Re: Disenchantment with the mainstream.

["John Gelles" <jjgelles@xxxxxxxx>]

        If mainstream economics, and far-out
        economics (in search of models that deal
        with complex natural systems including
        the weather and biological complexity,
        as well as, artificial human economics
        that generates price data with less useful
        meaning than many will admit), are both
        dazzled by a priori logic, then they will
        easily lose touch with real pain. And, at
        least the mainstream has done this.

        This loss of feeling for human pain is partly
        because they fail to measure the concrete
        living conditions of individual people, and
        aggregates that reflect these -- including
        minimum, median, mean and maximum
        values.

        Find some popular replacement for
        measures of price, like measures of
        hunger, absences of clothing, shelter,
        health, and personal safety, etc., and the
        rule of inapplicable a priori logic will be
        challenged successfully in the court of
        public opinion.

        Communism is dead. Old labor is now
        new labor. Old US liberals are new
        democrats. This "new" reflects the
        inadequacy of the "old".

        Technology is leading the way in all things.
        It cannot be far away, that a technological
        fix for money's failure to animate the poor
        will be found.  It is probably a simple thing
        -- like needing more money not less.

        The scare of hyper-inflation that was real
        has made us fearful of just the right amount
        of inflation to make sense of democratic
        capitalism as the way to "leave no one
        behind".

        All political parties are promising this. And
        they know technology can do it. Culture
        responds to war, politics, law, money, and
        technology, in that order. But each of these
        elements has an effect on the other.

        We are waiting for technology to reform
        money. When this happens, economics will
        come back to reality.

        Meanwhile, the vocabulary of criticism of
        mainstream economic dogma is nice to
        look at.

       o   sanity, humanity and science
       o   excessive mathematical formalisation.
       o   consideration of  "concrete realities".
       o   a "pathological taste for a-priori
                ideologies and mathematical
                formalisation disconnected from
                reality."
       o  disembodiment of economic discourse
       o  false emulation of physics that "should
                instead look to the human sciences".


        John Gelles
         email    1944@xxxxxxxx
             url    http://www.1944.org
                     http://www.1944.org/whatsnew.htm