Thinking about cold war, social rot and the dilemma of productivity will
lead us around and around in circles until we understand that "most of what
we thought we knew is wrong." I'm not talking about some kind of conspiracy
theory or secret history of the world concealed from the masses but known to
controlling elites. What I'm referring to is the unavoidable human activity
of constructing and projecting narrative historical frames out of snapshots
of partial information.
We need those meta-narratives to make sense of the world, but we soon forget
that they are/were provisional. The stories -- composed of one part fact and
nine parts conjecture -- take on a life of their own and eventually make
nonsense of our experience. When we think of the cold war, we associate it
with the names of Khruschev and Kennedy; not Lange, Samuelson, Robbins and
von Mises. We think of the ICBM, not the GDP. That is, when we think of the
cold war, we remember the headlines and celebrities, not the deep structures
and the legacies.
Most of what we thought we knew is wrong. What we always need to do is
revise "history" from the perspective of the present. We seldom do that.
Instead we cling to uprooted conceptual "guideposts" that not only mislead
us about the past and the present but persuade us to repudiate whatever
brief flashes of insight we stumble across. We tell ourselves, "That can't
be true; I've never heard it before."
"The ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are
right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is commonly
understood. Indeed the world is ruled by little else. Practical men, who
believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influences, are
usually the slaves of some defunct economist. Madmen in authority, who hear
voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler
of a few years back . . . soon or late, it is ideas, not vested interests,
which are dangerous for good or evil."
The quotation is from John Maynard Keynes' _General Theory of Employment,
Interest and Money_. But most people who have read or heard the quote before
have never held Keynes' book in their hand. The quotation was presented as
an epigraph at the beginning of the first chapter of Paul A. Samuelson's
introductory textbook _Economics_. For all the celebrity lustre of Keynes'
name, it was Samuelson's interpretation of Keynes that became the core of
what we retrospectively regard as "Keynesianism". Similarly, for all the
evocative authority of Marx's name, it was Lenin's, Bukharin's and
eventually Lange's interpretations of centralized state planning that came
to stand for "Marxism".
All of the terms in our current thinking about economics have, since the
1930s, been refracted through a narrow lens of calculability. Markets,
social welfare, economic growth, planning, full employment, competition,
productivity, equity and efficiency mean precisely what the Humpty-Dumpty
econometricians of the 1930s wanted them to mean.
For the first twenty years of its publication, the journal Econometrica
featured Lord Kelvin's dictum that science is measurement on its title page.
Had they been dadaists, the editors of the journal would have juxtaposed
this assertion about science with Kelvin's other claim that heavier-than-air
flying machines were impossible. In their zeal to portray themselves as
objective scientists -- and as 19th century scientists, at that --
economists adopted a yo-yo as their measuring rod.
In the 1968 Canadian edition of Samuelson and Scott, chapter 37, the Theory
of Growth, begins with the epigraph from Lord Kelvin:
". . . when you can measure what you are speaking about, and express it in
numbers, you know something about it; but when you cannot measure it, when
you cannot express it in numbers, your knowledge is of a meager and
unsatisfactory kind. It may be the beginning of knowledge, but you have
scarcely, in your thoughts, advanced to the stage of science. . ."
The reification of economic growth -- its deification, really -- relies on a
sleight of hand. The yo-yo value of labour time is "conveniently supposed",
as a "simple book-keeping artifice" to be a unit of definite and measurable
dimensions. I call labour time a "yo-yo value" because the value of labour
time becomes larger and smaller and changes direction from negative to
positive and back again to negative according to the variation of the length
of the usual working day.
At this moment, when "impossible" heavier-than-air flying machines rain
death on random bus passengers in Kosovo, it might be worth reconsidering
the powerful ideas of the defunct economists whose hubris told them they
could take the measure of things they couldn't comprehend. Truly, "Madmen in
authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some
academic scribbler of a few years back."
more on growth and its discontents at:
http://www.vcn.bc.ca/timework/satanic.htm
regards,
Tom Walker
http://www.vcn.bc.ca/timework/covenant.htm
