If you accept the science on climate change, then you must accept [insert industry paid science here]

http://www.smh.com.au/environment/conservation/fish-kill-not-linked-to-gladstone-dredging-acting-premier-20120104-1pko0.html

"If it's good enough to accept the science on climate change then it's good enough to observe the science on issues around Gladstone Harbour," he said.

Oh really. So extensive, decades long research peer-reviewed by hundreds of scientists across the globe over a period of many years even in the face of opposition from big-moneyed interests is suddenly equivalent to a non-peer-reviewed environmental assessment paid for by either the mining-hungry, gung-ho, Government of Queensland, or some big mining company, or both? More than likely it was carried out over a very short period of time, and those things always have a very limited scope and often end up as "tick in the box" exercises, which even the most pig-ignorant of politicians must know.

No, Dear Sir, they are NOT equivalent!

"CO2 isn't pollution!" - Some simple answers to a non-argument...

There are plenty of things being said against the theory of anthropogenic climate change. It would be dismissive to just say that it's all nonsense, but you'd think that when people have such easy access to answers to every "question" posed by so-called "climate sceptics", it's hard to take the constant stream of attacks seriously.

One "argument" that has really got to me of late is the one in the title - "CO2 isn't pollution!" I don't know why this one gets to me so much. I think a lot of it is to do with the fact that it is such a non sequitur. There is no logical relationship between the fact that humans, by adding too much extra CO2 to the atmosphere are driving the climate (not the weather) into an unstable state which, in all likelihood, will be highly unfavourable to all extant life on earth, including humans, and the fact that carbon is a part of all life on earth as a normal part of the metabolism of plants and animals.

To be clear, there is a relationship underlying the two statements above but it is not one of logical negation. In other words, the fact that carbon is a part of all life on earth does NOT disprove the scientific bases for Anthropogenic Climate Change.

Perhaps it's the word "pollution" that so irks people who take this fallacious line of argumentation. Well, if that's the case, how about this - something else that's in your body, which you could not live without, which is a vital part of the cycle of life on earth, and which is also considered pollution in the wrong places, or at the wrong times, or just in too great a concentration (in this case, people might say any amount is too much).

We're speaking, of course, about faeces. Shit. Crap. Food, which you can't live without, goes into your body. As it's being processed by your body, it eventually turns into something you can't stand to be near. Then you get rid of it. If you put it in a river, or in the ocean and, if humans need to access that resource later (for drinking water, or swimming) then it is very definitely pollution.

Does this mean that drinking contaminate water doesn't cause typhoid fever, to take just one example? No, of course it doesn't. There is no logical negation relationship between those two facts.

There are so many examples like this, I could go on all day. You need iron to live, but if your drinking water had too much iron in it, you'd certainly say it was "polluted" or "contaminated". OXYGEN! Without oxygen you would die very quickly, but a high oxygen environment is not only deadly to humans, but produces a highly dangerous, highly flammable environment.

Please, please! No more non sequiturs!!

Australian games development takes another blow...

In a departure from my usual rants, I've decided to take a brief diversion to discuss a topic that was once close to my heart - the games development industry in Australia.

In the last three or four years the industry in Australia has basically halved in size, mostly due to the closure of the biggest developer - Krome.

In another blow to the industry, THQ today announced that they would be shutting both of their studios here in Australia - THQ Studio Australia in Brisbane, and Blue Tongue in Melbourne. Some more details here:

http://au.games.ign.com/articles/118/1187090p1.html

So what's been happening with the Australian games industry of late?

Obviously, it's no single problem, but, in my opinion, as someone who has worked in the industry in Australia and overseas on and off since 1998, the fundamentals were never very good. For anyone who has met or worked with the owners of the companies here, they were, by and large, and not to put too fine a point on it, not exactly "geniuses". They were generally very good at getting government grants of various kinds, or convincing big name publishers to pour money on the fire of their inexperience, but not particularly good at marketing, planning, people management, project management, etc. Many of them assumed that because they liked playing games that they should therefore design them for a living, but with no actual skills of their own, lived their dreams on cheap credit, loans from family and friends, and the aforementioned hapless publishers.

They were also quite good at a manoeuvre known affectionately as "the circle jerk" which anyone who had the misfortune of attending the first years of the AGDC got to see at close range. Not pretty.

