GAME THEORY - September 22, 2011

The reality of Game Theory reveals the weakness that underlies its role in destroying the economy. The theory involves antagonists playing a game for a prize, and in order to do what usually passes for mathematics, and thus for science, the prize, and its probabilities, has to be reckoned in real numbers. The fact that the economy includes many things, like life and health and justice and education, which cannot be measured in mutually understood numbers, reveals why the attempt to reduce it to a game over real numbers cannot take account of some of the subtleties, and this gives the lie to the claim of the economic theorists that they are analyzing with science. The attempt to measure things in imaginary units called utiles ends up measuring them in dollars. Thus this 3-cushion shot gives us the 300-year-old error that money alone measures the effectiveness of economics. In the region of elections, we see the failure of that theory. The New Labour Party in UK acted in accord with the theory when they moved their policies to as near that of the Tories as they could without erasing any difference, but in the end they came so close that a substantial portion of their base in UK labor did not see enough difference between them and the Tories to make it worthwhile voting for Gordon Brown. Now that the Tories are in the saddle, they have plenty of opportunity to see that difference, and who knows how long the workers who abandoned the New Labour Party will sweat and bleed under that yoke before they will be able to rescue their lives and those of their children and grandchildren. Now Obama has the chance to make the error of Blair and Brown and submit US to the yoke of the tea party, in which case the ruination of obsolete economics may extend a century. The threat, as in UK, has no obvious road back to sanity if they regain the whip hand.