Academics From England

"Outside the firm, price movements direct production, which is co-ordinated through a series of exchange transactions on the market. Within a firm, these market transactions are eliminated and in place of the complicated market structure with exchange transactions is substituted the entrepreneur-coordinator, who directs production. It is clear that these are alternative methods of coordinating production. Yet, having regard to the fact that, if production is regulated by price movements, production could be carried on without any organization at all might we ask, why is there any organization?"

"A firm consist of the system of relationships which comes into existence when the direction of resources is dependent on an entrepreneur."

"I can't remember [of a good regulation]. Regulation of transport, regulation of agriculture—agriculture is a, zoning is z. You know, you go from a to z, they are all bad. There were so many studies, and the result was quite universal: The effects were bad."

"If economists wished to study the horse, they wouldn't go and look at horses. They'd sit in their studies and say to themselves, "what would I do if I were a horse?""

"Why... are there any market transactions at all? Why not all production carried on by one big firm?... First, as a firm gets larger, there may be decreasing returns to the entrepreneur function, that is, the costs of organizing additional transactions within the firm may rise... Second, it may be that as the transactions which are organized increase, the entrepreneur fails to place the factors of production in the uses where their value is greatest, that is, fails to make the best use of the factors of production... Finally, the supply price of one or more of the factors of production may rise, because the "other advantages" of a small firm are greater than those of a large firm."

"The question always is, will it pay to bring an extra exchange transaction under the organizing authority? At the margin, the costs of organizing within the firm will be equal either to the costs of organizing in another firm or to the costs involved in leaving the transaction to be “organised” by the price mechanism. Business men will be constantly experimenting, controlling more or less, and in this way equilibrium will be maintained. This gives the position of equilibrium for static analysis."

"In my youth it was said that what was too silly to be said may be sung. In modern economics it may be put into mathematics."

"Writers after Coase have referred to the authority structure of the firm as a "visible hand" that works in combination with Smith's invisible hand. The everyday fact that employers exercise power over their employees — not news to most employees — had been a central theme in Marx's economics, but it was (and generally continues to be) overlooked by most neoclassical economists. Early in his studies Coase noted the similarity between the hierarchical organization of capitalist firms, with their reliance on command relations, and the then-existing system of centralized economic planning in the Communist countries, where production was carried out in accordance with orders from higher authorities and where market competition played little role."

"The traditional approach has tended to obscure the nature of the choice that has to be made. The question is commonly thought of as one in which A inflicts harm on B and what has to be decided is: how should we restrain A? But this is wrong. We are dealing with a problem of a reciprocal nature. To avoid the harm to B would inflict harm on A. The real question that has to be decided is: should A be allowed to harm B or should B be allowed to harm A?"

"In my view, what is wanted in industrial organization is a direct approach to the problem. This would concentrate on what activities firms undertake, and would endeavor to discover the characteristics of the groupings of activities within firms. Which activities tend to be associated and which do not? The answer may well differ for different kinds of firm."

"American institutionalists were not theoretical but anti-theoretical.... Without a theory they had nothing to pass on except a mass of descriptive material waiting for a theory, or a fire."

"Transaction costs were used in the one case to show that if they are not included in the analysis, the firm has no purpose, while in the other I showed, as I thought, that if transaction costs were not introduced into the analysis, for the range of problems considered, the law had no purpose."

"In the early 1950s the now-famous British economist Ronald Coase announced his intention of going to the USA, and his colleagues at the LSE, myself included, gave him a farewell dinner. He explained how he became an economist. Not having been taught Latin from an early age, he was precluded from taking an Arts degree. His matriculation maths was not of the standard expected for entry to a science faculty. He found that his choice was narrowed to the taking of a B.Com. degree. 'In this mysterious way', said our honoured guest, 'the shade of Adam Smith beckoned me'. We have every reason to be grateful to the deficiencies in Coase's early education!"

"It's not... something where you say... you've got the fundamental theory of everything, then... [you can] tell me whether... lions are going to eat tigers or something. ...No, you have to run this thing for ...10500 steps ...to know ...You say ...run this rule enough times and you will get the whole universe. ...That's what it means to ...have a fundamental theory of physics ...You've got this rule, it's potentially simple... You've kind of reduced the problem of physics to a problem of mathematics... as if you generate the digits of pi."