This is just one segment of the problem though. Not all the owners were terrible at managing the business side of things. Krome was a company that managed to get its products out and keep clients happy. Sure, it did that by screwing its workers into the ground and demanding their souls, but plenty of less successful companies did this as well and never released anything. Soul-crushing crunching seems to be par for the course in the games industry worldwide, by and large.

The other major fundamental weakness, as I see it, is addressed by the question "why would overseas publishers invest here?" After all, the industry has never been big, there's never been a big talent pool to choose from here, and any companies that wanted to do decent work ended spending a fortune on importing workers. Why? This one's particularly relevant in the light of today's news since THQ falls into this category.

The answer seemed to rely on one simple element - Australia wages were lower, when translated into US dollars, than US wages. In the early 2000s when the industry was really starting to build up, the Aussie dollar bought about 50c to 60c US. And although Australia's property boom had already started, it was really only just starting to go nuts about this same time. So overseas publishers would see *relatively* low wages, a low cost of living (hey, it didn't always cost $8.50 for a sandwich from a local cafe!) and an untapped source of programmers and budding artists, all in an English-speaking country with reasonably low cost-of-business.

Oh, and don't forget the tax incentives.

Ever wondered why most of Australia's industry was in Brisbane and Melbourne? Well, wonder no more. Thanks to the miracle of tax incentives, coupled with the low Australian dollar, Australia (and Brisbane and Melbourne in particular) looked like attractive places to set up business. Not to produce world-class AAA titles. No, those are made where there's already lots of great talent. Overseas publishers needed developers to produce tie-in games (movie and TV series) and cheap sports games. These are generally seen as being more towards the "commodity" end of the production spectrum. Now, I'm not saying they're always easy to produce, or crappy products, but they generally require less "talent" and more grunt. Perfect work for a country with a cheap cost of production.

By the mid-2000s the exchange rate was hovering more around the 70 to 80 US cent mark, and things started to look shaky. Thanks to the mining boom the Australian dollar continued its rapid climb towards parity with the US dollar. The industry here started looking really shaky. The first big shock of the GFC (sometimes also called "The Great Recession") gave Australian games companies a short reprieve with international currency speculators panic selling the Australian dollar back below 70 US cents at the end of 2008/start of 2009, but the climb towards parity (and now beyond) resumed. Along with the mining boom, we also have the US Fed to thank for this - printing several tonnes of money (aka quantitative easing) was, after all, designed to devalue the US dollar.

For a country that was sold to corporate management as a source of cheap labour for easy-money tie-in games, this was all a slow death. Add to that the Australian house price bubble and mining boom savaging Australia's "low cost of living" in less than a decade, and this situation seems almost inevitable.

If you sell yourself as cheap labour, you'd better always stay cheap. Unless governments keep increasing the incentives for these companies to stay, there is just no reason why their money should keep flowing here. These guys have no loyalty - even 10 years of tax incentives would mean nothing to these people. If the money doesn't add up they will just pack up shop and leave. It's that simple. In fact, they'd probably be opening themselves to a lawsuit from their shareholders if they did anything else!

Who will survive these turbulent times in the Australian games industry? A few truly home grown companies who have loyalty to the country, and can produce decent quality titles, or are small enough to sustain themselves off mostly home-grown sales in Australian specific sports. We're probably still reasonably cheap in relation to the UK, so perhaps those with UK parent companies are somewhat safer. Perhaps one day the industry will bloom again, and we can hope that next time, somehow, it will have better fundamentals...

Good luck to all the developers over at THQ! At least there's work in mining...

The World according to W.O.R.Ms - White, Old, Rich Men run the show...

Let me start off by saying that I have nothing against WORMs (White, Old, Rich Men) per se. I myself am fairly pale, I hope to grow old one day, I have no objection to becoming wealthy, and I am male, so I could be in this category one day.

I am also writing this from an Australian point of view in 2011. In other countries where the majority is non-white (or perhaps Australia in the next few decades), then the class of status quo supporters who've got the game sewn up, so to speak, will likely not be white. They will, however, likely be Old, Rich and Male, so more generically it would just be ORMs, but I like the above acronym better.

In another post I spoke of politicians all singing from the same song sheet on another topic. Today I would like to relate a few instances of business people pushing the same line so identically that you would have to assume it has been fed to them. I'm not talking about a conspiracy theory here, just that perhaps some business representative groups have made press releases with a bunch of incorrect facts on them. However, a quick glance at the Business Council of Australia shows that they're not pushing a climate change denialist line, even if they are, as you would expecting, protecting their own interests.

