Obviously you are right and I promise to clean up my act and reform my wicked ways. Clearly math is an illusion. Examining the details of how a set of equations depicting investor behavior generate certain outcomes over time via computer simulation is as empty and meaningless as spending a lot of time poring over tables of numbers.
Henceforth, let us both agree to only write our ideas about economics in poetry, preferably Romantic. Barkley Rosser -----Original Message----- From: Doug Henwood <dhenwood at panix.com> To: lbo-talk at lists.panix.com <lbo-talk at lists.panix.com> Date: Friday, February 16, 2001 3:33 PM Subject: Re: Volatitily as social flaring
>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
>