2. - Brad DeLong points us to Jason Zweig, who challenges people to find confirmation of two attributed Keynes quotes (one of which graces the title panel of this blog): (1.) "The market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent", and (2.) "When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?". I think the whole exercise is a little odd, although it's nice for Zweig to bring attention to these two quotes. Nobody ever claimed Keynes wrote either of these down anywhere, so why is Zweig asking for that sort of proof? They both came up in conversation - the latter is from Roy Harrod's biography of Keynes, so I suppose it's worth checking out how Harrod cites the personal interviews he did for the blog. But ultimately these are going to be recollections of conversations. That doesn't seem like a good reason to assume he never said it. Robert Skidelsky apparently thinks both quotes are "apocryphal". I'm curious why he's so confident about that. Does anyone know?
3. - Mark Thoma shares a quiz. An unnamed Republican compares the Democrats to (1.) Mussolini, (2.) Marx, and (3.) "Lord Keynes, with his perpetual government spending, deficits, and inflation". The quiz is to guess the Republican that said it. The first sentence gave it away for me. See how you do, with that hint.
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My thought: So I got the official acceptance letter from American University that I alluded to earlier. I'm not sure if I'll go there for my PhD, but the point is I'll definitely be going somewhere in the Fall. I'm pretty sure I'm going to stop the blog at that point because I can really get wrapped up in it, particularly with the unstructured time that school affords. I don't want to completely end my online presence, though. One idea I've been toying with is to start a website with a less frequent blog on it on Keynes and Keynesian thought in general.
If you do a google blog search on "John Maynard Keynes" (which I often do to find interesting material to post), 95% of it is highly critical stuff, most fairly unintelligent, and some of it downright offensive. This isn't the case with, say, a google blog search on "Hayek". You don't have a substantial anti-Hayek web presence (and I'm not saying I would want to see one!), and most of the internet activity around Hayek is very positive. It's the internet, of course, and you still get a wide range of quality. But Hayek fans can be fairly happy with what a curious googler would turn up. I'm very bothered by the fact that a curious googler would not get a fair picture of Keynes (the same is true of youtube - Keynes haters dominate youtube searches on Keynes).
Part of the reason for this is that a lot of good Keynesians out there aren't especially interested in history of thought - which is fine - but it means that they don't post on Keynes himself much or the evolution of Keynesian ideas. I'm reading Thomas Kuhn now and from a Kuhnian perspective this is the mark of good science. Scientists operate within and challenge and innovate on their paradigm. They don't spend time digging up the history of their paradigm, which is why the Keynesian bloggers that are out there don't spend a ton of time covering Keynes himself. I want to be an economic scientist like this, of course. I have purely scientific interests. But I also have an interest in the history of thought, and I think that's something I could really contribute to with an internet presence. There are lots of posts on here that I'd like to develop into fuller essays (Keynes's German foreword; Consumptionism and Keynesianism; the relationship between overproductionist ideas and Keynesianism, etc.) that might one day be appropriate for a journal. I could post those sorts of longer essays, provide lots and lots of links, etc. It would be slower paced than a blog, and more of a depository of information. Sort of like Greg Ransom's www.hayekcenter.org except probably even less like a blog than that, and without the editorializing he does, but with the same sort of topical narrowness and half-academic/half-popular postings. Do people think this would be useful?
Posts
Are you suggesting that Keynes invented the concept of neoteny? Don't think so.
ReplyDeleteHad to share this: http://reason.com/blog/2011/02/11/communist-tract-of-the-day
ReplyDelete"Robert Skidelsky apparently thinks both quotes are "apocryphal". I'm curious why he's so confident about that. Does anyone know?"
ReplyDeleteBecause they sound too good? That would be my reason. I've known of far too many apocryphal quotes like this by famous people not to be suspicious. These days entire works can't be readily attributed to a deceased famous person (as was a the case in the classical world), so that pattern of human behavior has retreated into the realm of aphorisms.
What you say about anti-Keynes and anti-Hayek articles...
ReplyDeleteThere are a lot of conspiracy theories about the two in the internet. And not necessarilly by either Hayekian liberals or postwar-style social democrats. Nope, it often comes from that third-party of anarchists (no, not the "market" anarchists) and general anti-establishmentarian types.
Both are portrayed as men who walk around hands-over-shoulders with political elites, dictators or otherwise, and sneakily suggest and implement their plans of social engineering to oppress the working classes. Evil moustache-twirlers with foreign accents who make quick flights to some country and tell the capitalists there how to save their power, before coming back and philandering with women or partying with men. You get the idea.
One British anarchist website, AnarchistFaqs, which sometimes seems to support violent Catalonian and Greek anarchists, would often have such Chomsky quotes as "Economics was developed as a weapon of class warfare." These people seem to think that economists are actually admired or respected among the elites, even though it would probably be the opposite with those gruffy professor types.
Then, there is Naomi Klein, who says Milton Friedman secretly conspired to have natural disasters and wars happen so that his vision of society could be quickly implemented. This despite Friedman's monetarism lasting briefly from 1979 to 1982. Can you imagine how much otherworldly slander distinguished economists get?
I thought I would drop my blog when I started doctoral studies... so, we'll see what happens. :)
ReplyDeleteMr. Kuehn,
ReplyDeleteI will admit that I haven't read Roy Harrod's biography of Keynes. But I did use the "search inside this book" function at Amazon.com, and I can find no trace of any spoken remark resembling "When the facts are wrong, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?"
Are you sure it is in the Harrod book? If you can cite edition and page number, perhaps we can lay this question to rest.
Best wishes,
Jason Zweig
The Wall Street Journal
I read that it was in the Harrod book - I haven't read Harrod myself.
ReplyDeleteThis is from Wikipedia: "Reply to a criticism during the Great Depression of having changed his position on monetary policy, as quoted in Lost Prophets: An Insider's History of the Modern Economists (1994) by Alfred L. Malabre, p. 220".
Whoever attributed it to him, my point was who cares if it's a primary source or not? Who cares if there's no evidence. We know it's attributed to him. We know it's something he'd say. There's no hard evidence that he said it except these attributions.
I'm not sure what journalistic standards are and I would make sure I wrote "attributed" in an academic paper, but aside from that I don't see why we should second-guess the attribution.