"I thought... I had a pretty good idea for what the structure of this... theory that's underneath space and time and so on might be like. ...I thought, "Gosh, in my lifetime... we might be able to figure out what happens in the first 10-100 seconds of the universe. ...It's pretty far from anything that we can see today and it would be ...hard to test for what's right ...To my huge surprise, although it should have been obvious, ...we managed to get unbelievably much further than that. ...It turns out that even though there's this ...bed of computational irreducibility that ...all these simple rules run into, ...there are ...certain pieces of computational reducibility that ...generically occur for large classes of these rules, and... the big pieces of computational reducibility are ...the pillars of 20th century physics. That's the amazing thing, that general relativity and quantum field theory... turn out to be precisely the stuff you can say. There's a lot you can't say... at this... irreducible level where you.. don't... know what's going to happen. You have to run it [and] you can't run it within our universe... The things you can say turn out to be, very beautifully, exactly the structure that was found in 20th century physics..."

"This is what you... learn from this principle of computational equivalence. ...[I]t's both a message of ...hope, and ...[that] you're not as special as you think you are... We're just doing computations like things in nature do computations, like those gas molecules do computations, like the weather does computations. The only thing about the computations that we do that's very special is that we understand what they are... because they're connected to our purposes, our ways of thinking..."

"If we describe... heat... the air... it's this temperature, this pressure. That's as much as we can say... People [from the future] will say, "I just can't believe they didn't realize that there was this detail and all these molecules that were bouncing around, and that they could make use of that." ...One of the scenarios for the very long term history ...is the where everything... becomes thermodynamically boring... equilibrium. People say that's a really bad outcome, but actually... it's an outcome where there's all this computation going on... molecules bouncing around in very complicated ways, doing this very elaborate computation. It just happens to be a computation that right now, we haven't found ways to understand... [O]ur brains... and our mathematics and our science... haven't found ways to tell an interesting story about that. It just looks boring to us."

"What we realized is that... these theories are generic to a huge class of systems that have these particular very unstructured, underlying rules. ...[P]eople have been struggling for a long time... How does general relativity, the theory of gravity, relate to quantum mechanics? They seem to have all kinds of incompatibilities. ...What we realized is at some level they are the same theory!"

"There’s a tradition of scientists approaching senility to come up with grand, improbable theories. Wolfram is unusual in that he’s doing this in his 40s."

"The remarkable thing is, what we've been able to do, is to make from this very... structurally simple underlying set of ideas, we've been able to build this... very elaborate structure that's both very abstract and... mathematically rich, and... it touches many of the ideas that people have had. ...[T]hings like string theory... ..."

"Stephen has gone out on a limb. He is proposing a paradigm shift. A new twist on everything.""

"That's... the big discovery of this principle of computational equivalence of mine. ...This is something which is kind of a follow-on to Gödel's theorem, to Turing's work on the ... that there is this fundamental limitation built into science, this idea of computational irreducibility that says that even though you may know the rules by which something operates, that does not mean that you can readily... be smarter that it and jump ahead and figure out what it's going to do."

"[W]e live... in the pockets of reducibility. ...I should have realized [that] very many years ago, but didn't... [I]t could very well be that everything about the world is computationally irreducible and completely unpredictable, but... in our experience of the world there is at least some amount of prediction we can make. ...[T]hat's because we have ...chosen a slice of ...how to think about the universe, in which we can... sample a certain amount of computational reducibility, and that's... where we exist. ...It may not be the whole story about how the universe is, but it is that part of the universe that we care about and ...operate in. ...In science, that's been ...a very special case ...science has chosen to talk a lot about places where there is this computational reducibility... The motion of the planets can be ...predicted. The... weather is much harder to predict. ...[S]cience has tended to concentrate itself on places where its methods have allowed successful prediction."

"[F]iguring out where those pockets [of reducibility] are... is an essential thing... in science. ...If you just pick an arbitrary thing and say, "What's the answer to this question?" That question may not be one that has a computationally reducible answer. ...If you ...walk along the series of questions... you can go down this chain of reducible, answerable things, but if you just... pick a question at random... most likely it will be irreducible. ...When we engineer things, we tend to ...keep in this zone of reducibility. When we're thrown things by the natural world... [we're] not at all certain that we will be kept in this... zone..."

"What's happened is, for 300 years people basically said, "If you want to make a model of things in the world, mathematical equations are the best place to go. In the last 15 years: it doesn't happen. New models... most often are made with programs, not with equations. ...Was that ...going to happen anyway? Was that a consequence of my particular work and my particular book? It's hard to know for sure. ...Was there a chain of academic references? Probably not."

