[ishi crew]

JM– i realized those details were basically irrevelevant  so sorry about that.

My  point was just that because in the case of academia (or politics, etc.)  one has some dimensions of diversity doesn’t mean you are  doing your best in other areas.

From my brief glance I’m sort of surprised CASP doesnt appeared to have been reviewed much  by some people in the field –S Bowles and H Ginitis for example have  a 2007 paper on power (which I think is compatible though uses different terminology and also doesn’t deal with what i view as the very ‘macroeconomic’ kind of data seen in CASP— BG seem to focus on power in microeconoic situations.
My own sort of interest is how the micro- phenomena translate into the macro.)

But i’d also say that while I dont really know the details I did find an essay by K Arrow from 1978 in Dissent Magazine called ‘a cautious case for socialism’.  (free online).

While that may just have been just platitudes, at least that essay doesn’t   promote any view that the US economy or any other operates under perfect competion and information.  It discusses the very mainstream socialist and other views about elite control of corporations and assymetries of power.  (Arrow says even capitalist  shareholders of corporations (which often include unions)  dont have much  power to control the elites who run them,  much less workers).

[ishi crew]

Comment on S.G. and J.N.

1.  SG—If viewed as an ‘ethical’ rather than ‘economic ‘ question, my view is in a capitalist system with perfect information one could have 0 profit or any other value.  It depends on what the ethical system is and who who determines what it is or defines it.

I might even say to me CASP  doenst distinguish economics from ethics. Power is both a social construct and has ‘real ‘ effects.–it determines what is real, and also sometimes makes it.

(I sometimes make and sell very modern art usiing the most current theories learned in art scchools (i didnt go to one but went to the regular college next door so there was overlap. ) So I know what real art is and make it—my current artworks  are whatever trash i see on the street–i put a price tag on the trash and because i’m known as a very ethical  authority on real versus fake art people buy these.   I warn them not to get to ripped off by unethical criminals selling fake art.
‘this beer can is real art, the other is fake trash’.
If people need confirmation i use some money to hire another vetted expert  who vouches for my art.     I come out with more money than before, but zero profit and we have perfect info iof you hire the right expert–its worth getting expert help.)

Profit  to me means you basically get more out (return) than you put in (either labor, or investment /finance capital, or other kinds–e.g. gasoline in your car.)
If you drive your car somewhere find some gas and come back with more than you used then you  profited .  If your ethical system says you have to pay for the gas but didn’t then profit of that kind is unethical.   It would be possible to design a capitalist system in which profit was impossible. Its an equilibrium system–noone can ever get more out than they put in.

But you could design an  ethical system also with zero profit where you get more out than you put in–but its not called profit.  You just say for example anywhere you go that God –who defines the ethical system, and what is right and wrong, and what is stealing versus ethical aquistion —–gives you as much gas you want without paying  for it.

Using some thing like god (or equivalently the invisible hand) to define the  ethical system is sort of the way people made slavery ethical, domesticating or hunting animals, ‘privatizing the commons’, running labor camps and factores—in this view there is no ‘forced labor’ or ‘coercion’.

(In my virew, actuall;y Captialist markets are free with no exploitation, by definition–only people like marx see exploitation.
Captialists see ‘volunteered slavery’ (famous song by Rahsan Roland Kirk) as just a job descrition or occupation –peopple are ‘free to choose this job’. If they didnt want it they wouldnt have it–they would have taken another –eg ‘master’.
Same for  authoritarian leader or dictator under stalinism—stalin was just the a member of the dictatorship of the proletariat with a specific job.    Everything was held in common  but and everyone was equal but jobs and what individuals had differed.

I actually could argue capitalism operates with perfect information even if it doesnt look that way.

This is like the ‘least action or shortest path principal ‘ in physics   (and there are many attempts or papers applying these to econ).  A particle has perfect information about the easiest or shortest path when it goes down a hill even if it may not look that way–same with planets–they know exactly where to go.

———————

JN—I read ‘Capital accumulation’ and also looked at a long video from 2015 on same topic   (which also discussed the employment situtation for CASPers, and described the idea of creating a non-academic research institute of some kind.

I basically agree with these to a large extent except maybe for some terminology.

