NECSI Discussion Forum

From: "Phil Henshaw"
Date: February 9, 2006 10:17:03 PM EST


Subject: RE: FORWARD Guardian (UK)- Capitalism or a habitable planet

Igor, your sense that unspecified social changes will need to come along
to take capitalism beyond its immature stage could be seen as the broad
view, and Stan's stages of maturation as a natural succession a more
specific statement.  A still more specific statement of it is that the
growth mechanism will switch from positive to negative feedback, in our
case by diverting the returns on financial investments to other things,
i.e. because investment drives change, we'll at least top out our rate
of change.

Of course, when you see what's entailed socially and institutionally in
achieving that (either the easy or hard way) it clearly looks like the
biggest change in plans in human history, and it's about to happen in a
tremendous cascade.  That's what our looming collision with the limits
of explosive growth (mainly from changing too fast to avoid mistakes)
really means.  We're about to change.

The usual idea of climax is as a prelude to decline, but I see it as
potentially a stepping stone.  In the evolutionary record when societies
(populations) become new species it's not the beginning of their end.
It's just the next stage.   The stage we're finishing now is the great
600 year leap out of feudalism (an almost magical productivity increase
of about 4 billion!).  That's where the growth curve started, and
because our invention of our system isn't done yet, capping growth with
a sustainable high continuing rate of change might be appropriate
accomplishment for this stage!


Phil Henshaw                       ¸¸¸¸.·´ ¯ `·.¸¸¸¸
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

>fye You seem to be leaving out most of your viewpoints, hard to follow.


Phil
Strange comment!!, What view points am I leaving out? What is hard to follow?
G

Responding to Stan's
A brief comment on Igor's:

>>Phil, I agree with what you say. Reaching a climax does not necessarily
>>imply subsequent decline.  This belief was common in ancient
>>civilizations which viewed history as moving in circles -
>>growth-climax-decline. Our societies may stay "indefinitely" in the
>>materially mature (steady) state but still experience growth in other
>>dimensions of culture. Hunter and gathering societies spend quite a lot
>>of time in leisure - this is not bad as a future option... Igor

>I think that one probem here will be to get to understand just what system maturity >entails in comparison with senescence.  The one item I think I have pinpointed as a >general systems principle here is the avoidance of continued uptake of information >without losing some.  I believe that it is fundamentally the overconnectedness >resulting from continued information intake after a system has become 'definitive' >that leads to functional underconnectedess involving (a) lags in response time + (b) >increased stereotypy of response.  a + b = system rigidity.

>STAN
>PS: Can anyone tell me what 'moving the discussion to the NECSI site' involves? >That is, what should Phil, Igor and I have done instead of just posting to the list?


This is a very key question.   What is the difference between evolutionary life systems that can apparently keep climbing, stage after stage indefinately, and ones that have only one chance.    I'm not at all sure I'd know how to define the difference, since systems that evolve to higher states over and over and over still presumably have some finite lifetime.   If you looked at some measure over time they would probably  display something like growth and decay curves in that longer span.   If you look at species population curves, for example, they always seem to have exactly the classic shape.  ¸¸¸¸.·´ ¯ `·.¸¸¸¸ 

You seem to suggest above a characteristic of the disintegration phase (#3 in my phase sequence of inflation, integration, disintegration, decay) that I don't entirely follow, something about an uptake of information after maturity?   If you consider the content of an open system to be information (referred to as an observable thing for my thinking, it's busyness, say) you seem to be reaching for a physical cause of the entropy.   Is that it?

Well, do follow you passion!  If there's anything that I swear by it's growing out my spontaneous notions as far as I can, taking a couple notes, and then smashing them to bits, to build enriched compost for another crop.   The lasting framework builds slowly.

Anyone in charge of almost any kind of organization, throwing a party, running a business, etc., will want it to build up to a point where it’s exciting, but not to where you loose control.    You usually want things to approach the edge of stability, but not go over it.   It’s fun, and in business, makes money and gets the most out of everyone.   

