> Is a simpler life style (snip) of lesser quality? .... >> Central to this oikonimos is our use of money. >> [full quote below] Let me see if I have this right: Because of the structure lent to the system by the presence and use of money, each act of an individual is is commoditized and becomes a transaction that either enriches or impoverishes him. So for the individual, the system has two agressive attractors at the extrema of the financial scale. Is that right? In the overall capitalist system, the one in which individuals are the components, there seems to be an attractor to a region of phase space where a few individuals (of which many are corporations) have vast financial assets and most have approximately nil. It has been said that this is the natural course of capitalism. Has anyone proposed a phase space model of capitalist economy that that represents money in a way that that would let us test the effect of removing money or removing one or more of the purely financial components on the distribution of wealth? Brian Arthur's work on positive feedback in the economy is now going on 10 years old. Has he or anyone else pushed this approach further, beyond the narrow cases that he describes? (I regret that I'm not keeping up -- it's been 4 years since I've been able to spend a whole day in a first class bookstore.) - Mike -- Michael Spencer Nova Scotia, Canada [EMAIL PROTECTED] URL: http://www.mit.edu:8001/people/mspencer/home.html --- "john courtneidge" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > But ! Simplicity is a cusp that's unachieveable in a market economy, since, > in such a madhouse, activity results either in (ever escalating) profit > accumulation, or in (ever escalating) impoverishment. > > (This could be graphed, were e-mails there yet!) > > The solution is to invert the 'values' that lead to this cusp and, so, > create the cusp as the default condition - to move, in other words, to an > economics (an 'oikonimos') based on giving out, rather than accumulating in > of, both, material 'goods' and spiritual 'bads.' > > Central to this oikonimos is our use of money.
