> > is it all based on the present ownership mode?
> > Can your scheme simulate a system based on a different
> > economic base, such as common ownership?
>
> It's hard to answer anything but "maybe" to these questions, which doesn't
> really satisfy me. "Ownership" is quite an abstract concept, and for all
> that Marxists talked about materialism they sure attached a lot of
> importance to something so abstract.
>
all concepts are abstract... ownership is a very concrete one
and it is the determinant part of the capitalist profitmaking
process that makes our world go round at present and everything else
is a dependent variant. Just the way matter is linked to all it's
various forms such as thought.
> I think we can incorporate into a simulation or model anything that
> can be estimated -- if someone could estimate the amount of private,
> state, corporate and morgaged owernership for most of the countries
> in the world, that information could be put into simulations, but
> it might not mean or be useful for anything. But then again, it might.
>
Private, state, corporate and mortgaged are not akll that different
in a capitalist frame. But than, you cannot and plan not to use any
other. I don't hold my breath waiting for a magic solution coming out from
your simulation. I think all possible variation of capitalism have
now been tried and failed.
Your random style of using data without definition
and vague operators reminds me the games we played in school
with my mates putting god, nature, matter etc into equations and
ending up with some amazing conclusions...
Eva
> Putting data into a simulation can be a way of finding out what is
> meaningful, by way of sensitivity analysis, which I mentioned in the
> first sentence of my first message about this simulation project.
>
> > How can you simulate the scale of democracy in decision making,
> > and the scale of oppenness - surely an important feature.
>
> Such things are estimated quite often, by many people for different
> purposes. For example, each month the New Internationalist magazine
> has a review of a country, in which they give it from 1 to 5 stars
> for various aspects. E.g. last month they rate the Fiji Islands
>
> Income Distribution **
> Literacy ****
> Self-Reliance **
> Position of Women **
> Freedom ***
> Life-Expectancy ****
> Politics **
>
> I find this quite useful, and if I had a chance to use their estimates
> in a simulation, I definitely would, even though the magazine as a whole
> is terribly one-sided. But making estimates from scratch is hard, and
> it is not something I plan to do. I'll write the software, put in some
> data, try it, and then encourage other people to use it with their
> own data -- hoping they will make some of their results public.
>
> dpw
>
> Douglas P. Wilson [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> http://www.island.net/~dpwilson/index.html
>
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
