Re: [Pen-l] Naomi Klein: Beware of Obama's Chicago School of Economics boys

[ravi <ravi@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Jun 14, 2008, at 2:56 PM, Doug Henwood wrote:
> On Jun 14, 2008, at 10:17 AM, Patrick Bond wrote:
>
> > And I don't blame you, if this distracts from your own pollyannish  
> > view of the unfolding crisis. But you are missing your targets with  
> > this geographical confusion, when obviously she's aiming at the  
> > confluence of Chicago School assumptions of rational - or at least  
> > clearing - financial markets, and neoliberalism more generally.
>
> Say that then. Say that it's a tradition in economics that goes way  
> back, and infects the faculty of Harvard too. Say that it fits  
> nicely with capitalist class interest (unless they need a bailout,  
> which they've just gotten for the umpteenth time). Why narrow it  
> down in every dimension, time, place, person?

You guys know the economics (and the history) better than me, but it  
seems to me that Patrick's point (not quoted above) is legitimate that  
its not a geographic matter... here is how I see it (and as noted,  
this may be an naive view), and how I argued it in the previous post:  
in my understanding, what the common person saw (and appreciated) in  
Wall Street (the movie) was the turnaround achieved in the dominant  
paradigm. Years of general and politically driven progressive advances  
were finally brought to a halt and within a few years in the 80s it  
was morning once again in the America where greed was good. The entire  
Clinton triangulation and staged surrender of territory was an  
acknowledgement of this shift. And (again IMHO) both the technocratic  
wealth and ascendance of the 90s, and the war and economic bust of the  
Bush years, seem to have invoked a [mild] rejection of this hedonistic  
reductionism... and at such a point, and by a man who seems to be the  
leader of this surge, Klein finds it a strange and disturbing thing to  
see the presence of individuals who unabashedly (and unreservedly)  
think in those recently displaced terms and attack those who have  
risen up as indulging in "Kum Ba Ya singing". The thread or idea that  
Klein sees running through all of it from Goolsbee and Furman to hedge  
fund backers of Obama is the one resurrected (not so much from  
Economics, in my admittedly illiterate view -- rooted in a theory of  
moral sentiments, Schumpeter and Austrians notwithstanding -- but from  
folk psychology) and given credibility by Friedman.

	--ravi

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