Can Science Help Solve the Economic Crisis?

[sunskyfan]

Re: Can Science Help Solve the Economic Crisis?

Well, moral outrage seems like a handy term that describes a personal emotional/irrational response justified by morality. I can see there might be an element of shock to one's world view caused by the extremity of what is observed. That shock would then cause action to reconcile the world view. I just think that that it is the exact wrong time to act.
I understand the value for an emotional response to motivating people but I can't imagine it as an effective basis for making systematic decisions and I am posing it is a dangerous basis.

[Rajiv]

Re: Can Science Help Solve the Economic Crisis?

I understand the value for an emotional response to motivating people but I can't imagine it as an effective basis for making systematic decisions and I am posing it is a dangerous basis.

Read again the end of the paragraph that I had originally quoted

he would like to see many more systems scientists and planners feeling moral outrage at the common acceptance of bounded systems thinking – not because he thinks moral outrage can or should replace intellectual effort, but because it is apt to help us break through the commonly accepted bounds of systems rationality.

For West Churchman, such moral outrage renders systems thinking – the attempt to understand the world we live in in terms of whole systems – an inescapable obligation to every planner or manager,

[santafe2]

Re: Can Science Help Solve the Economic Crisis?

Not saying that Communism or dictatorships are better, merely that it is idealistic to the extreme to think somehow Democracy fixes everything.

I'm a complete homer for the US political structure and have felt lately like a Red Sox fan in 2003. I think American style democracy occasionally gets it 100% right. We might only have been completely right 4 or 5 times since we began this experiment, but occasionally, we're dead on. As Churchill pointed out, we have to try every wrong answer before we get it right, but when we do, we lead the world forward.

Since I appreciate your research and so much of what you write, I try not to be contradictory of your views, but I find myself at a place where I have to choose. And Democracy, well executed, fixes everything.

I always seem to get myself into an argument around here when I encourage contributors to get out in their community, to organize, to assist those in need, to make a difference. To me, that's what makes us Americans. We don't feel successful unless the majority of us are successful. Each generation we become more inclusive and more accepting. We're very flawed and the worst of us are awful but democracy allows the majority of us to come to our senses every couple of generations and steer the world in a new direction.

If someone is composing a post to let us know we're idiots, save your Internet scrabble pieces, we know we're idiots. But as a group, we care deeply about doing the right thing and eventually steer the country in that direction.

[c1ue]

Re: Can Science Help Solve the Economic Crisis?

Santafe,

You are, of course, entitled to your views.

I've said before - the main benefit of democracy is very similar to the main function of free markets: in striving to outdo each other, the wannabe movers and shakers in a democracy as well as the competing firms in a free market nullify each other's bad behavior to a major extent.

However, just as the monopolist grows out of the inordinately successful capitalist, so to does a corrupt government grow out of an inordinately successful political movement. In my view we've long since reached that point as exemplified by Bush/Clinton/Bush.

The point was reached in the past but pushed back on at least 2 occassions.

I hope there will be a third, but I see no evidence so far. The 'enemy action' is as well organized, motivated, funded, and insightful as has ever been seen in history.

[santafe2]

Re: Can Science Help Solve the Economic Crisis?

Santafe,

You are, of course, entitled to your views.

I've said before - the main benefit of democracy is very similar to the main function of free markets: in striving to outdo each other, the wannabe movers and shakers in a democracy as well as the competing firms in a free market nullify each other's bad behavior to a major extent.

Democracy has nothing to do with moving ahead. If anything, it moves back to gather more of us into its fold. What you call nullification I call agreement. As you pointed out, we're entitled to our views.

[Uno]

Re: Can Science Help Solve the Economic Crisis?

Intelligent Design is a mathematical model built on top of a religious theory. Which is why it is not science.

Quants are math geeks that build made-to-order models on top of economic theories, economics is not a science, and so quants are all quacks.

Now if you believe in Intelligent Design then I have a great hedge fund for you to invest in, ...

[c1ue]

Re: Can Science Help Solve the Economic Crisis?

