Abstract
Understanding the morphogenetic (creative destruction) nature of economic systems is crucial for modelling economic growth and analysing traverse. Prof. Zambelli’s contribution to endogenous growth theory by harnessing the Turing Machine (TM) metaphor to intrinsically encapsulate the uncertainties of discovery, knowledge generation, and innovation is original and significant. This chapter sets out to explore some of the possible applications of the TM metaphor for modelling innovations and to discuss the importance of viability creating mechanisms to effectively traverse the dynamic disequilibrium.
Special thanks to Vela Velupillai and Stefano Zambelli for taming, inspiring, educating, and letting us explore and follow our passion. This chapter is an extension of the PhD thesis written under their supervision in 2011 (see Dharmaraj 2011). Though all the ideas and themes of this chapter originated out of their work, any misinterpretation or remaining infelicities remain mine.
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Notes
- 1.
Stefano, by spring of 2008, had moved to Trento, Italy, from Aalborg, Denmark.
- 2.
Recollecting and emphasizing the point, Richard Goodwin (1989; italics added) wrote, “Like Marx he [Joseph Schumpeter] was a student of the morphogenetic nature of capitalism. The economy is not a given structure like von Neumann’s model, …., it is an organism perpetually altering its own structure, generating new forms. Unlike most organisms it does not exhibit durable structural stability: it is perhaps best thought of as a kind of hyper-Darwinian, perpetual evolution. We are so familiar with it, we normally do not realize how remarkable it is. It is not like morphogenesis in animals and plants, where the species is programmed to generate a particular structure, and exhibits structural stability by creating the same form for thousands of years. Rather it is analogous to the much disputed problem of the generation of new species. The economy is unsteadily generating new productive structures. In this sense Schumpeter was profoundly right to reject the elegant new mathematical models: they are the analysis of the behaviour of a given structure. He saw that not only was the economy creatively destroying parts of its given structure, but also that one could not analyze a given structure, ignoring that this cannibalism was going on.”
- 3.
“By ‘development,’ …. we shall understand only such changes in economic life as are not forced upon it from without but arise by its own initiative, from within. …. [T]he mere growth of the economy, as shown by the growth of population and wealth, [will not] be designated here as a process of development. …. Development in our sense is a distinct phenomenon, entirely foreign to what may be observed in the circular flow or in the tendency towards equilibrium. It is spontaneous and discontinuous change in the channels of the flow, disturbance of equilibrium, which forever alters and displaces the equilibrium state previously existing” Schumpeter ([1911] 1934, pp. 63–64; italics added).
- 4.
Schumpeter: “[W]hat we are about to consider is that kind of change arising from within the system which so displaces its equilibrium point that the new one cannot be reached from the old one by infinitesimal steps” ([1911] 1934, p. 64, fn. 1; italics in the original).
- 5.
Chaitin (2010): In algorithmic information theory, you measure the complexity of something by counting the number of bits in the smallest program for calculating it:
Program → Universal Computer → output
If the output of a program could be a physical or a biological system, then this complexity measure would give us a way to measure the difficulty of explaining how to construct or grow something, in other words, measure either traditional smokestack or newer green technological complexity:
\( {\displaystyle \begin{array}{l}\mathrm{Software}\to Universal\kern0.17em Constructor\to \mathrm{physical}\kern0.17em \mathrm{system}\\ {}\mathrm{DNA}\to Development\to \mathrm{biological}\ \mathrm{system}\end{array}} \)
- 6.
- 7.
- 8.
“Yet if the only form of tradition, of handing down, consisted in following the ways of the immediate generation before us in a blind or timid adherence to its successes, “tradition” should positively be discouraged. We have seen many such simple currents soon lost in the sand; and novelty is better than repetition. Tradition is a matter of much wider significance. It cannot be inherited, and if you want it you must obtain it by great labour” T.S. Eliot, “Tradition and the Individual Talent” (italics added).
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Navaneethakrishnan, D. (2021). Production, Innovation, and Disequilibrium. In: Velupillai, K. (eds) Keynesian, Sraffian, Computable and Dynamic Economics . Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-58131-2_8
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