"I think Computation is destined to be the defining idea of our future."

"Can we use programs instead of equations to make models of the world? ...[I]n the beginning of the 1980s ...I did a bunch of computer experiments. ...It took me a few years to really say, "Wow, there's a big important phenomenon here that lets... complex things arise from very simple programs." ...[A] bunch of other years go by [and] I start of doing ...more systematic computer experiments ...and find ...that ...this phenomenon ...is actually something incredibly general... [T]hat led me to this... principle of computational equivalence... [A]s part of that process I said, "OK... simple programs can make models of complicated things. What about the whole universe?" ...and so I got to thinking, "Could we use these ideas to study fundamental physics?" ...I happened to know a lot about traditional fundamental physics. ...I had a bunch of ideas about how to do this in the early 1990s. I made... technical progress. ...I wrote about them back in 2002."

"If you think about things that happen, as being computations... a computation in the sense that it has definite rules... You follow them many steps and you get some result. ...If you look at all these different computations that can happen, whether... in the natural world... in our brains... in our mathematics, whatever else, the big question is how do these computations compare. ...Are there dumb ...and smart computations, or are they somehow all equivalent? ...[T]he thing that I ...was ...surprised to realize from ...experiments ...in the early 90s, and now we have tons more evidence for ...[is] this ...principle of computational equivalence, which basically says that when one of these computations ...doesn't seem like it's doing something obviously simple, then it has reached this ...equivalent layer of computational sophistication of everything. So what does that mean? ...You might say that ...I'm studying this tiny little program ...and my brain is surely much smarter ...I'm going to be able to systematically outrun [it] because I have a more sophisticated computation ...but ...the principle ...says ...that doesn't work. Our brains are doing computations that are exactly equivalent to the kinds of computations that are being done in all these other sorts of systems. ...It means that we can't systematically outrun these systems. These systems are computationally irreducible in the sense that there's no ...shortcut ...that jumps to the answer."

"It's a lot easier for one person to have a crisp new idea than it is for a big committee... It can happen that you have a great idea but the world isn't ready... for it. ...This has happened to me plenty. ...It's actually a pretty good idea, but... either you're not really ready for it, or the ambient world isn't... and it's hard for the thing... to get traction."

"Cellular automata are discrete dynamical systems with simple construction but complex self-organizing behaviour. Evidence is presented that all one-dimensional cellular automata fall into four distinct universality classes. Characterizations of the structures generated in these classes are discussed. Three classes exhibit behaviour analogous to limit points, limit cycles and chaotic attractors. The fourth class is probably capable of universal computation, so that properties of its infinite time behaviour are undecidable."

"Computational reducibility may well be the exception rather than the rule: Most physical questions may be answerable only through irreducible amounts of computation. Those that concern idealized limits of infinite time, volume, or numerical precision can require arbitrarily long computations, and so be formally undecidable."

"Problem 9. What is the correspondence between cellular automata and continuous systems? Cellular automatat are discrete in several respects. First, they consist of a discrete spatial lattice of sites. Second, they evolve in discrete steps. And finally, each site has only a finite discrete set of possible values. The first two forms of discreteness are addressed in the numerical analysis of approximate solutions to, say, differential equations. ... The third form of discreteness in cellular automata is not so familiar from numerical analysis. It is an extreme form of round-off, in which each "number" can have only a few possible values (rather than the usual 216 or 232)."

"It's clear that we can go further than the quantum mechanics that I've known for the last fifty years."

"I'm committed to seeing this project done. To see if within this decade we can finally hold in our hands the rule for our universe, and know where our universe lies in the space of all possible universes."

"[S]cience has become used to... using the little... pockets of computational reducibility ([A]n inevitable consequence of computational irreducibility... There have to be these pockets ...scattered around.) to be able to find those cases where you can jump ahead."

"It was the spring of 1978 and I was 18 years old. I’d been publishing papers on particle physics for a few years, and had gotten quite known around the international particle physics community (and, yes, it took decades to live down my teenage-particle-physicist persona). I was in England, but planned to soon go to graduate school in the US, and was choosing between Caltech and Princeton. And one weekend afternoon when I was about to go out, the phone rang. In those days, it was obvious if it was an international call. “This is Murray Gell-Mann”, the caller said, then launched into a monologue about why Caltech was the center of the universe for particle physics at the time."

