a few links

[spoonless]

Is the Efficient Market Hypothesis equivalent to P=NP? Bizarre (and probably wrong) but intriguing idea:
http://arxiv1.library.cornell.edu/abs/1002.2284

Nice visual representation of 2011 budget breakdown:
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2010/02/01/us/budget.html

The Dalai Lama on Technological Change:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_CgZ2qkRSpo

I have a ticket to see the Dalai Lama speak in person 2 months from now in Indiana. I'm looking forward to hearing what he has to say. In the above link, he sounds a lot like a transhumanist when he says he thinks one day humans should be improved by becoming part machine and "that would be good". Out of context I can't tell what exactly he means by that. But it's an interesting comment.

Comments

[puellavulnerata.livejournal.com]

I'm pretty sure the Weak EMH implies P = NP direction of that one is wrong because he's redefined the semantics of placing orders on the market in such a way that brokers need to solve an NP-complete problem to decide transaction prices, but it's subtle and I'm not sure and need to think about it more. Applying computational complexity to economics is an interesting idea whether or not this application of it is valid.

Speaking of subtly wrong but interesting approaches to P vs. NP, there's another paper on arxiv (which I couldn't dig up the link to easily and am short on time at the moment) that argues P = NP because soap films minimizing surface area solve NP-complete problems and you can simulate the underlying physics in polynomial time in the system size, but he never justifies the assumption that the corresponding physical system settles to equilibrium in polynomially many time steps, and I suspect on thermodynamic grounds that this is false; the energy gap between the lowest and next-lowest energy configurations decreases exponentially in system size.

[firmament.livejournal.com]

What do you think about the economists arguing that the global financial crisis falsifies the EMH (or, perhaps more broadly, strongly implies that it is wrong-headed).

[easwaran.livejournal.com]

Not having read this particular discussion about the connection between EMH and P=NP, I would have thought that EMH was much stronger. Just as you can come up with market problems that are NP-complete, it seems to me that you should be able to come up with non-Turing-computable market problems, so that full efficient markets would be required to solve uncomputable problems. Perhaps there's a natural way to reduce the logical strength needed by weakening the EMH, but I should think about this.