Meso comes to markets: Comment on ‘Markets come to bits’

Abstract

Mirowski's research programme of markomata formally sets out to model ‘the diversity of market forms by making use of the mathematical theory of automata, and then to taxonomize and organize these entities by means of a theory of evolution’ (Mirowski, this issue). This suggests a new sort of economics in which it is markets that evolve not people, systems that evolve not agents, prosthesis that evolve not preferences, and rules that evolve not information. Economies evolve; people do not. This proposition is both obvious and true, making it an excellent foundation for an evolutionary social science. So, if we are to take Mirowski's program seriously as a general framework for economic analysis, which we think we certainly should, then it is important to recognize that although Mirowski's unified rubric of markomata elides agency and is instead based upon John von Neumann's theory of automata as a model for the study of social institutions, the separate lines of research into markets as computational entities are all still very much but a microeconomics. Markomata is a theory of the core microeconomic building blocks of an economic system as well as a theory of their evolutionary principles (i.e. a microeconomics) but it is not yet a theory of the whole economy. Yet, it is our view that Mirowski's markomata program can indeed be the basis for such a general theory when analytically expounded in terms of the new evolutionary economic framework of micro meso macro (Dopfer et al., 2004 and Dopfer, 2005) in which market automata (Mirowski and Somefun, 1998 and Potts, 2001) are abstracted as a special, central instance of generic meso rules (Dopfer and Potts, 2004). Which is to suggest that the Mirowski framework of markomata can be yet further developed