Hobbes and Darwin in China
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/02/29/weekinreview/29zhao.html China's Wealthy Live by a Creed: Hobbes and Darwin, Meet Marx By YILU ZHAO BEIJING The rich in China these days are moving into the villages of Napa Valley, Palm Springs, Long Beach, Upper East Side and Park Avenue, all in the suburbs of Beijing and Shanghai. When I grew up in Shanghai, places were called New China Road, Workers' New Village and People's Square. Now China's real estate tycoons have chosen American place names, and adorned what they build with Spanish arches, Greek columns and faux Roman sculptures. But the settings themselves are not bucolic. The vast majority of these new single-family homes, which cost $800,000 on average, are huddled together in walled compounds with 24-hour security guards. The few rich who dare to live on their own in the countryside almost always become targets of burglars, who, in desperate moments, are willing to kill. This is the dark side to China's new wealth: Envy, insecurity and social dislocation have come with the huge disparity between how the wealthy live and how the vast numbers of poor do. Clear signs of class division have emerged under a government that long claimed to have eliminated economic classes. China still calls itself socialist, and in an odd sense it is. While the income structure has changed, much that was intended to underpin social order has not. The criminal justice system, for example, has remained draconian. When caught, burglars invariably receive lengthy sentences. But there is no shortage of burglars, and the reason is clear: 18 percent of Chinese live on less than $1 a day, according to the United Nations. The poor are visible on the edges of any metropolis, where slums of plywood apartments sometimes abut the Western- looking mansions. The most recent measure by which social scientists judge the inequality of a country's income distribution indicates that China is more unequal, for example, than the United States, Japan, South Korea and India. In fact, inequality levels approach China's own level in the late 1940's, when the Communists, with the help of the poor, toppled the Nationalist government. In 1980, when the turn toward a market economy started, China had one of the world's most even distributions of wealth. Certainly, China before 1980 was a land of material shortage. When I was a child in the 1970's and 80's, I can recall, every family, equally poor, collected ration coupons to get flour, rice, sugar, meat, eggs, cloth, cookies and cigarettes. Without coupons, money was largely useless. Today, huge Western-style supermarkets offer French wine and New Zealand cheese. But an odd change has come about in some shoppers' minds. As members of China's business and political elite, they have come to believe that the world is a huge jungle of Darwinian competition, where connections and smarts mean everything, and quaint notions of fairness count for little. I noticed this attitude on my most recent trip to China from the United States, where I moved nine years ago. So I asked a relative who lives rather comfortably to explain. Is it fair that the household maids make 65 cents an hour while the well-connected real estate developers become millionaires or billionaires in just a few years? I asked. He was caught off guard. After a few seconds of silence, he settled on an answer he had read in a popular magazine. Look at England, look at America, he said. The Industrial Revolution was very cruel. When the English capitalists needed land, sheep ate people. (Chinese history books use the phrase sheep ate people to describe what happened in the 19th century, when tenant farmers in Britain were thrown off their land to starve so that sheep could graze and produce wool for new mills.) Since England and America went through that pain, shouldn't we try to avoid the same pain, now that we have history as our guide? I asked. If we want to proceed to a full market economy, some people have to make sacrifices, my relative said solemnly. To get to where we want to get, we must go through the 'sheep eating people' stage too. In other words, while most Chinese have privately dumped the economic prescriptions of Marx, two pillars of the way he saw the world have remained. First is the inexorable procession of history to a goal. The goal used to be the Communist utopia; now the destination is a market economy of material abundance. Second, just as before, the welfare of some people must be sacrificed so the community can march toward its destiny. Many well-to-do Chinese readily endorse those views, so long as neither they nor their relatives are placed on the altar of history. In the end, Marx is used to justify ignoring the pain of the poor. What the well-off have failed to read from history, however, is that extreme inequality tends to breed revolutions. Many of China's dynasties fell in peasant uprisings, and extreme inequality fed the Communist revolution. While
Fwd: Darwin was innocent--but wrong. Debriefing Historical Darwinism
In a message dated 6/24/2001 4:34:14 PM Eastern Daylight Time, Nemonemini writes: Subject: Darwin was innocent--but wrong about history. Debriefing Historical Darwinism Comment on article below in Biomednet, "Darwin was innocent" LINK: http://news.bmn.com/news/story?day=010622story=1 The Eonic Effect, Debriefing Darwinian Historical Theory Darwinists just don't get it. The heroic instant replay of the Wilberforce debate is getting a bit tiresome, and this genre is running on empty. Huxley won the debate, but not the argument. In any case, Huxley changed his story on evolution and ethics, later in life. Noone is complaining about trying to apply the idea of evolution to social science. But the attempt to carry out this feat in Darwinian terms always results in the glaring discrepancies between Darwin's theory and the hard reality to be explained. We cannot pretend anymore natural selection is the truly significant factor in the complex evolution of man, let alone the total explanation. It is not surprising then that social scientists sense that something is wrong with this Darwinist idee fixe of trying to fit human anthropology into a bed of procrustes. But they are hampered by their own methodological assumptions, and the assumption so strictly enforced is that the basic theory is correct, which it almost certainly is not. But whatever the case with Darwinian accounts in general, they fall out of range in the realm of history, and that includes the derivative theories of social evolution that are based on Darwin's basic theory. The gung-ho 'let's take the social sciences' rife in the more cocky sociobiologists is simply vacuous. The problem is that we have more evidence of social evolution, direct, visible evidence, than we do of earlier evolution. (This shouldn't be a problem! )The point is to understand it. And noone can produce a theory, because the complexity is overwhelming, and doesn't correspond to what students of Darwinism expect to find. It is more convincing to make claims that noone can refute about unobserved times. Natural selection is visibly destructive if not counter-evolutionary in many crucial historical instances, where macroevolution must compensate for the destructive force of selectionism. The imposition of this wrong thinking has gone on too long. Noone seems to suspect just how far off they are. And the result is the perfect case of 'bad cultural software', the reason for the resistance to this unsound and ultimately dangerous methodology. Creationists perhaps have confused the issue. But at least they are aware that there is a problem and that they are under no obligation to take the theory as established. And they are often an excuse for Darwinists to denounce all criticism. No assumptions about transcendentalism are required to see that Darwinism doesn't work as an historical theory. The mismatch of cultural with biological evolution never seems to dawn on anyone in the scientific field. "We've put a man on the moon, how could we be complete idiots on the subject of evolution?" Now sociobiologists are bringing their unique form of one-dimensional stupidity to historical study, claims