ concept, and its application across disciplinary lines.

By the end of the 1980s, arguably the best-known SFI affiliate was Stuart Kauffman, a philosopher-turned-theoretical biologist, who pressed the claim that all complex adaptive systems were essentially 'all the same thing, the same goddamn thing.’

To explain what unified complex adaptive systems, Kauffman invoked the concept of ‘spontaneous order’ developed by the libertarian philosophers Friedrich Hayek and Michael Polanyi in the mid 20th century.

In Kauffman's formulation, spontaneous order occurred when the action of ‘agents’—from biomolecules to stockbrokers—following simple ‘local rules’ nonetheless produced complex patterns of ‘global order’.

The favorite example of spontaneous order among Kauffman and his SFI colleagues was the ‘Game of Life’ computer simulation devised by the British mathematician John Conway in 1970.

In the Game of Life, ‘cells’ on a two-dimensional grid would either become colored or blank as the simulation progressed according to a set of rules that referred exclusively to the colored or blank status of adjacent cells.

Users discovered that despite the fact that the rules of the simulation did not refer to the overall pattern of the grid, certain orderly, recognizable visual patterns or animations frequently cropped up as the simulation ran with different initial conditions.

SFI researchers imagined that everything from consciousness to financial markets might be understood as an extremely sophisticated type of Game of Life.

For support for his work at SFI, Kauffman leveraged recently established Institute connections with the Monsanto Company and longtime New Mexico Republican Senator Pete V. Domenici.

Nonetheless, by the end of the 1980s, frustration was mounting at the perceived discrepancy between the internal sense of the significance of the work being done at SFI and the external attention they had received from media and funders, which was still felt to be inadequate.

The economics program had the best track record of attracting corporate interest, reflecting the discipline's burgeoning prestige in the worlds of business and politics during the Reagan era.

SFI's leaders felt that a funding squeeze would accelerate the Institute's turn to economics and the social sciences. Not everyone was happy - George Cowan said that he thought the economics program was ‘possibly overly ambitious’. He blamed ‘the world out there which responds...

...to the notion of new ideas about economics more quickly than to any of the other notions we’re kicking around’. Because ‘there are people who are prepared to support this new effort’, the Institute has moved more rapidly in that direction than caution might have indicated’.

Cowan announced his decision to resign the presidency in 1990. & was replaced by Ed Knapp, who had gotten involved with the Institute in its early years at the end of his time as a Reagan-appointed National Science Foundation director.

Knapp institutionalized SFI's growing focus on corporate fundraising—which, because of his own Republican convictions & Reagan connections, as well as the disproportionately conservative leanings of US business leaders, entailed a rightwards political shift in SFI's funding base.

In mid 1992, he announced the establishment of a ‘Business Network for Complex Systems Research’, a new ‘corporate membership program’ that would raise funds and ‘establish links’ between ideas circulating at SFI and in industry.

Eight years after SFI's founding conferences, the Institute was no longer defined by a method—conversation between disciplinary experts—but a subject matter: ‘complexity’.

SFI's founders worried that too narrow a subject matter focus would constrict its scientists’ autonomy. SFI now valued 'complexity' as a tool to promise funders its research was uncovering fundamental principles not only in atomic nuclei/crystal lattices but in markets & firms.

Over the course of the 1990s, SFI became an important part of a true business network, providing an organizational infrastructure for business leaders, business lobbyists, & business admirers in media & academia to meet, launch projects, & develop a shared vocabulary.

The overall purpose of this business network was to make a ‘New Economy’. Celebrated by Bill Clinton and Newt Gingrich alike, the New Economy was imagined as an economic order built around the high-tech sector, from industrial automation to personal computers & dot-com startups.

New Economy boosters promised that high-tech embodied a propulsive dynamic energy that could counteract the doldrums brought on by the manufacturing crisis of the 1970s and the recurrent financial crises of the 1980s.

In practice, the construction of the New Economy was characterized by #deregulation of the telecomms industry, ‘restructuring’ & downsizing corporations to provide the ‘flexibility’ to capitalize on new innovations, & the expansion of venture capital financing for tech startups.

The 90s are often remembered as a period of ideological complacency 'the end of history'. But they were characterized by a strong degree of coordinated action by elite actors in business & government to enact the transformations required for the construction of the New Economy.

