Libertarianism seems a dead duck to me - how can it work when there is money and influence? How might it stop such arising? Democracy fails on the same issues - at least as we have known it. Somehow we have to build countervailing positions and that means institutions - so naked anarchism is out of the window flying with the birds. The Modern Monetary Theorists have pointed out money 'comes from thin air' via an institutional base (of course, one can produce real things from thin air - like petrol). The question, presumably, for economics is how we use money to bring about situations we want and retain confidence in money. I don't see the subject offering many answers
I can see sense in the book-keeping end of economics/business - profit and loss, cash flow and balance sheets - done reasonably honestly as my tax return. Yet I can't teach how to interpret, say, the RBS balance sheet presented pre-crash or now - I can deconstruct corporate balance sheets to point to we'd need to know a great deal more on this, that and the other claim before buying in - but we'd never get the information I'd ask for in real time. My guess is UK banks are sitting on $60 billion claimed as assets but which are 'mark to market' mega-losses waiting to happen. My point here is there is something to teach. The problem is the sums in play are not of the kind we were taught at school and it doesn't matter how many times we intercourse the Gaussian penguin's copula when what we need is a search for the rocking horse droppings claimed as collateral. Most of the maths wizardry in finance is just a common language of valuation that doesn't make any real sense other than, say, as the rules of Monopoly. To say this is all a collective set of actions by homo economicus is plain piss. There is a thermodynamics of open systems - neo-classical economics actually closes on purpose to render what it can't or doesn't want to account for an 'externality' - so Shell, BP and the rest produce accounts that exclude the people whose lives they have taken or poisoned. Hardly science and much more like the things we try to exclude from that (roughly Bacon's Idols). I'd say the features we should be looking at are job guarantee, fair wages and what it is reasonable to be able to spend in environmental terms, how we motivate and control this production with profit and build social capital and re-distribute excess money and keep it out of politics, non-democratic foreign policy and military/terrorist cliques. In saying this, I'm going to back our infantry/marines against sexist, religionist perverts any time. There is no point in starting from a position so laid back one's brains drop out. On 14 Mar, 00:54, "Stephen P. King" <stephe...@charter.net> wrote: > Yeah, like all classical theory, thermodynamics etc. IMHO we need > thinking that looks at open systems... My main beef with libertarians is > that they are all talk and no action... Meanwhile the system is ... > > On 3/13/2013 7:34 PM, archytas wrote: > > > > > > > > > Neoclasssical economics is closed-system - one might say closet. > > Critique of this has gone on for more than a century these days > > Michael Hudson, Steve Keen and many others. Veblen wanted to produce > > it as an evolutionary science. The libertarians mostly claim our > > problems all emerge from big government as this is inevitably corrupt > > - so we'd have more freedom, democracy and even equality without it. > > > On Mar 13, 4:34 pm, "Stephen P. King" <stephe...@charter.net> wrote: > >> Hi Nom, > > >> Nice attempted pigeonhole. Nah, Freethinker, seeking of knowledge > >> is > >> more like what I am. I am trying to be able to shift from premise to > >> premise, basis to basis and see the pro/con distributions and Nash > >> equilibria of the various theories and visions. > > >> On 3/13/2013 12:02 PM, nominal9 wrote: > > -- > Onward! > > Stephen -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Epistemology" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to epistemology+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to epistemology@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/epistemology?hl=en. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
