Thanks for your kind words.
Much progress comes from stating the problem clearly. Some languages lend themselves better to describe social life. It seems to me that measure theory is one of them -- as it is, e.g. game theory in trying to illuminate some angles. I'm not saying that just by stating the question in a given language answers it. Easier questions may, of course, be answered ipso facto. But the real purpose is that by merely attempting to state the problem in the new terms may make the thornier questions clearer. That's about all we can demand from math.
A quick example is self reference. Say that you frame the interesting aspects of social life in terms of measures, and their interrelations in terms of measurable functions. Thus, the mental states of each individual (knowledge, individual technology, whatever you wish to call it) become measures, which gets you ready to use all the theory's stuff. Except that to find solutions, you cannot allow mental states on mental states, because they will lead to infinite regress. Arnold Faden, who worked on this project seriously, admitted this limit. Etc.
As to how the problems of socialist building can be better tackled with this, I'll again use an example: the notion of ownership. Why do we own wealth (e.g. privately)? Owning wealth (e.g. capital, wealth used to extort more wealth via wage labor) makes sense as a device to store (and, in the case of capital, expand) value (or its *material* substance in a more direct form, if you are talking about collective ownership). Owned wealth works like a time machine. You plug value now and extract value later. Why do people need that time machine? Because of uncertainty (the main aspect of which is self referential, as Keynes ch. 12 suggests).
One way to think of the case for socialism is that, ultimately, the wealth we need to treasure is mutual reliance (and that our current productive powers enable it like never before), and that using others instrumentally winds up eroding the basis for that mutual reliance. But the point to stress here is that the *material* aspect of what a finance economist would call "insurance" remains. What you abolish when you abolish private ownership is not the need for mutual reliance, but its *social* form. In fact, if you look at how the math of insurance (and, in general, contingent or derivative) pricing has developed, you'll see that it's only thinly glued to a particular social form. Insurance math is statistics. And if we frame the world in statistical terms (the "mechanisms" of social life as "experiments," so we can measure our ignorance, no pun), then we are using a particular class of measures. Etc.
My concern is that when radicals reject finance economics, Black-Scholes, etc. they are thereby rejecting all that as well. A few of my friends, with influence on younger people, seem to believe that if you learn math, you become one of them. But building socialism doesn't mean that we abolish the law of gravity, it just means that we're trying to make a better aircraft. I've been saying this (on Louis Proyect's list first and then on PEN-L) for ages with few people finding it persuasive enough to get into that kind of work.
I guess, it's like political organizing -- it all starts when you
realize nobody else cares to do it the way you want it to be done.
:-)
Our push is towards minimizing the vertical or hierarchical division of labor. But under socialism, labor will still be divided, hopefully only horizontally, and the need to re-unify it in order to make social life flow will remain, and doing so will be a complex dynamic process involving the relatively autonomous decisions of a myriad of prosumers with a measure of "systemic risk" to handle (assuming all "idiosyncratic risk" is diversified away) and everything around shifting. I guess I cannot get into meaningful detail without getting more formal and technical and narrow (or cryptic).
On Mon, Oct 3, 2011 at 11:35 PM, Mike Beggs <mikejbeggs at gmail.com> wrote:
> Also, I'd be interested to hear what you think is gained by subsuming
> all the math of economic theory into the "new, unified mega-framework"
> of measure theory. Is it because of the association with probability
> theory, which you are pleased to see migrating from empirical work to
> theory, or is it something more?
>
> Mike