[MD] BBC documentary 'the trap'

[Ian Glendinning]

Hi DMB, Khaled ...

Interesting documentary. Where is that summary from DMB ?

 In defence of game theory - Nash's ideas were that most complex
socio-intellectual actions are a game - moves that anticipate the
moves of others - where we players are rational agents. This provided
a way of modelling and predicting outcomes to help decision-making.
The problems arise when people using such models take too narrow a
"selfish" view of the agents "interests" and too crude a view of
"rationality". Then we get self-serving "autistic" & "neurotic"
economics - the kind that has been dragging us down since Friedman,
Thatcher and Reagan.

Regards
Ian

On Sat, Aug 15, 2009 at 11:56 PM, david buchanan<dmbuchanan at hotmail.com> wrote:
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> Khaled provided a link to the BBC documentary, 'the trap'  http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article17371.htm
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> dmb says:
> Thanks for that, Khaled. I've started watching it and find it to be quite delicious. I found a succinct little summary of the kind of stuff people will find in the film, at least in the first part. Hopefully, this will help explain some of the main ideas...
>
> Here is our take on the fundamental differences of belief and values that differentiate the 'Nordic Model' and the 'Free-market' type best exemplified by the United States.Free Market Assumptions
> The building blocks of a society are individuals, their families and immediate dependents. 'Society' - the wider association of interdependent individuals - is a chimera dreamed up by left-wing intellectuals. (See Margaret Thatcher*).The best outcomes for all will come from individuals acting in their own interests. (See Game Theory**). Successful, highly motivated people ought not to be restrained in their pursuit, accumulation and disposal of wealth.The Market represents the summation of collective knowledge and wisdom and produces better results than interventions and initiatives by institutions, especially governments.Markets are the most efficient way of allocating resources in a society, as they will be deployed to those places where the needs are greatest and the returns highest.Markets also self-adjust efficiently, resolving anomalies and glitches automatically and far more effectively than government led intervention.Institutions, especially governments, are incapable of improving the lot of people - only economically successful, highly motivated individuals working in free markets can do that. Their success can be an example for all to follow. It will also be beneficial to all through increasing the total stock of wealth and such mechanisms as 'trickle-down' and philanthropy.* Margaret Thatcher famously said: "There is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women and their families". This interesting statement would seem to be connected with her strong belief in markets as being better mechanisms for fulfilling individuals' needs than community or government. Behind this view, lies the bizarre science of Game Theory - see next point.
> ** The deep assumptions lying behind the belief that markets are the most effective means of fulfilling peoples' deepest wants and needs arises from the assertion that human beings are selfish individuals, inexorably driven by a simple desire to fulfil their own interests, adjusting their behaviour to counter others' attempts to do the same. Game Theory, which supports this idea, is backed by complex mathematical models that purport to explain human behaviour. This theory has been adopted by some biological scientists, who postulate that humans, like all animals, are receptacles for and driven by, the selfish need of their genes to reproduce. In this sense, human behaviour is determined by genetics, people will follow a set of rules which can be understood by complex mathematical modelling. This theory was developed to predict adversaries' behaviour in the Cold War and eagerly taken up by some geneticists and economists.In case you think economic science has gone mad, all the above is fact. These theories have been enthusiastically adopted by many economists and politicians who assert that, given that people are driven simply by selfish individualism, then the market is a more effective means of giving them what they need than membership of society or democratic politics. The economics of Reagan, Thatcher, Blair and Bush have all been driven by Game Theory and its derivatives, even if they didn't understand that! The high priests of these wondrous theories are an economist, James Buchanan (who, when it was put to him that people had a social conscience and cared about others, said that he "couldn't compute" that) and mathematician John Nash, who made a recovery from the paranoid schizophrenia from which he was suffering when he developed his theories.These constructs are now being seriously challenged in both economic and biological domains and John Nash later described his own theories as being grossly simplistic and not at all representative of the complexity of human beings.Adam Curtis, who has produced a brilliant series of BBC TV documentaries on these themes, sums it up nicely: "The only people who still believe these theories are (some) economists - and psychopaths" And maybe the Economist magazine??
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