"The field of ethics went into crisis just as economics turned to mathematics,"

Gavin Kennedy responds..

From where do they get these muddled ideas? Economics as a subject did not exist in the 18th century, certainly not as Adam Smith wrote about what was called ‘police’ (ensuring subsistence for a society).

Political economy was a title coming into vogue when Smith wrote Wealth Of Nations, which lasted a century until the 1870s when mathematical analysis began to appear. That title too declined in the 20th century.

Smith wrote about ‘commercial society’ and market, but did not mention The Metaphor of an ‘invisible hand’ in his analysis of how markets functioned (Books I and II of Wealth Of Nations). He certainly never said ‘the advent of market economics as being guided by "an invisible hand" ’.

It is, however, true that The Metaphor is ‘often misconstrued as the early progenitor of the Milton Friedman-spawned, market-knows-all Chicago School’.

Indeed, the modern myth of The Metaphor was virtually invented by ‘Chicago’ in the environs of 59th street (see Oscar Lange, 1946 and Paul Samuelson, 1948) and has become universally misconstrued as ‘markets always produce socially beneficial outcomes’, despite the presence of monopolistic practices, protectionist policies, tariffs and non-tariff barriers, pollution, and other negative externalities.

Economics didn’t turn ‘to mathematics’; scholars calling themselves economists ‘turned to mathematics’. Economics did not become ‘a hard science’; its proponents confused ‘hard science’ with economic models that were bereft of the presence of human beings.

And ‘ethics’ did not become ‘a confusion’ – the basic ideas of ethics (partly summarized by Adam Smith in his Moral Sentiments) remain valid.

Posted via web from jimnichols's posterous

Badiou on BBC

Badiou on BBC

In a BBC HARDtalk interview broadcast on 24 March 2009, Stephen Sackur talks to French socialist philospher Alain Badiou.

Posted via web from jimnichols's posterous

Rorty and Philippine Postcolonialism

Some Useful Lessons from Richard Rorty’s Political Philosophy for Philippine Postcolonialism

Colbert always does it best (when he's on that is... sometimes he's really off)

But this time he's on... and the topic is Ayn Rand. I loved her stuff when I was a teenager. If you haven't read Atlas Shrugged or Fountainhead, you should.

The Colbert Report	Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c
The Word - Rand Illusion
comedycentral.com
Colbert Report Full Episodes Political Humor NASA Name Contest

Political Structures question...

Krugman:

Let me also say that I think a blanket guarantee without some kind of seizures will just fuel a vast — and justified — populist rage.

I just realized one of the reasons you might want a Republic that is (ever so slightly) detached from the popular will--doing things that are necessary but unpopular and/or misunderstood by the general population who can't possibly be expected to become experts in all sorts of areas of expertise.

So the question is how detached?  And who are the experts? 

Posted via web from jimnichols's posterous

two new reads and off the computer...

Headed upstairs with Capitalism Beyond the Crisis By Amartya Sen and What You Can Learn from Reinhold Niebuhr By Brian Urquhart.

Okay I'll probably make a short stop to the couch to watch this PBS show on Ireland... in honor of the day I suppose...

Posted via web from jimnichols's posterous

The Modest Marxist

Il “marxista modesto”: Žižek sul Financial Times -

I ask him about the financial crisis, hoping for some political pyrotechnics about the death throes of capitalism. Does thecrisis herald revolution? “No, no, no. I am an extremely modest Marxist,” he replies, rather disappointingly. “I am not a catastrophic person. I am not saying that revolution is round the corner. I am fully aware that any old-style communist solution is out.”

However, he insists, the financial crisis has killed off the liberal utopianism that flourished after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 and all the grand talk about the “end of history”. The terrorist attacks of September 2001 and the financial meltdown have exploded the myth that the market economy and liberal democracy have all the answers to all the questions. In the short term, at least, governments will introduce more state regulation and global co-ordination strengthening the capitalist system. In this sense, he suggests that the liberal Barack Obama may one day be counted as among the best conservative presidents in US history.

Free will! Can I have one? | Psychology Today Blogs

Free will! Can I have one? | Psychology Today Blogs

The Free Will debate is something that I have pondered from a very early age. I truly believe that the Free Will question answers a lot of confusions on the part of people regarding political questions.

The more we learn about what really causes us to tick, the better we can structure our society, laws, and political systems--with the goal being to allow individuals to freely flourish.

I personally believe free-will is an illusion, which survived as a useful mechanism for our ancestors to flourish, those having such a processing tool were better able to reproduce and multiply over those who lacked it.

I think that more effort to look into why this illusions and/or brain processing function was useful to our ancestors will help us better understand our biological system.

