The Emergent Fool

Synchronized Chaos and the Economy

Posted by kevindick in Economics, Superorganism on March 18th, 2009 | View Comments

I had a thought today when I was reading Arnold Kling’s post on always trying to fight the last war with financial regulations. We seem to reliably have financial crises. They don’t follow a schedule, but they do happen somewhat frequently. What if the financial system is gripped by the same pehonomenon of synchronized chaos that I described in this post? A brief survey of Google and Google Scholar doesn’t turn up much. Anybody know of work in this area? In other words, “Is there a mathematical economist in the house?”

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Jes R.

I always thought that the research on mode locking had some promise as an avenue of research... if you can persuade yourself that the economy has some kind of inherent cyclicality (think of a complex system that gravitates to some kind of periodic solution, there have to be attractors out there that fit the bill), then you could get synchronization with relatively weak signal sharing... the same way you would if you put to grandfather clocks next to each other. I've never pursued it but always thought it would be an interesting way to approach the question.
Daniel

Cursory search yields nothing promising...But, I would not be surprised if many (or all) complex systems exhibit similar properties, (like synchronized chaos.)

It certainly sounds like a promising research path someone should pursue.
kevindick

I'm not interested in generic theories of boom/bust or business cycles. I'm already pretty familiar with that literature. What I want to know is whether anyone has specifically applied synchronized chaos to the problem. As I said in the OP, I already Googled for it and didn't see anything promising.
Jo Jordan

search boom and bust? or cyclical?