Democracy has nothing to do with moving ahead. If anything, it moves back to gather more of us into its fold. What you call nullification I call agreement. As you pointed out, we're entitled to our views.

SF,

I'm sorry, but I don't get where you derive this view from.

Democracy is not about agreement, it is about the majority shoving its view down on the minority. There are no constructs under pure democracy for sharing views and gaining agreement, only for obtaining majority.

Similarly Adam Smith's invisible hand was not about competing firms coming to an understanding on where prices should be or wages ought to be, but in said firms competing tooth and claw with survival being the indicator of success.

Competing views coming to agreement is called oligarchy in politics and oligopoly in economics.

[labasta]

Re: Can Science Help Solve the Economic Crisis?

I agree with you all as well.

I was always rubbish at maths at school (one of those language people). I thought maths was just a way of describing something with numbers. I thought imagine writing a calculation(s) to describe a galloping horse. It must be a huge calculation. I thought, why bother doing it when I can just see a galloping horse and understand it immediately, if you know what I mean.
Maths never helped me understand the world I live in, I think I am trying to say.

Geometrics on the other hand I can visualise. That's a different kettle of fish for me altogether.

I understood science to be a proceedural process of elimination of what practically works in the world. Theories are then thought of to describe this proceedure which they keep see happening. That theory is not science (even if it is a correct part of the truth of the understanding).

In other words, if everyone does step A, B, C, then Z will happen.
If it can be repeated over and over again then it's science. Why it happens is theory, but what about if there is a math correlation for the frequency of its occurance? What if Z happens roughly every 3 times A,B,C is done, and not every time? Is this science? I'd say no, as there are other variables which have not been eliminated in order to get the Z result everytime.


My two cents.

[alcyone]

Re: Can Science Help Solve the Economic Crisis?

Much of what passes for wisdom on ITulip these days reminds me of what Plato wrote in his “Allegory of the Cave”. According to the Prince of philosophers, “The whole world of objects is a mass of forms screening Reality. All empirical investigation and knowledge amounts in the end only to a great deception grounded in the nature of our knowing faculties and Reason.”
If we look deeply into his use of the “Cave metaphor” Plato compares the perceptual blindness of an unenlightened culture to individuals being chained deep below the earth and surrounded by darkness. The prisoners chained there since birth know only the shadows and perceive them as the only and absolute reality. They never see each other as three dimensional beings, only as shadows. They spend their days and nights in the formulation of shadow knowledge and compete with each other for shadow wealth, power and prestige. They have developed shadow science to a high degree and have shadow schools to teach the children and shadow churches to mold the faith. The prisoners below live in complete delusion. They have no true understanding of Reality and thus no conscious control of their lives. They have become mere pawns of an evolutionary process that they cannot possibly understand destined to be tossed hither and yon by inscrutable laws forces that they describe as "Black Swans". But for many of these cave dwellers the emptiness of their shadow life has become unbearable. Their shadow world is crumbling around them and they don’t know where to turn.

The underlying problem with cave dwellers is that their collective REALITY is based on a scientific worldview fostered by physicists, intellectuals, philosophers and in spite their claims to the contrary, most religious leaders who extol the virtues of an after death heaven or nirvanic liberation. Science tells us that we exist within an accidental, meaningless, purposeless mechanistic universe. There is no god, no place for faith, no overarching plan, everything is a coincidence. Now granted, most cave dwellers have not clearly thought this out but the belief is implicit in a culture that seeks MONEY as the highest possible good. We live in a culture where property determines rank, where wealth is the only source of virtue and authority, and where falsehood is seen as an acceptable route to success in life so long as it results in the acquisition of enough money. Just think about it… failing some greater meaning and purpose to our lives, the default motivation of our species is to compete for more and more material security with which we may endlessly indulge our petty Egos. This notion has infected every aspect of our lives from business to politics to economics, to medicine to education and agriculture… Big Money has become the sine qua non of the modern world.
The collapse of the Money Power that we are witnessing today is not simply a temporary aberration of an otherwise functional system. It is a symbol, indeed a terminal symptom of a fatal worldview based on a meaningless grasp of Reality. It cannot be fixed or restored no matter how hard they try because it owes its existence to an utterly false view of reality that is passing away in order that a truer and more meaningful existence may emerge. The New Reality is one of Consciousness in evolution. To quote the sage, Sri Aurobindo:

