It’s my belief (I have no special knowledge here) that complexity and simplicity have a fractal distribution in the world–they both exist everywhere you look. Complexity is contained by larger constraints (technology, the laws of physics, human limitations) which create simplicity that makes the world comprehensible. This is why it has been my experience that all new theories about human societies inevitably lead you back to what people have been telling their children for thousands of years. Trudge thru the complexity, and wind up with simplicity again in the end–yet the simplicity is never completely simple.

The dysfunction in our economic and political system is not hard to understand. Agents milk the system for their own good at the expense of others. Hardly a new idea. I believe that an economic and political system should be thought of as a computation system running a search algorithm to find more efficient methods for supporting human life. It is a distributed, massively parallel system–a “swarm intelligence.” We need to know more about the algorithms used by the agents (evolutionary psychology) and what types of systems interact constructively with those agent’s algorithms. In other words, which social systems bring out the best in us, and create a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts? To do this we need to take a hard look at human weaknesses, something our flattering, fawning media is loath to do, and experiment with social systems that “patch” them.

I just lost a longer reply with a single errant key-stroke. So, shorter version: the analogy with turbulent thermodynamics and complex physical systems vis-a-vis unpredictability is apt. Except that economics concerns the production and distribution of material surpluses, which is negentropic and does not dictate any reversion to low-energy dispersion. Human agents can always defect from structural constraints, though never without “costs”, and some of those defections might effect improvements in the production and distribution of surpluses. Human beings further variably can endure losses, i.e. suffer, and moderate and secure gains. Which makes the effort to understand, rather than predict,- since their very agency renders prediction all the more impossible,- the social and natural constraints that they are under worthwhile. Faillible human beings and infaillible markets is, indeed, the very stuff of theology. (Such notions also contradict the very argument for markets as information aggregating and processing mechanisms, which implicate the finite human impossibility of fulling knowing inputs and outcomes). But muddling on through under conditions of distributed uncertainty is still possible. Which is otherwise known as politics, the “conspiracy” of the collective good against itself.

I understand the author’s reluctance to be tagged as a conspiracy theorist, but let’s face it–there is a conspiracy of the rich and powerful versus the rest of us. It is pervasive but subtle. It is probably useless to rant and rave about it, but if we are not to be complicit in it, we must be honest about it.

See my article “Inflation and Transparency” for an illustration:

http://www.eurotrib.com/story/2006/11/20/143350/23

The problem is not political. It is methodological. It is ironic that the radical leftists, once they conquer faculty positions, assume the same old, mostly useless empirical methods of standardized economics. Instead of developing real methods for real problems, they dig themselves into the old marginalist and econometric trenches. While econometrics has its use in limited areas, it is basically useless on real world problems that our legislators are dealing with. An excellent example is the solution to our social security problem: the time horizon is 50-75 years, a time span that is an eon of uncertainty in the econometric context.

This all goes back to Keynes’s principle of uncertainty, which is a far more useful tool in economic analysis than most (though of course not all) quantitative methods.

Academic gatekeepers do their best to keep people out who do not strictly adhere to the quantitative gospel. There is your gatekeeper/policing problem. Absurdly enough, the emphasis on more or less useless methods also prevents the leftists themselves from actually putting their theory to interesting work.

Tom’s points about intellectual policing are important. I just wish he would direct his search light a little more to the left.

The fact is, professionals, even though they are the annoying gatekeepers, do deserve that role and by having it help keep the pool of knowledge clean from intellectual confusion.

But they shouldn’t be immune to enquiry, and they should be forced to teach and defend in order to maintain their position at the gates. They should be constantly arming the unlearned so that when they are weak and weary they have to step down and can be properly replaced.

If they can’t or won’t do that, then they probably don’t deserve to be the gatekeepers.

The fact is, professionals, even though they are the annoying gatekeepers, do deserve that role and help keep the pool of knowledge clean from intellectual confusion.

But they shouldn’t be immune, and they should be forced to teach and defend in order to maintain their position at the gatekeeper. They should be arming their foes so that when they are weak and weary they have to step down.

If they can’t do that, then they probably don’t deserve to be there.

I continue to advocate greater attention to the work of Stephen Toulmin in this respect. His work, Human Understanding [1972], stated with eloquence and nuance the case for considering both the “discplinary” and “professional” problems that scientists - and specifically natural scientists - confront. He stated the issues in terms that are very similar to those used by Thomas Palley. Not long ago, in Return to Reason, Toulmin elaborated his thought for the social sciences including economics. His portrayal of the classic “epistemic portrait” shares a kindred spirit with John Halasz’ comments about the hazy boundary line between the “detached observer” and an “economic system” which is at least partially created by that same “observer” as a “participant”.

The upshot is that economic theory does not have the sort of “hard” objectivity that is often attributed to it and, further, that it usually deploys a narrow and rather fantstical conception of social agency, tailored to its own narrow preoccupations, that lends to its claims an overly assertoric air, as if it were entirely “justified” in its “positive” claims, that obfuscates the normative import of its implications. A good example would be a recent article by Edward Prescott of RBC fame, noted by Thoma among others, that displays such tendencies in all their absurdity.