mikema63 wrote:Math is a form of logic that generates necessary conclusions from premises. It is the single most powerful tool humanity has ever invented and if it can't help lead to paradigm shifts then I'd despair that anything actually could do so.
It can be used and abused by humans of course but it is still a tool that anyone with some grounding in math can analyze.
Fundamentally there may be a difference in attitude towards math vs. verbal arguments between us. You may not know this but years ago when I joined pofo right when I finished high school I was a right wing libertarian (in part just because of upbringing). I was taken in by austrian economics which is a group that reject mathematical models entirely in favor of verbal arguments about how the economy works.
Ultimately it amounts to little more than verbal slight of hand to justify some of the most ridiculous policy positions imaginable, it's all utter unverifiable nonsense that rejects entirely any attempt to critically analyze it with mathematical tools. I was taken in for a decent amount of time because I didn't really understand math and it led me to conclusions that not only supported my biases but took them to the most ridiculous possible totalizing libertarian conclusions.
Having had the experience of being totally bamboozled by this sort of verbal argument that eschews mathematical analysis I went into my degree program and was basically brought up in the institutional culture of the sciences. I learned to truly appreciate math not only as a tool but as a beautiful thing in it's own right, with massive power to correct our deepest biases.
So fundamentally I have a deep respect for mathematics and a hypercaution towards verbal arguments because of my life experiences. Which is a gap I'm not sure I can bridge with you who seem to distrust the math and prefer entirely verbal arguments.
The way you talk about the Austrian school makes it sound as if their mistake was their use of language over math. But to make explicit, i’m not eschewing mathematics in itself. But since you are focused on math and it’s ability to help illuminate understanding, a point can be made that the fetish of maths has lead to it’s inappropriate/inapt use, as such is asserted by Tony Lawson who is shifting the discussion for reconsideration of the ontology of economics presumed.
See
https://sci-hub.bz/10.1177/0486613408324412 for a review of his book. In which his criticism of the manner in which math is used, is insensitive to the ontological nature of the reality economists are meant to be modelling.
https://www.worldeconomicsassociation.org/newsletterarticles/interview-with-tony-lawson/I’m merely arguing that in social science, including economics, we should take account the nature of social reality in fashioning methods appropriate to exploring specific aspects of it. The problem of modern economics is that methods are determined a priori without consideration of the nature of the task. Whatever the question or object of analysis, mainstream economists insist in advance that certain sorts of methods of mathematical modelling are always the appropriate tools.
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Q2: What do you mean by atomism and closed systems? How do these categories figure in your critique of mainstream economics?
TL: OK now you are asking for details of ontological argument. Given the modern emphasis on mathematical modelling it is important to determine the conditions in which such tools are appropriate or useful. In other words we need to uncover the ontological presuppositions involved in the insistence that mathematical methods of a certain sort be everywhere employed. The first thing to note is that all these mathematical methods that economists use presuppose event regularities or correlations. This makes modern economics a form of deductivism. A closed system in this context just means any situation in which an event regularity occurs. Deductivism is a form of explanation that requires event regularities. Now event regularities can just be assumed to hold, even if they cannot be theorised, and some econometricians do just that and dedicate their time to trying to uncover them. But most economists want to theorise in economic terms as well. But clearly they must do so in terms that guarantee event regularity results. The way to do this is to formulate theories in terms of isolated atoms. By an atom I just mean a factor that has the same independent effect whatever the context. Typically human individuals are portrayed as the atoms in question, though there is nothing essential about this. Notice too that most debates about the nature of rationality are beside the point. Mainstream modellers just need to fix the actions of the individual of their analyses to render them atomistic, i.e., to fix their responses to given conditions. It is this implausible fixing of actions that tends to be expressed though, or is the task of, any rationality axiom. But in truth any old specification will do, including fixed rule or algorithm following as in, say, agent based modelling; the precise assumption used to achieve this matters little. Once some such axiom or assumption-fixing behaviour is made economists can predict/deduce what the factor in question will do if stimulated. Finally the specification in this way of what any such atom does in given conditions allows the prediction activities of economists ONLY if nothing is allowed to counteract the actions of the atoms of analysis. Hence these atoms must additionally be assumed to act in isolation. It is easy to show that this ontology of closed systems of isolated atoms characterises all of the substantive theorising of mainstream economists.
It is also easy enough to show that the real world, the social reality in which we actually live, is of a nature that is anything but a set of closed systems of isolated atoms (see Lawson, 1997, 2003)
Q3: If your critique means that we have real problems with current mainstream approaches, how should they be addressed?
TL: Basically we should elaborate the real nature of social reality and tailor our methods to that nature. This is a long story that I have elaborated upon over and again (again see Lawson, 1997, 2003). All I would add here is that your use of the phrase “current mainstream approaches” could be misleading. The defining feature of modern mainstream economics, as I see it, is its insistence on methods of mathematical modelling. It is this dogmatism that both defines the mainstream and is the problem. I see nothing wrong with individual economists experimenting with mathematical methods here and there in the hope that in the contexts of analysis, the relevant conditions hold. The mainstream does not own the methods or approaches they employ any more than they own mathematics. There is nothing wrong with mathematical methods per se only with the manner in which they are used. The problem of the mainstream is one of application of methods in inappropriate conditions. Mainstream economists insist that their mathematical methods be applied to all problems. They fail to differentiate the conditions of legitimate and illegitimate application. So ultimately the failure is one of ontological neglect, no doubt grounded in a cultural-ideological presupposition that mathematics is somehow necessary to all scientific activity, understanding and rigour. In this they are just misguided.
