harvard's humanitarian hawks:Should a human rights center at the nation’s most prestigious university be collaborating with the top US general in Iraq in designing the counter-insurgency doctrine behind the current military surge?
(...) It’s not that counter-insurgency Harvard-style has been effective, as proven by the continued suicide bombings, sniper activity and increasing casualties among US forces since the “surge” began. It is an academic formulation to buttress and justify a permanent engagement in counter-terrorism wars.
(...) If that is the limit of legitimate debate at Harvard, the Pentagon occupation of the academic mind may last much longer than its occupation of Iraq, and may require an intellectual insurgency in response.
Monday, July 16, 2007
stop trying to 'save' africa:"Don't you want to help us save Africa?" she yelled.
(...) Such campaigns, however well intentioned, promote the stereotype of Africa as a black hole of disease and death. News reports constantly focus on the continent's corrupt leaders, warlords, "tribal" conflicts, child laborers, and women disfigured by abuse and genital mutilation. These descriptions run under headlines like "Can Bono Save Africa?" or "Will Brangelina Save Africa?" The relationship between the West and Africa is no longer based on openly racist beliefs, but such articles are reminiscent of reports from the heyday of European colonialism, when missionaries were sent to Africa to introduce us to education, Jesus Christ and "civilization."
(...) Why do the media frequently refer to African countries as having been "granted independence from their colonial masters," as opposed to having fought and shed blood for their freedom? Why do Angelina Jolie and Bono receive overwhelming attention for their work in Africa while Nwankwo Kanu or Dikembe Mutombo, Africans both, are hardly ever mentioned? How is it that a former mid-level U.S. diplomat receives more attention for his cowboy antics in Sudan than do the numerous African Union countries that have sent food and troops and spent countless hours trying to negotiate a settlement among all parties in that crisis?
(...) Last month the Group of Eight industrialized nations and a host of celebrities met in Germany to discuss, among other things, how to save Africa. Before the next such summit, I hope people will realize Africa doesn't want to be saved. Africa wants the world to acknowledge that through fair partnerships with other members of the global community, we ourselves are capable of unprecedented growth.
(...) Such campaigns, however well intentioned, promote the stereotype of Africa as a black hole of disease and death. News reports constantly focus on the continent's corrupt leaders, warlords, "tribal" conflicts, child laborers, and women disfigured by abuse and genital mutilation. These descriptions run under headlines like "Can Bono Save Africa?" or "Will Brangelina Save Africa?" The relationship between the West and Africa is no longer based on openly racist beliefs, but such articles are reminiscent of reports from the heyday of European colonialism, when missionaries were sent to Africa to introduce us to education, Jesus Christ and "civilization."
(...) Why do the media frequently refer to African countries as having been "granted independence from their colonial masters," as opposed to having fought and shed blood for their freedom? Why do Angelina Jolie and Bono receive overwhelming attention for their work in Africa while Nwankwo Kanu or Dikembe Mutombo, Africans both, are hardly ever mentioned? How is it that a former mid-level U.S. diplomat receives more attention for his cowboy antics in Sudan than do the numerous African Union countries that have sent food and troops and spent countless hours trying to negotiate a settlement among all parties in that crisis?
(...) Last month the Group of Eight industrialized nations and a host of celebrities met in Germany to discuss, among other things, how to save Africa. Before the next such summit, I hope people will realize Africa doesn't want to be saved. Africa wants the world to acknowledge that through fair partnerships with other members of the global community, we ourselves are capable of unprecedented growth.
Wednesday, July 11, 2007
"sicko", health care, and the other side of hitler
Health care is not a commodity, it is a human right that should be apportioned without regard for accidents of birth, class, sex and race. Of the 46.6 million uninsured Americans, almost one-third (14.1 million) is Hispanic and almost one in five (7.2 million) is African American.
Health care is not a commodity, it is a human right that should be apportioned without regard for accidents of birth, class, sex and race. Of the 46.6 million uninsured Americans, almost one-third (14.1 million) is Hispanic and almost one in five (7.2 million) is African American.
Sunday, July 8, 2007
neoclassical micro and macro: science or silliness?
Daniel Bell, certainly no theoretical revolutionary, nonetheless writes: “Modern economic theory is based upon two specific assumptions about economic behavior and its social setting. One is the idea of utility maximization as the motivational foundation for action; the other is a theory of markets as the structural location where transactions take place. The assumptions converge in the thesis that individuals and firms seek to maximize their utilities (preferences, wants) in different markets, at the best price, and that this is the engine that drives all behavior and exchange. It is the foundation for the idea of the comprehensive equilibrium.”
(...) It is important to understand how surprising this claim may be to anyone not immersed in this tradition. Greed breeds bliss. That this self-serving answer that “a decentralized economy motivated by self-interest and guided by price signals” is superior to all alternative designs has long been claimed true and has permeated the economic thinking of even most non-economists is sufficient ground for investigating it seriously. Since the proposition is put forward by policymakers, social commentators, and most economists, it is important to know not only whether it is true, but whether it even could be true. Much of what mathematical economists devote themselves to, therefore, is demonstrating the validity of such claims.
(...) An interesting by-product of this approach, which may go a long way to explaining its appeal, is that if we accept all the assumptions and characterizations as being accurate or at least indicative representations of reality, it shows that each agent operates with a maximum of efficiency and that no agent can be made better off without some sacrifice by another agent. In the economist’s terminology, the general equilibrium is “pareto optimal.” Once we achieve an equilibrium, for you or I to get more pleasure, someone, somewhere, must get less. There is no wasted capability, no inefficiency in how things are produced or allocated, at least in this sense that to get anyone better off someone else would have to suffer a loss.
(...) That is, the model cannot easily or usefully account for the reality that economic agents do not actually know such things as future prices, future availability of goods, changes in production techniques or in markets to occur in the future, etc. Instead, to achieve its results—proofs about equilibrium conditions—the model assumes that actors have perfect knowledge at least of the probabilities of all possible outcomes for the economy. Sir John Hicks, also of great economics fame, says “One must assume that people in one’s models do not know what is going to happen, and know that they do not know what is going to happen. As in history!” Yet economists assume just the opposite. Abstracting from time and uncertainty, they ignore that agents have different consciousness and life experiences and that approaching problems of decision-making in the absence of sure knowledge, they have different expectations and make different choices than economic models suggest.
(...) General equilibrium theory has no room for [involuntary] unemployment. Certainly this is an interesting prediction in a society where some sectors of the workforce suffer unemployment rates as high as thirty percent.
(...) Oligopoly and imperfect competition have also been abstracted from so that the theory does not allow one to answer interesting questions which turn on the asymmetry of information and bargaining power among agents, whether due to size, or organization, or social stigmas, or whatever else.
(...) In addition to ignoring the effects of markets on personal preferences, the inevitability of unemployment and inflation, the structure of workplaces and the role of classes and class struggle, the theory also leaves out unions, racism, sexism, and for the most part, the state. Commodities and work are considered buyable in any quantities whereas they really often come only in “lumps.” The prevalence of “public goods” and “externalities” (where my consumption or production affects not only me but others or even everyone, as in when it generates drunkenness or oil spills, for example) is systematically underemphasized. The stratification of the workplace to achieve greater long-run control rather than to ensure immediate profit-maximization is deemed inconceivable even though it is ubiquitous in our economy.
(...) General equilibrium theory “is a work of art, so compelling that one thinks of the celebrated picture of Apelles who painted a cluster of grapes so realistic that the birds would come and pick at them. But is the model “real”? Obviously there is disequilibrium in the labor market...If the model as elaborated by Arrow et. al. has validity, it is only as a “fiction”—logical, elegant, self-contained, but a fiction nonetheless.”
(...) Consider the following statement from the eminent economist, Lord Kaldor: “The powerful attraction of habits of thought engendered by ‘equilibrium economics’ has become a major obstacle to the development of economics as a science...the process of removing the scaffolding, as the saying goes—in other words of relaxing the unreal basic assumptions—has not yet started. Indeed, the scaffolding gets thicker and more impenetrable with every successive reformulation of the theory, with growing uncertainty as to whether there is a solid foundation underneath.”
(...) In short, neoclassical equilibrium theory is a “fiction,” “impenetrable” for its “forest of assumptions” and unable to become less abstract, perhaps without “solid foundation,” suitable only for “imaginary problems” of the “angel-pinhead variety,” “scandalous,” “dangerous,” and “likely unjustifiable.” Yet this same theory is the core of what students of economics labor to learn and the centerpiece of the reigning social “science” which supports such “common sense wisdom” as the notion that competitive capitalist market systems are optimally efficient.
(...) A century of thought, countless volumes, infinitely rigorous mathematical analysis, how many hours out of how many student’s lives reading “Dean” Paul Samuelson et. al.—and the ultimate contribution to wisdom of the whole miasma is the assertion that economic agents tend to do what they find “advantageous.” This is what the “deans” of economic theory offer? This immense and “satisfying” intellectual edifice has no capacity to predict and no facility for assisting the practitioner in creating “viable, useful economic policy.” The economist-king is wearing no clothes and even knows it but prances forth without modesty anyhow? This yields an interesting query: why do economists continue to pour so much energy into the refinement and teaching of this elaborate “fiction.” And why do students put up with it?
(...) Is this palatable? A vast edifice that claims to be a science but really has little if anything to say to serious people concerned with how our economy works continues to exist because practitioners are eager for mathematical elegance before all else? Perhaps Frisch is correct that this is a motivating factor in the daily efforts of many economists, but if so it would seem to be the last in a long line of factors relevant to the maintenance of the whole theoretical structure—more a rationale than a real cause. For surely economists could exercise their mathematical faculties in context of real analysis or, alternatively, if that is too difficult, those with especially active mathematical inclinations could simply become pure mathematicians and dispense with excessive pretensions about being scientists of real economies.
(...) And surely, if one examines the history of general equilibrium theory, then the transition from what was without doubt a desire to understand and explain real economic relations (Ricardo, Smith, Mill, Marx, and even Walras, the father of general equilibrium theory) to the tendency to show-off mathematical prowess must be explained by something deeper than merely a mathematical “peacock disposition.”
(...) Here is the crux of the matter. Whatever the inclinations of particular economists, in fact the mathmatization of neoclassical micro-theory is mystification with a purpose. First, it legitimates the occupation of economics by clothing its prescriptions in language that looks like the language of physics. Physics is valid and the lay person must take its results as they are presented; so too for the new economics. Second, and much more important, this elaborate mathematical structure serves the aims of “soul-destroying,” “world-polluting” commercialism by deprecating the importance of “aesthetic and humane factors” in economic calculations. General equilibrium theory shows the viability of an unreal system and this is translated into assertions about the world that we live in until most people just accept that “our economy is efficient and stable, the best one possible.” Theories can pursue truth or serve vested interests. In the later capacity they will incorporate only concepts suited to attaining the results desired. An economic theory, for example, may highlight profits, quantities of output, amount of investment, and prices, and leave out class struggle, alienation, direction of investment, and bargaining power. Then the theory will serve capitalists, and, since capitalists pay economists’ wages and endow their universities, economists and their students who comply, will benefit as well.
