> Charles Brown wrote:
> > > >Are you saying "lets hurry up and end capitalism" ? Or that
because
> > > >it hasn't had an accelerated rate of decay, it will never end
?
>
> Doug Henwood wrote:
> > > I'm all for ending capitalism. It's not likely to end itself.
> > >
>
> Carrol Cox:
> > Any peaceful ending of capitalism would, almost tautologically, be
> > capitalism ending itself??????
>
> Capitalism being a dynamic, progressive system containing
> positive-feedback loops, rather than a homeostatic one, we
> can expect it to transition to a state where it ceases to
> exist.
>
> The problem is that some of these possible states entail the
> disappearance of a good deal besides capitalism, like most
> or all human beings. One might, therefore, want to help it
> along to a less dramatic exit.
===========
If I may be so nutty as to pull from the lbo archives to quote myself
quoting somebody else in the course of arguing with yet someone
else....
Subject: RE: Godel and economics? From: Lisa & Ian Murray (seamus at accessone.com) Date: Wed May 24 2000 - 18:44:28 EDT
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."
"The theory of computability and computational complexity suggests that there are two inherent limitations to the rational choice paradigm. One limitation stems from the possibility that the agent's problem is in fact undecidable so that no computational procedure exists which for all inputs will give her the needed answer in a finite time. A second limitation is posed by computational complexity in that even if her problem is decidable, the computational cost of solving it may in many situations be so large as to overwhelm any possible gains from the optimal choice of action."
"Most human beings can work out the dynamics of a two or three state system, but few can carry on chains of recursion of even ten periods, not to speak of the hundreds of thousands that easily arise in complex financial transactions or complex diplomatic or military confrontations. Even periodic systems, if they involve a large number of degrees of freedom, can challenge the computational resources built into our brains by evolution."
The best quote comes from Albin himself though: "An economic system is shown on its own terms to be as rich as general mathematics and the analogy suggests the impossiblity of proposing nonvacuous universal properties for its functions. The assertion of such properties is HUBRIS" [emphasis his].
To the extent that Brad and others suggest game-theoretic disourse ino their attempts to explain and justify free trade, they cannot avoid Godel's results when they attempt a formal explication of the terms and decision procedures that would bring such an economic prescription to the trading nations of the world. To say that free trade is the optimum policy for dealing with international economic relations is tantamount to a prediction that leaves out more factors driving economic history than it admits; for that reason alone it is problematic, especially in light of attempts to explicate and predict/simulate possible economic policy outcomes using game theory with computable general equilibrium models.