On Tue, 2014-04-15 at 13:53 -0600, Steve Smith wrote: > I believe that our "common understanding" of such problems as > gender/race inequalities tends to be too "simple" which might explain > why progress in the domain is both slow and somewhat herky-jerky.
A master equation for an economic system will be high dimensional. For example, every person has assets to track over time. There are many-to-many economic transactions that explode the state space. Forget about geometry you can visualize. And a lot of the variables are not going to be independent. Time spent at work and time spent with family will be t and (1-t). Income will be correlated with t (paid by the hour). To get at gender culture things various stateful things like affinity to peers and family need to be quantifiable somehow. Are love and hate a linear scale or logarithmic? Maybe it is more like a step function? And how do you validate these system evolution models? You might be able to give someone a million dollars but you can't easily take it away, or spontaneously make a janitor a medical doctor or get most people to agree to change their sex. The experiments that would be illuminating can't be done for practical or ethical reasons. It's a curse of dimensionality in spades, and only by contrasting Billions and Billions of different policy systems could one hope to get good enough statistics to say that a hypothetical master equation was or was not at work in the real world. Marcus ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