about ethics, selection, and the complete mythology of game-theory altruism. This view is highly promoted, but fictive, and demonstrably so, looking at history. We see the evolution of ethics, for example, in direct fashion, and it isn't amenable to natural selection, reductionism, numerical models, or economic ideology. We should grant that the 'evolution of civilization' as higher culture is not easily compared to, say, the 'evolution of dinosaurs'. But the point remains, a theory of cultural evolution must deal with the evidence of history, and there we see the evolution of consciousness, values, religions, philosophy, the arts, political forms, an indeed science itself, and these have a demonstrable pattern of emergence (higlighted by so-called the eonic effect) that does not conform to hypotheses of natural selection. It simply does not. And we have never observed in proper fashion at the level of millennia or centuries the fact of natural selection in the descent of man able to produce the truly distinct advances of brain, intelligence, culture, or consciousness, and certainly not at the level of centuries, the latter point is crucial. We can catch a glimpse of macroevolution as soon as we have properly mapped the data of real transformation at close range, and that doesn't exist before the invention of writing. The extrapolation of speculative fictions to the descent of man is one of the most unjustified steps in the whole of Darwinism, as both Wallace and Huxley began to suspect. The whole Darwin scheme is simply a paradigm out of control here. And yet, the point simply fails to register with Darwinists. This ostrich regime would be a form of humour if the matter were funny. But the reduction of
Re: Dinos-Darwin-Gould
Ricardo, Thank you for admitting you don't have a source. Your speculation that the dinos were in decline before the asteroid hit is just that, speculation. It is possible to accept punctuated equilibrium that is not exogenously driven, although it may be in major cases (like asteroid hits). Also, it does not imply that any particular change is "progressive." Barkley Rosser On Thu, 30 Apr 1998 11:07:53 -0400 Ricardo Duchesne [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Date sent: Tue, 28 Apr 1998 17:10:28 -0400 (Eastern Daylight Time) Send reply to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] From: "Rosser Jr, John Barkley" [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Copies to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject:Re: Liebig's Law and the limits to growth I apologize to the list for getting into this again, but I must say that I have never seen anywhere any claim that the dinosaurs had been declining for two million years prior to the asteroid hit, much less any credible data on why such a decline was occurring. Could you provide the source where you read this, please, Ricardo? Barkley Rosser The way I worded that last missive was misleading. I meant to say that once the asteroid hit it took over two million years for the dinos to become extinct. On the other hand, the dust that rose up as a result of the asteroid must have come down to the earth in less than a year. So, it is better to think of the asteroid as accelarating a process that was already in place, namely, the normal process of decline that species experience. That's why I also said that the dinos were already in decline prior to the asteroid; the asteroid then hit but did not wipe then out, as they continued to roam around for two more million years. Source? I just recall reading the two million thing and the dust falling in less time than that. I don't have available right now a full paper or argument. What's wrong with catastrophe theories is that it sees evolution as the plaything of external environmental forces. Gould's theory of "puntuated equilibria" says that "stasis" is the normal feature of evolution . Change - leading to new species - results when some external episode disturbs this equilibrium. So, only because an asteroid hit did dinos disappear and mammals became the dominant species. He does not reject Darwin's theory of natural selection, that evolution is a result of organisms struggling for survival. But he does reduce selection to "a principle of local adaptation, not of general advance or progress" (See his excellent article in Scientific American, "The Evolution of Life on the Earth, October, 1994). Rather, "General advance" is seen as a result of external forces, which led to the mass extinctions of previous creatures, "for reasons unrelated to adaptive struggles", allowing new species to come onto the scene. Gould is highly uncomfortable with any notion of evolutionary progress, "that evolution means progress defined to render the appearance of something like human consciousness either virtually inevitable or at least predictable. The pedestal is not smashed until we abandon progress or complexification as a central principle and come to entertain the strong possibility that H. sapiens is but a tiny, late-arising twig on life's enormously arborescent bush..." I think we can reject any notion of inevitability without denying the principle of "complexification". These are two very different things. Without Gould's complex mind none of the above would be known. ricardo On Tue, 28 Apr 1998 16:01:21 -0400 Ricardo Duchesne [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Date sent: Tue, 28 Apr 1998 09:59:59 -0700 Send reply to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] From: James Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject:Re: Liebig's Law and the limits to growth The more I think about question of the causes of the mass extinction of the dinosaurs, the more I think that it may be like that of the fall of the Roman Empire. There are lots of good reasons why the Empire fell -- but there's no reason to presume that (absent these causes) it would have lasted forever. So maybe the question should be "why did the Roman Empire last so long?" Similarly, I think Barkley is right that the scientific community may be reaching a consensus that the "comet done them in." But that may be only what Aristotle called the "efficient cause," the trigger that caused a slide that was already ready to happen. It's possible that dinosaurs had become over-specialized in a way that made them especially vulnerable to shocks of the sort that comets cause. (Think of T. Rex, the over-specialized eating machine.) The normal predator-prey cycle may have become unstable, ready to be pushed off the region of regular
Re: Dinos-Darwin-Gould
Date sent: Tue, 28 Apr 1998 17:10:28 -0400 (Eastern Daylight Time) Send reply to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] From: "Rosser Jr, John Barkley" [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Copies to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject:Re: Liebig's Law and the limits to growth I apologize to the list for getting into this again, but I must say that I have never seen anywhere any claim that the dinosaurs had been declining for two million years prior to the asteroid hit, much less any credible data on why such a decline was occurring. Could you provide the source where you read this, please, Ricardo? Barkley Rosser The way I worded that last missive was misleading. I meant to say that once the asteroid hit it took over two million years for the dinos to become extinct. On the other hand, the dust that rose up as a result of the asteroid must have come down to the earth in less than a year. So, it is better to think of the asteroid as accelarating a process that was already in place, namely, the normal process of decline that species experience. That's why I also said that the dinos were already in decline prior to the asteroid; the asteroid then hit but did not wipe then out, as they continued to roam around for two more million years. Source? I just recall reading the two million thing and the dust falling in less time than that. I don't have available right now a full paper or argument. What's wrong with catastrophe theories is that it sees evolution as the plaything of external environmental forces. Gould's theory of "puntuated equilibria" says that "stasis" is the normal