Foundations of Complexity Economics • Hacker News Board

Re: Foundations of Complexity Economics

#31

Post by jaygernaught » Sat, Apr 17, 2021, 3:11 PM UTC

zwaps wrote: post #28

jaygernaught wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Very interesting. I still have this niggling belief that things like price and utility should be able to be derived from a fundamental matrix of possible unique activities and learnings and there collapse into actions or learnings enacted. I don't know enough mathematics or economics to even start to model it, though I did watch the khan academy on eigenvalues, lol. but building it as a computational model in the way…

The most convincing description of utility is as a representation of ranked choices or preferences. Perhaps it’ll be an interesting exercise to think about two experiments, one asking for valuations of things, and one asking whether one thing is preferred above the other. Then, consider how these outcomes may be related!

That's interesting. I did read quadratic voting more accurately reflects preference, along those lines. I wonder if there isn't some way of modelling a world with independent actors and a fixed number of unique activities, where availability of the activity changes with respect to preference, maybe conceptually your quadratic vote budget is effectively time units. I suppose you'd have to consider how innovation increases available activities. Is there a real world example of that type of model with pricing data?

Re: Foundations of Complexity Economics

#32

Post by jonwachob91 » Sat, Apr 17, 2021, 3:46 PM UTC

snidane wrote: post #14

My gripe with all schools of economics is how real estate/land market is completely abstracted away. Even though it is the largest financial market of them all, with everyone except homeless involved. In mainstream economics it is treated as just another good, such as break or milk, but somehow it behaves differently. The dynamics of the market are driven by monopoly pricing and mortgage and rent are paid more like a…

>>>The dynamics of the market are driven by monopoly pricing and mortgage and rent are paid more like a tax than a payment for a yoghurt that you can choose not to buy or buy an alternative. You can't choose not to be housed.

You also can't choose[0] to starve to death, and yet your use of the choice to buy, or not buy, yogurt isn't counted as a monopoly of the food industry. Housing isn't a monopoly. We have plenty of choices, from buying a house to renting a house, or we can build our own mansion or vanlife van. We can live in a hight Cost of Living environment like NYC or Singapore, or we can live in a Low Cost of Living environment like the middle of Alabama or Bali. Shelter is a necessity for live, just like food. And just like food, we have lots of choices to choose from.

[0] *choose may be a poor choice of words for both our arguments, as lots of people choose every years to be homeless, and some people choose to starve to death. But that's semantics and not the spirit of either of our statements. :)

Re: Foundations of Complexity Economics

#33

Post by bernardv » Sat, Apr 17, 2021, 11:34 PM UTC

The economy as a complex system is appealing. The idea looked very promising in the early 1990’s when I was a grad student. Unfortunately, it has not led to any meaningful (i.e. practical/usable) results. Just this month came across an attempt to model insurance markets using an agent-based model. The paper was co-authored by an eminent proponent of complexity theory etc. Unfortunately, the authors trip all over themselves when trying to actually calibrate or relate their model to real-world conditions.

Complexity theory is a useful thinking tool, but has yet to bear fruit when it comes to making statements about future system behavior.

Likewise, econophysics was a thing fifteen years ago, but now only survives in academia.