REH wrote: > First we think of the mega system of the US as a home budget and now a > human body. > > I don't think I would "buy" either metaphor. It's a big blinking > system much too complicated for such comparisons even though the body > is complicated and doesn't break down well into the mechanical models > when it comes to mapping.
It's hard to put find a metaphor for how a computer works that could explain it to, say, a bright, literate, educated late 17th c, gentleman. And a computer is an engineered, blueprinted artifact. The biological system -- the biosphere in all its Gaian complexity -- is sui generis. Nothing else exists that will serve as a model or metaphor to explain it. We can model little pieces -- Isle of Langerhans function or population dynamics of Sable Island horses, say. But, in general, we have to find out what's there and discover how a given "what" interacts with its surroundings, then do that a million times, building up our knowledge of Gaia. The human body, the human brain or the socio-economic system of the US (or of the Pakistan or of the world) are similarly sui generis or nearly so. And they're subsets of Gaia, of the global biology system. A unique factor of the global system of living things is that evolution, popularly described at the level of ecological niches, actually takes place at the molecular level so Gaia is integrated all the way down from populations of large organisms to the level molecules -- from giraffes and forests down to dietary trace elements in diet or systemic effect of ppm pollutants. I my view, the chief failure of economics is just about what McClosky points to: failure to look at what's actually there at all scales and try to describe it. Instead, simple models are constructed, their properties hypothesized as properties of the real world and and further models are constructed in an attempt to match the real world. It doesn't work well. The result is, as the piece from Marketwatch [1] opines, pressure to create a society that matches market concepts in place of a market economy that serves society. Good medical practitioners understand and allow for the underlying complexity of biology, for the fact that "disease models" and therapies are "best guesses" and "best practice". Pharma companies, in contrast, do not. For them, a pathological condition, a set of presenting symptoms, is a marketing opportunity. Just as we're appalled that some physicians adopt the viewpoint of the pharma companies, we should be appalled when people in government, education, justice and other social domains adopt the viewpoint of Wall Street and Madison Avenue. We should be outraged when such people manipulate those social domains into operating under the rubric of Wall Street and Madison Avenue. Hmm.., Not sure I've said anything new here. So there you go... - Mike [1] http://www.marketwatch.com/Story/story/print?guid=01AA1916-AEA6-11E2 -BA04-002128040CF6 -- 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
