Dear Citizens and Elected Officials:
This will be one of my briefest diary postings, so cherish the moment. Some preliminaries are in order however.
I'm responding below, in the main text, to a column by Swedish economist Lars Syll, at the Real-World Economics website. I'm allowed to comment there but not post articles since I am not a professional economist. Here at:
https://rwer.wordpress.com/...
And here's the bio on Lars... http://en.wikipedia.org/...
I'm trying to talk them (the editors) allowing me to do a book review of Richard Smith's "Green Capitalism: The God that Failed." That's a story for another day, however.
So logically you might ask next, whose website is that, this Real-World Economics one with the title implying that some other economists might not be living in a, or "the" real world, but an imaginary one (see below for details.)?
Well, the organization behind the website is the World Economics Association, a loose affiliation as the song goes...with 13,500 members, founded in 2011, and it's safe to assume I think, that the force behind it was the Great Financial Crisis of 2007-2008, the grand and emphatic failure of 99% of the economics profession to see it coming, and the general unhappiness with neoliberal and neoclassical economics among dissenting thinkers.
Let's ground this organization with some founders and members whose names you might recognize: Dean Baker, Herman Daly, James Galbraith, Steve Keen, Richard C. Koo, Richard Parker, Anne Mayhew, Stephany Griffith-Jones, Heiner Flassbeck, Yanis Varoufakis (the Greek Finance Minister)...Ann Pettifor, Robert Skidelsky (Keynes' biographer and a member of the House of Lords, "Lord" Skidelsky), Michael Hudson, Mark Weisbrot...
I'll leave comments at the site from time to time as the various postings cross my own areas of interest or contemporary events...
Good post Lars, thank you very much. Micro theory, “the margin this and the margin that,” always reminded me of the trouble I had following the higher reaches of geometry, where I was being asked to imagine lines, intersections, angles and spheres that were presented as common sense everyday renderings, as if that were the way I visualized the world, real and imagined. Of course some of it was based on the physical realities of every day life; but it soon ascended into something quite remote and abstract…I always had the feeling of being led over a cliff, step by step, further and further from my comfort with a world that I could know and grasp. Power, who holds it and how it shapes economic theory? How silly!
I wonder if any readers here are familiar with Mark C. Taylor’s 2004 book, “Confidence Games: Money and Markets in a World without Redemption.” A fascinating author from Williams College and then Columbia, an atheist (or is it agnostic? Atheist, I believe) head of the Religion Department and visiting professor of Architecture, who handles economics with the best of the profession, having apparently drunk lots of coffee and other beverages across the table from some savvy inside players in the go-go “creative” world of investing and speculating that we all grew to love so much in the 1990-2007 era.
(He's done a bit more than drink with hedgers, though, done a bit of reading and thinking I would venture...a bit of understatement here...)
Taylor is impossible to pigeon hole, and he is brilliant in helping us understand the grand hopes, Utopian hopes for the world of hedge funds as they developed: infinite leverage based on zero capital/collateral. An economic “perpetual motion machine.” LTCM….chaos theory, “self-organizing, complex networked systems,” avalanches, and the Santa Fe Institute…it’s all there.
I’ve met one other person in my life who has read it. I still recommend it.
And an additional thought to connect your post, Lars with Taylor’s “Confidence Games, and the strange fact that here is a Religion Department chairman writing as fluidly about the most difficult parts of advanced economics as well as… John Meriweather.
But here’s the thing: is not religion a vast extension, a vast series of walking out over the cliff based on a few fragments and hopes, a vast system built upon longings…economics has nicely filled the void for those who can no longer accept the old faiths…has assumed, among the powerful, the same role as consulting the auguries…whether it is built upon any more solid foundations, Lars is pointing out to us what has been left out…the sociology of power, with just a hint that Marx was a better sociologist than economist…
And this delicious thought, that the Republican Right in the US is built upon a near religious intensity about the market and micro economics, and its alliance with the Religious Right, fundamentalists and the slightly more diverse evangelicals and their fierce intensities about matters religious and cultural…a strange alliance which buries class…for now…
No wonder James Galbraith notes in the Acknowledgements at the end of his latest book, “The End of Normal,” no, he actually apologizes for this “fairly gloomy work…”, for his having come to “these dire straits” of his conclusions,” his recognition of Taylor’s world “without redemption.”
Cheers.