(...) So whatever the motives of a particular economist might be, the sleight of hand called micro economics is not art or science, but propaganda. The explanation for the longevity of the confidence game is rendered obvious: the commercial magnates who decide what is and what is not to be valued in society, who is and who is not to be respected and well paid, legislate by countless means that general equilibrium theory is jolly good while maverick critics are fringe lunatics. And students can read this handwriting on their classroom doors even more clearly than they can read Samuelson’s text. They know that they will never gain credentials and wealth worth protecting if they don’t play the game as it is meant to be played, firstly propping up capitalism and capitalists and only then and cons within that foremost aim incidentally trying to find some non-threatening new “truths” or old rehashes on which they can build a career.
(...) “A second problem with neoclassical economics is that its technical structure fundamentally reflects its philosophical origins. It is the science of society of the rising bourgeoisie. As such it assumes right at its heart that individuals are what count and that the relations of production are thoroughly privatized.... For example, a fundamental assumption of the theory of consumer behavior is that one person, or family, or consumption unit’s satisfaction from a particular consumption package is independent of the satisfaction of other consumption units. Exit socialism right there!”
(...) Thus where microeconomists use equilibrium to mean “market-clearing,” macroeconomists use it to refer to a condition of stability, with no apriori assumptions that markets will necessarily all clear. Indeed, the whole point of the macro-theorists is to recognize the possibility that the economy might “function smoothly” and yet have a high rate of unemployment or inflation or underutilize some of its productive capacity.
(...) Each of the equations of a macro-system is backed by an economic description of why one should believe it. Yet, few of these descriptions amount to rigorous statements about how all component institutions of the economy function and how their interrelated activity sums to an aggregate relation embodied in the equation. Instead, for the most part supporting arguments just translate the mathematical expression into a verbal story about the same variables, still at the macro level. For example, a supporting argument about the GNP response to new taxes won’t demonstrate on the micro level how each unit and all consumers and other actors in the economy react to the taxes in terms of their individual preferences and circumstances and how the results sum into a rise or fall in average overall prices or consumption and investment and how that in turn influences GNP, but will instead simply say something like “a rise in taxes engenders a rise in prices which in turn causes a drop in demand which then... and then ..., etc.” Some stories are more compelling than others and serious debates are always in progress over the exact form the different equations in the macro-system should assume. But none of the stories have a detailed micro underpinning (we already saw that micro theory can’t underpin anything requiring realism) and the gap between the mathematical model and any really descriptive economic model grows even larger as economists try to specify the functions and their parameters more precisely.
(...) In fact, at best the whole of macro-theory is a kind of “art” in which analysts use hunches, intuitions, or prejudices, plus their own experience of real world trends, to hypothesize certain mathematical relations between macro-variables in the hope that their model systems will then function like the world they seek to explain. At worst macro theory is an ad hoc construction designed to intellectually legitimate policy prescriptions proposed in the first place for interest-based reasons having nothing to do with theory.
Daniel Bell, certainly no theoretical revolutionary, nonetheless writes: “Modern economic theory is based upon two specific assumptions about economic behavior and its social setting. One is the idea of utility maximization as the motivational foundation for action; the other is a theory of markets as the structural location where transactions take place. The assumptions converge in the thesis that individuals and firms seek to maximize their utilities (preferences, wants) in different markets, at the best price, and that this is the engine that drives all behavior and exchange. It is the foundation for the idea of the comprehensive equilibrium.”
(...) It is important to understand how surprising this claim may be to anyone not immersed in this tradition. Greed breeds bliss. That this self-serving answer that “a decentralized economy motivated by self-interest and guided by price signals” is superior to all alternative designs has long been claimed true and has permeated the economic thinking of even most non-economists is sufficient ground for investigating it seriously. Since the proposition is put forward by policymakers, social commentators, and most economists, it is important to know not only whether it is true, but whether it even could be true. Much of what mathematical economists devote themselves to, therefore, is demonstrating the validity of such claims.
(...) An interesting by-product of this approach, which may go a long way to explaining its appeal, is that if we accept all the assumptions and characterizations as being accurate or at least indicative representations of reality, it shows that each agent operates with a maximum of efficiency and that no agent can be made better off without some sacrifice by another agent. In the economist’s terminology, the general equilibrium is “pareto optimal.” Once we achieve an equilibrium, for you or I to get more pleasure, someone, somewhere, must get less. There is no wasted capability, no inefficiency in how things are produced or allocated, at least in this sense that to get anyone better off someone else would have to suffer a loss.
(...) That is, the model cannot easily or usefully account for the reality that economic agents do not actually know such things as future prices, future availability of goods, changes in production techniques or in markets to occur in the future, etc. Instead, to achieve its results—proofs about equilibrium conditions—the model assumes that actors have perfect knowledge at least of the probabilities of all possible outcomes for the economy. Sir John Hicks, also of great economics fame, says “One must assume that people in one’s models do not know what is going to happen, and know that they do not know what is going to happen. As in history!” Yet economists assume just the opposite. Abstracting from time and uncertainty, they ignore that agents have different consciousness and life experiences and that approaching problems of decision-making in the absence of sure knowledge, they have different expectations and make different choices than economic models suggest.
(...) General equilibrium theory has no room for [involuntary] unemployment. Certainly this is an interesting prediction in a society where some sectors of the workforce suffer unemployment rates as high as thirty percent.
(...) Oligopoly and imperfect competition have also been abstracted from so that the theory does not allow one to answer interesting questions which turn on the asymmetry of information and bargaining power among agents, whether due to size, or organization, or social stigmas, or whatever else.
(...) In addition to ignoring the effects of markets on personal preferences, the inevitability of unemployment and inflation, the structure of workplaces and the role of classes and class struggle, the theory also leaves out unions, racism, sexism, and for the most part, the state. Commodities and work are considered buyable in any quantities whereas they really often come only in “lumps.” The prevalence of “public goods” and “externalities” (where my consumption or production affects not only me but others or even everyone, as in when it generates drunkenness or oil spills, for example) is systematically underemphasized. The stratification of the workplace to achieve greater long-run control rather than to ensure immediate profit-maximization is deemed inconceivable even though it is ubiquitous in our economy.
(...) General equilibrium theory “is a work of art, so compelling that one thinks of the celebrated picture of Apelles who painted a cluster of grapes so realistic that the birds would come and pick at them. But is the model “real”? Obviously there is disequilibrium in the labor market...If the model as elaborated by Arrow et. al. has validity, it is only as a “fiction”—logical, elegant, self-contained, but a fiction nonetheless.”
(...) Consider the following statement from the eminent economist, Lord Kaldor: “The powerful attraction of habits of thought engendered by ‘equilibrium economics’ has become a major obstacle to the development of economics as a science...the process of removing the scaffolding, as the saying goes—in other words of relaxing the unreal basic assumptions—has not yet started. Indeed, the scaffolding gets thicker and more impenetrable with every successive reformulation of the theory, with growing uncertainty as to whether there is a solid foundation underneath.”
(...) In short, neoclassical equilibrium theory is a “fiction,” “impenetrable” for its “forest of assumptions” and unable to become less abstract, perhaps without “solid foundation,” suitable only for “imaginary problems” of the “angel-pinhead variety,” “scandalous,” “dangerous,” and “likely unjustifiable.” Yet this same theory is the core of what students of economics labor to learn and the centerpiece of the reigning social “science” which supports such “common sense wisdom” as the notion that competitive capitalist market systems are optimally efficient.
(...) A century of thought, countless volumes, infinitely rigorous mathematical analysis, how many hours out of how many student’s lives reading “Dean” Paul Samuelson et. al.—and the ultimate contribution to wisdom of the whole miasma is the assertion that economic agents tend to do what they find “advantageous.” This is what the “deans” of economic theory offer? This immense and “satisfying” intellectual edifice has no capacity to predict and no facility for assisting the practitioner in creating “viable, useful economic policy.” The economist-king is wearing no clothes and even knows it but prances forth without modesty anyhow? This yields an interesting query: why do economists continue to pour so much energy into the refinement and teaching of this elaborate “fiction.” And why do students put up with it?
(...) Is this palatable? A vast edifice that claims to be a science but really has little if anything to say to serious people concerned with how our economy works continues to exist because practitioners are eager for mathematical elegance before all else? Perhaps Frisch is correct that this is a motivating factor in the daily efforts of many economists, but if so it would seem to be the last in a long line of factors relevant to the maintenance of the whole theoretical structure—more a rationale than a real cause. For surely economists could exercise their mathematical faculties in context of real analysis or, alternatively, if that is too difficult, those with especially active mathematical inclinations could simply become pure mathematicians and dispense with excessive pretensions about being scientists of real economies.
(...) And surely, if one examines the history of general equilibrium theory, then the transition from what was without doubt a desire to understand and explain real economic relations (Ricardo, Smith, Mill, Marx, and even Walras, the father of general equilibrium theory) to the tendency to show-off mathematical prowess must be explained by something deeper than merely a mathematical “peacock disposition.”
(...) Here is the crux of the matter. Whatever the inclinations of particular economists, in fact the mathmatization of neoclassical micro-theory is mystification with a purpose. First, it legitimates the occupation of economics by clothing its prescriptions in language that looks like the language of physics. Physics is valid and the lay person must take its results as they are presented; so too for the new economics. Second, and much more important, this elaborate mathematical structure serves the aims of “soul-destroying,” “world-polluting” commercialism by deprecating the importance of “aesthetic and humane factors” in economic calculations. General equilibrium theory shows the viability of an unreal system and this is translated into assertions about the world that we live in until most people just accept that “our economy is efficient and stable, the best one possible.” Theories can pursue truth or serve vested interests. In the later capacity they will incorporate only concepts suited to attaining the results desired. An economic theory, for example, may highlight profits, quantities of output, amount of investment, and prices, and leave out class struggle, alienation, direction of investment, and bargaining power. Then the theory will serve capitalists, and, since capitalists pay economists’ wages and endow their universities, economists and their students who comply, will benefit as well.
(...) So whatever the motives of a particular economist might be, the sleight of hand called micro economics is not art or science, but propaganda. The explanation for the longevity of the confidence game is rendered obvious: the commercial magnates who decide what is and what is not to be valued in society, who is and who is not to be respected and well paid, legislate by countless means that general equilibrium theory is jolly good while maverick critics are fringe lunatics. And students can read this handwriting on their classroom doors even more clearly than they can read Samuelson’s text. They know that they will never gain credentials and wealth worth protecting if they don’t play the game as it is meant to be played, firstly propping up capitalism and capitalists and only then and cons within that foremost aim incidentally trying to find some non-threatening new “truths” or old rehashes on which they can build a career.
