The Chattering Classes

I don't think anyone really understands conservatives very well. For me, conservatives are the ones in the boonies. They are of low or moderate income, and they do not read so many books. They live in small towns, or rural areas, not the city. Drive to a rural area or a small town, look out your car window and you'll see the ones I mean. They are very nice. They believe silly things; but, then so do you. Only you don't admit it.
     They are mostly white. They see their lives being stolen away by liberals. They do not like that. Why should they? They are the guardians of decency and morals.
     When I say I do not think that anyone understands conservatives very well, I mean that the educated classes or chattering classes simply have no idea what is going on with these kinds of persons, the kind we are now discussing.
     I know, because I have had a bit closer contact with these people. I found them very nice persons. They have their own culture, and, no, I can definitely not explain it to you in a short essay. They don't chatter as much, let's just leave it at that.
     (I am wondering now if I will get readers because of the title of this thing and why is it that anyone reads this thing in general. maybe there are some good reasons. I don't know.)

Revision Policy

If you have a favorite post (some I get as many as twelve readers for) you should go back to it sometimes and see if I have revised it, as many times they are not written very professionally and I go back later and try to upgrade things a bit. Thank you.

How Do the Members of Trading Systems Think?

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There are solutions to economic problems but it does not seem that help is going to come from any of the usual sources. It takes creative thinking. 
How do members of trading systems think? Members of economic systems have been trained. They have been trained to think individualistically. A. Merkel of Germany is doing this. This is the simple reflex of: “I will protect my own.” 
     However since we live in an interconnected global system, what each person does affects the other. You cannot think only of yourself. 
     Not only is thinking about oneself alone not the only way to think, in fact that is not how the system works. It works based on mutual interdependence. 
     Systems work that way. All systems do. 
     If one person is generous, everyone has to be (it is the same for selfishness, isn't it?)  There is such a thing as capitalist generosity.

Roundtable: Kant, Aron, McCloskey, Silverman

In “Politics and History,” historian Raymond Aron discusses Immanuel Kant. Science, Kant points out, is not reality but the mind’s representation of it. Aron suggests the extension of this idea to the field of history. We just represent it in some suitable way. We have to be serious about which representation we decide to employ. We have a way of assuming things to be normal, or normative. Our own personal representation of reality starts by being pretty close to reality. What happens when we try to represent it, though, creating sciences like "history," or "economics." How do we reconcile out versions of reality with what makes reality real? Is it even possible to discuss it?

    This is reality. And here, you see, is a part of reality that I am going to call the economy. And, this is my fairy godmother! Where exactly did I depart from reality? Of those three things, which ones aren’t real? The last one? Not very likely, but, how do we know?

    Supposedly there is a race for money. There is some kind of race or competition. That’s a perfectly feasible idea and one that feels true or that has a feeling of reality. Out of this, some people create (the field or the science of) economics. What kinds of mistakes can be made when we do that? That creation of ideas or theories in the subject field of economics is not the race for money. It is only the creation of a pile of theories about the race for money. What is the best way to represent the race for money in a science of economics? Is it by performing the operation of putting the amounts of money on one axis of a graph and putting the quantities of items produced by some factory on the other? That's where standard economics begins but how do we actually know that is the right place to begin?

    The two are distinct. McCloskey denies that there is any such distinction, but in fact it is as good a distinction as any. There is an actual thing we are seeing as a kind of human competition or a race after money and there are the things economists say about it. But it is not the case that these two are identical. We need to actually verify that the things persons say about it have some kind of valid connection to the reality itself. There are all kinds of questions to be asked about whether the methods of economics are valid or not.

Deirdre Says...

(note: updated July 15)

Deirdre McCloskey says (p. 16, 1985, 1992) that there are many ways to practice literary criticism ----- or, for that matter, economics. Literary criticism (lit crit to some) can, she says, be subdivided into catergories of "rhetorical, philological, Aristotelian, belletristic, archetypical, neo [something or other]...Marxist, reader-response," etc. I think she's playing with us.
     Anyway, there are quite a few ways to do "lit crit", all of which can are conveniently called "literary criticism". And, as for this other thing, conveniently called "economics," the same thing goes, says she. There is: "Good Old Chicago School," whatever that is, and other terribly twisted names ("highbrow general equilibrium?"). In terms of economics I actually don't know what she is talking about since I got turned off a long time ago (as soon as I studied it, in fact, but I am not trying to dwell on this not-so-priviliged subject too much). The very same subject McCloskey, bless her heart, has been embracing, or at least she was, as of 1998 or whenever. For many years anyways.
    But, since the nineties, she like others are slowly lining up today like peeping ducks in a row, myself proudly included, and finally getting the picture. It is that bad, in just basic human, rational, ethical terms and you simply have to face it. After all, the truth is the truth ----- rhetoric, my ass.

Truths that aren't (Econo)

The "truths" of economics are not truths, they're ideology. What do I mean by "ideology" exactly? The distinguishing characteristic of what I consider as "ideological" is that they (ideological tropes, melodies McCluhan-ite messages and Machiavellian massages) are subscribed to blindly, without the further investigation that would upgrade it from the label "ideology." I do not actually think that ideology is always all that bad but it is that the accepting subject evinces no further desire or will to dig that far, far enough to find out if such matters are true, which, in many cases, is simply a whole lot of work. So, the word "ideology," for me, has a broad range. It is a very interesting word and I've seen a few debates about it.
     There are many things like this. It is not even unusual. Therefore, although I definitely do say that, in economics, the "ideological" content should be considered dangerous and even nefarious, not to mention insincere, dishonest and malicious, sometimes also there are cases where these standard tropes and messages are rather innocent, not necessarily nefarious. I do not agree that this is the case for economics, as a field of enquiry in this society. 
     In the more prosaic case, ideology is just examples of ubiquitous elements inherent in any culture. In order to create a workable society there have to be these "cultural" elements, and thus to the word "ideology" there is a wide range, an ambivalent, even nonverbal area.

     All of this can be very closely tied into an analysis of capitalism, capitalism as society/culture, in terms of capitalism's ambiguity, etc. but, quite frankly, it's hard. That takes a lot of time and energy...maybe if somebody would pay me... No, really, I would like to explain it.

Brains May Differe, and So May Persons

Brains may differ. There may be "left brain" and "right brain" types, or various types of person. That's possible; certainly, there are in general various "personality types" or what have you.
     It is possible for at least some of us to see things, to some degree of accuracy, without verbalizing them. Not everything is put into verbal label systems. I am like this. I see all kinds of things, without any verbality coming into it at all. Urban streets and doctors' offices and public spaces --- they all have their various patterns that register. There are no theories at all, at least not yet.
     I migh be getting there, but it just hasn't happened yet.

     (Here is something I just happened to see after writing that: "[p]erhaps the very idea of everydayness, of man "having" a world is rooted in these writings.") He means the writings of the Greeks, their "oikonomia." This is the thing he refers to, as "these writings." That is Till Duppe, who has a book out now on what is called "economics," which is to say in the university. I am interested in this one. I might discuss it more later, if you are good and keep reading me bloggie thing!