feature of evolution . Change - leading to new species - results when some external episode disturbs this equilibrium. So, only because an asteroid hit did dinos disappear and mammals became the dominant species. He does not reject Darwin's theory of natural selection, that evolution is a result of organisms struggling for survival. But he does reduce selection to "a principle of local adaptation, not of general advance or progress" (See his excellent article in Scientific American, "The Evolution of Life on the Earth, October, 1994). Rather, "General advance" is seen as a result of external forces, which led to the mass extinctions of previous creatures, "for reasons unrelated to adaptive struggles", allowing new species to come onto the scene. Gould is highly uncomfortable with any notion of evolutionary progress, "that evolution means progress defined to render the appearance of something like human consciousness either virtually inevitable or at least predictable. The pedestal is not smashed until we abandon progress or complexification as a central principle and come to entertain the strong possibility that H. sapiens is but a tiny, late-arising twig on life's enormously arborescent bush..." I think we can reject any notion of inevitability without denying the principle of "complexification". These are two very different things. Without Gould's complex mind none of the above would be known. ricardo On Tue, 28 Apr 1998 16:01:21 -0400 Ricardo Duchesne [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Date sent: Tue, 28 Apr 1998 09:59:59 -0700 Send reply to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] From: James Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject:Re: Liebig's Law and the limits to growth The more I think about question of the causes of the mass extinction of the dinosaurs, the more I think that it may be like that of the fall of the Roman Empire. There are lots of good reasons why the Empire fell -- but there's no reason to presume that (absent these causes) it would have lasted forever. So maybe the question should be "why did the Roman Empire last so long?" Similarly, I think Barkley is right that the scientific community may be reaching a consensus that the "comet done them in." But that may be only what Aristotle called the "efficient cause," the trigger that caused a slide that was already ready to happen. It's possible that dinosaurs had become over-specialized in a way that made them especially vulnerable to shocks of the sort that comets cause. (Think of T. Rex, the over-specialized eating machine.) The normal predator-prey cycle may have become unstable, ready to be pushed off the region of regular fluctuation into the region where the predators eat all the prey, killing off their food supply and thus their own futures. If this is so, enquiring minds want to know. Yes, I think this is a much better way of stating this issue than the catastrophe theory would have it. One problem with this theory, so I read, is that the end of the dinosaurs, once the decline started, occurred over a period of two million years. Afterall, that they were already in decline when the asteroid hit (due to their overspecialization, as Jim suggests)
Re: Plato (was: Maxwell, Darwin, Walras?)
I am not going to argue with Shane Mage about the details and meanings of Plato's work. He is clearly a much greater expert than I. It is quite possible that I have been misled by the second professor (Thomas Pangle) who assigned the REPUBLIC to me when I was an undergrad. He was a follower of Leo Strauss who saw the book as basically involving a secret conspiracy of the aristocracy (led by their mentor, Plato). As a Straussian, he saw the conspiracy as a good thing (much to my amazement). I've read most of the REPUBLIC two or three times since then and it fit with what Pangle said. But again, I bow to Shane's superior expertise (with absolutely no irony intended). I also am not implying that we should reject Plato's thought root and branch. His ideas are quite interesting and often valid, though I prefer Aristotle on most points (obviously not on the issues of slavery and the status of women). I think Plato deserves a lot of credit for openly asking the question of how to control society's Guardians (or at least getting published first). (The Straussians took this idea of the conservative conspiracy and tried to put it into action during the Reagan administration. There's a book about this somewhere; I don't know its title.) One comment: I had said: while most observers see the Republic as an idealized (cleaned-up) version of Sparta. Shane responds: Perhaps, if by "most observers" you mean tendentious smart-alecks of the I.F.Stone/Bertrand Russell/Karl Popper stripe. No-one in his right mind, least of all a product of the Athenian enlightenment, would ever take post-Leuctra Sparta as a model of anything at all. "Cleaning up" Sparta among other things involves harkening back to the golden age before Leuctra. It involved trying to set up an image of a perfect aristocratic society, drawing ideas from other places and times and seeking out the "forms" behind the appearances. This should be seen in the context of the various struggles in Athenian society (and in other city-states) between the demos and the aristocracy, etc. that Aristotle described in his POLITICS (and shows up in history books). Anyone who simply reads the *politeia* (misleadingly translated as "Republic") on its own terms, let alone with a philosophically critical mind and an appreciation of Socratic irony, will quickly realize that its purpose is quite other. Again, I don't want to argue here. But I must admit that I interpreted Plato's bit about the equality of women (in the Guardian class) as an example of irony or rather a matter of pushing his audience of aristocratic youth to think beyond the usual orthodoxy. It's the kind of thing that teachers do (or are supposed to do). Ken Hanly COMMENTs: Only the top two classes in Plato's Republic live in a mode that resembles anything like communism. Plato had a disdain for democracy but I am not sure that he had a disdain for the common folk. He thought the ability to rule was restricted to a few people and that common folk would not be able to recognise the people who had this expertise. I would count a dismissal of the majority's ability to rule to be an example of disdaining them. What amazes me about Plato's description of democracy is how accurately it often describes present phenomena. For example his myth of the people as a great beast used by democratic politicians to further their own aims. Taking the beast's temperature and measuring its moods so they can they can control it. Shades of contemporary spin doctors and political pollsters. Surely some democratic politicians view the public and treat it in exactly this way. Of course, capitalist democracies like that in the US almost seem designed to distort the ability of the people to control the state to make it fit this image. There is no system to encourage people to speak and act as communities (such would be anathema to the powers that be) but only as atomized individuals to be polled or manipulated. The means of production were not socialised in the Republic. Private and productive property were left in the hands of the lowest class. The main control by the rulers was simply to see that people did not become too rich or too poor. right. It's only the wealth of the Guardians that's socialized. It's kind of like the way the Jesuits (my university's Guardians) have communism. They can be rich collectively but not as individuals. Within the ruling class the means of reproduction seem to have been socialised and breeding controlled according to the best mathematical models as to when was the optimum time to conceive. Indeed the decline of the state is said to occur when these times are miscalculated. Probably by the Platonic equivalent of a neo-classical welfare economist ;-).Except in Marx's description of primitive communism in the Economic and PHilosophical manuscripts I don't think that communism is understood as socialising reproduction. there are some utopian novels where reproduction is socialized,
Maxwell, Darwin, Walras?
