Krugman on complexity and chaos

[Rosser Jr, John Barkley]

     Well, I find Jim Devine's latest salvo on Krugman of 
some interest.  I think the following is going on:
    1)  He has read John Horgan's _The End of Science_.  
Horgan is the one who coined this line about "cybernetics 
to catastrophe to chaos to complexity" (all garbage 
according to him).  In his complexity-oriented _The 
Self-Organizing Economy_ Krugman came up with this "where 
is catastrophe theory now"?  Well, we can see it on this 
list in the discussion on green permits and taxes.  David 
Laibman gave a paper on it at the Easterns in New York.  
But, when people publish in the AER they have to sneak into 
footnotes if it appears at all.  It has been "ruled out" by 
the powers-that-be for fairly silly reasons.
     2)  I would agree that not much has come out of the 
sandpile models for economics anyway.  There was one rather 
major and interesting paper by Bak, Chen, Scheinkman, and 
Woodford that appeared several years ago in _Ricerche 
Economiche_ on it.  A shortened version was presented at 
the AEA complexity session that Krugman chaired and where 
he presented some stuff of Haag and Weidlich's as his own, 
rather notoriously.  Brian Arthur was also presenting in 
that session.  Hmmmm.
     3)  I think that there must have been some kind of 
falling out while Krugman was at Stanford.  Arrow and 
Arthur were responsible for his having been hired and they 
run the econ side of Santa Fe where Krugman hung out for 
awhile.  Now he is back at MIT.  I hear through the 
grapevine that various people tried to restrain Krugman 
from his attack on Arthur in _Slate_, but...
     4)  I suspect that writing an intro textbook (still 
trying to outdo Paul Samuelson; will he beat out Mankiw?) 
pushes him towards a more conventional view.  You don't 
make a lot of money if your "great new book" deviates from 
the standard approach by more than 15%.  See what happened 
with Stiglitz's effort.
Barkley Rosser

- 
Rosser Jr, John Barkley
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