Socio-Economic Metaphors:

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Socio-Economic Metaphors

• Machine or Ecosystem?

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Common Metaphors

• Family
• Hive
• Machine

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Society/Economy as Ecosystem

• The machine metaphor is getting most of the
  traction right now in economy, society and
  community.
• Its a bad metaphor. Why?
• Society/Economy as ecosystem is a superior
  metaphor. Lets explore.

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Society as Machine
The prototype was an odd assortment of tanks,
pipes, sluices and valves, with water pumped
around the machine by a motor cannibalised from
the windscreen wiper of a Lancaster bomber. Bits
of filed-down Perspex and fishing line were used
to channel the coloured dyes that mimicked the
flow of income round the economy into consumer
spending, taxes, investment and exports. Phillips
and Walter Newlyn, who helped piece the machine
together at the end of the 1940s, experimented
with treacle and methylated spirits before
deciding that coloured water was the best way of
displaying the way money circulates around the
economy. - Elliot, Larry. The Computer Model
that Once Explained the British Economy, The
Guardian, May 2008.

• A sensation when it was unveiled at the London
  School of Economics in 1949, the Phillips machine
  used hydraulics to model the workings of the
  British economy but now looks, at first glance,
  like the brainchild of a nutty professor. Where
  the Banks of England team of in-house
  economists are equipped with state-of- the-art
  digital computers, the professions first stab at
  modelling was very much a do-it-yourself affair
  .

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Society as Machine

• Paul Krugman says he was attracted to economics
  because it seemed to reveal "the beauty of
  pushing a button to solve problems.
• J. M. Keynes and F.D.R. insist the economy is a
  pump that needs to be primed.
• A CNN headline reads "Obama's priority Fixing
  the economy."

Mission control
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Machine 3 Imbedded Assumptions

1. First, if an economy behaves according to certain
   laws, it is deterministic
2. Second, if the economy is deterministic, the
   intricacies of its complex relations are, in
   principle, knowable and
3. Third, if its intricacies are knowable, the
   economy is manipulablewhere manipulation can be
   carried out for the sake of an ideal social
   outcome.

7
Community Society

• Bad metaphors dont just muddy economic matters.
• Societies and communities are also victims of
  these metaphors and their related assumptions.
• Witness urban planning fetishism and the
  associated top-down economics. Costs largely
  unseen.
• All of these depend on the 3 assumptions imbedded
  in the machine metaphor.

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Non-Determinism

• Epistemic Non-Determinism
• (Knowledge Problem)
• Systemic Non-Determinism
• (Metaphysical)

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Spanners in the Works

1. If socio-economic life is non-deterministic, then
   it is neither knowable nor manipulable in
   important respects.
2. Too many plans and designs make us vulnerable to
   unintended consequences.
3. We suffer under the Intelligent Design problem
   of politicians and planners.

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Indicators of Economic ID

• Epicyclical Thinking and Policy
• Market Failure the God of the Economic Gaps
• Market Failure the Nirvana Fallacy
• Corporatism Public Choice Problems (Parasitism
  and Dependency)
• Crests, Troughs and Business Cycles
• Butterflies Black Swans

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In Search of New Metaphors
Sorry, George
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Society as Ecosystem
What are the parallels?
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Society as Ecosystem

• Undesigned, yet ordered
• Unknowable in its totality
• Complex, as in CAS
• - nested subsystems
• - open boundaries
• - holistic
• - non-deterministic
• - self-organizing
• - emergent
• 4. Networks over hierarchies

Networks over hierarchies
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Society as Ecosystem

• Rules-based, not directive-based
• Locally purposive, globally plural
• Result of iterative processes
• Structured around scarcity
• Specialization and adaptation
• Organic unity

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Lets Use Better Metaphors
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Thank You