If I had the stamina i’d write a long essay on these.  (I could probably write an essay on each paragraph or at least many of them.  Its possible these would  offend most if not all economists and physicists–as well as theoretical biologists. ‘Heterodoxy on steroids’ .  ‘Which side of the surface of the earth or the circle are you on? )

Theoretical bioloigists to some extent are like the ‘teflon economists’.
Except they call themselves biologists studying important problems relevant to health research because if they called themselves mathematicians they wouldn’t get funded.

‘this theorem  contains N Utils of   the cure and required N SNALTs to make’. ‘For optimum health combine it with my other theorem’.

To some extent biologists use ‘ftiness’ in place of utility’ (and there many math analogies).  Biologists sort of know fitness cannot be really defined except locally. (Like the value or utility of my art.  )  (There is a hige semi-math literature on this which overlaps with econ. )

The physics analogies i think could use some work—there are many similarities between the fields though physics and biology because they  seem to have alot more predictive power (computers work, vaccines can be made)  and often are very complex   they are harder to criticize.       Bu there is similarity.
Both fields have alot of stuff of questionable ‘utils’.

(The new winner of a Mccarthur genius award at Harvard in econ [edited] got his grant for doing some complex statistics to determine if there is discrimination in employment, and also whether field tests of things like vaccines are accurate.  While the latter study i think is worthwhile, sometimes discrimination doesnt need alot of heavy math to discern.   So some studies of that are just math dressed up as some sort of ‘social activism’.
Maybe he could see if his algorithm can detect discrimiation in academic publishing.)

————
It would be nice to have a study group on these topics –but i would  read CASP along with many other things if i had a study group.

Regarding creating a non-university research center of some sort I’ve also been trying and  spectacularily  failing to do this for a long time–i even applied for some grants for ‘independent researchers’ (which i basically knew would be denied because while they theoretically came from different places, they all basically had the  same 2 main sources of funding—  which also fund mainstream university research. )

—

 

• This reply was modified 3 years, 7 months ago by jmc.

[ishi crew]

JN—I think what i consider the best ‘neo/classicals’  –the ones who did the theory—Arrow, Hahn, Samuelson, Mantel, Debreu, Sonnenschein..–i dont think either misunderstood or misrepresented the world anymore than anyone else before or after.
I think they were quite  clear that they were making an ideal model which did not apply to the real world  .   They just understood their model and made no claims about the real world.   (and it later turned out there was more to be understood about their model than they knew.)

(Though maybe not Samuelson –i think only later did he say his models of trade and the stock market weren’t realistic.
I actually took his famous  ‘random walk model’ of the stock market as an anti-capitalist theory–because he said you couldnt make any money off ‘informed’ speculative investing—hence there is no reason for wall street to exist, and any one who  pays a fund manager is stupid., If he had been taken seriously —which he wasn’t or at least his conclusions were ignored–wall street wouldnt exist really .   Of course people noticed you could make money in the stock market so they knew the theory wasn’t correct.   This  could be  because either the market is imperfect or hedge fund managers, etc are scam artists or smarter investors than others–probably all of these . )

Physicists make ideal models is all the time as a first approximation.

Its  really their disciples  –‘lesser theorists  (the creators i think mostly stayed in the clouds out of reality)—who took this ideal model and then applied it to everything as if it was true.   But this is like blaming Adam Smith for capitalism, Marx for Stalinism, even anarchosyndiacalists (G Sorel) for fascism, Darwin for ‘social darwinism’, Newton for reductionism and materialism, Boltzmann for global warming, and Einstein for relativism,  postmodernism,    post structuralism. and critical  legal theory.

just as there is vulgar marxism (i think there are still alot of living practicioners–the kind of thing you hear at rallies and occasionally see in academic journals and book),    vulgar darwinism  (same) ,    vulgar capitalism (most libertarianism/anarchocapitalism/austrian economics–i include M Friedman in this class) ,  there is vulgar neoclassical economics  –this is what you  see alot last i looked in Am Ec Rev, JPE, QJE.   Actually vulgar neoclassism is what you really see in newspapers , hear on radio or see on tv.  Krugman is high vulgar neoclassiscsm; Mankiw etc. are journalists with academic positions.
(Actually I dont enough of their stuff to know if thats all they do .)