As I read the following comparison between Maxwell's Demon and Darwin's Natural Selector, I wondered how Walras' auctioneer would compare. Any comments would be appreciated. MJS Hodges writes: "As an agency working causally to bias population outcomes away from where frequencies alone would otherwise have them, nature as a selective breeder, in Darwin, may remind us of the demon in Maxwell. However, the resemblance must not be allowed to mislead us as to contrasting rationales motivating the two theorists' essentially diferent proposals. Maxwell was concerned to dramatize how utterly improbable in nature is anything like the outcome secured by the demon; for under all natural conditions there will be no such quasi-purposive interference as the demon exerts. By contrast, Darwin was out to establish that a quasi-designing form of selective breeding is an inevitable consequence of the struggle for existence and superfecundity, tendencies so ubiquitous and reliance not be construed as interferences at all...One can say, then, that Darwin gave up having variation arise as 'necessary' adaptations, as necessary effects of conditions, in favor of having it arise 'accidently' or 'by chance,' when and only when he came to see that its fate was under the quasi-designing control of natural selection aalogous to the skilled practice of the breeder's quasi-designing art." " From "Natural Selection" in The Probabalistic Revolution, vol II. (MIT, 1990): 245-6. Now my question for economists: The other great 19th century "agent" whose work was done behind the scenes, a most interesting trope it seems, was Auguste Walras' auctioneer, correct? Now this auctioneer was imagined as having set market prices and quantities of all commodities before any trading such that markets clear, equilibrium attained and maximum utility realized . The extreme improbability of such such a determinate outcome however did not prevent economists from believing that market processes were best understood as if such an omnipotent auctioneer were really at work, correct? Any ideas as to how pursue this analogies would be most appreciated. Best, Rakesh
Re: Maxwell, Darwin, Walras?
James Devine wrote:
It ends up being akin to Plato's golden myth (used to justify class
inequality in
the REPUBLIC).
In fairness to Plato, the first conscious communist, it should be pointed
out that the "class inequality" justified by the *gennaios pseudos*
consisted of persuading the *rulers* ("guardians" and "philosopher kings")
to accept a way of life in which they should not only own no money, but no
private property at all, and in which their material consumption would be
limited to the strict requirements of physical and mental health.
Shane Mage
"immortals mortals, mortals immortals, living their deaths, dying their lives"
Herakleitos of Ephesos, fr. 62
Re: Maxwell, Darwin, Walras?
Jim Devine wrote: Plato was a communist, but his communism was very much a conservative top-down operation. It is quite different from the bottoms-up democratic rule by the proletariat that Marx favored. (Cf. COMMENT: Only the top two classes in Plato's Republic live in a mode that resembles anything like communism. Plato had a disdain for democracy but I am not sure that he had a disdain for the common folk. He thought the ability to rule was restricted to a few people and that common folk would not be able to recognise the people who had this expertise. What amazes me about Plato's description of democracy is how accurately it often describes present phenomena. For example his myth of the people as a great beast used by democratic politicians to further their own aims. Taking the beast's temperature and measuring its moods so they can they can control it. Shades of contemporary spin doctors and political pollsters. Surely some democratic politicians view the public and treat it in exactly this way. The means of production were not socialised in the Republic. Private and productive property were left in the hands of the lowest class. The main control by the rulers was simply to see that people did not become too rich or too poor. Within the ruling class the means of reproduction seem to have been socialised and breeding controlled according to the best mathematical models as to when was the optimum time to conceive. Indeed the decline of the state is said to occur when these times are miscalculated. Probably by the Platonic equivalent of a neo-classical welfare economist ;-).Except in Marx's description of primitive communism in the Economic and PHilosophical manuscripts I don't think that communism is understood as socialising reproduction. Certainly not in the Platonic manner with the state organising marriage festivals at which partners are chosen in a lottery in which the state cheats everyone so that the best mate most with the best. As for the lowest class and those past childbearing Plato didn't give a shit what they did. Plato was not even a top-down communist. He just believed in a communal mode of life with no private property for the auxiliaries and rulers i.e. the top two classes. I used to have a communist friend at college who would always take the BIble into the pub. To convince his fellow Christian imbibers he used to haul it out and quote the passages about the disciples holding everything in common etc. Christ too was a commie so save your soul and join the Party. Cheers, Ken Hanly
Re: Maxwell, Darwin, Walras?
