Markets are never pure in themselves, there is always the pre-existent hands of government

Re: Nonalgorithmic Economics: The Evolution of Future Wealth, by Stuart A. Kaufmann by Rich on Fri 23 Feb 2007 12:17 PM PST Profile Permanent Link

Kaufmann's equation of physical and social systems is a really serious mistaking of logical types. Although I am inspired by Kaufmann's work in self-organizing natural systems, I am a bit skeptical about his advocacy for adapting metaphors from emergent biological systems onto the field of economics or to social systems in general. Although an analysis of self-organization and emergent behavior maybe appropriate in biological systems once we begin to overlay these notions onto social systems there arises real problems.

For example, libertarians would argue that one has to leave the economy to the self-organization of markets and that the emergent behavior of said markets will optimize the potential of the economy. What is left out of this analysis is the very fact that markets are never pure in themselves, there is always the pre-existent hands of government who have already created laws to regulate markets - most often at the behest of powerful economic self-interest groups – and so the economy is already soico-politically constructed and controlled by invisible hands to optimize the business practices of the already rich and powerful Therefore to pretend that market forces or social systems are propelled by the same mechanisms as biological systems is to exclude an extremely important critical dimension from one's analysis. rich