Brad:
> But the modern person who believes objects
really
> do move in straight lines forever, just like the modern
> person who beleves in perfect competition, has a
> grossly distorted view of their environment.
> do move in straight lines forever, just like the modern
> person who beleves in perfect competition, has a
> grossly distorted view of their environment.
You can't "believe" in perfect competition, all you can do is understand it
as the ideal state of the market given a number of assumptions. Nor is it
always necessarily the ideal state. Much depends on the size relationship
between the firm and the market. Where firms are tiny and powerless and
markets large you might have something approaching perfect competition.
But where firms, to operate efficiently, must be large relative to the market,
as in e.g. the airline business, you really can't have very much
competition.
Ed
----- Original Message -----
From: "Brad McCormick, Ed.D." <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: "Ed Weick" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Cc: "Keith Hudson" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>;
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Sent: Sunday, January 11, 2004 2:34 PM
Subject: Re: [Futurework] Two sorts of evolutionary
economics (the paradoxical relation of pure theory to
reality)
> > Just a quick comment, Keith, perhaps more later.
> >
> > I said:
> >
> > Perfect competition is nothing more than a static theoretical
> > device, not something that you'd find out there in the real economy.
> [snip]
>
> This reminds me of the latest NetFuture newsletter (Steve Talbott)
>
> http://www.netfuture.org/
>
> where he does an extensive deconstruction of the limits
> of physical laws for predicting what hapens to us in the
> real world.
>
> He points out that, in reality, Newton's ideal masses which
> travel forever in a straight line without change of
> either speed or direction (etc.) are never encountered:
> everything we find is in curved motion -- often, as the
> ancients asserted: circular (or more-or-less circular..)
> motion.
>
> So just as ideal masses going on forever in straight
> lines end up in cats' ball of yarn coreoraphies of
> cuvilinear motion -- so too, as you say, the condition for
> monopoly (circular motion) is perfect competition
> (straight-line motion).
>
> The ancients were unable to penetrate the circles to
> find the straight lines "underlying"; we are unable to
> penetrate real economic conditions to find the
> perfect competition "underlying", and, for all
> practical purposes, neither of us is/was the worse for it.
>
> But the modern person who believes objects really
> do move in straight lines forever, just like the modern
> person who beleves in perfect competition, has a
> grossly distorted view of their environment.
>
> Eppur si muove.
> (--Galileo, which was perhaps more a political than
> a physics statement).
>
> \brad mccormick
>
> --
> Let your light so shine before men,
> that they may see your good works.... (Matt 5:16)
>
> Prove all things; hold fast that which is good. (1 Thes 5:21)
>
> <![%THINK;[SGML+APL]]> Brad McCormick, Ed.D. / [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> -----------------------------------------------------------------
> Visit my website ==> http://www.users.cloud9.net/~bradmcc/
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