Does Learning Occur at the Macro Level?

Macro level analysis of living systems such as economies have often used aggregated data to compile and quantify descriptors of trends and the variables presumed to determine them. However, systems aren't static in their variables, and the short-run sloping and long-run vertical Phillips curve illustrates how decision making in the aggregate changes over time. The economic system as a whole seems to learn what to do when their is a change in government policy.

For example, Nobel Economist Robert Lucas demonstrated that The Phillips Curve doesn't work in the long run. Others such as John Muth who originally formulated the hypothesis of rational expectations had also taken exception to notions of static variables and permanent descriptors of people's economic decision making that had been commonly used in macro economics.

In the late 1960s, there was considerable empirical support for the Phillips curve; it was regarded as one of the more stable relations in economics. It was interpreted as an option for government authorities to increase employment by pursuing an expansionary policy which raises inflation. Milton Friedman and Edmund Phelps criticized this interpretation and claimed that the expectations of the general public would adjust to higher inflation and preclude a lasting increase in employment: Only the short-run Phillips curve is sloping, whereas the long-run curve is vertical. This criticism was not quite convincing, however, because Friedman and Phelps assumed adaptive expectations. Such expectations do in fact imply a permanent rise in employment if inflation is allowed to increase over time.

The conclusion seems to be that over time a macro system does figure out the long term consequences of policy changes and as a result, changes its decision-making in response to its emerging rational expectations of the future. With continued experiences, living systems, in effect, "learn" just as organizations, businesses, and people do as they adjust and fine tune their behavior to accommodate their improving view of the future.

Of course, if government policy is erratic and unpredictable, their can't be much learning nor can rational expectations of the future arise. Apparently, the erratic, frantic government activity during the Great Depression created uncertainty in the economic system that hampered rational decision-making necessary for recovery.

Should Schools Help or Hold Parents?—The Policy Choice is Give Parents Either School Choice or School Assignment

Compare how differently business and public school systems treat their clients. The Adaptive Path points out how relinquishing control works as a business model (shades of Macy's in Miracle on 34th Street).

"In the days before Google, search engines like Excite, Hotbot, and Altavista larded themselves up with content in a desperate effort to delay users beyond the two pages of a search activity — search box and results. The goal was “stickiness,” discouraging people from leaving your domain. When Google launched, one reason it shocked the Web community was its focus on getting you to where you actually wanted to go. How could there be a successful business model in actively sending people away from your site?

Seven years and a $75 billion market capitalization later, that question has obviously been answered. The other search engines attempted to control your behavior. Google recognized that users maintain control, and to win they had to become users’ preferred choice."

So what would happebn if schools actually attempted to help rather than hold their clients?

Do Living Systems Have Inherent Properties of Self-Improvement?

Here's a writer responding to Chris Anderson who apparently doubts the necessarily self-improving properties of living systems. Nicholas Carr is not sure that systems like Wikipedia necessarily contain a vector of improvement: "I confess: I'm an unbeliever. My mammalian mind remains mired in the earthly muck of doubt. It's not that I think Chris is wrong about the workings of 'probabilistic systems.' I'm sure he's right. Where I have a problem is in his implicit trust that the optimization of the system, the achievement of the mathematical perfection of the macroscale, is something to be desired. To people, 'optimization' is a neutral term. The optimization of a complex mathematical, or economic, system may make things better for us, or it may make things worse. It may improve society, or degrade it. We may not be able to apprehend the ends, but that doesn't mean the ends are going to be good."

The Long Tail - Wired Blogs

Why is the tendency to use overly vague generalizations so common? Chris Anderson and his concept of The Long Tail idea is useful here. As an example, instead of lumping blogs into an institution and referring to it in the singular, it is far more powerful to think of blogs as "a Long Tail, and (therefore) it is always a mistake to generalize about the quality or nature of content in the Long Tail—it is, by definition, variable and diverse."

What is misleading is that the head of a long tail composed of the most popular products based on common appeal but often the tail products by being specialized or uncompromising often have higher quality.

Using vague generalities seems to come from intellectual laziness in developing concise and precise definitions of specificities.

Explanatory Models of Living Systems Across the Social Sciences

If all the scholars in social sciences, in all the living sciences, do, in fact, necessarily activate some model of the living system of which they are studying or observing, then we might fruitfully attempt to abstract, compare, and study the general form of each of the various models the scholars use to identify isomorphisms. For example, we might compare the model of economic systems various writers use in analyzing government intervention. As I understand it the Keynesian model believes that demand can be increased by government spending and that will stimulate the economy to increase its production and employment. If the economic system is ailing, it is fixed by providing government spending to which it then responds and improves in its employment and production.

That model of a living system rests on the notion that the economic system is directly affected and responsive to environmental inputs, that it copies or reproduces something received; it may be isomorphic with the behaviorist model of cognitive development used by the Direct Instruction folks. The DI model seems to rest on the notion that cognitive development is the sum total of learning effects. In neither model is there the idea of some internal, constructive processes that follow their own internal self-regulations such that external factor are possible triggers for their activity but in no way controlling nor to be copied.

Of course, we want to know what other genral explanatory models operate in the social sciences before we begin to trace their developments and attempt explanations of the sources of their change and development across time. Such is my hypothesis regarding isomorphisms across the social sciences, and of course much empirical and theoretic work is needed before I can speak of any confirmation.

What I have in mind is that the study of political economy is one source of these models of living systems at work in the explanations of people since political economy confronts the effects of government on the economy. The economy as a living system may be forced to confront problem that government as an outside factor presents o it. Government from the point of view of the economic system is a challenge or external problem presented by its operating environment. Thus, problems of political economy as such, could be used to the study how Congressmen and others use some explanatory model to justify their positions on government and legislation. The current stimulus proposals would seem to present a source of interesting problems of explanation and justification that could be posed to politicians to reveal politicians' thinking that would lay bare the underlying model organizing their thinking.

The economy as an object of study is a living system entailing the propeties of living systems in general. The Behaviorists appear to see cognitive systems as accommodations, that is, merely as the effects of teaching and education.