AI RESEARCH

Sandpile Economics: Theory, Identification, and Evidence

arXiv CS.LG

ArXi:2604.13890v1 Announce Type: cross Why do capitalist economies recurrently generate crises whose severity is disproportionate to the size of the triggering shock? This paper proposes a structural answer grounded in the evolutionary geometry of production networks. As economies evolve through specialization, integration, and competitive selection, their inter-sectoral linkages drift toward configurations of increasing geometric fragility, eventually crossing a threshold beyond which small disturbances generate disproportionately large cascades.