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

HOW REALITY IS INTERPRETED

Commentary by Roger Erickson

Know of this place? Lincoln Land Institute

It's one of many similar institutes around the world, which track fundamental data. There are many similar organizations, tracking real data - from diverse disciplines - which can be used to define real contexts.

Key Problem?

These kinds of institutes seem to be lost in the overgrowth of DC propaganda "think tanks."

That signal/noise ratio implies that we're completely sidetracked to a struggle for control of meta data. Fundamentals SEEM less relevant every year, while the battle for "HOW REALITY IS INTERPRETED" becomes increasingly abstract.

Will we still know how to adjust quickly enough, when fundamental adjustment is once again needed?*

If you really care about your grandchildren, you better do more than just hope so.



* The difference between how theorists and pragmatists answer this question differs more in practice than in theory. :(
Your results may vary. :)


This message about pragmatic, patient exploration of unpredictable reality is void where prohibition by lobbyists is accepted by fools. Tolls, taxes, fees, propaganda and orthodox economics may impinge upon your reality-field.

Philip Pilkington — Defrocking Reinhart and Rogoff – Controversy Ignores Fundamental Issues in the Use and Abuse of Statistical Studies

Pollin and Ash, being good Post-Keynesian economists who have likely read Keynes’ critiques of econometric and statistical studies, recognise well that simply throwing decades of heterogeneous historical data into a statistical blender and then proclaiming the mush that results as some sort of Grand Truth for the absurdity that it is. They are well aware that when it comes to history context is key; a severe one-year recession in New Zealand in the late-1950s is such a different historical constellation than demobilisation in the US after WWII that to compare them in simple statistical terms is patently absurd.

The irritating thing is that most economists and media commentators will admit this as being true, yet they will continue to engage with such nonsense regardless. After all, it is so much easier to comment on single numbers – however mysteriously arrived at – than it is to discuss complex historical constellations....

Keynes compared such statistical manipulation to black magic and alchemy in that he recognised what a powerful influence the idea of objective interpretations of manifestly subjective and context-dependent data could have over the minds of men. Today we would do well to keep this in mind as the dust settles on the Reinhart-Rogoff controversy and the whole edifice of the economic priesthood and its pseudo-scientific methods remain intact.

Naked Capitalism
Defrocking Reinhart and Rogoff – Controversy Ignores Fundamental Issues in the Use and Abuse of Statistical Studies
Philip Pilkington, research assistant at Kingston University in London