(Lucas is his own category — his theory could not be vulgarized (approximated or made into some caricature of itself —it was already phrased into the most fundamental caricature beyond vulgarization.   Unlike the others Lucas basically denied it was an ideal model–it was reality.)

There is also vulgar quantum physics—Deepak Chopra, new age physics.  Dont blame the originators for that.

Actually some neoclassical econ is ok–its like classical mechanics and there still plenty   of problems to be solved that way.  But these are like engineering— if you make a machine thats not how the universe works and most physicsts dont claim it does (though a few do).
(Also  CM still has open  problems-so its possible something fundamental will come out of those.)
Neoclassical might work for grocery shopping.
But there may be open problems.     People used to say classical physics was ‘deterministic’ which in many ways it is–but not all. Simiarily it may turn out neoclassical economics in some cases isn’t what its called and considered to be.
I sort of thought the HUMBUG and SMD theorems already showed this.

It sort of like saying Hilbert’s program to  find a set of axioms so that one could prove every true statement was realized by Godel–who proved there are unprovable  statements.

——————
I do think the high the high theorists did mostly look the other way when others were saying their theories were saying things they didn’t say.
It may be like Soviet russia (and a little bit in nazi germnany) when some physicists decided to let politicans use their theories to support their politics.

[ishi crew]

Your first question ‘would profit exist…”? in my view  was proven by Arrow and Hahn or Debreu in the negative decades ago.

Likely i think it can argued it had been proven in the negative many times before that .   Critique of general equilibrium and in a sense neoclassical econ to me comes down to the fact pointed out Hahn, Debreu and others almost immedicatley after  they proved their result was their model didnt describe the real world which is why profit  exists.

so one can say actually existing capitlism where profit exists is due to either greedy and deceitful people, or as you say in your last sentence just ignorant people who make mistakes .

[ishi crew]

I admit that I really dont really know very well the details of  ‘macroeconomics’ and things like ‘fiscal policy’–

but i think I get the basics.—which are

Govt –federal reserve —either creates or gives private banks the right to create ‘value’ (or ‘fiat money’)–its illegal to create value or fiat money at home using a printer.     Then they give money in the form of debt to those who deserve it because they create more value–eg thery use the money to make a fire with coal they find to make diamonds.  Then Banks and Govt   ask in return–called taxes– a share of the diamonds.

This ‘macro/fiscal ‘ analyses is so far removed from the kind of ‘microeconomics ‘ (and theoretical ecology) i focus on its like trying to understand the economy by looking at what perfumes are sold in a store, or for ecology, what kinds of pets are sold in pet stores.

There are actually behavioral geneticists /ecologists who study pets (dogs) and basically claim they are experts in the theory of biological and social evolution.  The grad students are aiming for careers in the dog industry with a focus on owner-pet communication. They teach the owners how to understand their dog.   (I asked one grad student whether they had formalized the syntax of dog language using either one of Chomsky’s formalisms or the alternative  ‘anti-chomskyian’ connectionist version.   She didn’t respond but if she had would have said ‘I’m an expert’ and yoiur question doesn’t make any sense’.  (This is the kind of answer Chomsky gives.)

They think they can go to a dog park and learn more than Darwin ever knew by traveling to Galapagos islands .

(I also dont really know the ‘identities ‘ of  thermodynamics though those are first thing you learn. They are also the first things you forget once you learn statistical mechanics or physics .
You dont need thermodynamic identities once you know StatMech any more than you  need to know the name of 50 brands of cigarettes to understand the world  economy.       (It is quite possible more professional economists know more about brand names than they do about microeconomics.)

(Mechanics has a sort of ‘identity problem’or ‘labeling issue’. I think statistical, quantum classical, newtonian mechanics are all fine  terms, but if you use them people think you are are talking about car repair or plumbing.
It is true that alot of people who do quantum mechanics  try to repair quantum theory if its possible or even needed—some (eg Dirac) say if its not broke, dont fix it.
I personally am open to and consider the idea that numbers are actually  mechanical pieces of a machine called th universe.

