Re: Nobel laureate in economics aged 102 endorses the human economy...
Hi Mark Although I am haven't the time to promote and explore the application a wholistic approach like 'living systems theory' or 'general system theory' to such issues . . . Thanks for bringing this up! However, in this case, the key individual is probably Kenneth Boulding. Central to his work is the entire literature on the "Image" -- which he called "Eiconics" and which (sorta) later became "mimetics." Thanks for the references, I don't know how you can keep track of all that information There is a nice book out by Debora Hammond Hammond, D., 2003. The science of synthesis: Exploring the social implications of general systems theory, Boulder, CO: University Press of Colorado. that explores the history, including, of course, Boulding, Rapoport, Gerard, Bertalanffy and the others I mentioned. It occurs to me that I should ask around here at UofColorado about Boulding, while I am teaching here... The submersion (perversion!) of much general systems thinking into the cybernetic/military-industrial was an unfortunate result of crossovers between all these people (and others) at the time. But certainly some of the ideas are extremely powerful (as illustrated by the fact that our social system as it is rests largely on a technocracy constructed from that worldview!). I prefer the more wholistic open-system sensibility of Bertalanffy and the Millers. This is no coincidence as my father was a senior systems analyst & engineer deep in the MIT-MITRE-DOD-RAND circuit between '41-'69 -- it seemed incumbent to move in another direction :-| (An aside -- the psychological state that such thinking imposed, workday-after-workday, beginning in 1940, and eventually subsuming huge numbers of (mostly) men engineers had/has a direct formative effect on the entire social fabric that we are part of now... on personal, family, community, and national levels) Cheers, JH -- ++ Dr. John Hopkins, BSc, MFA, PhD Watching the Tao rather than watching the Dow! http://neoscenes.net/ http://tech-no-mad.net/blog/ ++ # distributed via : no commercial use without permission #is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
Re: Nobel laureate in economics aged 102 endorses the human economy...
John: > Although I am haven't the time to promote and explore the > application a wholistic approach like 'living systems theory' > or 'general system theory' to such issues . . . Thanks for bringing this up! However, in this case, the key individual is probably Kenneth Boulding. Central to his work is the entire literature on the "Image" -- which he called "Eiconics" and which (sorta) later became "mimetics." He organized the Ford Foundation funding for the Society for General Systems Research, from a plan that was hatched at the Center for the Advanced Study of Behavioral Sciences (also Ford funded.) He also *did* read McLuhan (and Carpenter, along with their predecessor Harold Innis, who had been involved in Rockefeller social science funding in Canada) and tried to incorporate what he learned into his own work on economics. When Boulding left Univ. of Michigan (where he was associated with the Group Dynamics center that had moved there from MIT after Lewin's death) in the early 70s, he (and his wife Elise) went to UofColorado at Boulder, where they published 5 volumes of his "collected papers." Little read nowadays, they are a trove of details about the "issues" being worked on in the 1950s/60s. Boulding also contributed to the McLuhan/Carpenter "Explorations" journal in the 50s and wrote a fascinating review of McLuhan's two early 60s books in 1965 (reprinted in Vol 4 "Toward a General Social Science"). _http://www.amazon.com/Collected-Papers-Kenneth-Boulding-E/dp/0870810537/ref =sr_1_5?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1358865800&sr=1-5&keywords=boulding+collected+pa pers_ (http://www.amazon.com/Collected-Papers-Kenneth-Boulding-E/dp/0870810537/ref=sr_1_5?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1358865800&sr=1-5&keywords=boulding+collec ted+papers) Elise was also very active in movements for "change" and how those efforts relate to history, as shown in her comments appended to the infamous 1974 SRI/Center for the Study of Social Policy "Changing Images of Man" -- _http://ce399.typepad.com/files/changing_images.pdf_ (http://ce399.typepad.com/files/changing_images.pdf) A "retrospective" review of this *manifesto* would be a good idea for an early issue of "Man and the Economy" -- if Coates/Wang ever succeed in getting their journal off the ground. Mark Stahlman Brooklyn NY # distributed via : no commercial use without permission #is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
Re: Nobel laureate in economics aged 102 endorses the human economy...
