[PEN-L:11348] Re: Male Chauvanist Mathematics

[Doug Henwood <dhenwood@xxxxxxxxx>]

James Devine wrote:

>I think it's important to remember that though he was mainstream, the
>Barron's reviewer was not an economist. I'm afraid that most economists
>simply won't read Doug's book. Hopefully, a more important group --
>workers, nonacademics -- will read it, especially since it's so
>well-written and IMHO so accurate. (Doug, do you think people will be put
>off or made more interested by all the stuff about sex and Freud?)

Hey, what's wrong with sex and Freud?

I'll confess that writing about the psychology of money & credit, which
involves a bit of sex here & there, does provide a welcome relief from
writing about flow of funds matrices and efficient market theory. But I'm
also trying to connect economics with the rest of social life, which is
something economists rarely do (just as cultural studies types rarely
connect with anything economic, except at the most general level of
cliche). Surely the transition from gold to credit money isn't just a
technical affair - money is deeply psychological. Don't you agree that the
demotion of gold has something to do with a, dare I say, "postmodern"
banishment of the "guilty sadomasochism of the anus" in favor of a roving,
hungry narcissistic entitlement? And that the shift in language from the
dry, hard rhetoric of gold to the protean, "liquid" rhetoric of credit
marks some significant shift in social psychology? And that the frequent
association of religious imagery with money is of more than passing
curiosity?

Doug