On Sun, 20 Feb 2011 11:32:33 -0600 "Carrol Cox" <cbcox at ilstu.edu> writes:
> It seems to me that many (most? All?) economic analyses tend to be
> generalizations from somewhat arbitrarily selected data. And this
> not only
> fails to be "scientific" but is rather unconvincing as history. (I
> assume
> that what is misnamed "economics" is a subdivision of history, and
> one
> judges it by the standards of historiography, not "science." The
> premise of
> a special realm of study, "political economy" or "economics," is
> grounded in
> a failure to recognize the core premises of Ellen Meiksins Wood's
> work: the
> separation of "the economic" from "the state" in capitalism. That
> means, as
> someone on this list suggested some months ago, that capitalism and
> capitalist society are not identical: i.e., that capitalism is
> embedded in a
> thick ensemble of social relations, most of which (daily life,
> education,
> state power, war and war preparation) are not themselves capitalist.
> Hence
> the context of purely "economic" data is necessarily ignored by the
> economist.
It should be noted that the earlier writers on political economy would have had no problem with Carrol's points here. Adam Smith, for instance, was a professor of moral philosophy, who undertook the writing of his "The Wealth of Nations," as part of a lifelong project to create a science of man. The notion of a science of man, was a concept that was bandied about by many different Englightenment thinkers like Rousseau, Kant, Francis Hutcheson (Adam Smith's teacher), and David Hume (as well as some later thinkers like the young Karl Marx in his 1844 Manuscripts). It was ultimately David Hume's version of the concept that was embraced by Smith (Hume being a close personal and intellectual friend of Smith). The science of man, as conceived by Hume and Smith, was intended to embrace all of what we might call the human sciences, which would include psychology, history, jurisprudence, and all the various social sciences. Hume himself certainly on all these topics, but he seems to have thought that Adam Smith would be the man to make the science of man a reality. Smith made this project the center of his life's work, with the intention of writing a series of treatises that would cover moral philosophy, political economy, jurisprudence, and other subjects too, like aesthetics. In the end, Smith only managed to complete two of these treatises: one on moral philosophy, "The Theory of Moral Sentiments," and "The Wealth of Nations." But it seems to me that Smith's "The Wealth of Nations" cannot be properly understood without being read in conjuntion with "The Theory of Moral Sentiments."
In any case, the later separation of economics from historiography would have seemed strange to Hume, Smith, and the other early political economists.
Jim Farmelant http://independent.academia.edu/JimFarmelant www.foxymath.com Learn or Review Basic Math
>
> Carrol
>
> -----Original Message-----
>
> From: lbo-talk-bounces at lbo-talk.org
> [mailto:lbo-talk-bounces at lbo-talk.org]
> On Behalf Of Jeffrey Fisher
> Sent: Sunday, February 20, 2011 11:12 AM
> To: lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org
> Subject: Re: [lbo-talk] Businesses are refusing to hire the
> unemployed,
>
> Well, there's nothing scientific about it at all, unfortunately.
> It's just a
> survey of the people they happen to get, as far as I can tell.
>
> The hard truth is that there doesn't seem to be any hard data about
> the
> relative difficulty of landing a job for the employed and the
> unemployed.
> Admittedly, I haven't gone all out to find it, but I would expect
> that if
> there really were something substantive, it wouldn't be that hard to
> find.
> And of course, this period of steep unemployment is a particular
> case and
> wouldn't necessarily apply in a situation where unemployment was half
> or
> less what it is now, with fewer long-term unemployed.
>
> But if there was ever a time to study it, you'd think now would be
> that
> time, wouldn't you?
>
> On Sun, Feb 20, 2011 at 9:30 AM, Jim Farmelant <farmelantj at juno.com>
> wrote:
>
> > This study doesn't seem to control for the amount of time and
> > degree of effort that unemployed versus employed job seekers
> > put into job searching. Generally, the unemployed would seem
> > to have morespare time to devote to job searching. Unless,
> > this crucial variable is controlled for, I don't see how one
> > can make a meaninguly comparison between the fruits of
> > job search efforts by the employed versus those of the
> > unemployed.
> >
> > Jim Farmelant
> > http://independent.academia.edu/JimFarmelant
> > www.foxymath.com
> > Learn or Review Basic Math
> >
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