America’s Ideological Infection — Christopher R. Hill

The United States is not only in the grips of a COVID-19 crisis that threatens to derail the economy and potentially take millions of lives. It is also suffering from a president who is deeply suspicious of expertise and of governance generally....

In my view, the second sentence should read, "Americans that are deeply suspicious of expertise and of governance generally elected a president that shares this view. Blaming government policy on the president rather than the political process is myopic. Polling indicates that the president's popularity at a high. This is an opportunity cost of representative democracy in a plutocracy in which competing elite factions control the narrative through the media. 

This should not devolve into being about personalities rather than issues. Democracy requires compromise rather than standing on principle no matter, with the winning faction imposing its will based on "elections have consequences," and the losing faction doing everything possible to neutralize the winning faction and preventing it from governing. Unfortunately, this has become the American way and it is resulting in divisiveness and paralysis.

I have my own attitudes and preferences in this regard but that is of no consequences to anyone but me. As citizens we should be debating issues and discussing qualifications. Not that the leadership's character should not be a subject of discussion, but that too is largely an ideological matter. Focus on personalities is basically a distraction and is is also used factionally in narrative control. Beware of being sucked in.

Why is this so significant? In addition to being part of the democratic process based on informed debate and free inquiry, it is also a matter of the collective consciousness. It is useless to criticize others on moral and ethical grounds that are largely ideological other than for political advantage and to "feel good" by venting. This is poison individually and it breaks the coherence of collective consciousness that is necessary for solidarity and community.

Most importantly, in addition to being blinded by partisan ideology, which is manipulated, focusing on personality poisons collective consciousness and lowers the "vibration" of the nation at at time when a high vibratory level characterized by resonance and coherence is needed to address emergent challenges and seize opportunities. The Chinese character for crisis includes both challenge and opportunity. Every breakdown is an opportunity for a breakthrough. What does kill you will make you stronger. This is true individually and socially.

Mike Norman constantly emphasizes that the mental game is as important as analysis and execution in markets. This involves establishing a center and functioning from it, focusing on the important instead of being distracted by the trivial, as well as maintaining poise under fire and in spite of the emotional heat or cold of "animal spirits" (Keynes).

For most people, self-talk is not enough, even though the messaging we send ourselves is important. Useful aphorisms here are, "Don't entertain negativity," and "Be happy, don't worry," even in the most challenging circumstances. But many people need more than words.

Most people will profit by incorporating some centering practice or practices that promote managing stress and giving deep relaxation. There are many such practices available and one is best advised to look for those that fit one's own disposition, since success in this requires a discipline of regular practice.

Project Syndicate

America’s Ideological Infection
Christopher R. Hill

The End of the Free-Market Paradigm — Diane Coyle

The assumption of isolated individuals transacting in free markets has underpinned highly damaging economic policies since the 1980s. Given the interdependent nature of the digital world, economic researchers need to ditch their unscientific attachment to this paradigm and instead focus on the economy of the 2020s.

The 2020s will be the decade when the idea that economic problems can be “left to the market” to solve is finally put to rest – after some 40 years during which that belief has caused untold damage to society and the environment....

This sort of assumption may be appropriate, sort of, for micro-theorizing, but it unsuited to macro-theorizing, as the results reveal.  Now the stakes are so big as to require revisiting the foundations of the normal paradigm. The issue for economics is scope and scale. Microeconomic toy models don't scale and the issues of macro lie beyond the scope of micro. "Microfoundations" as a governing assumption must go.

Accountant Richard Murphy points out that the first step is taking externality into account in figuring costs. Capitalize the gains and socialize the losses, as is the case at present, is not working so well and things are just getting worse without the market dealing with true cost. The economic calculation errors are becoming enormous.

Project Syndicate
The End of the Free-Market Paradigm
Diane Coyle | freelance economist and a former advisor to the UK Treasury. She is a member of the UK Competition Commission and is acting Chairman of the BBC Trust, the governing body of the British Broadcasting Corporation

Some People Who Have Shaped Economics — Robert Vienneau

"The University [of Chicago] is the best investment I ever made in my life." -- John D. Rockefeller

Follow the money.

Thoughts On Economics
Some People Who Have Shaped Economics
Robert Vienneau

Indoctrinated by Econ 101 — John Warner

My fundamental understanding of the world has been warped by a now challenged approach. I'm not alone.…

In the end, the chief byproduct of my general education exposure was a kind of indoctrination into the centrality of markets to understanding human behavior and the apparent importance of economics professors.

