Richard Powers:
Why is it that ecosystems produce rich networks, while markets – including literary markets – tend to produce monocultures?
a genetic correlate
mr_bean on 2007-07-08T02:57:31
This reminds me of a phenomenon in genetics I was reading about in wikipedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetic_drift"In population genetics, genetic drift is the statistical effect that results from the influence that chance has on the survival of alleles (variants of a gene). The effect may cause an allele and the biological trait that it confers to become more common or more rare over successive generations. Ultimately, the drift may either remove the allele from the gene pool or remove all other alleles. Whereas natural selection is the tendency of beneficial alleles to become more common over time (and detrimental ones less common), genetic drift is the fundamental tendency of any allele to vary randomly in frequency over time due to statistical variation alone, so long as it does not comprise all or none of the distribution."
"Given sufficiently long time, however, the mathematics of genetic drift (cf. Galton-Watson process) predict the allele will either die out or be present in 100% of the population, after which time there is no random variation in the associated gene. Thus genetic drift tends to sweep gene variants out of a population over time, such that all members of a species would eventually be homozygous for this gene. In this regard, genetic drift opposes genetic mutation which introduces novel variants into the population according to its own random processes."
The customer is always useful.
Well, in a natural ecosystem everyone (or every gene) is just trying to survive long enough to reproduce a lot. Why do we start decaying at 30? Because we're past our reproductive years at that point, and therefore useless. On the other hand, in an economic system, whoever dies with the most toys wins, so there's no such thing as "enough money."
As an aside, I think this touches on the biggest mistake people make about large-scale, first-world markets: that they are driven by some sort of diverse consumer tastes. In fact, it is just the opposite. For breakfast cereal, clothing, toothpaste, and many other things, there isn't a difference that makes a difference between the possible options. However, one of them is most profitable to produce, and efficiencies of scale make this option even cheaper. So consumers are told that they prefer whatever is cheapest to produce, and they happily "choose" and consume it. Why do wild animals spread into new ecosystems, while herds stick together?
Re:The customer is always useful.
Ron Savage on 2007-07-08T10:40:55
> so there's no such thing as "enough money."
Yes. This has been spelled out in the fascinating book:
Adam's Curse
Bryan Sykes
0 552 14989 6
Eg: Top of page 295
Re:The customer is always useful.
Thanks for the reference. I will give it a read.
The Evolution of Cooperation
ajt on 2007-07-08T13:24:34
In Axelrod's book The Evolution of Cooperation it's made quite clear than even companies/organisations that hate each other will tend towards a cartel/duopoly and finally monopolies. There is nothing within the mechanism of the market that will stop this from happening it's an automatic output from the mathematics. To prevent monopolies you need something external to destabilise the system, which could be the right kind of government legislation (the book contains examples that make things worse) or a new entry into the market place.
Basically cooperating even when you are fighting tool and nail can be the best strategy under certain conditions.