(...) “A second problem with neoclassical economics is that its technical structure fundamentally reflects its philosophical origins. It is the science of society of the rising bourgeoisie. As such it assumes right at its heart that individuals are what count and that the relations of production are thoroughly privatized.... For example, a fundamental assumption of the theory of consumer behavior is that one person, or family, or consumption unit’s satisfaction from a particular consumption package is independent of the satisfaction of other consumption units. Exit socialism right there!”
(...) Thus where microeconomists use equilibrium to mean “market-clearing,” macroeconomists use it to refer to a condition of stability, with no apriori assumptions that markets will necessarily all clear. Indeed, the whole point of the macro-theorists is to recognize the possibility that the economy might “function smoothly” and yet have a high rate of unemployment or inflation or underutilize some of its productive capacity.
(...) Each of the equations of a macro-system is backed by an economic description of why one should believe it. Yet, few of these descriptions amount to rigorous statements about how all component institutions of the economy function and how their interrelated activity sums to an aggregate relation embodied in the equation. Instead, for the most part supporting arguments just translate the mathematical expression into a verbal story about the same variables, still at the macro level. For example, a supporting argument about the GNP response to new taxes won’t demonstrate on the micro level how each unit and all consumers and other actors in the economy react to the taxes in terms of their individual preferences and circumstances and how the results sum into a rise or fall in average overall prices or consumption and investment and how that in turn influences GNP, but will instead simply say something like “a rise in taxes engenders a rise in prices which in turn causes a drop in demand which then... and then ..., etc.” Some stories are more compelling than others and serious debates are always in progress over the exact form the different equations in the macro-system should assume. But none of the stories have a detailed micro underpinning (we already saw that micro theory can’t underpin anything requiring realism) and the gap between the mathematical model and any really descriptive economic model grows even larger as economists try to specify the functions and their parameters more precisely.
(...) In fact, at best the whole of macro-theory is a kind of “art” in which analysts use hunches, intuitions, or prejudices, plus their own experience of real world trends, to hypothesize certain mathematical relations between macro-variables in the hope that their model systems will then function like the world they seek to explain. At worst macro theory is an ad hoc construction designed to intellectually legitimate policy prescriptions proposed in the first place for interest-based reasons having nothing to do with theory.
hip heterodoxy:
If the mainstream itself is opening up, molting the restrictive Homo economicus and general equilibrium casing, then is the field changing? And does that mean that the worldview of neoliberalism, and market fetishistic policy prescriptions, are losing the important intellectual bedrock in which they are grounded?
(...) Ruccio wasn't quite buying it. "There's a fracturing taking place," he conceded. "It's very hard to put your thumb on what neoclassical economics is. And yeah, there are new research agendas, but what gets taught at every institution in the country from undergraduate to graduate is the same utility-maximizing story. The teaching remains the same, and the policies remain the same."
If the mainstream itself is opening up, molting the restrictive Homo economicus and general equilibrium casing, then is the field changing? And does that mean that the worldview of neoliberalism, and market fetishistic policy prescriptions, are losing the important intellectual bedrock in which they are grounded?
(...) Ruccio wasn't quite buying it. "There's a fracturing taking place," he conceded. "It's very hard to put your thumb on what neoclassical economics is. And yeah, there are new research agendas, but what gets taught at every institution in the country from undergraduate to graduate is the same utility-maximizing story. The teaching remains the same, and the policies remain the same."
the political origins of neoclassical economics:
What agent/force has the power to make these economic theories and policies impotent and outmoded? What is it in capitalist society that wreaks havoc amidst theoreticians and managers, precipitates an intellectual crisis and leads to the formulation and adoption of new theories? Inasmuch as capitalist society is a social relationship amongst classes, the answer must lie in the agency of either the capitalist or the working class or buried deep in the arcane inner logic of the system. To an autonomist marxist (12), the answer to this question is quite clear -- it is an aggressive and recalcitrant working class and its self-activity that ruptures the normal operations of capitalist society and propels it towards crisis. Hence, the development of economic theory, since the dawn of capitalism, must be read as a process by which new policies and theories designed to govern and justify capitalist society replace those which have been rendered passe in the dynamic of class struggle.
(...) the focus of the proposed dissertation is an investigation of the articulation and adoption of the neoclassical framework. The working hypothesis is the proposition that this paradigm shift was an ideological and practical innovation crafted by bourgeois theoreticians as a response to working class insurgency.
(...) textbooks in economics at the introductory, intermediate and graduate levels generally present neoclassical economics as the only body of theory that is worthy of scholarly attention. Further, these texts take great pains to paint neoclassical economics as ideologically neutral and scientific. To a large extent, these texts are targeting a captive audience of students who do not have much influence in the choice of required textbooks. However, in recent years, students have been successful in compelling universities to offer courses of study in heterodox economics thereby challenging the hegemony of the neoclassical paradigm. A study of the political origins of neoclassical economics will expose the historical obscurantism of the textbooks and refute the claims contained therein. By doing so, the proposed dissertation will provide ammunition for those students and teachers who are actively attacking and undermining the authority of the above mentioned textbooks.
(...) One of the earliest of such critics was John Hobson. In discussing the "wide acceptance" won by Œmarginalism" in academic circles, Hobson opines that: "Its [marginalism's] expositors are able to deduce from it practical precepts very acceptable to those politicians and business men who wish to show the injustice, the damage and the final futility of all attempts of the labouring classes, by the organised pressure of trade unionism or by politics, to get higher wages or other expensive improvements of the conditions of their employment.... If our political economists can bring this gospel of marginalism home to the hearts and heads of the working- classes, they will set aside all their foolish attempt to get higher wages out of rent and property and will set themselves to producing by harder, more skillful and more careful labour an enlarged product, the whole or part of which may come to them by the inevitable operation of the economic law of equal distribution at the margin!"(37)
(...) Further, Hobson argues that the primary use of the new doctrine is "that it serves to dispose of the charge against capitalists of exploiting labour."(38) He proceeds to state that the "immanent conservatism" of the theory, recommends it, not only to timid academic minds, but to the general body of the possessing classes who, though they may be quite incapable of following its subtleties of reasoning, have sufficient intelligence to value its general conclusions as popularised by the press.(39)
(...) Ronald Meek, another marxist, attributes "the increasing popularity of the new type of analysis" to two factors. Firstly, he claims that "the basic problem of "scarcity" with which it [the new theory] was designed to deal actually began to emerge to prominence in the real world."46 Secondly, he claims that the new theory "was found to be particularly useful in connection with the task of opposing the labour theory of value - a task which became more and more urgent as marxist ideas began to grow in popularity."(47)
(...) Similar charges are echoed by many other marxists and radicals including Guy Routh and E. K. Hunt. In addition to reiterating the second point made by Meek, Routh points out the gradual process by which the old theories were "exorcised" in "favour of something that would be as unlike Marx's doctrine as unlike could be." (48) He also furnishes a considerable amount of ammunition, to critics of bourgeois theory, by providing numerous examples of the anti-working class prejudices of Jevons, Walras and Menger.(49) E. K. Hunt also supplies similar ammunition.(50) Furthermore, Hunt argues that: "With the growth of the corporation as the principal form of industrialization and the growing industrial concentration.....there was an important change in both the nature of the accumulation of industrial capital and the role of the industrial capitalist.....Increasingly, corporate managers were hired to direct and oversee industrial enterprises.....[and] profits and interest came to be a result of passive ownership."(51)
(...) Marx , in attempting to correct the fetishism inherent to the first chapter of Capital, observed that "commodities cannot themselves go to market" and that "we must, therefore, have recourse to their guardians."(57) A similar strategy becomes necessary if we are to explain how economic theories gain currency. After all, the mere enunciation of a theory does not inexorably lead to its adoption. In this context, it is my contention that the appropriate focus of study ought to be Alfred Marshall and his neoclassical synthesis and not the marginal utility theorists per se. For, it was Alfred Marshall who presided over the shift in paradigm and it was his synthesis that ultimately took root as a new orthodoxy.
What agent/force has the power to make these economic theories and policies impotent and outmoded? What is it in capitalist society that wreaks havoc amidst theoreticians and managers, precipitates an intellectual crisis and leads to the formulation and adoption of new theories? Inasmuch as capitalist society is a social relationship amongst classes, the answer must lie in the agency of either the capitalist or the working class or buried deep in the arcane inner logic of the system. To an autonomist marxist (12), the answer to this question is quite clear -- it is an aggressive and recalcitrant working class and its self-activity that ruptures the normal operations of capitalist society and propels it towards crisis. Hence, the development of economic theory, since the dawn of capitalism, must be read as a process by which new policies and theories designed to govern and justify capitalist society replace those which have been rendered passe in the dynamic of class struggle.
(...) the focus of the proposed dissertation is an investigation of the articulation and adoption of the neoclassical framework. The working hypothesis is the proposition that this paradigm shift was an ideological and practical innovation crafted by bourgeois theoreticians as a response to working class insurgency.
(...) textbooks in economics at the introductory, intermediate and graduate levels generally present neoclassical economics as the only body of theory that is worthy of scholarly attention. Further, these texts take great pains to paint neoclassical economics as ideologically neutral and scientific. To a large extent, these texts are targeting a captive audience of students who do not have much influence in the choice of required textbooks. However, in recent years, students have been successful in compelling universities to offer courses of study in heterodox economics thereby challenging the hegemony of the neoclassical paradigm. A study of the political origins of neoclassical economics will expose the historical obscurantism of the textbooks and refute the claims contained therein. By doing so, the proposed dissertation will provide ammunition for those students and teachers who are actively attacking and undermining the authority of the above mentioned textbooks.
