Solving the coordination problem at scale seems related to my musing (though not new as there is a large literature) about firms and particularly large corporation. Many big corporation seem more suitable to modeling as markets themselves rather than market participants. That seems like it will have significant implications for both standard economic modeling and policy analysis. Kind of goes back to Coase’s old article The Nature of the Firm.
Given the availability of technology, and how that technology should (and has) reduced costs, why are more developing countries still “developing”? How much of that might be driven more by culture than by cost, access to trade partners, investments, financing or a number of other standard economic explanations?
What we don’t understand looks like random noise: Perfect encryption should also look exactly like random noise. Is that perhaps why it seems the universe is so empty of other intelligent life. Clearly there are other explanations for why we might not be able to identify such signals (e.g., syntax, grammar and encoding so alien we are unable to see a pattern, perhaps signal pollution and interference due to all the electromagnetic sources in the univers) but how could we differentiate?
I would say that perfect encryption is a great example of something we don’t understand which looks like noise: at first it looks totally random, but if someone hands you a short key, suddenly it becomes obvious that the “noise” is highly systematic. That’s understanding. The problem is that achieving understanding is not always computationally tractable.
Regarding economic progress:
Solving the coordination problem at scale seems related to my musing (though not new as there is a large literature) about firms and particularly large corporation. Many big corporation seem more suitable to modeling as markets themselves rather than market participants. That seems like it will have significant implications for both standard economic modeling and policy analysis. Kind of goes back to Coase’s old article The Nature of the Firm.
Given the availability of technology, and how that technology should (and has) reduced costs, why are more developing countries still “developing”? How much of that might be driven more by culture than by cost, access to trade partners, investments, financing or a number of other standard economic explanations?
What we don’t understand looks like random noise: Perfect encryption should also look exactly like random noise. Is that perhaps why it seems the universe is so empty of other intelligent life. Clearly there are other explanations for why we might not be able to identify such signals (e.g., syntax, grammar and encoding so alien we are unable to see a pattern, perhaps signal pollution and interference due to all the electromagnetic sources in the univers) but how could we differentiate?
I would say that perfect encryption is a great example of something we don’t understand which looks like noise: at first it looks totally random, but if someone hands you a short key, suddenly it becomes obvious that the “noise” is highly systematic. That’s understanding. The problem is that achieving understanding is not always computationally tractable.