Brian: > Mark, I am always fascinated by your ideas and the things you refer to. So, Brian loves Mark (in public) . . . ?? I find that if you want to "go" someplace, it is very helpful to know where you are already. And, if you wish to know where you stand today, it is indispensable to understand how you got there. People who don't care about any of this are generally not "serious" about going anyplace. But, far more interesting are those who seem to be engaged with history and, in constructing their "narratives," make some things up and leave other things out. History is tricky that way. So are people. For instance, Richard Barbrook has "made up" a story about Marshall McLuhan (which forms an important part of his lecture series) -- derived, I suspect, from his general distaste for the French and their once-upon-a-time fascination with "Le McLuhanisme." From what I can tell, the French never really read McLuhan. (Or, for that matter, since he incorrectly calls him a "determinist," has Barbrook.) You mentioned Joseph Schumpter as a favorite of the neo-liberals. Perhaps. But, if by that you mean the promotion of the "creative destruction" meme in the 1990s, that is the work of George Gilder in Forbes and, as best I can tell, he never read Schumpeter -- who was already expunged from the curriculum when Gilder studied economics at Harvard. Schumpeter's 1938 "Business Cycles," which is at the center of his work on econometrics, is long OOP, other than a very expensive re-print -- _http://www.amazon.com/Business-Cycles-Theoretical-Historical-Statistical/dp /1578985560/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1358861572&sr=1-1&keywords=schump eter+business+cycles_ (http://www.amazon.com/Business-Cycles-Theoretical-Historical-Statistical/dp/1578985560/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1358861572&; sr=1-1&keywords=schumpeter+business+cycles) If you don't understand these cycles (and, importantly, the subsequent work on the topic), can you really say that you have read Schumpter? George Gilder, today's popularizer of Schumpeter, insisted that the Dot Com bust was the result of excessive "regulation." Wrong! If he had read and understood "Business Cycles," he could not (honestly) make that claim. You also mentioned Kondratiev and his supposed "waves." That is also a fabrication. The whole movement in finance to try to chart out these waves appears to have been constructed without the benefit of reading Kondratiev -- who wrote in Russian and the translation of whose work into English didn't happen until the 1990s. _http://www.amazon.com/Works-Nikolai-Kondratiev-Pickering-Masters/dp/1851962 603/ref=sr_1_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1358861757&sr=1-2&keywords=kondratiev_ (http://www.amazon.com/Works-Nikolai-Kondratiev-Pickering-Masters/dp/185196260 3/ref=sr_1_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1358861757&sr=1-2&keywords=kondratiev) Yes, Schumpeter read him in German, so maybe some others did as well but what is attached to his name today has little to do with what he actually said -- which is true for Schumpeter as well as Kondratiev and McLuhan. Sloppy scholarship? Sure. Laziness? Of course. But there is also a the drive to "invent" yourself and one of the easiest ways to accomplish that is to take a "popular" figure and put them on as a *cloak* to make yourself look erudite and, by association, worthy. Apart from ones own career, none of this is helpful -- if understanding the origins of the present-day context is the goal. Gregory Bateson is a fine case-in-point. To the extent that anyone knows the name, he is typically treated as a HERO and even a SAINT. But was he? I once had the head of the Communications Dept. a the New School storm out of a lunch, knocking the table over in her hurry, because she was so offended that I would question Bateson's legacy, on which she had written her PhD. There is plenty to question. Yes, Bateson and Mead and Lewin were all involved in aspects of what became the CIA, after being deeply involved in its predecessors during WW II. But, once again, the urge to fictionalize takes over the "story," since few seem to have bothered to sort out what the CIA was really up to in the 1950s. Here, the whole MKULTRA narrative and LSD-as-a-weapon story walks onto the stage. But, when you look more closely, this turns out to actually be a "cover-story" designed to fit in with the Church Committee purge of the agency in the 1970s. Spy vs. Spy?? For example, Timothy Leary was a CIA "asset" from his days as a graduate student studying personality -- where "personality testing" had been a specialty of the OSS. Then there was Allen Ginsburg. The counter-culture had significant CIA roots. As did the 60s anti-war movement (much of which was organized by Trotskyists, who were a CIA "specialty"). But none of that shows up in the popular narrative -- such as Marty Lee's "Acid
