
To help model financial systems, some economists are turning to biology - sethbannon
https://www.theatlantic.com/amp/article/549725/?single_page=true
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nkoren
18 years ago Jane Jacobs published _The Nature of Economies_ , which
explicitly applies principles of biomimicry to economic philosophy. It's
absolutely brilliant and has been the cornerstone of my economic thinking ever
since. Also, it's been a somewhat sardonic pleasure to watch the mainstream
economics world haltingly get the memo. They've come a long way since 2000,
but still have a long ways to go.

If you want to see what economic understanding will eventually look like, just
cut to the chase and read _The Nature of Economies_ today.

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ateesdalejr
Economics 2.0 from Accelerando here we come.

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zengid
So your comment was very interesting in that it kicked off a 30 minute wiki
investigation into that book and other sci-fi novels. I'm currently finishing
2312 from Kim Stanley Robinson and he uses the term _Accelerando_ , so that
piqued my interest for searching [0]. Haven't read any Stross, but it looks
interesting!

[0]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accelerando#Title](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accelerando#Title)

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doubleplusgood
His Laundry Files are excellent as well.

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blacksmith_tb
I politely disagree - they are funny, in a wink-wink, nudge-nudge sort of way
(if you've read your Lovecraft), but pale compared to his 'harder' SF (like
Accelrando, Singularity Sky, Glasshouse). That said, I do much prefer the
Laundry Files stories to The Merchant Princes, but I have a low tolerance for
Urban Fantasy...

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dalbasal
I suspect financial market are like a hoey trap for economics researchers.
Fast, plentiful transactions, rules about information flow and limitless
liquidity, "scientific" valuation of derivatives...

It's so damn close to a theoretical model and it exists in real life! Data is
easily accessed and interpreted. Compare this to the markets for real estate,
used cars, or online advertising. It's all precise enough to tie to monetary
rules, central bank actions ...the policy levers top economists have available
in a normal year.

Whatever your theory, it will be easier to test for publicly traded stocks or
commodities.

The problem is that public markets are formalized, centralized markets. They
are rational by design. This is unlike every other market.

To extend their ecological metaphor a different way... Researching public
markets is like cells in a petri dish, not a real ecology.

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oelmekki
Which doesn't mean it's not interesting to study :) The omnipresence of
fibonacci ratios is interesting by itself.

Last year, I was reading Proudhon's criticism of the speculative part of
financial markets. His main objection was that speculation was adding
absolutely no value to the world, by opposition to investors (who help making
something useful real) and merchants (who displace products from somewhere
where they're abundant to somewhere where they're scarce). It hitted me back
then: actually, they do produce something, they produce data. Financial
markets have produced the longest lived and most detailed dataset ever (I
can't think of a bigger one, at least). Would be a waste not to try to use it.

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dalbasal
True, I don't mean to say it's a bad idea to study it. I just mean "watch out"
with theories that are general, but studied mostly within the confines of
these market where the dataset is (as you say) orders of magnitude
bigger/better than anywhere else. .. searching under a streelamp

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sideshowb
Are _turning_ to biology (present tense)?

Evolutionary economics has been a thing since 1898
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolutionary_economics](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolutionary_economics)

And had a resurgance in the 1990s, see for example R. H. Day & P. Chen, eds,
‘Nonlinear dynamics and evolutionary economics’, Oxford University Press, USA

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68c12c16
Could the doubling of stock price of CUBA, mentioned at the beginning of the
article, be a result triggered (largely or merely partially) by a certain
number of automatic trading systems that did not directly involve human
rationality (or irrationality) -- or simply without any manual intervention?

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emptysands
This reminds me of Sugarscape.