Jim Devine wrote:
I wrote:
It ends up being akin to Plato's golden myth (used to justify class
inequality in
the REPUBLIC).
Shane Mage responds:
In fairness to Plato, the first conscious communist, it should be pointed
out that the "class inequality" justified by the *gennaios pseudos*
consisted of persuading the *rulers* ("guardians" and "philosopher kings")
to accept a way of life in which they should not only own no money, but no
private property at all, and in which their material consumption would be
limited to the strict requirements of physical and mental health.
Shane is right (and I don't have my copy here to check if he's totally
right or just right about Platos's emphasis). However, given Plato's
general disdain for the common folk, I think that the myth also applies to
convince them that the system he proposes is natural.
If Plato was so disdainful of common folk, he would scarcely have so
extolled Socrates the stonemason, who spoke of finding real knowledge only
among artisans and craftsmen (demiourgoi)--albeit only in what pertained to
their crafts. Nor, in particular, would he have imaged the creator of the
universe as a manual worker, a *demiourgos*.
Plato's main audience was the rich young men of the town, who we might label
conservative,
In Plato's literarily productive years (390-350 BCE) Athens was a shadow of
what it had been in the days of Pericles, Socrates, and Alkibiades.
Plato's audience was Panhellenic, as is obvious both from the drammatis
personnae of the greatest dialogues and from what is known of the Academy's
"fellows" [and girls] and of their scholarly and political activities.
while most observers see the Republic as an idealized
(cleaned-up) version of Sparta.
Perhaps, if by "most observers" you mean tendentious smart-alecks of the
I.F.Stone/Bertrand Russell/Karl Popper stripe. No-one in his right mind,
least of all a product of the Athenian enlightenment, would ever take
post-Leuctra Sparta as a model of anything at all. Anyone who simply reads
the *politeia* (misleadingly translated as "Republic") on its own terms,
let alone with a philosophically critical mind and an appreciation of
Socratic irony, will quickly realize that its purpose is quite other.
Plato was a communist, but his communism
was very much a conservative top-down operation.
True, as true as the fact that to declare the total equality of men and
women was viewed as a conservative stance in the nacient world.
It is quite different from
the bottoms-up democratic rule by the proletariat that Marx favored. (Cf.
Hal Draper's little essay, "The Two Souls of Socialism").
No doubt about that.
Shane Mage
"immortals mortals, mortals immortals, living their deaths, dying their lives"
Herakleitos of Ephesos, fr. 62
Re: Maxwell, Darwin, Walras?
At 12:21 PM 3/4/98 -0500, Rakesh wrote: ... my question for economists: The other great 19th century "agent" whose work was done behind the scenes, a most interesting trope it seems, was Auguste Walras' auctioneer, correct? Now this auctioneer was imagined as having set market prices and quantities of all commodities before any trading such that markets clear, equilibrium attained and maximum utility realized . The god-like Auctioneer doesn't set quantities, only prices. Individuals set quantities, but they're not allowed to actually trade (using which police force, I wonder?) until the quantities demanded equal the quantities supplied. Also, the result need not be "Pareto optimal" (if that's what you mean by "maximum utility") if not all of the requisite assumptions (e.g., the absense of external costs benefits) are in place. The extreme improbability of such such a determinate outcome however did not prevent economists from believing that market processes were best understood as if such an omnipotent auctioneer were really at work, correct? Any ideas as to how pursue this analogies would be most appreciated. The analogy between the Walrasian Auctioneer and Maxwell's demon is good. Neither could ever exist. But economists engage in "useful lies" -- e.g., assuming that the Auctioneer exists -- in order to get determinate results. They assume the economy acts _as if_ there were an Invisible Hand. Of course, _which_ assumptions they make reflects their political perspective, which embarrassing facts they feel are important to sweep under the rug. It ends up being akin to Plato's golden myth (used to justify class inequality in the REPUBLIC). I think a Darwinian perspective on economic competition (even in the hands of a conservative like Armen Alchian) makes more sense than the Walrasian perspective. I don't see how someone like John Roemer could get suckered by the latter. Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://clawww.lmu.edu/1997F/ECON/jdevine.html "It takes a busload of faith to get by." -- Lou Reed.
Re: Maxwell, Darwin, Walras?