(...) One of the earliest of such critics was John Hobson. In discussing the "wide acceptance" won by Œmarginalism" in academic circles, Hobson opines that: "Its [marginalism's] expositors are able to deduce from it practical precepts very acceptable to those politicians and business men who wish to show the injustice, the damage and the final futility of all attempts of the labouring classes, by the organised pressure of trade unionism or by politics, to get higher wages or other expensive improvements of the conditions of their employment.... If our political economists can bring this gospel of marginalism home to the hearts and heads of the working- classes, they will set aside all their foolish attempt to get higher wages out of rent and property and will set themselves to producing by harder, more skillful and more careful labour an enlarged product, the whole or part of which may come to them by the inevitable operation of the economic law of equal distribution at the margin!"(37)
(...) Further, Hobson argues that the primary use of the new doctrine is "that it serves to dispose of the charge against capitalists of exploiting labour."(38) He proceeds to state that the "immanent conservatism" of the theory, recommends it, not only to timid academic minds, but to the general body of the possessing classes who, though they may be quite incapable of following its subtleties of reasoning, have sufficient intelligence to value its general conclusions as popularised by the press.(39)
(...) Ronald Meek, another marxist, attributes "the increasing popularity of the new type of analysis" to two factors. Firstly, he claims that "the basic problem of "scarcity" with which it [the new theory] was designed to deal actually began to emerge to prominence in the real world."46 Secondly, he claims that the new theory "was found to be particularly useful in connection with the task of opposing the labour theory of value - a task which became more and more urgent as marxist ideas began to grow in popularity."(47)
(...) Similar charges are echoed by many other marxists and radicals including Guy Routh and E. K. Hunt. In addition to reiterating the second point made by Meek, Routh points out the gradual process by which the old theories were "exorcised" in "favour of something that would be as unlike Marx's doctrine as unlike could be." (48) He also furnishes a considerable amount of ammunition, to critics of bourgeois theory, by providing numerous examples of the anti-working class prejudices of Jevons, Walras and Menger.(49) E. K. Hunt also supplies similar ammunition.(50) Furthermore, Hunt argues that: "With the growth of the corporation as the principal form of industrialization and the growing industrial concentration.....there was an important change in both the nature of the accumulation of industrial capital and the role of the industrial capitalist.....Increasingly, corporate managers were hired to direct and oversee industrial enterprises.....[and] profits and interest came to be a result of passive ownership."(51)
(...) Marx , in attempting to correct the fetishism inherent to the first chapter of Capital, observed that "commodities cannot themselves go to market" and that "we must, therefore, have recourse to their guardians."(57) A similar strategy becomes necessary if we are to explain how economic theories gain currency. After all, the mere enunciation of a theory does not inexorably lead to its adoption. In this context, it is my contention that the appropriate focus of study ought to be Alfred Marshall and his neoclassical synthesis and not the marginal utility theorists per se. For, it was Alfred Marshall who presided over the shift in paradigm and it was his synthesis that ultimately took root as a new orthodoxy.
ignorance and ideological hegemony: a critique of neo-classical economics
In what follows, the content and causes of Mayhew's and the Beeds’ articulated frustration is pursued. Recent literature on the production of knowledge and ignorance-squared is discussed and then used to investigate neoclassical economic knowledge. Subsequently, it is argued that it is fruitless to appeal to neoclassical theorists to become more methodologically pluralist or to enhance their rhetoric. It is concluded that, although a number of causes exist for the intellectual narrowing of the discipline, a fundamental answer to the query "why is this the case?" may be found in Gramsci's notion of ideological hegemony.
(...) Herein is pursued a somewhat different sociological question which is not how to come to know what one doesn't know, the form of ignorance acknowledged by Marshall in the quote above; but why it is the case that neoclassical economists don't want to be aware of what it is that they don't know, which is subsequently defined as ignorance-squared.
(...) To supplement this assertion, it is argued that neoclassical economists, as traditional intellectuals, cultivate the social production of ignorance in the struggle for ideas. This is done through narrow pedagogy, delineation of research parameters, and by constraining the production and presentation of non-neoclassical knowledge.
(...) Training in textbook economics and economic research systematically fosters ignorance-squared, in that students and researchers are shielded from any acquaintance with problems outside the domain of successful puzzle solving. The curriculum is always crowded with the positive heuristic of neoclassical economics; there is always too much to teach. There is never time for reflection, for perspective, for the cultivation of awareness, and most importantly, for the presentation of other contentious viewpoints, much less for the knowledge produced outside the disciplinary boundaries. When neoclassical economists restrict their own discourse, as well as their students’ ability to engage with others of the same, or related specialties, then "ignorance-squared", in the manner put forward by Ravetz (1993) is enhanced.
(...) There is nothing necessarily negative about the fact that we proceed through life unaware of most of what there is to know. What is argued however, is that neoclassical economists promote ignorance-squared.
(...) To illustrate, there are numerous reasons for promoting ignorance-squared. Given the search costs combined with specialisation, there is only so much time to devote to methodological issues. Therefore, the dominant paradigm will draw the attention of most scholars. Moreover, the more a system (of thought) is entrenched, and the longer the time it has been operating, the more difficult and expensive it becomes to change that system (Collingridge 1980). Likewise, the more a person has invested in the training required to be admitted to the neoclassical coterie, the more it is in that person's interest to prevent the depreciation of knowledge threatened by alternative modes of discourse. Another reason may be the appeal of elegant mathematically constructed neoclassical axioms. For instance, Einstein's theory of relativity became the standard textbook theory of gravitation in the 1920s. Yet, it wasn't until the 1950s that radar and radio astronomy became sophisticated enough to generate and test the theory via precise predictions with experimental uncertainties less than one percent. The general acceptance of the theory in the intervening 30 years had been largely attributed to its beauty (Weinberg 1992: 98), similar to the dominance of general equilibrium theory in economics in the second half of the twentieth century. Given the conceptual apparatus of ignorance-squared, let us now examine the production of economic knowledge that incorporates simultaneously, the production of ignorance.
(...) Neoclassical economists normally treat economic instability as the effect of exogenous, stochastic factors even though nonlinear economics suggests that what may previously have been considered exogenous, or random, may more likely be endogenous to capitalist social formations. As such, economic fluctuations are seen as created by the processes of capitalism itself (Baumol and Benhabib 1989; Savit 1988). This is certainly not a new idea. Marx, Keynes, Hicks, Harrod, Kaldor and Hayek all considered causes for instability which were endogenous (Zarnowitz 1985).
(...) The 'rational' consumer of the mainstream economist is a working assumption that was meant to free economists from dependence on psychology (Simon 1976:131; Tversky and Kahneman 1987). The dilemma is that the assumption of rationality as intertemporally optimising is often confused with, and regularly presented as, real, purposive behaviour. In fact, the living consumer in historical time routinely makes decisions in undefined contexts. They muddle through, they adapt, they copy, they try what worked in the past, they gamble, they take uncalculated risks, they engage in costly altruistic activities, and regularly make unpredictable, even unexplainable, decisions (Sandven 1995).
(...) In his work Arthur divides up the profession into two world views, the neoclassical and the 'new' economics: neoclassical economics is based on diminishing returns; 19th century deterministic dynamics approaching equilibrium; homogeneous factors; no externalities; and is structurally simplistic around the concepts of supply and demand. Alternatively, 'new' economics introduces increasing returns; is evolutionary; focuses on heterogeneity and externalities; and is structurally complex and ever changing (Waldrop 1992:38; Bak and Chen 1991). Most students graduate, only having come into pedagogical contact with the former worldview.
(...) We are left with the pre-eminence of equilibrium economics when the balance of supplies and demands on all spot and futures markets takes place simultaneously, (Hicks 1939; Arrow 1971; and Debreu 1959). In this purely competitive, certain, optimising world of general equilibrium, pure profits are zero. Before students are permitted to achieve this level of sophistication, they must first go through the partial equilibrium components of marginal cost and revenue relationships.
(...) More recently, Nitzan and Bichler point out (1995 454-455) that modern corporations are not even "acting as if" they equilibrate marginal cost-marginal revenue to maximise profits. Rather, they attempt to "beat the average". References to the "average" or "normal" pervade the business literature - from the analysis of stock performance, through the stacking of country growth rates and risk premia, to the ranking of corporate profitability. In these terms, according to Nitzan and Bichler, the primary goal becomes "differential pecuniary accumulation", through which the corporation seeks to control a "larger share of the societal surplus". Consequently, success has less to do with the intuitively convincing textbook equality between marginal cost and marginal revenue, than with the capture of external contested income, thereby redistributing the available social surplus.
(...) Change, not rest is the characteristic 'state' of capitalism. "The essential point to grasp is that in dealing with capitalism we are dealing with an evolutionary process that is in continual disequilibrium. It may seem strange that anyone can fail to see so obvious a fact long ago emphasised by Karl Marx" (Schumpeter 1976:82).
(...) As Mayhew, and Beed and Beed suggest, the exercise of ideological power drives a portion of the full non-neoclassical transcript underground, in this instance to less reputable heterogeneous journals. In mainstream discourse, the subordinates (academic workers and students) tend to reveal only what is "safe" and "appropriate"; that which is delineated by the dominant paradigm or its ideological purveyors. Total subordinate revelation is only forthcoming in student or worker newspapers or "less reputable" heterogeneous journals, all treated with condescending contempt by the orthodoxy.
(...) The proficiency shown in neoclassical tools, concepts and language becomes the hallmark of identification and quality. The Krueger Commission on Graduate Education, established in the United States to report on tertiary education standards in 1990, reported that department procedures "bias the selection towards good technicians, rather than good potential economists". This implies that graduate education de-emphasises creativity and problem solving as the student requires "little or no knowledge of economic problems and institutions" (Krueger 1991:1040-42). Consequently, ignorance is promoted as a qualitative manifestation of a "good economist". The result is that the dominion of organic intellectuals, representing a class position and propounding its symbolic representation, is solidified. In order to join this coterie one must accept and disseminate the ideological and political constituents of class power that it represents.
(...) Economics is constructed around more than subjective differences of epistemology, methodological preference or appreciation of elegant techniques; the differences at the core are also political. Neoclassical economics has represented, for two hundred years, the political self-representation of autonomous, self-subsistent, and self-interest-optimising individuals. The populist works of Friedman (1962) in Capitalism and Freedom, or the more adrenalin-pumping stuff of Ayn Rand (1952 and 1957) in The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged provide adroit examples of the ideological and political content in the grasp of the "Invisible Hand". It is here where the connection between promoting ignorance-squared and ideological construction is entwined.
(...) "And your education! Is not that also social, and determined by the social conditions under which you educate, by the intervention, direct or indirect, of society, by means of schools, etc?" (Marx 1976: 502).
(...) Questioning, wondering, doubting, revising and collaborating are all practices which Socrates and now McCloskey (1985) would proffer to those interested in expanding the breadth of our knowledge through communication. Yet, students, and many of their preceptors, do not know that they do not know that capital cannot be measured; that utility is metaphysical; that optimisation is non-falsifiable; that capitalism is inherently unstable; or that, as Ricardo discovered, when we say 'supply and demand' we are explaining nothing (Dobb 1975: 52 and 119). The incentive remains not to find out; or at the very least, not to recognise the numerous serious-minded non-neoclassical economists who take all of the above for granted! Rather, mainstream protagonists spend time proving to each other that what they are doing is what they should be doing; and then convincing the disciples that what they should be doing is what their mentors are doing, ie., producing "acceptable" knowledge. The entire process is justified from within by noting that economists are all optimising their utility functions (Becker 1975).
(...) A student may actually accept what s/he is taught as normal, even justifiable, as part of the social order. Another may reject the information as "unreal", "incomplete", "too abstract", "not relevant", or "not falsifiable" and yet have no "realistic" option to present as a critical counter-claim. In either case, to survive, to pass the course, to increase their potential material enhancement upon graduation, both types of student must internalise and become technically proficient with what is served up. At the level of ideas, this symbolic production and re-production of both knowledge and ignorance-squared is replicated, with or without conscious consent (Gramsci 1971:passim).
