I agree with you about Ferguson although I never read the good early stuff you mention. As for Keynsian tactics, you may very well have a point about a lack of product motivation compared to Keynes days. However I would say the problem is artistic and serious human and social development. Artists don't have trouble with work, they have trouble with capital and having the time to develop the virtuosity necessary to be able to DO the work at all. You must either be rich and have the time or you must have a sugar daddy who will fund your practice because practice is hard, intricate, exact labor that requires self awareness in both action and product. I would advocate for a sophisticated superior human potential and product as a worthy goal for a society, much as the classic Greeks accomplished as a result of slaves freeing them to develop their ideas. I think slaves are a bad idea but computers and information offer a possibility for sophisticated, intelligent, cooperative human beings to build a legacy of significance. Keynsian stimulus would be tied to significant, meaningful ideas and exploration of the human instrument and consciousness of every variety.
REH From: Keith Hudson [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Wednesday, August 22, 2012 1:36 AM To: RE-DESIGNING WORK, INCOME DISTRIBUTION, EDUCATION; Ray Harrell Subject: Re: [Futurework] The West and the Rest I've been an admirer of Niall Ferguson, the economics-historian, since his first book, 30-odd years ago, on the Rothschilds. However, since he turned to someone more akin to an economics-best-seller with a spate of pot-boilers in recent years, I've been less sure about what is motivating him. His more recent pitching against Paul Krugman, however, confirms that Ferguson has lost the objectivity he used to have. His willful chopping up of facts and dates, well and truly nailed by Sullivan and others, puts him beyond the pale as far as I'm concerned. This doesn't make me any more partial to Krugman's Keynesianism, however. Demand-side economics might well have worked in the 1930s when there were several big ticket items (e.g. accessible mortgages, cars, TVs) on the supply-side waiting to be bought by the masses if only the dollar were not kept too high by Roosevelt. Today, with nothing new by way of iconic consumer goods on the supply-side, any amount of money-printing to enhance the demand-side can't get the economy moving again. Even Bernanke is now telling Obama and Congress that successive bouts of QE are having less effect each time, and that it's up to politicians now to carry our supply-side reforms. Keith At 00:25 22/08/2012, REH wrote: Ah yes, Niall Ferguson again. The West and the Rest, Edmund Burke etc. Ferguson is to history as a Nascar mechanic is to NASA. We live in different worlds but I've lived here longer and know more about it than he does. I'm really tired of people moving into my space and then claiming they know more about it than I do. It began with the visiting anthropologist who hired somebody from the local bar to be an informant, spent a few weeks looking around and went home to write a book. One guy named Henry Rowe Schoolcraft married one of our women but when he found that he couldn't learn the Ojibwa language he got religion in the local revival, divorced his "heathen" wife and went home to NYCity to start the Museum of Natural History and become the national "Indian Expert." His teacher, Louis Cass oversaw the death march of my ancestors, to Oklahoma and invented the term Hunter/Gatherer. Ferguson is just another Englishman who couldn't see straight. Thank God I had Dame Eva Turner to show me that they aren't all like that and that going home was much better than making a mess here. She changed the face of English opera and was beloved here. I don't know where they get the people like Ferguson. REH PS. Interesting post Viggo Krugman, Others Slam Newsweek's Ferguson Newsweek's eyebrow-raising cover story on President Barack Obama, headlined "Hit the Road, Barack: Why We Need a New President," is coming under fire from writers questioning conclusions reached and facts presented. Author and historian Niall Ferguson has been savaged in postings by Nobel Prize-winning economist and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, in a lengthy fact check by the Atlantic magazine, Andrew Sullivan and writers from Slate, Salon, and Mother Jones among others. Krugman wrote in a blog post that "there are multiple errors and misrepresentations" in the Newsweek cover story and cited the line that the CBO and the Joint Committee on Taxation now estimate that the president's healthcare law "will have a net cost of close to $1.2 trillion over the 2012-22 period." "Readers are no doubt meant to interpret this as saying that CBO found that the Act will increase the deficit. But anyone who actually read, or even skimmed, the CBO report knows that it found that the ACA would reduce, not increase, the deficit - because the insurance subsidies were fully paid for," Krugman wrote. The Atlantic magazine did a lengthy fact check of Ferguson's piece and wrote that rather than make a "straightforward case against the current administration, Ferguson delves into a fantasy world of incorrect and tendentious facts. He simply gets things wrong, again and again and again." The article then examines a dozen "of the more factually challenged sections of Ferguson's piece." The sections deal with such things as private sector job creation, household income, the numbers of citizens paying taxes and the stimulus. "In the world as Ferguson describes it, Obama is a big-spending, weak-kneed liberal who can't get the economy turned around. Think Jimmy Carter on steroids," the fact check concludes. "But the world is not as Ferguson describes it. A fact-checked version of the world Ferguson describes reveals a completely different narrative - a muddy picture of the past four years, where Obama has sometimes cast himself as a stimulator, a deficit hawk, a health care liberal and conservative reformer all at once. And it's a world where the economy is getting better, albeit slowly. "It would have been worthwhile for Ferguson to explain why Obama doesn't deserve re-election in the real world we actually live in. Instead, we got an exercise in Ferguson's specialty - counterfactual history." Ferguson's lengthy rebuttal, posted on The Daily Beast, characterized the criticisms of his article as "a storm of nit-picking and vilification" by "liberal bloggers." "My critics have three things in common," he wrote. "First, they wholly fail to respond to the central arguments of the piece. Second, they claim to be engaged in 'fact checking,' whereas in nearly all cases they are merely offering alternative (often silly or skewed) interpretations of the facts. Third, they adopt a tone of outrage that would be appropriate only if I had argued that, say, women's bodies can somehow prevent pregnancies in case of 'legitimate rape.'" He concluded, "Has the American public sphere so degenerated that it is now impossible to make the case for a change of president without being set upon in cyberspace by a suspiciously well-organized gang of the current incumbent's most ideologically committed supporters?" C 2012 Newsmax. All rights reserved. _______________________________________________ Futurework mailing list [email protected] https://lists.uwaterloo.ca/mailman/listinfo/futurework Keith Hudson, Saltford, England http://allisstatus.wordpress.com <http://allisstatus.wordpress.com/>
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