Its not a new idea and there  are quite a few (some high level) papers on this idea.
I actually add the idea that these number-machines also have personalities, preferences, tastes and emotions. So they sometimes prefer to be with certain  other numbers. )

———
While MMT in some ways is perfectly ‘valid’ ‘in the limit’, using the idea of ‘path dependence’ its not a ‘good path to take’ on its own . (Its like saying US ‘neoliberal captialism or market democracy’ or Chinese/Russian/African Marixst-Socialist-Communism is the optimal path to take.

If you look at history of MMT it comes from 3 places–1st is Keynes .

1.    MMT is just Keynesianism with a few parts of keynes deleted. (otgers have pinted this out and some MMTs dont deny it).

(Similarily libertarian capitalism is Adam Smith after you delete his book on ‘moral sentiments’—

you just keep ‘the invisible hand’ and ‘division of labor’.

Most current Marxism and Socialism is what you get when you delete Marx’s essay ‘on alienation’ and his last chapter of Capital.
You just get materialism, class struggle. dialectics,  etc. (Some marxists claim marx derived quantum theory–

they say Marx dervied heisenberg uncertainty principal before heisenberg.

There are theoretical papers that start wuith HUP and pretty much claim to get everything in physics from it.)

Like MMTs Keynes was not a mathematican (nor is say Soros)—

they may have written one equation and a few arithnatics statemenbts–billy mitchell has a lot of arithmatic…

(Many marxists do as well–still talking  about the economy using examples like 2 corns for 1 gold and 1 iron  etc.)

2.  Most relevant is MMT is party from Arthur Laffer of Reagonomics and the Laffer curve or supply side economics.

3.   Equally relevant is its funded by a hedge fund manager who offshores his wealth so he doesnt have to pay taxes.

This is why MMT people are amost virulentl opposed to icnome taxes, a Basic income, and for Guanteed Jobs for all who want an income, which they can have by guarantee–they have a choice between what they cal socially usefl jobs–
a sweatshop, slave plantation,  in the army or religious crusade, or in the police or as a prison guard, or do security or bartending at the universities where MMTs work.  (If they are young then appropriate jobs can be found–lawnmowing, lemonade stand, africulture, coltain mining…)

4. MMT is essentially a trojan horse.    Bernie Sanders did sort of defang this horse–never accepted the idea of ‘cut taxes on the wealthy people who fund MMTers’.

Many UBI proposals are trojan horses as well–

they are like the ‘knockoff drugs’ sold in USA  which look life genuine ‘pain pills’ but are made from other things

(Fentanyl, which i gather is often  imported from china and mexico and is responsible for 50,000 + overdose deaths a year in USA.     However the makers of ‘pain pills’ are also being sued and forced to make billion dollar payments because they also illegally sold their pau pills before fentanyl was around.   Local governments are saying big pharma has to pay for coronary, health, and police services caused by their pain pills.   One well known town with about  300 residents was  getting over a million pills a year from 1 drug store.-they did it for 5 years.   ‘Coal mining is painful and even worse most coal mines are closed.’)

The trojan horse UBI proposals tend to come from Silicon valley billionaires, pro-businesss people (‘a UBI will let everyone buy my products whether they need them or not’)  and ‘spiritual’, ‘god loving’, ‘compassionate-empathetic–sympathetic people’  –most of whom are vying to  named a saint by the pope or proclaimed as  the new messiah by their loving followers  .

———-
The only reasonable UBI arguments are similar to those in Blair Fix’s articles and a few others of varying conceptual and mathematical complexity–the idea is simple but in a world of 7 billion people finding a ‘representative agent’ and then mazimizing utility    gets complex.
——-
I’d also add that while i really havent read much on human capital  theory —discssed in a recent RWER aricle by Fix–i’ not against the simplest formulation.   If people develop their ‘human capital’–eg learn to read  a map–  they might realize if they need to go 1 mile down the street, they dont need to go catch 4 plane flights around the world to get there, even if they arrive at the same place.

[ishi crew]

I basically agree with you . I only know of Foucault and the ‘pomos’ because in college I sometimes hung out with with people who studied semiotics.
I basically only took science classes but I had to fulfill a humanities requirement so i took some and also people threw away their books so i got some .
Foucault, Julia Kristeva , Roland Barthes ‘  s/z seemed to make some sense. Because these were translations i figured it was possible something got lost in translation.

