me:
>> Wasn't the EPOG written/published much later than the "Tract," i.e.,
>> 1930? isn't evoking that book simply a way of distracting us from the
>> idea that the Tract might be monetarist in its orientation?
Ted Winslow wrote:
> Hardly.
So the "Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren" (1930) was
hardly written later than the "Tract on Monetary Reform" (1924)?
How does one interpret the latter by quoting the further? is it by
assuming that he didn't change his point of view over the years? But
wasn't Keynes famous for saying "When the facts change, I change my
mind. What do you do, sir?" (If in fact he didn't say that, he should
have. He changed his mind drastically on the way to the GT.)
Ted:
>... I had already pointed out that the analysis in the Tract
> explicitly assumes that "the psychology of people operating on a day to day
> basis in the economy" involves an irrational "love of money" rooted in "deep
> instincts," that this is a key aspect of the psychopathology the Tract
> assumes characterizes "the investment system" as a whole,
Was he simply waving his hands? Reference to "deep instincts" hardly
seems to be an explanation of anything. This is different from the
mature Keynes, who in the GT actually looked at the social situation
(the Depression) to try to understand hoarding (the "liquidity trap").
As I read the GT, the social situation deeply affected individual
psychology, encouraging hoarding. This is very different from positing
an unexplained need to hoard. It's too bad that JMK didn't make this
more explicit.
> and that this same
> psychopathology is attributed to "the psychology of society" in the earlier
> Economic Consequences of the Peace (where psychopathology is also invoked to
> explain the "proceedings of Paris" themselves - e.g. the attribution of a
> "Freudian complex" to Wilson II p. 34).
Again, talking about the psychopathology of creeps like Wilson and the
leaders of the victorious powers after World War I says nothing at all
about individual psychology of people in the economy. The elites are
not the same as the masses.
> Moreover, as I also pointed out to you in what you're responding to here,
> Keynes invokes a "bullionist complex" to explain irrational treatment of
> gold in France generally, the treatment by the Bank of France being but one
> expression of this. That is to say, he makes it a feature of "the
> psychology of people on a day to day basis in the economy" of France. In
> "Dr Melchior: A Defeated Enemy," the second of the "two memoirs" Keynes
> instructed be published after his death, he invokes the same irrationality
> about gold to explain French behaviour during the Paris peace negotiations.
This seems very shallow psychology -- or sociology: the French love
gold because they're French. Similarly, we might say that Americans
love war because they're American. The Brits love umbrellas because
they're Brits.
> I also pointed out that the 1913 Indian Currency and Finance makes auri
> sacra fames a feature of "the psychology of people on a day to day basis in
> the economy" of India.
But there was no explanation for this empirical observation. It was
not derived from any kind of social ontology.
> I'd also pointed earlier to Keynes's associating, in Economic Possibilities
> for Our Grandchildren, capitalist saving and accumulating (capitalist
> "purposiveness") with a psychopathological denial of death .
Again, this says nothing about books he wrote earlier, such as the
Tract. Unless one asserts that all of his books represent a totally
unified perspective of a man who never changed his mind.
> This
> associates them with one of the "instincts of Puritanism" invoked to explain
> them in the passage from the Economic Consequences of the Peace I quoted.
> The instinct is Freud's "death instinct."
Everyone and her mother refers to the "Puritan ethic" and the like. It
seems to be a major indoor sport. If you can't explain something,
invoke the Puritan instinct. You'd think that a great thinker like
Keynes could do better. But I doubt that he meant it as a serious
analysis. It's more likely that he was being journalistic, writing an
"essay of persuasion."
> This is also the source in "deep instincts" of "sadistic Puritanism" and of
> "the dangerous human proclivities that can be canalised into comparatively
> harmless channels by the existence of opportunities for money-making and
> private wealth" (General Theory p. 374).
Isn't the "sadistic Puritanism" a reference to Hayek, Andrew Mellon,
_et al_, who advocating purging sins out of the economy via a severe
slump? what does that say about everyday people and everyday
operations of the economy? Nothing.
in any event, Mellon wasn't "sadistic" for the personal pleasure of
it. That means he wasn't truly sadistic. Rather, he was speaking for
what he thought were the interests of his segment of the ruling class.
He thought that everything would work out well in the end, but didn't
see the pains of the process of getting there. He probably didn't get
any personal pleasure from the suffering of the working class (as a
true sadist would). Rather, he just didn't give a damn. The same goes
for Hayek, though he was more ideological, less concerned with
real-world interests.
