Building an Economics View:
The Purpose of the Economy
Problem-Solving Mindset
Production and Distribution
Motivations and Incentives
Inequality
We live in a time when it is fashionable for everyone to have an opinion about everything, and Economics is no exception. We are strongly pressured to have the “right” view of Economics, which is of course the same one as our friends and family and the news we watch. But we don’t do things like that here on A Scientist’s Fiction. Instead, we do our best to put our biases aside and acknowledge our assumptions, observe the relevant facts, and follow where logic takes us.
The first step in thinking about Economics is to shake the ideological mindset. When approaching the subject, the most tempting thing for most of us to do is to jump into the debate between Capitalism and Socialism. But that is the wrong question altogether, and just makes people angry at one another. We might also be tempted to come at it from the perspective of justice, of who rightfully owns what. While this is important from a values perspective, we must remember that it must be informed by our core economic values, which we talked about last time: to supply as many people as possible with their basic needs, so that they are empowered to pursue meaningful lives.
In order to accommodate our values, we need to understand how economies work. The economy is like a machine, built out of a bunch of different parts, all working together. We can look at the parts and see how they work and what they do. Only then can we build a realistic view of how a good economy can be built. It is impossible to build a rocket that will get to orbit without understanding physics. It is impossible to design a new medical drug that will heal people without understanding chemistry. Similarly, it is impossible to design an economy that will provide prosperity and freedom without understanding Economics. And like other sciences, we must be humble and remember that Economics is a complex field of study, and there is much about it that humanity does not yet understand.
Today’s discussion is very short, but it is important enough that it warrants its own post. Although it may seem like common sense that we have to look objectively at the mechanics of how something works if we want to make it work better, we humans so often forget this. Without a conscious effort to understand, our views are shaped by persuasive speakers, and we forget that good intentions are not enough to guarantee good outcomes. Unlike what many smart people throughout history have believed, we humans are not naturally rational. Rational thinking takes practice and effort, just like any other skill. Because Economics is an object of so much political rhetoric and propaganda, it is a high-level challenge for rational thinking. So it seemed appropriate to take a moment to remind ourselves of the mindset we want before we dig into the meat of the topic.
Saturday, December 22, 2018
Friday, December 14, 2018
MoebiusQuest – NaNoWriMo Results 2018
Hello friends, family, and people from the internet. Guess what? I wrote a novel!
You can read MoebiusQuest here for free at WritersCafe.
This November has been a milestone in my life in more ways than one. First, I met the official NaNoWriMo goal for the first time, writing 54,500 words during the month. Second, I finished my first novel, which came out to 57,000 words when it was finished. Around 3000 words were written in December, but it still counts as a win because over 50,000 of them were in November. Before this, my longest story was under the 40,000 word novel threshold. Third, the novel I wrote was MoebiusQuest, the story I started and restarted so many times as a teenager. Having finally finished it, I feel as if an obsession I had in the back of my mind for all those years has been lifted, and I am free to focus on other stories. And fourth, I met and became friends with a bunch of fellow writers, who are interested in sticking together to help and support each other in our writing.
As I wrote MoebiusQuest, I noticed something strange happening. I prepared only a barebones outline, so most of the story was made up on the fly. But time and again, I kept striking gold with ideas that could pay off later and make the story better. When the book was finished, I found myself looking at something better than I had ever imagined, where no scene was missing, and no scene had to be cut. The only revision it needed was a very small amount of spell-checking and trimming. It felt like a miracle.
It is because it turned out so well that I decided to post it online for anyone to read. MoebiusQuest is my baby, and I couldn’t be happier at how it turned out. Of course, it is nowhere near the quality of a “real” book, but I didn’t intend it to be. And because it is not garbage, and because it is my baby, I have decided to open it up for the eyes of the world. MoebiusQuest is online, and I am neither embarrassed nor ashamed of it.
