Cullen Roche — Do Economists Figure out how the World Really Works?

The reason these predictions were wrong was because they were politically biased, not grounded in operational understandings and compared to faulty or misleading historical data. But this is what so much of economics is these days. It’s not science at all. It’s mostly just politics masquerading as science. And so here we are with this muddled mess of understandings and a policy perspective that no one can agree on and actually appears to be resulting in almost no progress. It’s a sad state of affairs if you ask me and isn’t helping anyone get any closer to understanding our reality.

Pragmatic Capitalism
Do Economists Figure out how the World Really Works?
Cullen Roche

Econolosophy — What is the Justification for Economic Growth?

Market state v. welfare state. It's a choice based on choice of norms. Therefore, it is ideological, based on different world views.

We in America have gone all in on the economy. It has been our number one priority for years, a priority that President Obama enthusiastically put front and center in his recent State of the Union address.

But what is the philosophical justification for a faster-growing economy?

Econolosophy
What is the Justification for Economic Growth?

Meredith Bennett-Smith — Can Exposure To Science Boost Morality? Maybe So, New Study Suggests

The researchers found that while there was no relationship between the students' religious affiliation and their answers, “those who reported greater belief in science rated the date rape as more wrong," according to the study....

"Across studies, we found that believing in science and thinking about science led to more morally normative outcomes," Ma-Kellams told HuffPost Science....

"Many like to think of science as a neutral, purely objective force," she said. "But in reality, the things what we study and investigate and think about influence our very conceptions of right and wrong, acceptable and unacceptable, without us necessarily realizing it."

The Huffington Post
Can Exposure To Science Boost Morality? Maybe So, New Study Suggests
Meredith Bennett-Smith

Hans-Joachim Voth, Nico Voigtländer, Shanker Satyanath — Bowling for Adolf: How social capital helped to destroy Germany’s first democracy

The collapse of the Weimar Republic was a turning point in world history, bringing the murderous Nazi regime to power. This column argues that contrary to most conceptions of social capital, there can be negative outcomes to well-connected societies. Independent of ideology, dense social networks in interwar Germany greatly helped the Nazi party to rapidly and widely disseminate its messages. Putnam’s claims about the benefits of social capital for democracy need to be reassessed.

Of course "social capital" can be used for good or bad. Just look at organized crime, as the authors cite. So social capital is somehow disadvantageous or dangerous, and people need to avoid organizing? Everyone is supposed to "think for themselves"? Out of context?

Physical capital can also be used for good and bad, depending on one's point of view. It was not social capital that made Hitler and the Nazis so dangerous to the world but Germany's physical capital that could be put to military use in producing armaments. Is physical capital therefore potentially negative. Of course. Does that undercut the argument for capitalism?

Social capital is defined as the economic potential of organization and information complexity is social systems. Physical capital is defined as the economic potential of the means of production in social systems. Financial capital is defined as the economic potential of money, credit and other financial arrangements in social systems. Economically, they are amoral to the degree that they are evaluated on money return. But monetary return is not the only consideration, even economically. 

The use of the various forms of capital is not amoral from the societal standpoint in that evaluation of effectiveness in human affairs is broader than monetary and economics assumes this at least implicitly. All human societies are governed by law, and rights are key concepts in law. Rights are communal norms. Excluding non-monetary factors from consideration in effectiveness, e.g., limiting consideration to economic efficiency, is itself a normative judgement.

Vox.eu
Bowling for Adolf: How social capital helped to destroy Germany’s first democracy
Hans-Joachim Voth, Nico Voigtländer, Shanker Satyanath
(h/t Mark Thoma at Economist's View)

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

Daniel Little — Epochs and the social actor

It was suggested in an earlier post that important aspects of an individual's mental furniture are influenced by the concrete historical and social circumstances in which he or she is raised (link). Let's try to get a little more specific about this idea. How does historical context influence the behavior of the individuals who come to adulthood during its scope?

There are several kinds of practical cognitive features that seem to be historically conditioned. By "practical cognition" I mean the processes through which actors conceptualize their social environments, make sense of the activities going on around them, process their own desires and goals, and set out with a plan or strategy of action.

I can think of at least four largely independent features of social and practical cognition that seem to be importantly dependent on the social and historical context in which the individual develops from childhood to adulthood: social frameworks of interpretation; social norms; practices and habits; and enduring features of character. Let's look at each of these in turn.

Understanding Society
Epochs and the social actor
Daniel Little | Chancellor, University of Michigan at Dearborn

More on framing

1. Spending Cuts Spur Growth

2. Only Private-Sector Job Growth Matters

3. Public Employees Are a Problem

4. Education and Training Restore Family-Supporting Wages to Dislocated Workers

5. The “Skills Gap”

6. American Corporate Taxes Are Among the Highest in the World

AlterNet
6 Republican Economic Myths Obama and Dems Must Stop Repeating
Roger Bybee

So we have another gap between what is “true” in the conservative media bubble and the objective facts. In the real world, we spend about $25 per day on the needy. But, according to Fox News, the figure is $168.

AlterNet
How an Astounding New Right-Wing Lie About the Economy Is Born
Joshua Holland | Senior Writer

Robert Johnson — What About the Questions That Economics Can’t Answer?

Can economics be morally centered? And perhaps more importantly, should it be?

