The Great Recession

The American economy is in what I believe history will call “The Great Recession.” The recession is part of the fallout of the subprime crisis discussed elsewhere on this site. The linked to the essay, "The Great Recession: Vision Problems of the Experts and Concepts Useful in Avoiding Such Debacles" is the point of departure for the seminar along with a reference to the concept of consilience.

The opening paragraph of the “Great Recession” item is: "Former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan testified before Congress I did not forecast a significant decline because we never had a significant decline in prices. He was referring to housing prices. A decade earlier, the debacle of Long-Term Capital Management, with leadership from two Nobel Prize winners, occurred when forces exogenous to the sophisticated mathematical models drove prices down to devastating levels. Both cases were outliers in the distribution of expected events seen by application of the inductive reasoning used in the sophisticated econometric models."

This is from the essay shown by the Great Depression.pdf. That essay contains many links to the rest of the site and presents an overview of topics that may be included. Readers may comment on that paragraph or any other item or link in that essay.

The intent is bring other disciplines into the analytical system so as to get a better forecast of outcomes. Progress will depend, in large part, on bringing in researchers early in their career because as Max Plank said in an earlier era "A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and new generation grows up that is familiar with it."

As part of this first blog entry it is important to consider the concept of consilience. The idea is that, “everything in our world is organized in terms of a small number of fundamental natural laws that comprise the principles underlying every branch of learning. That is the thrust of the Edward O. Wilson book, Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge, argues for the fundamental unity of all knowledge. Notes for Consilience When I reviewed the book at ASPEC one participant asked what were the natural laws or principles. My response was that Wilson did not specify. However, in thinking about the answer I came up with a few; balance, leverage, inertia/momentum, and especially important in real estate timing and location (or Einstein’s time and space). These are discussed in a general sense near the end of Part II of the Book in Progress, What Were They Thinking? In Chapter 6. Addition discussion of an application is in Part III, Improving Decisions: Toward a New Age of Enlightenment, Part III: Strategic Decision Making , of the Book in Progress.

The comment that follows this blog entry is one extracted from as essay presented at a seminar I led at ASPEC.

Consilience: A Biological Example by John Khosh

The human body is a good example for demonstrating consilience which implies that what is true for part of nature is true for all of nature. A single set of laws of nature is applicable to all things in the universe, animate and inanimate. The laws of thermodynamic, electromagnetic, gravity etc. are subsets of the single set of laws.

A dynamic and holistic approach is applicable to all biosystems including cells, students and colleges. The phenomena in biosystems are not isolated events, nor stationary. For example, consider health. Our biological system attempts to be self corrective. It is dynamic. As a whole, our health is a matter of degree; and, the degree keeps changing as the biological systems get results from a dynamic process. The tendency is to move toward balance.

Each bodily system is made of organs, which are made up of tissues, which are made up of cells, which are made up of molecules etc. The complexity process in our hierarchical organizations creates some differences in properties in higher layers of organization that may not exist in the lower layer of the system, but the underlying principles are the same for a heart that pumps blood and a water pump in an automobile.

The linked essay Consilience: A Biological Example provides examples from the human body as system, with its various subsystems. The concern is with the wide range of the body’s scale of subsystems that are treated as systems. The synchronization of their dynamic activity is responsible for survival of a biosystem. This biosystem includes the fourteen human's biological systems Synchronization is only possible because of information present in the DNA.

Posted by Maury Seldin on behalf of John Khosh. The comment was prepared prior to blog opening and the link is to an essay prepared by Dr. Khosh for Maury's seminar at ASPEC. Dr. John Khosh is a founding member of the American Hoslistic Medical Association.