CDR: Re: A famine averted...

[Sampo A Syreeni]

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 at iki.fi>, aka decoy, student/math/Helsinki university