Neoclassical Logic

Ted Winslow winslow at yorku.ca
Fri Mar 16 07:51:12 PST 2001


Carl Remick wrote:


>
> That segues all too easily into Keynes' pathetic comment, "For at least a
> hundred years we must pretend to ourselves and to everyone that fair is foul
> and foul is fair; for foul is useful and fair is not. Avarice and usury and
> precaution must be our gods for a little longer still. For only they can
> lead us out of the tunnel of economic necessity into daylight."
>
> The forces that drive economic development today are overwhelmingly corrupt
> and corrupting, and, worst of all, they are self-perpetuating -- more likely
> to keep us trapped in that "tunnel" than to aid us in finding our way out.
> At some point in history, the pretense must stop; there must be frank
> acknowledgement and cultivation of broad awareness that we are encouraging
> evil forces that debase human potential in our pursuit of material
> abundance. There surely must be better way to achieve the necessary goal of
> assuring material security for all.

More than seventy of the hundred years have passed. Moreover, the original claim was partly based on a view of the "efficiency" of capitalism inconsistent with Keynes's own premises about its psychology.

The starting point of "neoclassical logic" is the "rationality postulate." The starting point of Keynes is that there are "insane and irrational springs of wickedness in most men."

He identifies capitalism with a particular expression of this irrationality - the dominance of motivation by "the instinct of avarice and hoarding," "the dependence upon an intense appeal to the money-making and money-loving instincts of individuals as the main motive force of the economic machine."

The implications of this for "efficiency" are much more negative than Keynes himself allows.

There is a great deal of evidence, for instance, that irrationality significantly affects the instrumental reasoning associated with greed. Many aspects of the labour process in capitalism are best understood as expressive of this irrationality. This includes important aspects of technology. From this perspective, the alienation characteristic of labour in capitalism is inefficient. Among other things, it reflects an obsessional irrational need for control on the part of the designers of the labour process. This has the implication that everyone could gain (in a more rational sense than allowed for by the idea of Pareto "efficiency") from a more humane organization of the process.

Recent feminist scholarship (e.g. Evelyn Fox Keller's Reflections on Gender and Science) provides grounds for believing that science itself has irrational aspects expressive of the psychology Keynes assumes is dominant in capitalism.

Keynes's psychological portrait of Newton anticipates this result. It also throws light on his claim that the conception of "rationality" dominant in neoclassical economics (an economics self-consciously modeled on physics) is irrational (an irrationality with much more damaging consequences in economics than in physics given that, as Keynes points out, the material of economics differs so significantly from the material of physics).

Ted -- Ted Winslow E-MAIL: WINSLOW at YORKU.CA Division of Social Science VOICE: (416) 736-5054 York University FAX: (416) 736-5615 4700 Keele St. Toronto, Ontario CANADA M3J 1P3



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