Re: Fundamentals

["John M. Legge" <jlegge@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Ted Winslow wrote:


> Determinism of the kind asserted in the first passage is
> inconsistent with
> the possibility of rational "choice" implicitly asserted in
> the second.  You
> are claiming, for instance, both that future holdings of money are
> "determined" and that they are not "determined" (i.e. they
> can be changed by
> present decisions).
>

We are getting close to debating the number of angels dancing on the end of
a pin.  When I make a decision I actually believe that I am acting
rationally in evaluating the available evidence and then making the best
choice.  If the circumstances were different, then my choice might be so,
too.  If I was being nagged by an economist about a decision with minor
consequences I might make the "wrong" choice to prove that I was capable of
making choices, but what does that prove?

Fundamental incomputability means that you cannot anticipate my decisions
reliably in non-trivial circumstances, and I cannot anticipate yours.  On a
list such as this, I cannot even prove that "Ted Winslow" is not the name of
a particularly clever program running on some powerful workstation. My
knowledge of the state of the art of intelligent machine development
suggests that your computations are carried out using a computing device
with a protein rather than a silicon substrate, but would your intelligent
and percipient remarks about Marshall, Whitehead and others have been less
percipient if they were computer generated?

As a practical matter I pointed out, some posts earlier, that even the weak
form of non-ergodicity represented by a geometric random walk introduces
sufficient uncertainty to establish a finite liquidity preference.  My
attribution of the NPV rule to Marshall came directly from Dixit's JEP
paper: perhaps you will point out Dixit's error to him on the next suitable
occasion.  I shall not, to the best of my ability, repeat it on this list.
Neither shall I post again to this thread.

JML