On 4/12/08, John Vertegaal <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Tom, (I believe that's your name isn't it?)
That's me. > My disagreement with the below concerns some relatively minor details. I > already expressed a different opinion re: Keynes on another forum. And not > Dilke but Sismondi originally defined wealth (in 1819) as the time one can > live off the avails from previously accomplished work; but let me suggest an > answer to your final question on how to proceed. I don't necessarily disagree regarding the priority of Sismondi to Dilke. My preference for Dilke is a simple matter of having grasped his system of analysis and not having grasped Sismondi's. I suspect there are enough similarities between the two approaches to make it inconsequential which one takes as a starting point. It's interesting that you cite Denison's estimates on capital formation. Elsewhere I have cited his estimates on the contributions of work time reduction and education. Of course education can also be viewed as an indirect, contingent contribution of work time reduction. > Now, most of the above holds within the mainstream paradigm. Denison was an > NC economist and his findings were never successfully challenged. So that > even by their own standards, the *attempt* at economic growth by the > financial sector is pathological as far as its outcome is concerned. I think NC economics, rigoroously applied, has demonstrated conclusively more than once the paradoxical nature of its own foundational assumptions. Demonstrating it again -- or "even more conclusively" -- doesn't seem to me to be the problem or the answer to the problem. Nor does the absence of an alternative. What troubles and astounds me is the apparent desire and ability of people to grasp intellectual notions of economic or political "crisis" while continuing on with their business-as-usual lives as if to say that the crisis is something remote from the matter of going about the motions of everyday life. My own response to this dilemma does not proceed from the conviction that reducing the hours of work is obviously the burning economic issue of the day. Rather it starts from the question of how people might become engaged both politically and intrinsically and leads from there to the issue of reducing the hours of work as a matter of autonomy, plain and simple. I skimmed your pdf document. I'm not sure it addresses my concern about engaging the disengaged and intrinsically engaging the abstractly engaged. I don't think ordinary people are persuaded that economics is logically coherent and need to be persuaded otherwise. I think they are in awe of the prestige of the occupation. We are talking something on the order of physicians in 17th century France. Satire is needed rather than logical refutation. My aspiration is to rework a Moliere comedy about doctors into a satire on economics and economists. -- Sandwichman _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
