A point I ought to bear in mind significantly more than I usually do ...
Like most heterodox economists, I have this vague idea at the back of my mind that if people took nonergodicity, nonlinearity and similar concepts more seriously, we would have an economics that wasn't quite so polluted by laughable rationalisations of right wing deflationist bollocks.
See yesterday's Krugman blog for a classic example of why that isn't at all necessarily true. Hetecon is just as good a toolkit for justifying spurious austerity measures and tax cuts as conventional economics, unfortunately. The war will never be won, all one can do is try to minimise the casualties.
(I first noticed this a while ago; although there was massive overlap between the Progressive Economists' Network and the Post-Keynesian Thought mailing lists, the median politics of PKT were always much more conservative than those of PEN. I always wondered why, not realising for ages that it was because one list was a self-identified left-wing list and the other, well, wasn't)
Debunking economics and breaking its stranglehold on policymaking are more important than improving it. Once people realize that it's both inconsistent and incomplete the worshipfulness should decrease or even disappear. Since many politically-significant questions are economically undecidable, people will feel free to select the economic interpretation they're most sympathetic with, and it will no longer be possible for gross ideologues like Alan Greenspan to disarm their opponents with scientific claims.
ReplyDeletePeople compare economics to alchemy and astrology, but neither of theose pseudosciences ever had the dominant influence that economics does.
People compare economics to alchemy and astrology
ReplyDeleteThe smarter comparison is to late Paracelsian iatrochemistry. When Keynes talked about animal spirits, he was thinking in terms of a particular time and place when people talked about them quite a bit.
I'll continue to subsume late Paracelsian iatrochemistry under alchemy, but you may come in and trump me whenever you see me doing that.
ReplyDeleteWouldn't dream of it.
ReplyDelete