So why have I seen or heard stories lately of these "Captains of Industry" quoting lines that sound, essentially, as though they come straight from the Gallileo Movement's website, or straight from the parrot's mouth himself (Alan Jones). Some months ago I heard the CEO of some Australian country respond to a question about how his business would handle a carbon tax by spouting off the usual nonsense about what percentage of global emissions humans represent, and then what percentage of the human contribution is down to Australia. I mean, this is basic, basic stuff that has been gone over and over, and the counter-responses to this are easily available from a variety of sources. Just for the sake of completeness, I will repeat them here.

Firstly, the whole world system emits and absorbs carbon, but humans have increased the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere. What we are concerned with is net emissions, because these contribute to the growth in atmospheric CO2 concentration. In fact, the oceans have absorbed half of all the CO2 we've emitted since the beginning of the industrial age. The significant contributors to net emissions are humans and volcanos, and volcanoes emit about 1% as much as we do. Basically, the increase in CO2 concentration in the atmosphere is all down to us.

The second part of the argument, that Australia represents only a tiny percentage of the world's CO2 emissions - usually quoted as 1% - listed as 1.32% on the wiki page on the subject. Take a look at that list. The most emissions from a sovereign nation come from China - 23.33% of global emissions. Think about that - China, which is a massive exporter, and has over 1.3 BILLION people, emits 23.33%. We emit roughly 5% of that, but we are only 23 million people - ie., we are roughly 1.7% of their population. Any argument about our contribution being too small is a furphy. We are amongst the world's worst per capita emitters, and when it comes to solving a global problem caused by the emissions that each little human being makes being added together, the worst individual emitters shoulder the greatest personal responsibility for fixing the problem.

Another story of these glorious Captains of Industry comes to me from a friend at a medical devices company in Sydney where the CEO recently held court at an annual meeting for staff. It was meant to be just an update on how the company was going and future changes, etc. Boring stuff, but it happened just one day after the Australian Prime Minister announced the details of the carbon tax package. Now, this particular CEO is Australian, but he lives now in the US. He is a well educated man in the field of chemical engineering, and much of his career life has been spent in the health sciences. You would think he knows how to read a scientific paper, and how to understand simple logic. He has been running a successful company for over 20 years. Not your average bonehead, by any stretch of the imagination. Well, apparently he started with a tirade about the "marxist" government in the US. I guess that's what Barack Obama gets for trying to get semi-decent universal healthcare for his country, even though he inherited a massive screwup as a result of financial deregulation and  bailed out the top-end of town with taxpayer money. Notwithstanding that the GFC started while George Bush Jr. was asleep behind the wheel, this certain CEO chose to blame the whole mess on the man who inherited the problem.

At this stage, you might start to doubt his objectivity somewhat...

This marxist topic apparently led him to begin a rant on how marxist the Australian government is, and how they are such a bunch of buffoons. The main focus of his attack was on how ridiculous it was to tax CO2 when CO2 is a crop nutrient. How ridiculous indeed! He gave the chemical formula for photosynthesis and how CO2 was involved. This received a warm response from the audience. He apparently also repeated the above claim about human's contribution to any possible problem, which doesn't exist anyway, as far as he was concerned.

When I heard this from my friend, it was what made me think they were all being fed their information from the same source. This CEO is a seemingly well educated man, and he spouts this sort of nonsense as though it's absolute fact. There's nothing to even disbunk in his statements about photosynthesis, etc. It is just completely illogical and irrelevant. I can't believe that an intelligent person would even think to speak such nonsense in private, let alone in front of his entire company. His entire line of argumentation was: CO2 is involved in photosynthesis. Fact. Therefore, CO2 can't be causing any problems and therefore all this global warming stuff is nonsense too. These two things just aren't linked.

Oxygen is vital for life, but if you have too much of it you will die. That is also a fact. So what? Plants will die if the CO2 concentration is too high. Does that mean it's bad? Only in the wrong concentrations, in the wrong places or at the wrong times. Ozone is vital for all life on earth when it's in the upper atmosphere as it protects us from UV radiation, but down at our level it's a main component of smog.

None of which means anything either way for anthropogenic climate change.

These guys are supposedly well educated, they tell us they're brilliant - that's why they deserve to get paid thousands of times more than their company's average salary, isn't it? They're the Big Thinkers, solving all the hard problems that mere mortals couldn't handle. And yet, on a topic of literally earth shattering importance, they haven't even bothered to do the most meagre of research, or perhaps they even lack the ability to understand it. The next time I hear an Australian businessman complaining about this or that problem that the government should solve for them, I'll continue to believe that they probably could do a lot better in their businesses without needing handouts or preferential treatment, or whatever else they demand from the taxpayers.

