engleski

Self-Organization and Design in Capitalist Economies

Power-law distributions in the variables related to the US business cycle (duration of recessions and recoveries, severity of recessions, employment, industrial output, and inventories) serve to establish empirical link with two meta-theories Self-Organized Criticality (SOC) and Highly Optimized Tolerance (HOT), which come from physics and offer explanation of power-laws in the context of complex, far from equilibrium systems. Brief analysis of epistemological potential of SOC and HOT theories for economic processes in general and for business cycles in particular points that there exist certain useful insights, but on the overall they are too mechanicistic to provide an appropriate theoretic framework. SOC and HOT theories are taken also as a conceptual background for discussing self-organization and design in a capitalist economy, with special focus on the business cycle. It is argued that power-laws encountered in business cycles arise from the interplay of self-organization and institutional design, and represent one particular dimension of organization and systemic efficiency of capitalist economies. Because of the crucial role of institutions – both spontaneous and designed - in the development of Western market economies, the presence of power-laws in business cycle dynamics is by definition historic. The role of self-organization in economy is confined to the institutionally constrained business game and this still leaves considerable space for innovative, competitive and selective forces to mark the historic process of economic change ad development.

business cycles, institutions, highly optimized tolerance theory, power law, self-organized criticality, self-organization

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