At 07:37 26/05/2012, Mike G wrote:
Soros' name is there if you dig a bit (and its (mostly) his money...
For those who want to read Soros's ideas (Reflexivity Theory), go to:
http://ineteconomics.org/sites/inet.civicactions.net/files/Soros%20SpeechBerlin%20INET2012.pdf
However, he admits at the end of his speech: " . . . my conceptual
framework is not sufficiently developed to serve as a new paradigm."
So quite where Soros's ideas takes us, I, for one, am at a loss. Most
of his speech is an exhaustive (and exhausting!) analysis of how the
Eurozone has gone wrong, with particular reference to the 2008 crash.
This is neither better nor worse than oodles of others we have read since then.
Essentially, what Soros says (at the beginning of his speech) is that
economic events rest on two pillars. One is human fallibility in the
market place (due to having insufficient knowledge when decisions are
taken); the other is further human fallibility (by politicians,
economists, regulators, businesses) when subsequently "reflexing"
(trying to neutralise any damage that might have been originally
caused). He then goes on to say that, behind the reflexive act lies
politics and human (complex) behaviour. Therefore, he maintains,
economic events are social events, and economics is, or ought to be,
a social science. By this he means a real science with real physical
constants and testable hypotheses. He then spirals downwards into the
afore-mentioned exegesis of the Eurozone.
George Soros therefore leaves us dangling. If any FWer finds more
substance in what he says then I would be delighted to hear of it.
Keith
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/ ^^-^^
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Keith Hudson, Saltford, England http://allisstatus.wordpress.com
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