Was Keynes a Keynesian, or a Lernarian?
I've heard of lifelong learning as a consultant's mantra. Yet cultural-lifelong-learning seems to be a curiously neglected topic. Yet most people would readily agree that cultures that don't keep learning, and keep acclerating their Adaptive Rate, simply don't last.
Exceeding few things should be selected for permanent inclusion into our cultural toolkit, but this discussion of Lerner's concise writings should be. Why doesn't every student go through this in depth, before age 16? How are we supposed to have a dynamic, coherent culture when the electorate never learns even he rudiments of it's own currency operations? We try to teach teenagers relativity and quantum mechanics, but not currency operations or even return-on-coordination? No wonder our DoD has to search harder every year for people qualified to enter Officer Training programs. And we're left wondering why there are no good political candidates to choose from, and no leaders whatsoever.
Ever seen Ayn Rand choreography, "AR" war games, or AR culture? No? There's a reason why they never even make it into practice. They can't learn, can't perform, aren't agile but have been tried in Russia! Wotta resume! Yet now there are AR acolytes in Wisconsin, of all places! Worse, we've elected Congresspeople who have never read anything EXCEPT Ayn Rand. Go figure. Tom Paine & Alexander Hamilton must both be turning over in their graves, along with all their founding peers.
Is Libertarian choreography an oxymoron? Is that what cat herds refuse to practice? How about Libertarian group agility?
We had common sense in 1945 - and deliberately chose to hide it from the common people ever since ... why?
From the article: [why don't we just print and distribute an adequate currency supply?] ... "It's the art of statesmanship to tell lies, but they must be plausible lies."
67 years on, and little but lying to ourselves all the while?
Instead of lying to ourselves, we should all be Lerners now, in early & open discussion of this and all other optional outcomes.
The last thing we need are so-called leaders terrified that the common person might know as much as they do? Avoidance and delays in addressing the separation between the options they fear and our optimal group options is most of what's slowing us down. Hiding won't help, and group practice at carefully accelerating group parsing of that gulf definitely would. An electorate is a huge, massively parallel analog computing system. It's functions, outcomes and agility improve as a direct function of the number and rate of feedback-loop iterations it runs. This is NOT a mysterious subject.
The problem is that the chief function of money is to provide liquidity to optimize economic performance, but it is bound up with ownership, so there is an incentive to hoard it, which gets in the way of optimizing economic performance, "the invisible hand" notwithstanding due to the imperfect markets and the resultant rents.
ReplyDeleteCapitalism only works toward optimizing economic performance in the absence of rents, and that is why economic rent is not taken into consideration in neoclassical economics, which is the prevailing model.
Colander, a co-author of a 1980 book with Lerner (born 1930, died 1982) has written:
ReplyDeleteInitially he [Lerner] toyed with various administrative wage and price control policies, but he found those lacking and soon gave them up. He replaced them, first, with a tax based incomes policy and ultimately, a market based[!!!] incomes policy in which property rights in prices are set and individuals have to buy the right to change prices from others who change their price in the opposite direction. It was this idea that formed the basis of our market anti inflation (MAP) book. (Lerner and Colander 1980) Under MAP, rights in value added prices would be tradable so that any firm wanting to change its nominal price would have to make a trade with another firm that wanted to change its nominal price in the opposite direction. Thus, by law, the average price level would be constant but relative prices would be free to change [page 12]
http://cat2.middlebury.edu/econ/repec/mdl/ancoec/0234.pdf
This is amazing. Two years before he died, Lerner was proposing that no one could change their price without trading with someone else the right to change the price in the opposite direction. It appears that Lerner had about as much understanding of the meaning of a price as Trotsky. What happened to the MMTer idea that inflation can be cured simply with taxes? No muss, no fuss.
Oh yes, the BIG RED BOOK whose aim is to promote socialism through "the controlled economy". You MMTers are just a bunch of commies.
ReplyDeletehttp://www.flickr.com/photos/bob_roddis/5560086644/in/set-72157626353319778
"The controlled economy". Amazing. Thanks for the laughs. They are endless.
Wikipedia on Lerner
ReplyDeleteHe entered theLondon School of Economics in 1929 where he would study under Friedrich Hayek. A six-month stay at Cambridge in 1934–1935 brought him into contact withJohn Maynard Keynes.... While in the US, Lerner befriended his intellectual opponentsMilton Friedman and Barry Goldwater.
Here's a factoid I was not aware of:
Lerner (1951, Ch. 14) developed the concept of the NAIRU (before Friedman and Phelps). He termed it "low full employment" and contrasted it the "high full employment," the maximum employment achievable by implementing functional finance.
I've never understood how Lerner/Colander could get the principles of Functional Finance so soundly, yet fail to see the functional inability to implement something like MAP.
ReplyDeletePeople have multiple ideas in their lifetime. Some are useful, some are not. Intelligent cultures & people routinely componentize the output of citizens.
Some people however, regardless of how clever, remain a captive of their obsessive compulsive disorders.