Date sent: Wed, 4 Mar 1998 10:29:40 -0800 Send reply to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] From: James Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject:Re: Maxwell, Darwin, Walras? At 12:21 PM 3/4/98 -0500, Rakesh wrote: ... my question for economists: The other great 19th century "agent" whose work was done behind the scenes, a most interesting trope it seems, was Auguste Walras' auctioneer, correct? Now this auctioneer was imagined as having set market prices and quantities of all commodities before any trading such that markets clear, equilibrium attained and maximum utility realized . The god-like Auctioneer doesn't set quantities, only prices. Individuals set quantities, but they're not allowed to actually trade (using which police force, I wonder?) until the quantities demanded equal the quantities supplied. Also, the result need not be "Pareto optimal" (if that's what you mean by "maximum utility") if not all of the requisite assumptions (e.g., the absense of external costs benefits) are in place. The extreme improbability of such such a determinate outcome however did not prevent economists from believing that market processes were best understood as if such an omnipotent auctioneer were really at work, correct? Any ideas as to how pursue this analogies would be most appreciated. The analogy between the Walrasian Auctioneer and Maxwell's demon is good. Neither could ever exist. But economists engage in "useful lies" -- e.g., assuming that the Auctioneer exists -- in order to get determinate results. They assume the economy acts _as if_ there were an Invisible Hand. Of course, _which_ assumptions they make reflects their political perspective, which embarrassing facts they feel are important to sweep under the rug. It ends up being akin to Plato's golden myth (used to justify class inequality in the REPUBLIC). I think a Darwinian perspective on economic competition (even in the hands of a conservative like Armen Alchian) makes more sense than the Walrasian perspective. I don't see how someone like John Roemer could get suckered by the latter. Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://clawww.lmu.edu/1997F/ECON/jdevine.html "It takes a busload of faith to get by." -- Lou Reed. Response: This is beautifully written. The so-called "invisible hand" of capitalism operates like the hand of a proctologist when it has a rubber glove on it (metaphor I use in class). On the issue of theoreticians like Roemer, I sincerely believe he represents a classic illustration of congnitive dissonance at work. We are taught, play the neoclassical game until you finish grad school; play the neoclassical game until you get your teaching appointment; play the neoclassical game to build your CV and get published in the "permissible" journals on the "permissible" topics until you get tenure; play the neoclassical game until you get promoted to high enough standing to have some "influence" in the "profession". After all that neoclassical game playing, coming out of the closet and showing your true "radical" colors involves either admitting unprincipled whoring and opportunism (especially when considering the sacrifices paid in blood by real radicals), giving up the "radical" pretense, or, one more possibility, trying to reconcile your "radicalism" with aspects of the neoclassical paradigm or attempting to apply supposedly "value free" aspects of the neoclassical paradigm to "radical" concerns--using neoclassical models and categories to supposedly turn neoclassical stuff on its head or purport to show that even the neoclassical approach, when slightly modified and stripped of clearly bogus/bullshit assumptions can be used as an instrument of critique of capitalism and its dynamics. The latter approach, of the have-your-cake-and-eat-it-too is, in my opinion, the most unprincipled opportunism and empty way out of the congitive dissonance contradictions. Even in formalistic terms however, some simply endogenizing of the so- called "exogenous" and some mechanical "histeresis" blows the general equilibrium shit out of the water. For example, in simple partial equilibrium Marshellian terms: /---dQd delta autonomous-dSupply---dShortages---dPrice \--Pe--Qe shift factordDemanddSurpluses\dQs/ Since expectations are assumed as one of the "autonomous shift factors", and since changes in shortages/surpluses and price can change expectations, yielding feedback loops from shortages/surpluses and price changes back to "autonomous shift factor", even in pure Walrasian "auction terms" or partial equilibria, the notion of a tendency to ONE or AN eq
Re: Darwin
Rakesh, I have a paper on this in the March 1992 issue of JEBO. Barkley Rosser On Tue, 24 Feb 1998 01:44:10 -0500 (EST) Rakesh Bhandari [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Hi, does anyone have any favorite readings about Darwin in relation to political economy from which he derived analogies, homologies, and/or metaphors for the development of his theory of descent with modification through the mechanism of natural selection? There is of course a chapter review in Geoffrey Hodgson's Economics and Evolution, the bibliography is quite good as well. But if anyone has any further recommendations, I would appreciate it. Thanks, Rakesh "...the industrial revolution directed interest into a field of objective quality subject to rapid change; that of biology. It made Man look for change everywhere, and began the development of all the evolutionary sciences: not merely biology, but also geology, cosmogony and the like. This [Darwinian] picture of evolution was also given a characteristic distortion." --Christopher Caudwell, The Crisis of Physics, 1939 "Schumpeter's basic idea was that evolution is the result of qualitative novelties, which in economics have their roots in the continuous product of our minds: inventions. These in turn led to economic innovations, which according to Schumpeter were not limited to the technological domain. We owe to Schumpeter the essential...distinction between growth (mere accretion) and development (in economics or in biology). His splendid aphorism, "Add Successively as many mail coaches as you please,, you will never get a railway thereby," tells a lot about what evolution means... "...Schumpeter's theory...was independently thought up some thirty years later by a renowned biologist, R Goldschmidt (1940). Against the prevailing neo Darwinian view that speciation results from the accumulation of small, imperceptible modifications, Goldschmidt maintained that species derive from the emergence of 'successful' monsters. By analogy a railway engine is a successful monster in comparison to a mail coach. "To gauge the depth of Schumpeter's vision we should note that explanation of speciation by successful monsters has recently been revived by one of the greatest minds in contemporary biology, Stephen Jay Gould." --Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen, 1990. -- Rosser Jr, John Barkley [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Darwin
Hi, does anyone have any favorite readings about Darwin in relation to political economy from which he derived analogies, homologies, and/or metaphors for the development of his theory of descent with modification through the mechanism of natural selection? There is of course a chapter review in Geoffrey Hodgson's Economics and Evolution, the bibliography is quite good as well. But if anyone has any further recommendations, I would appreciate it. Thanks, Rakesh "...the industrial revolution directed interest into a field of objective quality subject to rapid change; that of biology. It made Man look for change everywhere, and began the development of all the evolutionary sciences: not merely biology, but also geology, cosmogony and the like. This [Darwinian] picture of evolution was also given a characteristic distortion." --Christopher Caudwell, The Crisis of Physics, 1939 "Schumpeter's basic idea was that evolution is the result of qualitative novelties, which in economics have their roots in the continuous product of our minds: inventions. These in turn led to economic innovations, which according to Schumpeter were not limited to the technological domain. We owe to Schumpeter the essential...distinction between growth (mere accretion) and development (in economics or in biology). His splendid aphorism, "Add Successively as many mail coaches as you please,, you will never get a railway thereby," tells a lot about what evolution means... "...Schumpeter's theory...was independently thought up some thirty years later by a renowned biologist, R Goldschmidt (1940). Against the prevailing neo Darwinian view that speciation results from the accumulation of small, imperceptible modifications, Goldschmidt maintained that species derive from the emergence of 'successful' monsters. By analogy a railway engine is a successful monster in comparison to a mail coach. "To gauge the depth of Schumpeter's vision we should note that explanation of speciation by successful monsters has recently been revived by one of the greatest minds in contemporary biology, Stephen Jay Gould." --Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen, 1990.