Tony Lawson is from the Critical realist school of thought which is significantly influenced by Marxist thought though not synonymous with it.
But to make explicit, the problem isn’t the maths, the response isn’t that there shouldn’t be maths in economics. As such I can agree with there being a great utility to maths, but the great mathematical techniques do not make up for problematic abstractions about the nature of the economy.
I know very little about philosophy in psychology so I can't really comment, but it seems to me that psychology as a field has gotten better at addressing issues than ever before. The way I see it is that it's a necessary if a bit blind endeavor, addressing mental issues is important but we simply don't have any strong foundations to work from when it started and so it was just bumbling in the dark. We couldn't not try to address these important issues but we had no idea where to start so people seem to have just sort of made things up.
We understand things a bit better now and have stronger foundations to address mental issues from now.
It has certainly done a lot, but it’s still incredibly fractured.
https://www.politicsforum.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=23&t=166183Wilhelm Wudnt provided a theoretical foundation to legitimize experimental psychology, although its debtable the strength of such a foundation. But it was good in opening up a line of inquiry previously held impossible by some.
But the use of such a point was that one’s methods never get further than the assmptions that underpin them and if they are in error, then it seems likely that it’s futile to work on the method when one needs to move beyond the assumptions that underpin it. Though one might not really consider there to be a distinction between the assumptions of theory that gives legitimacy and the methods as the process should presumably inform one another.
And yet it is also the accumulation of facts that stretch the dominant paradigm in the sciences that ultimately cause people to go to a new paradigm. Facts are facts, and when necessary conclusions begin to strain the foundations of the dominant paradigm it will break apart.
Facts are facts within a certain framework of belief, that framework sets limits on what is considered and accepted as fact. And it’s not all that apparent that when things are strained that it breaks into a fundamentally new paradigm, as proven with general equilibrium theory which has been fucked up for ages but apparently still in vogue. Because, the transition to a new paradigm isn’t all that rational.
You’ll have to keep reading beyond Thomas Kuhn and see how Imre Lakatos tries to reconcile Kuhn with Poper for a demarcation of science and by Paul Feyerabend, fails the task.
https://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/ge/feyerabe.htmEven the ingenious attempt of Lakatos to construct a methodology that (a) does not issue orders and yet (b) puts restrictions upon our knowledge-increasing activities, does not escape this conclusion. For Lakatos' philosophy appears liberal only because it is an anarchism in disguise. And his standards which are abstracted from modern science cannot be regarded as neutral arbiters in the issue between modern science and Aristotelian science, myth, magic, religion, etc.
I'd argue that this is itself a rather simplistic reduction of society to just class issues and scientific ideas to just developments in class conflict. Darwins revolutionary idea wasn't born out of class conflict, it was born out of our growing understanding of the natural world.
I don't think any one shift in understanding can be linked to any one thing or indeed the same things in every case. Eienstein didn't fundamentally overturn newton because of any particular ideological shifts in society for example. Though the Nazi's amusingly thought they could ignore facts on the grounds of being jewish.
You seem to suffer from pessimism as much as anything else on this point. You just don't think people who do what they love with an honest commitment to find the truth are ever capable of coming to "correct" conclusions. You seem particularly hung up on marginalism for ideological reasons and I'm concerned that you are staring down one concept you don't like as your barometer for whether or not economics is capable of coming to better conlcusions without considering the field as a whole and embracing the possibility that you might not be entirely correct yourself. You are coming from a particular ideological view as much as anyone else and could be as blind to the flaws in the labor theory of value or whatever it is that you believe in as they might be blind to the flaws of the marginal theory of value.
Personally I don't have strong opinions on the particular topic since I don't know enough to form a strong opinion and don't see it as being the most pressing issue for me personally.
I do however embrace that I could be wrong about a great many things that I hold personally near and dear to my heart, though I shudder to think of being wrong about these deeply held personal beliefs that form the foundation of my belief structures, I have been deeply wrong before after all (i.e. my ancap period, good god what was I thinking?)
Well if I understand Feyerabend any, the idea here isn’t to mistake my focus on class as being the reduction of all of reality. The distinction being an awareness between that which is reality and the abstractions. But I’m not sure I posit things in a class reductionist way in that my assertion was that the bougsie in their corresponding relations emerging had them destroy the Church.
Without such a change, it’s not entirely clear that Darwin’s work would have spread and gained favour in the manner that it did. The Age of Enlightenment preceded Darwin’s work in 1850.
I didn;t assert Darwin’s understanding itself was a product of class struggle, but that it’s proliferation seems largely amicable to the rise of the bourgeoisie and the displacement of the Church’s authority/power.
https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/althusser/1970/ideology.htmIn the pre-capitalist historical period which I have examined extremely broadly, it is absolutely clear that there was one dominant Ideological State Apparatus, the Church, which concentrated within it not only religious functions, but also educational ones, and a large proportion of the functions of communications and ‘culture’. It is no accident that all ideological struggle, from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century, starting with the first shocks of the Reformation, was concentrated in an anti-clerical and anti-religious struggle; rather this is a function precisely of the dominant position of the religious Ideological State Apparatus.
The foremost objective and achievement of the French Revolution was not just to transfer State power from the feudal aristocracy to the merchant-capitalist bourgeoisie, to break part of the former repressive State apparatus and replace it with a new one (e.g., the national popular Army) but also to attack the number-one Ideological State Apparatus: the Church. Hence the civil constitution of the clergy, the confiscation of ecclesiastical wealth, and the creation of new Ideological State Apparatuses to replace the religious Ideological State Apparatus in its dominant role.
