>> 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...
The first paragraph you've quoted attributes to Keynes the ideas that the long run economic future is often unknowable and that this derives from the nature of reality. In particular, as I've pointed out before, it derives, according to Keynes, from the fact that social reality is a system of internal relations, of "organic unity."
I take it you, in contrast to most of your economist colleagues, don't find the first idea or my attribution of it to Keynes "*very* hard to understand." As I think you know, Keynes explicitly adopts and elaborates it in the following passage:
"we have, as a rule, only the vaguest idea of any but the most direct consequences of our acts. Sometimes we are not much concerned with their remoter consequences, even though time and chance may make much of them. But sometimes, we are intensely concerned with them, more so, occasionally, that with the immediate consequences. Now of all human activities which are affected by this remoter preoccupation, it happens that one of the most important is economic in character, namely, wealth. The whole object of the accumulation of wealth is to produce results, or potential results, at a comparatively distant, and sometimes at an *indefinitely* distant, date. ...
"By 'uncertain' knowledge, let me explain, I do not mean merely to distinguish what is known for certain from what is only probable. The game of roulette is not subject, in this sense, to uncertainty; nor is the prospect of a Victory bond being drawn. Or, again, the expectation of life is only moderately uncertain. The sense in which I am using the term is that in which the prospect of a European war is uncertain, or the price of copper and the rate of interest twenty years hence, or the obsolescence of a new invention, or the position of private wealth owners in the social system in 1970. About these matters there is no scientific basis on which to form any calculable probability whatever. We simply do not know." (Collected Writings, vol. XIV, pp. 113-4)
My experience has been, however, that even economists (e.g. Post Keynesians such as Davidson) who understand this idea of "uncertainty," find the idea that it derives from the ontological hypothesis of "organic unity" very hard (if not impossible) to understand.
Keynes's most explicit adoption of the hypothesis is contained in the following passage (significantly, a passage found in a context where he criticizes and rejects attempts, such as Edgeworth's "mathematical psychics," to ground ethical and social theory in general and economic theory in particular in "utilitarian ethics and utilitarian psychology"):
"The atomic hypothesis which has worked so splendidly in physics breaks down in psychics. We are faced at every turn with the problems of organic unity, of discreteness, of discontinuity - the whole is not equal to the sum of the parts, comparisons of quantity fail us, small changes produce large effects, the assumptions of a uniform and homogeneous continuum are not satisfied." (Collected Writings, vol. X, p. 262)
I've attempted to elaborate the concept many times on this list. The epistemological implication I'm now emphasizing was in fact the basis of one of the main criticisms made of the concept in Keynes's own early 20th century Cambridge context, a context where the main elaborator and defender of the concept was A.N. Whitehead.
Bertrand Russell claimed that if the hypothesis of internal relations was true it would make not just knowledge of parts of the long run future but knowledge per se impossible since it would require us to know everything before we could know anything. Since it was "patently untrue" that knowledge was impossible, he took this implication to be a refutation of the hypothesis.
Whitehead undertook to demonstrate that such relations could be conceived so as to avoid this implication. It is, however, a characteristic even of this conception that the longer into the future are the events to be predicted the more we will be under the impossible requirement of needing to know everything at once, i.e. the more likely it will be that the future will be "uncertain" in Keynes's sense.
Is this part of what you find "*very* hard to understand"? Is there something here that provides evidence that I'm among those who have "completely and totally lost their minds" or that is "accompanied by jumps in mental logic that are totally unfathomable"? If so, what is it?
The second paragraph makes some assertions about a kind of psychology which will lead, among other things, to irrational responses to the fact of "uncertainty." The psychology is Kleinian psychoanalysis, a psychology with a critically important relation to Keynes's Bloomsbury context (e.g. Melanie Klein's close connection to and strong intellectual support by James and Alix Strachey was a key factor leading to her first visit and subsequent emigration to London).
Later, in a part of the post you don't quote, I attribute a psychology consistent in very important ways with Klein's psychoanalysis to Keynes. Some months ago I elaborated this psychology at length in a post responding to what I took to be a claim by you that the foundations of Keynes's economics are neoclassical.
Which part of this did you find very hard to understand? Where in it do you find jumps in mental logic that are totally unfathomable or evidence that I've completely and totally lost my mind?
Ted