By the way, I couldn't find any references to sadism in the GT. Maybe
it's because I don't have a searchable version.
on page 374 of the GT, JMK refers to "dangerous human proclivities can
be canalised into comparatively harmless channels by the existence of
opportunities for money-making and private wealth, which, if they
cannot be satisfied in this way, may find their outlet in cruelty, the
reckless pursuit of personal power and authority, and other forms of
self-aggrandisement. It is better that a man should tyrannise over his
bank balance than over his fellow-citizens; and whilst the former is
sometimes denounced as being but a means to the latter, sometimes at
least it is an alternative. But it is not necessary for the
stimulation of these activities and the satisfaction of these
proclivities that the game should be played for such high stakes as at
present. Much lower stakes will serve the purpose equally well, as
soon as the players are accustomed to them."
He seems to be talking about what economists call market failure: when
the market works well, "dangerous proclivities" serve the public
(though he doesn't explain the origins of those proclivities). On the
other hand, if the market fails, they don't. In any event, it doesn't
say anything about the origin of these "proclivities." His psychology
doesn't seem to be very deep. It doesn't seem to be based in the
social ontology.
(BTW, how can you take the GT -- where Keynes had totally rejected his
earlier flirting with monetarism -- to say anything about his
monetarist "Tract"?)
> The second of Freud's instincts - Eros - is pointed to implicitly in the
> passage from The Economics Consequences of the Peace, i.e. "the nineteenth
> century was able to forget the fertility of the species in a contemplation
> of the dizzy virtues of compound interest" and explicitly in Keynes's review
> of H.G. Wells's The World of William Clissold (IX p. 320).
why is Freud relevant here? that doesn't say anything denying the
monetarist status of the "Tract." Nor does it say anything about JMK's
view of social psychology in the GT. Does he quote Freud there?
Sigmund isn't in the index. does he quote Freud in the Tract?
> Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren [published several years after
> the Tract] also describes "the love of money as a possession" as "a somewhat
> disgusting morbidity, one of those semi-criminal, semi-pathological
> propensities which one hands over with a
shudder to the specialists in mental disease." (IX p. 329)<
Again, this is not a deep analysis of "social ontology." It's
parlor-room Freudianism. It's hardly a replacement for the behaviorism
of neoclassical economics.
> So no, my pointing to this 1930 essay wasn't meant to distract attention
> from an inability to produce any textual evidence from the Tract itself or
> from earlier writing such as The Economic Consequences of the Peace that the
> psychological assumptions on which the Tract's analysis of monetary
> phenomena is based are essentially different from those of "monetarism."
> Among other things, this makes the version of the quantity theory elaborated
> in the Tract essentially different from the monetarist version.
So the Tract presents an "essentially different" (and presumably
better) version of the quantity theory? it's still a quantity theory.
If deLong isn't lying, it still has all the same monetarist policy
implications. JMK's parlor-room Freudianism seems to have gotten lost
when he got to the bottom line.
BTW, is there anywhere in JMK's work where he states explicitly what
his psychological assumptions are? or should we simply generalize from
scattered exercises in casual Freudianism, which involved speaking in
the fashionable lingo of JMK's day?
without a _systematic_ reading of JMK's psychology, it's easy to see
things that aren't there, just as it's easy to see the face of Elvis
on Mars.
> Texts provide the evidence on which to base judgments of a writer's "key
> understandings of the world." There therefore isn't a way of justifying
> interpretive claims alternative to quoting text.
yes, but they are subject to the text-quoter's interpretations,
including their prior biases. If I want to prove to a sympathetic
audience that Marx (for example) was antisemititic or if I want to
reinforce my preexisting beliefs that he was so, it's easy. (It's been
done.) Of course, that would be ignoring that antisemitism was the
norm at the time he wrote.
Similarly, if you want to prove that JMK had an especially deep theory
of psychology, you can dig up references to Freudian-type concepts.
But that would ignore the fact that Keynes, among others, was an
intellectual in a period when reading Freud and talking about him was
all the rage.
> It's also true, however, that to "see" what texts mean (in this context,
> texts invoking an irrational "love of money" rooted in "deep Instincts" to
> explain monetary phenomena), you may have to know other things (in this
> context, this would include knowledge of what Keynes calls "the Freudian
> theory of the love of money, and of gold in particular" VI p. 258).
I don't know that source ("VI"). In any event, I'd like to see where
this reference to the "love of money" is any deeper than that of the
New Testament (where the "love of money is the root of all evil").
BTW, are you referring to volume VI of JMK's collected works? was this
published before or after the Tract? is there any reason to assume
that he didn't change his mind about things between the two
publication dates?
Like many other people, JMK may have posited a "love of money" as part
of human psychology, but what role does this play in his theory? for
example, Patinkin (a monetarist) posits that people have "a love of
money" (after all, money shows up in utility functions) but he's still
a monetarist.