I’m not alone. Introductory economics could be one of the most widely received credits in all of higher education. And unlike other common courses (like say, first-year writing), Econ 101 is extremely similar institution to institution. Supply and demand is framed as a law in the same fashion as gravity. When supply and demand does not seem to work according to the “law” (e.g., health care) it is the not the law that is faulty, but the market itself, with much public policy effort going toward trying to bring the market in compliance with the law, often to negative effect.

That supply and demand might not be a law doesn’t seem to occur. Higher education seems to be bumping up against these tensions as well....

Bingo! That's is the purpose of it, after all. Some are finally waking up to it. Fake news is one thing that drives the narrative, and fake knowledge is another.

And it is not just Econ 101. The brainwashing continues through the PhD.

Inside Higher Ed
Indoctrinated by Econ 101

John Warner

See also

Real-World Economics Review Blog
Economics is an ideology

Atheists & Agnostics Also Frequently Believe in the Supernatural, a New Study Shows — Josh Jones

Being an atheist or agnostic doesn't necessarily imply that one is a naturalist.

Open Culture
Atheists & Agnostics Also Frequently Believe in the Supernatural, a New Study Shows

Josh Jones

Jonathan Cook — Long Read: The neoliberal order is dying. Time to wake up

Analysis from the left mostly about British politics but inclusive of all aspects of neoliberalism as the policy, strategy and tactics of elite power.

Says "long read," but it is not that long. Worth a read even if you are not British since it is also an analysis of elite power as it relates to national politics and neoliberal globalization.

Let's hope Cook is correct in seeing the wave cresting. The question then becomes will the breaking of the wave result in world war as the elite desperately tries to hang on to its waning power and control.

True Publica
Long Read: The neoliberal order is dying. Time to wake up

Jonathan Cook, award-winning British journalist based in Nazareth, Israel; author, and public intellectual as a voice of conscience

Robert Paul Wolff — SOCIALISM?

One of the Anonymati [Anonymouses? Anonymice?] asks that I write a critique of the oh so sober, serious analysis of socialism, complete with charts and graphs, produced by the President’s Council of Economic Advisors....

I have read the Executive Summary of the report and scanned through the report itself, but I do not intend to take issue with it, and my reason for not doing so is the real subject of this post. Let me begin by reminding you that Karl Marx, who wrote 5000 pages, more or less, on the history, anatomy, laws of motion, and mystified ideology of capitalism, wrote maybe 50 or 60 pages, if that, about socialism. It was not a lapse in memory on his part. He had a reason for not writing about how socialism would work, and that reason is the very heart of his economic and historiographical theory.

Marx believed that just as capitalism had developed slowly, organically, within the existing socio-economic system of feudalism, so too the social relationships of production appropriate to socialism would develop within the structure of capitalism until the contradiction, as he called it, between the two would produce a revolutionary transition. Socialism would not come about as a result of manifestos, or theoretical analyses, or counter-cultural utopian experimental communities. Rather, the inner development of capitalism itself would create the new social relations of production out of which socialism would emerge. In effect, capitalists themselves would be the gravediggers of capitalism....

The Philosopher's Stone
SOCIALISM?
Robert Paul Wolff | Professor Emeritus, University of Massachusetts Amherst

See also

In what follows, I propose to take as my text a famous statement from Marx’s A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy1—a sort of preliminary sketch of Das Kapital2—and see what it can tell us about the capitalism of our day. I shall try to show you that Marx was fundamentally right about the direction in which capitalism would devel- op, but that because of his failure to anticipate three important features of the mature capitalist world, his optimism concerning the outcome of that development was misplaced. Along the way, I shall take a fruitful detour through the arid desert of financial accounting theory.

Here is the famous passage, from the preface of the Contribution, published in 1859:

No social order ever disappears before all the productive forces for which there is room in it have been developed, and new, higher re- lations of production never appear before the material conditions of their existence have matured in the womb of the old society.3

Robert Paul Wolff, "The Future of Socialism"35 SEATTLE U. L. REV. 1403 (2012)

See also

In a slender volume edited by Heinrich Geisenberger “The Great Regression”, fifteen, among the most important left-wing social thinkers of today, ask the following question: what is the future of social-democracy now when global neoliberalism is crumbling and the forces of nationalism and xenophobia are on the rise? I would not be letting you in on a big secret, nor do I think I would undermine the book’s appeal, if I say that they do not have an answer; neither individually, not collectively. The reason is simple: the answer, as of now, is elusive, and it might even seem that it does not exist....

Global Inequality

What is to be done? Fifteen authors in search of a solution.

