From: Jurriaan Bendien (adsl675281@TISCALI.NL)
Date: Fri Apr 20 2007 - 13:41:03 EDT
Paul Cockshott et al. explain their concept of statistical and mechanical equilibrium on p. 158f here: http://www.dcs.gla.ac.uk/~wpc/reports/info_book.pdf The notion of equilibrium developed is a distributional equilibrium, as contrasted with an equilibrium of enforced and secure private property ownership (there could be a distributional disequilibrium, although enforced and secure private property ownership remains in equilibrium). What Paul Cockshott et al. really mean by a statistical equilibrium, is a constancy or stability in income & wealth distribution, which persists regardless of the pattern of transactions in economic exchange. The constancy or stability is defined in terms of lack of quantitative change. A supplementary "physical" defn is provided by Farjoun & Machover: "a system is in a state of equilibrium when all its internal forces neutralise each other, so that if left to its own devices the system will continue in the same state, and will be perturbed away from it only under the influence of outside forces. If the state of equilibrium is stable and the system is subjected to a small disturbance by external forces, the internal forces of the system create a negative feedback effect, pulling the system back towards equilibrium. the system will then either converge to that state of equilibrium or oscillate around it. Note: Which forces count as internal and which as external depends on the way the system is conceptualised. But the distinction is not arbitrary, inasmuch as one conceptualisation is more appropriate than another. In any case, a given force cannot count simultaneously as both internal and external." (Laws of Chaos, p. 33). As I noted in a previous post (e.g. Friday 11 november 2005), numerous different notions of equilibrium can be entertained, depending on what the things are that are being equilibrated or balanced out. Any notion of equilibrium is meaningless, unless we can specify what is being equilibrated. Jurriaan
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