Social science explanations of collaborative phenomena must become largely probabilistic ('cloudy with a chance of collaborations') because social life involves many complex feedback loops making it more like predicting weather than gravity—even with full knowledge of inputs, predictability is far lower than the neoclassical model hopes, and such phenomena get stuck in special cases (you couldn't recreate Wikipedia with identical inputs because Wikipedia already exists).

factualpending

Speaker

Clay Shirky

Evidence Quote

the best we could say is Cloudy with a Chance of collaborations

Source

Clay Shirky on Coase, Collaboration and Here Comes Everybody 10/20/2008EconTalk
Created: 6/15/2026, 9:28:59 AM

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