David F. Ruccio — The practical necessity of utopian thinking

Julia O’Connell Davidson and Neil Howard have just announced a new series of articles on utopia.

Utopias are like formal models in that both are idealizations that can be used to gain insights. The issues arise when they are confused with reality or their use ignores practicality.

Compare also stylized fact, heuristic, creativity, and possibility thinking.

In critical thinking, all relevant information and suitable tools are brought to bear on the issues. If critical thinking is brought in too early, opportunities are likely to be overlooked.

Utopian thinking properly employed is about vision and possibility. I should be the starting point of doing economics.

For example, in economics an policy, actual full employment is regarded as utopian, so its consideration is off the table. Economic sociologist Adolf Lowe argued that a properly conceived economics is not to fall into the trap of markets dictate but that human beings can choose (within limits) the kind of society they wish to live in and construct it. Mathew Forstater has an interesting paper about the thinking of Abba Lerner and Adolf Lowe about constructing a "utopian" full employment society with institutions, resources, and tools that are presently available.*

Occasional Links & Commentary
The practical necessity of utopian thinking
David F. Ruccio | Professor of Economics, University of Notre Dame

* Mathew Forstater, Toward a New Instrumental Macroeconomics: Abba Lerner and Adolph Lowe on Economic Method, Theory, History and Policy

Kimball Corson — China's Developing Thoughts on Statecraft

A short summary of the Chinese history of statecraft and governance from ancient times to Xi Jinping. This is a should-read unless you are up to date on it already. It's short. I think that Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin are pretty close on this. The US leadership not so much.

 Having studied Chinese martial arts and strategy for some time, I believe that Kimball gets it basically right. Kimball observes that the Chinese integrate various traditions into an ideology and worldview suitable for the contemporary context. Understanding this gives insight into their way of thinking.

Western people tend to adopt a single ideology based on a preferred historical view that they then interpret in contemporary terms. 

This makes Westerners seem simple to the Chinese, and the Chinese "inscrutable" to Westerners. A basic rule of strategy in the martial arts is to understand the opponent so that one knows what he is likely to do, whereas one should be invisible to the opponent, so that he does not know what you are likely to do. Hence, the Chinese have an advantage over Westerners in this regard, since Westerners send signals whereas Chinese don't.

While I am less familiar with Russian strategy, people who are familiar with it say that it is more similar to the Chinese than the Western. Additionally, Vladimir Putin has been a judoka for many years, so he presumably understands this very well.

Wandering the Oceans
China's Developing Thoughts on Statecraft
Kimball Corson