Dickens and chaos

William S. Lear rael at dejanews.com
Thu Aug 13 06:57:18 PDT 1998


Dickens invokes the flavor of chaos in the reflections of Pip on his day's uncomfortable and transformative events:

Pause you who read this, and think for a moment of the long chain

of iron or gold, of thorns or flowers, that would never have

bound you, but for the formation of the first link on one

memorable day.

I've been reading the very interesting *Barriers and Bounds to Rationality* by Peter S. Albin (whose work was highly recommended to me by Jamie Galbraith). Duncan Foley provides a long and thoughtful introduction (I suspect, in part, because Albin, though relatively young, has had a fairly serious stroke).

One thing that struck me when reading this, is that this mathematical treatment of complexity and rationality is not only "neat mathematically" (as Doug says) but it does tell us something very important about human decision making (social choice) within market settings.

It tells us that if you can show (as I believe Albin does) that "selection of an optimal social choice" is not only costly, but computationally infeasible for an individual to undertake, you might then begin to more fully undermine the "rational expectations" nonsense and provide openings to economic and social problem solving that are not based on the neoclassical vision of homo economicus (solitudos).

That is, to spin it Albin-style, if, by relying on individual agents, the "solution space" to economic problems is necessarily narrowly constricted to only that which can be explored by an individual, perhaps this can lead to more efficient (and fair) collective solutions, perhaps using computers, but perhaps more generally and simply by different social organizations.

The central, dominant contention of that branch of mass propaganda known as economics (present company excepted, naturelment) is that the computations necessary to communicate and evaluate information to undertake efficient market transactions are not only feasible for an individual, but are trivial, automatic, and are undertaken properly *only* by isolated individuals, lest doom descend.

So, in a hopeful sense, this can not only beat the criminals at their own game, it can provide some insights about how to collectively, democratically manage our future.

Bill



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