At 00:01 12/07/2010 -0700, you wrote:
On 7/11/10, Keith Hudson <[email protected]> wrote:
> Although Keynes went off the rails by
> rejecting Say and Smith, he had the courage at the end of his life to admit
> that he'd been wrong. That counts for a lot in my view.
You really need to be more specific about precisely WHAT Keynes
repudiated. He famously said, "When the facts change, I change my
mind. What do you do, sir?" Is that admitting he'd been wrong? Well,
yeah, but in a non-specific way.
He specifically said a few days before his death -- as I've already quoted
-- that the 'hidden hand' of Smith was the way that the market worked (and,
by implication that any other demand input would not by itself restore an
under-performing economy).
Adam Smith said a lot of things, some of them brilliant, some wacky
and not all of them consistent. One can BOTH agree and disagree with
Smith. One can also agree with Say, provided one picks the occasion.
Say, too changed his mind. Both Smith and Say (like Marx, Keynes,
Hayek and Freud) were victims of posthumous cults that took trivial
sound bites from their works, twisted them and elevated them to holy
scripture. Did Keynes reject the cant of the vulgar classical
political economists of the 19th century and mistakenly attribute it
to Say or Smith and then later retract the unkind attribution?
This is not to say that Keynes wasn't wrong in some respects, but
possibly these were not the things that he admitted were wrong. By the
way, for a critique of Keynes, I would go to Fred Hirsh rather than
Fred Hayek.
If you mean Fred Hirsch, yes I agree. His "Social Limits to Growth" is,
like Veblen's "The Theory of Business Enterprise", one of those 'sleeper'
books that have yet to have their day. Both of them are saying extremely
important things about the modern economy and are the only ones (I would
maintain) who have lifted the discussion above that of the classical
economists (and Ricardo's 'comparative advantage' of the 19th century). (I
frequently mention Schumpeter in the modern pantheon but I don't think he
has added anything really new, only his observation from history that
economic systems change in great destructive lurches and that today's
industrial-consumerist model is ripe for change.)
It is so hard, when people's names become an ism, to separate what
they were about from some wholly amorphous and mostly incorrect image
of what they proposed. Even most of the popular quotations attributed
to famous people were actually said by somebody else.
Agreed, and the more famous the original utterer the more unlikely that
he/she ever said it. I doubt whether Einstein or Churchill said 10% of what
they were supposed to. I included "she" because the best known wrongly
attributed statement of all was "Let them eat cake" by Mary Antoinette. She
didn't even say; "Qu'ils mangent de la brioche' -- being invented by
Rousseau of an unknown "grande princesse".
Keith
--
Sandwichman
Keith Hudson, Saltford, England
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