"[In] Ancient Babylon... they were trying to predict three kinds of things.... where the planets would be, what the weather would be like, and who would win or lose a certain battle; and they had no idea which of these things would be more predictable than the other."

"I had a very selfish reason for building Mathematica. I wanted to use it myself, a bit like Galileo got to use his telescope four hundred years ago. But I wanted to look, not at the astronomical universe, but at the computational universe."

"It's always seemed like a big mystery how nature, seemingly so effortlessly, manages to produce so much that seems to us so complex. Well, I think we found its secret. It's just sampling what's out there in the computational universe."

"I think there is an infinite collection of these local pockets [of reducibility]. We'll never run out..."

"If we want to have a predictable life... then we have to build in these... pockets of reducibility. If we were... existing in this irreducible world, we'd never be able to... know what's going to happen."

"Could it be that some place out there in the computational universe, we might find our physical universe?"

"The military domination of Prussia, with all that it involved to the fortunes of the secular struggle between force upon the one side and right upon the other, that domination has been once and for all and for ever overthrown."

"Some of the great results of the war, if they are adequately realized, are in complete harmony with what for ages past have been Liberal aims and ideals. I mean, for instance, the abolition of militarism; I mean the progressive disarmament of the civilized peoples of the world; I mean the recognition for small states as well as for great States of the principle of self-determination. ... And it means, above all, or ought to mean...a conversion of the old State system with its precarious equipoise of power, with its shifting alliances and combinations, with its infinite opportunities for the achievements of selfish ambition and territorial aggrandizement, it means the conversion of that into a true international democratic polity, a system of Government under which there will be equal rights and equal power to all States whatever their size."

"Excerpts from a Leader's speech delivered in Manchester in 1918"

"In dealing with an opponent who has openly repudiated all the restraints, both of law and of humanity, we are not going to allow our efforts to be strangled in a network of juridical niceties. We do not intend to put into operation any measures which we do not think to be effective, and I need not say we shall carefully avoid any measures which violate the rules either of humanity or of honesty. Subject to those two conditions I say to our enemy—I say it on behalf of the Government, and I hope on behalf of the House of Commons—that under existing conditions there is no form of economic pressure to which we do not consider ourselves entitled to resort."

"[T]hree of the most important resolutions, namely, those relating to the Most-Favoured-Nation treatment, protection against dumping or unfair competition, and the adoption of measures to render the Allies independent of enemy countries as regards essential industries, were proposed by the British delegates and passed at the Conference in the form in which they were put forward."

"[T]his long and sombre procession of cruelty and suffering, lighted up as it is by deathless examples of heroism and chivalry, cannot be allowed to end in some patched-up, precarious, dishonouring compromise, masquerading under the name of Peace. No one desires to prolong for a single unnecessary day the tragic spectacle of bloodshed and destruction, but we owe it to those who have given their lives for us, the flower of our youth, the hope and promise of our future, that their supreme sacrifice shall not have been in vain. The ends of the Allies are well known; they have been frequently and precisely stated. They are not selfish ends, they are not vindictive ends, but they require that there shall be adequate reparation for the past and adequate security for the future. On their achievement we in this country honestly believe depends the best hopes of humanity."

"We shall never sheathe the sword, which we have not lightly drawn, until Belgium recovers in full measure all, and more than all, that she has sacrificed; until France is adequately secured against the menace of aggression; until the rights of the smaller nationalities of Europe are placed upon an unassailable foundation; and until the military domination of Prussia is wholly and finally destroyed."

"If I am asked what we are fighting for I reply in two sentences. In the first place, to fulfil a solemn international obligation, an obligation which, if it had been entered into between private persons in the ordinary concerns of life, would have been regarded as an obligation not only of law but of honour, which no self-respecting man could possibly have repudiated. I say, secondly, we are fighting to vindicate the principle which, in these days when force, material force, sometimes seems to be the dominant influence and factor in the development of mankind, we are fighting to vindicate the principle that small nationalities are not to be crushed, in defiance of international good faith, by the arbitrary will of a strong and overmastering Power. I do not believe any nation ever entered into a great controversy—and this is one of the greatest history will ever know—with a clearer conscience and a stronger conviction that it is fighting, not for aggression, not for the maintenance even of its own selfish interest, but that it is fighting in defence of principles the maintenance of which is vital to the civilisation of the world."