Naturally, these things did not happen automatically: witness the Concordat, the Restoration and the long class struggle between the landed aristocracy and the industrial bourgeoisie throughout the nineteenth century for the establishment of bourgeois hegemony over the functions formerly fulfilled by the Church: above all by the Schools. It can be said that the bourgeoisie relied on the new political, parliamentary-democratic, Ideological State Apparatus, installed in the earliest years of the Revolution, then restored after long and violent struggles, for a few months in 1848 and for decades after the fall of the Second Empire, in order to conduct its struggle against the Church and wrest its ideological functions away from it, in other words, to ensure not only its own political hegemony, but also the ideological hegemony indispensable to the reproduction of capitalist relations of production.
That is why I believe that I am justified in advancing the following Thesis, however precarious it is. I believe that the Ideological State Apparatus which has been installed in the dominant position in mature capitalist social formations as a result of a violent political and ideological class struggle against the old dominant Ideological State Apparatus, is the educational ideological apparatus.
Indeed I’m hung up on Marginalism in that it posits ideological obscrufication no matter the science and facts that it does arrive at, in not that it’s entirely false but the way in which is frames it’s knowledge is false eg an atomistic ontology.
There are others who do indeed come up with better conclusions for a difference in their view and methods. I’m unclear whether Marx believes in a labor theory of value as it seems he rather critiqued the it although he did posit that value was constituted by socially necessary labor time.
http://libcom.org/files/marx,%20marginalism%20and%20modern%20sociology%20-%20clarke.pdfI argued in the last chapter that Marx’s critique of alienated labour defines a quite different project from that of simply re-interpreting political economy from a different class viewpoint. Far from defining the historical form of the social relations of capitalist production on the basis of the private ownership of the means of production, Marx insisted clearly and unequivocally that this was precisely the source of the errors of political economy, which failed to see that private property was only the expression of alienated labour. Thus, far from Marx adopting Ricardo’s labour theory of value, the key to Marx’s critique of political economy was his critique of that theory.
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Far from adopting the labour theory of value to ‘prove’ the exploitation of the working class, Marx’s critique of Ricardo undermines any such proof, both philosophically, in undermining the liberal theory of property which sees labour as the basis of proprietorial rights, and theoretically, in removing the immediate connection between the expenditure of individual labour and the value of the commodity, so that the relationship between ‘effort’ and ‘reward’ can only be constituted socially. Thus Marx was harshly critical of ‘Ricardian socialism’ which proclaimed labour’s entitlement to its product, arguing that such a ‘right’ was only a bourgeois right, expressing bourgeois property relations.4
Just a nitpicky clarification.
I strongly believe in the institutions power. Perhaps I am overly optimistic, perhaps I am naive, but I really do think you are overly pessimistic that nothing can come from the economics departments because they haven't already adopted your particular ideas about how the economy functions.
Somethings do come from economists, many are quite incredibly bright, but many for all their brightness are quite restricted. Somethings can come from economics, but there are things lacking and I think that is a structural point in the way economics as a field is designed and has been based in it’s origins (Marginalist revolution). It avoided the politics of the political economy and restricted itself from some evaluative discussions (fact value distinction).
But economists have a lot to answer for when people lose their homes and jobs and they are left still asserting the rationality of the capitalist market even though they are left dumbfounded as to how to explain something like the GFC (2008).
https://thenextrecession.wordpress.com/2012/10/17/the-dilemma-of-the-mainstream/ That some universities or institutions haven’t adopted my ideas isn’t my criticism of them, there are specific criticisms to be made. The dislike isn’t a critique in itself of course.
How do you judge this? It would seem to me that the abstractions you find superior would be simply those that appeal to your values, preconceived beliefs, and various cognitive biases.
I can only say that I am radically suspicious of such an approach without fundamental tools like mathematics. I distrust myself far to much to deem myself an arbiter of whose abstractions are better than others.
I’ll reiterate that I’m not arguing a position for non-mathematics.
Then I keep coming back to how you can believe in anything, a moderate scepticism is healthy but one runs into mere subjectivism if stuck in such a mindset, a negative infinity. Though of course you believe in things.
But I assert as such in the way that one is persuaded by anything, not just through reason but experience. It took me a long time of mulling over stuff in regards to Marx’s epistemology and Evald Ilyenkov’s characterization of Marx’s sense of abstraction.
And whilst it can be difficult to compare some abstractions, it can also be foolish should one posit all abstractions as equal (what leads to negative infinity in scepticism). But often to critique one manner of thought requires it be internally critiqued rather than smashed against that which has different views. Which is why I’m not saying believe what I believe though I’ll sprinkle points from my view, but instead to shake that comfort in economists.
But I judge the abstractions to be superior in that I think there is a significant flaw in the manner of abstracting an empirical entity from it’s real world relations.
Marx thinks relationally rather than associatively and as such thinks about things in a way that I think is simply more illuminating.
But as to how to anyone is persuaded, I guess one listens to things and finds that it accords with their reasoning and sense of the world.
I always recommend Ilyenkov and this page summarizing him as good first steps
https://kapitalism101.wordpress.com/2014/07/21/abstraction-abstract-labor-and-ilyenkov/Might take it as shit but it was a big find for me in clarifying a lot. But it took quite a lot of re-reading it among other bits and pieces to get a sense of what was meant by ‘concrete abstraction’. Which as far as I can tell relates to what I think is Hegel’s solution to the issue of essence in which the essence of any one thing is how it is constituted by it’s real world relations, as opposed to abstracted from them (end up with empty forms this way detached from their empirical content).