Branko Milanovic | Visiting Presidential Professor at City University of New York Graduate Center and senior scholar at the Luxembourg Income Study (LIS), and formerly lead economist in the World Bank's research department and senior associate at Carnegie Endowment for International Peace

See also

When we launched the Niskanen Center in January 2015, we happily identified ourselves as libertarians. Sure, we were heterodox libertarians, but there are many schools of libertarianism beyond those promoted by Charles Koch’s political operations. The school we identified with was a left-libertarianism concerned with social justice (a libertarian perspective that I’ve defended in debates with more orthodox libertarians here and here). That worldview lacked an institutional voice in 2015. Our ambition was to create a space for it and, in so doing, redefine what it meant to be libertarian in the 21st century.

 I have abandoned that libertarian project, however, because I have come to abandon ideology. This essay is an invitation for you to do likewise — to walk out of the “clean and well-lit prison of one idea.” Ideology encourages dodgy reasoning due to what psychologists call “motivated cognition,” which is the act of deciding what you want to believe and using your reasoning power, with all its might, to get you there. Worse, it encourages fanaticism, disregard for social outcomes, and invites irresolvable philosophical disputes. It also threatens social pluralism — which is to say, it threatens freedom.

The better alternative is not moral relativism. The better alternative is moderation, a commodity that is rapidly disappearing in political life, with dangerous consequences for the American republic.

My hope is that I might best convince you to leave ideology behind by holding up a mirror to an ideological culture that is likely not your own — the world of libertarianism — and discussing the reasons why I left it behind. I suspect that, for those who hold to an “–ism,” the ideological culture of my old world doesn’t look too terribly different from your own.

I do not aim here to settle old scores or to criticize friends and former colleagues. After all, the beliefs that I find wanting today are the very beliefs that I myself held for most of my adult life. I simply mean to put in stark relief the pitfalls of ideological thinking, to illustrate those pitfalls in the world I know best, and to make the case for something better...

Niskanen Center

THE ALTERNATIVE TO IDEOLOGY

Jerry Taylor

See also

What happens when the rising tide doesn't lift all boats.

Conversable Economist
Remembering Albert Hirschman's Tunnel Effect
Timothy Taylor | Managing editor of the Journal of Economic Perspectives, based at Macalester College in St. Paul, Minnesota

Adam Kotsko — On civil war

We have a new tag — "civil war." Sadly, it has come to the point that serious people are discussing the issue.

Adam Kotsko is a rising public intellectual.

Incidentally, I follow many blogs and news sources on the RSS feed. The political divide in the US reflects the growing political divide in the world between unipolarism (my way or the highway) and and multipolarism (let a hundred flowers bloom). The right is convinced that the left is "communist," while the left is convinced that the right is "fascist."

This is not headed in a good direction either domestically in the US or internationally.

We the subject of war is occurring more frequently, both internationally and in terms of an actual US civil war.

This is happening mostly in venues that appeal mostly to the silos they represent. Since it hasn't been picked up by the corporate media, most are probably unaware of it.

An un für sich
On civil war
Adam Kotsko, independent scholar

See also

"Mob" again. The new political meme. You can see where this is going.

Zero Hedge
Trump: "Angry Mob" of "Radical Democrats" Has Become "Too Extreme And Too Dangerous To Govern"

Robert Vienneau — Ideological Innocence Of The Fox News Viewer

This post deals with a set of ideas that I find appealing, but contradictory. I know I do not fully understand many of them. Perhaps somebody who understands more can either agree with me that there are contradictions here or point to some way of resolving them. This post is also more about current events than is typical of my posts....

Not actually about Fox News but rather on the use of analytic concepts in human science — psychology, sociology and political science, and by extension economics and political economy.

Poses questions rather than tendering answers.

The post is especially concerned with refining the broad term "ideology" into an analytic concept by defining boundary conditions. This is both a logical and epistemic matter, dealing with sign use and also mindset and behaviors.

The most is short and compact. It brings up many issues that consistently come up in comments but it also leaves them hanging, as might be expected given the scope of a blog post.

These questions touch upon some of the knottiest and most controversial issues in philosophy, semiotics, and foundational studies.

Thoughts On Economics
Ideological Innocence Of The Fox News Viewer
Robert Vienneau

Brian Romanchuk — DSGE Wars (Again)

Although this sounds extremely harsh, it is the only way to describe aspects of DSGE macro such as the assumption that the level of interest rates is a key determinant of economic behaviour. In practice, this assumption is built into all mainstream models, and the empirical methodologies have no way of rejecting the assumption. It is not entirely an accident that the consensus has been shocked by the slow pace of recovery after modern recessions -- after all, it was believed that the level of interest rates was "unsustainably low." Indeed, the natural rate of interest had to be revised lower in order for the data to fit the theory.