living systems theory
Well, the following might be an entry point to a systems theory approach to economics: which is, in fact, a subsystem of a wider ... living system. "Living Systems Theory is a general theory about how all living systems 'work,' about how they maintain themselves and how they develop and change. By definition, living systems are open, self-organizing systems that have the special characteristics of life and interact with their environment. This takes place by means of information and material-energy exchanges. Living systems can be as simple as a single cell or as complex as a supranational organization (such as the European Economic Community). Regardless of their complexity, they each depend upon the same essential twenty subsystems (or processes) in order to survive and to continue the propagation of their species or types beyond a single generation. Some of these processes deal with material and energy for the metabolic processes of the system. Other subsystems process information for the coordination, guidance and control of the system. Some subsystems and their processes are concerned with both. The essence of life is process. If the processing of material-energy and information ends, life also ends. The defining characteristic of life is the ability to maintain, for a significant period, a steady state in which the entropy (or disorder) within the system is significantly lower than its non-living surroundings. Living systems can maintain their energetic state because they are open, self-organizing systems that can take in from the environment the inputs of information and material-energy they need. In general, living systems process more information than non-living systems, with the possible exception of computers which have greater information processing capabilities. Another fundamental difference between living and non-living systems is that all living systems have, as essential components, DNA, RNA, protein and some other complex organic molecules that give biological systems their unique properties. These molecules are not synthesized in nature outside cells." (from The Living Systems Theory of James Grier Miller) -- ++ Dr. John Hopkins, BSc, MFA, PhD exploring the patterns and flows of power @ http://neoscenes.net/ http://tech-no-mad.net/blog/ ++ # distributed via : no commercial use without permission #is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
Re: Nobel laureate in economics aged 102 endorses the human economy...
hehe Mark Economics is in *trouble* (like the rest of social science) because it leaves out basic realities and these "simplifications" -- whether in the service of "modeling assumptions" or whatever -- have now become too important to ignore. By emphasizing the HUMANS, you have correctly noted *one* of the parts left out. However, the humans are highly "plastic" and largely shaped by their environment -- which, in turn, is mostly defined by technology. Do you discuss this *environmental* effect on humans in your book? Although I am haven't the time to promote and explore the application a wholistic approach like 'living systems theory' or 'general system theory' to such issues, I believe that those intellectual tools could easily take on the scope and connectivity (immersiveness, etc) of our reality in a way that is, imho, wider than any particular considerations or efficacy of discipline-specific carcases, uff, I mean models, such as you folks are picking over here. For those who are not familiar with GST +/- -- you might consult Ludwig von Bertalanffy, James R. Simms, James & Jessie Miller (for example, the following references) Bertalanffy, L. von, 1975. Perspectives on general system theory: scientific-philosophical studies, New York, NY: G. Braziller. Miller, J., 1995. Living systems, Niwot, CO: University Press of Colorado. Simms, J.R., 1999. Principles of quantitative living systems science, New York, NY: Kluwer Academic/Plenum Publishers. jh -- ++ Dr. John Hopkins, BSc, MFA, PhD Watching the Tao rather than watching the Dow! http://neoscenes.net/ http://tech-no-mad.net/blog/ ++ # distributed via : no commercial use without permission #is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
