Capitalism beyond Harmonious Equilibrium: Mathematics as If Human Agency Mattered
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Narrating a world of flux entails moving away from equilibrium-oriented thinking toward considerations of emergence, uncertain futures, and unintended consequences. This is not the exclusive domain of the qualitative theory construction and analysis that has dominated such thinking in sociospatial theory: it is also involved in mathematical theory construction. It requires a relational approach to mathematical theory, however, that moves beyond unidirectional claims of cause and effect, avoids deterministic and teleological thinking, and recognizes the incompleteness and openness of any such theoretical construction. These arguments are explored through an example that employs mathematical techniques often associated with complexity theory to examine unevenly shifting economic landscapes where the best guesses of capitalist entrepreneurs are interrelated with the emergent multiregional economy in which capitalists participate. This highlights the unexpectedly heightened dynamical importance of regions in a globally connected world; how cherished theoretical principles become renegotiated, as relationality leads to emergence; and that there is space for human agency, through modeling praxis appropriate to ‘incomplete systems’. We open modest cracks in the supposed wall between quantitative and qualitative approaches, oriented toward a methodological reinterpretation of what employing mathematical arguments could mean within larger, postpositivist theoretical projects in critical human geography.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.008 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.026 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.013 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".