A Comment on Phillip Mirowski. Markets Come to Bits: Evolution, Computation and Markomata in Economic Science

Mirowski’s capacity to stimulate interesting debates is well known. And equally recognized is his capacity to see through a discipline, like that of economics, with the freshness of one who can spot unseen connections and ideas. In this special issue Mirowski makes a step forward by presenting a neologism, that of the Markomata, with the claim that it can unify and help to further the research efforts of different researchers (whose research is described in Section 2) by providing a new tool for the understanding of the functions of markets. The concept of markomata is obviously a very interesting one, and so are the suggestions and considerations made by Mirowski. As I have argued above, it is the unnecessary Mirowski postulate that markomata can be simulated at most by finite automata equivalents, which could be problematic. In my view, Mirowski’s theoretical construction and/or research agenda needs Turing machine equivalents. This is clearly so for the cases of the undecidability of the halting problem and of the evolving self-reproducing markomata.