Perhaps the deep sort of common experience that explains it is playing with a water hose as a kid.   The fun really begins when someone turns up the pressure and the person holding the nozzle at the time (usually one of the girls) gets scared and lets go.   It wasn’t the pressure so much that made the hose go out of control, but naturally slow reaction times in correcting minor mistakes holding it steady that multiply.   Everyone flees screaming their heads off, having a wonderful time.    It’s the same edge involved with the inherent thrill and danger of speed.   Playing the edge of control makes a great contest with yourself or others, and going over it in a harmless way, is often huge and memorable fun.    Dangerous play, like driving ever faster up a mountain road, is huge fun too.   Only those who know the fine edge of what is and is not play survive it, however.

Unfortunately our economic system does not know where that fine edge is at all.   It has no brain.    Over the past few centuries it’s been huge fun always exceeding our expectations, even granting that it’s been more fun for some than others.   However you rate the experience, though, as operated the world economy is positively destined to go out of control.   Continually multiplying the through-put of a system necessarily leads to multiplying mistakes in controlling it, i.e. destructive consequences as critical signals multiply faster than competent responses.   Where I think you can see that today is in critical issue overload.   The common thread to all our competing great world problems is that they can’t be solved because people are distracted by all the other multiplying great world problems.   There are also a certain number of poignant glaring mistakes being made and going unattended.   

Many of us would point to one or another favorite issue, loss of security, loss of rights, rising major climate change, extinctions, etc.    Some of us have long and growing lists.   Here are two I’m really bothered by.   The US is attacking terrorism in a way that terrorizes the major religious community it comes from.   It seems basically incorrect and profoundly dangerous.    In comparison, perhaps it’s just perfectly laughable that the controlling political movement in the US is trying to restore simpler times at home by disabling government functions and shifting government debt and taxes from the rapidly growing part of the economy (investment) to the completely non-growing part (wage earning).   It doesn’t fit our myth in several ways, granted, but seems to be happening.  It’s totally operatic!

So this is what I think.   Growth has been fun for a long time, mostly staying on the fine edge of play.   That has apparently ended.    There are things that can be done about it, to get the fun and fair play back, non-disruptive and highly effective things potentially, but paying a price of another kind.   It’s a new kind of physics that touches personal matters.   For some it would be admitting we’re licked, when every bone in our bodies refuses, only because reason paints a vividly clear picture of the alternative.   For some it would be admitting that humanity is just another living thing in the sense of having a life of growth and maturation like anything else, with no special dispensations on that part of life of any kind.   For some it would be feeling queer about the need for inventing a new kind of control strategy.  We need to make a global group decision, yielding to self-interests so plainly drawn that we choose to give up what many feel is a sacred right, to passively multiply our savings, in order to retain continually evolving stable free market business and political lives.   

I have an unusual vantage point, and my writings are frequently found to be unsatisfying because of it I think.   It would really help me make my work more accessible if you complained about where it falls short, over-reaches, seems just plain wrong or unbalanced, or whatever.    I seem to somehow have learned how to look at complex natural systems, those things where the whole is greater than the sum of their parts, from the inside and outside at the same time.   Most people just don’t recognize that things that grow even have an organizational inside.   Most people don’t recognize that their own image of the world even has an outside.   Yes, having a strange perspective is problematic, and a pain in some ways, but it also exposes tremendous beauty and occasionally fabulous choices where there seemed to be none before.   It apparently came from and continues to be, I guess, a somewhat risky form of play.

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>>Many of us would point to one or another favorite issue, loss of security, loss of rights, rising major climate change, extinctions, etc.    Some of us have long and growing lists.   Here are two I’m really bothered by.   

>Gavin Says: I don't get too bothered, why not just watch and wait, as you said we live in in a dangerous world.

[ph] If you see a silly yellow thing out the window saying CURVE AHEAD you could just wait and see what it means too, right?

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>>So this is what I think.   Growth has been fun for a long time, mostly staying on the fine edge of play.   That has apparently ended.    There are things that can be done about it, to get the fun and fair play back, non-disruptive and highly effective things potentially, but paying a price of another kind.   It’s a new kind of physics that touches personal matters.   

>Gavin says: If the universe didn't grow(expand) continuously we would be in big trouble.

[ph] You have not looked at what physically happens.   Just read the data of change over time.   It's quite obvious.   Growth is the beginning of everything, but also always a transitional phase of development.

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>>I have an unusual vantage point, and my writings are frequently found to be unsatisfying because of it I think.   It would really help me make my work more accessible if you complained about where it falls short, over-reaches, seems just plain wrong or unbalanced, or whatever.   

