Friday, January 28, 2005
The Palsied Hand
These nuggets, from the famous anon@nowhere.no, recently hit my inbox:
We're ripe for someone to write a volume focused on telecom and unreflective free-market ideology. Working title: "The Palsied Invisible Hand: Economic Ideologues Meet Healthy Commons and other Horrors of Apostasy."
The combination of human nature, expectations, and network economics is a thicket -- one unlikely to be penetrated by the sort of thinking that believed that Eastern European cultures (or those in Arabia) could be summarily 'flash cut' to an alien free-market model after two generations of statism.
Displacing prevailing modes of thought when the evidence discredits them presents, I submit, almost an anthropological challenge. Traditional modes of thinking, under challenge both by technical evolution and, somewhat less visibly, by our broad national decline from postwar predominance (which tends to drive triumphalists into denial), still struggle to escape their cocoon. Much of the resistance must, I think, be understood in terms of human behavior, psychic distress, etc., as well as vested interests/rights in capital.
Comments:
By co-incidence I've got some incoherent mumblings on the topic at http://www.telepocalypse.net/archives/000577.html
Wow. That working title reflects an abyss of ignorance about economics. First, there's nothing wrong with a commons ... as long as the demand for them does not exceed the supply, or if it does, the commons is managed. This could be something as informal as "You fish on your side, I fish on my side, nobody fishes in the middle" or whatever that lake is called. Or it could be a commonly owned commons like you have in gated communities.
Second, the invisible hand is no more or less than everyone who participates in the market. If the invisible hand is palsied, then you have a problem with the participants in the market.
Third, I think that if less ignorance was being paraded about as if were wise commentary, your contributor would know that some economists predicted exactly the result that is happening in Iraq. For example, John Powelson in his _Centuries of Economic Endeavour_.
Fourth, just like I said at WTF, there *are* bad economists out there. A lot of them. Since I have no control over their existance, I cannot apologize for them. And yet, the astute observer will notice that some branches of economics produce better results than others.
-russ
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Second, the invisible hand is no more or less than everyone who participates in the market. If the invisible hand is palsied, then you have a problem with the participants in the market.
Third, I think that if less ignorance was being paraded about as if were wise commentary, your contributor would know that some economists predicted exactly the result that is happening in Iraq. For example, John Powelson in his _Centuries of Economic Endeavour_.
Fourth, just like I said at WTF, there *are* bad economists out there. A lot of them. Since I have no control over their existance, I cannot apologize for them. And yet, the astute observer will notice that some branches of economics produce better results than others.
-russ
