Researchers at Princeton have recently published an article entitled, "Can Monkeys Choose Optimally When Faced with Noisy Stimuli and Unequal Rewards?" The corolary is obvious when Republicans Nay-say everything on every possible ground, but rescuing the economy is crucial to each of our rewards. Ah, the simple, rational world of computational biology. A good quote from their presser:
Remarkably, the monkeys devised a near-optimal strategy. Across the course of several hundred choices in each daily session, with randomly interspersed coherence and reward conditions, their typical harvesting efficiency fell within 1-2% of the theoretical maximum. These findings reveal impressive decision-making ability, and raise important questions about the neural mechanisms that underlie it.
So, let's look at a typical ideologically noisy issue like bank nationalisation. Economist Axel Leijonhufvud says fiscal policy will not be effective until private sector balance sheets are recapitalized.
However, "the American ideological taboo against 'nationalisation' ... stands in the way of dealing with the matter in the straightforward way"
We have yet to see if Barack can overcome the noise machine to be able to chose the optimal path. This is not just for economics, in honor of Darwin's 200th birthday, here's one of my favorite You Tube videos called: Dance, Monkeys, Dance: