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The composition of this book has been for the author a long struggle of escape, and so must the reading of it be for most readers if the author’s assault upon them is to be successful, — a struggle of escape from habitual modes of thought and expression. The ideas which are here expressed so laboriously are extremely simple and should be obvious. The difficulty lies, not in the new ideas, but in escaping from the old ones, which ramify, for those brought up as most of us have been, into every corner of our minds. John Maynard Keynes

Much of what filters down to standard economists about complexity economics are summaries of abstract analysis that are generally seen as having little direct impact on the workaday policy analysis that most economists do. This chapter argues that complexity theory has significant implications for workaday economic policy. Even if economists do not accept that the complexity scientific theory of the economy is ready for prime time, the complexity vision, which pictures an economy as a complex evolving system undergoing continual evolutionary change, has direct relevance for their workaday applied policy.