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Most economic concepts such as the market, competition, flexibility, pricing of production factors and consumption theory no longer reflect the reality of the contemporary situation. The current economic model and political system form a synthesis of fiduciary economics and privilege political systems. The exponential rise in material wealth amassed over the industrial age is unsustainable when figuring in the availability of resources. Even more interesting is how it may run counter to human instincts, our gene structure, and how the mindset and behavioral pattern are forged. As the economy and society evolves, combining in-depth knowledge across various disciplines is crucial to furthering our understanding of the world.

Managers are faced with increased complexity and unexpected risks. This article raises some reasons for the increase in complexity and risks. It also describes the tools and approaches used to anticipate some of these risks and how to mitigate against them. The usefulness of the scenario planning process is also indicated. The type of behavioral biases that makes risk identification difficult is also explained.

People may be surprised by noticing certain regularities that hold in existing knowledge they have had for some time. That is, they may learn without getting new factual information. We argue that this can be partly explained by computational complexity. We show that, given a knowledge base, finding a small set of variables that obtain a certain value of R² is computationally hard, in the sense that this term is used in computer science.We discuss some of the implications of this result and of fact-free learning in general.