If you wish to understand what relations are actually important to abstract them why on earth would you not start from what the current relations in the world today are? :?:
I would add that mathematical models take real world information and make real world conclusions, the are not as you make out purely abstract.
Then, I think you should get back into a study of Marx considering such a view seems most amicable to him in beginning from the empirically real, then abstracting from it in order to return back to the real with concrete abstractions.
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1857/grundrisse/ch01.htm#loc3If I were to begin with the population, this would be a chaotic conception of the whole, and I would then, by means of further determination, move analytically towards ever more simple concepts, from the imagined concrete towards ever thinner abstractions until I had arrived at the simplest determinations. From there the journey would have to be retraced until I had arrived at the population again, but this time not as the chaotic conception of a whole, but as a rich totality of many determinations and relations.
One is meant to start from the world as it actually exists.
But the issue still remains how on abstracts that empirical world, which gets back to the point that the way in which the world is conceived is the issue and once again, if that view has problematic assumptions. Then it doesn’t matter how much empirical data you want to throw at it, the framing is inadequate.
http://ase.tufts.edu/gdae/publications/working_papers/stilldead.pdfFor those who are overwhelmed by the ongoing mathematical escalation in economic theory, McCloskey’s call to turn away from empty formalism toward real empirical work has a certain refreshing charm. But even applied researchers often present their work in terms of the abstractions of what she calls “blackboard economics.” Some theory is present, explicitly or implicitly, in any empirical study. In applied economics today, it is common to find explicit reliance on a general equilibrium framework, and hence implicit reliance on the dynamic stability of its equilibrium points.
The purely abstract is stated in terms that the models are ideal models that don’t really correspond all that well with the real world in a lot of ways in that they’re based on a conception of the world that is inadequate.
I simply fail to see the issue you are claiming here. Economics seems to be a rather expansive field doing all sorts of wide ranging things. It studies everything from individual behaviors and small scale microeconomics to the study of institutions large and small, to the entire economy of all of society and how this or that effects it. What makes you say it is so narrowly focused?
I say narrow or restricted or limited in that relative to political economy it is.
https://www.marxists.org/glossary/terms/t/h.htmThe other significant component which marked the departure of bourgeois economic science from the tradition of political economy was this: political economy had for its aim to explain why people lived the way they did, and part of this was to explain why and how the wealth of the world was distributed in the way it was, i.e., why there were rich and poor for example. The new economic science was definitively not interested in investigating this, but took distribution as a given. This change was also tied up with a change in ethical conceptions: whereas Adam Smith had been concerned to understand why people placed a greater or lesser value on things, the new economic science was not interested in this. Mill and Bentham’s Utilitarianism was founded on the conception of “freedom of the individual” to the extent that enquiry into virtue, ie., into why we value this or that, was ruled out. Adam Smith arrived at the conclusion that value was determined by the quantity of socially necessary labour embodied in the production of a commodity, for Utilitarianism, value was “in the eye of the beholder”.
http://libcom.org/files/marx,%20marginalism%20and%20modern%20sociology%20-%20clarke.pdfThe new methods of analysis arose out of a new concern with the problem of prices. Economists had always sought to explain the determination of prices as part of their enterprise. What the marginalists introduced was an emphasis on the need for a rigorous theory of price determination. For classical political economy the determination of prices was a subordinate concern. The central theoretical issues were those of the constitutional order within which capitalism could best develop to the advantage of the nation as a whole, and of the relations between the classes proper to such a development. This led classical political economy to pose questions of distribution within the framework of a theory of growth, within which the rigorous determination of individual prices was of little concern, so long as the determination of prices could be assumed not to conflict too seriously with the theory of distribution. For the marginalists this order of priorities was inverted, and the central concern became one of developing a rigorous theory of price determination.
Within classical political economy the determination of prices was subordinate to the problem of distribution and prices were the by-product of the theory of distribution. Once wages, rent and the rate of profit had been determined, prices could be derived by adding together the component parts. However the contradiction between the classical theory of production and the Ricardian theory of distribution meant that the resultant prices did not coincide with the values according to which the distributive categories were determined. Hence within the Ricardian system the determination of prices was always subject to the qualifications that this divergence necessarily introduced. The vulgar critics of classical political economy had exploited this contradiction to reject the classical theory of distribution and the theory of value on which it was based. However, although they asserted the priority of price over value or even the exclusive reality of price as against value, they could offer no rigorous theory of price determination, nor did they seriously seek to develop such a theory.
The marginalists followed the vulgar economists in their concern with the question of prices, but they did not follow them in rejecting the need for a theory of value. For the marginalists a theory of value was essential to any attempt to develop a rigorous theory of price, and the scientific weakness of the classical theory of value was that it could not achieve this. The task the marginalists set themselves was to develop a rigorous theory of price determination on the basis of the subjective theory of value, the basis of the marginalist theory of value was initially defined as ‘utility’.
You see a vast sea, but I see it has having been made smaller, and now amount of dicing it up would make it that massive relative to the task of understanding in the political economy.
It has largely ignored the question of society, reduced itself, left a gap for sociology considering itself a value neutral science of resource allocation where there was once no need for the distinction of economics and sociology. Because the distinction between economy and society is conceptual but not empirical and to tear out society as it is from the technical calculations in economics of the marginalsit variant, is to render it impotent to certain considerations.
