Networks, recessions and economists

The Farrell paper

It helps a lot if one recognized that the recession itself was a rank order reduction in network complexity and due to coherence, the  economic expert network shrank along with the real networks. Economists were closer together because their employers, the banks themselves,merged. Hard to avoid contagion when everyone is crammed in Ben's office trying to save their own asses.

The corollory is that aggregate transaction rates slow along with rank reduction, so each transaction has to carry a large chunk of economic theory and one has less room for variability of ideas. The other half is that individual node transaction rates speed up a little to we get faster equilibrium. (Channel theory once again)

Third, I would have mentioned Hidalgo-Haussman in that paper, they actually did the math.

Fourth, this effect has been measured before; where we know that crass Keynesianism only has a chance right at the crash, before equilibrium of the reduced rank channel. Thoma posted that paper early to advocate Keynes, then posted it later to advocate fraud.

I guess I will post the advanced effect, ( for post-greaduate economists only) the tunneling effect where we leave stranded economists at the leaves of the network.  They become free radicals running forming the new emergent network.