Re: gravity and the market
jeff lister (bolivar@planet.eon.net)
Fri, 21 Mar 1997 10:08:26 -0700
At 08:44 PM 3/20/97 -0800, Anton Sherwood wrote:
>[hi Extropians, this is for another list, I thought you'd enjoy it]
>
>Jeff Lister--
>: >: If economic considerations are the *only* consideration, then you
>: >: truely do have a beast; it [the market? (yes.)] will evolve blindly and
>: >: inexorably toward its stable niche (and this is the important
>: >: part->) independant of the cares or wishes of those working within it.
>
>Anton Sherwood--
>: >That's a bit like saying the gravity field of a galaxy as a whole
>: >is independent of the gravity fields of its component stars.
>
>Jeff Lister--
>: Good point, but i'm not sure the analogy applies.
>
Anton Sherwood--
>Here's a better one. Consider a binary star, two stars bound by gravity.
>In the plane of their mutual orbit, and rotating with them, J.L.Lagrange
>(1772) identified five points where the balance of forces is such that a
>small mass can stay put. Three of these points, on the line through the
>stars, are unstable: if the satellite is nudged along the line it will
>accelerate away from the Lagrange point. But two (L4 and L5), each
>forming an equilateral triangle with the stars, are attractors --
>virtual masses (though their gravity fields are far from symmetrical).
>Satellites can orbit these points. The attractors are informally
>called trojan points, because most of the asteroids around the
>Sun-Jupiter triangle points happen to be named from the Iliad.
>(Trojan companions have also been found for Saturn's big moons.)
>
>You seem to be suggesting that the market obeys not only the wishes of
>human buyers/sellers (the true masses) but also fluke phenomena, phantom
>bidders, analogous to the trojan points. I thank you for planting that
>interesting thought. But because the market is far more complex and
>chaotic than a two-body system, I expect the "market trojan points"
>to be transitory.
Yes, this *is* better! In the last paragraph you say "human
buyers/sellers," shouldn't that be corporate/human buyers/sellers? To
extend the analogy, the humans would be the interstellar dust from which a
protosystem is currently forming and the corperations would be the stars;
initially chatoic, the system would become more ordered with time. The
formation of the system would initially be more dependant on the
distribution of 'dust,' but eventually dominated by the relative positions
of the stars. I thank *you* for the generation and presentation of this
interesting thought.
jeff