Chris Lehman: Neoliberalism, The Revolution in Reverse

   (Quoted with permission, email from Chuck Spinney.)

"This is one of the best critiques on neo-liberalism as an extreme ideology that I have read. It is long but well worth the investment in your time.

On a personal note, I have long been offended by the neo-liberal hijacking of F.A. Hayek’s ideas, especially those on the relationship of central planning to the limits of information, which fit my studies of the Pentagon's decision-making pathologies like a hand fits a glove. Neo-liberals, led by Milton Freedman, have twisted them into an uber capitalist, free-market, quasi-religious dogma. Lehmann’s essay is an admirable evisceration of that extremism."

Chuck Spinney

Neoliberalism, the Revolution in Reverse

CHRIS LEHMANN, [from The Baffler No. 24, 2014]

Bill Black — GM’s Cartoon Version of von Hayek’s “Road to Serfdom” – on the 70th Anniversary of D-Day

Libertarian takedown. Eisenhower's failure: he was a government employee and not a CEO. Democracy's failure: the majority rules.

New Economic Perspectives
GM’s Cartoon Version of von Hayek’s “Road to Serfdom” – on the 70th Anniversary of D-Day
William K. Black | Associate Professor of Economics and Law, UMKC

Magpie — Keynes and Hayek: Yin and Yang

Keynes and the Fabian "social democrats" (as Commenter 2 would have) were indeed elitists. Commenter 2 is right on that. Paul Samuelson, for instance, also said that Keynes (like Bertrand Russell) "was an elitist exponent of the middle classes" (see here)

In that sense, Keynes and the Fabian socialists were no different from "Hayek et al".

Whatever differences Hayek and Keynes had in a number of areas (and I am not implying these differences were unimportant), they both shared something fundamental: a belief that there is a natural order to society, a social hierarchy.

It just so happens that in said hierarchy, they and their peers were at the top; and the rest of us at the bottom. For them, that's how things are and that's how they should be.

Theirs is a hard job, but someone's got to do it...

Magpie's Asymmetric Warfare
Keynes and Hayek: Yin and Yang
Magpie

Robert M. Solow — Hayek, Friedman, and the Illusions of Conservative Economics

JUST AS I WAS wondering how to start this review, along came the Sunday New York Times Magazine with a short article by Adam Davidson with the title “Made in Austria: Will Friedrich von Hayek be the Tea Party’s Karl Marx?” One Tea Party activist reported that his group’s goal is to fill Congress with Hayekians. This project is unlikely to go smoothly if the price of admission includes an extensive reading of Hayek’s writings. As Davidson remarks, some of Hayek’s ideas would not go down well at all with the American far right: among them is a willingness to entertain a national health care program, and even a state-provided basic income for the poor.

The source of confusion here is that there was a Good Hayek and a Bad Hayek. The Good Hayek was a serious scholar who was particularly interested in the role of knowledge in the economy (and in the rest of society). Since knowledge—about technological possibilities, about citizens’ preferences, about the interconnections of these, about still more—is inevitably and thoroughly decentralized, the centralization of decisions is bound to generate errors and then fail to correct them. The consequences for society can be calamitous, as the history of central planning confirms. That is where markets come in. All economists know that a system of competitive markets is a remarkably efficient way to aggregate all that knowledge while preserving decentralization.

But the Good Hayek also knew that unrestricted laissez-faire is unworkable. It has serious defects: successful actors reach for monopoly power, and some of them succeed in grasping it; better-informed actors can exploit the relatively ignorant, creating an inefficiency in the process; the resulting distribution of income may be grossly unequal and widely perceived as intolerably unfair; industrial market economies have been vulnerable to excessively long episodes of unemployment and underutilized capacity, not accidentally but intrinsically; environmental damage is encouraged as a way of reducing private costs—the list is long. Half of Angus Burgin’s book is about the Good Hayek’s attempts to formulate and to propagate a modified version of laissez-faire that would work better and meet his standards for a liberal society. (Hayek and his friends were never able to settle on a name for this kind of society: “liberal” in the European tradition was associated with bad old Manchester liberalism, and neither “neo-liberal” nor “libertarian” seemed to be satisfactory.)

The Bad Hayek emerged when he aimed to convert a wider public. Then, as often happens, he tended to overreach, and to suggest more than he had legitimately argued. The Road to Serfdom was a popular success but was not a good book. Leaving aside the irrelevant extremes, or even including them, it would be perverse to read the history, as of 1944 or as of now, as suggesting that the standard regulatory interventions in the economy have any inherent tendency to snowball into “serfdom.” The correlations often run the other way. Sixty-five years later, Hayek’s implicit prediction is a failure, rather like Marx’s forecast of the coming “immiserization of the working class.”

Good article. Read the rest.

The New Republic
Hayek, Friedman, and the Illusions of Conservative Economics
Robert M. Solow | Institute Professor of Economics emeritus at MIT, Nobel Prize in Economics 1987

"Orthodox" Economics is 80 Years out of Date! And Useless.

commentary by Roger Erickson

Keynes vs. Hayek on BBC Radio 4

John Maynard Keynes and Friedrich Hayek are regarded as two of the twentieth century’s greatest economists. Modern day followers came together at the London School of Economics to debate the ideas of their intellectual heroes. 

Weepin' Buddha on a frictionless incline! Economics is 80 years out of date!

Do physicists get together and rehash Bohr/Einsteign/Schroedinger discussions?

Do construction firms stage imagined discussions between outdated engineers?

Weepin Laozi, Imhotep & Wotan! This is appalling. Can't economics departments acknowledge that actual operations already moved on - 80 years ago, and have continued moving FURTHER on ever since?

We need an Operations Religion just to help economists worship at the Mirror of Obsolescence, so they can recognize it sooner.  Further, we should insist on establishing operational shrines at the LSE and Harvard Department of Economics, specifically to counter the black holes for operational relevance which are manifesting there.  Surely the LSE and HDE must be considered dangerous leaks in the Bozone Layer?

Note to acolytes of imagined academic heroes. You do NOT own operational reality. Get over it. It moved on via many added layers of orthogonal, operational dimensions, while you were still arguing over which obsolete tangent to follow into oblivion.

It's beyond pathetic or irrelevant. It's suicidal. Suicide via Luddite Credentials, in a race to extinction. The BBC should have also invited the acolytes of Kevorkian to the discussion. That would have at least made it educational for new students, as a warning example.

Lachmann’s Quick Comment on The Cambridge Capital Debate

Lord Keynes points to Lachmann’s Quick Comment on The Cambridge Capital Debate at The Radical Subjectivist by Isaac Marmolejo.