---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Sat, 14 Nov 1998 23:08:13 -0400
From: Kerry Miller <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: Re: "The fault isn't with the models."
> Two months ago Myron S. Scholes made a sentimental journey to the
> steel-manufacturing city of Hamilton, Ontario, to be honored as a local
> boy made good.
>
> He had recently been awarded, with Robert C. Merton, the Nobel award in
> economics, for breakthrough work in finding a way to value risky
> financial investments known as options.
"CHICAGO SCHOOL OF ECONOMICS. A great center of contemporary
scholasticism [q.v.] The economists working there and produced by it are as
important to the stagnation of useful thought as the Schoolmen of the
University of Paris were at the height of the Middle Ages.
"Like that of the Paris scholastics, their mastery of highly complex
rhetorical details obscures a great void at the centre of their argument. They
also share a tactical genius for exporting their conceptual definitions to less
important centres around the world. The result is a pleasing symphony of
international echoes imitating their calculations and cadences so confirming
their correctness, even when their policies bring econnomic disaster. The
percussion section of Chicago's orchestra is the Nobel committee for
economics. Each golden medal is like another congratulatory parchment
presented at the end of an elaborate theological debate.
"But what of content? There isn't much. What of Friedrich Hayek abnd
Milton Friedman? These minor Thomists preach little more than inevitability
and so counssel passivity.
"What they call libertarian economics is a remarkable revenge of the
scholastics on the men fo the Enlightenment, who had theoretically
destroyed them. Peel away the tangle of intellectual leaves from the Chicago
School and what remains is a great clockmaker god who has set the world
ticking. But the conclusion of the Enlightenment was that god's indifference
left humans free to organize the world as they wished. Chicago has so
deformed this idea as to invert it. The great clock has been turned into an
absolute, all-encompassing system. Better than an ideology, the world is its
own absolute economic truth. We must remain passive befor eits majesty.
"This is a denial of Western experience. It is nonsense which simply
comforts the power slipping increasingly into the corporatist structures.
"Strategic thinking can save a great deal of time wasted over tactics. A
large number of America'seconomic problems, and those of the West [and
of the world?], could be solved by shutting down the Chicago School of
Economics.
"This would not prevent the academics employed there from preaching
their essentially anti-social and amoral doctrines. They would be gathered up
with delight by the hundreds of imitation Chicago Schools. The purpose of
closure would be simply to disentangle a tendentious ideology from its
unassailable position within contemporary power structures. The same sort
of liberating shock treatment was applied to European civilization in 1723
when the Society of Jesus (Jesuits) was disbanded. The effect weas to set
free the ideas of the Enlightenment."
-- John Ralston Saul, _The Doubter's Companion_ (NY: Simon & Schuster,
1994)