"...In this new Society, much that is normal to human life would disappear. In the light of gnosis, the many mental idols, constructed principles and systems, and conflicting ideals which man has created in all domains of his mind and life would no longer be accepted. War, antagonism, destruction, oppression, selfish interests and ignorance could have no ground for existence. What is necessary is that there should be a turn in humanity felt by some or many toward the vision of this change."

Prior to this happening we are pretty much obliged to live through the collapse of this old pathological materialism so that the New Order may take its rightful place. As Henry Miller once wrote:

"The great mass of mankind, destined in our time to suffer more cruelly than ever before, ends by being paralyzed with fear, becoming introspective, shaken to the very core, and does not hear, see or feel anything more than everyday physical needs. It is thus that worlds die. First and foremost, the flesh dies. But although few clearly recognize it, the flesh would not have died if the spirit had not been killed already."

Not even Obama can save us from this...

[don]

Re: Can Science Help Solve the Economic Crisis?

Formula for the Rational Use of Science in an Economic Crisis:

(Class Interests + Political Power) divided by Science = A Hope & A Prayer

[sunskyfan]

Re: Can Science Help Solve the Economic Crisis?

I think that an organized effort to study a world economic system and model it would be worth while.
As stated many times in this thread "Science" is a process. Mathematics is generally the language used to formalize that process.

Science and predicting the outcome of stochastic processes has been a "problem" for some time.

Perhaps the bigger problem is that "Science" is a majic word to many people as is "intelligence", "expert" or even "succesful". Confidence scams are as old as the oldest profession.

[ASH]

Re: Can Science Help Solve the Economic Crisis?

In other words, if everyone does step A, B, C, then Z will happen.

If it can be repeated over and over again then it's science. Why it happens is theory, but what about if there is a math correlation for the frequency of its occurance? What if Z happens roughly every 3 times A,B,C is done, and not every time? Is this science? I'd say no, as there are other variables which have not been eliminated in order to get the Z result everytime.


My two cents.

Here's something I find compelling in the physical sciences. I wonder how it strikes you?

Math has a truth value that is independent of the tangible world, in the same way that one can make up an abstract set of game rules, and then make "true" statements about the game. At that level, different branches of math amount to identifying a set of rules (or axioms) and then working out the logical implications of the application of those rules -- all very abstract.

On the other hand, some -- but not all -- math seems to express physical relationships observed in the tangible world. Simple arithmetic like 1+1=2 has tangible and intuitive meaning to most of us, although the question "one or two of what?" is thorny. If we're talking about buns from the baker, there is the issue that no two buns are objectively identical, yet there is a subjective equivalence we apply, because for our practical purposes, similar buns can be interchangeable. Here is a real world situation that is modeled adequately by math, yet is not a rigorous expression of the pure math. An awful lot of the math that is used in the physical sciences is like this -- practically useful, descriptive, but still an abstract representation of a more complicated reality.

However, math takes a stronger role in the physical sciences where simpler systems are concerned. This is the point at which math as a description of reality -- and math as reality -- blur for me. One of my favorite examples relates to the question of the buns, only this time they truly are identical. Unlike slightly irregular buns from the baker, fundamental particles like electrons and even some larger objects like atoms are as equivalent and interchangeable as the mathematical concept of the two 1's in 1+1=2. Not only that, but their interchangeable nature seems to lead to important physically-observeable phenomena that is apparently explained, rather than described, by math alone.