SFI helped facilitate such coordination pragmatically & intellectually. What mattered most wasn't what was done at SFI, but what was done WITH SFI—with the connections people made through the Institute, & the ideas they acquired for explaining/justifying their actions.

The 1998 SFI annual report bragged about ‘extensive coverage in the general media and within companies and corporations’ of the ‘New Economy’, noting that SFI work ‘has gone far in having this descriptor accepted within academic, business, and government environments’.

Before the formal establishment of the SFI Business Network, the SFI's reach into the worlds of venture capital & high-tech industry started to expand in late 1990, when Esther Dyson, daughter of physicist Freeman Dyson & a prominent businesswoman & investor, joined the board.

In addition to her business connections, Dyson facilitated a burgeoning relationship between SFI & political libertarianism. Knapp twice visited the libertarian Electronic Frontier Foundation, where Dyson was a board member, & solicited them for a donation of up to 100,000.

Dyson brought together her connections to the tech industry & her connections to the libertarian movement in her advocacy for telecom deregulation.

In 1994, Dyson and fellow SFI board member George A. Keyworth II co-authored a ‘Magna Carta for the Knowledge Age’ with the popular libertarian writer George Gilder and the futurologist Alvin Toffler, a close Newt Gingrich collaborator.

‘If there is to be an “industrial policy for the knowledge age”’, the group argued, ‘it should focus on removing barriers to competition and massively deregulating the fast-growing telecommunications and computing industries’.

Dyson & her co-authors drew on the SFI conceptual framework: society, understood as an evolutionary system, had reached what Toffler had previously termed a ‘Third Wave’ of development in which spontaneous order rather than deliberate planning ensured dynamism & growth.

‘The complexity of Third Wave society is too great for any centrally planned bureaucracy to manage’, they wrote. Characteristic of this complexity was the seemingly overnight rise of new technology giants.

These giants might appear to be monopolistic within their industries, but that was to be expected when they were ushering entirely new industries into existence. If ‘static competition’ was receding, it was only to be replaced with ‘dynamic competition’, which as part of its ...

proper functioning creates ‘creates winners and losers on a massive scale’.

The Magna Carta's core ideas were soon codified into law with overwhelming bipartisan support in the deregulatory Telecommunications Act of 1996.

The idea of dynamic competition emerged in large part from the work of W. Brian Arthur, the first Citibank Professor of Economics at SFI and the in-house figure most closely associated with the New Economy.

Arthur's central concept was that of ‘increasing returns’. Arthur argued that it was ‘natural’ that the first firm to capitalize on a new technology would enjoy advantages that would bolster its market position.

With new technologies, ‘the more they are adopted, the more experience is gained with them, & the more they are improved’. By the time the second entrant to the market was up and running, the original firm was getting ready to introduce a new and improved version of the product.

Dynamic competition between firms introducing new technologies rather than firms competing for share of an existing market, would naturally produce apparent monopolies in the new industries that took off, though they were always at risk of being made obsolete by another new firm.

As Newt Gingrich's To Renew America co-author William Tucker summarized in a 1996 profile of SFI, ‘Improvement leads to improvement, which interlock in an ever more interdependent network of improvements’.

Arthur himself was reluctant to explicitly critique antitrust policy on the basis of the ‘natural’ laws of technological development he had uncovered.

Just because the formation of monopolies was natural did not mean it was good from a public policy perspective, especially if it obstructed the equally natural supersession of today's tech giants by tomorrow's.

William Tucker thought Arthur's reluctance to follow his arguments all the way to their pro-monopolistic conclusions was regrettable. He blamed the influence of the left-leaning Kenneth Arrow and Murray Gell-Mann among the first generation of SFI researchers.

Nonetheless, corporate enthusiasm for the work of Arthur and other SFI economists remained steady. Ian Ross, president of AT&T Bell Labs, wrote to Brian Arthur in 1990 to express his excitement that Arthur's work could help explain why...

‘it is important for the Nation to recognize that there are certain industries that cannot be treated according to the principles of traditional economics’—that is to say, why telecomms should be exempt from the anti-monopolistic conclusions of conventional economic theory.

With an eye towards future collaboration, Ross said that he ‘would very much appreciate any suggestions or any support that you and your colleagues could provide in furthering these ideas in the national interest’.

