François Divisia
On X[edit]
2009[edit]
Dirac biographer @grahamfarmelo opines that P.D. talked nonsense about economics in Stockholm. That's correct about paragraph 3. But not 2.
I will risk challenging Graham. Dirac's larger point is OK but wrong in the specifics (as with the positron/proton flub).
First of all, by 1925 work of Algerian economist Francois Divisia, Abelian gauge potentials had already entered economics.
Additionally, Vilfredo Pareto's move towards ordinal utility can be seen as imparting a non-abelian bundle structure to welfare.
At issue in economics is that the gauge potentials are so far more determined by Levi-Civita than Yang-Mills type constructions.
If @grahamfarmelo, in 10Y the representative consumer w/ seasonal ordinal tastes is modeled by a gauged quantum string, will Dirac be right?
2021[edit]
Claim: when it comes to inflation and growth, Economists don’t even understand the theory of their *own* price and quantity indices mathematically:
WILD IDEA: Maybe the economists don't actually understand what is going on right now? https://x.com/disclosetv/status/1392488787838742536
The problem of inflation index calculation has not been adequately updated since Ragnar Frisch destroyed Irving Fisher’s attempt to axiomatize economic indices following the last great advances of F. Divisia and A. Konüs on continuous and welfare indices respectively.
Economists are holding their own field back by retaining their freedom to just cook up any revised index they want.
It’s as if physicists retained the right to define temperature differently every year based on a closed door meeting and manufactured new thermometers thereafter.
If you’re going to push us all to move to “true” “economic” indices & chain them to reflect dynamic actors (or to disguise true inflation!), you would end up chaining ordinal preferences. And you can’t do that without gauge theory because it is a problem in parallel transport.
Watch the US CPI revisions and methodology going forward. People who like to print money tend to want to change their definition of inflation and therefore don’t like anyone taking away freedom to make up methodologies to suit their political objectives involving wealth transfer.
Moral: whoever constructs CPI and GDP numbers in a dynamic economy is in a position to fake higher growth and lower inflation if they are also in a position to stop the field from debating methodological advances that would restrict the freedom to make up index number recipes. 🙏
For the technically inclined who are wondering about the measurment & theory of Inflation/CPI construction, I highly recommend the following search terms: "Konus index", "superlative index", "Divisia Index", "cycling problem", "mechanical index number", "COLA" and "chain index".
You'll soon see that "The Index Number Problem" lies beneath everything from the measurement of the impact of prices on households/consumers, to the construction of Divisa Monetary Aggregates & the measurement of the money supply.
Our gauges are riddled with error & discretion.
A thermometer is a gauge of temperature. You can't let those trying to disguise human impact on climate change make the thermometers giving them discretion.
A price index is a gauge of prices. Likewise, we need to remove as much discretion from the @BLS_gov gauge as possible.
The @UChi_Economics department has also made a draft available of the proposed non-Abelian extension of intertemporal comparison theory to bi-lateral trade specifically when trading partners *cannot* agree on prices:
https://economics.uchicago.edu/sites/economics.uchicago.edu/files/Chicago_Trade_Index_Draft.pdf
A novel feature here going from 1 to 2 pricing systems means moving from values in the Reals, to indices valued in non trivial matrix groups like GL(2,R). This necessitates use of a Dyson series using time ordered products and a specific reworking of Divisia-like integrands.
We have yet to find this anywhere in the Economics literature. If you know of any close relationships to standard theory we would like to include the reference. But as yet, as an outsider making a good faith effort, I haven’t seen these formulae anywhere. Thanks!
If we are going to have faith in the stewardship of our economy, and in particular our trade with strategic rivals like China, we will need indicators that are not afflicted with the confusions of bilateral comparisons used to disguise the effects of intrinsic economic curvature.
2023[edit]
who's your favourite economist?
François Divisia or Ken Arrow or Paul Samuelson or Satoshi or Ronald Coase etc.... would be easy to defend.
But Graciela Chichilnisky or Bert Balk would be more interesting offbeat choices I could defend. I don't think they got their due for what is coming in mathematical econ.
He was very supportive of me. If I had to make a single choice it might be him or Samuelson.
Yes, but when I said ‘brightest minds’ I meant it.
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