Timeline for Examples of theorems misapplied to non-mathematical contexts
Current License: CC BY-SA 3.0
8 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
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| Apr 21, 2015 at 11:10 | comment | added | Gottfried William | The article has a problem: there are no calculations to solve in a socialist economy. The authors argue apparently that socialist economies cannot exist because they could never make sufficiently many arbitrary guesses and list them all even with a hypercomputer, and so cannot be called socialist economies: they didn't plan absolutely everything, implying no socialist economies can exist. Which is true but trivially so. One defines socialisms as planned almost everywhere. Socialist economies have a problem because they arbitrarily guess their productions, not a problem listing their guesses. | |
| Apr 21, 2015 at 10:56 | comment | added | Gottfried William | by the fact that, as Milne (1949) showed, these types of equations are typically unstable, a small change of parameters leads to orders of magnitude different solutions. Which means that if measurement or estimation errors occur, the validity of solutions cannot be confirmed. An calculated price due mostly to error in measuring conditions cannot be distinguished from a solution of completely different conditions. The reason the linked authors thought it matters how large infinity is, I guess, because perhaps they imagined Russell-type hypercomputers possibly doing the calculations? | |
| Apr 21, 2015 at 10:48 | comment | added | Gottfried William | If values of factors of production are unknown, they cannot be compared with values of consumed goods by anybody, and which quantities of each are to be produced to cause least dissatisfaction, given that resources are insufficient to produce arbitrary quantities of each all at once, becomes unknown and unknowable. Listed prices would be correct only be accident if ever. Assuming an unbiased money exists (so it's not a socialist economy) the solving of equations explicitly is complicated ... | |
| Apr 21, 2015 at 10:28 | comment | added | Gottfried William | this ordering. They don't satisfy wants directly and values of possibly consumed goods correspond to concrete wants one to one satisfied or anticipated to be satisfied. Without a perfectly liquid consumption good with an unbiased price in each goods exchange pair it is present and relative scarcity being used to map quantities of it to factors of production, no value proxy for factors of production exists and they cannot be valued. In which case costs exist but are unknown. The equations to solve would be unknown. Which is a problem, for ends don't justify means, foregone ends (costs) exist. | |
| Apr 21, 2015 at 10:17 | comment | added | Gottfried William | The key thing about the market is that nobody needs to know all the money prices but they are consistent (each contains information about all) or there is a thermostat negative feedback that rapidly converges to such a state. Hayek and especially his opponents, in particular, were wrong regarding solving market simultaneous equations absent an unbiased common medium of exchange. Behaviorally value is known to be not a function, an invariant in the nonclosed category of all partially ordered sets of words monotonically transformed. And factors of production are not in the domain of ... | |
| Jun 11, 2014 at 18:41 | history | edited | I. J. Kennedy | CC BY-SA 3.0 |
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| Apr 29, 2012 at 2:40 | history | edited | I. J. Kennedy | CC BY-SA 3.0 |
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| Feb 24, 2012 at 2:17 | history | answered | I. J. Kennedy | CC BY-SA 3.0 |