SFI bragged that ‘corporations from the investment & financial sector recognize that SFI, in challenging the conventional rational, decreasing-returns, equilibrium view of economics, is advocating alternatives that offer the promise of understanding the new high-tech world’.

The reality was that from the perspective of the Business Network, there was no reason for SFI researchers like Arthur to directly enter the political fray themselves—that was what people like Tucker and Dyson were for.

The most popular expositions of SFI ideas & their implications for public policy & business in the 90s didn't come from permanent SFI faculty members but from members of the constellation of donors, visitors, advisors, & admirers who orbited the Institute with increasing density.

Michael Rothschild helped popularize Arthur's work in his bookBionomics: The Inevitability of Capitalism, a book that floated around SFI. Rothschild pressed the SFI equation of capitalist markets & biological organisms & other natural systems to its logical political conclusion:

'Capitalism was literally a part of nature & any attempt to interfere with its natural functioning was doomed to failure. Socialism ‘tries to fix what is “wrong” with the spontaneous, self-organizing phenomenon called capitalism. But a natural process cannot be “fixed”’.

Yikes.

If policymakers could sit back & let the market run its course, business leaders could not. In the complexity science story, markets only self-organized because of the ceaseless efforts of individual firms to adapt themselves to their environment, like organisms in an ecosystem.

That meant that SFI and its apostles could at once prescribe laissez-faire in the economy as a whole and advise business leaders on how to ‘revolutionize’ their own firms. The best way to revolutionize a firm, it turned out, was to make it more like a complex adaptive system.

In 1999, the basic principles of the SFI approach to corporate restructuring appeared in a volume titled The Biology of Business: Decoding the Natural Laws of Enterprise, edited by entrepreneur and SFI Business Network member John Clippinger and with a foreword from Esther Dyson.

The volume argued that complexity science elucidated the wisdom of the quintessential New Economy organizational reforms endorsed by consultancies such as McKinsey, also an SFI Business Network member.

The structure of old corporations was too unwieldy, bureaucratic, and inward-looking to permit rapid adaptation and innovation in a dynamic, constantly evolving marketplace.

Firms should eliminate layers of middle-management that pursued the hopeless dream of ‘command-and-control’ in favor of new positions such as ‘chief knowledge officer’, with the autonomy to ‘create new sources of variation that can alter the organization's evolutionary path’.

Decentralization, outsourcing, & internal competition between teams could introduce ‘market-like mechanisms’, a ‘self-organizing approach’ to management. Managers should use digital technologies to collect as much data as possible on customer preferences & employee performance.

By defining performance criteria, collecting data, and constructing proper incentive systems, managers could use ‘feedback loops’ rather than annoying hands-on intervention to get the most out of their organizations.

‘Managers do not operate the network; they influence the feedback that causes the network to self-organize’, as one contributor summarized.

SFI hoped that its own network would be self-organizing—that its organizational infrastructure could seamlessly integrate its in-house scientists with its funders, allies, and evangelists in the worlds of business, politics, consulting, and journalism.

The reaction of the external scientific community to SFI's direction in the 90s is a reminder that the success of this strategy was not guaranteed. In the middle of the decade, the Institute received a wave of criticism from outsiders about the direction of its research activity.

Journalist John Hogan excoriated SFI in a 1995 piece titled ‘From Complexity to Perplexity’: SFI efforts to develop a unifying theory of complexity had removed researchers so far from the realm of the empirically testable, their activity could barely be considered science at all.

In a 1995 critical article in the New York Review of Books, eminent evolutionary biologist John Maynard Smith emphasized SFI's complexity science approach to evolution was by no means standard in evolutionary biology: ‘Devotees’ of complexity were practicing ‘fact-free science’.

SFI was never totally reliant on corporate or individual philanthropy; SFI researchers succeeded in obtaining grant support from mainstream funding institutions for various projects throughout the late 80s & early 1990s. But there was some evidence that patience was wearing thin.

In 1996, two philanthropic program reviews, one sponsored by the MacArthur Foundation and the other by the NSF, expressed concern that the Institute had come perilously close to leaving the world of mainstream science behind.

