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From: bob@pedsgd.UUCP (Robert A. Weiler)
Newsgroups: net.politics.theory
Subject: Re: Supposed monopolies: AT&T
Message-ID: <245@pedsgd.UUCP>
Date: Sat, 24-Aug-85 12:44:01 EDT
Article-I.D.: pedsgd.245
Posted: Sat Aug 24 12:44:01 1985
Date-Received: Sun, 25-Aug-85 03:20:21 EDT
References: <9563@ucbvax.ARPA> <1106@umcp-cs.UUCP> <10166@ucbvax.ARPA>
Reply-To: bob@pedsgd.UUCP (Robert A. Weiler)
Organization: Perkin-Elmer, Tinton Falls, NJ
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Summary: 

Organization : Perkin-Elmer DSG, Tinton Falls NJ
Keywords: 

In article <10166@ucbvax.ARPA> fagin@ucbvax.UUCP (Barry Steven Fagin) writes:
>behavior of third parties.  Consider two people who want to sell you
>widgets.  For whatever reasons, you habitually purchase widgets from
>A.  Then, one day, you notice that B is selling better widgets for
>10% less than A, or that B's store is air conditioned, or something that
>makes you change your mind and start buying widgets from A.  Has coercion
>occured?  Surely the answer is no.  You made a decision as a free human
>being to control your actions according to your will.
>
>Now multiply this scenario by N buyers, and M sellers, then reenact it.
>Has coercion occured?  Most who accept your definition would say yes,
>at least for certain values of N and M.  But how did the coercion
>creep into things?  At what point did it happen?  Are there critical
>numbers of buyers and sellers that make economic activities coercive,
>below which they are not?
>
Consider 2 objects with mass, one of them at rest the other moving
near the speed of light. You decide, for whatever reason to accelerate
them equally. But one day you notice you are acheiving much greater
success with accelerating the (formerly) resting body toward the speed
of light, so you stop trying to accelerate the other one. Now at what
point did it start to become difficult to accelerate the fast moving
object? Is there some critical speed at which it becomes difficult
to accelerate things? You bet there is, at least as far as we understand
physics right now. I realize that this analogy is stretching things
some what. The point is that the science of physics was well understood
for a couple of hundred years before Einstein came along and gummed
everything up. And it explained the movement of objects perfectly,
until velocieties got extremely high. In the 1700's had you proposed
relativity, somebody probably would have said
>
>			Clearly further discussion along this line 
>is absurd.
>
My contention is that economics today is nowhere near as well
understood as physics was 300 years ago and it is entirely possibly
that theories ( and definitions ) which hold for small models do indeed
fall apart when the model gets much larger. The point at which
they start to fail may be extremely difficult to find.
>--Barry
>
Bob Weiler.