I understand Keynes completely now

By -
At least his comment about how he could only understand material in written German that he to some extent already understood well. My Italian is about at that point now. When I read an Italian newspaper, I can understand a story about Obama's trip to Israel pretty well, since I know the topic already. But the articles on Italian politics I really don't get at all. I think this is just the sort of thing of which Keynes was speaking.

Comments

  1. Jonathan Finegold Catalán7:09 PM

    This is just an educated guess, with an emphasis on "guess," but maybe Keynes was just being nice. He did read, and positively review, several books in German. It's true that some of Mises' ideas were unique and complicated, but I feel that Keynes understood enough of it and didn't find it convincing.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. gcallah7:57 PM

      Yes, Jonathan, I think you are correct. Others have documented Keynes's extensive knowledge of German.

      Nevertheless, the phenomenon he notes is real.

      Delete
  2. Bob Murphy1:06 AM

    Just admit it Gene: Your linguistic abilities are most suited to a totalitarian society.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Libertarians, My Libertarians!

By -
Cruel to be kind means that I love you . Because, while I think you are mistaken, your hearts are in the right place -- yes, even you, Silas --  unlike some people . This Breitbart fellow (discussed in the link above), by all appearances, deliberately doctored a video of Shirley Sherrod to make her remarks appear virulently racist, when they had, in fact, the opposite import. I heard that at a recent Austrian conference, some folks were talking about "Callahan's conservative turn." While that description is not entirely inaccurate, I must say that a lot of these people who today call themselves conservative give me the heebie-jeebies.
Read more

"Pre-Galilean" Foolishness

By -
 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...
Read more