It’s a grim reality today that many of humanity’s emerging global problems— like climate change and biodiversity loss— produce the conditions for market failure in stunning abundance.
In other words, markets aren't self-sustaining or perfect. If the conditions--cultural, social, political, or natural--aren't aligned & operative, markets will fail.
The best you can do, whether with a prince or a landscape or the past, is to represent reality: to smooth over the details, to look for larger patterns, to consider how you can use what you see for your own purposes.
“The best that we have from history,” Goethe says, “is the enthusiasm that it stimulates.”
Disagree, Goethe. Per Collingwood, the highest use of history is self-knowledge.
For Samuelson and his followers, physics was the foundation of knowledge, and mathematics was its language. Where The General Theory had proclaimed “uncertainty” to be the bedrock analytical concept for economic thinking, Samuelson and his protégés sought not only certainty but precision.
Excessive physics-envy is the bain of the social sciences.
Z
THE OUTRAGES OF financialisation provide a specific example of a more general tendency that’s always been problematic in our culture, but it’s now accelerating with frightening speed. Knowledge and information throughout our economy and society are being degraded on an immense scale.
From Australian economist Nicholas Gruen. This suggests that information & knowledge are forms of energy that suffer from entropy. They need constant inputs to remain valuable.
On October 27, within hours of Trump declaring that it would be “totally inappropriate” if ballots were still being tallied after election day, eight business organizations, led by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the Business Roundtable, took the unusual step of issuing a joint statement, rebutting the president and calling for “peaceful and fair elections,” the counting of which might, quite legitimately, extend over “days or even weeks.” Jamie Dimon, chairman and chief executive of JPMorgan Chase, emailed the bank’s staff, stressing the “paramount” importance of respecting the democratic process. Two hundred and sixty leading executives signed a statement “warning that the health of the US economy depended on the strength of its democracy.”
I derive some hope that even Wall Street, with its infatuation with the bottom line, realizes that it, too, will lose of democracy & the rule of law go down the drain.
Once upon a time on the family farm, the feed was made on site (dried grass called hay), and cow manure was a combination fertilizer/pesticide—essentially a GHG break-even process. But now, with monoculture farming, the feed is on the factory farm in Iowa, and the manure is left on the concentrated animal feeding operation (CAFO) in Kansas (there’s triple the animal manure versus human feces produced each day in the US). Furthermore, on the CAFO, the manure isn’t repurposed as fertilizer. Instead it decomposes into methane and other pollutants—including nitrogen, phosphorus, antibiotics, and metals—which leech into groundwater when manure storage facilities inevitably leak.
We don't need to kill all the cattle; we need sustainable agriculture.
Self-organizing systems are intrinsically stable and resilient—but only up to a point. Chronic, low-grade stress sickens them, and once stressed beyond a certain threshold (sometimes called a tipping point), they can fall out of equilibrium and enter a regime of positive feedback in which a self-destructive process feeds on itself.
See my comment on the Homer-Dixon quote at the beginning.
A number of these themes come together in some remarks of Guicciardini, which explain why legal thinking is a natural matrix for a wide range of conceptual advances in applicable reasoning. “Common men find the variety of opinions that exists among lawyers quite reprehensible, without realizing that it proceeds not from any defects in the men but from the nature of the subject. General rules cannot possibly comprehend all particular cases. Often, specific cases cannot be decided on the basis of law, but must rather be dealt with by the opinions of men, which are not always in harmony. We see the same thing happen with doctors, philosophers, commercial arbitrators, and in the discourses of those who govern the state, among whom there is no less variety of judgement than among lawyers.”
Take it from a lawyer: so true.
If there is anything that could be called progress in the religious history of mankind, it resides in the gradual preference for the self over the other as the primary sacrificial victim. It is precisely in this that the Christian religion rests its moral claim.
I believe that Scruton is channeling Rene Girard here.
[Colin] Wilson felt something of the same [transported to a different time & place] while writing his book on Shaw. Writing of Shaw’s breakthrough after years of overwork as a music and theater critic, he [Wilson] had a “sudden feeling of intense joy,” as if his “heart had turned into a balloon” and was “sailing up into the air.” He had become aware, he said, of the “multiplicity of life.” He was back in Edwardian London, as the hero of The Philosopher’s Stone was back in Shakespeare’s day or Proust back in Combray. But he could just as easily be in “Goethe’s Weimar or Mozart’s Salzburg.” The experience, he points out, was not one of empathy; it was, as William James had said of his own mystical experience, perceptual. It was not merely a matter of feeling but of seeing, of perceiving a reality of which we are usually blind, or toward which we are usually indifferent. It was a moment of seeing from the bird’s-eye view rather than from our usual close-up perspective. Or, in other words, it was a moment of non-robotic consciousness.
Such moments are important because they renew us. They connect us to our source of power, meaning, and purpose, and fill us with new vitality. As Wilson came to see, the right brain is in charge of our power supply. It holds the purse strings on our strength.
Wilson knew that it was precisely such moments as these that the Romantics craved: the sense that distant realities are as real as the present moment—more real, in fact—and that life is infinitely interesting.
A sort of deja vu experience?
