Re: Heterodoxers are crackpots

[Bruce McFarling <ecbm@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

At 12:00 PM 9/1/02 +1000, John M. Legge wrote:
>
>For an event to be truly uncertain it would have to be unpredictable a
>picosecond before it occurred to an observer a nanometre away from it.

Again, there is no way that such a statement can be an *argument*, it
is simply a *definition* of a particular use of the phrase.  There is
nothing in this definition that is of much interest to the following
position in the current intellectual discourse about economics:

(1) One line of discourse in which models of ergodic systems are
used as models of monetary production economies

(2) A second line of discourse that objects to the use of such
models, on the grounds that certain information required as
inputs into those models does not exist yet because the
information has not been created yet.

>Explicability sums up the possibilities open to such an observer.
>Events in the future may well be uncertain but that does not mean
>that they are not the result of the regular operation of the laws
>of the universe.  In practice the demonstration that various events
>conformed to such laws may be carried out post facto (explicability)
>and often is.

Conformity to the laws of the universe is not at issue for the
problem with respect to self-reproducing populations when the
range of viable states is sparsely distributed across the range
of states in conformity with the natural laws.  Suppose that I
am investing in a business with a newly launched product with
a normal product life cycle of twelve years and a normal product
development cycle of three years.  The array of competing products
that it will face six years down the track is a critical element
for having any certainty about the return on the investment, yet
that array of competing products is fundamentally uncertain.

If the economy is non-ergodic, which it is, you cannot scale
from strong certainty a picosecond in the future a nanometer
away to necessarily any degree of certainty six years down the
track. That is why it is dangerous to apply models of ergodic
systems to systems that are in fact non-ergodic where the model
requires information that is AT RELEVANT TIME SCALES AND
DISTANCES intrinsically uncertain.

>If a healthy cat turned into a hyena an event would have occurred
>that was unpredictable and inexplicable within the laws of the
>universe as I understand them; but if it catches a mouse next week
>it would be an event unpredictable today but predicable enough a
>few minutes before the event to an observer familiar with cat
>behaviour and aware of the presence of a mouse.

This, of course, is why physics is so much easier than biology.
It makes a difference as to which cats catch mice as to what
colours the cats are going to be in twenty years time.


--
Dr. Bruce R. McFarling, PhD
Bus. Office 1.72 -- (02) 4348-4078
School of Business
Faculty of the Central Coast
Newcastle University, Ourimbah