Comment by mistrial9 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mistrial9 | Hacker News Reader

from the top of the paper:

"As the total value of the global financial market has vastly outgrown the value of the real economy, financial institutions on this planet have created a web of interactions whose size and topology calls for a quantitative analysis by means of Complex Networks."

refer to Capital in the Twenty-First Century :

"The book's central thesis is that when the rate of return on capital (r) is greater than the rate of economic growth (g) over the long term, the result is concentration of wealth, and this unequal distribution of wealth causes social and economic instability."

regarding models, in a conclusion of Nature paper:

"Differently from other networks, here nodes have some ability to anticipate the future, including the future structure of the network and try to take advantage of it. Although in reality such ability is much more limited than what models in mainstream economics postulate, it represents a circularity in the model that is difficult to treat with analytical or statistical tools. "

so, participants use models and apply them to change behavior, making the system harder to model (!)

"so, participants use models and apply them to change behavior, making the system harder to model (!)"

I am ignorant here, but isn't this property true of iterated prisoner dilemma situations? Is game theory not an adequate model here?

I mean there are a lot of questions that can be posed, but are computationally intractable to answer. Think of the traveling salesman problem. Or worse - the halting problem.

That property is true of game theory problems, of which iterated prisoners dilemmas are a subset. And yes, game theory is the appropriate field to deal with those issues, however that does not necessarily mean that any solutions exist or are trivial for a specific problem.

Compare to a lot of engineering models being reduced to "just calculus"

refer to Capital in the Twenty-First Century

yikes, no thanks, keep it academic.

How's Picketty's work not academic ?

I have not read Picketty myself, but inferring .. Picketty is quantitatively substantiated, but also adds political descriptions and prescriptions; not academic in the sense of neutrality and reliance on accepted sources.

Honestly, calling for an academic treatment of economics like this, is less compelling for me even in retrospect, than quantitatively substantiated, current, analysis. How many people understand modern financial flows at scale? .. the topic of the original post.

I get your point now, however he does a really good job in Capital in the XXIe century to be purely descriptive and mostly rigorous (and why this work was regarded so highly even from rightist, neoclassical economists). His political philosophy contribution is mainly from his interviews and Capital and Ideology which is politically loaded because logically from his political "activism" he had to respond to the first book in which he wasn't. (as an idea, demonstrating descriptively how inequality works, how capitalism favors inequalities, people were expecting now what do you propose about it ? Which is then a ecopol book). I get where you came from though.

economics without politics is useless and pointless. economics is a social and behavioral science. the job of economists is to analyze and synthetize policies.

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