The Most Dangerous Woman in America.

"How can I adopt a creed [i.e. Marxism] which, preferring the mud [i.e. you and yours] to the fish, exalts the boorish proletariat above the bourgeois and the intelligentsia who, with whatever faults, are the quality in life and surely carry the seeds of all human advancement?" (J.M. Keynes, "A Short View of Russia", 1925. My emphasis.)

Mary (Mother) Harris Jones is but one example of those the "bourgeois and the intelligentsia" so despise, hate, and fear.

Mother Jones. [A]

----------

How did a lonely migrant woman, with little wealth or education, become "the most dangerous woman in America", as the West Virginia district attorney, Reese Blizzard, called her in 1902?

I cannot speak for Blizzard, but one thing is for sure: her fearsome reputation didn't come from being the sinister conspirator of bourgeois nightmare. Nobody, not even her opponents, ever claimed she had anything to do with the Elders of Zion, the Illuminati, reptilian aliens, or other night frights of rich people's feverish imagination.

Reading Lance Selfa I came with an answer. Trotsky -- whom Selfa quotes -- compares Jones with another American left-wing icon, Emma Goldman:

"Lying in the open air, I looked through a collection of articles by the anarchist Emma Goldman with a short accompanying biography, and am now reading the autobiography of 'Mother Jones.' They both came from the ranks of American working women. But what a difference! Goldman is an individualist, with a small 'heroic' philosophy concocted from the ideas of Kropotkin, Nietzsche and Ibsen. Jones is a heroic American proletarian, without doubts or rhetoric, but also without a philosophy. Goldman sets herself revolutionary aims, but tries to achieve them by completely unrevolutionary means. Mother Jones always sets herself the most moderate aims: more pay and less hours, and tries to achieve them both by bold and revolutionary means. They both reflect America, each in her own way: Goldman by her primitive rationalism, Jones by her no less primitive empiricism. But Jones represents a splendid landmark in the history of her class, while Goldman signifies a departure from her class into individualistic non-existence. I could not stomach the Goldman articles: lifeless moralizing which smacks of rhetoric, despite all its sincerity. I am reading the Jones autobiography with delight." (My emphasis. See here)

Mother Jones' didn't call for revolution, violent or otherwise, or the abolition of the property of the means of production. That's not why she was "dangerous". What she did do was equally outrageous and unforgivable, from the point of view of the powerful: she sided, not in words only, but in actions, with the "mud", the miners and seamstresses, her adopted children. She gave them voice and made them visible.

To side with the "boorish proletariat" is more than enough to make of you a dangerous person to be ridiculed, whose ideas must be opposed out of hand, if not deliberately misrepresented. And if you are "the bourgeois and the intelligentsia" why wouldn't you do that? Isn't the right to humiliate, oppress, deceive, and exploit your natural right?


Image Credits:
[A] "Mother Jones, American labour activist (04/11/1902)". Author: Bertha Howell. This media file is in the public domain. Source: Wikipedia.

You Asked for Institutions.

(source)

A few days ago, Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson published a critique ("The Rise and Fall of General Laws of Capitalism") of Thomas Piketty's book "Capital in the Twenty First Century".

In it, Acemoglu and Robinson liken Piketty's views with those of "the great classical economists, Malthus, Ricardo and Marx":

"We argue that all of these general laws are unhelpful as a guide to understand the past or predict the future, because they ignore the central role of political and economic institutions in shaping the evolution of technology and the distribution of resources in a society".

Branko Milanovic replies to the charge that Piketty totally neglects institutions:

"This is hard to understand since Piketty's explanation for a large part of changes in inequality in the US, France and elsewhere are precisely institutional: higher and then lower income and inheritance tax rates, abolition of slavery …
"Actually, that part of the critique is fundamentally dishonest. It proceeds as follows. First, Acemoglu and Robinson establish the equation Piketty=Marx …"

So far, so good. The Acemoglu/Robinson charge against Piketty is obviously unfounded.

But then, as if to show he is a reasonable mainstream economist, Milanovic "bounces" the charge against Marx:

"They then criticize Marx for ignoring institutions, more or less correctly (but clearly that has nothing to do with Piketty)".

----------

Today, David Ruccio literally taught the three men a lesson. Out of Capital, volume 1 -- only -- he cites thirteen (yes, 13!) chapters where Marx considers institutional details in addition to an assortment of works by Marx and Engels (including Engels' "The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State" -- can there possibly be any title more explicit about its institutional content?).

Ruccio closes his post with this (although I urge you to read the whole epic takedown post):

"They want institutions? Then try this vivid summary (from Chapter 31) of the institutions that gave rise to capitalism:
"Tantae molis erat, to establish the 'eternal laws of Nature' of the capitalist mode of production, to complete the process of separation between labourers and conditions of labour, to transform, at one pole, the social means of production and subsistence into capital, at the opposite pole, the mass of the population into wage labourers, into 'free labouring poor,' that artificial product of modern society. If money, according to Augier, 'comes into the world with a congenital blood-stain on one cheek,' capital comes dripping from head to foot, from every pore, with blood and dirt.
"Acemoglu and Robinson and Milanovic (not to mention Piketty) can't, it seems, handle that kind of institutional analysis."

----------

Will Very Serious Economists learn anything from this? My guess, for what it is worth: not a chance in hell.

Nietzsche at Nuremberg.

Thursday, 17 January 1946.

Morning Session

The President: "I call upon the Counsel for France".