>Gavin says: I don't think it falls short anywhere actually, it's just another point of view.

[ph] Thanks, it would be great if anyone would disagree with me about whether growth pushes us to into ever more rapid decision making though....

>>I seem to somehow have learned how to look at complex natural systems, those things where the whole is greater than the sum of their parts,

>Gavin says: I have nevr been personally draw in by the parts and wholes issue because the plain fact is noboby knows what the parts really are or even if there are parts or it's just a figment of our imagination.

[ph] I guess you don't have a way of seeing them, which seems odd since your own models are of open systems and how they learn and grow.   There are many levels of organization in open systems.   Maybe the hard part is that they're not fixed structures (even their reliable parts are almost always disconnected) and do interpenetrate both functionally and spatially.


>Gavin says: It's like the self-organisation thing, how can anything self-organise. It's just plain silly to me. Things just don't slef-organise there are clear motivators or power drivers that invoke any sort of organistion. Things don't organise unless (in the human realm) there is an ideal even if it is power, money, prestige or whatever.

[ph]Yea, the terminology is silly until you slowly figure out what it is in nature that it refers to.    No, natural systems do not (nor do you or I) stand apart from themselves with a soldering gun and screwdriver assembling some kit of parts to then jump back into.   That's sort of what the words say, but not what they mean.

[ph] If you watch change over time you can directly observe that organization develops from the inside.   Watch growth.   It's a strictly local thing.   Outside influences are very real, but as resources rather than complex coordinated instructions.    Say you want to test that, your theory that the whole internal organization of natural systems, their growth dynamics, resilience and responsiveness, etc., comes from the outside.   That requires locating an outside source of coordination and dynamics in remote things that display less and less of the system's patterns the greater the distance from it you observe them.   Ocham's razor says to me that things grow from the inside right where you see them, even if we can't entirely explain it or rule out the chance of remote causes we can't observe.

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>>>>Many of us would point to one or another favorite issue, loss of security, loss of rights, rising major climate change, extinctions, etc.    Some of us have long and growing lists.   Here are two I’m really bothered by.   

>>>Gavin Says: I don't get too bothered, why not just watch and wait, as you said we live in in a dangerous world.

>>[ph] If you see a silly yellow thing out the window saying CURVE AHEAD you could just wait and see what it means too, right?

>(GR): Youre assuming that you know the rules of the road but in complexity we don't and the whole concept is racked with uncertainty so you don't always get a nice sign (in human relations) that says youre coming to a dangerous area so be careful. In fact the opposite is often the case. Things look so great and then it turns to custard. If you have read biographies of famous politicians like Churchill, or JC Smuts (father of holism) you see they often make decisions choices between horrors.

[ph] drawing conclusions based on an absence of information is important to avoid, like the conclusion that there are no dangerous limits to growth because we can't see them.   The dangerous limit is being slow to react and making mistakes in response to increasingly sudden demands for response.   The danger is in what we can't see, and is quite predictable.   No doubt the gut feeling that the world is going to hell in a hand basket is a perennial byproduct of exponential system change and quite misleading.  Don't overread that!   The question for the evidence to decide is whether we're heading into an exploding period of mistakes.   

In any case, every exponential is an absolute and certain CURVE AHEAD sign.   How and when to pull off the curve is sometimes better left to 'fate' and sometimes not.   Once you start looking for signs you might be mislead by finding a flurry that only show that you started looking, and not something fundamental.   Needing ever more rapidly expanding resources and finding them shrinking is kind of basic though.   Jumping from big to bigger pools is different from jumping from big pools to rapidly increasing numbers of ever smaller pools.


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>>>>So this is what I think.   Growth has been fun for a long time, mostly staying on the fine edge of play.   That has apparently ended.    There are things that can be done about it, to get the fun and fair play back, non-disruptive and highly effective things potentially, but paying a price of another kind.   It’s a new kind of physics that touches personal matters.   

>>>Gavin says: If the universe didn't grow(expand) continuously we would be in big trouble.

>>[ph]You have not looked at what physically happens.   Just read the data of change over time.   It's quite obvious.   Growth is the beginning of everything, but also always a transitional phase of development.

