PIMCO quotes Minsky

[Bradford DeLong]

>Brad wrote:
>
>>  High Keynesianism: Weirdness about how attempts to pierce the veil of
>>  time and ignorance involve not risk but Knightian uncertainty, and
>>  about how the theory of aggregate demand needs to be connected with
>>  Sraffian insights into the pricing of commodities produced by means
>>  of commodities. I have some High Keynesian leanings myself (the first
>>  branch, not the second branch), although I prefer to express them in
>>  the Shleifer-Vishny "limits to arbitrage" and "inefficient markets"
>>  language, rather than in the Davidsonian language that I have a hard
>>  time understanding.
>
>For what are ultimately ontologically based epistemological reasons, Keynes
>claimed that the long run economic future is often unknowable so that where
>the most important consequences of present decisions will be long run - as
>in decisions concerning the accumulation of wealth - decisions frequently
>cannot rationally be based on forecasting consequences.
>
>This idea of "uncertainty" looks weird to the kind of personality
>psychologically unable to face such uncertainty.  This is a personality
>lacking the ego maturity and strength required for what Keats called
>"negative capability."  Such a personality will be characterized by
>unmastered persecutory anxiety and will defend itself against this by, among
>other things, denying facts that provoke it.  Keynes's kind of uncertainty
>is one such fact.  This personality will also be dominated by greed...

You see what I mean?

People who express allegiance to the "Knightian uncertainty" branch 
of post-Keynesian often seem to have completely and totally lost 
their minds. Not only are their economic arguments *very* hard to 
understand, but they are accompanied by jumps in mental logic that 
are totally unfathomable...

Brad DeLong