Complex-valued functions are used in the descriptive mathematics that models the physical behavior of electrons in atoms, and in order to calculate the properties of an electron that are observeable in the real world (which are real numbers, rather than complex numbers), one ends up having to multiply the complex-valued function by its complex conjugate. As a refresher, if a complex number is:

Z=A+i B

where A and B are both real numbers and i is the square root of negative 1, then its complex conjugate is:

Z*=A-i B

So that:

Z multiplied by Z* = A^2+B^2

which always gives you a real number, no matter what A and B were.

Going back to the truly interchangeable fundamental particles, lets say that you have two equivalent buns (#1 and #2) and you want to write down the function that describes what they are doing. Notionally, this could be written as

f(#1,#2)="some mathematical description of what #1 and #2 are doing"

Here the arguments #1 and #2 are supposed to represent the generalized coordinates, or quantum numbers, of the two buns, and "some mathematical description of what #1 and #2 are doing" means a functional representation of their state in terms of some convenient real world parameter, such as position (i.e. where you are likely to find them).

But, bun #1 is supposed to be equivalent in every way to bun #2, so physically there is no way to tell them apart. That means we have to write our descriptive math in such a way that the same physical behavior is predicted, regardless of which bun we label #1 in the function, and which is labeled #2. This could be represented symbolically by swapping the labels in the argument of the function, so that #1 is now described as doing what #2 had been, and vice-versa:

f(#2,#1)="some mathematical description of what #1 and #2 are doing, with all the labels swapped"

Now, the point of switching the labels is that f(#1,#2) is supposed to predict the same physical behavior as f(#2,#1), and as discussed above, the rule for making physical predictions based upon this descriptive math involves multiplying the function by its complex conjugate. In other words:

f(#1,#2)* multiplied by f(#1,#2) = f(#2,#1)* multiplied by f(#2,#1)

Generally speaking, this is only going to be true if either:

f(#2,#1)=f(#1,#2)
or
f(#2,#1)=-f(#1,#2)

Obviously, if the two functions are identical, then they are going to predict the same thing. Also, a factor of -1 would cancel out in the product, which is why f(#2,#1) is also allowed to be the negative of f(#1,#2).

If you're still with me, here's where I'm going with this. Suppose you try plugging the same quantum numbers into the version of this relationship with the negative sign. Lets say the letter "a" represents a possible state for a bun, such as sitting in a particular location on a table, and the condition #1=#2=a means that both buns are in the same spot on the table:

f(#2,#1)=-f(#1,#2) is rewritten as f(a,a,)=-f(a,a)

When is a function equal to its negative? When that function is zero. In other words, according to the math, the buns cannot occupy the same spot on the table if they obey f(#2,#1)=-f(#1,#2). On the other hand, if they obey f(#2,#1)=f(#1,#2) -- the version without the minus sign -- then there's no problem.

Well, as it happens, we actually see this math represented in the physical world. Objects with half-integer spin like the electron (called fermions) obey the version of the rule with the minus sign, and no two fermions can have the same quantum numbers. This is known as the Pauli Exclusion Principle, and is the reason why electrons in atoms vary in their average radius from the nucleus, rather than piling degenerately into the lowest energy orbital. Chemical bonding, and the band structure of solids upon which our semiconductor technology is based, also derive from the same math. Objects with integer spin (called bosons), such as photons -- but also paired systems of fermions, and some atomic nuclei -- obey the version of the rule without the minus sign. Not only can multiple bosons share the same quantum numbers, but the probability of adding bosons to a given state actually increases as the occupancy goes up (a result that can also be obtained mathematically, but which isn't apparent at the level discussed above). Lasers are the most common application of this phenomenon, but superconductivity and superfluidity are also related.

So, lets recap. We've got some math that seems useful for describing the behavior of subatomic particles; fine. If we try to use that math to describe what multiple equivalent particles are doing, the requirement that the descriptive math not distinguish between particles which can't be told apart in the real world imposes some mathematical restrictions on the form of the functions which can be written down. But... this limitation imposed upon the descriptive math seems to correspond to real limitations observed in the physical world. You could say that the descriptive math is just very successful, and manages to self-consistently describe a large number of seemingly unrelated natural phenomena. Or, you could say that the physical world is a tangible expression of an underlying mathematical regularity -- that math, like logic, has a fundamental truth within its axioms that is independent of man -- and that to the extent that mathematical axioms find tangible expression in the physical world, math explains, rather than describes nature. I take the latter view, because I am struck by the sheer detail in which physical objects mimic mathematical objects.

