Eric, thanks for the passage below. It illuminates a lot for me.
As for whether this formally absurd framing has actually captured
something useful, we could probably have a long discussion--even
economists were chastened by the outcomes of the last few years.
After a lot of years of listening to the endless litany of objections
that can be (correctly) raised against this notion of "competition",
and also seeing that the economists know all this perfectly well and
yet (even the honest ones, not just political lackeys or disingenuous
ones) continue to speak as they speak, one comes to think that the
standardly-heard objections are somehow not responding to the right
point. One can read Arrow or Samuelson, who make clear that they
understand all this wild unreality, but that they are after something
else in it, which they think they correctly capture in spite of the
formally absurd framing. It's almost like Bertrand Russell says:
"[more or less] Why read philosophy, when all of it is wrong and most
of it goes beyond wrongness to the point of being wild nonsense?" and
then defends that the value is to capture something that one still
can't see through other lenses, and which may yet have some use.
"Heroism breaks its heart, and idealism its back, on the intransigence
of the credulous and the mediocre, manipulated by the cynical and
corrupt."
Christopher Hitchens
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