The New Yorker had an article on Matteo Renzi – the Demolition Man, they called him – in late June. Towards the end, there is an enlightening passage about the intellectual problems of the German political elite:
Monti told me that, when he was Prime Minister and visited Barack Obama at the White House, Obama admitted to being at a loss to know “how to engage Merkel on matters of economic policy.” Obama asked his advice, and Monti replied, “For Germans, economics is still part of moral philosophy, so don’t even try to suggest that the way to help Europe grow is through public spending. In Germany, growth is the reward for virtuous economics, and the word for ‘guilt’ and ‘debt’ is the same.”At least the Germans admit this. Other economists are moral philosophers, too, but they purport to be value-free scientists. Their assumptions, stated and hidden, belie that.
econoblog 101
Monti to Obama: “For Germans, economics is still part of moral philosophy”
Dirk Ehnts | Lecturer at Bard College Berlin
6 comments:
Yes Tom, It is like a religion. You can explain about resources in economy and the listener will understand, but you are a bad person and he is not willing to approve your ideas. Politics is like a religion. The lefties who support "euro integration" despite high unemployment and bad economics are not less religious.
ordoliberalism is a sickness that must be cured through pain, just cut their export market and they will bend eventually. they don't have armies any more.
There is nothing wrong with considering economics as moral philosophy. The Germans should think that way more - and read their own philosophers as well as many Greek lefties do.
Monti is just enunciating a completely crazy non sequitur, an anti-consequence:
Economics is moral philosophy.
Therefore no public spending.
Sane people would say:
Economics is moral philosophy.
Therefore the public should spend enough to treat each member of the uh, public, morally.
That "growth" is a possible reward for "virtuous economics" rather than an aim is roughly the MMT point of view too. All logic & experience shows that Keynesian / JG spending will greatly outperform any other type of policy - except on the measure of how much the super-rich can blight everyone else's lives. But the main thing is to make society juster and saner. Better growth and development is a natural, inevitable side effect. How much growth, how much should go to current consumption and how much to be invested in the future is something for each society, each generation to decide, as Minsky notes at the end of Stabilizing an Unstable Economy.
According to Keynes, economics is a "moral science."
J. M. Keynes to Harrod , 4 July 1938
The Oxford Dictionaries site defines moral science as "social sciences and/or philosophy.
See
Keynes’s Economics: A Political Economy as Moral Science Approach to Macroeconomics and Macroeconomic Policy
Ted Winslow
Paper prepared for presentation to:
Research Network Alternative Macroeconomic Policies 9th Conference Macroeconomics and Macroeconomic Policies - Alternatives to the Orthodoxy Berlin, 28 - 29 October 2005
Abstract
The paper attemps to situate Keynes’s approach to macroeconomics and macroeconomic policy within an ontological and anthropological framework that makes “political economy” a “moral science” in the ancient sense of the art of managing the “body politic” so as to enable citizens to live “good” lives. These would be lives creating and appropriating beauty and truth within relations of mutual recognition, i.e. lives filled with beauty, truth and love. The idea of what Keynes called ”the ideal social republic of the future “ - “the republic of my imagination” - to which this leads is the basis of his critique of the values dominant in “capitalism,” the “essential characteristic” of which, he claims, is “the dependence upon an intense appeal to the money- making and money-loving instincts of individuals as the main motive force of the economic machine.” In “Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren,” he describes this “main motive force” as “a somewhat disgusting morbidity, one of those semi-criminal, semi-pathological propensities which one hands over with a shudder to the specialists in mental disease.”
For individuals to be actually able to live good lives in this sense requires a highly developed capacity for producing the material and other means (e.g. free time) required for such lives. It is the development of these means that justifies capitalism and the businessman. Once this development has been achieved, however, it will no longer be necessary to “pretend to ourselves and to everyone that fair is foul and foul is fair.” We shall then be free “to return to some of the most sure and certain principles of religion and traditional virtue - that avarice is a vice, that the exaction of usury is a misdemeanour, and the love of money is detestable, that those walk most truly in the paths of virtue and sane wisdom who take least thought for the morrow. We shall once more value ends above means and prefer the good to the useful. We shall honour those who can teach us how to pluck the hour and day virtuously and well, the delightful people who are capable to taking direct enjoyment in things, the lilies of the field who toil not, neither do they spin.” (vol. X, pp. 330-1)
Tomr, right, but the moral philosophy of Keynes and the moral philosophy of ordoliberals is based on different assumptions and has completely different conclusions. That's why Germans will accuse others of "anglo-saxon" agent provocateur lol.
Ordoliberalism (Germany moral economics thinking) is a poisonous religion/ideology designed to destroy lives because "our sins in Earth", regardless of any economic reality, and it has to be defeated and destroyed if humanity has to prosper. Germany should have been probably sacked and dismantled after WWII, for the good and forever, depriving them of any industrial base and indirectly destroying their destructive way of thinking. This is how things were done in the ancient civilizations to secure rule and prosperity for centuries, instead now we get stability for a few decades before it starts it all again.
Tomr, right, but the moral philosophy of Keynes and the moral philosophy of ordoliberals is based on different assumptions and has completely different conclusions. That's why Germans will accuse others of "anglo-saxon" agent provocateur lol.
This is why economics is about politics at the level of ideologies that shape assumptions. Economic liberalism is an aspect of liberalism, which is a framework for political theory. Within this framework, different liberal political theories with different economic approaches can be articulated based on different assumptions — classical liberalism, neoliberalism, Rothbard Libertarianism, Friedman Libertarianism, ordoliberalism, etc. The stated and hidden assumptions are based on ideological beliefs and values that are philosophic even when they are rationalized by appeal to empirics, since data has to be collected, which involve selection which in turn involves criteria, and processed in terms of methodological choices based on criteria to become information. These criteria are part of the framework on which an ideology is constructed.
The problem is that people take their ideology as reality and their values as the standard of morality. This is dogmatism philosophically and it is one of the paradoxes of liberalism that makes liberals of different stripes illiberal even toward each other.
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