Reply to Stan:
SS: I am wondering if institutional design is really conceptually
different in its effect from boundary conditions imposed on SOC by physical
surroundings. No natural phenomenon -- say a tornado -- is unaffected by
its environment, and in descriptive equations we must add the values of
constants to represent these effects. Why is institutional design not just
part of the 'enviroment' of economic activity, contributing somewhere to
the values of constants in its descriptive equations?
Igor: The point is exactly that institutional environment does not come
under the constants of the environment but represent dynamic, historical
process of "tuning". And tuning as such is contradictory to the concept of
SOC. There is, however, another idea coming from physics - the Highly
Optimized Tolerance theory of Carson and Doyle, which does account for
tuning in complex systems like engineering and biological, but is devoid of
self organization. Economies have both aspects, where the institutional one
(the goal-oriented tuning) is superimposed on the self-organizing process
(what, when, where and in which quantity will be produced).
>Also, the formation and behavior of autocatalytic
>networks, which is endogenous, does not fit well with formal
>characteristics >of SOC, which refers to "externally driven"
systems.
SS: Are not most material phenomena combinations of both of these?
Certainly a tornado is. In this case the tornado is actually only a part
of a larger phenomenon -- a rotating supercell -- which self-organizes,
making it look like its tornado part is externally driven. Of course,
self-organizing autocatalytic systems also must be afforded by
environmental configurations before they can occur. This applies as well
to organisms as to simpler forms -- and this contextualization by
environment is a key principle of scalar hierarchy theory.
__________________
Igor: I am not sure about the tornado but there is nothing in SOC dynamics
that resembles the characteristics of autocatalysis: competition, selection,
performance, growth, autonomy, centripetally and ascendency. SOC models are
steady-state, while economy has been a growing system so far, and its
internal diversity and complexity also grew with time. SOC cannot account
for none of these. In general, I am highly skeptical of any kind of
mechanical models dealing with complex socioeconomic phenomena.
The very best
Igor
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Received on Tue May 31 11:56:27 2005
