Sublime

Scientific models that seek to predict the consequences of human actions with some reasonable accuracy—such as game theoretical models of economic behavior—for the most part ignore human individuality in favor of aggregated outcomes.

Homeostatic mechanisms are especially useful for handling short-range fluctuations in the environment, hence for making short-range prediction unnecessary.

In economics the particles, that is, agents, are endowed with some kind of foresight. Their image of the future affects the present.

In other words, up to recent times, the major problem of organization was efficiency in the performance of the manual worker who did what he had been told to do. Knowledge workers were not predominant in organization.

Dans leur ouvrage Practical Wisdom1, le psychologue Barry Schwartz et le politologue Kenneth Sharpe

that people—or, if you like, automata, algorithms—can and do act in situations that are not well defined.

One is the neoclassical rational-choice-equilibrium argument that markets automatically come to the Pareto optimal equilibrium for society. This was Ken Arrow and Debreu’s great work. The second is more out of the Hayekian tradition, that markets are efficient at processing distributed information to help coordinate activity in the economy. But bot

There has been no definable boundary between the sociability of work and of leisure.

he had an unerring instinct for important (and difficult) problems.