MoebiusQuest is a light-hearted space adventure where three friends jaunt across the galaxy in search of the seven elemental MacGuffins—I mean medallions. Every planet they visit brings a new and different adventure, from the high-tech to the alien to the downright weird. It is great fun and excitement from start to finish, and I hope you have as much fun reading it as I had writing it.
You can read MoebiusQuest here for free at WritersCafe.
This November has been a milestone in my life in more ways than one. First, I met the official NaNoWriMo goal for the first time, writing 54,500 words during the month. Second, I finished my first novel, which came out to 57,000 words when it was finished. Around 3000 words were written in December, but it still counts as a win because over 50,000 of them were in November. Before this, my longest story was under the 40,000 word novel threshold. Third, the novel I wrote was MoebiusQuest, the story I started and restarted so many times as a teenager. Having finally finished it, I feel as if an obsession I had in the back of my mind for all those years has been lifted, and I am free to focus on other stories. And fourth, I met and became friends with a bunch of fellow writers, who are interested in sticking together to help and support each other in our writing.
As I wrote MoebiusQuest, I noticed something strange happening. I prepared only a barebones outline, so most of the story was made up on the fly. But time and again, I kept striking gold with ideas that could pay off later and make the story better. When the book was finished, I found myself looking at something better than I had ever imagined, where no scene was missing, and no scene had to be cut. The only revision it needed was a very small amount of spell-checking and trimming. It felt like a miracle.
It is because it turned out so well that I decided to post it online for anyone to read. MoebiusQuest is my baby, and I couldn’t be happier at how it turned out. Of course, it is nowhere near the quality of a “real” book, but I didn’t intend it to be. And because it is not garbage, and because it is my baby, I have decided to open it up for the eyes of the world. MoebiusQuest is online, and I am neither embarrassed nor ashamed of it.
MoebiusQuest is a light-hearted space adventure where three friends jaunt across the galaxy in search of the seven elemental MacGuffins—I mean medallions. Every planet they visit brings a new and different adventure, from the high-tech to the alien to the downright weird. It is great fun and excitement from start to finish, and I hope you have as much fun reading it as I had writing it.
Friday, December 7, 2018
Massive Complexity
Scholars used to marvel at the elegance and mathematical simplicity of the universe. That was before we invented supercomputers.
From the days of Newton and Galileo to the middle of the 20th century, science was a mixture of brilliant insight and trial-and-error. Intelligent, learned people would come up with ideas and build experiments to test them. It was a golden age, romanticized by the iconic ideas of the scholar in their study and the tinkerer in their garage, creating new machines and discovering new laws of nature.
In the process, better tools were built. Instruments were invented that were more precise, and could measure more things. A new field of mathematics opened up, statistics, which gave scientists guidance on how to make hypotheses, devise experiments, and interpret data. Then, computers came upon the scene, able to deal with vastly more data than human beings could.
When computers and statistics advanced to the point at the end of the 20th century that the supercomputer was invented, science changed. No longer was it dominated by eccentric individuals writing equations on chalkboards and napkins. Instead, science entered the era of big data, when computers gained the ability to store and analyze billions of data points at once. The change was so dramatic that it would be fitting to say we are in a new era of science, which we might call Phase-II science. Whereas during Phase-I science we could learn about the elegant and simple parts of nature, the tools of Phase-II science let us take a peek into its messiness and complexity.
What makes a system complex? One factor is the number of degrees of freedom it has. Degrees of freedom are ways that a system can change. A lever has one degree of freedom; it can be pulled or pushed. A pencil has six degrees of freedom; it can move in three dimensions, and spin along three axes. Another contributor to complexity is how interconnected the parts of the system are. And another contributor to complexity is how many environmental factors come into play, and how unpredictable they are. There are many more as well.
One type of complex system is a chaotic system. Chaotic systems require exponentially more precision the longer you want to accurately model it. The classic example is the three-body problem, where three stars of similar mass are orbiting each other. The stars will swing around each other wildly and erratically, and even a small change in the initial conditions will lead to drastically different paths.
