As Mike points out, in actual conditions it is very difficult to distinguish a multitude of possible interacting chaotic processes from noise.
I am sure Ormerod will publish theoretically the scientific reasons for his schadenfreude over the fate of LTCM and its Nobel Prize winners. Perhaps he has already.
But my recollection of "The Death of Economics" is that he included what looked like serious empirical data showing how the employment rate in various countries circled round an "attractor" and then shifted to circle round another attractor after the imposition of monetarist, neo-liberal policies. It looked a serious attempt to apply chaos theory.
Chaos theory of course, despite its unfortunate name, does not mean "it's all a mess". It describes how regularly occurring patterns may perpetuate for a long period of time although not in a precisely determined way, and then, occasionally, may shift to quite different patterns or become patternless. There are obvious analogies with phase shifts in physics, quantitative changes leading to qualitative in dialectics, and revolutions where the ruling class can no longer go on ruling in the old way.
I did not pick up clues that Ormerod is marxist, or marxist influenced, but when marxists talk of the anarchy of production under capitalism, we too do not mean it is all just a mess. We mean that a social process is privately owned and controlled by people who cannot control, and are substantially unconscious of that social process. Indeed Marx's explanation of interlocking crises is one with considerable pattern in it.
>From the point of view of chaos theory one could argue that both Marxism
and Keynesianism recognised that economies may flip through a phase shift
from high employment to high unemployment and may get stuck for long
periods of time in the latter.
Chris Burford
London
At 05:57 PM 10/15/98 -0400, you wrote:
>Charles Brown wrote:
>
>> Chris,
>>
>> Might "chaos" be another name for
>> anarchy of production under
>> capitalism ?
>>
>> Charles Brown
>
>Nope. Unless this is a joke. Chaos represents the dynamics of deterministic
>but
>highly unpredictable trajectories of differential equations whose long run
>behavior is
>highly dependent on initial data. Trajectories are very difficult to
track and
>simulate
>noise. I hope this helps.
> --mike
>--
>Michael Cohen mike at cns.bu.edu
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