Mike G. wrote:
> http://ineteconomics.org
Soros? That name didn't appear on the page served to me.
What caught my eye was the group of pieces on "complexity economics",
and Doyne Farmer's name.
But dang, it's a 25 minute video. Aside from the fact that I don't
have a video-capable net connection, I don't want to spend 25 minutes
watching a lecture on a subject like that. Want to put my feet up and
read text.
I had a brief debate with a long-time net personality with growing
chops in (for want of a better term) internet freedom activism about
the fashion for video clips to deal with complicated technical
subjects. His last word was that video has more "impact". Uh-huh.
Mine eyes glaze over, my brain goes into television-watching
trance-mode, but by golly, I *noticed* whatever it was.
At least that mention led me [1] to the Wikipedia page on "complexity
economics":
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complexity_economics
Of note there is:
In 1995-1997 publications, Scientific American journalist John
Horgan "ridiculed" the movement as being the fourth C among the
"failed fads" of "complexity, chaos, catastrophe, and
cybernetics". In 1997, Horgan wrote that the approach had "created
some potent metaphors: the butterfly effect, fractals, artificial
life, the edge of chaos, self organized criticality. But they have
not told us anything about the world that is both concrete and
trul surrprising, either in a negative or in a positive sense".
I wasn't aware that those "four Cs" were being sneered at. That has
the odor of a journalist striving to be more hip than thou, especially
seeing as cybernetics has built the last half of the 20th century. In
its original (and etymological) sense of "steersman", it underlies
robotic control of cruise missiles, manufacturing machine tools
etc. etc. In it's colloquial sense, it underlies anything that uses
computers.
What complexity hints at telling us about the world is that we may be
best advised to give up much of our managerial dogma -- the notion
that we can manage anything whatsoever with predictable outcomes --
especially with regard to anything that has an impact on the
biosphere or geological and marine dynamics inter alia. Complexity,
to the extent that I understand it, offers a potential smack upside
the head to the hubris implicit in mega-projects, global-scale
marketing and distribution and anything remotely like global
economics.
Well, maybe I can run down a transcript of Farmer's talk somewhere.
- Mike
[1] It also led me, indirectly to this:
...coming as I did from a physics background, I found several
things that annoyed me about the [graduate-level business cycle
theory] course (besides the fact that I got a B). One was that, in
spite of all the mathematical precision of these theories, very
few of them offered any way to calculate any economic quantity. In
physics, theories are tools for turning quantitative observations
into quantitative predictions. In macroeconomics, there was plenty
of math, but it seemed to be used primarily as a descriptive tool
for explicating ideas about how the world might work. At the end
of the course, I realized that if someone asked me to tell them
what unemployment would be next month, I would have no idea how to
answer them.
As Richard Feynman once said about a theory he didn't like: "I
don't like that they're not calculating anything. I don't like
that they don't check their ideas. I don't like that for anything
that disagrees with an experiment, they cook up an explanation - a
fix-up to say, 'Well, it might be true.'"
That was the second problem I had with the course: it didn't
discuss how we knew if these theories were right or wrong.
And more in that vein. That sounds rather like John Horgan's remark
(mentioned above). This writer's econ course didn't tell him "anything
about the world that is both concrete and truly surprising" or even,
for that matter, very convincing.
Noah Smith
What I Learned in Econ Grad School
Friday, April 29, 2011
http://economistsview.typepad.com/economistsview/macroeconomics/
(Scroll down 3/4 of the page. Other interesting bits of opinion
there from people that sound knowledgeable.)
--
Michael Spencer Nova Scotia, Canada .~.
/V\
[email protected] /( )\
http://home.tallships.ca/mspencer/ ^^-^^
_______________________________________________
Futurework mailing list
[email protected]
https://lists.uwaterloo.ca/mailman/listinfo/futurework
