Ted Winslow :
Keynes psychological treatment of the expectations underpinning the investment decision is connected to the ontological idea of internal relations.
The implication of the idea for long-run forecasting is that the farther into the future are the events to be forecast the more difficult rational forecasting becomes The reason is that the farther into the future the fewer are the internal relations which can reasonably be treated as "given" and the more we approximate to the impossible to meet requirement of needing to know everything before we can know anything. The problem is particularly acute in the case of social phenomena where relevant relations are much less stable than is the case with physical phenomena.
^^^^ CB: Although, Heisenberg found profound uncertainty in physical science , too. It doesn't even have to involve particles in the distant future.
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This is the basis of Keynes's idea of radical "uncertainty." Keynes sets out a ratiional way of dealing with this, but it doesn't involve
actually attempting to forecast. Conventional approaches to the long run future deny this uncertainty (Keynes claims conscious awareness of it provokes disabling anxiety) and substitute for the knowledge that is unobtainable irrational forecasting "conventions" (one version of these being a mistaken obsessional use of mathematical and
statistical methods).
Marx himself overlooks this implication of internal relations in his falling rate of profit, immiserization argument.
^^^^^ CB: Maybe Marx takes account of it in his use of the concept of "tendency" with respect to the fall rate of profit ( "the law of the tendency..."). Continuous creation of poverty - immiseration - _ is_ certain in capitalism. Isn't that empirically confirmed ? ( "What about Scandinavia !? ", says the critical thinker. Ah, but capitalism is a _world_, not national system, globally, internally related). The specific investment decisions of capitalists may be uncertain in the distant future, but it is certain that those who succeed at accumulating wealth will create poverty at the opposite "pole". It's like two sides of a coin. For there to be heads, there must be tails. They are internally, necessarily, related, a la Hegel and Aristotle: If accumulation, then poverty. Not poverty, not accumulation. To end poverty means to end capitalist accumulation.
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