I reminded of a quote of Thorstein Veblen I shall paraphrase, "The more jargon and technical language that is involved in an endeavor, the more we may assume that the endeavor is essentially make-believe."
> From: egwinslow at rogers.com
> To: lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org
> Date: Tue, 18 Nov 2008 11:14:50 -0500
> Subject: Re: [lbo-talk] The "Long Depression" of the 1870s vs. now
>
> Chris Doss wrote:
>
> > betcha we wouldn't have any economic problems if we had just
> > listened to Whitehead. Damn! What fools we were!
>
> I don't think so.
>
> Whitehead traced the economic problems of the 1930s to the "mentality"
> then dominant in economics and business, a mentality that, among
> other things, ignored the social ontological fact of "internal
> relations".
>
> This diagnosis of the problems was set out in two lectures at the
> Harvard Business School, "The Study of the Past: Its Uses and
> Dangers" (reproduced in Essays in Science and Philosophy) and
> "Foresight" (reproduced as chap. 6 in Adventures of Ideas).
>
> He assigned the task of creating a more "virtuous" (in the sense of
> Plato) "business mind of the future" to university business schools.
>
> This ignored the fact that the dominant mentality he was attempting to
> change was, as a psychological matter, not open to being changed in
> this way. This was true of the mentality dominant in business schools
> (and economics departments) as well as that dominant in business.
>
> An illustration is provided by the late James Tobin, one of the
> leading American "Keynesian" economists of the last century.
>
> Tobin was a student in Whitehead's 1937 Harvard undergrad philosophy
> course. The meticulous notes he took record Whitehead applying his
> philosophical ideas, including the idea of "internal relations", to a
> critique of the "classical" form of economics. This included an
> elaboration of the limits "internal relations" place on deductive
> axiomatic (including mathematical) reasoning.
>
> Tobin, however, went on to, among other things, reconstruct key
> aspects of Keynes's economics as exercises in mathematical
> optimization, i.e. to reconstruct them in a way that ignores their
> social ontological and psychological foundations.
>
> As Keynes pointed out, listening and reading with understanding
> themselves require developed "virtue"; they require what Keynes called
> "good will".
>
> Ted
>
>
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