>(GR) I have looked at the model you are talking about and it can be like two s curves back to back, it can be chaotic with intermittancy, it can just keep growing like the universe. Depends what you are looking at. Still my point is you never know. Take the Verhulst curve it becomes chaotic past a certain point after following a nice s-curve.

[ph] the human growth universe is the earth, not metaphors.  To say "you never know" is saying that your lack of information can be read confidently, and determining the therefore incontrovertible answer you prefer.   I think that kind of false reasoning is scattered all over science and public policy.  People just don't like to think they have no answer to their big questions, but it's really much healthier.



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>>>Gavin says: I have nevr been personally draw in by the parts and wholes issue because the plain fact is noboby knows what the parts really are or even if there are parts or it's just a figment of our imagination.

>>[ph] I guess you don't have a way of seeing them, which seems odd since your own models are of open systems and how they learn and grow.   There are many levels of organization in open systems.   Maybe the hard part is that they're not fixed structures (even their reliable parts are almost always disconnected) and do interpenetrate both functionally and spatially.

>(GR) I create my own parts but am aware that I have created them and the parts can be cut up in many ways. My point here is I'm not stuck on one model of parts.

[ph]  No, no one is ever stuck with one model or even one kind of model.   Sometimes there are system parts that just pop out of nowhere, though, like the cluster of stores that appears around yours, producing a commercial magnet, or the social groups within the ranks of your employees and the kind of bonding or conflicts between them that makes your business either a great success or perfect failure...  those kinds of things.    I think a competent business model needs to have feelers out for that stuff.



>>>Gavin says: It's like the self-organisation thing, how can anything self-organise. It's just plain silly to me. Things just don't slef-organise there are clear motivators or power drivers that invoke any sort of organistion. Things don't organise unless (in the human realm) there is an ideal even if it is power, money, prestige or whatever.

>>[ph]Yea, the terminology is silly until you slowly figure out what it is in nature that it refers to.    No, natural systems do not (nor do you or I) stand apart from themselves with a soldering gun and screwdriver assembling some kit of parts to then jump back into.   That's sort of what the words say, but not what they mean.

>(GR). You misssed the point. Complexity is my speciality, I follow Ashby meanings, still I think its a silly concept without much rigour to the idea.

[ph]I'm sorry, I'm not really versed in Ashby.  I read definitions mostly from common usage.   You're right that there's generally little rigor to 'parts' and 'wholes'.   I find it hard to rigorously pin down the structure of something where all the parts are disconnected...   For me there's a rigor to identifying dots of information that are probably connected in the physical world, but the story I invent to connect them may be always changing.



>>[ph]If you watch change over time you can directly observe that organization develops from the inside.   Watch growth.   It's a strictly local thing.   Outside influences are very real, but as resources rather than complex coordinated instructions.    Say you want to test that, your theory that the whole internal organization of natural systems, their growth dynamics, resilience and responsiveness, etc., comes from the outside.   That requires locating an outside source of coordination and dynamics in remote things that display less and less of the system's patterns the greater the distance from it you observe them.   Ocham's razor says to me that things grow from the inside right where you see them, even if we can't entirely explain it or rule out the chance of remote causes we can't observe.

>(GR) There is always an internal and external connection (with feedback loops) in all systems. I would have thought that this is not an argument. For exmaple a plant has 5 extrenal factors that are musts for development with appropraite internal response mechanisms that work hand in hand like "being and becoming" in an everlasting dance of reflexivity and reciprocity whilst the one can never be the other in needs the other.

Quality-quantity, space and time are key determinants of any system.

[ph] I think I mostly agree.   I was also talking about the deterministic principle of modern science and where it breaks down.   Growth evidence is usually produced by an internal determinism.   That it is craftily hidden and beautifully orchestrated with mirroring internal and environmental developments is talked about but I know of no one who has the skills to document it as yet.

I think the main guide to understanding complexity is using logical and mathematical tools to direct an observer's attention to the real thing, rather than to replace real things with idealized rules and definitions like science has done.   

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Hi Guys!

Newbie here.

In regard to the discussion on ‘capitalism or a habitable planet’, would it not be useful to have a sort of video-game representation of generic economic adjustment under capitalism with which to educate the public? Is not the representation of capitalism a problem in complex non-linear dynamics? If economic adjustment could be expressed in a fashion approachable by the general public, would not the mandarins of economic science stomp on it like the 17th Century Cardinals did Galileo’s telescope?

