Related papers: Economics cannot isolate itself from political the…
In economic theory, an agent chooses from available alternatives -- modeled as a set. In decisions in the field or in the lab, however, agents do not have access to the set of alternatives at once. Instead, alternatives are represented by…
Macroeconomics essentially discusses macroeconomic phenomena from the perspectives of various schools of economic thought, each of which takes different views on how macroeconomic agents make decisions and how the corresponding markets…
Economies are complex man-made systems where organisms and markets interact according to motivations and principles not entirely understood yet. The increasing dissatisfaction with the postulates of traditional economics i.e. perfectly…
This paper presents mathematics as a general science of computation in a way different from the tradition. It is based on the radical philosophical standpoint according to which the content, meaning and justification of experience lies in…
The aim of this essay is to propose a conception of mathematics that is fully consonant with naturalism. By that I mean the hypothesis that everything that exists is part of the natural world, which makes up a unitary whole.
It is hard to overstate the importance that the concept of symmetry has had in every field of physics, a fact alluded to by the Nobel Prize winner P.W. Anderson, who once wrote that physics is the study of symmetry. Whereas the idea of…
We believe that economic design and computational complexity---while already important to each other---should become even more important to each other with each passing year. But for that to happen, experts in on the one hand such areas as…
The intrinsic difficulties in building realistic climate models and in providing complete, reliable and meaningful observational datasets, and the conceptual impossibility of testing theories against data imply that the usual Galilean…
An explanation for the political processes leading to the sudden collapse of empires and states would be useful for understanding both historical and contemporary political events. We seek a general description of state collapse spanning…
In this paper an interesting application of mathematics in economics is presented: the formulation of the theory of consumer basic problem, grounded on the concept of preferences relation and operationalized with optimization tools.
Practicing mathematicians often assume that mathematical claims, when they are true, have good reasons to be true. Such a state of affairs is "unreasonable", in Wigner's sense, because basic results in computational complexity suggest that…
"Mathematicians, like physicists, are pushed by a strong fascination. Research in mathematics is hard, it is intellectually painful even if it is rewarding, and you would not do it without some strong urge." [D. Ruelle]. We shall give some…
As the twin movements of open science and open source bring an ever greater share of the scientific process into the digital realm, new opportunities arise for the meta-scientific study of science itself, including of data science and…
Could John Kerry have gained votes in the 2004 Presidential election by more clearly distinguishing himself from George Bush on economic policy? At first thought, the logic of political preferences would suggest not: the Republicans are to…
Recent work on the logical structure of non-locality has constructed scenarios where observations of multi-partite systems cannot be adequately described by compositions of non-signaling subsystems. In this paper we apply these frameworks…
Many widely used models amount to an elaborate means of making up numbers--but once a number has been produced, it tends to be taken seriously and its source (the model) is rarely examined carefully. Many widely used models have little…
Environmental determinism in the past followed from the belief that the gods bestowed political power and the best possible weather on the sponsors of early scholars. Although later discredited in academia because of the associations with…
When a decision, such as the approval or denial of a bank loan, is delegated to a computer, an explanation of that decision ought to be given with it. This ethical need to explain the decisions leads to the search for a formal definition of…
Courses in mathematical methods for physics students are not known for including too much in the way of mathematical rigour and, in some ways, understandably so. However, the conditions under which some quite commonly used mathematical…
Being mathematics a natural language to Mankind and to physics, it must be constantly adapted to our necessities and our natural perception. Then, mathematical concepts are not absolute to reality. Although mathematical theories are…