The MacArthur reviewers, for instance, encouraged the Institute to take steps to rectify ‘a common perception that most of the “products” of SFI are published in non-competitive, “house” venues’.

Some NSF reviewers were less polite: ‘SFI wants to follow the “high road” & leave the hard work to traditional research universities’; SFI's complex systems modeling of financial markets ‘is probably of more interest to Wall St than to economic policy or science in general’.

The NSF report painted a picture of an institute whose insulation from the broader academy had produced ‘insufficient openness to participation and decision-making’ from scientists, with ‘women and minority groups’ in particular starkly underrepresented.

What benefits of SFI affiliation might lead an academic researcher to disregard their colleagues’ raised eyebrows? Pecuniary incentives played a role. Following significant NSF budget cuts in the late 1970s & 80s, many academics outside SFI also turned to corporate philanthropy.

There was a perception that corporate and other non-traditional funding sources were willing ‘to fund things that no one else will’. SFI provided the infrastructure to connect researchers who felt marginalized from established scientific funding channels with wealthy funders.

Some researchers also aspired to use SFI's connections not simply to make ends’ meet but to profit from the New Economy. In 1997, faced with loss of govt support for his work on ‘artificial life’, SFI stalwart Chris Langton chose to seek funding from the private sector.

He founded a startup called the Swarm Corporation, named after his best-known piece of artificial life software. Shortly afterwards, BusinessWeek called Swarm the ‘best thing to emerge from the Santa Fe Institute’.

Stuart Kauffman, after ten years in residency at SFI, founded a startup to support his work as well, called BiosGroup, though unlike Langton he stayed on as an external professor.

Langton and Kauffman were following the lead of SFI physicist & market modeler Doyne Farmer, who had founded a financial betting startup called the Prediction Company. He remarked that his goal was to ‘make so much money that he would never have to write a grant proposal again’.

Besides the money, SFI offered researchers membership in an exciting, high-powered, & even glamorous social world. The social life of the Institute had crystallized around the interdisciplinary meeting—by the end of the 1990s nature of the meeting as a social event had changed.

Rather than an opportunity for scientists to escape into an Arrowsmith-esque world of pure inquiry, meetings at SFI became a way for scientists to leave the supposedly cloistered environs of the academy and make contact with the world of commerce and celebrity.

SFI boasted a dynamic of ‘dialogue’ had replaced the ‘teacher/student’ dynamic that characterized SFI's first encounters with business. Visiting SFI scholars had the opportunity to converse not just with other scholars but with jet-setting business leaders & even famous artists.

One researcher who became involved with SFI in the 1990s remembered it as a place to ‘hang out’ and make interesting friends. At SFI he felt like he was part of a ‘network of minds’. Another remarked that his wife ‘loves Santa Fe’.

In short, being at SFI was fun. Stewart Brand helped design & fundraise for a stunning new campus in the foothills of the Sangre de Cristo mountains. Researchers dined with business leaders at world-class restaurants & perused the city's world-class art galleries.

The SFI environment helped visiting researchers feel like they were at once experiencing the commanding heights of the New Economy, the Georgia-O’Keefe bohemianism of a Southwestern art colony, and the frisson of pioneering both literal and intellectual frontiers.

Displayed in the SFI stairwell, and reprinted on the cover of one annual report, was an old photograph of Albert Einstein in full headdress with members of the Hopi Nation, taken during one of his Manhattan Project-era visits to Los Alamos.

A researcher taking one step out of the established academic community to join the SFI network could feel that they were stepping into a world where genius coexisted with the authenticity of the exotic.

SFI's intellectual quest for the ‘natural’ principles of markets and businesses would transpire in a setting where researchers could enjoy a more ‘natural’ mode of living and working—long the promise of the American West.

The burst of the dot-com bubble in 2000 and the eruption of the Enron scandal the following year put a damper on the optimism of the New Economy discourse, not just at SFI but throughout the philanthropic world and American political culture more broadly.

The idea of sitting back and letting the tech-finance nexus organically evolve the economy to prosperity lost some of its luster. Even George W. Bush called for a ‘compassionate conservatism’.

The American political and business elite seemed to discover suddenly that people needed to be taken care of after all, and it was no longer obvious that personal computers and the Internet would suffice to do the job.