As an economist, I respect the (so far successful) arguments that most economists would urge against big models of human ecology, viz.: the economy has a remarkable ability to substitute inputs as they come into short supply; and technical economic growth provides a great potential for environmental clean-up. These arguments suffice for the economist because he is certain that the dynamics of input substitution are beyond expression. Even the steady state of an economic system is complex beyond any possibility of quantification.

Economic certainty in these matters derives from the indissolubility of a certain ‘Vienna Problem’ which has been solved for at least 35 years, and exploited commercially for 10 years. The model demonstrating these findings is open-sourced, fully documented, and is finding some daylight in the world of complex systems. See:

Lang, P. An Essay on SFEcon’s ‘Perfect Markets Model’. International Conference on Complex Systems (ICCS2004), May 16-21 2004.
http://www.sfecon.com/Downloadables/PMktz.doc

I would like to meet others interested in using this model to make credible, formal, economically bullet-proof demonstrations of the points being made on this thread.

Responding to both Econbabe & Eberniker, I agree a beautiful model of complex systems responses, that always achieves an ideal balance, is more than a little suspicious.  I did look it up though, and there's excellent methodology involved.   I'd take anyone up on a little challenge, in that I'm interested in the rampant failure of models.   I bet I can make very realistic assumptions for any model constructed that will make it fail catastrophically.   There are lots of choices, but one of the best is lag times.    A dollar is a decision, and growth means making ever bigger decisions ever more rapidly.   It's not realistic to assume that this won't affect the lag time in making competent decisions, or not produce multiplying confounding mistakes.   I think that's what we're now seeing actually.    Of course, 'the sky is falling' is what a radically evolving economic system ALWAYS looks like... so it's quite fair to question one's intuition on the subject.   

Wouldn't it be nice to have a sufficiently realistic economic model to show how capitalism always eventually explodes in confusion and disarray?   One general evidence that this is presently happening is people preferring to make our ever faster decisions with ever wider and longer impacts on the basis of faith and power instead of planning.   There's just too much involved, and moving too fast for people to keep their attention on it, they just bounce from one hot button to another.    There are wonderful cultural things happening too, but our problem solving, just at the time we most need it, is really in the gutter.

The ideally harmonious lifestyles that one might imagine, that some of our ancestors do seem to have practiced, without our present complicated world, make wonderful ideals.   I also think that it would be possible to reinvent them to benefit our future on earth.   We definitely need change, and it's definitely not in the capitalist's business interest to try making a profit on a failed planet.    The problem though, is that most people think the limits of growth will be benign, like they are for most everything else in our personal experience.   "Wait and see" seems to most like a fine answer.    They have no idea what an unmitigated disaster a true systemic failure would be.   It's the justly heralded flexibility and creativity of the economy that is it's greatest ultimate danger.   Flexibility means that it's transferring stresses from one place to another, and that it won't fail until all system flexibilities and buffers are exhausted at the same time!   At the breaking point some little vibration that would otherwise be insignificant triggers a cascade.

The other choice is to learn how to unplug the growth imperative and become a new kind of human species.   There's actually a fairly simple way, but people would have to really understand the difference between the money we all have that multiplies 'by itself' and the money we earn.   It's quite doable actually, some fairly simple acts signifying that we care to live on the earth, that can't happen until people see the magnitude of the problem for themselves.   No doubt there would be various bumps, but it would also unquestionably be better for business!

--second post, first on Sat AM didn't stick--

I'm really delighted to hear someone else say "This option is... a technical possibility that only a few dozen people know exists, and that substantially all economists will maintain cannot exist."   

My own proposal is a little different but also fits that statement.  I hardly ever get to talk about it.  People tend to be confused and disoriented by questioning things they accept as givens.  Apparently there are at least two ways to reinvent the growth imperative as an evolving quality ladder instead.