[PEN-L:10762] FW: 1997 Darwin Award Nominees
NOMINEE #1 [San Jose Mercury News] An unidentified man, using a shotgun like a club to break a former girlfriend's windshield, accidentally shot himself to death when the gun discharged, blowing a hole in his gut. NOMINEE #2 [Kalamazoo Gazette, 4-1-95] James Burns, 34, of Alamo, Mich., was killed in March as he was trying to repair what police described as a "farm-type truck." Burns got a friend to drive the truck on a highway while Burns hung underneath so that he could ascertain the source of a troubling noise. Burns' clothes caught on something, however, and the other man found Burns "wrapped in the drive shaft." NOMINEE #3 [Reuters, Mississauga, Ontario] Man slips, falls 23 stories to his death. A man cleaning a bird feeder on his balcony of his condominium apartment in this Toronto suburb slipped and fell 23 stories to his death, police said Monday. Stefan Macko, 55, was standing on a wheeled chair Sunday when the accident occurred, said Inspector D'Arcy Honer of the Peel regional police. "It appears the chair moved and he went over the balcony," Honer said. "It's one of those freak accidents. No foul play is suspected." NOMINEE #4 [Hickory Daily Record 12/21/92] Ken Charles Barger, 47, accidentally shot himself to death in December in Newton, N.C., when, awakening to the sound of a ringing telephone beside his bed, he reached for the phone but grabbed instead a SmithWesson 38 Special, which discharged when he drew it to his ear. NOMINEE #5 [UPI, Toronto] Police said a lawyer demonstrating the safety of windows in a downtown Toronto skyscraper crashed through a pane with his shoulder and plunged 24 floors to his death. A police spokesman said Garry Hoy, 39, fell into the courtyard of the Toronto Dominion Bank Tower early Friday evening as he was explaining the strength of the building's windows to visiting law students. Hoy previously had conducted demonstrations of window strength according to police reports. Peter Lauwers, managing partner of the firm Holden Day Wilson, told the Torontom Sun newspaper that Hoy was "one of the best and brightest" members of the 200-man association. NOMINEE #6 [AP, Cairo, Egypt, 31 Aug 1995 CAIRO, Egypt (AP)] Six people drowned Monday while trying to rescue a chicken that had fallen into a well in southern Egypt. An 18-year-old farmer was the first to descend into the 60-foot well. He drowned, apparently after an undercurrent in the water pulled him down, police said. His sister and two brothers, none of whom could swim well, went in one by one to help him, but also drowned. Two elderly farmers then came to help, but they apparently were pulled by the same undercurrent. The bodies of the six were later pulled out of the well in the village of Nazlat Imara, 240 miles south of Cairo. The chicken was also pulled out. It survived. NOMINEE #7 [Bloomburg News Service, 25 March] A terrible diet and room with no ventilation are being blamed for the death of a man who was killed by his own gas. There was no mark on his body but autopsy showed large amounts of methane gas in his system. His diet had consisted primarily of beans and cabbage (and a couple of other things). It was just the right combination of foods. It appears that the man died in his sleep from breathing from the poisonous cloud that was hanging over his bed. Had he been outside or had his windows been opened, it wouldn't have been fatal. But the man was shut up in his near airtight bedroom. He was ". . . a big man with a huge capacity for creating [this deadly gas]." Three of the rescuers got sick and one was hospitalized. NOMINEE #9 [18 May 93, San Jose Mercury News] A 24-year-old salesman from Hialeah, Fla., was killed near Lantana, Fla., in March when his car smashed into a pole in the median strip of Interstate 95 in the middle of the afternoon. Police said that the man was traveling at 80 MPH and, judging by the sales manual that was found open and clutched to his chest, had been busy reading. NOMINEE #10 [1/29/96 The News of the weird.] JOINT NOMINEE Michael Anderson Godwin made News of the Weird posthumously in 1989. He had spent several years awaiting South Carolina's electric chair on a murder conviction before having his sentence reduced to life in prison. In March 1989, sitting on a metal toilet in his cell and attempting to fix his small TV set, he bit into a wire and was electrocuted. On Jan. 1, 1997, Laurence Baker, also a convicted murderer once on death row, but later serving a life sentence at the
[PEN-L:9630] Re: DARWIN AWARDS
Treacy: As a guy who used to drink a lot of beer and roar off on my BMW bike, I would say a lot of this behavior is just youthful machismo. After laying down the bike and smelling my self burn a couple of times it occurred to me that I might be courting death. I stopped before killing myself and thus still remain in the shallow end of the gene pool. [EMAIL PROTECTED] copyrighted On Tue, 22 Apr 1997, James Devine wrote: this kind of thing always evokes a chuckle (as with NEWS OF THE WIERD's recent story about a man who died because he played "catch" using a poisonous snake, which was titled "the thinning of the herd"). But it's very crude Darwinism. (There's no guarantee that these idiots didn't contribute to the gene pool before their escapades; in the case of the man with the lawn-chair and the balloons, he could easily make contribution even afterwards.) Further, it ignores the entire sociological dimension. Specifically, these actions seem to reflect the bizarre form of alienation the infests US culture along with a lot of macho craziness. While it's fun to laugh at this kind of stupidity, it's important to note that many or even most of the people in pen-l are immersed in the same culture.
[PEN-L:9592] Re: DARWIN AWARDS
Jim Craven writes:You all know about the Darwin Awards - It's an annual honor given to the person who did the gene pool the biggest service by killing themselves in the most extraordinarily stupid way. this kind of thing always evokes a chuckle (as with NEWS OF THE WIERD's recent story about a man who died because he played "catch" using a poisonous snake, which was titled "the thinning of the herd"). But it's very crude Darwinism. (There's no guarantee that these idiots didn't contribute to the gene pool before their escapades; in the case of the man with the lawn-chair and the balloons, he could easily make contribution even afterwards.) Further, it ignores the entire sociological dimension. Specifically, these actions seem to reflect the bizarre form of alienation the infests US culture along with a lot of macho craziness. While it's fun to laugh at this kind of stupidity, it's important to note that many or even most of the people in pen-l are immersed in the same culture. BTW, I see nothing wrong with reopening the discussion of "progressive internationalism" vs. "progressive nationalism." It's one of the big issues of our day. For example, what does the PI camp say about MAI? in pen-l solidarity, Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] Econ. Dept., Loyola Marymount Univ. 7900 Loyola Blvd., Los Angeles, CA 90045-8410 USA 310/338-2948 (daytime, during workweek); FAX: 310/338-1950 "Segui il tuo corso, e lascia dir le genti." (Go your own way and let people talk.) -- K. Marx, paraphrasing Dante A.
