Paul Hoffman in _The Man Who Loved Only Numbers_ tells of itinerant
Hungarian mathematician Paul Erdos who traveled from school to school
to talk math with his colleagues and search out young math talent.
Mathematics can be quite lonely, and Erdos helped make it more
social by keeping a list of good unsolved problems, parceling them
out, and checking up on their progress. This stood in contrast to
the more ego-centric view held by some that if a problem wasnt
figured out by by them, then they would rather see it go unsolved.
It seems to me that as we head into a conference with the theme
of Economic Dynamics, some students might benefit from a list of
important and open economic questions. With this in mind (and tacitly
acknowledging that -- golly gosh! -- I wont be able to tackle them
all myself) I point out that IMF/Harvard economist Kenneth Rogoff has
compiled a list of six open International Political Economy (IPE)
questions (http://www.imf.org/external/np/vc/2002/080302a.htm):
1. Current-account imbalances
2. Government debt
3. Exchange rates
4. Capital controls
5. Persistent economic underdevelopment (Africa)
6. Moral hazard & IMF lending
System dynamics is particularly well positioned to address these
questions in part because the analytic limitations of economics
helped create them -- that is, traditional techniques tend to stress
a small number of variables in equilibrium while system dynamics
in contrast handles a larger number of variables in dynamic
disequilibrium.
One historical example that encompasses several of Rogoffs issues
is the 1997 East Asian Contagion that affected the interconnected
economies of Thailand, Indonesia, Japan, and the United States among
others. Traditional economics has trouble handling the large number
of variables required to represent each countrys economy not to
mention the connections among them, but system dynamics does not suffer
from such limitations. Moreover, system dynamics would be able to handle
the subtle nonlinearities and dramatic dynamics that stymie more linear,
equilibrium-assuming, and data-driven techniques. For those looking for
SD thesis topics or new research areas, this appears to be fertile
territory.
Best,
Corey Lofdahl
From: "Corey Lofdahl" <clofdahl@bos.saic.com>
Simulation & Information Technology Operation
Science Applications International Corporation
Burlington, Massachusetts