Weapons of mass des/ neoclassicists

Charles Brown CharlesB at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us
Fri Dec 21 14:08:06 PST 2001


Ian: And the US wasn't operationalizing earlier versions of neoclassical economics when it dropped those bombs?

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CB: Your "earlier versions" is a recognition on your part that there has been a shift to a new much stronger version of operationalization of neo-classical economics outside the imperial centers especially corresponding to globalisation. So, no there wasn't the spread of neoclassical models around the world in 1945. Maybe it starts with Chile in 1974 or so, with the invasionof the Chicago school.

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Corporate managers are not reading Paul Krugman's textbooks when they strategize how to sell more cigarettes in Thailand or more laundry soap in Czheckoslovakia.

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CB: That's right but neo-classcism is the term used in textbooks to describe what they are doing in Thailand and the Czech Republic or Slovakia.

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The various permutations of neoclassical economics are over 100 years old; more importantly perhaps is the 200+ years of liberal notions of property and contract and until lefties come up with alternatives to the legal and political theories that inform policy making and juridical decision making that increase the scale and scope of human freedom in a manner that lead us out the iron cage of neoclassical economic-politico-legal theories.....

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CB: Yea, classical economics was capitalist , and neo-classical economics was capitalist not surprisingly. Do you think that neo-liberalism/globalization has nothing new about it ?

Lefts already have an alternative theory. It's Marxism. We just have to freshen it up , and get going with a second round of it.



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