I guess I should remember that these WORMs grew up in the post war years. They never had to really struggle - all the machinery of war was turned to helping humanity do less and less actual labour, and fossil fuel slaves and wide-open spaces made it seem like anything was possible. They all made their wealth in a society that based it's very existence upon those classic great lies which modern industry with its capability to reshape the earth, and humanity with its massive population growth, has proven to be false - nature is limitless, we can't make a difference, GDP growth reflects real growth in jobs and prosperity for all, etc. Whether or not they ever fought against the status quo in their youths is irrelevant. Now it is their very lifeblood - it supports their wealth and power. Anything that attacks that is likely to be met with fierce resistance. Add to that the fact that this particular problem that could change our earth for all life in devastating ways, and that the responsibility for this reckless growth in consumption and population lies with them and the policies of governments that support them, and you will realise that it would be basically impossible to convince a WORM of something like climate change.

Should we even waste our breath on trying?

We can't save the planet now we've got too much else to do!

Good old Gerard Henderson has been at it again. His most recent article in the Sydney Morning Herald entitled "A time for Australia's consolidation, not isolation, on carbon emissions" continues his long history of representing the traditional view of Australia's politicians and business "leaders" that Australia shouldn't do anything if the big boys haven't done it first.

His comments on the recently released Productivity Commission report  try to make Australians feel silly for thinking that we should do anything about human-induced climate change because our trading partners aren't doing much more (in his opinion) than us and the BRIC countries (Brazil, Russia, India and China) aren't doing anything at all in terms of a carbon tax or emissions trading scheme. And the American economy might experience a "double-dip". Ipso facto, we shouldn't be wasting our time on this climate change nonsense - after all, there's an economy to look after!

 I have to assume that Mr Henderson does not understand anthropogenic climate change, because surely no one who understands the science, the risks and the consequences could be so blithe as to ask "but what's everyone else doing?" before asking "what can I do to stop this?". I say "understand" and not "believe" because, unlike the religions of the world (buddhism, catholicism, islam, communism and neoliberalism), it does not require "belief", but rather an understanding of basic physics and humanity's reliance on the "services" nature delivers to us for free.

But I digress. I really want to focus on some specific issues as I see them with his article:

"As followers of the US media know, there is almost no debate on climate change there."

Not so. There's plenty of "debate" (acrimonious gainsaying might be a more appropriate term), which sets the US apart from the picture in Europe where the populous generally seems to have a better grasp of the issue and the debate really is largely "over". The US and Australia are the great bastions and perpetrators of climate denial fictions. Don't compare tweedledum with tweedledee in order to convince anyone of the soundness of your argument!

"It found Australia was in the "mid-range" - along with the US and China - with respect to the electricity generation sector. Germany and Britain are out in front of Australia, but the likes of India, Japan and South Korea are behind."

Remind me again - which of these nations are the worst polluters per capita? From amongst the so-called advanced nations, it's the US, followed closely by Australia. No wonder the US and Australia lead the world in self-interested, professional climate sceptics. China is the world's biggest carbon polluter overal, but, along with India, they are way out in front in terms of population. China and India are 99th and 140th in terms of per capita emissions! Good old Australia though - 15th biggest carbon polluter in total (not per capita) in the whole world, but 50th in terms of population. Like I said, Mr Henderson clearly doesn't understand climate change because, if he did, these numbers which show where we rank in terms of dealing with this issue would make his blood boil for a different reason. Then again, considering his comments about the US in the article ("At the national level, Barack Obama no longer talks much about climate change."), it's pretty clear that whatever the US does ranks very high in Mr Henderson's thinking. This is par for the course for people who see themselves as identifying with a right-wing ideology.


"The EU's scheme does not cover road transport fuels but is scheduled to cover aviation and petrochemicals in 2012 and 2013 respectively."