> -----Original Message-----
> From: NECSI Discussion Forum Mailer [mailto:office@necsi.org]
> Sent: Friday, March 03, 2006 2:56 PM
> To: id@synapse9.com
> Subject: Reply to topic: 'Guardian (UK)- Capitalism or a
> habitable planet (email discussion)'
>
>
> Hi Phil and Eli,
>
> Thank you for taking a look at the SFEcon Model. You were
> right to be suspicious of it simply because a lot of bright
> people have tried and failed to objectify the Vienna Problem
> over the last hundred years. As an economist, I am sure that
> there is no possibility for this accomplishment outside the
> realm of complex systems analysis; and that, even here,
> SFEcon is unique. If you can see the beauty and validity of
> SFEcon, that is progress. Economic science is based on an
> algebraically falsifiable premise, and there is nothing to be
> gained (outside mere careerism) by allowing this premise to
> go unchallenged.
>
> Eli is certainly on point with his observation that
> capitalism is as a phenomenon has only existed for 200-250
> years (with prior, but more short-lived emergences in Holland
> and Venice).

[ph]I think when growth began rather than 'capitalism' gives us 650 year history to consider, arguably 1347-51, the dates of the black plague in Europe that tore up feudal society and released a continent of talented people to invent a 'Renaissance' of individual freedom and enterprise. [my view]

> Without some embodiment of profit maximization,
> made possible by certain aspects of a highly developed social
> context, the ‘economic equation’ is under-specified and
> cannot be modeled as self-actuating and correcting. But I am
> not persuaded that mankind is better off, materially or
> otherwise, in a pre-capitalist system that is most likely to
> be controlled by dueling warlords.

[ph]There are additional choices.  The difference between 'profit' maximization and 'wealth' maximization is *huge* in its impact on either a model or the world.  The destructive power struggles of Feudalism, as I see it, result from individual 'wealth' maximization in a limited system.  That's a major part of why it looks to me that the limits to growth pit the ruin of the earth and the ruin of civilization against each other.    The current global explosion of business would seem to suggest another breakthrough for the system similar to the industrial revolution, postponing the necessity to stop compounding returns another cycle.   There are so many signs of climax fundamentals though, I think it's a bubble.

> And Phil is correct in that an evolving economic system is
> always in a process of scrambling back toward balance, and
> always being knocked off-balance by discoveries, culture, and
> demographics. The SFEcon system demonstrates how elegant,
> supple, and efficient this process can be under the
> assumptions of pure capitalism. It seems to me that the
> importance of a formal model of this process is that it
> allows us to examine the extent to which pure capitalism can
> 1) have a real embodiment, and 2) be dynamically stable.

[ph]... so, in the interest of testing different assumptions, what would change in the model if non-participating investors spent all their returns?   My guess is that trying it would show other parts of the model also needing to be fixed.   Spending investment returns is smoothest and most creative way to tame a rush toward self-destructive excess.  It states a general principle for how any growth system successfully transforms its structures from growth to maturity. http://www.synapse9.com/prpr.htm


> My sense of SFEcon is much like Phil’s sense of what is at
> issue between capitalism and a world of finite resources.
> Maintaining economic order is like riding a bicycle: the
> faster you are moving forward (economic growth) the more
> rotational inertia you have to react against in controlling
> the mechanism and keeping it upright; but, as the bicycle’s
> velocity slows to zero (sustainable economics) the more
> unstable its upright equilibrium becomes.

[ph]I think we need to watch for differences in what we mean by an economy's 'size', 'speed' and 'acceleration'.  The rate of growth is degree of exponential acceleration (explosiveness of compounding acceleration), not a steady speed.  The analogy of a bicycle is a little confusing because it is a thing of fixed design which easily balances at fixed moderate speed, but goes out of control with ever more rapidly accelerating speed.  You're using the metaphor differently.  I think the feeling that the economy would become unstable without growth comes from the bank & business failures during recessions and the feeling that people might loose interest and motivation without the excitement of always reinventing the world.   

What many don't seem to see is that the 'size' of the economy also indicates the level of investment, and so also measures our rate of reinventing all the parts.   Climax would be at our peak rate of change, not a 'steady state'.   If we could understand and eliminate the cause of the bank and business failures, climaxing at a peak size will also maintain rapid evolution throughout the system.   It's a window to vast qualitative change without spinning out of control and wrecking the earth.


> SFEcon’s picture of an economic world which is both
> Friedmanite as to profit maximization, and in a state of
> sustainable stable equilibrium (i.e. the bicycle is upright
> and has no forward motion) informs as to what would have to
> be realized and what would have to be done away with if such
> a state were to become real.