I guess an analogy to help think about it is how some Americans say they have a good healthcare system because of waiting times or something whilst downplaying how many people who would want or need healthcare aren’t readily accessing it. Sure one does a good job at what one is doing but one has largely neglected a significant lot. Now in considering the capitalist economy, economics has confined itself in a way that leads to all sorts of nonsense dualities and obscures real questions about capitalism treating it ahistorical as presupposed in it’s particular relations.
This seems a hefty claim indeed. 
You seem to be asserting that Darwin was only able to discover evolution because he had somehow used some aspect of your ideology to do so. You could see how this would make me rather suspicious of the claim. It has an air of "i'm totally right about how the world works and so anyone else who was right must have secretly shared the way I think about stuff ideologically".
What shocks you about it?
Darwin was able to conceive of the essence of organisms (although he didn’t know the basic unit that underpins as such, the cell). The previous Linnaeus Taxonomy was associative in terms of appearance only, but didn’t grasp the essence of organisms.
Got to think about change and how simply looking at appearances doesn’t suffice as this just ends up with snapshot sense of things rather than properly conceiving of how one things turns into another.
https://www.scribd.com/document/93941626/Getting-to-Know-Hegel-by-Andy-BlundenWhen we say that truth is historical, this observation has a further meaning. Forexample, if we define "fish" in terms of a sub-category of species organised inthe manner of Linnaeus, we quickly find ourselves with a host of hybrids and"border-line cases" which cannot be satisfactorily classified "fish" or "not-fish"without in fact losing the notion of Fish. "Fish" is in fact not a set of propertiesbe means of which an object may be classified as "fish" or "not-fish" - as aresult of the discovery by Darwin of the origin of species, we can nowunderstand the category of "fish" as a particular stage or arm in the evolution of species, and it is by the relation of a given species to this genesis that we maycall it "fish" or "not-fish"
It is important to understand that the notion of a thing is not just it's history, the story of it's rise and fall, but the underlying principle or truth of its genesis.
To which the unviersal or essence, the real thing which underpins all particulars, is not identified by associative features but something else.
I recommend this piece to clarify this point
https://kapitalism101.wordpress.com/2014/07/21/abstraction-abstract-labor-and-ilyenkov/ But also:
https://www.marxists.org/archive/ilyenkov/works/articles/universal.htmAnd might see the point of how the ‘old logic’ finds itself at an impasse when it comes to comprehending things when thinking of them associatively.
I don’t seek to use Darwin’s reputation to imbue Marxism with some grand authority, but instead argue that the way Darwin thought was exactly inline with the manner in which Marx thought as inherited from Hegel (though different in that Hegel apparently doesn’t posit a real existing universal, only conceptual or ideal). If anything, it’s more to implore you to consider how Darwin came to such a conclusion and the manner of thought to see that Marxism isn’t some alien thing out to trick you, but that it posits things that should accord with your very reasoning should you give it attention.
My point isn't that sociology complete economics. Philosophy of economics matters too, in some way shape or form every field will touch on every other and impact each other. The divisions between fields are in part arbitrary after all, a discovery in one field can challenge the foundations of another. Every field of science and study are different levels of focus on the same reality after all, not so perfectly divided as all that. There will always be criticism of each and that matters.
This type of argument matters.
I'm not claiming that economics itself as an individual field with not influence from outside is necessarily able to transcend itself. the entire institution of science and academics is required, all of society is required. Anything isolated in a vacuum will be sterile.
But how actively intermingled and interdisplinary economics is I wonder. There are some cracks and potential in people starting to discuss things more.
https://www.worldeconomicsassociation.org/newsletterarticles/interview-with-tony-lawson/But at least for a forum like this one in Paris2, where there are nearly 700 heterodox economists, we can seek to be serious in our papers, to be respectful both to each other as audience members and also to our subject-matters. We don’t need to show how clever we all are; let us take the capabilities of each other as givens. What is needed, yet can be lacking, is real engagement and debate over the nature of the social world and how it works, a progression of the discipline. Instead we allow features like numbers of publications, citations, rankings of journals in which we publish, and so forth to dominate the manner in which we do things. This all results in, or is a manifestation of, a dumbing down of the discipline. It is anti-intellectual. Yes it is the path of the mainstream. But the whole point of heterodoxy I assume is to distance ourselves from mainstream practices that can clearly be seen to be indefensible. I am sorry if this sounds heavy. And of course I’m saying that I must raise my standards as much as anyone else. But I think it is gatherings like this that can help us; and it is in gatherings like this that we can hopefully be allowed to try. I am hopeful that we can draw strength from each other, and connect with each others’ research in serious and respectful ways. Up to a point we already do; some contributors especially. But I feel that many of us could do so much better.
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Of course I am not suggesting that we must all agree with each other; or that everything deserves publication; only that we engage and encourage engagement, that we don’t exclude on non-intellectual grounds. I recognise that resources including journal space are limited; heterodox ones especially. That is why I believe that heterodox journals should not fill themselves with the sort of mathematical exercises that can get into, and indeed are the sole content of, mainstream journals. But I certainly think heterodox journals should be open to, say, mainstream contributors who wish to argue that the current emphasis and insistence on mathematical modelling is entirely appropriate. The problem here, of course, is that mainstream economists do not seem willing to argue a case; they merely take it as given that mathematical tools are appropriate. And they thereby, and in this manner, exclude all alternatives. My worry is that certain heterodox and methodological journals sometimes act in similar anti-intellectual ways to other heterodox views with which they feel uncomfortable or in competition or whatever.
