Economics as a Cultural System

Cultural Economics

The two terms “culture” and “economics” can be related in two quite different ways: The first approach is to study the relationship between two different sectors or spheres of society; the second approach is to study the arts with the help of economic analysis. The concept of “culture” as an institution or as an organization supplying artistic services used in the Economics of Art differs funda...

Gesture as a Cultural System

WHEN GREGORY BATESON was conducting fieldwork in New Guinea, his friends among the native Iatmul could not understand why he had to work so hard to learn their language: “But our language is easy to understand” they told him, “we just talk.”1 I wonder how Romans would react to an American studying their gestures from a distance of two millennia. A predictable response would be that their body l...

Design as a Socio-cultural Cognitive System

Economics needs to treat the economy as a complex system

The path to better understanding the economy requires treating the economy as the complex system that it really is. We need more realistic behavioral models, but even more important, we need to capture the most important components of the economy and their most important interactions, and make realistic models of institutions. The complex systems approach is intermediate between traditional eco...

Music as a Cultural System: Sensibility and Interpretation

My favourite Borges fable is that of Pierre Menard, the man who wanted to rewrite Don Quixote. Menard’s ambition, Borges recounts in his dry parody of literary criticism, was not merely to reproduce Cervantes’s work, but to do so spontaneously: to (re)write the Quixote not by a labour of research, nor by somehow mystically channeling the original author, but as an act of original creativity. By...