On Sat, 14 Oct 2000, Jim Choate wrote:
On a similar vein, just about every somehow understandable version of free market theory is based on the assumption of a steady state market.
Is there a distinction between 'equilibrium' and 'steady state' in this context?
None. But I think both terms are easily misunderstood - in most cases we can analyze the local time behavior of differential equations based on steady state assumptions. However, global properties of the system, like unconditional stability, cannot. I think most of what a layperson knows about economics is based on the former while the latter is a specialty to chaos theorists.
Many of the folks I deal with have turned to cellular models. They seem to behave in a reasonable manner and they're reasonably easy to manage. My personal interest is in the application of modelling the near term politico-military situation with the two China's.
Cellular automata are nice and well understood. But isn't this quite a leap from analytic treatment to the direction of numerical simulation? Not that there's anything wrong with that, but to me some of the theoretical questions (like the question of fundamental stability) really seem to live more in the domain of equations. Sampo Syreeni <decoy@iki.fi>, aka decoy, student/math/Helsinki university