RE: ECONOMICS: Re: Globalization and corporate power

From: Lee Corbin (lcorbin@tsoft.com)
Date: Thu Aug 23 2001 - 18:34:39 MDT


Brian W. writes

> [Lee wrote]
> >The *other*, equally important, completely independent reason is
> >that economies are too complex to be centrally administrated.
> >When quadrillions of decisions must be made, nearly optimal
> >decisions have to be made locally, in accordance with local
> >conditions.
>
> You must have missed my other post, I pointed out that we know
> economics to be in the realm of non-linear dynamics and therefore
> subject to "butterfly effects" of individual consumers.

No, I didn't miss it. It just didn't do anything for me, and now
I know why. The reason is that the so-called "butterfly effect"
dominates *all* human living. Perhaps all of life, period. For
example, one single germ gets on a little kid's hand, he rubs
his eye, gets sick, doesn't go to school the next day, so Billy
(Clinton) gets elected president of the 2nd grade, and... the
next thing you know, MONICA LEWINSKY!

Of course this was known eons before someone wrote

    For want of a nail, the shoe was lost,
    For want of the shoe, the horse was lost,
    For want of the horse, the rider was lost,
    For want of the rider, the battle was lost,
    For want of the battle, the kingdom was lost,
    And all for the want of a horseshoe nail!

I actually can't make any further progress on your point. Why do
you suppose it appropriate to add to the present list

    1. Human nature isn't yet sufficiently altruistic
    2. Centralized control is vastly too inefficient

your third reason that communism must fail, and socialism must
be far from optimal to the same degree that it abandons capitalism,
namely your non-linear economics thesis?

Lee



This archive was generated by hypermail 2b30 : Fri Oct 12 2001 - 14:40:13 MDT