Well boys,
What do you think about this statement when it comes to which pocket that
invisible hand is picking?
"The Wealthy are led by an invisible hand to make the same
distribution of the necessities of life, which would have been made, had
the earth been divided into equal portions amongst all its inhabitants."
From The Theory of Moral Sentiments: Adam Smith.
Not my culture but yours:
"Though I speak with the tongue of men and of angels and have not charity I
am as a tinkling cymbal and a sounding brass."
So thanks Tom for your comment about von Hayek. I've often wondered what
my old friend and mentor John Warfield saw in von Hayek.
There are certain writers whose attitudes are so reminiscent of the
attitudes of the people who thought it was OK for kids to grow up in a lead
and zinc hell hole that I just can't think seriously about them. They
imitate the toxic grammar of the oppressor while constantly lying about the
damage they do to us when we have no idea why we feel the way we do or that
it is far from normal. This Eagle Picher lead and zinc, BP in the Gulf,
Exxon in Alaska you name it. Human potential is stunted, lives are
shortened and the thousands of hours of both theater character work and
every kind of psycho-therapy is the only antidote I've found to such demonic
theories and practices.
As Fritz Perls said it all comes down to one thing: Top Dog and Underdog.
I was lead poisoned with impunity by the Top Dogs of the Eagle Picher Mining
company (a subsidiary of BP) as were all of the other expendables Indian
folks. When someone talks like a TopDog around me I want to bite his
leg:>))
Some time ago there was an exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art in NYCity
that traced the influences from Africa on Picasso and other modern painter
sculptors. It was a revelation for a city that had a big black prejudice
in the Art world. I was following a young Caucasian "Art" expert as he
went through the exhibit explaining to a bevy of women why the exhibit was
wrong and that the Europeans had improved on the primitive ideas of the
Africans.
[My daughter had already encountered the attitude when she looked at a very
gut wrenching African piece and just screamed NO! and backed away.]
It was toxic. But it was also true. When we came to the room with the
Picasso Avignon Damsels the two masks placed across the room from each other
- that had been the inspiration for the painting - were so strong as to
render the painting almost invisible. Anyway the young man blandly went on
with his story until he encountered a Reliquary from Gabon that was
stunning. It was such an astounding piece of work in brass as to seem
golden and shine like the sun. He was struck silent.
At that moment I moved up behind him and whispered in his ear that the
Artist once finished had been captured by slavers and spent the rest of his
life chopping cotton in South Carolina. And then I quickly moved away.
The young man changed. He looked a little haunted. Yes Chris I was
hunting him but not to eat. The language of the young man reminded me of
that TopDog language that I read in the Road to Serfdom. I couldn't
imagine that any action coming out of such a toxic and prejudiced mood and
feeling could be constructive. Perhaps I will be able to tolerate the
toxicity and find the gold in von Hayek. Today he's just another Austrian
noble ......head. John certainly made me believe the gold's there. Tom
you made some good points as well.
As for Keynes, I think Lydia's challenge to Keynes and the arts had a lot to
do with his opting for her. She could make the Art profitable when he was a
magnificent failure at making his theater company make a profit. It's said
that it was in the black but he funded and did everything. Nothing is said
about the salary he took. In the end he had a heart attack and had to quit.
Productivity lag. The book that described also said it was a pleasant time
for Keynes although I've read differing opinions elsewhere. All Lydia had
to do was hire a pianist, rent a theater and dance. He had to run a
company of actors with labor costs. You can do it with long successful
singular runs but if you mix, you lose money. When was the disease of
productivity lag first documented in the literature? 1968 by William
Baumol whose name is now attached to it. They call it the Baumol Disease.
How many letters did Keynes write to von Hayek about the Road to Serfdom?
Here's an interesting quote that says something different than what Keith
implied, I wonder if it's from the same letter?
