Heroes Not Zombies

There are interesting discussions taking place on financial and economics blogs mainly in relation to questions of control, complexity and the impossibility of certainty. Here’s an example from an article discussing computerised financial trading technologies.

Here is the conclusion of a US study of computer-generated trading recently concluded: “Financial markets are alive, but a model, however beautiful, is an artifice. …To confuse the model with the world is to embrace future disaster driven by the belief that humans obey mathematical rules.” The powers that be have been embracing future disaster on this belief in a manner which goes far beyond financial markets. But in that shrunken context, individuals everywhere have already abandoned that belief. Wall Street and its global counterparts have been trying to do that too, but their problem is that they have nothing to replace it with. The “belief” that humans can be managed by obeying arbitrary rules of any kind is the last bastion of our rulers. It is waning on the financial markets, just as it is everywhere else, with results that no computer program can predict. That’s why the “market model” no longer “works”.

Think of health care from this perspective. The tendency to confuse models with real life is everywhere in contemporary medical practice. Human beings just don’t follow mathematical rules at an individual level. So why treat statistics as if they are not only TRUTH but the only TRUTH?

It’s not only the “market model” which no longer works……