(...) By disseminating a paradigmatic discourse and the concepts to go with it as well as defining the standards of what is legitimate, a symbolic climate is created that prevents subordinates from thinking their way free. Thinking "free", is used in the sense that acts are dialectically interactive with intentions, neither consciousness nor action being "unmoved movers" (Scott 1985: xvii and 38-39).
(...) No matter how hard neoclassical economists try to drive away the world of complexity, it too continues to confront them. Yet, to the frustration of "heterogeneous" antagonists the neoclassical paradigm remains dominant, blatantly promoting ignorance-squared. Elegance and technique have replaced relevance. What has been shown herein is that the production of that elegance has involved the opportunity cost of simultaneously producing ignorance. Ignorance-squared is replicated amongst students given the social interests of those dominant in the paradigm. This process of producing ignorance becomes entwined with the promotion of ideology to the detriment of us all. McCloskey importunes the deaf, for dialogue with more relevant tributaries of the mainstream is not in the interests of those presently in control.
In what follows, the content and causes of Mayhew's and the Beeds’ articulated frustration is pursued. Recent literature on the production of knowledge and ignorance-squared is discussed and then used to investigate neoclassical economic knowledge. Subsequently, it is argued that it is fruitless to appeal to neoclassical theorists to become more methodologically pluralist or to enhance their rhetoric. It is concluded that, although a number of causes exist for the intellectual narrowing of the discipline, a fundamental answer to the query "why is this the case?" may be found in Gramsci's notion of ideological hegemony.
(...) Herein is pursued a somewhat different sociological question which is not how to come to know what one doesn't know, the form of ignorance acknowledged by Marshall in the quote above; but why it is the case that neoclassical economists don't want to be aware of what it is that they don't know, which is subsequently defined as ignorance-squared.
(...) To supplement this assertion, it is argued that neoclassical economists, as traditional intellectuals, cultivate the social production of ignorance in the struggle for ideas. This is done through narrow pedagogy, delineation of research parameters, and by constraining the production and presentation of non-neoclassical knowledge.
(...) Training in textbook economics and economic research systematically fosters ignorance-squared, in that students and researchers are shielded from any acquaintance with problems outside the domain of successful puzzle solving. The curriculum is always crowded with the positive heuristic of neoclassical economics; there is always too much to teach. There is never time for reflection, for perspective, for the cultivation of awareness, and most importantly, for the presentation of other contentious viewpoints, much less for the knowledge produced outside the disciplinary boundaries. When neoclassical economists restrict their own discourse, as well as their students’ ability to engage with others of the same, or related specialties, then "ignorance-squared", in the manner put forward by Ravetz (1993) is enhanced.
(...) There is nothing necessarily negative about the fact that we proceed through life unaware of most of what there is to know. What is argued however, is that neoclassical economists promote ignorance-squared.
(...) To illustrate, there are numerous reasons for promoting ignorance-squared. Given the search costs combined with specialisation, there is only so much time to devote to methodological issues. Therefore, the dominant paradigm will draw the attention of most scholars. Moreover, the more a system (of thought) is entrenched, and the longer the time it has been operating, the more difficult and expensive it becomes to change that system (Collingridge 1980). Likewise, the more a person has invested in the training required to be admitted to the neoclassical coterie, the more it is in that person's interest to prevent the depreciation of knowledge threatened by alternative modes of discourse. Another reason may be the appeal of elegant mathematically constructed neoclassical axioms. For instance, Einstein's theory of relativity became the standard textbook theory of gravitation in the 1920s. Yet, it wasn't until the 1950s that radar and radio astronomy became sophisticated enough to generate and test the theory via precise predictions with experimental uncertainties less than one percent. The general acceptance of the theory in the intervening 30 years had been largely attributed to its beauty (Weinberg 1992: 98), similar to the dominance of general equilibrium theory in economics in the second half of the twentieth century. Given the conceptual apparatus of ignorance-squared, let us now examine the production of economic knowledge that incorporates simultaneously, the production of ignorance.
(...) Neoclassical economists normally treat economic instability as the effect of exogenous, stochastic factors even though nonlinear economics suggests that what may previously have been considered exogenous, or random, may more likely be endogenous to capitalist social formations. As such, economic fluctuations are seen as created by the processes of capitalism itself (Baumol and Benhabib 1989; Savit 1988). This is certainly not a new idea. Marx, Keynes, Hicks, Harrod, Kaldor and Hayek all considered causes for instability which were endogenous (Zarnowitz 1985).
(...) The 'rational' consumer of the mainstream economist is a working assumption that was meant to free economists from dependence on psychology (Simon 1976:131; Tversky and Kahneman 1987). The dilemma is that the assumption of rationality as intertemporally optimising is often confused with, and regularly presented as, real, purposive behaviour. In fact, the living consumer in historical time routinely makes decisions in undefined contexts. They muddle through, they adapt, they copy, they try what worked in the past, they gamble, they take uncalculated risks, they engage in costly altruistic activities, and regularly make unpredictable, even unexplainable, decisions (Sandven 1995).
(...) In his work Arthur divides up the profession into two world views, the neoclassical and the 'new' economics: neoclassical economics is based on diminishing returns; 19th century deterministic dynamics approaching equilibrium; homogeneous factors; no externalities; and is structurally simplistic around the concepts of supply and demand. Alternatively, 'new' economics introduces increasing returns; is evolutionary; focuses on heterogeneity and externalities; and is structurally complex and ever changing (Waldrop 1992:38; Bak and Chen 1991). Most students graduate, only having come into pedagogical contact with the former worldview.
(...) We are left with the pre-eminence of equilibrium economics when the balance of supplies and demands on all spot and futures markets takes place simultaneously, (Hicks 1939; Arrow 1971; and Debreu 1959). In this purely competitive, certain, optimising world of general equilibrium, pure profits are zero. Before students are permitted to achieve this level of sophistication, they must first go through the partial equilibrium components of marginal cost and revenue relationships.
(...) More recently, Nitzan and Bichler point out (1995 454-455) that modern corporations are not even "acting as if" they equilibrate marginal cost-marginal revenue to maximise profits. Rather, they attempt to "beat the average". References to the "average" or "normal" pervade the business literature - from the analysis of stock performance, through the stacking of country growth rates and risk premia, to the ranking of corporate profitability. In these terms, according to Nitzan and Bichler, the primary goal becomes "differential pecuniary accumulation", through which the corporation seeks to control a "larger share of the societal surplus". Consequently, success has less to do with the intuitively convincing textbook equality between marginal cost and marginal revenue, than with the capture of external contested income, thereby redistributing the available social surplus.
(...) Change, not rest is the characteristic 'state' of capitalism. "The essential point to grasp is that in dealing with capitalism we are dealing with an evolutionary process that is in continual disequilibrium. It may seem strange that anyone can fail to see so obvious a fact long ago emphasised by Karl Marx" (Schumpeter 1976:82).
(...) As Mayhew, and Beed and Beed suggest, the exercise of ideological power drives a portion of the full non-neoclassical transcript underground, in this instance to less reputable heterogeneous journals. In mainstream discourse, the subordinates (academic workers and students) tend to reveal only what is "safe" and "appropriate"; that which is delineated by the dominant paradigm or its ideological purveyors. Total subordinate revelation is only forthcoming in student or worker newspapers or "less reputable" heterogeneous journals, all treated with condescending contempt by the orthodoxy.
(...) The proficiency shown in neoclassical tools, concepts and language becomes the hallmark of identification and quality. The Krueger Commission on Graduate Education, established in the United States to report on tertiary education standards in 1990, reported that department procedures "bias the selection towards good technicians, rather than good potential economists". This implies that graduate education de-emphasises creativity and problem solving as the student requires "little or no knowledge of economic problems and institutions" (Krueger 1991:1040-42). Consequently, ignorance is promoted as a qualitative manifestation of a "good economist". The result is that the dominion of organic intellectuals, representing a class position and propounding its symbolic representation, is solidified. In order to join this coterie one must accept and disseminate the ideological and political constituents of class power that it represents.
(...) Economics is constructed around more than subjective differences of epistemology, methodological preference or appreciation of elegant techniques; the differences at the core are also political. Neoclassical economics has represented, for two hundred years, the political self-representation of autonomous, self-subsistent, and self-interest-optimising individuals. The populist works of Friedman (1962) in Capitalism and Freedom, or the more adrenalin-pumping stuff of Ayn Rand (1952 and 1957) in The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged provide adroit examples of the ideological and political content in the grasp of the "Invisible Hand". It is here where the connection between promoting ignorance-squared and ideological construction is entwined.
(...) "And your education! Is not that also social, and determined by the social conditions under which you educate, by the intervention, direct or indirect, of society, by means of schools, etc?" (Marx 1976: 502).
(...) Questioning, wondering, doubting, revising and collaborating are all practices which Socrates and now McCloskey (1985) would proffer to those interested in expanding the breadth of our knowledge through communication. Yet, students, and many of their preceptors, do not know that they do not know that capital cannot be measured; that utility is metaphysical; that optimisation is non-falsifiable; that capitalism is inherently unstable; or that, as Ricardo discovered, when we say 'supply and demand' we are explaining nothing (Dobb 1975: 52 and 119). The incentive remains not to find out; or at the very least, not to recognise the numerous serious-minded non-neoclassical economists who take all of the above for granted! Rather, mainstream protagonists spend time proving to each other that what they are doing is what they should be doing; and then convincing the disciples that what they should be doing is what their mentors are doing, ie., producing "acceptable" knowledge. The entire process is justified from within by noting that economists are all optimising their utility functions (Becker 1975).
(...) A student may actually accept what s/he is taught as normal, even justifiable, as part of the social order. Another may reject the information as "unreal", "incomplete", "too abstract", "not relevant", or "not falsifiable" and yet have no "realistic" option to present as a critical counter-claim. In either case, to survive, to pass the course, to increase their potential material enhancement upon graduation, both types of student must internalise and become technically proficient with what is served up. At the level of ideas, this symbolic production and re-production of both knowledge and ignorance-squared is replicated, with or without conscious consent (Gramsci 1971:passim).
(...) By disseminating a paradigmatic discourse and the concepts to go with it as well as defining the standards of what is legitimate, a symbolic climate is created that prevents subordinates from thinking their way free. Thinking "free", is used in the sense that acts are dialectically interactive with intentions, neither consciousness nor action being "unmoved movers" (Scott 1985: xvii and 38-39).
(...) No matter how hard neoclassical economists try to drive away the world of complexity, it too continues to confront them. Yet, to the frustration of "heterogeneous" antagonists the neoclassical paradigm remains dominant, blatantly promoting ignorance-squared. Elegance and technique have replaced relevance. What has been shown herein is that the production of that elegance has involved the opportunity cost of simultaneously producing ignorance. Ignorance-squared is replicated amongst students given the social interests of those dominant in the paradigm. This process of producing ignorance becomes entwined with the promotion of ideology to the detriment of us all. McCloskey importunes the deaf, for dialogue with more relevant tributaries of the mainstream is not in the interests of those presently in control.
