Tory is right, ecologic systems and especially
their inhabitants, the living organisms, look
more complex than companies or corporations.
What I meant was that there seem to be a
fundamental difference in the input-output
relations.
The output of agents in economic systems is
a product made from the inputs during the
business process. In ecologic systems this is
only comparable to the cognitive part of
organisms, where perceptions are processed to
produce an action. In the "food web" there is
nothing produced except the organisms themselves.
Whenever there is something interesting happening
in nature, it is either supper time or pairing
time. The former is used to sustain the body,
the latter to sustain the species. This is
different from economies, isn't it?
-J.
----- Original Message -----
From: Eric Smith
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group
Sent: Monday, October 18, 2010 12:02 PM
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Economy vs. ecology, er
The acts that organisms take, merely in the course of living from one day to
the next, tend to be under-emphasized in relation to the acts of
reproducing. But the input-output relations of ecology should correspond
fairly nicely to the input-output relations of the economy, if either were a
well-formed technical theory. In economics, input-output goes under the
names Leontief I/O theory, or closely related von Neumann-Gale growth
theory. I have often wished that either had more of the strictness of
chemical input/output relations -- at least where such are warranted -- but
that is not yet the case, as both fields have been more interested in the
flexibility afforded by innovation than in the constraints that limit the
landscape.
In terms of what organisms do to each other, whether intentionally or
inadvertently, there are the two names "Niche Construction" and "ecosystem
engineering". The first has a book by Laland, Odling-Smee, and Feldman.
It's a big area, and the book only opens the topic, but it's a start. Many
of the ideas are general enough that they are equally comfortable in the
economy, which is, as you say, part of the global ecosystem.
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