I remember reading Michael Intriligator's book on optimization a long time
ago. Its chapter on "the maximum principle" of dynamic optimization or
something said that if you are on the optimum long-run path, all you need
to do is optimize in the short run. If not, not. That suggested to me that
what is good in the long run has to be good in the short. Less possibility
for detours into evil in the name of eventual good.
At 04:54 PM 6/22/05, you wrote:
tom walker wrote:
Keynes said in
the long-term we're all dead. Well, I say in the
short-term we're all slaves to circumstance. Our task,
to paraphrase Walter Benjamin, is nothing less than to
make the continuum of history explode so that the
chains of "long-term" and "short-term" lose their
power: a tiger's leap into the open air of history.
Keynes's point was that it usually isn't possible to justify short term
pain on the ground that it will be overwhelmed by long run gains. This is
because, so he claimed, no rational grounds are usually available for
belief in the long run gains. Moreover, given that the destruction of
existing arrangements can liberate irrational emotions that will now find
their outlet in much worse forms of "cruelty, the reckless pursuit of
personal power and authority, and other forms of self-aggrandisement"
(witness WW I, the rise of fascism and Nazism, and WW II) the short term
pain issuing from the destruction of existing arrangements is likely to
prove much greater than those enthusiastic for "a tiger's leap into the
open air of history" expect.
Though opposed on these grounds to apocalyptic messianic visions of the
process that would actualize the "ideal social republic," his idea of this
republic is very close to Marx's. Thus he claims that the "central thesis
throughout" his discussion, in Essays in Persuasion, of long run future
possibilities, of "economic possibilities for our grandchildren," is:
"the profound conviction that the economic problem, as one may call it for
short, the problem of want and poverty and the economic struggle between
classes and nations, is nothing but a frightful muddle, a transitory and
an unnecessary muddle. For the western world already has the resources and
the technique, if we could create the organisation to use them, capable of
reducing the economic problem, which now absorbs our moral and material
energies, to a position of secondary importance.
"Thus the author of these essays, for all his croakings, still
hopes and believes that the day is not far off when the economic problem
will take the back seat where it belongs, and that the arena of the heart
and head will be occupied, or reoccupied, by our real problems - the
problems of life and of human relations, of creation and behaviour and
religion." (Collected Writings, vol. IX p. xviii)
Here he was, like Marx, overly optimistic.
Ted
Robert Scott Gassler
Professor of Economics
Vesalius College of the Vrije Universiteit Brussel
Pleinlaan 2
B-1050 Brussels
Belgium
32.2.629.27.15