Derrida seemed to be doing a parody of science –eg ‘neoclassical economics as standup comedy ‘.  ‘Bah HUMBUG’ .  qed.

I decided Lacan was probably a fraud or charlatan. He had an ‘equation’ i tried to figure out.

one problem is there are some similar equations i dont really understand.

https://arxiv.org/abs/2009.09666

(note lastt 3 numbers–one author was wife of a member of the bourbaki group—
one of whom also wrtoe a math treatment of C L Strausss’ structural anthropology theory) .

https://arxiv.org/abs/1306.2843     more of the same

—————-
aside.

I knew someone who said he was Derrida’s ‘ ‘best student’ when Derrida was at UC Irvine.  This person also described himself as ‘working class’ and viewed me as a  ‘rich bum or slacker’  because i was living at my parents house where he was visiting his friend who my parents also let stay there.   This dude actually had rich parents in california and his ‘working class ‘ job was as a waiter with a minimum wage of 7$/hour  at a posh restaurant where he made 100$ in tips /hour.     Made 450$/4 hours ‘work’.   (pour beers).

I mentioned some scientists had critiques of Derrida –he said ‘you can’t criticize Derrida’ and i said i was just repeating what others had said — and he assualted me in my parents house–where i had permission to stay while they were gone.

( I could have pressed the issue but my ‘friend’ and him just ran me out–my friend had been living there off and on for years–endeared himself to my parents.
Stole everything too –my mom’s wedding ring,  some old coins–family heirlooms, my computer, etc. . If I complained i was told ‘this is because you are envious’–because your friend is a responsible person, is employed except when he isnt, has 2 kids by 2 different mothers by age 20, has 2 restraining orders against him (ie if he goes to visit his kids their moms will call the police on him)  , and he gave you a ‘dream job’ (want to breathe some lead paint?).

I later ran all of them out.    (My ‘friend’ OD’d shortly after  in someone else’s home. He did teach me how  to play chess and   how to identify birds –he had  a birdbook and could draw them.   He also did a little bit of maintenance work at that house which was falling down–it was a borderline public hazard. It was sold and turned into 4 condominiums each of which sells for 40 times what the original house cost.  My bedroom and bathroom which might have been 4000$ —1/5th of the house— now costs 800,ooo$.
last time i went to that house to look, police showed up and asked what i was doing there–i was on my bike–i said i’m leaving.   )

———————

One class i had was on ‘metahistory’ —-based on a book by H White—a sort of analyses of historical ‘tropes’ in the spirit of Toynbee, and O Spengler’s ‘decline of the west’—very pessimistic book from early 1900s with alot of mathematical analogies .

IE  the idea was that historical periods should be viewed as expressions of whatever mathematics was available at the time.

Similar to saying hisotry was determined by lack of fire, fire, then iron, then steel, then computers..

After around 1850,  and the writing of Reimann, Clifford, Cantor , Boltzmann, Einstein, Poincare, Schrodinger etc    standard narratives of history went into chaos and uncertainty seemed to be Spengler’s point.)

———-
Same thing happened with literature and poetry— you start with shakespeare and end up with  Ulysses and Finnegan’s wake, free verse and spoken word.
———-
music was same–mozart , bach, etc.led  to stravinsky and john cage, dixieland jazz goes to art ensemble of chicago, coltrane, dolphy  and ornette coleman. rock goes from chuck berry and elvis through stones/beatles to ramones/iggy/VU/sp’s and then hc, noise and grunge and now electronica.

——————————

civilization and its discontents by freud i think was ok (maybe his last book) that can be rewritten as a 1 page lotka volterra equation.

to get the rest of Freud (eg the psychoanalyses  , etc ) you might need 3 pages.
these will  be ‘strongly nonlinear LVEs’ (eg the predators and preys have varying degrees of education, personal histories or traumas, may even have minds or cosciousness , obey different gods etc.)

to get more pages you can turn it into Lie algebras and look for symmetries or group invariants–a la Noether’s theorem.  this might look like poetry or postmodernism or just scribbles.

if you want a few more pages you can turn it into statistical mechancis .   (i’m rambling but in a way thats my life).

[Author]

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