"I should...conclude rather differently. I should say that what we want is
not no planning, or even less planning, indeed I should say we almost
certainly want more. But the planning should take place in a community in
which as many people as possible, both leaders and followers, wholly share
your own moral position. Moderate planning will be safe enough if those
carrying it out are rightly oriented in their own minds and hearts to the
moral issue. This is in fact already true of some of them. But the curse
is that there is also an important section who could be said to want
planning not in order to enjoy its fruits, but because morally they hold
ideas exactly the opposite of yours, and wish to serve not God but the
devil."
Von Mises anyone? If only the vons would have just stopped with Beethoven.
Sorry, but seriously, it seems that what Keynes is proposing is what
Warfield and company called Interactive Management but that Warfield had the
computer power to overcome the information deficit caused by just using the
limitations of human logic. In Interpretive Structural Modeling (ISM) you
can take the logic to the level of over 200 separate logical syllogisms.
Where the individual has a limit of seven or less.
That ISM stuff is new. But we've been here before on this list folks.
Keith, Steve, Tom, Ed, the two Mikes. I first wrote about it on this list
Feb. 15, 2003 and here it is again. Keynes pointed it out and the Art
world in America proved it but was anyone watching or caring? No.
Equilibrium Depression. But it's in Keynes "General Theory". Being an
Artist deprived of a fine education with a pollution disability, I don't
have access to the kind of reading attention that you folks have. But I do
read what I can and even my ADD allowed me to look this up.
Life is a discovery of the answers to questions. You have to trust your
experience and accept what you find. Then compare it to others with respect
and change your mind. Equilibrium Depression. The West has been getting
dumber. Especially the West in America. The Marshall Plan rescued many
of the cultural systems that were destroyed by the war. They funded over
18 orchestras in Germany, built the most powerful contemporary music
festivals in the world and rebuilt a theatrical and operatic edifice that is
only matched in the U.S. in New York City's two opera houses. Germany today
has 81 repertory opera companies with full seasons to feed the intelligence
and culture of its average citizen.
The crash started in 1929 for the performing Arts when there were 44,000
opera houses across America delivering live artistic performances to smart
audiences from all levels of society. Smart Art makes you smart.
The first world war used the Arts trashily. Check out the writing of
Charles Ives for that. After 1929 they entered a Depression like the rest
of the country and FDR funded them to bring them back with the rest of the
country but the double blow of no endowment (savings) and automation,
recordings and movies gave an economie of scale that cut the work force back
98% from the pre-WWI levels. The taste of the audience plummeted and
segregated Vaudeville continued to lower the sophistication and thus the
demand.
What you got was (according to Keynes) an Equilibrium Depression that lasts
down to the current times. Keith why do you avoid that? Do you not
believe it happened?
Now that same process of no capital, automation and robotics is working on
everything else but especially the public health and education. What now?
What do you do with all of those surplus teachers and doctors? What do you
do with all of the surplus anything? Retrain? Hell you already killed the
teachers or dummied them down.
What do you do on this list? I feel like I'm in a time warp. Same story
as I wrote in 2003 on this list. Nothing changes. Just keep being
faithful to "yo momma". I finished my Freudian analysis. Good stuff.
Hallelujah! Unlike Mike Gurstein I would have said "Rightwing rant." And
it would have been "nothing personal." We have a word: Hohokum.
Now let's see you boys ignore that or go silent for another few days.
REH
Cherokee in Manhattan
-----Original Message-----
From: [email protected]
[mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Sandwichman
Sent: Sunday, July 11, 2010 2:35 PM
To: Keith Hudson; RE-DESIGNING WORK, INCOME DISTRIBUTION, EDUCATION
Subject: Re: [Futurework] Keynes the convert
It's news to me that Schumpeter's creative destruction has been
"largely ignored". Paragraph five contains a remarkable instance of
argument by elision and insinuation. The only reference to Keynes in
"The Road to Serfdom" is a warmly approving citation of his 1915
critique of the militarization of industrial life in Germany. To say
that Hayek argued that Keynes's ideas would lead to Soviet-style
totalitarianism is a slander against Hayek. To then say that Keynes
acknowledged an argument that Hayek didn't make is then fatuous. But
let's get down to brass tacks. The idea that Hayek is criticizing, and
praising Keynes for criticizing, is summed up in the following:
"Individualism must come to an end absolutely. A system of regulation
must be set up, the object of which is not the greater happiness of
the individual... but the strengthening of the organized unity of the
state for the object of attaining the maximum degree of efficiency,
the influence of which on individual advantage is only indirect. --
This hideous doctrine is enshrined in a sort of idealism."
