Volatitily as social flaring

Doug Henwood dhenwood at panix.com
Fri Feb 16 11:41:18 PST 2001


J. Barkley Rosser, Jr. wrote:


> No more of a tautology than most math approaches.
>Stripping away the fancy math (that comes from Otto
>Rossler, one of the godfathers of chaos theory), it is
>basically a way of modeling bandwagon speculative
>outbursts with heterogeneous agents. There will be
>times when the agents will infect each other with their
>overoptimism and will overdo it. The mathematics are
>similar to that which can describe a solar flare shooting out.
>Conceptually it is not all that different from a lot of purely
>verbal descriptions of how speculative bubble processes
>operate.

So what does this kind of modeling tell you that one expressed in English prose can't? Are you simply translating something from words into math that gives the illusion of more rigor without actually providing it? Or is something more going on?

Doug



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