These are questions that society is grappling with in the face of the economics profession's failure to confront the global impact of exploding inequality within and between countries. 

Limitations of the Dismal Science

Economists are very good at studying mechanisms for efficiently allocating things. But they are less effective at addressing more fundamental questions related to these things' social value. Indeed, economists typically leave values unexamined in their mathematical formulas. Social utility is simply not explored.

But what happens when economists' implicit value assumptions break down?

Yahoo Finance
What About the Questions That Economics Can’t Answer?
Robert Johnson | Executive Director of the Institute for New Economic Thinking

(h/t Stephan Ewald via Twitter)

It's necessary to view human knowledge as an integrated whole rather than atomized into separate and distinct disciplines.

On one hand, economics is a subset of political economy, which is a subset of social and political philosophy, which is a subset of ethics. Ethics interfaces with metaphysics and epistemology in formulating the fundamental POV of a system of thought.

The other hand, economics as a science is subset of cognitive-science-psychology and social science and is informed by other social sciences such as anthropology and sociology. Psychology and sociology are subsets of life science, including biology and evolutionary theory. Economics, being focused on real resources and production, also depends on hard sciences and their application, e.g., physics, engineering.

Moreover, all thought must find expression to be communicated and therefore, logic and its branches, mathematics and analytic philosophy-philosophy of language are also essential.

This list is not offered as exhaustive. Indeed, the entire body of human reflection impacts economics to some degree and ignoring important contributions from any field is myopic.

Considering economics in isolation from the entire system and the subsystems in which it is nested results in persistent ignorance and often malignant error.

Floris Heukelom — Economics as a doctrinal discipline

This is a provocative post challenging the notion that economics is or can be an entirely empirical science since it is grounded in norms and values, which act as hidden assumptions. Better to admit them, shine light on them and examine them rationally instead of pretending that they don't exist.

Read it at INET | History of Economics Playground
Economics as a doctrinal discipline
by Floris Heukelom
(h/t Matt Stoller at Naked Capitalism)

Colin McGinn — Philosophy by Another Name

Some philosophers have physics envy, too, largely because they think that only real scientists get respect in the currency of contemporary culture.

Pitiful. Typifies what is wrong with academic philosophy. The obvious retort is. if you want to be considered a scientist, then do the math.

Oh right, academic philosophers in the US already did that by focusing attention on logical positivism in the early 20th century and then symbolic logic back in the Sixties.

Traditional inquiry about the enduring questions based on perennial wisdom went out the window. Just as contemporary New Classical economists do not read in the history of economics, so too, contemporary philosopher have abandoned the history of ideas.

As a result, philosophy now has bad name since it has not live up to its stated purpose, "philosophy" meaning love of wisdom. Contemporary academic philosophy aborted that search when scientists started getting all the respect, since they apparently felt left out, as McGinn's article shows.

The word “philosopher,” as everyone knows, means “lover of wisdom,” from the Greek. Its origin is sometimes attributed to Pythagoras, who is said to have coined it in order to distinguish people like himself from the sophists (both words have the same Greek root, “sophia”). Sophists, Pythagoras argued, are not genuine lovers of knowledge but only purveyors of rhetorical tricks, whereas another group of thinkers — those who possess a true “thirst for learning” — qualify as the real thing. This name stuck and came to be used to describe a very wide range of thinkers — anyone with a real intellectual interest. It is now, however, used extremely narrowly, at least within the academy, excluding people from most academic departments, but still applied to the few who study the subject now called “philosophy.”Those inquirers in other fields have new names more suitable to their specificity: physics, chemistry, biology, psychology and history among them. But philosophy is still called by the old highly general name Pythagoras introduced. And here we already see an obvious objection to the label: Isn’t everyone employed in a university, and indeed some people beyond, a “lover of wisdom”?

Most academics are not “sophists”! Physicists, say, have the attitude described as much as philosophers. But why should one particular discipline be characterized by reference to an attitude instead of a subject matter?

Here is a "philosopher" who does not know the meaning of the term "wisdom" as used by the ancients.

One the first day of my first class in philosophy in 1959 as a college junior, the meaning of "philosophy" was explained in detail. We learned that "philosophy" was Greek for love of wisdom and that "philosophy" in ancient times signified a way of life dedicated to the pursuit of wisdom. The goal of the genuine philosopher was to become a sage rather than simply a purveyor of information about the material side of life.

Significantly, the two most influential philosopher-sages in the West have been Socrates and Jesus, neither of whom either was an academic nor did either of them write a word. But their influence is still pervasive, and Western culture is inconceivable without their seminal contributions to living the good life and attaining wisdom, which Socrates called "self-knowledge" and Jesus "the kingdom," through the core spirituality taught by the sages of perennial wisdom of all times and climes.

Actually, I agree with McGinn that academic philosophy should change its name to distinguish itself as emulating scientists rather than sages. The present approach to philosophy in academia dishonors the discipline and has relegated it to comparative irrelevance.

OK, maybe I am being too hard on Professor McGinn. His work demonstrates keen interest in the most important philosophical subjects of the day, including the philosophy of consciousness, which is the next frontier. But I stand by what I have written about the views stated above.

Read it at The New York Times
Philosophy by Another Name
By Colin McGinn | Professor and Cooper Fellow, University of Miami