Re: Backed Money-etc. - Reply To Winslow re. Whitehead

["Gunnar Tomasson" <tomasson@xxxxxxxx>]

Ted:

Re. the following:
>
> Re your claim in an earlier post about Keynes's relation to Bentham, here
> are some more passages for you to consider.
>
> In the essay on Marshall, in a footnote to the claim that Jevons's Theory
of
> Political Economy "lives in the tenuous world of bright ideas", he says:
>
> "How disappointing are the fruits, now that we have them, of the bright
idea
> of reducing Economics to a mathematical application of the hedonistic
> calculus of Bentham!" (X, p. 184)
>

To which Bentham would have said a resounding Amen!

"I have by me," he wrote in this respect, "a large quarto of mathematics
written by a mathematician and politician of deserved eminence, in which the
utility of numbers, as a security for good judicature, is assumed.  The
conclusions of mathematicians, though always mathematically just, are not
infrequently physically false: that is, they would be true if things were
not as they are.  Some necessary element is omitted to be taken into
account: and thus the only effect of the operation is to mislead."

A footnote in my 1988 working paper states that "These were the concluding
words of Bentham's essay on 'The Philosophy of Economic Science."

More later on other aspects of your interesting note.

Regards,

Gunar