> Otherwise you might misidentify the theory of instincts underpinning
> Keynes's treatment of the love of money, a theory that posits only two
> instincts, with some other "instinct psychology," say
so you're saying that Keynes believed in Freud's two instinct
(Eros/Thanatos) theory? Is there any place where he explicitly says
so? is there any place where he applies this theory to get an actual
insight into the actual economy's operations? does he go beyond casual
references to Freud?
Ted:
> Similarly, you won't be able to see the idea of "internal relations" in
> Keynes's texts if you don't understand it.
okay, where does Keynes explicitly endorse the "internal relations"
view? Specifically, where can it be found in the Tract, which was the
subject of this silly discussion?
I _wish_ that JMK had fully accepted the internal relations view. Then
the GT would have gelled, because it would have been clearly
differentiated from standard neoclassical view. The latter has
everything going from the individual to the system as a whole (parts
make whole): our tastes, expectations, and economic endowments
determine the global results as part of a unique equilibrium, assuming
perfect markets. JMK could have more explicitly introduced the over
"moment" of the dialectic, in which whole makes parts: the
macroeconomic situation "feeds back" to affect our tastes,
expectations, and economic endowments, so it's possible to have more
than one macro-equilibrium, even assuming perfect markets. One of
these equilibria involves mass unemployment.
(This, it seems, was Robinson's point of view and she knew JMK
personally. BTW, what did she say about his psychological theories?)
> As is briefly elaborated in the
> sixth thesis on Feuerbach, it's the idea of the "essence" of the individual
> as determined by, rather than independent of, the individual's relations; it
> isn't accurately elaborated as
(quoting me) >> the idea that society (or some other totality)
represents a unified whole, with all sorts of relationships between
the parts [with] ot feeding back to affect individual attitudes,
ideologies, etc. <<
actually, those are two different ways of looking at exactly the same
thing. Rejecting the nonsense idea of an individual "essence," the
feed-back from the whole to the parts determines our individual
tastes, attitudes, expectations, etc. at the same time that we help
determine the nature of the whole. Whole makes parts _and_ parts make
whole.
> Though he doesn't call the ontological idea of interdependence involved
> "internal relations," Keynes does, like Marx, explicitly invoke the idea to
> explain why the alternative idea of relations as "external" (what he calls
> "the atomic hypothesis") "breaks down" in "psychics." This is one of the
> facts, a social ontological fact, that he claims makes the project of
> erecting a "mathematical psychics" on the foundations of "the utilitarian
> ethics and the utilitarian psychology") impracticable (X pp. 260-2).
I don't have a copy of "X." I don't know if it was published before or
after the Tract, so I can't say if it's relevant to the understanding
of the latter.
what does he say in this source? is it simply a descriptive effort,
such as your quotes about the love of money? or was it a serious
analysis?
crucially, criticizing the "atomic hypothesis" (parts make whole) is
not the same as presenting a complete alternative.
> In his essay on Marshall, he points to the idea (the idea that, as Marshall
> puts it in the Principles, "man is largely a creature of circumstances and
> changes with them") as the basis of the distinction Marshall drew "between
> the objects and methods of the mathematical sciences and those of the social
> sciences" ( X p. 197) and as constituting "the profundity of his
> [Marshall's] insight into the true character of his subject in its highest
> and most useful developments" (X p. 188). Marshall, as he tells us in the
> Principles, appropriated the idea from, among others, Hegel (an influence
> pointed to in Keynes's essay X p. 172).
Again, I don't know when this was published, so it's hard to see its
relevance to the "Tract."
BTW, it seems to me that it's quite possible that JMK was _developing_
a deeper vision of psychology than casual references to Freud or the
"love of money." The experience of the Depression may have pushed him
to understand how circumstances change people, so that people aren't
simply creators of circumstances.
> Figuring out what others mean is only part of what's involved in
> appropriating insight from them. Such appropriation requires that you also
> puzzle out the degree to which what they mean is true.
right.
> So my arguments supporting claims about what Keynes and Marx mean aren't, as
> you repeatedly suggest, arguments from authority, i.e. claims that this is
> sufficient to demonstrate that what they mean is true. They're interpretive
> arguments relying on quoted text as evidence. I've pointed this out to you
> before. Why do you continue repeating it?
actually, I did say anything about arguments from authority. (If it
seems that I did, that was not my major point.) My complaint has
always been about the sterility of scholasticism. The point of reading
old books is to get insights about the world, not to try to collect
quotes from here and there to prove some academic thesis. It's the
world that matters, not the texts.
--
Jim Devine / "Segui il tuo corso, e lascia dir le genti." (Go your own
way and let people talk.) -- Karl, paraphrasing Dante.
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