POINTS OF VIEW
8086 Economics 1 – Economics
My greatest academic love has been economics, or at least the part of economics that I recognise as being meaningful to humanity. First, in the sixth form at school, I had been given the new book by Samuelson to study. This was the first of the beautifully illustrated and written textbooks. It grabbed me as no novel ever had. Like many books at the leading edge of such revolutions, he described the practices which were to be seen at work in the business community -- then identified with the economics -- and started to link these with some theory. It was, though, about real-life. In those days if you qualified to do anything else you studied economics at university and went on to do business. If you were intelligent you tried to be a civil servant instead. The stock markets were nowhere to be seen in terms of training their rocket scientists. The economics Samuelson described, which was at the heart of academic studies at the time, could be reached out and touched. Prior to that my first love, physics, had also been very touchable subject -- although its love affair with mathematics soon took over from that. Equally, economics was soon seduced by the idea of being a science, and needing to be explicable in terms of mathematics.
Ever since, I have tried to put together a package of theories on economics which actually make sense in real-world. Unfortunately, my academic peers have spent their time trying to create a science. Instead, they have created a religion -- counting the number of angels which can be found on the head of a pin -- rather than the technology it really is.
Elsewhere you can see my attempts at describing future economics. In essence, this tries to return economics to its basis in the reality of commercial life. Not least, it tries to counter all the mathematical constructs which modern economists favour with the reality of market research based exploration. It's one of wonders of the modern age of that chaos theory is presented to the world as a whole, and to economists in particular -- as the reality of chaos. Instead, it is a very precisely defined mathematical construct which is very sensitive to its starting position -- so that the results looks very chaotic. Nothing of the sort, it is totally predictable. As such, it has introduced this chaos as a popular subject, but certainly does not described genuine chaos. Incidentally, as you will see elsewhere, I produced results at Imperial College which others elsewhere eventually recreated as the basis for chaos theory. Unfortunately our own exploration was abandoned before we got anywhere near the theory.
At the Futures Observatory, on the other hand, we devised a set of protocols which would enable macro economic forecasting to make more sense. Unfortunately, though this has achieved some measure of acceptance within the futurology community, I don't believe it had any impact at all in the economic community.
The net result was, and still is, that economists preached their voodoo messages to governments everywhere. Worst of all, was the impact of economists rushing into Eastern Europe after the Berlin Wall came down. Every single one of them had their own voodoo explanation as to what needed to be done -- and each and every one of them was wrong; and a disaster for the country involved. In Ethiopia I issued an edict, only half jokingly, that if an economist was caught trying to enter through one of its airports they were not to be deported. Instead they were to executed on the spot, since they would only find some other way of entry and poison the atmosphere of the country. It took a further two years before the first economic adviser appeared and that delay was, fortunately, important in creating a stable government and economy.
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