Microstructure of Macro Behavior

In connection with the launch of the paperback version of his book The Logic of Life, Tim Harford has a nice video illustrating one of Tom Schelling's demonstrations of how market outcomes may not reflect the preferences of any individual market participant: The Logic of Life: Racial Segregation and Thomas Schelling.

Schelling's demo had to do with a residential real estate market in which everyone preferred to live in a racially integrated neighborhood in which people of their own race were in a slight majority, and how the resulting dynamics could lead to segregation that nobody wanted. Harford's video dramatizes this with brown and white eggs.

(The title of this blog post comes from Micromotives and Macrobehavior, Schelling's wonderful book on the subject, originally published in 1978.)