[lbo-talk] Interesting Chilean economist, on DN today

Wojtek S wsoko52 at gmail.com
Thu Sep 23 06:54:53 PDT 2010


[WS:] I have mixed feelings. On the one hand, he says all the right things, but on the other - these are mostly old mantras that I heard ad nauseam in Santa Cruz some twenty years ago (he used to teach at Berkeley, so that may explain it :)): a reincarnation of the noble savage myth (if poverty makes such great human beings, why bother fighting it?), the love your mother earth mantra (viruses and bacteria too?) and that the US is exceptional in social inequality (it is not.)

The other point is that he says all the right thing about knowledge, especially economics, but does not draw a logical conclusion (at least not in the interview) - namely that "being determines consciousness" i.e. social conditions and interactions determine how we think, how we frame our understanding, what we emphasize what we disregard etc. The conventional economics is not "wrong" as he alleges, but it is simply a product of certain social relations. As such, it is either: (i) a technique that helps managing those relations (e.g. national accounting system) which is neither right nor wrong but simply useful to a varying degree; or (ii) (ii) a mythology legitimating those relations, especially the distribution of power, which may be true or false from a logical point of view, but the truth function is irrelevant when it comes to rationalizations (as Noam Chomsky once said, 'In the special case of the United States, facts are irrelevant") - what matters is the congruency with the value system that legitimizes a particular set of social relations.

Knowledge as a management technique and a legitimation myth has been with the humankind since antiquity - and yet we as a species not only survived that calamity, but we are generally better off that our ancestors hundreds or thousands years ago. In other words, shysterism and bullshit is as old as the humankind, yet they did not lead to the doom of people who espoused them. Or more precisely, sometimes they did, sometimes they did not.

So a far more interesting question is under what conditions shysterism and bullshit (of which conventional economics is one example) lead to a downfall of a society or a way of life and under what conditions they do not? (Jared Diamond tackled this issue quite effectively in his book "Collapse").

As far as the United States is concerned, I do not think it is exceptional in any way, as Max-Neef seems to believe. In fact it is very typical, a conglomeration of many typical trends from around the world. It does not have exceptionally living standards (many other countries are better off) nor does it have particularly glaring social inequalities and related vices (there is plenty to much worse examples around the world.) although its hegemonic position in the world has declined somewhat, it is not on a verge of a collapse, not even close.

The most likely scenario is that it will be muddling and limping through in its present form and its present problems for a long run (i.e. until we are all dead.) No spectacular changes, no catastrophic downfalls, but no meteoric rises either - just mediocre slouching along.

While we are at that, my main "beef" with America is not a "patrician hatred" as someone on this list opined - but the realization that it does not utilize its economic potential to improve standards of living, and it simply wastes a big chunk of that potential. This is a rather conventional criterion of evaluation - one routinely applied to many forms of social organization.

Wojtek

On Wed, Sep 22, 2010 at 6:02 PM, Chuck Grimes <c123grimes at att.net> wrote:
> Below is a link to a Chilean economist worth listening to:
>
> http://www.democracynow.org/2010/9/22/chilean_economist_manfred_max_neef_us
>
> He is a bit over the top, but almost everything he says, seems right to me.
> He has a kind of metaphysical view that he claims to have learned from
> living with poor people in small villages.
>
> CG
> ___________________________________
> http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/mailman/listinfo/lbo-talk
>



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