> SFEcon can maintain this perfect state because its mechanism
> for financial intermediation is a perfect abstraction of what
> financial control needs to accomplish. The best current
> approximation mankind has to this abstraction is the
> free-for-all of self-interested private capital, which
> conduces to 1) an increasingly skewed distribution of
> capital, and 2) increasingly uncivil inducements to certain
> wasteful forms of consumption.

> But SFEcon gives us a second option. An abstract model of
> capitalist efficiency means that efficiency can be realized
> without private capital. Collected capital can be managed
> with superior efficiency toward whatever goals the citizenry
> wishes; and returns to capital (not wages) can be distributed
> evenly for the social purposes capital now has, viz.:
> pensions, health insurance, education, etc. If citizens wish
> to stop economic development at a certain point in the
> interest of environmental safety, social stability, or
> whatever, then they have that option.
>
> This option is, I emphasize, a technical possibility that
> only a few dozen people know exists, and that substantially
> all economists will maintain cannot exist. If one has
> expertise and credibility with the complex systems analysis
> on which the option is based, then making the option known
> has a real possibility of moving reality in the direction you desire.

[ph] So what's the feature of your's that people would be averse to accepting?  For mine it's that no one wants to hear that the technique of amassing great wealth, compounding returns, results in a systemwide growth imperative leading to systemic collapse at climax.   When you actually trace through doing it, it looks like a genuine practical way to maintain growth oriented free enterprise while also imitating the profound kind of self-control found in ecosystems everywhere.

Last edited by phenshaw (2006-03-05 15:25:55)

Econbabe
> Hi Phil,
>
> To answer your questions, economists will not accept SFEcon
> on two mathematical grounds, one geometric and the other
> dynamic.
Can you simplify the dilemmas of either?   I think models are very useful, particularly how they fail to represent reality.  My view of systems is similar but a little different from the artificial life guys.  Natural systems do seem to develop from the inside, fed and constrained from the outside, but not organized from the outside.  Part of the way you learn what difference that makes is by looking at the discrepancies with the models.

> The dynamic objection also originated at MIT at the time when
> the geometric problem was first solved. It seems that, though
> SFEcon was fine with the grizzled old EE prof who taught my
> control theory course, it somehow fails to be “dynamic in the
> Forrestonian sense” – and, with few exceptions, that seems to
> be sufficient for the academics interested in human systems.

The thing I can't understand about control theory is that I can't find in it any mention of the primary rule of self-control, i.e. don't overdo it.   Our economic growth system, for example, is designed to explosively multiply change with no end but failure, and that's one step too far.  I think the flaw (in our not noticing the problem) is that self-control is only needed in reality.  Systems of rules, because they are closed and made to work, usually do indefinitely.  Because that's what our clients request they're the kind we develop for modeling economies.   Is that possible?

> Since the Forrestonians be made to say what they mean by
> “dynamic”, or how this could possibly be different than
> anyone else’s “dynamic”, I have concluded that the MIT
> Systems outfit is only interested in maintaining their
> monopoly on what the world needs in the way of systems
> thinking on social systems. Meanwhile, their own efforts have
> all but discredited the whole concept of systems’ application
> to big human problems.

The preceding comment indicates my direction of thinking on why model making isn't attracting adherents and support.  What's yours?   It's clear to me that even bad systems models make good tools for contrasting with nature so we can see what the real live systems that actually matter are doing differently.

> As an economist interested in the application of SFEcon for
> public purposes, I am hoping to engage some math guys in not
> letting the know-nothings get away with this fraud. If big
> social problems could be approached from the standpoint of
> mathematically sound economics, then we can have the
> efficiencies of economic optimality with stability in service
> to whatever social and ecological criteria the public ordains.

I'm not a math guy, in your sense here, but maybe I could help with making more realistic assumptions on various things.

>
> It is relatively easy to proclaim agenda, organize parties,
> elect officers, etc. Rooting-out scientific prejudice and
> academic rent-seeking is more challenging. Economists are not
> going to be able to do this from within our discipline; we
> need self-confident mathematicians demanding answers from
> outside the ramparts as well!

> Any takers hereabouts?
 
  Great, lead the change!   I'm desperate to meet some mathematicians who understand that a good representation is next to useless if mistaken for the real thing.   


Phil Henshaw                       ¸¸¸¸.·´ ¯ `·.¸¸¸¸
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