Mike Beggs wrote:
>
>>
> Things are a little different with share prices because you do have
> analytical reasons to think that expected returns (including
> valuations of liquidity and risk) would not get out of line with those
> from alternative investments. But it's possible for the average return
> on all kinds of investments to rise and fall, secularly and
> cyclically. Anyway, the historical experience of what happens to asset
> prices when central banks attempt to put a floor under collapses
> doesn't go back very far.
>
Moishe Postone argues, rather convincingly, that Marx produced a Critique of Political Economy, NOT a Critical Political Economy. In other words there is no Marxian Economic Science, ther eis only a historical critique of capitalism in the abstract. (That abstraction bites*, but it is an abstraction, andalways embodied in athick non-capitalist comples: Daily life, the family, the state, education, etc.
And if Marx didn't produce a "scientific economics" who in the hell did, and just what kind of a discipline _is_ economics.
Dou is insanely empirical, which ma be why he makes such a damned good economic journalist. He has no scientific pretensions, and scientific pretensions are fatal in economics.
I'm tentatively suggesting that in the quoted paragraph you in effect say the same thing. Economics is a strange sort of guessing game, on which historical experience gives a lot of light, but is also at some pont utterly undependable.
Carrol
* And its bite will eventually be lethal to the human species if we don't destroy it first, but that's another story.