[PEN-L:9584] Re: DARWIN AWARDS
that is pretty good
[PEN-L:9568] DARWIN AWARDS
You all know about the Darwin Awards - It's an annual honor given to the person who did the gene pool the biggest service by killing themselves in the most extraordinarily stupid way. The 1995 winner was the fellow who was killed by a Coke machine which toppled over on top of him as he was attempting to tip a free soda out of it. In 1996 the winner was an air force sergeant who attached a jet engine (JATO) unit to his car and crashed into a cliff several hundred feet above the road. AND NOW! The 1997 winner: Larry Waters of Los Angeles - one of the few DARWIN winners to survive his award-winning accomplishment. * * * * * * * * Larry's boyhood dream was to fly. When he graduated from high school he joined the Air Force in hopes of becoming a pilot. Unfortunately, poor eyesight disqualified him. When he was finally discharged, he had to satisfy himself with watching jets fly over his backyard. One day, Larry, had a bright idea. He decided to fly. He went to the local Army-Navy surplus store and purchased 45 weather balloons and several tanks of helium. The weather balloons, when fully inflated, would measure more than four feet across. Back home, Larry securely strapped the balloons to his sturdy lawn chair. He anchored the chair to the bumper of his jeep and inflated the balloons with the helium. He climbed on for a test while it was still only a few feet above the ground. Satisfied it would work, Larry packed several sandwiches a six- pack of Miller Lite, loaded his pellet gun--figuring he could pop a few balloons when it was time to descend-and went back to the floating lawn chair. He tied himself in along with his pellet gun provisions. Larry's plan was to sever the anchor, lazily float to about 30 feet above his back yard, and in a few hours come back down. Things didn't quite work out that way. When he cut the cord anchoring the lawn chair to his jeep, he didn't float lazily up to 30 or so feet. Instead he streaked into the LA sky as if shot from a cannon. He didn't level off at 30 feet, nor did he level off at 100 feet. After climbing climbing, he leveled off at 11,000 feet. At that height he couldn't risk shooting any of the balloons, lest he unbalance the load really find himself in trouble. So he stayed there, drifting, cold frightened, for more than 14 hours. Then he really got in trouble. He found himself drifting into the primary approach corridor of Los Angeles International Airport. A United pilot first spotted Larry. He radioed the tower described passing a guy with a gun in a lawn chair. Radar confirmed the existence of an object floating 11,000 feet above the airport. LAX emergency procedures swung into full alert a helicopter was dispatched to investigate. LAX is right on the ocean. Night was falling the offshore breeze began to blow. It carried Larry out to sea with the helicopter in hot pursuit. Several miles out, the helicopter caught up with Larry. Once the crew determined that Larry was not dangerous, they attempted to close in for a rescue but the draft from the blades would push Larrry away whenever they neared. Finally, the helicopter ascended to a position several hundred feet above Larry lowered a rescue line. Larry snagged the line was hauled back to shore. The difficult maneuver was flawlessly executed by the helicopter crew. As soon as Larry was hauled to earth, he was arrested by waiting members of the LAPD for violating LAX airspace. As he was led away in handcuffs, a reporter dispatched to cover the daring rescue asked why he had done it. Larry stopped, turned replied nonchalantly: "A man can't just sit around." Let's hear it for Larry Waters, the 1997 Darwin Award Winner! *--* * James Craven * " For those who have fought for it, * * Dept of Economics* freedom has a taste the protected * * Clark College* will never know." * * 1800 E. McLoughlin Blvd. *Otto von Bismark * * Vancouver, Wa. 98663 * * * (360) 992-2283 * * * [EMAIL PROTECTED]* * * MY EMPLOYER HAS NO ASSOCIATION WITH MY PRIVATE/PROTECTED OPINION *
[PEN-L:3063] Darwin-L
Since somebody asked: About the Darwin-L Discussion Group [EMAIL PROTECTED] is an international network discussion group on the history and theory of the historical sciences. This introductory information is sent automatically to all new subscribers and may be viewed at any other time by visiting the Darwin-L Web Server (http://rjohara.uncg.edu) or by sending the message INFO DARWIN-L to [EMAIL PROTECTED] Specific questions about the Darwin-L group may be sent to the group's sponsor, Dr. Robert J. O'Hara ([EMAIL PROTECTED]).P Scope and Purpose of Darwin-L Darwin-L was established in September 1993 to promote the reintegration of a range of academic fields all of which are concerned with reconstructing the past from evidence in the present, and to encourage communication among professional researchers in these fields. Darwin-L is not devoted to evolutionary biology, but instead examines the entire range of historical sciences from an explicitly interdisciplinary perspective. These fields include: Evolutionary Biology Archeology Historical Linguistics Paleontology Textual Transmission and StemmaticsHistorical Anthropology Historical Geology Cosmology Systematics and Phylogeny Historical Geography To join the Darwin-L discussion group send the following e-mail message to [EMAIL PROTECTED]: SUBSCRIBE DARWIN-L Your Name For example: SUBSCRIBE DARWIN-L Robert J. O'Hara To cancel your subscription send the following message to the same address: UNSUBSCRIBE DARWIN-L To receive your mail in digest form send the one-line message: To address the group as a whole simply send your message to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