I think free-will is popular because it allows us to justify our own actions and condemn those whom we disagree with. Even saying free will is popular will send your mind in two different directions 1) if we lack free will to say it is popular would be a mistake 2)does someone stop justifying their own actions and condemning others whom they disagree with when they "say" they don't have free will anymore?

My thoughts on 1...
This is a great example of the crux of most philosophical problems i.e. confusions of language. I can count 5 problems that are created by carelessness and/or double meanings of some of the words in

if we lack free will to say it is popular would be a mistake

So one big problem is simply that we run so haphazardly with words.
To the questions of 2...
No... justification and condemnation don't stop. Or at least the things that what we perceive those words to mean do not. But to quickly argue that this disproves those who argue against free will would be sloppy, and miss the point completely. The question at hand is what exists and why. We have to differentiate between the words we use to describe things and the things in themselves.

So the question of free will is split into two:
1. What biological processes exist (either we do or don't... or somewhere in between)
2. What words/descriptions are best used to resolve question 1

Finally I think most of the "debates" I end up having with people aren't about 1... and I hardly ever get people to dealing with the gravity of question 2; most of the debate which ends up happening is on questions of ethics. People sound terrified by the idea that they lack the "freedom" to choose of their own volition and want to dig into ethical questions to prove how outlandish it would be to lack free-will. Ethics are are different issue from whether free will exists, though ethics is the core of what drives me to want to apply our findings on the question of free will to politics.

Another asymmetry is that determinism excludes the possibility of free will, whereas free will does not fully negate determinism. There is supposed to be a privileged domain in which the will is free. But how did this precious free zone open up? How did it emerge from an otherwise deterministic universe? And what are its boundaries? The self-congratulatory answer is that free will is uniquely human. Upon reflection, however, we are "determined" to realize that the boundaries are fuzzy. The behaviors of infants, senile or autistic humans show clear evidence of will, but that will does not appear to be free in the folk psychological sense. There is little reasoning, deliberation, or rationality.

I think that Baumeister's approach to the boundary problem lies in the role he accords perceptions of responsibility. This is his argument number three. The proposition is that if people have free will, then they are personally responsible for their actions. I do not argue with this proposition, but with its inverse. The fact that people hold humans (mostly others) to be responsible does not mean that there is free will; it does not even mean that they think there is free will. In fact, people hold others responsible even if they agree that the behaviors in question (e.g., heinous crimes) are determined by causes outside the person (Nichols & Knobe, 2007). If the allocation of rewards and punishments is an indication of perceived responsibility, people treat many animals as if they think these animals have free will. A similar argument can be made for power. Finding that many people pursue "the right to make decisions that may affect others" (Baumeister, p. 16) says nothing about the presumed freedom of those decisions. Many non-human animals are concerned about power, rank, and status, and they struggle to get it. Yet, they are widely regarded as automatons.

update:
Here is the post from Garden of Forking Paths that sent me to this piece. Go read the comments thread. That dialogue is exactly one thing that blogs and the Internet are great for... I love fruitful debate. And this thread digs a lot more in-depth into the free-will debate, hitting far more than my own post does...

Review: The Political Mind by George Lakoff

Owen Flanagan knocks around Lakoff's recent book The Political Mind pretty successfully.

I don't think it takes away from the merits of the book, Flanagan is making a broader intellectual history challenge to Lakoff's context.

Also I'm gonna plug Flanagan's The Problem of the Soul which is a wonderful book that I highly recommend.

force either way...

Jason Pye was criticizing the rail funding in the stimulus package

I stated that one might do this, "to make people use more of one over the other..."

He then responds by stating

Because that is all government is...force.

I'm assuming he stated this because I said "make people use." But this has me perplexed. The debate seems to be spending money on rail vs. roads. Either policy decision is going to create incentives for certain behaviors over other behaviors (force in Jason's terminology). Thats policy.

I responded that

all policies impose certain incentives over other incentives. A traffic ticket creates an incentive to not speed... "forcing you". But once we move past an obvious truism i'm not sure what that has to do with anything on the policy front.

he responded that

I’m referring to government forcing individuals to change personal habits, such as creating an atmosphere that is more amenable to riding transit instead of driving.

If you divert enough money away from roads and into transit, you can’t construct new roads or at least be effective with new roads or maintenance on existing roads. You’re using the power of government (force) to get a desired end. It’s an incredibly misguided and expensive angle for government to take.

but again thats a policy decision... either decision would be impacting personal habits.

which is why I'm still perplexed by the use of the term "force" in his response.