To me, math is an extension of logic, and logic is truth -- but logic needs axioms from which to reason. Math cannot provide a complete explanation for the physical world, because not all math finds expression in reality, and math alone can't identify which axioms actually apply to the universe. However, to the extent that the physical universe is comprehensible, I think math is more than a description. The descriptive part comes in identifying the axioms -- observation of which math the universe instantiates -- but once you have figured out which math is at work, the mathematical consequences which flow from the axioms do properly constitute an explanation of that which is explainable.

My $0.22 (there was inflation).

[bpwoods]

Re: Can Science Help Solve the Economic Crisis?

... 'grow and thrive.' 3rd sentence. Grow and thrive on what? More debt? Science cannot solve the crisis, but it can show with absolute certainty (yes - absolute certainty!) why the economy will decline. Check out Albert Bartlett and his comments on the Exponential Function. Mathematics rules are invariant - well mostly! But Second Law of Thermodynamics IS absolute!. Sustainability is the bohereen to follow. Annual decrement of 0.0x% in GDP! 'Math is Kool'

Brian P

[vinoveri]

Re: Can Science Help Solve the Economic Crisis?

To me, math is an extension of logic, and logic is truth -- but logic needs axioms from which to reason. Math cannot provide a complete explanation for the physical world, because not all math finds expression in reality, and math alone can't identify which axioms actually apply to the universe. However, to the extent that the physical universe is comprehensible, I think math is more than a description. The descriptive part comes in identifying the axioms -- observation of which math the universe instantiates -- but once you have figured out which math is at work, the mathematical consequences which flow from the axioms do properly constitute an explanation of that which is explainable.

My $0.22 (there was inflation).

ASH, I enjoy these waxings of yours; reminds me of a day, when I used to contemplate the nature of nature, no pun intended (but that was long ago in my youth). Hey, once I understood the simple math that explains why the hydrogen molecule is a stable system and the indistinguishable particle 'exchange' contribution to the energy integral, I knew, at least for myself, that I would not find the Truth in the study of nature alone.

I would have to disagree however that logic is truth. Logic is a means to apprehend elements of the truth, but Truth stands on its own IMO. Logic routinely leads to absurdity and paradoxes, perhaps because the assumption and axioms we begin with are not wholly true, and logic leads us to identify their incongruities.

Did you must mean hyperinflation?

[ASH]

Re: Can Science Help Solve the Economic Crisis?

ASH, I enjoy these waxings of yours; reminds me of a day, when I used to contemplate the nature of nature, no pun intended (but that was long ago in my youth). Hey, once I understood the simple math that explains why the hydrogen molecule is a stable system and the indistinguishable particle 'exchange' contribution to the energy integral, I knew, at least for myself, that I would not find the Truth in the study of nature alone.

I would have to disagree however that logic is truth. Logic is a means to apprehend elements of the truth, but Truth stands on its own IMO. Logic routinely leads to absurdity and paradoxes, perhaps because the assumption and axioms we begin with are not wholly true, and logic leads us to identify their incongruities.

Did you must mean hyperinflation?

Yeah -- maybe I should say that logic is truth, with a lower-case 't', and only within the context of the axioms. If you make a bad assumption and use that as the basis for logical reasoning, you will come up with a conclusion that is 'true' within the context of your faulty axioms, but untrue in reality. Truth with a capital "T" is a different beast entirely.

And, it should be added, none of this stuff about the microscopic world nor musings about the nature of reality have direct bearing upon the original topic of the thread. I just wanted to point out that in some areas of science, math looks to me like a bit more than mere description, and more like a limited explanation. Of course, as we've all said ad nauseum, in one way or another -- it ain't science unless it's predictive and falsifiable.