Soros' name is there if you dig a bit (and its (mostly) his money... As I understand it after 2008, Soros and some of his friends but mostly Soros realized that "we are on the eve of destruction" and not unintelligently noticed that a lot of it was the direct result of the genius' giving themselves Nobel prizes for Economics. So as rich folks do he set up a very expensive Institute hired a lot of very expensive very smart people (you know they are very smart because they have all graduated from the schools where, as they all tell themselves, very smart people go) and set them to work to rethink the foundations of Economics. That that was rather like telling folks on the top floor to rebuild the ground floor of the building that they were occupying didn't seem to occur either to Mr. Soros or to the very smart people that he hired so what the site seems to consist of is very smart people playing intellectual games with themselves and each other (sort of the academic equivalent of Ring a Round a Rosy) and not coming up with much that is either very interesting, very new and least of all very useful in dealing with or foregoing "the eve of destruction" which was evidently the point of the exercise rather than simply spending a lot of money, getting Mr. Soros a healthy tax write-off and ego massages up the yin yang which seems to have actually been the result.
But such is life in Liberal Foundationdom in this the 4th year and counting of the death spiral of global capitalism. M -----Original Message----- From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Mike Spencer Sent: Friday, May 25, 2012 9:24 PM To: [email protected] Subject: [Futurework] Re: Soros' Contribution to New Economic Thinking 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 _______________________________________________ Futurework mailing list [email protected] https://lists.uwaterloo.ca/mailman/listinfo/futurework