Either action is a government decision to spend money in a specific way. Therefore force is implied in either decision and there is no reason to bring in "force" in regards to spending on rail rather than spending on roads. Either decision is going to impact peoples behaviors. I don't walk around saying the government forces me to drive all the way to Indian creek to jump on the train. I guess I could?!?!?

You can state that more people use their cars, but the government isn't forcing people to not use cars in this instance, they are just increasing the quality of trains--which would increase ridership, and change the development/growth of those areas; for better or worse.

The force is implied either way when it comes to government spending/policy because all policy decision preference some behaviors over others.

Anyways it just seemed strange to bring up force for one when its just as true for the other.

They may be two different policy decisions with different impacts... but thats a political decision... that is determined in the political process.

You can argue more people prefer spending on roads, but thats what representative government is for to make such decision and if ones representative doesn't people would kick them out.

One mans misguided and expensive angle is another perfered policy...

I guess one could argue that increasing rail would increase the infrastructure costs over the long term, which the orginal quote he cited noted, and increase the services that government is obligated to fund--hence need to raise revenue for.

But I was just intrigued by the word on this one...

the soviet decline...

Samuelson on Hayek, A Comment on Comments

while Hayek argued that centrally planned socialism would be inefficient, an argument PAS agrees with, Hayek no more forecast the moment of the Soviet collapse than did PAS or the CIA or pretty much anybody other than a French sociologist named Revel in 1976. Also, the severe economic decline in the Soviet bloc largely came after the political collapse of the bloc. It is not at all clear such a collapse would have happened without the political collapse, if the Soviet leaders in 1989 had cracked down on the independence demonstraters in Lithuania, the people fleeing across the Hungarian border into Austria, and of course supported the Honecker regime in East Germany in preventing the Berlin Wall from falling. After all, the upshot of the Chinese crushing the demonstrations in Tienanman Square was continued economic growth with a gradual transition to its current peculiar mixed economy that has grown very rapidly. And for all the carrying on many make about the Soviet economy, while it may have been inaccurate to describe it in 1989 as "thriving," and it was falling behind the US in growth, technical innovation, and quality of goods, it was functioning, and the population was not starving or homeless or without clothing or education or medical care, although it was politically repressed. But it had provided the industrial expansion that allowed it to build a military capacity that defeated Hitler's military at Stalingrad and Kursk. In short, this dumping all over PAS for these statements is fairly ridiculous, whatever one thinks of Samuelson's ultimate or broader influence on economics as the godfather of its mainstream neoclassical form in the last half of the 20th century.

article on Hayek in Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization

A few remembrances of Friedrich von Hayek (1899–1992)

interveiw with Chantal Mouffe

Hegemony, democracy, agonism and journalism: an interview with Chantal Mouffe

I like this point

Tax and Sales and SPLOST’s OH MY!

I’m generally inclined to support the T-SPLOST, and inclined to oppose the local SPLOST on similar grounds.

A SPLOST is supposed to ignite growth, fund emergency projects, or create a more habitable environment for citizens. It was not meant to be a crutch for local governments to fund their normal responsibilities.

You hear a lot from the right about cuting taxes and cutting spending--but at the same time you hear them decrying vote buying (i.e. representing those who have a certain preference over another--in a democracy we call this an election) and they tend to thereby support underfunding government programs that are needed and/or supported. This works to make government less effective (and there-by less popular) at doing its job of protecting and empowering its citizens. The conservatives then get to point to how terrible government is at "doing business" (which in itself is an interesting framing of an entity that is not intended to make profits) and that we need to cut it even more because of how terrible it is.

His post had nothing to do with most of that... it just got me on a train of thought...

Libertarianism

Modern Liberalism and Libertarianism: An Economist's View
By Brad DeLong

Let me give you what I take to be an American card-carrying modern liberal economist’s take on classical liberalism--which I think is broadly an updated version of Adam Smith's take. It is, in short, that modern liberal economists are wanderers who have been expelled from the garden of classical liberalism by the angel of history and reality with his flaming sword...

It starts with an observation that we are all somewhat more interdependent than classical liberalism allows. It is not completely true that it is from the self-interest and not the benevolence of the butcher that we expect our meat. Self-interest, yes, but benevolence too: a truly self-interested butcher would not trade you his meat for your money but instead slaughter you and sell you as long pig. So this opens up a gap between the libertarian view and the world.

That said, and modulus this basic human--well, call it "sympathy" as Adam Smith did--modern liberal economists were very happy for a long time with classical liberalism. Yes, there were externalities, and increasing returns over a range, and market power--but the presumption was that market failures were tolerable and in a sense optimal because of the magnitudes of government failures that would attend any attempt to compensate for them. The near-consensus of economists was at least crypto-classical liberalism, along the lines of Colbert's exchange with Legendre in the reign of Louis XIV:

"What do you need to help you?" asked Colbert. "Leave us alone" answered Legendre. ("Que faut-il faire pour vous aider?" asked Colbert. "Nous laisser faire" answered Legendre).

