Practical systems analysis

["John Gelles" <indexed-savings@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Thanks to Gunnar Tómasson we are enticed to visit
the New Kind of Science forum sponsored by Stephen
Wolfram and Mathematica. www.wolframscience.com
In particular:
http://forum.wolframscience.com/showthread.php?s=6962346434f1e9e4bf8f0ee72def79d8&threadid=66

Just above Gunnar's post there is one by Jason Cawley.
It includes the pregnant philosophical sentence:

       "Economies are themselves practical systems.
        They deal with problems of prediction every day.
        They do not deal with them quite as physics does
        or as positivist manifestos once promised, no doubt.
        But they do deal with them, because they must, or
        everything falls apart."

As a positivist then and now, I insist we follow this lead.

The positivist would look at my heart bypass operation
last year and note two interesting things:

First, the surgeons created from a vein in my leg three
short bypasses that move arterial blood past three
blockages on the way to my heart. They also connected
arterial bypasses for two additional blockages from
arteries that used to feed my breasts. (Not nice to
imagine if your not a surgeon.)

The second interesting thing for positivists, who still
hope to see political economy reduced to no-nonsense
practicality, is the $200, 000 cost to prevent my death.

They might claim that the economic system (that paid
for the operation and included such elements as training
surgeons and insuring costs) must be practical. No doubt
it currently is -- but it is still far from universal health care
and a sufficiency of hospitals and trained experts to ensure
that all patients have a fair choice of where to go. That is
our objective -- and positivism connects objectives to
systems that work.

Now is positivism not the philosophy for analyzing the
human heart in operation and the surgical procedure that
can save it from blockages for a time?  Some would say
that positivism rules this analysis. Yet medicine is as
much art as science.

So what about paying for the food and care of doctors,
hospital staff, suppliers and patients? Is it any more
complicated than heart surgery?  Are not economics and
medicine each an art and science. Being part art -- does
this rule positivism out and something else in?

I think not. Practicality rules. What we have today is not as
practical as what we will have tomorrow -- in both medicine
and economics.

In fact the whole problem of economics is not that it follows
physics -- it doesn't.  It follows law.  And it should follow
medicine more than law.  Would that be so great a change?

Medicine keeps you alive.  Law should keep you free.

Economics has been bought by the banks.  We need to
buy it back to be positive it works -- one person, one income
(above the poverty line) -- that is its objective.

When people's income is too high above that line, they must
be stopped from buying the law. But that is law, not economics.

John Gelles