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The second positive feature I would like to emphasise is the launch of the pluralistic World Economics Association (WEA), and its various activities, not least its open forum journals. To the latter everyone can submit papers, observe the submission of papers by others, observe in turn the feedback received from referees and any and all others wishing to make an input, engage with any of the latter, all leading to final revisions, and so on. Such an open process appears necessarily free from some of the concerns I raised earlier. The whole thing seems designed to be truly pluralistic. I do so hope these sorts of developments continue, and are widely recognised and supported.
I would never claim that philosophy doesn't have a role here or that you shouldn't make your arguments. I do think you are underestimating people within this fields ability to think more deeply about things. Many people don't of course but that's true of everyone. It seems a little unfair to imagine every scientist of being reduce to a thoughtless cog.
Oh they can think deeply, but that doesn’t change the sad state of economics as a field for me and others. I don’t think of them as thoughtless cogs, hell they can be incredibly thoughtful, but that doesn’t mean they find the means to overcome their issues for all their thinking. But when I posit tunnel vision, the point is related to the earlier characterization of the inadequate nature of how the world is assumed to be in economic thought.
Which is why I bring up Tony Lawson as a positive influence in pressing the discussion on ontology.
Funnily the last sentence here is something the Austrians would say all the time. That is where the models come in, with a model you can take your hypothesis and take real world data and create necessary conclusions about the future if your hypothesis is true. It's hard to do science in the way physicists or chemists do on the whole of humanity and society but I'd point to ecology which studies many subjects that can be hard to do controlled experiments on but can produce very good work. This isn't in and of itself a fatal flaw.
If something can't be studied in the real world it can only be because two conflicting theories would produce the same results in that area. In which case if those distinctions matter you can fight over it but I'm more concerned with real world effects than logical debates about marginalism and the labor theory of value.
If either theory of value gave the same results all else being equal then I probably wont care all that much about which one is right. If those theories have other necessary conclusions that are good or bad then we have something to indirectly test those theories with.
My point is that whilst one can do empirical tests, one won’t find that a theory is readily dispensed with even if a hypothesis is shown to be wrong. And oddly enough, one finds that those who don’t believe in the LTV don’t find conclusive results and those who do, tend to.
Overall, the LTV in Marx’s conception (alienated labor) doesn’t seem to have been conclusively proven right nor false. As I understand it Marx at this point has been shown to be 100% internally consistent when interpreted correctly as people have long misinterpreted him according to some. But to the empirical proof of his theorizing is still needing to be done.
The falling rate of profit I imagine has difficulties in that there are tendencies to counter it and so it seems many things are acting simultaneously at once.
I don't know all that much about the barter illusion, but models are math and math can be right or wrong based on the presuppositions used. Any particular example of a bad model doesn't make modeling fundamentally flawed.
If all economics models have some fundamental flaw I'm not aware of it is because they are poorly constructed, not because math can't describe reality.
Indeed there can be such a thing as bad modelling but again, my issue isn’t with math but with the axioms of how the economy is conceived in economic models.
I must wonder where I gave of this impression of anti-math as it permeates your response.
A model that gives out false answers because it is grounded in untrue things about reality is a bad model, which can be ultimately rejected as flawed because it will give bad conclusions which do not map onto reality. It will be falsified.
Again, one can have hypothesis falsified but this doesn’t lead to the rejection of the theory.
But to get to a point that might be compelling to you, much of economics of the marginalist variant begins from individuals exhcnaing with one another (why is referenced the barter illusion which
abstracts away commodities in a market and capitalist relations)
Based on this [url]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonnenschein–Mantel–Debreu_theorem[/url]
Think I linked this earlier but this gives a good rendition of the above in relation to General Equllbirum Theory
http://ase.tufts.edu/gdae/publications/working_papers/stilldead.pdfInstability arises in part because aggregate demand is not as well-behaved as individual demand. If the aggregate demand function looked like an individual demand function -- that is, if the popular theoretical fiction of a “representative individual” could be used to represent market behavior -- then there would be no problem. Unfortunately, though, the aggregation problem is intrinsic and inescapable. There is no representative individual whose demand function generates the instability found in the SMD theorem (Kirman 1992). Groups of people display patterns and structures of behavior that are not present in the behavior of the individual members; this is a mathematical truth with obvious importance throughout the social sciences.
For contemporary economics, this suggests that the pursuit of microfoundations for macroeconomics is futile. Even if individual behavior were perfectly understood, it would be impossible to draw useful conclusions about macroeconomics directly from that understanding, due to the aggregation problem (Rizvi 1994, Martel 1996). This fact is reflected in Arrow’s one-sentence summary of the SMD result, quoted at the beginning of this section (“In the aggregate, the hypothesis of rational behavior has in general no implications.”).
The microeconomic model of behavior contributes to instability because it says too little about what individuals want or do. From a mathematical standpoint, as Saari suggests, there are too many dimensions of possible variation, too many degrees of freedom, to allow results at a useful level of specificity. The consumer is free to roam over the vast expanse of available commodities, subject only to a budget constraint and the thinnest possible conception of rationality: anything you can afford is acceptable, so long as you avoid blatant inconsistency in your preferences.
The assumed independence of individuals from each other, emphasized by Kirman, is an important part but not the whole of the problem. A reasonable model of social behavior should recognize the manner in which individuals are interdependent; the standard economic theory of consumption fails to acknowledge any forms of interdependence, except through market transactions. However, merely amending the theory to allow more varied social interactions will not produce a simpler or more stable model. Indeed, if individuals are modeled as following or conforming to the behavior of others, the interactions will create positive feedback loops in the model, increasing the opportunity for unstable responses to small fluctuations (see Section 4).
