Most of the "Simple rules, complex systems" school actually ignore the fundamentals
of complexity theory. Cyberlibertarians may think of Godel's incompleteness theorem
as old hat now that it's no longer a favorite plaything of the nuagers, but it
remains rather essential to the particular types of analysis they try to do. Once
systems grow beyond a certain level of complexity, there is no static set of rules
which can completely define them. Your system will have problems or questions which
exist within it, and which have solutions or answers, but which the system is not
capable of solving or answering. (I suppose I could be kind to the dialeticians on
this list and refer to these as contradictions, but since I'm fundamentally
mean-spirited -- I won't.) Further, when you discover the correct answer to one of
these problems or question outside your complex system, and forcibly incorporate it
into the system as a new axiom or fundamental premise or radical reform, immedi!
ately new problems or questions of the same type emerge. In other words if you are
analyzing -- say economics or politics or society -- as a dynamic evolving complex
system generated by rules, then the rules themselves will always be dynamic, evolving
and ever changing.
Again this is separate from any acceptance or rejection of the usefulness applying
cybernetics and complexity theory to politial economy. If it is a useful thing to do,
the cyberlibertarians are doing it wrong . And they are wrong in a fundamental way ,
which ignores the basic well established tenets of the mathematical methods they claim
to use.
At 03:44 PM 1/31/98 -0500, Doug wrote:
> >>I don't have
> >>time to get into the details, but this sort of thinking is designed to
> >>cut off any notion of social action in an economy. It's all
> >>individuals and the beautiful patterns they create, so just stand back
> >>and be amazed at the wonders of the market....
> >
> >Not to mention cutting off any notion of conflict or alienation. Is it that
> >they're willing to give up on equilibrium without bearing the full
> >consequences (like politics and history)?
>
> I don't think it's a matter of "cutting off" conflict so much as not having
> the guts to move up to it. The kind of model-building they do actually
> fits with social action very nicely. One of the basic ideas of complexity
> theory (at least as I understand it from the non-econ lit, which I know
> better) is that small sets of simple rules can produce very complex
> behavior, such as the actions of a flock of birds in flight. Social action
> and politics is what happens when one of the rules governing actors
> behavior is that actors can attempt to change the rules of the game.
>
> Far from being a limitation of complexity theory, I think it's clear from
> the writings of, say, Brian Arthur, that complexity economists spend a
> decent amount of time willfully closing their eyes to the logical
> implications of their theory (this is esp. noticable when Arthur writes
> about the computer industry, where the role of govt. & other rule-changing
> agents is rather hard to ignore).
>
> Anders Schneiderman
> Progressive Communications