As New Economy exuberance waned, it became clear that it was time for a new era at SFI. It was no longer enough to explain that markets would inevitably generate technological innovation, or even to provide ambitious business leaders with strategies for joining the vanguard.

It would be necessary to elaborate a vision for how complexity theory could help address ‘social problems’—a vision for rectifying injustice and inequality that remained exciting to the Institute's corporate and libertarian financial backers.

This vision was SFI's contribution to the developing world of philanthrocapitalism. SFI researchers set about reorienting their theories of social and economic evolution to focus on social problem-solving.

Introducing a new emphasis on evolutionary psychology, SFI researchers elaborated a portrait of human nature as intrinsically cooperative and spontaneously oriented toward problem-solving.

As these cooperative problem-solvers interacted and worked together, they would tend, obviously, to cooperate to solve problems. Philanthropy, not just technological innovation, was an emergent product of complex social systems, including markets.

Enduring problems were a sign of some blockage obstructing the free play of these cooperative instincts. Identify and remove the blockage, and solutions would emerge spontaneously.

SFI leaders took these ideas to power players in business, philanthropy, and media at new institutional settings for the promotion of ‘social entrepreneurship’ such as the World Economic Forum.

These new enlistees in the SFI network then drew on SFI ideas in more direct messaging promoting ‘social entrepreneurship’ as an alternative to Govt-led social problem-solving. The result was an influx, by the 2010s, of a new wave of corporate & libertarian financial support.

In 2000, SFI rehauled its economics program under the leadership of a new director, Samuel Bowles. Bowles and his longtime collaborator Herbert Gintis, who officially joined the SFI faculty soon after Bowles, began their careers at Harvard in the 1960s as outspoken Marxists.

They were denied tenure and left for the University of Massachusetts at Amherst in the early 1970s as part of an influx of radical economists. At Amherst they published Schooling in Capitalist America, a widely read Marxist study of the American education system.

But Bowles & Gintis abandoned its Marxism soon after its publication. Eventually they also gave up on its socialism. According to Gintis, the key catalyst was the rising profile of Amnesty International in the late 1970s/early 80s (Amnesty won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1977).

‘If you mention human rights to a Marxist, they laugh at you, like the tooth fairy’ (Gintis). But the work of Amnesty & other human rights advocacy organizations convinced him & Bowles that moral suasion rather than class struggle was the most promising avenue of social change.

The Amnesty model also suggested that the leadership of nongovernmental, philanthropic organizations, rather than traditional political movements, could spark the moral transformations that were the source of social progress.

As Bowles and Gintis were turning their intellectual attention from class structure to moral norms, they began to attend conferences at SFI in the 1990s, initially at the recommendation of their old Harvard mentor Kenneth Arrow.

The decision to put Bowles in charge of the economics program, therefore, was not as politically shocking as it might have seemed to an outsider. Nonetheless, it did ‘represent a new direction’ for the program, as the 2000 SFI annual report put it.

Bowles & Gintis had never published on ‘complexity’ or tech innovation - SFI's calling cards. The keyword that unified their research with SFI's existing concerns was ‘evolution’. SFI researchers had long understood biological evolution as a model for complex adaptive systems.

In the 1990s, SFI had sponsored conferences in the field known as ‘sociobiology’ or, increasingly, ‘evolutionary psychology’—the study of the evolutionary origins of human behavior.

SFI visitors such as Robert Axtell produced models depicting cooperative activity as an example of the ‘order’ that could emerge spontaneously from complexity: even without a rule to act cooperatively, agents could still evolve the behavior spontaneously.

At SFI in the 2000s, Bowles & Gintis strove to make the evolutionary psychology of cooperation the pivot point for the ‘unification’ of economics with other human-scientific disciplines. Reflecting this, SFI eventually rebranded its economics program as ‘Behavioral Sciences’.

With this move, one of the quintessential categories of Cold War human science received a jolt of new life for the neoliberal era: Once connoting a desire to place the study of human activity on a supposedly more scientific, laboratory-friendly basis...

now the term ('Cold War human science') primarily reflected the impulse to replace talk of macro-level social structures with analysis of the interaction of individual agents.

Starting from evolutionary psychology rather than complexity theory, Bowles and Gintis developed an image of society as a problem-solving organism that ultimately converged with the stance of earlier SFI work on complex adaptive systems.