May I remind Keith that "the object of attaining the maximum degree of
efficiency" is the single overarching rationale for the market
fundamentalism of the last 30 years that has adopted Hayek as its
patron saint? Anyone heard of the Efficient Market Hypothesis? The
stuff is steeped in two things: the worship of "efficiency" and the
dogmatic certainty that the market and only the market is the
guarantor of "the maximum degree of efficiency."
On 7/11/10, Keith Hudson <[email protected]> wrote:
> John Maynard Keynes was one of the most humane and brilliant minds of the
> last century. At the Versailles Conference after the First World War and
> Germany's defeat, President Clemenceau of France was adamant that millions
> of German civilians should be allowed to starve to death. It was Keynes
> (then a Treasury official) who persuaded Prime Minister Lloyd George to
> oppose Clemenceau's plans and make sure that emergency food was sent.
>
> Unfortunately Keynes was less successful when trying to persuade Lloyd
> George and Clemcnceau not to punish Germany's economy too fiercely. It was
> then that he wrote one of his most famous books, "The Economic
Consequences
> of the Peace" (1919) when he forecast the German instability that would
> follow France's vengeance. Thus the subsequent Weimar hyperinflation of
the
> 1920s, the Great Depression which followed and the subsequent outbreak of
> the Second World War did not surprise him.
>
> Brilliant though Keynes was, he was also someone who could never quite
make
> up his mind on other issues for most of his life. For some years he had a
> homosexual relationship with a young man, Sebastian Sprott at the same
time
> as one with Lydia Lopokova, a leading ballerina of the 1920s. It became an
> effort of will to finally plump for Lydia, whom he married in 1925 (and a
> happy marriage ensued).
>
> He was equally vacillating about his economic ideas and the book for which
> he is best known, his "General Theory", is self-contradictory in places --
> which he acknowledged himself later. His main fault is that he said (most
> of the time anyway) that money was the prime motivator of consumer goods
> consumption and that if governments showered money on people in bad times
> then they would start buying goods and the economy would recover. But
money
> is only a transient intermediary. It's the attractiveness of the goods
> themselves which causes people to work hard, save money and buy them.
>
> In fact, when Friedrich Hayek opposed Keynes' ideas in his book, "The Road
> to Serfdom" (1944) -- as leading to Soviet-style totalitarianism -- Keynes
> finally acknowledge that his own main idea had been wrong. He wrote to
> Hayek: "In my opinion it is a grand book ... Morally and philosophically I
> find myself in agreement with virtually the whole of it: and not only in
> agreement with it, but in deeply moved agreement."
>
> Furthermore, only ten days before he died of a heart attack in 1946 he
told
> Henry Clay at a Bank of England lunch that he was finally a convert to
Adam
> Smith's primary idea of the invisible hand. He said: "I find myself more
> and more relying for a solution of our problems on the invisible hand
which
> I tried to eject from economic thinking twenty years ago."
>
> Keynes was brilliant enough to be able to change his mind -- and not to be
> ashamed when he did so. Unfortunately, that cannot be said of some public
> economists who are certainly clever but nowhere near as brilliant as
Keynes
> or -- dare I say it? -- Hayek.
>
> Incidentally, the other great economist of the last century who also
argued
> forcefully against Keynes' earlier ideas was Joseph Schumpeter, someone
> whose ideas of "creative destruction" are largely ignored because they're
> uncomfortable. But as we're living in uncomfortable times perhaps some of
> our public economists ought to do some reading of him also.
>
> Keith
>
> Keith Hudson, Saltford, England
--
Sandwichman
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