From: "ÁÎ×Ó¹â Henry C.K.Liu ¹ù¤l¥ú" <hliu@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
To: Steve Keen <stevekeen10@xxxxxxxxxxx>, Post Keynesian Thought
<pkt@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Subject: Re: Debunking Economics
Date: Mon, 22 May 2000 02:12:09 -0400
Steve:
Your introduction is written a bit like a lead-in for a detective novel,
laying
down clues on where you are going, warning readers of pitfalls, etc. I am
the
type of reader you seem to be aiming for, someone interested in economics
but
not formally trained in it. As I was reading it, I kept wishing that you
sound
less defensive about you are planning to do and come on stronger with what
I
summise is your point: that neoclassical economics is faulty not because
conditions have changed over time but its intial rationale was faulty.
Your critique of economics education as the blind teaching the blind is
insightful but not unique to economics. It is the problem with education
in
general.
Your intention to give "the lie to the claim by Economists that ?Economic
Reform
??by which they mean removing aspects of the real world which don?t conform
to
Economic Theory?is inevitable and ultimately in everyone?s best interests,"
had
direct bearing on current events, such as IMF and Federal Reserve policies
and
perhaps should be so linked to give the reader a sense of reality.
You intend for your book to break "the hegemony of conventional thinking".
Ideas are prisoners of language. Language, rooted in the Latin word:
langue
(tongue), is the medium of communication, while ideas are the content. Yet
some
may even argue that man thinks only
through speech and that without speech, there can be no intelligent
thought. Even the visual and audio arts are not exempt from dependence on
languages of their own for expressing visual images and musical ideas.
Learning to think without language is like learning to swim without water.
Furthermore, writing music requires the adoption of musical scales of pitch
and
rhythm, just as the visual arts require principles of spatial organization,
color and light. Similarly, language is the prisoner of rhetoric which
constitutes the rules and principles of speech, a convention through which
thoughts are communicated among humans. Economics thoughts are no exeption.
The problem of rhetoric is that it tends to degenerate into expressions of
coded
messages that obscure true meaning and stifle creative expression. He
whose
thinking is trapped by rhetoric is also condemned to conventional wisdom.
Such
a person would deprive himself of creativity, unable to entertain original
thoughts because the medium for original expression is, by definition,
wanting
in rhetoric.
Confucian classics are all written in the most rigid form of rhetoric.
Being well versed in Confucian classics in Chinese is to run the danger of
emphasizing form over substance or emphasizing style over essence. It is
not
much different from trying to learn creative writing from the excessively
flowery language of the school-book Latin of Cicero.
Escape from verbal imprisonment by rhetoric is possible only through
poetry, the
grammar of which begins beyond the bounds of the established rules of
rhetoric.
Poetry invents new grammar and syntax for expressing new ideas
indescribable by
rhetoric. Notwithstanding the claim of romantics, poetry creates truth of
which
beauty is but a function.
Poetic ideas and their prerequisite unconventional expressions are
generally the
rhetoric of the future, when the once innovative syntax and original
concepts
would have become unthinkingly commonplace through excessive use. In that
respect, original economics thought requires the characteristics of poetry.
You wrote: "Interest in Economics as an intellectual pursuit for its own
sake
has waned significantly over the last twenty years." I am not sure that is
the
case. Economics is covered regularly in the polpular press, even TV shows
and
specials. The annual Davos meeting a a media event.
The question is whether you intend your book to be a declaration of a
palace
coup or a revolutionary manifesto.
To critics of neoliberalism, Economics is like theology, with the market as
god.
I have not started to read your book - I will, but I also read slowly - I
hope
you are writing the economic equivalent of Luther's 95 thesis.
Your characterization of Escher as "the rules of perspective are used to
render
scenes which appear genuine," are actually examples of topology, a branch
of
mathematics dealing with surfaces and those properties of geometric figures
that
remain unchanged after continuous deforming transformations.
Hope the above is helpful. If not, just ignore it.
Henry