Chaos theory and economics.

Doug Henwood dhenwood at panix.com
Mon Aug 10 17:15:07 PDT 1998


Rosser Jr, John Barkley wrote:


> Guess that depends on "what we knew before." There is
>a lot of disagreement about that. Did "we know" about the
>butterfly effect? "We" certainly knew (or should have
>known, although lots of people pretended to forget) that
>markets can change very suddenly and have a lot of local
>instability. Chaos theory tells us that this local
>instability is endogenous, not just the result of exogenous
>shocks or noise, sudden external disturbances. It says that
>the market is much more deeply and inherently volatile.

Uh, no kidding.

That's what I was afraid of.


> BTW, I don't think you should have picked on Brad's
>piece as being so unclear. It was not so bad for writing
>by economists, which is generally utter impenetrability.

Oh, I wasn't at all. My point was that someone who wasn't used to the genre probably couldn't make much sense of it. Clarity is all relative.

Doug



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