PEN-L message, Re: The Mind of Paul Krugman: Mahathir, Pinochet, bad men, goo

One more time on this topic:

Juriaan, your capacity to ingest and retain information is amazing, most often helpful and sometimes overwhelming. Both you and Melvin P. occasionally remind me, though, of the person who, when asked "how are you?", recounts his medical history.

I have read Krugman in the paper of record for years, and I realize perfectly well that he would not assess and prescribe policy like, for instance, Kissinger or Robert Rubin or Eagleburger or other realpolitik wonks; all I wanted to point out was that his words, as I read them, seemed overbroad and suggested that he could be interpreted to mean what he said: that prescription and analysis of policy are not to be governed by "who makes them", which was a criticism of those who object to praise of Pinochet's results because of the method by which they were accomplished.

And I certainly understand that a "policy analyst", whether Brzezinski on Afghanistan or Krugman more benignly on capital controls in Malaysia or Kissinger on Chile, or let's say Wolfowitz on the Middle East, is called on to make an assessment that is circumscribed by the job description that defines what he was hired to do, to analyze no more than the present picture, or at least if to go beyond that, to keep in mind heh! heh! homilies about breaking eggs to make an omelet or the odious nature of sausage making.

People on this list, presumably mostly academics unlike me, have a profound influence on countless people who are likely to go forth and practice their preachments. What Krugman's digression called to mind was the kind of analysis I got in econ and other "social science" courses in college - a static, snapshot, discrete-frame view of the world, blip-blip-blip series of unconnected events, absent of relevant history, causative chains or any of the kind of analysis which sees the skein of contradictory phenomena implicit in all policy prescription, consequent implementation or assessment of results, and which pulls those pieces apart and illuminates more than just how to get a leg up in a cruel world, by any means necessary - how to engender a relatively stable environment for the accumulation of capital.

But this is the sort of statement, as I read it, that is consistent with that, and that was all I meant to suggest. Not to bash every good left economist's icon, who no doubt despite his statement does assess consequences in making recommendations - but who may also have a liberal blind spot which leads to the sort of claim he made in the column I quote from.

And as to "self-expansion of capital", that was an imprecise _expression_ for Marx's reproduction schema M - C - M'. It shouldn't present a problem unless it distorts in some way. I would be sorry if your lecture implied that I come across to you as a person who is not aware that "Marx never believed that capital could 'expand itself by itself' or could automatically realise itself in the market, but rather that living human labor was essential for this expansion and realisation".

Ralph

----- Original Message -----

From: Jurriaan Bendien

To: PEN-L@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

Sent: Thursday, September 23, 2004 11:07 PM

Subject: Re: The Mind of Paul Krugman: Mahathir, Pinochet, bad men, good policies - and the 'job of economic analysts'

so for Krugman to say the value-free

"job of economic analysts OUGHT to be, to assess the policies, without regard to who makes them",

The real question is whether he can assess the policies, without regard to who makes them, and I could drag out quite a few quotes which indicate that he does have regard for the people making the policies in his assessments. If Pinochet's army and police butchering of leftwing people is somehow treated as an "extra-economic" event of no relevance to economic policy, then I think we'd have to say we are dealing with a case of professional cretinism. I think Krugman is trying to say "I am interested not in the rhetoric or the personalities, but in what objectively speaking actually gets done, and what real effect it has." It is just that in the real world, butchering people and political repression was part of the policy, and objectively part of what got done, and to say it had nothing to do with economics or is somehow disconnected from economics, is a reification - in that sense I agree with you.

As regards the formula "self-expansion of capital", Marx never really used that _expression_, except possibly in some specific contexts where he is talking in a Hegelian way about the ability of the capitalist mode of production to reproduce its own initial conditions on an increasing scale. "Self-expansion of capital", is actually a mistranslation from the German "Kapitalverwertung", which means the valorisation of capital. Marx never believed that capital could "expand itself by itself" or could automatically realise itself in the market, but rather that living human labor was essential for this expansion and realisation, and that was more or less the whole point of his story: human work became capital, began to function as capital and was treated as capital, resulting both in the economising of labor, the degradation of labor and the fetishism of capital as a thing that can grow in value of its own accord (disregarding the source of this increa se in surplus-labor).

Jurriaan

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