Friday, July 6, 2007
the crisis of imperialism:
Things reached a crisis in the mid 1980s when, to stave off the prospect of a world depression due to the bad debts incurred by Third World countries, the IMF and WB stepped in and took over responsibility for those debts from the big private banks like Barclays, Credit Lyons, Chase Manhattan, etc., which were threatened with collapse. It was a move which put the IMF and WB into an unassailable position of power which they have never relinquished since.
(...) These austerity programs pave the way for transnational corporations, always looking to reduce costs and access cheap sources of raw materials, to come in and set up their manufacturing operations, driving people, including children in many cases, from the land into factories, where they are forced to labour long hours under horrendous conditions for starvation wages. This serves two purposes: it destroys the agro-economies of the Third World, which are now required to import their food from the First World, and ensures the outward flow of wealth to First World transnational corporations and their international investors.
(...) The case of Nigeria is typical. Today, life expectancy in this oil-rich, aid-dependent nation is 47 years for males and 52 years for females. Of a population of 120 million, 89 million people live on less than a dollar a day, this despite the fact that the Niger Delta region contains large deposits of oil. One IMF loan of $12 billion has become a continuous unpaid debt of $27 billion.
(...) Six million children under the age of 5 die each year in the Third World as a whole due to hunger and preventable disease.
Things reached a crisis in the mid 1980s when, to stave off the prospect of a world depression due to the bad debts incurred by Third World countries, the IMF and WB stepped in and took over responsibility for those debts from the big private banks like Barclays, Credit Lyons, Chase Manhattan, etc., which were threatened with collapse. It was a move which put the IMF and WB into an unassailable position of power which they have never relinquished since.
(...) These austerity programs pave the way for transnational corporations, always looking to reduce costs and access cheap sources of raw materials, to come in and set up their manufacturing operations, driving people, including children in many cases, from the land into factories, where they are forced to labour long hours under horrendous conditions for starvation wages. This serves two purposes: it destroys the agro-economies of the Third World, which are now required to import their food from the First World, and ensures the outward flow of wealth to First World transnational corporations and their international investors.
(...) The case of Nigeria is typical. Today, life expectancy in this oil-rich, aid-dependent nation is 47 years for males and 52 years for females. Of a population of 120 million, 89 million people live on less than a dollar a day, this despite the fact that the Niger Delta region contains large deposits of oil. One IMF loan of $12 billion has become a continuous unpaid debt of $27 billion.
(...) Six million children under the age of 5 die each year in the Third World as a whole due to hunger and preventable disease.
brown's bombs:
In his first day's address outside 10 Downing Street and his statement to parliament on 3 July, Brown paid not even lip service to those who would be alive today had his government - and it was his government as much as Blair's - not joined Bush in a slaughter justified with demonstrable lies. He said nothing, not a word.
(...) He said nothing about the added thousands of Iraqi children whose deaths from preventable disease have doubled since the invasion, caused by the wilful destruction of sanitation and water purification plants. He said nothing about hospital patients who die every day for want of equipment as basic as a syringe. He said nothing about the greatest refugee flight since the Palestinians' Naqba. He said nothing about his government's defeat in Afghanistan, and how the British army and its Nato allies are killing civilians, including whole families. Typically, on 29 June, British forces called in air strikes on a village, reportedly bombing to death 45 innocent people - almost as many as the number bombed to death in London in July 2005. Compare the reaction, or rather the silence. They were only Muslims. And Muslims are the world's most numerous victims of a terrorism whose main sources are Washington, Tel Aviv and London.
In his first day's address outside 10 Downing Street and his statement to parliament on 3 July, Brown paid not even lip service to those who would be alive today had his government - and it was his government as much as Blair's - not joined Bush in a slaughter justified with demonstrable lies. He said nothing, not a word.
(...) He said nothing about the added thousands of Iraqi children whose deaths from preventable disease have doubled since the invasion, caused by the wilful destruction of sanitation and water purification plants. He said nothing about hospital patients who die every day for want of equipment as basic as a syringe. He said nothing about the greatest refugee flight since the Palestinians' Naqba. He said nothing about his government's defeat in Afghanistan, and how the British army and its Nato allies are killing civilians, including whole families. Typically, on 29 June, British forces called in air strikes on a village, reportedly bombing to death 45 innocent people - almost as many as the number bombed to death in London in July 2005. Compare the reaction, or rather the silence. They were only Muslims. And Muslims are the world's most numerous victims of a terrorism whose main sources are Washington, Tel Aviv and London.
displacement for the olympic games:
Everything we have been told about the Olympic legacy turns out to be bunkum. The Games are supposed to encourage us to play sport; they are meant to produce resounding economic benefits and to help the poor and needy. It’s all untrue. As the evictions in London begin, a new report shows that the only certain Olympic legacy is a transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich.
(...) They found that "there is no guaranteed beneficial legacy from hosting an Olympic Games … and there is little evidence that past Games have delivered benefits to those people and places most in need."(3) Tessa Jowell must be aware of this as well – she wrote the forward to the report. A paper published by the London Assembly last month found that "longterm unemployed and workless communities were largely unaffected [by better job prospects] by the staging of the Games in each of the four previous host cities"(4).
(...) But far more damning than any of this is the study released last week by the Centre on Housing Rights and Evictions. In every city it examined, the Olympic Games – accidentally or deliberately – have become a catalyst for mass evictions and impoverishment. Since 1988, over 2 million people have been driven from their homes to make way for the Olympics(5). The games have become a licence for land grabs.
(...) The 1988 Olympics in Seoul are widely considered a great success. But they were used by the military dictatorship (which ceded power in 1987) as an opportunity to turn Seoul from a vernacular city owned by many people into a corporate city owned by the elite. 720,000 people were thrown out of their homes. People who tried to resist were beaten up by thugs and imprisoned. Tenants were evicted without notice and left to freeze: some survived by digging caves into a motorway embankment. Street vendors were banned; homeless people, alcoholics, beggars and the mentally ill were rounded up and housed in a prison camp. The world saw nothing of this: just a glossy new city full of glossy new people.
(...) Even before the 1996 Olympics, Atlanta was one of the most segregated cities in the United States. But the Games gave the clique of white developers who ran them the excuse to engineer a new ethnic cleansing programme. Without any democratic process, they demolished large housing projects (whose inhabitants were mostly African-American) and replaced them with shiny middle-class homes. Around 30,000 families were evicted. They issued "Quality of Life Ordinances", which criminalised people who begged or slept rough. The police were given pre-printed arrest citations bearing the words "African-American, Male, Homeless": they just had to fill in the name, the charge and the date. In the year before the Games, they arrested 9,000 homeless people(7). Many of them were locked up without trial until the Games were over; others were harassed until they left the city. By the time the athletes arrived, downtown Atlanta had been cleared for the white middle classes.
(...) The old pattern resumed in Athens, where the Olympics were used as an excuse to evict 2700 Roma, even from places where no new developments were planned.
(...) In Beijing, 1.25m people have already been displaced to make way for the Games, and another quarter of a million are due to be evicted.
(...) The International Olympic Committee raises no objection to any of this. It lays down rigid criteria for cities hosting the Games, but none of them include housing rights(10). How could they? City authorities want to run the Games for two reasons: to enhance their prestige and to permit them to carry out schemes that would never otherwise be approved. Democratic processes can be truncated, compulsory purchase orders slapped down, homes and amenities cleared. The Olympic bulldozer clears all objections out of the way. There can be no debate, no exceptions, no modifications.
(...) None of this is an argument against the Olympic Games. It is an argument against moving them every four years. Let them stay in a city where the damage has already been done. And let it be anywhere but here.
Everything we have been told about the Olympic legacy turns out to be bunkum. The Games are supposed to encourage us to play sport; they are meant to produce resounding economic benefits and to help the poor and needy. It’s all untrue. As the evictions in London begin, a new report shows that the only certain Olympic legacy is a transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich.
(...) They found that "there is no guaranteed beneficial legacy from hosting an Olympic Games … and there is little evidence that past Games have delivered benefits to those people and places most in need."(3) Tessa Jowell must be aware of this as well – she wrote the forward to the report. A paper published by the London Assembly last month found that "longterm unemployed and workless communities were largely unaffected [by better job prospects] by the staging of the Games in each of the four previous host cities"(4).
(...) But far more damning than any of this is the study released last week by the Centre on Housing Rights and Evictions. In every city it examined, the Olympic Games – accidentally or deliberately – have become a catalyst for mass evictions and impoverishment. Since 1988, over 2 million people have been driven from their homes to make way for the Olympics(5). The games have become a licence for land grabs.
(...) The 1988 Olympics in Seoul are widely considered a great success. But they were used by the military dictatorship (which ceded power in 1987) as an opportunity to turn Seoul from a vernacular city owned by many people into a corporate city owned by the elite. 720,000 people were thrown out of their homes. People who tried to resist were beaten up by thugs and imprisoned. Tenants were evicted without notice and left to freeze: some survived by digging caves into a motorway embankment. Street vendors were banned; homeless people, alcoholics, beggars and the mentally ill were rounded up and housed in a prison camp. The world saw nothing of this: just a glossy new city full of glossy new people.
(...) Even before the 1996 Olympics, Atlanta was one of the most segregated cities in the United States. But the Games gave the clique of white developers who ran them the excuse to engineer a new ethnic cleansing programme. Without any democratic process, they demolished large housing projects (whose inhabitants were mostly African-American) and replaced them with shiny middle-class homes. Around 30,000 families were evicted. They issued "Quality of Life Ordinances", which criminalised people who begged or slept rough. The police were given pre-printed arrest citations bearing the words "African-American, Male, Homeless": they just had to fill in the name, the charge and the date. In the year before the Games, they arrested 9,000 homeless people(7). Many of them were locked up without trial until the Games were over; others were harassed until they left the city. By the time the athletes arrived, downtown Atlanta had been cleared for the white middle classes.
(...) The old pattern resumed in Athens, where the Olympics were used as an excuse to evict 2700 Roma, even from places where no new developments were planned.
(...) In Beijing, 1.25m people have already been displaced to make way for the Games, and another quarter of a million are due to be evicted.
(...) The International Olympic Committee raises no objection to any of this. It lays down rigid criteria for cities hosting the Games, but none of them include housing rights(10). How could they? City authorities want to run the Games for two reasons: to enhance their prestige and to permit them to carry out schemes that would never otherwise be approved. Democratic processes can be truncated, compulsory purchase orders slapped down, homes and amenities cleared. The Olympic bulldozer clears all objections out of the way. There can be no debate, no exceptions, no modifications.
