Re: Davidson seminar paper -- day 4

[Randy Wray <lwray@xxxxxx>]

Denver was hit with 9 inches of snow, wiping out trees and powerlines
and somehow also knocking out the university mainframe; thus, i am
late in clarifying something. I realize the seminar is over, but i
wanted to make clear that i was not arguing that a model that leads to
neutral money would be useful. Thus, i agree with paul that if our
expectations were indeed always fulfilled, if the world were stable
and ergodic, then we should model that as if agents will eventually
adopt certainty-equivalent behaviors and abandon use of money
contracts. My point was merely that many interpreters of Keynes seem
to believe the essence of his theory of uncertainty is that
expectations are disappointed; rather, I argued that even if
expectations were not, if agents are uncertain, this will change their
behavior. This is how changning views about the future are capable of
influencing current outcomes, as Keynes said; this is how money
impacts outcomes so that it is not neutral.
And regarding my comments about time series data, my point is that no
matter how nicely behaved these were in the past, this cannot serve as
any indication whatsoever that these outcomes were not the product of
decisions taken under conditions of uncertainty. Nor, I would now add,
are they useful for predicting how they will behave in the future.
Like Paul, I would emphasize that as we humans are creating the
future, there is simply no way to extrapolate from the past (which we
created) to the future (which has not yet been created). This is so
simple, obvious, and true that only economists seem to have a lot of
trouble understanding it.
That said, I do leave more room for determinism that Paul might. There
are laws of motion of capitalist systems, but this is not the place
for that discussion.

On the PKT open forum (again, sorry for the late response), I agree
with Jamie. One post per day as an average should certainly be more
than sufficient to satisfy the needs of the biggest contributors. Herb
seemed to mention something of an automatic delete (his message seemed
to be garbled); is there a way this can be done either individually or
for the net as a whole? No, I am not saying delete someone entirely
from the net, but rather, to stop my in box from filling up with 10
posts by an individual each day. this has nothing to do with whether I
agree with the posts or not. I simply cannot handle so many posts. If
self discipline will not work, there must be an automatic
intervention. Otherwise, like some others, I will be off the net
before the quarter is over. People say it is easy to delete; maybe
their university mainframes have greater capacity. If I skip two days
of pkt deleting, my in box is more than full, I get nasty messages
from the computer people, and the editor starts behaving badly
(dropping me, losing my deletes, etc).

Randy Wray