In their book A Cooperative Species, Bowles & Gintis argued that human behavior was characterized by what they called ‘strong reciprocity’, an instinct for people to cooperate even when it ran against their individual self-interest from a short-term, ‘rational’ perspective.

Drawing on lab experiments by the economist Ernst Fehr and anthropological fieldwork by Robert Boyd, Bowles and Gintis claimed that individuals were consistently willing to sacrifice their own immediate utility in order to promote cooperative norms such as fairness.

Experimental subjects would agree split their payout from an experimenter with another participant even if they were assured there would never be a future experiment for the fellow participant to return the favor.

A strong inbuilt drive to prioritize fairness over personal benefit would have promoted overall reproductive fitness in groups in which it emerged in human evolutionary history, Bowles & Gintis concluded. The payoff? It was not necessary to deliberately ‘promote’ cooperation.

They concluded that cooperation was natural. Left alone, cooperative instincts would work to solve social problems spontaneously. ‘Where the invisible hand fails, the handshake may succeed’, they argued—the handshake, not the state or the militant labor union.

In fact, it was argued the heavy hand of the state or union could actually obstruct natural cooperative instincts & promote destructive norms of materialism & self-protection😬. As the title of a subsequent Bowles book put it ‘good incentives are no substitute for good citizens’.

From these premises, much of the ‘applied’ work that Bowles led at SFI in the 2000s sought to validate concern about various social problems while urging restraint about taking an overzealous public policy response.

The results of a long-gestating SFI study on intergenerational inequality appeared in 2005 in a volume edited by Bowles and Gintis with Melissa Osborne Groves called Unequal Chances.

In this volume, Bowles and Gintis repudiated the emphasis of Schooling in Capitalist America on socialized class markers as the driver of persistent inequality, arguing that genetics, ‘personality’, & ‘luck’ also played an important role alongside race & wealth inheritance.😬

In 'Schooling', Bowles & Gintis recommended socialist economic reforms to address the problem of ‘unequal chances’. But now, having come to consider that prescription the weakest part of its argument, they were left painting a ‘scientific portrait’ with muted policy implications.

The following year, Bowles edited a book on cycles of poverty with Steven Durlauf & Karla Hoff, concluding that the problem was too complex to ‘permit the identification of any single specific policy recommendation to counter potential poverty traps’.😬

The editors emphasized that ‘one should not underestimate the difficulties in designing efficacious policies’, and the expansion of charter schools was the only policy intervention to receive explicit support in the book.

As always, external admirers were willing to draw out the implications of SFI theory more sharply. In 2008, Justin Danhof of the conservative National Center for Public Policy Research drew on Bowles’ critiques of incentive-based policymaking to argue against carbon pricing.

The question was not what the best policy solution to a social problem might be, but who would act as that problem's Amnesty International, providing the leadership to reopen the channels through which humanity's natural cooperative energies wanted to flow. 😬

Attitude change was everything. For example, SFI helped incubate the work of Harvard social psychologist and SFI faculty member Mahzarin Banaji and her collaborator Anthony Greenwald on ‘implicit bias’.

Implicit bias, Banaji and Greenwald claimed, ‘plays a greater role than does explicit bias in explaining the discrimination that contributes to Black disadvantage’.

Contemporary racial inequality, they argued, was not primarily a product of a fundamentally racist social structure or of conscious white supremacy but was an emergent product of countless...

..discriminatory actions undertaken by individuals who held no overt prejudices but had absorbed unconscious though detectable biased attitudes that shaped their automatic behavior (thus downplaying structural racism/white supremacy as significant contributing factors to racism).

In the familiar SFI refrain, Banaji and Greenwald remarked that ‘strategies available to avoid unintended discrimination resulting from hidden biases’ are not ‘easily described’. Nonetheless, there is one strategy that has since caught on: consulting.

Implicit bias consultants, including Banaji & Greenwald's Project Implicit, could—for a fee—work with organizations in the business, government, & nonprofit sectors to explain the evidence for implicit bias & provide exercises for confronting & modifying unconscious attitudes.

