How historical analogies in newspapers of five countries make sense of major events: 9/11, Mumbai and Tahrir Square

We analyze how historical analogies are used in the media to make sense of novel events. While earlier work focused on single case studies, this is the first quantitative analysis comparing historical analogies invoked in three events in newspapers from five countries. With very high intercoder reliability we found 881 invocations of historical analogies. We found an interesting contrast between the roles of historical analogies in foreign policy decision making vs. newspaper articles. When the task is advocacy for policy choice, a compelling historical analogy will be one in which the causal mechanisms are as similar as possible to the current situation so that similar actions are likely to lead to similar results. Instead, newspapers spend more time at the early stages of sense-making and help the audience understand just a few features of the current situation. Newspapers thus offer a much broader range of historical analogies without much regard to maximizing similarity.     

Rhetoric and analogies

The art of rhetoric may be defined as changing other people's minds (opinions, beliefs) without providing them new information. One technique heavily used by rhetoric employs analogies. Using analogies, one may draw the listener's attention to similarities between cases and to re-organize existing information in a way that highlights certain regularities. In this paper we offer two models of analogies, discuss their theoretical equivalence, and show that finding good analogies is a computationally hard problem.     

Walras and Darwin: an odd couple?

General equilibrium theory and the evolutionary branches of economics and game theory take rather opposite positions in the spectrum covered by the economic science. However, we reveal and explore analogies between Darwinian dynamics and Walrasian tatonnement processes for pure exchange economies, as well as further analogies implied by these.     

On methods for avoiding the a priori numerical specification of preferences in policy selection

Generalised inverses, repeated simulations, and regression analogies are all ways of avoiding the explicit specification of a policy optimization objective. They are contrasted here with a numerical search procedure which avoids specifying, a priori, approximations to such objectives.     

Analogies and theories: The role of simplicity and the emergence of norms

We consider the dynamics of reasoning by general rules (theories) and by specific cases (analogies). When an agent faces an exogenous process, we show that, under mild conditions, if reality happens to be simple, the agent will converge to adopt a theory and discard analogical thinking. If, however, reality is complex, analogical reasoning is unlikely to disappear. By contrast, when the agent is a player in a large population coordination game, and the process is generated by all playersʼ predictions, convergence to a theory is much more likely. This may explain how a large population of players selects an equilibrium in such a game, and how social norms emerge. Mixed cases, involving noisy endogenous processes are likely to give rise to complex dynamics of reasoning, switching between theories and analogies.     

The rejection of Andrew G. Pikler from postwar American economics

This paper introduces the life and work of the Hungarian-born, U.S.-naturalized economist Andrew Pikler (1907–1984). First in 1930s Hungary and then as a refugee in postwar U.S., Pikler pursued a radical program of physics analogies in economics. This program was endorsed by (among others) John von Neumann who, however, unsuccessfully tried to introduce Pikler into the Cowles Commission. In the end, Pikler could not become a professional economist. His experience testifies to a major turn in mathematical economics in the 1950s, as this field avoided programmatic and explicit physics analogies and also diverged from cybernetics.     

Competitive selection, self-organisation and Joseph A. Schumpeter

Post-Schumpeterians have tended to use biological analogies to understand economic evolution, in contrast to Schumpeter himself. In this paper it is argued that the biological analogies used tend to be outdated and that Schumpeter espoused an intuitive understanding of the evolutionary economic process that is closely related to modern conceptions of self-organisation, suitably adapted for application in socioeconomic systems. Using a self-organisation approach, competition can be understood without recourse to biological analogy, in terms of general systemic principles that operate in the presence of variety. Viewing economic evolution in terms of complex adaptation in self-organising systems yields nonequilibrium and nonlinear perspectives that parallel Schumpeter's own intuitions, reinvigorating them as the basis of evolutionary economic thinking in the new Millennium.     

Co-evolution of firms and strategic alliances: Theory and empirical evidence

This paper reviews the analogies of evolution and co-evolution within a business context. Specifically it examines some of the essential underlying assumptions of these theories including the unit of change, the unit of selection; the mechanism of selection, and the ability to change an organisational form. The usefulness of the application of theories of both evolution and co-evolution to explain firm behaviour is examined. Empirical evidence from the UK fresh produce industry is presented to illustrate that both firms and strategic alliances evolve, co-evolve and are subject to selection at individual, dyadic and group levels simultaneously.     

The Isolated State in Relation to Agriculture and Political Economy,Part III: Principles for the Determination of Rent,the Most Advantageous Rotation Period and the Value of Stands of Varying Age in Pinewoods

Abstract

Sraffa's book artfully combines an exposition of key problems of capital theory, using economic logic, with mathematical arguments, and he created a school of disciples extending his ideas by means of both methods. His analysis of single product systems has turned out essentially to be flawless, but the problems of joint production cannot simply be solved on the basis of analogies with single production. A truncation approach and a dynamic approach are discussed in order to summarise his main results, to illustrate his method and to take stock of the recent developments of the theory.     

Forecasting emerging technologies: Use of bibliometrics and patent analysis

It is rather difficult to forecast emerging technologies as there is no historical data available. In such cases, the use of bibliometrics and patent analysis have provided useful data. This paper presents the forecasts for three emerging technology areas by integrating the use of bibliometrics and patent analysis into well-known technology forecasting tools such as scenario planning, growth curves and analogies. System dynamics is also used to be able to model the dynamic ecosystem of the technologies and their diffusion. Technologies being forecasted are fuel cell, food safety and optical storage technologies. Results from these three applications help us to validate the proposed methods as appropriate tools to forecast emerging technologies.