I apologize for interjecting myself into your detailed, on-going exchange on what appeared to be technical economics literature. Even though I am less than well informed on the specifics, I find your posts lucid and logical, though at times your views are puzzling. Specialifically, I would like to focus on the following for clarification:
Rakesh Bhandari wrote:
>
> There is a whole history of how the critique of science has been
> substituted for the critique of bourgeois society or how the denigration of
> science is understood as an attack on the highest form bourgeois society
> and thus a root and branch critique of it(from Croce to Marcuse?) To me
> this is what is at the heart of the debate, not the division between
> equally idealized and mythified Old and New Lefts (the substitution of
> science for bourgeois society as the object of critique goes back much
> further than the New Left--well at least back to Martin Heidegger?)
While not a social scientist myself, thus having the liberty to evaluate social science on the basis of its utility to what I perceive as real problems, rather than academic consistency within its own definitions, please allow me to observe that there is a distinction between the critique of science and the critic of bourgeois science. Granted that distinction is hard to maintain in current Western academic circles where bourgois culture rule. If I remember accurately, a major contribution of Max Weber was his point that scientific data is predetermined by the theoretical thesis behind its collection, that relevance is structurally defined to support the very thesis under "objective" investigation. This is why there is no real dialogue between the live participants of the Asian financial crisis and Western influenced academic economists (including Asian ones in and out of government), because these economists, despite their self professed positions ranging from left to right, are debating each other on a set of theories based on concepts that the actual participants find strangely unrelated to their direct experience and external to their empirically derived discourse. This explains why China is relatively insulated from the current crisis, not because Chinese policies are more effective in Western terms, but because of China's isolation. Thus the criticism from the World Bank of the IMF/Treasury packages are irrelevant to many Asians. It relates to what I referred to in an earlier post about Mencius' proposition of the 50-pace retreating soldiers laughing at the 100-pace retreaters as cowards.
Many Asians are realizing that their economic salvation will not come from a better understanding of "truths" in Western economics theory, but from political power struggles that will redefine the game of international economics to produce a more level playing field in Asia's favor.
Henry C. K. Liu