If most people, as natural cooperators, really did not want to be racist, they just needed the kind of practical tips and tricks a consultant could provide to modify their behavior. Then just as spontaneously as racial inequality emerged in the first place, it could un-emerge. 😬

In the 2000s, a new (horrifically neoliberal) term gained traction to describe nongovernmental social problem-solvers, from Amnesty International to implicit bias consultants: ‘social entrepreneurs’.

The label was especially fitting at SFI, given that the figure of the social entrepreneur in many ways occupied the position in SFI research in the new millennium that the technology entrepreneur had enjoyed in the 1990s.

‘Ours is the age of doing good by doing well’, Herbert Gintis announced in 2009, in a blurb for a book called Be the Solution: How Entrepreneurs and Conscious Capitalists Can Solve All the World's Problems.

In a sense, SFI came to conceptualize itself as a social entrepreneur whose mission was the promotion of social entrepreneurship.

Participants in a 2002 conference for philanthropists, for instance, learned that they ought to focus on identifying ‘doers’—entrepreneurial figures already at work developing solutions to social problems—and provide them with money ‘as directly and efficiently as possible’.

SFI came to frequently employ its dizzying array of meetings, conferences, seminars, workshops, symposia, and online learning modules to encourage would-be ‘doers’.

Aspiring entrepreneurs could attend SFI-sponsored events, including at Google's Mountain View campus, to learn more about the ‘Santa Fe Institute perspective’ on innovation, & to hear about the underlying scientific rationale for the social significance of their career ambitions.

At the 2016 SFI Annual Symposium, participants from the business world learned that ideal ‘corporate athlete’ for the 21st century was defined by ‘a long-term commitment to making a difference in a domain’.

SFI Trustee John Chisolm put it most succinctly in the title of his book Unleash Your Inner Company. The natural expression of the cooperative, problem-solving instincts flowing through every individual was a money-making firm. 😬

Just as was the case during its era of New Economy boosterism, the point of SFI's advocacy on behalf of social entrepreneurship was not just to provide an ideological excuse for public policy inaction but to contribute to the creation of a new political-economic order.

SFI's primary audience remained existing business elites, not external political skeptics. Since 2000, SFI leaders and trustees have provided encouragement to entrepreneurs to direct their attention to social problem-solving,

They have done this at venues such as the World Economic Forum, which has played a crucial role in convincing global economic elites to view philanthropy and business as inextricable.

SFI-sponsored conferences and publications on ‘social investing’ have provided practical guidance to investors interested in providing social entrepreneurs with reliable access to capital.

And SFI researchers have encouraged policymakers to conceptualize the promotion of ‘social innovation’ as their core purpose—not direct problem-solving but the incubation of a problem-solving class.

Since the early 2000s, the influential journalist and urban planning theorist Richard Florida has helped popularize SFI research that depicts cities as uniquely favorable environments for innovation—the natural home of what Florida calls the ‘creative class’.

Florida's enormously influential writing & advocacy reshaped 21st-century urban policy across the USA, as municipal leaders devoted considerable resources to programs of ‘urban renewal’ aimed at attracting young, wealthy, creative problem-solvers to their core neighborhoods.

🚨From Davos to Austin, SFI's 21st-century business network has helped create the infrastructure for the *systematic conversion of social problems into business opportunities for entrepreneurs* in both the for-profit and nonprofit sectors. (The replacement of the welfare state).

In turn, SFI's embrace of social entrepreneurship has attracted financial support for the Institute from many of the wealthiest backers of the philanthrocapitalist agenda.

In 2008, eBay cofounder Pierre Omidyar joined the SFI board & committed $7.5 million to financing the Institute's postdoctoral program, now known as the Omidyar Fellowship. Omidyar was one of the earliest champions of social entrepreneurship & what he calls ‘impact investing’.

‘We believe market forces can be a potent driver for positive social change’, Omidyar's website explains. ‘That's why we invest in both for-profit businesses and nonprofit organizations, whose complementary roles can advance entire sectors.’