Then starting in the late nineteenth century liberal economists were mugged by reality:

--on issues of income distribution--the Gilded Age--and how laissez-faire did not appear to be producing the reasonable distribution of the fruits of the social division of labor that economists had all expected...

--on issues of macroeconomic stability--the Great Depression was a big shock--and the argument that the Great Depression arose because markets were not free enough never acquired legs or force outside the theological...

--on issues of the persistence of "unfree" labor--Adam Smith expected the imminent collapse of slavery, but ending slavery took a war, and the market economy in America did not appear to be doing very much at all to undermine Jim Crow...
last and most recently, the fear of the increasing importance of "market failure"--the coming of the "information economy"--caused economists to worry that we were moving from a Smithian to a Schumpeterian world, and even if the presumption of laissez faire works for a Smithian world it is not at all clear that it works for a Schumpeterian world...

The upshot is what Keynes said eighty-four years ago:

It is not true that individuals possess a prescriptive ‘natural liberty’ in their economic activities. There is no ‘compact’ conferring perpetual rights on those who Have or on those who Acquire. The world is not so governed from above that private and social interest always coincide. It is not so managed here below that in practice they coincide. It is not a correct deduction from the principles of economics that enlightened self-interest always operates in the public interest. Nor is it true that self-interest generally is enlightened; more often individuals acting separately to promote their own ends are too ignorant or too weak to attain even these. Experience does not show that individuals, when they make up a social unit, are always less clear-sighted than when they act separately. We cannot therefore settle on abstract grounds, but must handle on its merits in detail what Burke termed “one of the finest problems in legislation, namely, to determine what the State ought to take upon itself to direct by the public wisdom, and what it ought to leave, with as little interference as possible, to individual exertion”...

One way to understand Keynes's General Theory is that Say's Law is false in theory but that we can build the running code for limited, strategic interventions that will make Say's Law roughly true in practice. The modern Ametican liberal economist's view of libertarianism is much the same: libertarianism is false in theory, but it is very much worth figuring out a set of limited, strategic interventions that will make the libertarian promises roughly true in practice.

August 8th 1853

Marx: The Future Results of British Rule in India

Thomas Frank interview

Q+A With Thomas Frank

In the book you talk about this cynicism as being self-fulfilling.

If you believe in bad government you will deliver bad government. If you think big government is by nature going to fail, is corrupt, is evil, that's what you'll deliver. That's the larger message of the book...

...And yet they love big government, in the sense that they've figured out a way to appropriate it.

But they have the deniability. They can always get out of it. "No, we're against Bush. He's a Big Government conservative!" And then the people that criticize Bush will get in and do the same thing. My friend calls it the "no true Scotsman fallacy." The story goes like this: a guy is Scotland says no Scotsman would put soy milk in his porridge and someone says, Oh yeah, Joe Blow puts soy milk in his porridge. "Ah," he responds, "but no true Scotsman would ever put soy milk in his porridge. You can always retreat, but you see it's a fallacy. It's time to make that retreat impossible.That's one of the projects of the book, to take that sanctuary away from the conservatives. Let's examine this beast, this movement, not by what is says but what it has done every time it takes over.

Zizek at google! : )

The Austrian and Chicago Schools

Excerpt from History of Economic Thought: A Critical Perspective, by E.K. Hunt via Mark Thoma

I think the best point made is this

Every human being has ideological, moral and political views. To pretend to have none and to be purely objective must necessarily be either self-deception or a device to deceive others. A candid writer will make his preconceptions clear and allow the reader to discount them if he does not accept them. This concerns the professional honour of the scientist.

You see this all the time. I always think about Howard Zinn's you "can't be neutral on a moving train."

show me the money...

or historical proof...

Laissez-Faire as a real world, rather than ivory tower, policy position is based on a fabricated interpretation of history. You can see a great example in a recent op-ed Bush and Obama Opt for Corporatism over Freewheeling Capitalist Economy

We've always had some elements of the corporate state in America — subsidies, tariffs, monopoly privileges, regulatory cartels — but we've prospered because of the freewheeling entrepreneurship and creative destruction that characterizes most of our economy.

How do we know it was "freewheeling entrepreneurship and creative destruction" rather than... well... the other thing he mentioned?

Its creative reinterpretation of how the world works... and/or how the world is allowed to work by societies and those who run them.