Re: [Fis] leteral comment

Re: [Fis] leteral comment

From: Igor Matutinovic <[email protected]>
Date: Fri 03 Jun 2005 - 10:08:48 CEST

Reply to Stan:
I cannot but agree with your holistic picture! However, when talking about
economy I find it useful to distinguish institutional tuning (the aspect of
institutional change that is designed on purpose as distinguished from the
spontaneous change which arises from agent interactions) from the kind of
self-organization that is implied in SOC models. I use it as a
methodological and epistemological critique of mechanicistic models applied
to economic dynamics, which is largely historical and where I claim that
institutional framework must be explicitly stated if we are to understand a
phenomenon - say a business cycle. There is also another reason why SOC may
not be adequate for economy - the separation of time scales between
accumulation of stress in the system and its relaxation, which is several
orders of magnitude: in earthquakes, where the stress involved in the
movement of tectonic plates may take thousands of years while the earthquake
itself (the "avalanche") takes only a few seconds. I don't see any such
parallel in economic dynamics, say, in the time scales that separate booms
from recessions. I have to confess that even before I realized the
"institutional catch" in SOC my initial sympathy for this theory was shaken
by works of Carson and Doyle on Highly Optimized Tolerance theory, which
stresses the importance of design in complex system and its inevitable
vulnerability to design flaws or rare unaccounted-for events.
I guess that you basic message was that a complex system like economy may
involve both aspects of SOC, internal design, and autoctalysis and that one
doese not exclude the other. I agree with that.

The very best
Igor
----- Original Message -----
From: "Stanley N. Salthe" <ssalthe@binghamton.edu>
To: <fis@listas.unizar.es>
Sent: Thursday, June 02, 2005 11:43 PM
Subject: Re: [Fis] leteral comment

> Replying to Igor (and footnotes to John H and John C)
>
> I will attempt to reply to Igor's interesting posting, where he
> distinguishes strongly between self-organization, SOC, and autocatalytic
> systems, all of which, it seems to me could nevertheless be aspects of any
> natural system. So, my view is not to suggest that these different ideas
> are related, but that they may all be modeling different aspects of some
> complex dynamic material system, which, in addition, would necessarily --
> if located somewhere -- be regulated by environmental conditions.
> Any natural dynamical system self-organizes, but only under the tutelage
> of
> current boundary conditions (some of which may be recursive upon the
> actions of the system). And some of these would be like the externalties
> of
> classical economics. As well, some of these, it seems to me, would be
> formally like the 'tunings' of economic systems, even though the latter
> have been influenced by human projects and would emerge from within a
> system. As for being "externally driven", such systems often/?always
> would
> come into being as a result of environmental forcings.
> Self-organizing natural systems would undergo development, and would not
> become "steady state" until they reached that stage (I call it maturity)
> in
> their development. SOC is observed when systems designed to show it reach
> (if they do) steady state, ignoring the development of the system up until
> that time (which is often very rapid in the simple systems usually
> examined). In some natural cases that development could have
> autocatalytic
> properties, which would be more likely to become salient in more
> complicated systems.
> So, I guess my point is that all of these ideas could be applied to a
> single system. As in SOC, the system could be initited by some external
> forcing (efficient cause). After being initiated, it might self-organize
> (based on material causes), and, if it has some duration and complication,
> autocatalysis (a formal cause) could feature in its development, as well
> as
> some kind of process of internal tuning via feedbacks on recursive
> constraints if the system is complicated enough. Is a syncretic picture
> like this not reasonable?
>
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Received on Fri Jun 3 10:07:05 2005


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