(...) None of this is an argument against the Olympic Games. It is an argument against moving them every four years. Let them stay in a city where the damage has already been done. And let it be anywhere but here.
the japan model:
The statist ideology that came to be known as "Asian values" had its trial run in postwar Japan. Any attempt to cast this illiberal growth model as "normal" for Japan will run aground on the nation's labor history. Activistic unions staged more than 250 strikes per year in the 1920s. Even the military dictatorship that took over in 1938 -- disbanding all unions and funneling workers into Sanpo, the all-embracing Industrial Patriotic Society -- could not extinguish the spirit of social democracy that drove unionization. Its robust survival was demonstrated by the tidal wave of re-unionization that swept Japan after its surrender in September 1945. Any political process that did not reflect this liberal-left voting bloc could hardly be called democratic.
The statist ideology that came to be known as "Asian values" had its trial run in postwar Japan. Any attempt to cast this illiberal growth model as "normal" for Japan will run aground on the nation's labor history. Activistic unions staged more than 250 strikes per year in the 1920s. Even the military dictatorship that took over in 1938 -- disbanding all unions and funneling workers into Sanpo, the all-embracing Industrial Patriotic Society -- could not extinguish the spirit of social democracy that drove unionization. Its robust survival was demonstrated by the tidal wave of re-unionization that swept Japan after its surrender in September 1945. Any political process that did not reflect this liberal-left voting bloc could hardly be called democratic.
making a "world-class" city for the world cup:
It is clear that in their desperate drive to produce "world class" cities, both the city and the province have decided that the easiest way to achieve this is by simply expelling the poor. However, organisations of the poor are arguing that a world-class city is one that cares for the poor and makes policy decisions in consultation with them.
It is clear that in their desperate drive to produce "world class" cities, both the city and the province have decided that the easiest way to achieve this is by simply expelling the poor. However, organisations of the poor are arguing that a world-class city is one that cares for the poor and makes policy decisions in consultation with them.
assimilation is a double-edged sword for immigrants:
Italian, Polish, and Jewish immigrants may not have identified with, or been accepted into, white society when they first arrived in the United States. But they, or more often their children, assimilated by becoming "white" and experienced upward mobility as they melded into the white majority. And part of the assimilation into whiteness meant the adoption of white racial attitudes.
(...) For immigrants of color, assimilation means something very different than it historically has for European immigrants. For Latin American immigrants, assimilation more often means shedding their American dream and joining the lowest rungs in a caste-like society where Native Americans and African Americans, the most "assimilated" people of color, have been consistently kept at the bottom. When Haitian immigrants assimilate, explains one study, "they become not generic, mainstream Americans but specifically African Americans and primarily the poor African Americans most vulnerable to American racism."
Italian, Polish, and Jewish immigrants may not have identified with, or been accepted into, white society when they first arrived in the United States. But they, or more often their children, assimilated by becoming "white" and experienced upward mobility as they melded into the white majority. And part of the assimilation into whiteness meant the adoption of white racial attitudes.
(...) For immigrants of color, assimilation means something very different than it historically has for European immigrants. For Latin American immigrants, assimilation more often means shedding their American dream and joining the lowest rungs in a caste-like society where Native Americans and African Americans, the most "assimilated" people of color, have been consistently kept at the bottom. When Haitian immigrants assimilate, explains one study, "they become not generic, mainstream Americans but specifically African Americans and primarily the poor African Americans most vulnerable to American racism."
put away the flags:
On this July 4, we would do well to renounce nationalism and all its symbols: its flags, its pledges of allegiance, its anthems, its insistence in song that God must single out America to be blessed. Is not nationalism -- that devotion to a flag, an anthem, a boundary so fierce it engenders mass murder -- one of the great evils of our time, along with racism, along with religious hatred?
(...) Our citizenry has been brought up to see our nation as different from others, an exception in the world, uniquely moral, expanding into other lands in order to bring civilization, liberty, democracy.
(...) On the eve of the Mexican War, an American journalist declared it our "Manifest Destiny to overspread the continent allotted by Providence." After the invasion of Mexico began, The New York Herald announced: "We believe it is a part of our destiny to civilize that beautiful country."
(...) We invaded Cuba in 1898 to liberate the Cubans, and went to war in the Philippines shortly after, as President McKinley put it, "to civilize and Christianize" the Filipino people.
(...) One of the effects of nationalist thinking is a loss of a sense of proportion. The killing of 2,300 people at Pearl Harbor becomes the justification for killing 240,000 in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The killing of 3,000 people on Sept. 11 becomes the justification for killing tens of thousands of people in Afghanistan and Iraq.
(...) We need to refute the idea that our nation is different from, morally superior to, the other imperial powers of world history. We need to assert our allegiance to the human race, and not to any one nation.
On this July 4, we would do well to renounce nationalism and all its symbols: its flags, its pledges of allegiance, its anthems, its insistence in song that God must single out America to be blessed. Is not nationalism -- that devotion to a flag, an anthem, a boundary so fierce it engenders mass murder -- one of the great evils of our time, along with racism, along with religious hatred?
(...) Our citizenry has been brought up to see our nation as different from others, an exception in the world, uniquely moral, expanding into other lands in order to bring civilization, liberty, democracy.
(...) On the eve of the Mexican War, an American journalist declared it our "Manifest Destiny to overspread the continent allotted by Providence." After the invasion of Mexico began, The New York Herald announced: "We believe it is a part of our destiny to civilize that beautiful country."
(...) We invaded Cuba in 1898 to liberate the Cubans, and went to war in the Philippines shortly after, as President McKinley put it, "to civilize and Christianize" the Filipino people.
(...) One of the effects of nationalist thinking is a loss of a sense of proportion. The killing of 2,300 people at Pearl Harbor becomes the justification for killing 240,000 in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The killing of 3,000 people on Sept. 11 becomes the justification for killing tens of thousands of people in Afghanistan and Iraq.
(...) We need to refute the idea that our nation is different from, morally superior to, the other imperial powers of world history. We need to assert our allegiance to the human race, and not to any one nation.
parecon and anarchism:
Participatory economics, or parecon for short, is a classless economic system that serves as an alternative to capitalism, market socialism, and centrally planned economies. Parecon is based upon equity, solidarity, diversity, and participatory self-management, as well as takes into account kinship/gender, community/race, and polity in addition to economic considerations. Under parecon, workers and consumers councils are responsible for self-managed decision making; workers have balanced job complexes; effort and sacrifice are rewarded, not hours worked or how much capital was invested; and planning is participatory.
Participatory economics, or parecon for short, is a classless economic system that serves as an alternative to capitalism, market socialism, and centrally planned economies. Parecon is based upon equity, solidarity, diversity, and participatory self-management, as well as takes into account kinship/gender, community/race, and polity in addition to economic considerations. Under parecon, workers and consumers councils are responsible for self-managed decision making; workers have balanced job complexes; effort and sacrifice are rewarded, not hours worked or how much capital was invested; and planning is participatory.
injustice in jena as nooses hang from the "white tree":
In a small still mostly segregated section of rural Louisiana, an all white jury heard a series of white witnesses called by a white prosecutor testify in a courtroom overseen by a white judge in a trial of a fight at the local high school where a white student who had been making racial taunts was hit by black students. The fight was the culmination of a series of racial incidents starting when whites responded to black students sitting under the “white tree” at their school by hanging three nooses from the tree. The white jury and white prosecutor and all white supporters of the white victim were all on one side of the courtroom. The black defendant, 17 year old Mychal Bell, and his supporters were on the other. The jury quickly convicted Mychal Bell of two felonies - aggravated battery and conspiracy to commit aggravated battery. Bell, who was a 16 year old sophomore football star at the time he was arrested, faces up to 22 years in prison. Five other black youths await similar trials on attempted second degree murder and conspiracy charges.
In a small still mostly segregated section of rural Louisiana, an all white jury heard a series of white witnesses called by a white prosecutor testify in a courtroom overseen by a white judge in a trial of a fight at the local high school where a white student who had been making racial taunts was hit by black students. The fight was the culmination of a series of racial incidents starting when whites responded to black students sitting under the “white tree” at their school by hanging three nooses from the tree. The white jury and white prosecutor and all white supporters of the white victim were all on one side of the courtroom. The black defendant, 17 year old Mychal Bell, and his supporters were on the other. The jury quickly convicted Mychal Bell of two felonies - aggravated battery and conspiracy to commit aggravated battery. Bell, who was a 16 year old sophomore football star at the time he was arrested, faces up to 22 years in prison. Five other black youths await similar trials on attempted second degree murder and conspiracy charges.
the dirty word:
But in order to "strengthen" Abbas, Olmert addressed him as "President" and not as "Chairman", which has been the de rigueur title used by all Israeli representatives since the establishment of the Palestinian Authority. (The wise men of Oslo circumvented this difficulty by referring - in all three languages - to the head of the Authority by the Arab title of Ra'is, which can mean both president and chairman. And the word that did not appear throughout this long monologue? "Occupation".
(...) With the air of a Sultan throwing coins to the paupers in the street, Olmert announced his intention of releasing some Fatah prisoners. 250 coins, 250 prisoners. That was the "generous gift" that was to make the Palestinians jump for joy, "strengthen" Abbas and awaken to new life the dry bones of his organization.
(...) To eliminate any doubt about this, Olmert sent the army at once into the kasbah of Nablus, the heart of Abbas' virtual kingdom, in order to "arrest" the leaders of the military arm of Fatah. They put up determined resistance, wounding several soldiers. A lieutenant lost a hand and a leg. In another incursion, this time into Gaza, 13 Palestinians were killed, including a boy of 9. According to the official version, the aim was to throw the militants off balance so that they would feel hunted.
(...) THE DISAPPEARANCE of the occupation as a subject for discussion is the real message of the conference. All the arrangements and ceremonies were designed to create the false impression that Olmert and Abbas were the heads of two states conducting negotiations on the basis of equality - rather than the leader of an occupying power and a representative of the occupied population.
(...) Blair will come, meet, make declarations, ooze charm from every pore, generate headlines, fly, come back, make more announcements, meet again with kings, presidents and prime ministers. A long tail of news-thirsty journalists will follow him everywhere, generate media noise, write, tape and take pictures, as if he were a male Paris Hilton.
But in order to "strengthen" Abbas, Olmert addressed him as "President" and not as "Chairman", which has been the de rigueur title used by all Israeli representatives since the establishment of the Palestinian Authority. (The wise men of Oslo circumvented this difficulty by referring - in all three languages - to the head of the Authority by the Arab title of Ra'is, which can mean both president and chairman. And the word that did not appear throughout this long monologue? "Occupation".
(...) With the air of a Sultan throwing coins to the paupers in the street, Olmert announced his intention of releasing some Fatah prisoners. 250 coins, 250 prisoners. That was the "generous gift" that was to make the Palestinians jump for joy, "strengthen" Abbas and awaken to new life the dry bones of his organization.
(...) To eliminate any doubt about this, Olmert sent the army at once into the kasbah of Nablus, the heart of Abbas' virtual kingdom, in order to "arrest" the leaders of the military arm of Fatah. They put up determined resistance, wounding several soldiers. A lieutenant lost a hand and a leg. In another incursion, this time into Gaza, 13 Palestinians were killed, including a boy of 9. According to the official version, the aim was to throw the militants off balance so that they would feel hunted.
