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Two by James
K. Galbraith, first from Winter 2005, the second from the current issue of
Mother Jones. Smith vs Darwin: Like Intelligent Design, the idea of the
Invisible Hand stubbornly persists in the face of overwhelming evidence. In each generation
since Veblen, some economists have fought for evolutionary ideas, but the ID
types keep coming back. Today their most lethal champions call themselves the
"School of Law and Economics." This group holds that markets are
self-policing, that fraud is really impossible except where publicly provided
insurance creates "moral hazard." Get rid of regulations, they
believe, and we won't much need the SEC, the FTC, and the Justice Department to
protect us from Enron, Tyco, and WorldCom. Now that John Roberts has taken over
at the Supreme Court, we'll see how this touching faith works out. Modern economics
resembles religion in other, more prosaic ways. The American Economic
Association (AEA) runs like a priesthood; its flagship Review is as unreadable as a Dead Sea
Scroll. And when heretics gather in the Association for Evolutionary Economics and elsewhere, Inquisitors keep after
them. (At the annual academic meetings, the AEA sends seat counters to the
heretical sessions, looking for groups small enough to cut from its rolls.) To
borrow an old line from Robert Kuttner, the evolutionists are "a tiny and
despised sect that stubbornly refuses to disappear." Yet we're a threat.
For Darwin cannot be erased; his material, randomized, godless view of change
informs every aspect of the way real scientists investigate physical,
biological, and social problems, from cosmology to the study of political or
technological change. The new mathematics of chaos and complexity are
evolutionary, for they study how simple determinate processes can give rise to
lifelike diversity. These techniques yield many new insights into the origins
of pattern and structure. (For a fun example, download John Conway's "Game
of Life" and have a look at what it can do.) One day, they may break
through even in economics, and Veblen's long-delayed evolutionary revolution
will be complete. http://www.motherjones.com/commentary/columns/2005/12/smith_darwin.html The Predator State: Enron, Tyco,
WorldCom... and the U.S. government? http://www.motherjones.com/commentary/columns/2006/05/predator_state.html |
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