Excerpts from an interview with
Brian Arthur.:
-- a great deal of economics is done the way it is done for analytical convenience. It is not just that the framework has become, as I said, so persuasive that economists don't feel that they need to look outside anywhere near as much. It is also that the framework itself is 50 percent an approximation to reality and 50 percent analytical self-convenience.
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But we're facing a danger that economics is rigorous deduction based upon faulty assumptions. Science after science gets that way from time to time. When it does, we're in real trouble.
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: The Libertarians are upset because I'm saying that the invisible hand is not perfect. Indeed, the invisible hand is a little bit arthritic. It's pretty good, but it's slightly less than perfect. I think we need to grow up and recognize this.
Excerpts from another interview which may be relevant to India here .:
These are interesting, especially India. But none are large enough—not even India yet—to make much of a difference.
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But a lead in science and in the innovations based on science takes a really long time to build up. You can’t just put in government funding and accomplish this in a decade. Advanced technology comes out of a very deep understanding of the theory and grammar of certain scientific phenomena. It took a huge amount of understanding of quantum physics to produce the laser for example (which lies at the heart of modern telecommunications). And similarly it takes a lot of understanding to translate these scientific understandings into technologies. This sort of understanding can’t just be lifted
from data or knowledge published in technical journals. What counts in these areas is knowing what methods work and what ones don’t, how exactly to “cook” the thing, what ways help to cut through obstacles, and what new directions to pursue next. This sort of expertise is no more easily transferable than is Cordon Bleu cooking. It is a craft—a collection of knowings—of hundreds of particular methods and details. As a craft it resides implicitly in people’s minds and over time, over years, it builds up within small groups in particular high-tech labs and in particular localities. The result is that once a region or a country gets ahead in a set of specific advanced technologies it becomes hard to challenge. I am not saying that other countries don’t have advanced science. I am saying that because of its deep understandings of the sciences behind genomics and proteomics and nanotech, the U.S. is well placed to lead in these new technologies and in the industries they will create.
Seems to be a sort of new age person from this interview ,
and story of a spat with Krugman .
Here is an article which features both Ormerod and Brian Arthur .
And Ormerod on Milton Friedman: here.
These bring me to a recent post by Madhukar Shukla. One wonders whether the sort of problems which MS mentions need thinking about the existing social structures and cultures discussed by Brian Arthur above.
Kuffir has given several links to farmers’ problems in the comments to my post “Why cotton prices are falling?” here.
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