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