In other words, the whole panoply of mathematics used is a gigantic red herring.

From the perspective of wanting to understand how the economy functions, there is only one real question: are the desired theoretical outcomes of DSGE macro practitioners useful? The fact that DSGE macro is roundly ignored by everyone whose job depends upon being right about the economy is probably the best answer to that question. (In theory, central bankers are supposed to care about being right about the economy, but in practice, even the raw incompetence displayed heading into 2007 did not cut into retired senior central bankers' subsequent speaking fees.)

From the perspective of academic economics, it is an obvious problem that this methodology has to be used in the "top journals." This is only a surprise if you assume that the academic system shows a tendency to progress towards the truth.…

Fitting the world to a model doesn't work so well.

The key criticsm from the POV of logical analysis and philosophy of science is this:

In Section 7.3, recursive competitive equilibrium is defined. It starts with a lot of mathematics, but even then, some economist hand-waving sneaks into the definition. They use terms that do not appear to correspond to standard mathematical concepts, and hope the reader knows what they mean. Mathematics largely consists of statements about sets and the property of sets; it is unclear what set properties they are describing at key sections of their definition.

Math may look impressive but it says nothing that is not contained in the stipulations — definitions and axioms that relate them. In represesntational models these stipulation establish the semantic connection with the "world" that the model purports to represent. That world provides the objective criteria for assessing the how representative a model actually is in application.

Problems at this foundational level result in GIGO. There is no room for lack of specificty in mathematical reasoning.

Bond Economics
DSGE Wars (Again)
Brian Romanchuk

Guy Rolnik and Asher Schechter — “A Slow, Creeping Consolidation of Power by Big Money Over Think Tanks in the United States”

Following his ouster from New America, antitrust scholar Barry Lynn talks to ProMarket about academic capture and the power of digital platforms like Google.

I don't know about "slow and creeping." A lot of influential think tanks were founded by big money to promote ruling elite ideology as a means of influence and propaganda. Coupled with increasing centralization of media control and inroads of influence into eduction, the forum free enquiry and debate is shrinking.

ProMarket — The blog of the Stigler Center at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business
“A Slow, Creeping Consolidation of Power by Big Money Over Think Tanks in the United States”
Guy Rolnik and Asher Schechter

Ramanan — The Los Angeles Review Of Books On Liberalism

Rensin says:

The most significant development in the past 30 years of liberal self-conception was the replacement of politics understood as an ideological conflict with politics understood as a struggle against idiots unwilling to recognize liberalism’s monopoly on empirical reason. The trouble with liberalism’s enemies was no longer that they were evil, although they might be that too. The problem, reinforced by Daily Kos essays in your Facebook feed and retweeted Daily Show clips, was that liberalism’s enemies were factually wrong about the world.…

Comeuppance.

The Case for Concerted Action
The Los Angeles Review Of Books On Liberalism
V. Ramanan

Suzanne Venker — Campus Free Speech Is The Least Of It: What I Learned From My Visit To Bard

This short post says a lot about reality construction. The author is a controversial speaker who was invited to speak at Bard College. She was received politely and delivered her presentation. Her complaint is that the students were so brainwashed that they did not agree with her.

Parallel realities.

Both the speaker and the student think that the other has been blue-pilled, and they have popped the red pill.

This is normal wherever ideology is prevalent, and this includes economics.

The Daily Caller
Campus Free Speech Is The Least Of It: What I Learned From My Visit To Bard
Suzanne Venker | Fox News Contributor

John Quiggin — Bastiat anticipates climate science denialism

… on Googling Bastiat + pollution, I came across a remarkable package in which Bastiat anticipates the climate change debate and takes the denialist side in advance.…

What’s striking, though, is [Bastiat's] a priori faith that everything will be OK because of Divine Providence [compare with "spontaneous natural order"], which ensures that human activity tends towards harmony. If that fails, and a laissez-faire economy does in fact produce unsustainable pollution, his whole case collapses.

Of course, it’s possible to salvage a version of laissez-faire in the way suggested by Coase, using newly created property rights. But this requires the admission that property rights are a socially constructed set of rules, enforced by coercion, rather than a category inherent in the natural relationship between people and things. It’s precisely this admission that propertarians have been unwilling/unable to make, and why they still rely on magical thinking like that displayed by Bastiat.

John Quiggin's Blog
Bastiat anticipates climate science denialism
John Quiggin | Professor and an Australian Research Council Laureate Fellow at the University of Queensland, and a member of the Board of the Climate Change Authority of the Australian Government

SouthFront — US State Dept Believes There Are No Civilians In Mosul And No Terrorists In Aleppo

I think that most US official involved actually believe this regardless of the counter-evidnece and counter-testimony involved. Clash of world views and the lenses through which "facts" are shaped.

