Naive Intervention – Part 1: From Antifragile to Models Behaving Badly

Max’s blogs are consistently, both thoughtful and thought-provoking…

Not all science suffers from naive intervention.

What physicists do differently to economists is that they learn from nature. They observe and measure and then a hypotheses is turned into a theory and then a model. It works when it predicts. In economics and business naive interventionists build a model and then turn it into a religion. There is neither proof nor validation and at best there is anecdotal evidence. But economy is a social science and not physics. Social systems are dealt with through biology. Theories of economy must follow the same natural dynamics of complexity that drive all biological systems. A biologist like E.O. Wilson can teach us more about economy than any theoretical economist can. Wilson said that Karl Marx was right about Communism. Marx just applied it to the wrong species. It does work fine for ants!