I'm quite surprised he mentioned this, since it plays strongly against his argument that we shouldn't be doing as much as we are planning to. EU members already pay over AU$2 per litre for petrol, and it only looks so "good" due to the strong Australian dollar. By and large, the price difference is tax. That high level of tax on transport fuels has probably helped the EU achieve a significantly lower level of per-capita emissions than Australia, along with a significantly lower energy usage. Adding a new carbon tax on top of that would be redundant. So, by 2013, two massive carbon emitting industries will also covered under the EU's cap-and-trade scheme. Note that I'm not analysing how well their scheme has worked here, merely that they will have a fairly all-encompassing scheme. In contrast, Australia is only now implementing a carbon pollution tax on 1,000 big polluters, which plays well to the Green's definite anti-business sentiment, and also to the great masses who want to do something but don't want to pay for it. Who knows when an ETS will be implemented? Malcolm Turnbull's old mates over at Goldman Sachs are salivating now at the massive commissions they'll be able to charge on such an abstract market, but again, I digress.

"That's all. In the US, California is the only state that is committed to implementing a scheme by next year."

California being the 8th largest economy in the world. When you put it like that, this move is pretty significant, especially given the US's role as one of the biggest purveyors of anti-science rhetoric and the inventors of neliberalism. Speaking of California, I'm reminded of their power blackouts back in about 2000 which proved that unregulated markets are NOT the cure for all the world's ills. Often quite the opposite in fact.

The concluding paragraphs in Mr Henderson's article are a smattering of random right-wing fears: EU sovereign debt crisis - which doesn't seem to be stopping German energy companies from investing big time in solar thermal reactors in North Africa - the Muslim Brotherhood taking over the Middle East, and fear about the US economy continuing to suffer at the hands of neoliberalism doctrine and cronyism, though that's not exactly how he puts it, admittedly. The idea being to try to create enough fear in the reader's mind to think there are many more important problems to deal with other than trying to save the planet.

Maybe if we make enough money we can buy another planet somewhere instead. Will that be the lowest cost option?

[Edited only to correct some typos - I really should proofread at least once!]

Tree-planting projects for producing carbon credits...

As has been pointed out by several people (a brief summary is available on wiki), tree-planting projects are sometimes a problematic source of carbon sequestration. In theory, they are brilliant, but when we talk about removing carbon from the atmosphere that we have added since the start of the industrial age, we mean to remove it permanently. It wouldn't be much of a solution if we found a way to remove CO2 for, say, 100 years. We could lock up massive quantities of CO2, only to have them returned to the atmosphere with a sudden vengeance in the not-too-distant future.

Of course, this is a problem with all carbon sequestration schemes. The problems for trees basically boil down to fires and the fact that they are so damn useful! In 100 years time, whose to say we won't have decided that we really need a certain forest after all, even if it was planted to soak up carbon emissions. Indeed, we'll hear all the same old arguments - it's only a small contribution to the problem, we have to have jobs, the economy must grow, etc.

The other problem with tree-planting projects, and it's a large problem really, is that, just like most things to do with the world of finance these days, we've let people get away with selling promises based on the future prospects of the trees (just like credit) rather than on what has actually been achieved. Now, I can understand the basis for this. Traders currently buy, for example, a whole crop of, say, fruit from a commodities market before the crop is actually harvested. They are therefore taking a risk - they pay a lower price, but risk losing money if the crop fails or is damaged, or just not the size they expected. The farmer gets capital to run their business, while taking less risk for guaranteed lower income. Sounds like a sensible arrangement, right?

For tree-planting, we are dealing with something vitally different. We are trying to permanently remove carbon from the atmosphere that results largely from the burning of fossil fuels, in order to avoid possibly catastrophic consequences due to human-induced climate change. The current practice of planting a bunch of trees and then selling the estimated lifetime carbon capture (known as forward-selling) is just untenable and too prone to error to be valid. Remember, the risk isn't that a crop of wheat won't produce the required quality or quantity over the course of a season, it's the risk that we, human beings, will seriously and perilously alter the world's climate, biodiversity, and ocean chemisty, and effectively bring about the end of our own civilisation in the process. Maybe the effects won't be all that terrify in the end, but that is the risk.

Obviously, the best way to help remove carbon emissions from the atmosphere is to make everyone pay for their emissions as they produce them, from carbon savings already in the bank. The notion of only spending what you've already earnt, rather than relying on the miracle of credit, is rather anathema in the western world, and in particular in the UK, the USA and Australia (Germans, for example, are more restrained in their use of credit). I think that our society should turn back more to relying on savings for our expenditures, rather than promises on future earning power. I'm sure some neo-classical economist could show me just how crazy an idea that is, but sometimes it seems to me that economists live in their own little world of non-dependent, linearly-aggregatable agents which we would be better off eschewing for most practical purposes.