SouthFront
US State Dept Believes There Are No Civilians In Mosul And No Terrorists In Aleppo

See also

TASS
Russian defense ministry says situation in Iraqi Mosul is nothing like in Syria's Aleppo

Fort Russ
“Stop watching RT and other Russian-biased sources.” A Tale of Two Cities

Tom Winter

Chris Dillow — Ideologue? Moi?

The difference between Marxians (realists) and Marxists (ideologues) relative to other ideologies and assorted fanatics. Simple, short, to the point and documented. Good one.

Stumbling and Mumbling
Ideologue? Moi?
Chris Dillow | Investors Chronicle

John Mearsheimer — Why ISIL won't be defeated

In late August 2006, John Mearsheimer and Steve Walt published a book called 'The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy', ever since life, says Mearsheimer, has been fundamentally altered.

"If you criticise Israel or criticise the lobby, you pay a significant price and most people are unwilling to pay this price," Mearsheimer told Al Jazeera.

A specialist of international politics and author of several books, Mearsheimer maintains a critical view of United States foreign policy with special emphasis on its Middle East policies.

He argues that the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) will not be defeated in traditional warfare because "you do not defeat an ideology".

Mearsheimer is working on a new book that tackles the relationship between liberalism and nationalism in international politics.

"My argument is that nationalism is the most powerful ideology on the planet and, whenever liberalism and nationalism clash, nationalism wins almost every time," he said.

He spoke to Al Jazeera about the war on ISIL, US foreign policy and the Palestinian question.

Al Jazeera
Why ISIL won't be defeated

John Mearsheimer | R. Wendell Harrison Distinguished Service Professor of Political Science and the co-director of the Program on International Security Policy at the University of Chicago

Brad DeLong — Weekend Reading: Diane Coyle (2012): Do Economic Crises Reflect Crises in Economics?

Insightful observations about what's wrong with the economics profession and why it matters to everyone else.

WCEG — The Equitablog
Weekend Reading: Diane Coyle (2012): Do Economic Crises Reflect Crises in Economics?
Brad DeLong

JR Barch — … On Raising the Level of Collective Consciousness [I]

There are three major fields of thought or areas, before our consciousness, present in the mind:

1. Science – including education

2. Philosophy – great conditioning ideas

3. Psychology – what is man essentially, and how does he function?

The first two deal with the proper use of the mind and intellectual faculty – the power of discrimination – so that correct knowledge arises from correct perception, correct deduction, and correct witness (accurate evidence). Governments around the world commit a grave crime against humanity by LYING in order to sustain their particular ideology. So does the advertising and entertainment industries. No parent would LIE to their children if they wanted their kids to grow up with a clear mind and right habitual use of the mental faculties; and to be in touch, inside of themselves, with a sense of integrity, dignity and self-respect, extending to others. People forget that it is our behaviour towards one another, based on the inclusivity and universality of the sense of self, that determines what happens in the world; the ideologies are not necessarily compelling. It depends upon whether or not we are willing to be slaves, to whatever mind says. Or to put it in other words, whether or not our relations with ourselves and others come from a deeper place, free of all ideologies, because they are centred in the greater reality of being.…

Inspecting the foundation. If a foundation rests on granite, an edifice built on it can be strong. If  foundation is set in sand, any edifice built on it will not only be weak but also dangerous.

heteconomist
… On Raising the Level of Collective Consciousness [I]
JR Barch

Lars P. Syll — Demand theory gobbledygook

Back in 1992, New Jersey raised the minimum wage by 18 per cent while its neighbour state, Pennsylvania, left its minimum wage unchanged. Unemployment in New Jersey should — according to mainstream economic theory — have increased relative to Pennsylvania. However, when economists Alan Krueger and David Card gathered information on fast food restaurants in the two states, it turned out that unemployment had actually decreased in New Jersey relative to that in Pennsylvania. Counter to neoclassical demand theory we had an anomalous case of a backward-sloping supply curve. 

Lo and behold! 

But of course — when facts and theory don’t agree, it’s the facts that have to be wrong …

Read the rest where James Buchanan makes a fool of himself without being savvy enough to realize that, "It's the ideology, stupid."
I'm not sure that gobbledygook is the correct term here though. I'd suggest Buchanan's own term, camp-following whoring.

"When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?" — attributed to J. M. Keynes.

Ideologues double down.

Lars P. Syll’s Blog
Demand theory gobbledygookLars P. Syll | Professor, Malmo University