Instability and Development in the Political Economy

Abstract

This discussion between Achilles and the Anteater very wittily sums up the arguments of classical economic liberalism and populist democratic theory to which Riker (1980a) refers in his recent article.

Anteater: Ah, but you fail to recognize one thing, Achilles, the regularity of statistics.

Achilles: How is that?

Anteater: For example, even though ants as individuals wander about in what seems a random way, there are nevertheless overall trends, involving large numbers of ants, which can emerge from that chaos.

Achilles: Oh I know what you mean. In fact, ant trails are a perfect example of such a phenomenon. There, you have really quite unpredictable motion on the part of any single ant-and yet, the trail itself seems to remain well defined and stable. Certainly that must mean that the individual ants are not just running about totally at random.

-Ant Fugue, in Douglas R. Hofstadter (1979, p. 316)