This point being not just testing done mathematically, but that the theoretical assumptions set limits which made it untenable. Hence my point that it doesn’t matter how good the methods are if the very foundation of such work is inadequate.
But if you look at it, the point is that it persists in spite of it’s inadequacy, there hasn’t been some radical shift in some of the mainstream. This is the sort of shit that’s put in textbooks.
We all struggle in an absurd universe and die, looking for meaning that isn't there the whole time. 
I really don't know what more to say to this part except that it's a problem that's true of everyone and everything past, present, and future. Not much I can really do to address the concern that humans are human and that makes everything we do flawed. 
The lack of meaning comes from alienation as
Once in the form of religion but now in the form of the commodity over man.
People can do better, the point is that the conceptual distinction between subjectivity and objectivity is a lot murkier considering that our perception of the objective is subjective. But its to emphasize that our perception is mediated and to then ponder how there are suprasensuos things which are ‘objective’. The meaning and essence of things not embodied within the object itself but within empirical entities as constituted with their relations. The prime example being money which isn’t simply subjective value, which is what occurs for the empiricist that posits anything that isn’t empirical as subjectivity. It has real value as revealed when one uses it, because it is constituted by a market of commodities in which it is the universal commodity. Which relates back to the point about the barter illusion, discussing with someone else how money is treated as insignificant despite the barter illusion because its rationalized a way as just smoothing along transactions. The below also makes the point of the illegitimacy of generalizing from the individual exchange.
http://libcom.org/files/marx,%20marginalism%20and%20modern%20sociology%20-%20clarke.pdThe implications for the marginalist analysis of exchange become clear as soon as we turn to the explanation of money. For the marginalists money is simply a means of avoiding the inconvenience of barter, which has no substantive implications. However, barter cannot be reduced to the elementary form of immediate exchange, for in barter the individual acquires things through exchange with a view to their subsequent exchange for other things. The ‘inconvenience of barter does not lie in the mediated character of the exchange relation, which requires the individual to enter two exchange relations instead of only one, for this is as much the case when money serves as the mediating term in the exchange as it is when any other commodity plays that role. The ‘inconvenience’ of barter lies in the fact that the first exchange is conditional on the outcome of the second, the results of which cannot be known with certainty. I may wish to exchange corn for meat, but the butcher may want not corn but cloth. The butcher may be willing to accept my corn in exchange for her meat, with a view to subsequently exchanging the corn for cloth with somebody else. In this event neither of us wants the corn in itself, but only as the means of exchange for something else: corn serves in this exchange not as a use-value, but as a value. However, in exchanging meat for corn the butcher runs the risk of not being able to make the subsequent exchange on the anticipated terms, and this is where the ‘inconvenience’ of barter lies.
The use of durable, infinitely divisible commodities, with a high value in relation to their volume, as means of exchange certainly removes some of the physical inconvenience attached to less suitable commodities, but it does not solve the fundamental problem of barter, that exchanges are made conditional on an uncertain outcome. If corn is not in general demand the butcher will be unwilling to accept corn in exchange for meat, but the introduction of money does not solve this problem, for if corn is not in general demand I will no more be able to exchange my corn for money than I was able to exchange it for meat. On the other hand, if I am able to sell my corn for money, the rationality of this exchange is not determined by the conditions of this exchange alone, but also by my uncertain expectation of the future price of meat. It is the uncertainty of the outcome of particular exchanges that disqualifies particular commodities from serving as the means of exchange, and gives rise to money as the universal equivalent. However money does not remove the uncertainty attached to particular exchanges, it merely expresses that uncertainty in a universal form. Money does not resolve the inconvenience of barter, it generalises it. Far from expressing the rationality of exchange, money expresses the irrationality of a system of social production in which provision for human need is achieved only through the alienated form of commodity exchange.
The explanation of money presents problems of a different order from those raised by recognition of inequalities of wealth and power, because the existence of money cannot be explained without abandoning the most fundamental assumptions of the marginalist model. In the elementary act of exchange the agents of exchange knew with certainty the range of opportunities available to them, expressed in the reciprocal offers of each party to the exchange. If the exchange-ratios of all commodities, in the present and the future, are generally known, the results achieved in the analysis of the elementary act of exchange can be generalised to a system of indirect exchange. However, in the absence of uncertainty as to future exchange-ratios, every commodity can serve indifferently as means of exchange, and there is no need for one commodity to serve as a universal equivalent. On the other hand, if we recognise the existence of ignorance and uncertainty we can explain the emergence of money, but it is no longer legitimate to generalise the results achieved in the analysis of the elementary act of exchange.
People fall in love with their own beliefs. I wouldn't really expect them to reject flawed beliefs overnight. This is true in many fields, people fought over whether or not atoms existed in physics for far longer than the evidence in it's favor would have you expect. It's just how people are. It happens in every academic field, we just have to have people keep pointing it out and have the evidence keep piling up and struggling till the truth wins out.
Indeed, but I would say many have had long enough. But the real issue isn’t just to be shown to be wrong, but given an alternative otherwise one still requires that which one believes to be false to function. Even in knowing it’s wrong one will still act accordingly, because things are changed through disbelief, thats just a good precondition to change. But to change one needs the alternatives which some people find, but others won’t. Well it takes a lot of struggle for truth to become truth and I’m not sure how much struggling is going on.
Nothing happens in a vacuum of course.