However, carbon-offset schemes from trees don't work this way. They work on the promise of future value. Does this mean we should throw out the baby with the bathwater, and not use carbon-credits generated from tree-planting?

No, of course not. It simply means the design of the systems is not adequate. So, here's what I propose:

- Carbon Credits can be sold at the end of every year, based on the estimated growth of the trees in the plantation area over that time. Estimating this sort of quantity in hindsight is certainly much easier than predicting the future value of something.

- The plantation is under a permanent, legally-binding, type of title that recognises the carbon stored therein. The plantation can be freely sold, with the proviso that any trees that are harvested, or destroyed by fire, are offset by the owner with carbon credits bought elsewhere. The harvested/damaged areas could be replanted, of course, with new credits being generated, but it is absolutely vital that any carbon lost from the plantation is offset elsewhere.

- Trees that die and rot into the soil should be offset at the time of falling, but perhaps the full amount wouldn't need to be offset as some of the rotten tree may end up permanently stored as a deep layer of soil. I don't think the reduction should be much though, as the risk would be high that most of the carbon could be returned to the atmosphere.

Would this be expensive? Well, compared to what? Destroying up to 90% of species on our planet, causing massive social upheavals and wars over diminishing and failing resources, and seeing our children's or our grand-children's lifestyles being significantly worse than our own as a result - or, doing something real about the problem now?

But the short answer is yes. Yes, it would be expensive to try to lock up carbon permanently once it's been released from fossil fuels.

You didn't really think you could offset your domestic flight's carbon emissions for just $20 now, did you?

The madding crowd of investors...

I read something funny recently, sent to a mailing list associated with the Australian Stock Exchange, usually full of tips and advice for investors. Right there, in black and white, for all the share market investors to see, is a quick overview about why economic theories about markets are, by and large, no better than wishful thinking:

http://www.asx.com.au/resources/201105-why-markets-are-irrational.htm

This isn't news to anyone outside of the profession of economics and has been well known for quite some time. And yet, we still hear the lines about "letting the market sort it out", and how efficient using markets is - for EVERYTHING.

The article above sets out the fundamental reason why anything that economists come up with derived from their perfectly (or even semi-) rational agents maximising their utility (what does this mean in the real world, by the way? It's always taken by economists as, essentially, just money) just cannot be an accurate reflection of the real world.

My own background is in engineering, which is full of complex, non-linear mathematics. The models engineers use are, under the right conditions (which the engineer can usually control to some extent) reasonable reflections of the real-world. However, they always keep in mind the conditions under which the models apply, and the tolerances of how tightly they can fit reality. This is why, in general, buildings don't fall over, planes stay in the air and the electricity network doesn't blow up whenever someone in just the wrong place turns on a light!

Economics, on the other hand, doesn't seem to be burdened in this way. I must admit, first of all, that I am no expert in current economic theory, and that I only studied one economics at university because I had to to get my degree, and since that time I have eyed it very warily, but always assumed that I just don't understand the gory details well enough. However, whenever I have looked into the gory details, I have found them wanting. For example, when looking into how Game Theory is used in economics, my engineering training told me that here, again, were models of seemingly very limited scope and hence very limited usefulness in the real-world. However, it seems that these are the fundamental basis of economics.

The mathematics I was presented in University was hopelessly linear for systems that were obviously highly dependent on multiple variables in complex ways. Even more complex, non-linear mathematics (that might get closer to reality) wouldn't really work because, as has been noted many times before, economics deals with social systems which are characterised by complex dependencies and interactions between agents, many of whom have the same preferences at the same time. From a mathematical point-of-view, there is no "closed solution" to these systems. Worse than that, their behaviour is highly unpredictable and is driven by strong internal dynamics.

In engineering, we would seek to ensure that the system operated in a stable range, usually through negative feedback, and, especially, through avoiding positive feedback which characterises so much of the shenanigans we see in most "markets" these days. Big companies get bigger and bigger, the gap between rich people and poor people continues to widen, and speculative bubbles not only keep appearing, but seem to do so more and more frequently. The government's job should be to engineer the conditions for the system to operate with stable growth. The only aspect of economic policy that seems to be engineered for stabilising swings in the system (in Australia at least), is the macroeconomic setting of central bank exchange rates to keep inflation within controlled bands. It's a crude instrument, with quite a simple goal, but it seems to do the job. If only the government's microeconomic policies were engineered for stability as well!