(...) THE DISAPPEARANCE of the occupation as a subject for discussion is the real message of the conference. All the arrangements and ceremonies were designed to create the false impression that Olmert and Abbas were the heads of two states conducting negotiations on the basis of equality - rather than the leader of an occupying power and a representative of the occupied population.
(...) Blair will come, meet, make declarations, ooze charm from every pore, generate headlines, fly, come back, make more announcements, meet again with kings, presidents and prime ministers. A long tail of news-thirsty journalists will follow him everywhere, generate media noise, write, tape and take pictures, as if he were a male Paris Hilton.
Thursday, July 5, 2007
independence day hypocrisy:
Noted political scientist and social critic Michael Parenti wrote of our Founder's achievement in the 8th and earlier editions of his important book, "Democracy for the Few." In it, he states "the Constitution was consciously designed as a conservative document" with provisions in it, or omitted by intent, to "resist the pressure of popular tides" and protect "a rising bourgeoisie('s)" freedom to "invest, speculate, trade, and accumulate wealth" the way things work for capital interests today. It was to codify in law what politician, founding father, jurist and nation's first Chief Supreme Court justice, John Jay, said the way things should be - that "The people who own the country ought to run it (for their benefit alone)."
(...) Republican America was created as a nominal democracy Adam Smith said should be "instituted for the defense of the rich against the poor."
(...) At the nation's birth, only adult white male property owners could vote; blacks were commodities, not people; and women were childbearing and homemaking appendages of their husbands.
(...) Religious prerequisites existed until 1810, and all adult white males couldn't vote until property and tax requirements were dropped in 1850. States elected senators until the 17th amendment in 1913 gave citizen voters that right, and Native Americans had no franchise in their own land until the 1924 Indian Citizenship Act gave them back what no one had the right to take away in the first place. Women's suffrage wasn't achieved until the 19th Amendment passed in 1920 after nearly 100 years of struggling for it. The 1865 13th Amendment freed black slaves, the 1870 15th Amendment gave them the right to vote, but it wasn't until passage of the landmark Civil and Voting Rights Acts in the mid-1960s, abolishing Southern Jim Crow laws, that blacks could vote, in fact, like the Constitution said they could decades earlier.
Noted political scientist and social critic Michael Parenti wrote of our Founder's achievement in the 8th and earlier editions of his important book, "Democracy for the Few." In it, he states "the Constitution was consciously designed as a conservative document" with provisions in it, or omitted by intent, to "resist the pressure of popular tides" and protect "a rising bourgeoisie('s)" freedom to "invest, speculate, trade, and accumulate wealth" the way things work for capital interests today. It was to codify in law what politician, founding father, jurist and nation's first Chief Supreme Court justice, John Jay, said the way things should be - that "The people who own the country ought to run it (for their benefit alone)."
(...) Republican America was created as a nominal democracy Adam Smith said should be "instituted for the defense of the rich against the poor."
(...) At the nation's birth, only adult white male property owners could vote; blacks were commodities, not people; and women were childbearing and homemaking appendages of their husbands.
(...) Religious prerequisites existed until 1810, and all adult white males couldn't vote until property and tax requirements were dropped in 1850. States elected senators until the 17th amendment in 1913 gave citizen voters that right, and Native Americans had no franchise in their own land until the 1924 Indian Citizenship Act gave them back what no one had the right to take away in the first place. Women's suffrage wasn't achieved until the 19th Amendment passed in 1920 after nearly 100 years of struggling for it. The 1865 13th Amendment freed black slaves, the 1870 15th Amendment gave them the right to vote, but it wasn't until passage of the landmark Civil and Voting Rights Acts in the mid-1960s, abolishing Southern Jim Crow laws, that blacks could vote, in fact, like the Constitution said they could decades earlier.
Tuesday, July 3, 2007
a sudden change of state:
The IPCC predicts that sea levels could rise by as much as 59cm this century(2). Hansen’s paper argues that the slow melting of ice sheets the panel expects doesn’t fit the data. The geological record suggests that ice at the poles does not melt in a gradual and linear fashion, but flips suddenly from one state to another. When temperatures increased to 2-3 degrees above today’s level 3.5 million years ago, sea levels rose not by 59 centimetres but by 25 metres. The ice responded immediately to changes in temperature(3).
(...) Rather than taking thousands of years to melt, as the IPCC predicts, Hansen and his team find it “implausible” that the expected warming before 2100 “would permit a West Antarctic ice sheet of present size to survive even for a century.” As well as drowning most of the world’s centres of population, a sudden disintegration could lead to much higher rises in global temperature, because less ice means less heat reflected back into space. The new paper suggests that the temperature could therefore be twice as sensitive to rising greenhouse gases than the IPCC assumes. “Civilization developed,” Hansen writes, “during a period of unusual climate stability, the Holocene, now almost 12,000 years in duration. That period is about to end.”(4)
(...) I looked up from the paper, almost expecting to see crowds stampeding through the streets. I saw people chatting outside a riverside pub. The other passengers on the train snoozed over their newspapers or played on their mobile phones. Unaware of the causes of our good fortune, blissfully detached from their likely termination, we drift into catastrophe.
(...) Or we are led there. A good source tells me that the British government is well aware that its target for cutting carbon emissions – 60% by 2050 – is too little, too late, but that it will go no further for one reason: it fears losing the support of the Confederation of British Industry. Why this body is allowed to keep holding a gun to our heads has never been explained, but Gordon Brown has just appointed Digby Jones, its former director-general, as a minister in the department responsible for energy policy. I don’t remember voting for him. There could be no clearer signal that the public interest is being drowned by corporate power.
(...) If Hansen is correct, to avert the meltdown that brings the Holocene to an end we require a response on this scale: a sort of political “albedo flip”. The government must immediately commission studies to discover how much of our energy could be produced without fossil fuels, set that as its target then turn the economy round to meet it. But a power shift like this cannot take place without a power shift of another kind: we need a government which fears planetary meltdown more than it fears the CBI.
The IPCC predicts that sea levels could rise by as much as 59cm this century(2). Hansen’s paper argues that the slow melting of ice sheets the panel expects doesn’t fit the data. The geological record suggests that ice at the poles does not melt in a gradual and linear fashion, but flips suddenly from one state to another. When temperatures increased to 2-3 degrees above today’s level 3.5 million years ago, sea levels rose not by 59 centimetres but by 25 metres. The ice responded immediately to changes in temperature(3).
(...) Rather than taking thousands of years to melt, as the IPCC predicts, Hansen and his team find it “implausible” that the expected warming before 2100 “would permit a West Antarctic ice sheet of present size to survive even for a century.” As well as drowning most of the world’s centres of population, a sudden disintegration could lead to much higher rises in global temperature, because less ice means less heat reflected back into space. The new paper suggests that the temperature could therefore be twice as sensitive to rising greenhouse gases than the IPCC assumes. “Civilization developed,” Hansen writes, “during a period of unusual climate stability, the Holocene, now almost 12,000 years in duration. That period is about to end.”(4)
(...) I looked up from the paper, almost expecting to see crowds stampeding through the streets. I saw people chatting outside a riverside pub. The other passengers on the train snoozed over their newspapers or played on their mobile phones. Unaware of the causes of our good fortune, blissfully detached from their likely termination, we drift into catastrophe.
(...) Or we are led there. A good source tells me that the British government is well aware that its target for cutting carbon emissions – 60% by 2050 – is too little, too late, but that it will go no further for one reason: it fears losing the support of the Confederation of British Industry. Why this body is allowed to keep holding a gun to our heads has never been explained, but Gordon Brown has just appointed Digby Jones, its former director-general, as a minister in the department responsible for energy policy. I don’t remember voting for him. There could be no clearer signal that the public interest is being drowned by corporate power.
(...) If Hansen is correct, to avert the meltdown that brings the Holocene to an end we require a response on this scale: a sort of political “albedo flip”. The government must immediately commission studies to discover how much of our energy could be produced without fossil fuels, set that as its target then turn the economy round to meet it. But a power shift like this cannot take place without a power shift of another kind: we need a government which fears planetary meltdown more than it fears the CBI.
Monday, July 2, 2007
finding lessons in gaza's bloodshed:
Gaza has exposed, like no other experience in modern history, the hypocrisy of the US government's democracy charade; if it was true democracy that the United States was seeking, it would have acknowledged the Palestinian people's collective will and fostered dialogue with their representatives, as opposed to starvation and blockade and covert operations to topple the government.
Gaza has exposed, like no other experience in modern history, the hypocrisy of the US government's democracy charade; if it was true democracy that the United States was seeking, it would have acknowledged the Palestinian people's collective will and fostered dialogue with their representatives, as opposed to starvation and blockade and covert operations to topple the government.
around the globe, farmers losing ground:
The thin layer of topsoil that covers the planet's land surface is the foundation of civilisation. This soil, measured in inches over much of the earth, was formed over long stretches of geological time as new soil formation exceeded the natural rate of erosion. As soil accumulated over the eons, it provided a medium in which plants could grow. In turn, plants protect the soil from erosion. Human activity is disrupting this relationship. Sometime within the last century, soil erosion began to exceed new soil formation in large areas. Perhaps a third or more of all cropland is losing topsoil faster than new soil is forming, thereby reducing the land's inherent productivity. Today the foundation of civilisation is crumbling. The seeds of collapse of some early civilisations, such as the Mayans, may have originated in soil erosion that undermined the food supply. The accelerating soil erosion over the last century can be seen in the dust bowls that form as vegetation is destroyed and wind erosion soars out of control. Among those that stand out are the Dust Bowl in the U.S. Great Plains during the 1930s, the dust bowls in the Soviet Virgin Lands in the 1960s, the huge one that is forming today in northwest China, and the one taking shape in the Sahelian region of Africa.
The thin layer of topsoil that covers the planet's land surface is the foundation of civilisation. This soil, measured in inches over much of the earth, was formed over long stretches of geological time as new soil formation exceeded the natural rate of erosion. As soil accumulated over the eons, it provided a medium in which plants could grow. In turn, plants protect the soil from erosion. Human activity is disrupting this relationship. Sometime within the last century, soil erosion began to exceed new soil formation in large areas. Perhaps a third or more of all cropland is losing topsoil faster than new soil is forming, thereby reducing the land's inherent productivity. Today the foundation of civilisation is crumbling. The seeds of collapse of some early civilisations, such as the Mayans, may have originated in soil erosion that undermined the food supply. The accelerating soil erosion over the last century can be seen in the dust bowls that form as vegetation is destroyed and wind erosion soars out of control. Among those that stand out are the Dust Bowl in the U.S. Great Plains during the 1930s, the dust bowls in the Soviet Virgin Lands in the 1960s, the huge one that is forming today in northwest China, and the one taking shape in the Sahelian region of Africa.
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