Another type of complex system is a holistic system. In a holistic system, all of the parts are interconnected in such a way that a change in one part causes changes throughout the entire system. DNA is a holistic system, because a change in a single nucleotide can affect an entire gene, and a change in a single gene can affect the entire body. Brains are holistic systems, because a change in one neural pathway can affect quite a lot about a person’s cognition or memory or other mental processes.
Supercomputers can model some chaotic and holistic systems, and are getting better all the time. But there is one more kind of complex system, which I call massively complex, which not even supercomputers can model accurately. Massively complex systems are complex systems which function in environments that are also complex. Human behavior is a massively complex system, because humans are already complex, and we interact with all manner of unpredictability in our environments every day. Economics and sociology are massively complex, because they are holistic, and they happen in a very large and unpredictable environment.
It is anyone's guess as to whether we will ever be able to model and understand massively complex systems. Maybe we won't, because it is just too complicated. But people might have made that argument about normally complex systems before supercomputers were invented, so we shouldn't be so hasty. Maybe our supercomputers will keep improving until they can model massively complex systems as well as they do normally complex systems today. Or maybe it will require another revolution in computing technology, like quantum computers, ushering in a new era of Phase-III science. Only time will tell, and I am quite excited to see what the future brings.
 |
| Simulation of the ejected matter from colliding neutron stars. Credit: NASA |
When computers and statistics advanced to the point at the end of the 20th century that the supercomputer was invented, science changed. No longer was it dominated by eccentric individuals writing equations on chalkboards and napkins. Instead, science entered the era of big data, when computers gained the ability to store and analyze billions of data points at once. The change was so dramatic that it would be fitting to say we are in a new era of science, which we might call Phase-II science. Whereas during Phase-I science we could learn about the elegant and simple parts of nature, the tools of Phase-II science let us take a peek into its messiness and complexity.
What makes a system complex? One factor is the number of degrees of freedom it has. Degrees of freedom are ways that a system can change. A lever has one degree of freedom; it can be pulled or pushed. A pencil has six degrees of freedom; it can move in three dimensions, and spin along three axes. Another contributor to complexity is how interconnected the parts of the system are. And another contributor to complexity is how many environmental factors come into play, and how unpredictable they are. There are many more as well.
One type of complex system is a chaotic system. Chaotic systems require exponentially more precision the longer you want to accurately model it. The classic example is the three-body problem, where three stars of similar mass are orbiting each other. The stars will swing around each other wildly and erratically, and even a small change in the initial conditions will lead to drastically different paths.
Another type of complex system is a holistic system. In a holistic system, all of the parts are interconnected in such a way that a change in one part causes changes throughout the entire system. DNA is a holistic system, because a change in a single nucleotide can affect an entire gene, and a change in a single gene can affect the entire body. Brains are holistic systems, because a change in one neural pathway can affect quite a lot about a person’s cognition or memory or other mental processes.
Supercomputers can model some chaotic and holistic systems, and are getting better all the time. But there is one more kind of complex system, which I call massively complex, which not even supercomputers can model accurately. Massively complex systems are complex systems which function in environments that are also complex. Human behavior is a massively complex system, because humans are already complex, and we interact with all manner of unpredictability in our environments every day. Economics and sociology are massively complex, because they are holistic, and they happen in a very large and unpredictable environment.
It is anyone's guess as to whether we will ever be able to model and understand massively complex systems. Maybe we won't, because it is just too complicated. But people might have made that argument about normally complex systems before supercomputers were invented, so we shouldn't be so hasty. Maybe our supercomputers will keep improving until they can model massively complex systems as well as they do normally complex systems today. Or maybe it will require another revolution in computing technology, like quantum computers, ushering in a new era of Phase-III science. Only time will tell, and I am quite excited to see what the future brings.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)