"Don’t ever take a fence down until you know the reason it was put up.”
G.K. Chesterton
Technologists and free-marketeers are obsessed with removing barriers: Barriers to entry. Frictions. Levees. Borders. All in the name of frictionless transactions.
But barriers were often put up for a reason.…Dizzy is a historian by training. The post is worth a read in full.
Economists need to pay more attention to history — and philosophy, too. Homo economicus, which is a foundational assumption of conventional, presumes a theory of human nature that is not only contested by regarded in the history of thought as puerile.
This is also another argument against the over-reliance on formal models in economics. Economics is a "moral science," as Keynes put it, rather than a natural science. It has an important and foundational economic component, as well as being historical rather than atemporal.
This constitutes another paradox of liberalism.
4 comments:
They just need a border at the boundary of the EU....
She talking about economic liberalism and removing "frictions" that supposedly stand in the way of natural order arising spontaneously in the economy.
It started off well and then went all meta-physical.
"There is no such thing as society", famous words by neoliberal hero and founder Margaret Tatcher.
What's so hard to understand? They DON'T believe in walls, just in money to keep it flowing to their pockets. All the efforts going towards saving capitalism from itself are going to fail because the radicals in charge are oblivious to reality ("walls exists for a reason").
If you don't think there is such thing as society, you don't need walls to keep society up. Is all a clueless economic jihadist ideology. The ideology of free riders and pirates.
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