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| An outstanding consideration of Keynes & his legacy. |
Market economies were not a distinct realm, independent of the state, operating according to their own principles. The rhythms of trade, their logic and mechanisms, had to be defined and supported by political authority. His [Keynes's] battle over reparations and inter-ally debt had made him a lifelong enemy of austerity—the doctrine that governments can best heal troubled economies by slashing government spending and paying down debt. When a government was burdened with too much debt, Keynes had come to believe, it was generally better to swear off the debt than to pay it off by burdening the public with a lower standard of living.
N.B. My insight is that all economics, or at least macroeconomics, is political economy.
I am not suggesting that every Jew go and talk to a neo-Nazi, or that historians reconsider whether the Holocaust happened, or that psychiatry revisit the claim that homosexuals are mentally ill. The Constitution of Knowledge owes its efficiency to producing a body of knowledge, an archive of settled claims which do not need constant relitigating. The reality-based community is conservative, in the sense that it conserves what it has learned and reopens closed accounts reluctantly. When new evidence turns up or experts develop new arguments, then reexamining an established claim may be in order, but the vast majority of claims against settled knowledge do not deserve research budgets or investigative-reporting teams and are rightly ignored.
sng: To wit, it's all a matter of sound judgment, which, like all human endeavors, remains fallible. But we must work with what we've got, knowing all the time that we could be wrong. But not all probabilities of wrongness are the same.
His [Lorenzo Valla, Italian humanist, 1407-1457] project was to replace Scholastic logic and metaphysics with dialectic and rhetoric, as understood by Cicero, Quintilian, and Boethius. This involved a revival of the arguing on both sides of a question, the urbane skepticism and topical argument of classical rhetoric, in opposition to Scholastic “dogmatism.” As in Cicero, an emphasis on the likely followed. After dividing premises of arguments into the necessary and the likely, Valla draws distinctions among the latter. “But as long as the reason is not plainly true but half-true and half-certain, then the conclusion is not necessary but half-necessary, which when it has much force is called likely and credible, that is, exceedingly possible, and when it has scant force is called possible, that is, scarcely likely or credible.”
sng: Compare this thought with the preceding quote from Rauch. Thinking along the same lines?
As civilization has advanced, the pack-bond (the tribe, the extended family) has been broken. This is the root of the widely diagnosed “anomie” or “alienation” or “existential anguish” about which so many social critics have written so eloquently. What has happened is that the conditioning of the bio-survival bond to the gene-pool has been replaced by a conditioning of bio-survival drives to hook onto the peculiar tickets which we call “money”.
sng: Does money equal energy? Food? Status? Prestige? Love? Security? In some way, I would answer a qualified "yes" to each of these questions.
[T]heir [poor Indians'] hardships were primarily derived from inequalities of wealth and power among Bihar’s [an Indian state] castes and from the corrosive effect of these inequalities, when combined with severe resource scarcities, on the state’s political institutions.
sng: If you're not worried about the growing inequalities here in the U.S. and the decline in the efficacy and legitimacy of our governments, then this is an example of why you should be.
From the perspective of perennial philosophy, time is not separate from but manifests timelessness. The unfolding of patterns in nature has its origin in timeless numbers and geometry that, in turn, are principles radiating from the timeless realm of order prior to the cosmos that we see now.
When people subconsciously begin to associate you with positive moods and emotions, you are going to be the bell that makes people smile without realizing why
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