I am currently reading The Master and His Emissary , which appears to be an excellent book. ("Appears" because I don't know the neuroscience literature well enough to say for sure, yet.) But then on page 186 I find: "Asking cognition, however, to give a perspective on the relationship between cognition and affect is like asking astronomer in the pre-Galilean geocentric world, whether, in his opinion, the sun moves round the earth of the earth around the sun. To ask a question alone would be enough to label one as mad." OK, this is garbage. First of all, it should be pre-Copernican, not pre-Galilean. But much worse is that people have seriously been considering heliocentrism for many centuries before Copernicus. Aristarchus had proposed a heliocentric model in the 4th-century BC. It had generally been considered wrong, but not "mad." (And wrong for scientific reasons: Why, for instance, did we not observe stellar parallax?) And when Copernicus propose...
This actually shows the quality of the article:
ReplyDelete"Of course, the “Austrian school” is not a school in the traditional sense of the word denoting a physical structure; the term defines those who believe in pure free-market economics and laissez-faire principles."
I had the wrong URL for that last link: sorry about that.
ReplyDeleteGene, do you still consider yourself an Austrian economist? (Just curious).
ReplyDeleteMy paper "Economics and it's modes," published in The Journal of Collingwood and British Idealism Studies, recommnds a pluralistic approach to economics. That has been my view since at least 2004, when I began working on that paper. (It was first my master's thesis at LSE.)
ReplyDelete"If you read a site like Lew Rockwell.Com..."
ReplyDeleteYour first mistake was reading LewRockwell.Com.
Ah, but Prateek, I read it for amusement value.
ReplyDeleteAh, but of course.
ReplyDeleteLRC is one of the wackiest websites ever made.
I think the people there deliberately want to keep it that way, but...a long pretense creates a reality.
It's like LRC was made by libertarians to troll on the internet. But their trolling went so far, they started trolling themselves.
David Kramer, whom acquaintances describe as an otherwise calm and easygoing person, is anything but that when he does his LRC blog posts.
Please consider this comment responsive not to the LRC articles, but rather to the implicit notion that "plunging" public support for free markets is an indicator that free marketers are losing the "battle of ideas."
ReplyDeleteFacially it seems obvious that that's the case. On the other hand:
1) The old Gandhi aphorism, "first they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win." It could be that "plunging support" for free markets merely means that more people have made it past the first two stages.
2) If the mental process of working through economics at the popular level in any way resembles the "five stages of grief," then progress from denial (of the existence of free market economics) to anger (over the tenets of free market economics) is, well, progress.
Well, the Mises Institute site is a mixture of silly posts and high quality articles, and the main result of that is that they are lowering those articles's reputation. It's a disservice to Ludwig von Mises.
ReplyDelete