I would say that you are making too strong a statement in the other direction though. You seem to be making the statement that what economists think is simply a secondary consequence of everything else when I don't see it as so clear as that. Economic theory can drive changes in society and society can drive changes in economic theory but they aren't so seperate that one causes the other in one direction only.
Indeed.
https://etd.lib.metu.edu.tr/upload/12613281/index.pdfEven in the German Ideology, Marx explicitly points out that “circumstances make men just as much as men make circumstance” (GI. 165), and this sentence obviously shows that the real concrete’s relation to law, morality, religion, consciousness etc. is not one-sidedly determined. Of course, intellectual wealth directly depends on material conditions (GI. 154, 163, 166, and 172), but human beings affect and even change the material conditions and the circumstances in so far as it is possible for them to do so within the boundaries of the restrictions set by these conditions. Material conditions and intellectual wealth affect each other: “The production of ideas, of conceptions, of consciousness; is at firstly directly interwoven with the material activity and the material intercourse of men” (GI. 154 italics mine)
Our ideas can lead to change, but the ideas that lead to change are ones in tension with the society, not that which naturalizes the status quo. The status quo has it’s influence of course, this is what constitutes a hegemony, but wish to be clear that the change doesn’t come from apologists, not all ideas are out to change things. In this case, things keep changing but nothing changes at all applies I think. The appearance of things changes but real qualitative change doesn’t seem all that apparent for somethings.
But it’s also the case that…
http://d-scholarship.pitt.edu/10867/1/VWills_ETD_2011.pdfMarx's second argument against Kantian morality is that its focus on the free will belies the extent to which the will is itself determined by material conditions and material interests. The abstraction of the “free will” is illegitimate according to Marx because it attempts to prize apart the intellectual life of individuals from their economic, social, and historical context. A person with a will that is “wholly independent of foreign causes determining it,” to adopt Kant's phrase, simply does not exist in reality, and therefore such a subject makes a rather poor starting point for moral theory. (Later, in 1853, Marx writes, there critiquing Hegel, “Is it not a delusion to substitute for the individual with his real motives, with multifarious social circumstances pressing upon him, the abstraction of “free-will” — one among the many qualities of man for man himself”74!)
…
What Marx describes when he addresses the way in which economic laws play a role in determining the actions of human beings, are tendencies of members of various social groups to act in circumstances shaped through those laws, and not iron-clad predictions for particular individuals. Howard Sherman, in his 1981 paper, “Marx and Determinism,” puts this point very nicely when he writes:
Marx pointed out that one can find regularities of human behavior, that on the average we do behave in certain predictable ways. This behavior also changes in systematic ways, with predictable trends, in association with changes in our technological and social environments. At a simpler level, the regularities of human behavior are obvious in the fairly constant annual numbers of suicides and divorces (although these also show systematic trends). If humans did not, generally, behave in fairly predictable ways, not only social scientists but also insurance companies would have gone out of business long ago. Any particular individual may make any particular choice, but if we know the social composition of a group, we can predict, in general, what it will do. Thus, on the average, most large owners of stock will vote in favor of preferential tax rates for capital gains; most farmers will favor laws that they believe to be in the interest of farmers109
As a rule, a capitalist will tend to maximize his profit irrespective of the social repercussions. A bourgeois intellectual will tend to develop theoretical justifications for the continuation of capitalism, often in spite of the glaring social contradictions.
Within what Marx would call a bourgeois standpoint, that is to say, even while continuing to support the bourgeoisie as the class most suited to lead humanity economically, politically, and otherwise, it is possible for certain members of this class to develop a keen understanding of the social contradictions produced by class society and in some cases, even a real commitment to human development or to the eradication of such ills as global poverty or unfolding ecological destruction.
I don’t place optimism on average that people will merely find their way out, they need the tools of course but as mentioned earlier there isn’t yet enough free discussion. Many useful contribution by heterodox economists are still marginalized because they’re defined against a mainstream which mostly plays with itself.
I have my own personal reasons that I respect these institutions.
I would point out that most economists don't really make tons of money or gain fame. It's the same for them as most other academic disciplines, they do it because they love it, because they have a drive for truth and have inherited those values and those values are reinforced by those institutions.
Maybe those institutions need changing maybe they dont, but I have a fundamental attitude that if people struggle for what they value they can get there eventually. Otherwise why even bother trying if you don't believe it?
And good luck to them, i need not posit nefarious motivations for them to be inadequate to the task of displacing the mainstream. Many with good intentions are readily subdued by systems of power before them. Indeed people can struggle, this I agree with, it’s just that things are at a weak point right now even though it’s quite clear that in our western nations/economies things are going to shit but instead right wingers are galvanized, any left is yet to find its feet and stand firmly. Only baby steps are being taken thus far. But in regards to the institutions themselves, I surely ain’t expecting some en masse of heterodox influence, this should’ve happened years ago.
Anything can change, but what it takes to change such a thing is the issue, I would think that what is mainstream was dealt a significant blow years ago when they failed to predict the GFC. But somehow its going on, even the
washington consensusisn’t slowed down that much in that the criticisms fall by the wayside in that they end up essentially accepting the presuppositions of capitalism.
Stuck with a lot of people whose most radical response to the issues of capitalism is to end up in terms of reformist like the utopian socialists. Basically, good intentions, haven’t spent time to understand capitalism in terms of what is, only to posit what ought to be in relation to bits and pieces.
https://www.ethicalpolitics.org/ablunden/pdfs/For%20Ethical%20Politics.pdf#page90
-For Ethical Politics
- By skinster
- By QatzelOk
- By litwin