On 4-Aug-07, at 10:27 AM, Doyle Saylor wrote:
Greetings Economists,
On Aug 4, 2007, at 6:08 AM, Ted Winslow wrote:
How can econometric methods be used to test whether this treatment of
capitalist individuality and its historical development is realistic?
Doyle;
Well graph theory (see Erdos) is amendable to metrics. Further if you
reference emotional states like greed one I think can describe a space
around the person in which connection occurs. What is often
missing in
a left view of emotion structure is what really happens in the
connection process dynamically 'felt' by people who are in a society.
Those are often described as personality clashes. It is clear that
discrimination means closed to contact of particular types. But
discrimination is really reflecting a built emotion structure. If
I am
angry I will do it. If I am scared I won't do it. If I am
disgusted I
won't do it. Etc. describes spacial relations. That shape
describes a
conventional numerical space or metric.
My question wasn't how can an emotion like "greed" be so conceived as
to make applicable methods that assume that the form of greed is such
as to make such methods applicable. It was how can such methods be
used to show that greed has or doesn't have this form. The same
point can be made about "experimental" methods.
The authorities (their "authority" deriving from their independently
confirmable insight) Marx cites in chap. 24 as insightful about the
feudal and capitalist "passions", Hegel, Goethe and Balzac, reached
their insight through "experience", but the particular insights Marx
attributes to them can't be represented "metrically". Balzac, for
instance, who is represented as someone "who so thoroughly studied
every shade of avarice," is cited as insightful about the different
roles played by "hoarding" in "childhood" and mature forms of
avarice; he "represents the old usurer Gobseck as in his second
childhood when he begins to heap up a hoard of commodities." This
difference in the "identities" of childhood and mature forms of greed
rules out the existence of a unit common to each in terms of which
each could be "measured".
<http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch24.htm>
Ted
