OromianEconomist

 

 

 

 

 

Change is variation, impermanence, acceleration, flux. Heraclitus, an ancient Greek philosopher, said: “Change, the state of flux, is a permanent feature of nature”. Greeks philosophers were fond of paradoxes. Another ancient Greek philosopher, Parmenides disagreed: “Change is ephemeral and things truly staid the same”. Greek philosophers were fond of disagreement. The dictionary says it’s the process of becoming different. Men have lamented the constancy of Change and decried the lack of Change. Barack Obama won a presidency promising Change.

The interesting thing about Change is that many, if not all, equations describing change look about the same. Let’s say Change is C, some driving force prompting the change is DF, and resistance to change is R. Then the generic form for most equations describing change is:

C = DF * 1/R

If this Universal Law of Change applies to many different Changes, perhaps it also applies to the economic and social Changes? For example:

Influx of Mexican immigrants to the United States, driven by the difference in hourly wages, and resisted by the high “coyote fees”, border patrol and vast deserts.
A flood of Central American children to the Texas border, driven by fear of death or injury from the local gangsters and resisted by the distance, and other resistances mentioned above.
Implementation of green energy generation driven by the fears of climate change, but resisted by the high cost of the green energy.
Etc., etc.
As mentioned, there are many laws describing change is physical systems that look about the same. For example, here’s Newton’s famous law as it is commonly written:

F = m a

Or force is mass times acceleration. In this case, acceleration, “a”, represents change. Acceleration occurs when something is at rest or traveling at a constant speed, and then it accelerates (positive acceleration) or decelerates (negative acceleration). Rearranging the equation:

a = F * 1/ m

So change, a, is equal to a force F driving for a change, acting on the object with the mass m. A heavy bowling ball has more mass, so it’s harder to make it accelerate than, let’s say a tennis ball. So m is resistance to change. Given the same driving force, the bigger m, the less change there is. Broadly interpreted, Newton’s law is a mathematical representation of change:

Change = (Driving Force) * (1/Resistance to Change)

In fluid dynamics, a science describing fluid flow, there’s a famous equation called the Bernoulli’s equation:

V12/2g + P1/ρg + Z1 = V22/2g + P2/ρg + Z2

Looks complicated, but rearranged into the Change = (Driving Force) * (1/Resistance to Change) it looks like:

(V22 – V12) = (P1 – P2)* (2/ρ) + 2g(Z1 – Z2)