SFI's most important funder today, the John Templeton Foundation, has also been preoccupied with the promotion of ‘moral capitalism’.

https://twitter.com/docrussjackson/status/1217220688530067457?s=20&t=unRLUCfMQ-0wH7MOoMApUQ

The Templeton Foundation's annual Freedom Prize once had a special category for ‘social entrepreneurship’, to honor recipients ‘engaged in innovative and successful projects that strengthen society’.

opendemocracy.net/en/dark-money-…

While ‘the 21st century opened with unparalleled stories of greed and corporate corruption’, a blurb for the Templeton Foundation's award in 2004 explained, the work of social entrepreneurs was a reminder of ‘the role of ethics in free markets:

intangible assets like goodwill and trust produce real-dollar value; companies that serve social needs can be profitable’. 😬

At SFI, Templeton funding underwrites the Institute's most abstract work on human cultural evolution—in search of ‘universal patterns in the emergence of complex societies’, like the work of Bowles and Gintis on strong reciprocity.

The quest for universal patterns was precisely the dimension of SFI research that drew the ire of NSF reviewers in the 1990s, but it is what excites the Templeton Foundation the most.

SFI remains, as I have argued throughout this paper, not just a site for the production of ideas—however favorable to its backers’ political interests—but a site for the production of people.

Since the late 80s, SFI has been an important node in a network of elite actors in business, politics, & media working to construct a new leadership class—stewards of the New Economy & today's philanthrocapitalism; the creative class, social entrepreneurs, SFI libertarians.

Wealthy philanthropists have partnered with SFI because they have wanted to see this leadership class built, & because they themselves have aspired to its membership.

In 2019, for instance, it was revealed that the billionaire sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein donated approximately $275,000 to SFI over the course of his life, including a $25,000 donation two years after his first sex offense conviction in 2008.

Epstein relentlessly used his philanthropy to gain access to elite social circles, & in particular sought out scientists whose friendship could burnish his reputation as a Renaissance man of ‘curiosity’ & ‘energy’—to help him ‘come to be accepted by the Establishment’.

Epstein's donations, then, are evidence that he saw SFI as one possible ticket to establishment acceptance. SFI cofounder Murray Gell-Mann was a regular attendee of Epstein dinner parties.

It is a reminder that science funding is not only an intellectual but a social fact.

The ideas that emerge out of partnerships between institutions like SFI & their wealthy backers knit together a social world—a big tent, as Jesse Walker put it for Reason.

Like the concept of complexity itself, the defining trait of the social world of SFI is its flexibility, its ability to provide unity while preserving difference.

SFI could encompass theoretical physicists and organizational sociologists; entertaining dinner-party guests and high-priced consultants; hard-core tech industry cheerleaders and liberal social entrepreneurs.

By assembling these intellectual, social, and political differences within the same institutional container, the SFI network acquired a sense of depth and robustness that more homogenous and overtly activist think tanks could never aspire to possess.

But the bounds of acceptable difference only extended so far. As SFI's libertarian financiers hoped, the Institute as a social fact demonstrated the possibility of arriving at a posture of acquiescence to corporate power from a variety of ideological starting points.

At the same time that the Institute's gravitational field held participants’ ideas in orbit around its trademark renovation of Friedrich Hayek and spontaneous order, it held participants themselves in orbit around centers of social power, from Santa Fe to Davos and DC.

If funders have pursued their ideological objectives in other contexts by insisting upon disciplined messaging and lockstep coordination, the history of SFI demonstrates that it can be useful instead to produce a solar system:

diffuse, in motion, heterogeneous—and yet circumscribed by an outer limit that few ever transgress once inside.

This #THREAD summarises & quotes extensively from 'The ultimate think tank: The rise of the Santa Fe Institute libertarian', by Erik Baker.

journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.117…

In 2021, Erik Baker received a commendation in the History of the Human Sciences' Early Career Essay Prize.

HHS spoke to him about his research & his commended essay ‘The Ultimate Think Tank: The Rise of the Santa Fe Institute Libertarian’.

histhum.com/interview-erik…

The SFI "used a particular metaphor from the natural sciences, the complex adaptive system, to legitimate these changes that were occurring on a much broader scale in the American economy at this time – outsourcing, downsizing, the elimination of middle management ranks etc."

"This ideology has helped to channel the broad desire for social change and social progress into support for particular entrepreneurial initiatives, alongside a tolerance for the slow erosion of other modes of social problem solving, namely the welfare state and labour unions."

"This is often made explicit by the more conservative or libertarian proponents of the social entrepreneurship vision, which is presented as the successor for these institutions that are seen as characteristic of a hopelessly outdated politics of the past."