A fun and interesting piece on the way philosophy impacts culture and policy
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2015/07/04/a-hilarious-monty-python-sketch-explains-why-greece-is-in-a-huge-crisis/ Walter Eucken (1891-1950), an opponent of the Nazis and an economist who has been enormously influential in Germany since the Second World War, wanted to develop a comprehensive economic theory <http://www.eucken.de/fileadmin/bilder/Dokumente/Diskussionspapiere/07_4bw.pdf> that could describe prices, investments, debts, monopolies and more in a comprehensive way — instead of as just a sequence of apparently random facts. In particular, he took issue with the work of John Maynard Keynes (1883-1946) — the famous British economist who long dominated economic thinking in the English-speaking world — about how the government should respond to crises. Keynes believed that the government had to aggressively deal with each crisis as it happened by filling in the gap left by the private sector. It could so by reducing interest rates to stimulate economic activity or spending money directly to get the economy moving again. "Thus economics is without a firm basis, always trying to catch up with events and always moving from one crisis to another," Eucken wrote in The Foundations of Economics, a 1940 book. It was a direct echo of the differences between Kant and Mill. Eucken saw markets as systems of rules and guiding principles and believed that government's responsibility was to establish these principles and to follow them. Those rules, he believed, should be designed to adjust the economy automatically to a crisis, so that policymakers could adhere to them even when things got bad. In that respect, Eucken's thinking was similar to the American economist Milton Friedman's, who also believed that central banks should follow rules established in advance during times of crisis. Agreed-upon rules would limit the chance that policymakers would misjudge and set interest rates too high or too low as they tried to straighten out a wobbling economy. Both thinkers also felt that giving too much leeway to government officials limited citizens' liberty, and it was better to go by a system of clear, well-known rules. Moq_Discuss mailing list Listinfo, Unsubscribing etc. http://lists.moqtalk.org/listinfo.cgi/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org Archives: http://lists.moqtalk.org/pipermail/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org/ http://moq.org/md/archives.html
