Godel and economics?

Carrol Cox cbcox at ilstu.edu
Wed May 24 18:18:48 PDT 2000


Lisa & Ian Murray wrote:


> accept that Godel's results have implications for
> economics,
>
> >Ian
>
> OK, I'll bite. What are these?
>
> cheers
>
> dd
> ==========
> That would take a book that has yet to be written. I'll just give you a
> couple of quotes from Duncan Foley's intro to Albin's "Barriers and Bounds
> to Rationality and then a link or two. IMHO free trade is a 90 pound theory
> trying to solve a 20 ton problem.
>
> "A fundamental question about any problem is whether there exists a
> computational procedure for solving it that will eventually come up with an
> answer...Problems of this type are decidable. One of the central
> mathematical discoveries of the century is that undecidable problems exist."

This assumes a premise which is almost certainly false. It assumes that human action consists in resolving or solving problems -- i.e., that the world as we confront it constitutes a vast array of problems. But this seems to me false on the face of it. Godel, as I understand him, dealth *only* with problems. But "economics" does not deal with problems -- though perhaps the assumption that it does and that its burden is to solve those problems might be one of the fundamental difference between marxism and all varieties of bourgeois economics. The very word "problem" assumes that it is possible to describe a solution (whether the solution is achievable or not) -- which implies that we can describe any situation in a set of finite questions, but this is absurd.

Carrol



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