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> Subject: Re: Krugman-Arthur Brouhaha
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> 1. Krugman is obviously jealous that Brian Arthur has achieved a certain
> status as an popular interpreter of economics, a position to which Krugman
> seems to feel he has exclusive rights.
>
> 2. The Santa Fe school has 2 main claims to economic relevance -- besides
> undermining traditional theory in a mild way.
>
> a. Much of their early money came from finance, which thought that the Santa
> Fe school could discover the "strange attractors" that underlie financial
> markets. John Reed of CitiBank was an early enthusiast, I believe. This
> hope has an ironic relationship to the Asian crisis.
>
> b. Brian Arthur's notion of lock-in infuriates the laissez faire school,
> because it suggests a role for government intervention. Even the Wall
> Street Journal has editorialized against this theory, so it cannot be all
> bad.
> --
> Michael Perelman
> Economics Department
> California State University
> Chico, CA 95929
>
> Tel. 916-898-5321
> E-Mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]
>
Some of the Santa Fe stuff is interesting and for sure many of the
neoclassicals are pssed off about it. But again, we get (with the
advent of more sophisticated computers to do chaos simulations,
multiple-equilibria solutions and "spontaneous order" simulations) we
get another kind of "fetishism" glossed over with some elegant math.
It all still seems to be so sanitized. Freeman and Carchedi (eds)
"Marx and Non-Equilibrium Economics" show that Marx was far ahead of
his time, a non-linear dynamicist and shows the many areas in which
Marx is being "vindicated" by some of the chaos/non-linear dynamics
work; I recommend the book to all.
But this gets into the area of "dialogues" and "debates" with the
neoclassicals through debates that come down to "My Math is longer
[more sophisticated] than yours". Personally, I don't debate
neoclassicals or Libertarians as I consider them totally worthless
and not worth even talking to. We can get to the level of the
"third derivative" and draw parallels with Marx's concept of
quantitative changes turning into qualitative changes, crises, chaos,
anarchy of capitalism (I once told a student who was fucking around
in my class to "stop third derivative-ing off" and he said "Uh?") but
underneath it all, sanitized and glossed over by much of the Santa Fe
stuff, are real people, suffering real forms of
exploitation/expropriation/brutality/desperation/commodification etc
while the dialectic unfolds and the inner logic and defining
imperatives and relations of production of capitalism lead to
increasing anarchy, concentration/centralization, misery and chaos
for the many under the veneer of "spontaneous" and "natural" and
"eternal" "order" for the few.
Jim Craven
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