Economics for a creative world: A response to comments

Abstract

In response to Pelikan, Witt, Foster, and Colander, we reiterate our main contributions: (1) our more careful demonstration of why 'mechanistic' models have limited application, (2) our account of novelty as a system-level phenomenon, and (3) our identification of 'novelty intermediation' as important to creative economic dynamics. We also address some of the criticisms raised by the commenters. Pavel Pelikan's idea of stochastic causality does not somehow eliminate unprestateable change. We do challenge certain strong notions of universal causation, as Ulrich Witt notes, but such notions are probably best abandoned. Although, we do not repudiate mathematical modeling as our paper suggested to John Foster, we may give less scope than Foster to such methods. Finally, we point out the extreme difficulty of implementing the sort of engineering vision Colander articulates.