[A]

M. François de Menthon (Chief Prosecutor for the French Republic):

"Over a people in this state of spiritual crisis and of negations of traditional values the culminating philosophy of Nietzsche was to exercise a dominant influence. In taking the will to power as a point of departure, Nietzsche preached, certainly not inhumanity but superhumanity. If there is no final cause in the universe, man, whose body is matter which is at once feeling and thinking, may mould the world to his desire, choosing as his guide a militant biology. If the supreme end of humanity is a feeling of victorious fullness which is both material and spiritual, all that remains is to insure the selection of physical specimens, who become the new aristocracy of masters.
"For Nietzsche the industrial revolution necessarily entails the rule of the masses, the automatism and the shaping of the working multitudes. The state endures only by virtue of an elite of vigorous personalities who, by the methods so admirably defined by Machiavelli, which alone are in accord with the laws of life, will lead men by force and by ruse simultaneously, for men are and remain wicked and perverse.
"We see the modem barbarian arise. Superior by his intelligence and his wilful energy, freed of all conventional ethics, he can enforce upon the masses obedience and loyalty by making them believe in the dignity and beauty of labor and by providing them with that mediocre well-being with which they are so easily content. An identical force will, therefore, be manifest in the leaders, by the harmony between their elementary passions and the lucidity of their organizing reason, and in the masses, whose dark or violent instincts will be balanced by a reasoned activity imposed with implacable discipline.
"Without doubt, the late philosophy of Nietzsche cannot be identified with the brutal simplicity of National Socialism. Nevertheless, National Socialism was wont to glorify Nietzsche as one of its ancestors. And justly so, for he was the first to formulate in a coherent manner criticism of the traditional values of humanism; and also, because his conception of the government of the masses by masters knowing no restraint is a preview of the Nazi regime. Besides, Nietzsche believed in the sovereign race and attributed primacy to Germany, whom he considered endowed with a youthful soul and unquenchable resources." (see here)

----------

After the previous tragicomic interpretation of Nietzsche and his moral philosophy, the words of the French Chief Prosecutor at Nuremberg add a rather sinister dimension to the man and his political philosophy.

And, yet, Nietzsche (and his political philosophy) is the man some (like this young, up-and-coming Post Keynesian) want to propose as your inspiration, instead of Karl Marx.

Now, choose.

Don't worry if you have a family. It's not me you'll have to answer to, if you chose the wrong guy.


Image Credits:
[A] Nuremberg Trials: some of "he accused on their bench (front left to right: Wilhelm Frick, Julius Streicher, Walther Funk; back left to right: Franz v. Papen, Arthur Seyß-Inquart, Albert Speer, Konstantin v. Neurath)". The image is in the public domain. Source: Wikipedia.

Wren-Lewis and Syll on Prediction.

Prof. Simon Wren-Lewis (economics professor at Oxford University, and a fellow of Merton College) has long been posting on the topic of prediction. In a recent post he writes:

"Macroeconomic forecasts produced with macroeconomic models tend to be little better than intelligent guesswork. That is not an opinion - it is a fact. (…) In other words, model based forecasts are predictably bad.
"The sad news is that this situation has not changed since I was involved in forecasting around 30 years ago."

His conclusion is that, even tough unreliable, macroeconomic forecast/prediction is "probably no worse than intelligent guesses". Although he doesn't specify, he is presumably speaking of predictions based on New Keynesian/Neoclassical models.

In reply, Prof. Lars Pålsson Syll (professor of civics at Malmö University) wrote about the impossibility inherent in forecasting/prediction:

"The future is inherently unknowable - and using statistics, econometrics, decision theory or game theory, does not in the least overcome this ontological fact. The economic future is not something that we normally can predict in advance. Better then to accept that as a rule 'we simply do not know.'
"So, to say that this counterproductive forecasting activity is harmless, simply isn't true."

Syll goes further than Wren-Lewis: he seems to make a case for the impossibility of prediction/forecast in economics in general, and, unlike Wren-Lewis, accuses forecasting/prediction of being harmful.

Regardless of their philosophical differences, or whether New Keynesian/Neoclassical models are to be blamed, both men seem to agree on two things: (1) prediction is essentially out of the question. What's more, if I am not mistaken, both (2) tend to favour government intervention in the economy.

----------

While I disagree with them on what refers to prediction/forecasting, I am not taking sides in their debate, neither am I in their league and I won't pretend otherwise.

I can't, however, avoid this question: if prediction is at least very unreliable (if not outright impossible and harmful, as Syll seems to claim) -- i.e. point (1) above -- how can an active government  -- i.e. point (2) -- predict the effects of its policies?

This is not a matter of simply making a general statement like "plan A is the way to go", and leave things at that, for if the government faces mutually exclusive courses of action (say, plan A, B, and C), it must decide which is the most beneficial; for that, it seems, it would need some kind of quantitative estimate: say, how many jobs it predicts each alternative would create.

If econometric methods are not reliable, what kind of methods would be used instead?

In the absence of good answers to those questions (and it would be incumbent upon both men to provide them), it seems to me the ultimate implication of their reasoning is that government intervention could be as unreliable and potentially as harmful as the predictions on which it is based on. To me, this seems a pretty good argument for a hands-off government: laissez faire.

What's more, although they focus on macroeconomic policy, I see no reason why their argument should be limited to that. Urban planning, for instance, uses pretty much the same kind of data and forecasting methods: should it be abandoned? How do public transport authorities decide how many lanes a new road should have? How many beds should a new hospital have?