[PEN-L:11399] Re: Sustainable Development, Complexity theory, and Economics

["William S. Lear" <rael@xxxxxxxxxx>]

On Wed, July 23, 1997 at 06:21:02 (-0700) Anders Schneiderman writes:
>I'm starting a new research project, and I need to get up to speed on the
>latest thinking about sustainable development.  Anybody have any reading
>suggestions (particularly things I can find on-line, since the libraries in
>Syracuse are fairly limited)?  I'm trying to use ecology / sustainable
>development as a metaphor.  Also, has anyone in economics done research
>using complexity theory that's reasonably accessible?  I know Kenneth Arrow
>was doing some work, but I was curious who else has done interesting research.

About online sustainable development... The folks at CSF had a Herman
Daly seminar the remains of which can be found online, along with
other material, at http://csf.colorado.edu/isee/daly/.  You might try
searching USENET by going to http://www.dejanews.com/ and typing in a
search of "sustainable development" (without quotes; disclaimer---I am
an owner of and worker for Dejanews).  I just did a search and there were
several articles you might find relevant (one article pointed readers
to the site http://www.nautilus.org/).

About complexity theory, it depends on what you mean by accessible.
Richard H. Day has a book called _Complex Economic Dynamics: An
Introduction to Dynamical Systems_. Volume 1 (MIT Press, 1994), which
is not too bad.  Also, Richard M. Goodwin. _Chaotic Economic Dynamics_
(Oxford University Press, 1990) might be useful.  Ching-Yao Hsieh and
Meng-Hua Ye's _Economics, Philosophy, and Physics_ (M. E. Sharpe,
1991) touches on chaos theory and is quite good.

For an example of how *not* to think about chaos theory and economics,
see Paul Krugman's insipid _The Self-Organizing Economy_ (Basil
Blackwell, 1996), research for a review of which I am presently
conducting.

For online chaos stuff, you might try the Santa Fe Institute at
http://alife.santafe.edu/.  You might also try Yale's Center for
Computational Ecology at http://peaplant.biology.yale.edu:8001/, or
the Complexity and Nonlinear Social Systems Home Page at
http://www.actlab.utexas.edu/~paradox/complexity.html.  Barkley Rosser
has written a paper, "Complex Dynamics in New Keynesian and Post
Keynesian Economics", available at
gopher://csf.Colorado.EDU/00/econ/authors/Rosser.Barkley/complex%20dynamics.
Finally, try the Chaos Network at
http://www.prairienet.org/business/ptech/txt/.


Bill