Wednesday, October 14, 2015

Homo Socialis By Gintis and Helbing In ROBE

Folks,

I ususally do not do this sort of advertising, but it is picking up commentary here and there, so I problably should.  The journal I edit, Review of Behavioral Economics, has recently published a major target article by Herbert Gintis and Dirk Helbing, "Homo Socialis: An Analytical Core for Sociological Theory," a long paper that presents several provocative arguments, with this issue being 1 and 2 of our second volume.  It is accompanied by 14 lively commentaries by people from several disciplines along with rejoinders by each of the coauthors. The comments are by Catherine Eckel and Jane Sell, Mauro Gallegati, Robert L. Goldstone, Michael Hechter, Geoffrey M. Hodgson, Alan G. Isaac, Paul Lewis, Siegwart Lindenberg, Michael W. Macy, Andrzej Nowak and Jorgen Andersen and Wojciech Borkowski, Paul Ormerod, Vernon L. Smith, Ulrich Witt, and David H. Wolpert.

Addendum:  Journal link now works, and issue is there.

Barkley Rosser

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

i thought j b rosser edited JEBO (one of those journals noone reads because it has stuff like j conlisk on 'bounded rationality' which is a concept that makes no sense---i know i have unbounded rationality---eg www.math.arizona.edu/~cais/papers/expos/div.pdf its well known that 1+2+3+4...=-1/12 just add it up to infinity. DAViD WOLPERT---LAST ON THE LIST---is worth reading. i see macy (my mom goes to macy's for lunch in kaneohe hawaii---a place where you will fall off the mountains as i did )is there, helbing (math similar to weidlich), gintis---famous for his amazon book reviews), ormerod (had some issue with economics or econophysics), hodgson (old school), nowak (don't get me started), gallegati (has some reasonable stuff), vernon smith (mercatus/koch center). i think i won the noble prize recently but they misspelled my name so they delivered the check to the wrong adress. oh well. i heard there is a poverty somewhere. i am confident that can be solved using a combination of maximum entropy and reimannian geometry. (i solved my poverty problem an hour ago--'time to leave' ----i got a warning from my landlord).

Anonymous said...

ps---the link didnt work for me. however i noticed the paper is on gintis' website so i downloaded it. didnt get comments though.it has a bit (or it for bit) starting on page 46---evolution of social conventions (peyton young used a more fokker-planck approximation for social conventions, as did brian arthur, aoki, and c j lumsden and e o wilson ('genes mind and culture) . i see they cite dugatkin (guppies, d s wilson, altruism) and emile durkheim. i always pay my way. most of those 'equations' look quite familiar---culture and the evolutionary process (boyd and richerson 85, now templeton foundation). My interest is more in, following N G van Kampen, higher order or non-markov processes. the issue there is to try to find something like a poincare section to find a linear approximation.

rosserjb@jmu.edu said...

media,

I edited JEBO from 2001-2010. I am founding Editor-in-Chief for ROBE for two years now.

The commenters are listed and their comments appear in alphabetical order of the lead author. Not sure what your one word comments about some of them mean. I would simply note that they represent a wide range of views and are generally fairly prominent and well known, if not all of them being universally loved or admired by everybody. I note they represent a wide range of disciplines beyond economics and sociology as well, including poli sci, psych, philosophy, and comp sci.

The link to the journal works now, but the link to the paper does not. Sorry about that.