Abstract
The principles of political economy, particularly those of the Anglo-Saxon origin, were kinds of utilitarian-based moral philosophy. In this sense, the idea of individualistic rational utility is the essential ontological factor of empiricism to generate the source of all human behaviour in the economic system. Thus, many economists have so far been inclined to indulge in an individualistic utility-based prediction, almost everywhere that human nature matters. While the Schumpeterian epistemological view of the continental idealisms is construed as the triangular theoretical layers of statics, dynamics, and sociodynamics. Without any modification of the ontological–epistemological constructs in economics, we can no longer capture the essence of the rapidly salient evolution of complex economic systems in the modern times.
Reprinted from Dynamisches Denken und Handeln. Philosophie und Wissenschaft in einer komplexen Welt. Festschrift für Klaus Mainzer zum 60. Geburtstag. Aruka, Y., The Moral of Heterogeneous Economic Interaction in the Face of Complexity, 171–183 (2007). With kind permission from Hirzel Verlag, Stuttgart.
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Notes
- 1.
As jump-started by Nelson and Winter’s book, evolutionary economics promptly gained popularity all over the world at the end of the last century. See Nelson and Winter (1982).
- 2.
Arthur depicted this capitalism vividly. Casino capitalism should bring on the “winner-take-all society” if we focus on the distribution side. See Frank and Cook (1995).
- 3.
These particular rationalities are examined in some detail and their failures are argued in Aruka (2006).
- 4.
Such a social transition rate as generating solidarity will be operated in the master equation of the social process. According to the steps of the modelling procedure by Weidlich, we will need a set of various personal attitudes in order to set out the social configuration in our model. When we sketch this configuration, we also need the concept of strength and direction of preference, as being touched later. In particular, direction may be argued as a trend of the social configuration. See Weidlich (2000, Sect. 3.2).
- 5.
In addition to such a state transition, we will use the information on many attributes of the individual like age, gender, income to refine an actual utility function: “The analyst has to identify those that are likely to explain the choice of the individual. There is no automatic process to perform this identification. The knowledge of the actual application and the data availability plays an important role in this process”. Bierlaire (1997, p.4).
- 6.
Here i is omitted for simplicity.
- 7.
We use the scaled preferences such as \( \mathop {\hat{U}}\nolimits (x|\,y;t): = U(x|\,y;t) - {\rm ln}\sum\limits_{x^\prime} \,{e^{U(x^\prime|\,y;t)}}. \)
- 8.
See Sects. 9.1–9.4 in Weidlich (2000).
- 9.
We define a Markov chain \( {X_t} \) on the state space \( S \) which dynamically describes a flux of probabilities. In a state \( j \) at time \( t \), we can imagine a probability \( {P_j}(t) = { \Pr }({X_t} = j) \). We suppose that there are a number of independent agents, each of whom is in one of finite microeconomic states, and its state evolves according to the master equation
$$ \frac{{d{P_j}(t)}}{{dt}} = \sum\limits_{k \ne j} \,[{P_k}(t){w_{kj}} - {w_{jk}}{P_j}(t)]\ \rm for\ j \in S, $$where \( {w_{kj}} \) denotes the transition rates from state \( j \) to state \( k \), or the in-flow rates, and \( {w_{jk}} \) the rates from \( k \) to \( j \), the out-flow rates.
- 10.
The applications of this method are strenuously developed by Aoki (2002), for instance.
- 11.
If we had this critical situation, we would have a kind of entropy maximization.
- 12.
The rational postulates on individualistic behaviour will not necessarily guarantee selfishness of the result of choice. Bowles and Gintis ask in the following manner: “Is cooperation, then, just an expression of self-interest? Do other-regarding preferences such as a reciprocity and altruism play no role in the explanation of human cooperation? The answer hinges on whether most forms of cooperation are altruistic [in society] or mutualistic [in biology]?” (Bowles and Gintis 2005, p. 22).
- 13.
It is noted that Akiyama smartly defined the class of games as dependent games such as Avatamsaka games. See Akiyama and Aruka (2006).
- 14.
See the full text of Mozi (Chinese and English) at http://chinese.dsturgeon.net/text.pl?node=101&if=en
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Aruka, Y. (2011). The Moral Science of Heterogeneous Economic Interaction in Face of Complexity. In: Aruka, Y. (eds) Complexities of Production and Interacting Human Behaviour. Physica, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-7908-2618-0_8
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