Abstract
I live above a “failed” slab of the Earths crust. The Farallon Plate slid under the North American Plate over a period of many millions of years. The process of subduction seems nearly complete now, and so we have some idea of how it all worked out over time. It was a long process, it was resisted by opposing forces, and it involved a good deal of transformation of the North American Plate as well as the end of the distinctiveness of the subducted plate. There were volcanoes and other manifestations of sudden flare-ups. There was also the slow but, after the fact at least, seemingly inevitable movement into and through subduction.1
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Notes
Mary Hill’s Geology of the Sierra Nevada (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), 179–81. A chunk of the plate superducted and ended up as the Smartville Block, a 150 mile stretch of the Sierras that formed Gold Rush country. Perhaps the latter symbolizes the attempt of the mathematical economists to match the granitic hardness of physics.
Philip Mirowski, in his Machine Dreams, Economics becomes a Cyborg Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), mentions several times the effects of this mathematics-of-continuity smoothing.
Examples such as airline ticketing, Google advertising auctions, and others are surveyed in Robert E. Litan, Trillion Dollar Economists (Hoboken, NY: Wiley, 2014).
As in earlier comments, Edward Learner’s Macro economic Patterns and Stories, A Guide for MBA’s (Berlin: Springer, 2010) is my bible for current macro forecasting procedures. The paragraph in the text attempts a bit of generalization.
Diane Coyle, GDP, A Brief but Affectionate History (2014), ch. 5, discusses the pros and cons of dashboard indexes. The World Bank’s index of human welfare represents an example of the tendency toward variable creep in the history of indexes.
See Charles Duhigg’s The Power of Habit, 2014, op. cit.
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© 2016 Benjamin Ward
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Ward, B. (2016). Subduction and Resurrection. In: Dionysian Economics. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137597366_16
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137597366_16
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