Michelle Starr — Tomorrow The Definition of The Kilogram Will Change Forever. Here's What That Really Means

This is a big deal even though it won't be noticed by most people. However, precise measurement essential to science and measurement involves application of metrics defined by criteria. The units and their criteria are arbitrary. There was no such thing as a kilogram prior to the development and introduction of the metric system. Same with other measurement systems. The "trick" is to establish a constant criterion in a relative universe. That is as close to an absolute as human can construct. This post explains how the issue has been approached in physics.

Of course, a great deal more precision can be arrived at through physics than other science, which strive to use the measurements developed by physics in so far as possible, but physical measurement is applicable only to quantity. Measuring quality presents greater challenges. So do psychological "dimensions."

Science Alert
Tomorrow The Definition of The Kilogram Will Change Forever. Here's What That Really Means
Michelle Starr

Lord Keynes — The Left needs to abandon Postmodernism

It is high time that the Left dispensed with and put an end to the fashionable nonsense that is Postmodernism (or “Poststructuralism” as the French intellectual movement which gave rise to it was originally called).

I can, incidentally, speak on this subject from personal experience. When I was an undergraduate I learnt a lot of this Postmodernist nonsense myself, and encountered it frequently at university, but I had the great benefit of learning a considerable amount of analytic philosophy (an acid under which Postmodernism dissolves) and listening to, and reading, no-nonsense Leftists who always understood it for the idiocy that it was and still is.

This subject is relevant to economics, because there are some actual Post Keynesians who seem to think that they can adopt a serious “Postmodernist” methodology and epistemology as a foundation of Post Keynesian economics. This, in my view, is a terrible delusion.…

The logical issue involved is criteria, a subject which underlies both meaning and truth as the necessary grounds for communication.

Social Democracy For The 21St Century: A Post Keynesian Perspective
The Left needs to abandon Postmodernism
Lord Keynes

See also

Steve Keen on Yanis Varoufakis

George Ellis and Joe Silk — Scientific method: Defend the integrity of physics

Attempts to exempt speculative theories of the Universe from experimental verification undermine science, argue George Ellis and Joe Silk.

Nature
Scientific method: Defend the integrity of physics
George Ellis, professor emeritus of applied mathematics at the University of Cape Town, South Africa, and Joe Silk, professor of physics at the Paris Institute of Astrophysics, France, and at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, USA

ht Steve Keen retweeting Noah Smith

Noah Smith — What does it even mean to "believe" something?

Peter Dorman in the comments:
Jeez, Noah, you need a stiff shot of (later) Wittgenstein. Now.

Exactly.

I did my dissertation on Wittgenstein's notes that were published posthumously as On Certainty. While the term "belief" has many meanings in ordinary language given different contexts, the type of belief under discussion is absolute unshakeable conviction in an assumption that is not grounded on publicly available criteria, without which there is no agreement outside that POV that the assertion is actually knowledge. See Plato on belief or opinion (doxa) v. knowledge (episteme).

Wittgenstein elucidates the logic of justification in ordinary language in contrast with formal languages where truth is deductive, being based on axioms or postulates. Wittgenstein's elucidations show how ordinary language description occurs through the lens of one's language, which is reflective of a worldview. I have been calling this a POV. Wittgenstein elucidates this using the Gestalt figure of a duck-rabbit, which can be seen as a rabbit from one POV and as a duck from another. We can conceive of two parties arguing over whether it is really a duck or a rabbit.

Certain propositions function as norms and criteria to delineate the boundary of one's worldview (POV). For example, functioning as normative they test admission and exclusion with respect to the POV.

While appearing to be descriptive propositions based on form and content, their function shows that they are not descriptive propositions in that they are not falsiable. This is, their position in the worldview privileges them from error. Their function is to assess other items in terms of inclusion or exclusion, truth and falsity.

Mises apriori method is a good example of this in economics and no evidence one adduces will falsify the priors for true believers since they are held to be "synthetic a priori" in Kant's sense. Same with religious dogmas and articles of faith. The invisible hand plays a similar normative role in conventional economics based on the neoliberal POV. But if one looks deeply enough into any POV, one will discover the boundary conditions.

We are all ideologues to one degree or another, because ordinary language use involves imposition of a POV in that there are no absolute criteria to ground general agreement. When there is general agreement, it is usually because we are talking to others who share that POV, which Wittgenstein calls "a form of life". But some POVs are more empirically based than other, hence, more "scientific." But that too involves the presumption that empirical criteria are paramount and that is in the final analysis a preference — pragmatically justified perhaps, but not known to be true in any absolute sense.

This is a quick summary and any explanation of Wittgenstein is bound to be wrong because he chose the method he did because the subject matter is ineffable. One has to see how the logic actually works since logic cannot describe itself without becoming involved in nonsense. Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, Through the Looking Glass and, "The Hunting of the Snark" and "Jabberwocky" should be read by adults as nonsense in this sense. Lewis Carroll (Rev. Charles Lutwidge Dodgson) was a logician playing with logic.

Noahpinion
What does it even mean to "believe" something?
Noah Smith | Assistant Professor of Finance, Stony Brook University

Criteria for policy criteria, anyone?

 Economic efficiency, human rights, or some group's moral norms?

In recent weeks, conservatives have complained about being forced to pay for other people’s birth control, but a recently released study indicates that increasing availability to contraception actually saves taxpayer money.

A report released by The Brookings Institution this week showed that a $235 million program to expand access to Medicaid family planning would actually result in a savings of $1.35 billion. That’s a return on investment of over 500 percent.

Mass media campaigns and teen pregnancy prevention programs also resulted in savings, but to a lesser degree.

Read it at Raw Story
Study shows birth control saves taxpayer money
by David Edwards

Thinking about criteria in relation to MMT

Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) is a macroeconomic theory that is embedded in a revolutionary paradigm because of the contributions it makes to monetary theory.

1. Efficiency. As a macroeconomic theory, MMT must be evaluated in terms of efficiency. The traditional challenge for macroeconomics is to reconcile production, employment and price level so that the economy optimizes the use of its resources while maintaining price stability. Previous macroeconomics theories have been unable to promise full employment, optimal output wrt available resources, and price stability, so as to provide for present and future needs of the society.

2. Effectiveness. Economic theories do not generate goals but respond to them. In liberal democracies goals are set by the people based on the type of society that choose to create. At least this is the ideal that liberal democracy sets for itself and that lies in its potential. These goals are often made explicit with respect to public purpose in the establishing documents like the constitutions and in the laws.

For example, the preamble to the US Constitution states: "We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America." Promoting the general welfare of the populace is established as goal that is key to achieving public purpose. To the degree that macroeconomics is applied as a public policy instrument, it receives this goal exogenously and macroeconomists have no choice in the matter.

3. Morality and Ethics. The norms of individual and social behavior are set by morality and ethics, which are in part cultural and in part universal, to the degree that humanity subscribes to these norms, for example, as a basis for international law and justice. The United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights is a documentary presentation of what previously had largely been implicit. Article 23 states:

(1) Everyone has the right to work, to free choice of employment, to just and favourable conditions of work and to protection against unemployment. (2) Everyone, without any discrimination, has the right to equal pay for equal work. (3) Everyone who works has the right to just and favourable remuneration ensuring for himself and his family an existence worthy of human dignity, and supplemented, if necessary, by other means of social protection. (4) Everyone has the right to form and to join trade unions for the protection of his interests.

This sets norms for economic institutions within various countries, which are free to manifest these norms as they wish. Macroeconomics as a policy instrument must conform to these norms, which are overarching criteria.