By Fractals, There is No Climate and No Macro Economy

I haven't written in some time, and to be honest, I haven't been thinking about fractals for some time. I often wonder if I've lost my superpowers, my creative thought. I can worry about this; there was a time I would fill my ideas book up in quick time, whereas now I only go to it every now and then. A fractal view of it would say that maybe I have completed a set of knowledge; that I have completed a shape. Maybe.

Last night I was thinking about laws and what a law is, and it quickly came to me that a law is a fractal attractor. It is a shape. I don't know if anyone has put it that way before.

When I search what a law is, and I'm doing so to check that my reasoning is on track, I found that my intuition holds. A law is the what; a theory is the why.

Anyway, I was thinking of gaseous CO2 coming out of liquid solution, water, and its relationship to heat, and I thought that it works for a fizzy drink and for a scale of the planet. That is a law. It should be scale free and the only limit to it is our context.

My mind went towards, and I don't know why, but it does, what is climate and what is the macro economy?

I know I've thought about these things a lot in the past; I actually teach these topics, but I immediately had different views on them. I started thinking that the economy and the climate are shapes, so I searched for them and came up with these. 

There is no climate; there is no average; it all depends on the scale of the measurement or set of data. If there is no starting position in a set of data, there is no average. There's no average in an infinity of complexity.  And this works for the economy too. It's fractals all the way down.

This knowledge initially came from and was shaped by James Gleick's book Chaos

AI searchs: 

AIQ 1: Did any of the Austrian economists argue: there is no macro economy?

Yes, Austrian economists fundamentally argue that there is no independent, distinct "macroeconomy" that operates separately from microeconomic actions. [1]

While they analyze aggregate phenomena like inflation, recessions, and employment, they reject the mainstream view that the macroeconomy is a machine driven by collective variables like "Gross Domestic Product (GDP)" or "Aggregate Demand". Instead, prominent Austrian thinkers such as Ludwig von Mises, Friedrich Hayek, and Murray Rothbard asserted that macroeconomics is nothing more than the sum of individual choices—a principle known as methodological individualism. [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]

1. The Core Arguments Against Mainstream Macroeconomics

Austrian economists reject conventional macroeconomic models for several structural reasons: [1]

• The Problem of Aggregation: Traditional macroeconomics treats a nation’s economy as a single equation (e.g., Y = C + I + G + NX). Austrians argue that averaging out millions of distinct individual preferences into a single "price level" or "output" metric obscures reality and destroys the visibility of real cause-and-effect relationships. [1, 2]
• The Illusion of Holistic Entities: Ludwig von Mises argued that concepts like "the national economy" do not actually exist or make choices. Only individual human beings act, think, and value things. Treating a collective aggregate as an independent living organism is a logical fallacy. [1, 2]
• No Fixed Macro Relationships: Mainstream macroeconomics relies on constants (like the velocity of money or the marginal propensity to consume). Austrians maintain that because human values shift constantly, there are no stable mathematical laws or permanent statistical relationships between macroeconomic variables. [1, 2, 3]

2. Methodological Individualism vs. Macro Models

The Mises Institute notes that Austrian economics is built on a "causal-realist" approach. For example, if a central bank injects money into an economy, mainstream macroeconomists calculate a general rise in the aggregate price level. [1]

Conversely, an Austrian economist focuses on the Cantillon Effect. They look at exactly who receives the new money first (e.g., specific banks or corporations) and how their individual spending alters specific relative prices in a ripple effect across the network. [1, 2, 3]

3. Do Austrians Practice Macroeconomics?

While they deny that the macroeconomy exists as a separate field of study, they still explain systemic economic fluctuations. Their alternative framework, the Austrian Business Cycle Theory (ABCT), explains booms and busts. However, rather than manipulating fiscal or monetary policy to "steer" the macroeconomy, they argue that government attempts to fine-tune these aggregate numbers distort individual price signals and cause widespread malinvestment

AIQ 2 : With respect to chaos theory and the book Chaos 'Is there an average climate?'

In the context of chaos theory and James Gleick’s seminal book Chaos: Making a New Science, the question "Is there an average climate?" poses a profound mathematical paradox: No, a true, stable "average climate" may not actually exist because chaotic systems can wander infinitely without ever settling into a permanent average. [1, 2]

This concept stems from the work of meteorologist Edward Lorenz, the father of chaos theory, who realized that the earth's weather and climate do not behave like a standard statistical bell curve where anomalies eventually average out. [1, 2, 3, 4]

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1. The Paradox of "Transitivity" vs. "Intransitivity"

Gleick discusses how Lorenz challenged the traditional meteorological assumption that climate is comfortably uniform and always reverts to a long-term historical mean. Mathematically, Lorenz divided systems into two categories: [1]

• Transitive Systems: Systems that have a definitive, stable average. No matter where the system starts, if you run it long enough, its moving average will always converge to the exact same value.
• Intransitive Systems: Systems where the long-term average depends entirely on where the system started. A simple set of non-linear equations can produce two completely different climates (e.g., one ice age, one tropical) under the exact same physical laws, depending purely on minuscule differences in the initial state. [1, 2]

2. Almost-Intransitivity: The Illusion of Stability

Lorenz suspected that Earth’s climate is "almost-intransitive."
In an almost-intransitive system, the weather stays in a stable, recognizable pattern for a very long time—giving humans the illusion of a predictable, permanent "average climate". However, without any external changes (like an asteroid or volcanic eruption), the system will suddenly shift on its own into an entirely different regime for another long stretch of time. [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]

Because the system continually fluctuates across vast timescales, the "average" keeps changing depending on how long a timeline you choose to measure. [1, 2]

3. Weather is the Trajectory; Climate is the Attractor

In chaos theory, climate is redefined not as a static numerical average, but as a Strange Attractor (specifically, the butterfly-shaped Lorenz Attractor): [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]

• Weather is the specific point moving along the trajectory of the attractor from moment to moment. It is entirely unpredictable in the long run.
• Climate is the overall geometric shape of the attractor itself. It defines the boundaries of what weather is possible. [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]

While the bounds of the attractor are fixed, the path loops around its wings aperiodically—meaning it never repeats the same state twice. Therefore, what we traditionally call "average climate" (like a 30-year meteorological average) is just a brief snapshot of a system that is perpetually in motion and technically never at rest