CDR: Re: A famine averted...

[Jim Choate]

On Sat, 14 Oct 2000, Sampo A Syreeni wrote:

> On Fri, 13 Oct 2000, Jim Choate wrote:
> 
> >No stupid, there are lot's of persons called the 'market'. There is no
> >'market' without those individuals. When the market goes out of
> >equilibrium then free market mechanisms are not enough to correct.
> 
> 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?

> The theory does not include a temporal element.

I'd say with respect to individual exchanges you are correct. This means
the results of some exchange i doesn't effect exchange t, even if they
involve the same participants. This lack of information transfer, economic
amnesia, is my primary dislike for this theory. However, the
concept of equilibrium does have a time variable. The flow of time is
actualy required for any 'measurement' of that 'equilibrium' (I'll
continue to assume parity per my question above) to be meaningful. There
is of course no requirement that time be linear or smooth.

> If you want to study those, you're bound for such a quagmire of stochastic 
> nonlinear differential equations that you would not believe. Hence, the 
> global stability of any reasonably realistic model of markets is practically
> impossible to guarantee with current mathematical tools. It is quite 
> possible for such systems to behave badly enough to kill most of the 
> participants in the market, for instance. Besides, the basic continuity 
> assumptions behind mathematical economics practically guarantee that the 
> theory does not take such possibilities seriously - I know of no models 
> which take into account the discrete, limited number of people participating 
> in the market.

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.

There is psychohistory at egroups.com, there are several interesting
participants and several of us are working on a CROWDS model. I also have
a history list at SSZ, cliology at ssz.com. For more info,

http://einstein.ssz.com/sci-tech/index.html#cliology

Right now I'm working on a CROWDS project that models behaviour in
aircraft. It's pretty simple, an ASCII map and some behaviour rules to
animate the passengers written in Perl. Pretty standard cellular automaton
theory. I hope to start on my China simulator some time next year. Right
now I'm collecting data on the American Civil War, WWII (German
perspective), and the current China participants. The goal is to include
'political', 'social', and 'economic' factors into a CA and their effect
on military force growth and use.

Speaking of CA's. I've heard that Wolfrom's new book is supposed to be out
sometime in the next year or so. He claims to have a fundamentaly new
modelling science if I understand the marketing slicks (and they're not
too inaccurate).

I've been saying for several years that an unrecognized threat is the
amount of data available to the larger governments is enough to setup and
run a economic simulator using real world data sets. It's the reason I am
so certain that there must be increased individual involvement and that
control of that data must be mediated by the person generating it - in all
cases. There is no justification for any access to that record being
exempt from monitoring - law enforcement arguments considered.

> Free market theory, though interesting, useful and absolutely much better
> than most available alternatives simply does not cover it all. It is an
> abstraction which probably should not be attained any more than the
> socialist one.

Which raises the real question of "Ok, where to now?"...

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