tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7608702.post1820836083995308907..comments2023-10-25T08:46:20.242-05:00Comments on The Distributist Review: Chapter II: If it Ain't Broke...John Médaillehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16463267750952578888noreply@blogger.comBlogger6125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7608702.post-11571642256246794772008-11-21T15:50:00.000-06:002008-11-21T15:50:00.000-06:00John, your quote of Keynes on Hayek got me researc...John, your quote of Keynes on Hayek got me researching Champion (very much an interested party it seems) and rereading Hayek's "Road to Serfdom". The quote apparently came from a letter written by Keynes after reading RTS on the way to Bretton Woods, where what Hayek says about world government was very relevant. Keynes however was not a socialist but a liberal in, as Hayek thought of himself, the Classical tradition of J S Mill and Gladstone. His macro-economics was not arguing for a planned economy, even though it might seem like that to those used to the micro-economic tradition where everything is particular and the whole is no different than the sum of the parts. <BR/><BR/>In an economy as a whole the parts are arranged as a control system (Smith's invisible hand), and Keynes was not concerned with the individual parts but effectively moved from a 1st order to a 2nd order control system, in which a standing error necessary to show how much short-term (trade) correction is needed is off-set by a long-term (infra-structure) correction. What the respective money flows are to be used for is no more necessarily predetermined in the infra-structure than the trade channel: governments or powerful businesses may either plan/impose their own priorities or simply respond to known needs.<BR/><BR/>The example from aeronautics that I gave in my comment on chapter 1 is relevant to characterisation of control system orders (0 thru 3). These correspond mathematically to Chesterton's "four winds", plotted on the Cartesian axes of a compass. When you insist that economics is properly "political economics" you are in effect insisting on these "horizontal" and "vertical dimensions"; your distinctions between money and land, labour and capital map onto the four cardinal directions. <BR/><BR/>I understand that you don't want to make this book overly technical, but unless you can advance the mathematical concepts of your readers beyond simple quantities to the complex numbers necessary for directed (here circular) flows, they will be left seeing oppositions between right and wrong or supply and demand, rather than economic life cycles (product development, production, maintenance and recycling) in which priorities change and in teams different types of talent take the lead as the cycles progress.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7608702.post-11655751323607234832008-06-10T16:13:00.000-05:002008-06-10T16:13:00.000-05:00@Abe, good points. I must say that I am enjoying t...@Abe, good points. I must say that I am enjoying this way of writing. It allows me to see the work from the reader's point of view before publication.<BR/><BR/>Thanks to all.John Médaillehttps://www.blogger.com/profile/16463267750952578888noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7608702.post-42591681927953758062008-06-10T09:45:00.000-05:002008-06-10T09:45:00.000-05:00Since this chapter is a critique of Keynes and Hay...Since this chapter is a critique of Keynes and Hayek, and your audience is distributists who need to be educated in economic theory, it would do well to define Keynesianism and Hayekism at the very beginning of the chapter. As it is, you introduce them like this:<BR/>"What distinguishes the right and left sides of this chart, and the two different economies they illustrate, is the introduction of Keynesian economic policies during World War II... Both Reagan and Thatcher took Fredrick von Hayek as their economic mentor. But the more “Hayekian” the economic rhetoric became, the more Keynesian the economy has actually become"<BR/><BR/>For people who are just beginning to learn history, those names are meaningless. By the end of the chapter, I finally figured out that the factor that distinguished those two economists was their support of government intervention, but then I had to go back and re-read the first part of the chapter now that I understood what you were talking about.Abehttps://www.blogger.com/profile/04975921628357312902noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7608702.post-6176484177735457702008-06-09T21:12:00.000-05:002008-06-09T21:12:00.000-05:00@tpolg, I think you're right; I may be outsmarting...@tpolg, I think you're right; I may be outsmarting myself here. I don't want to go into the discussion of the distinctions between corrective and distributive justice until after I've addressed the "scientific" questions, and shown that the science is itself dependent on questions of equity. However, if I don't at least give some hint of what "justice" means here, I will likely only cause confusion in the reader's mind.John Médaillehttps://www.blogger.com/profile/16463267750952578888noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7608702.post-6204579416130399662008-06-09T18:24:00.000-05:002008-06-09T18:24:00.000-05:00Yes well, getting down to content, you use the phr...Yes well, getting down to content, you use the phrase “Distributive justice” but you have not really defined it yet. If I had to free-associate that phrase, it would probably be “Marxism”. I don’t know if that is really what you want.A. L. Bracketthttps://www.blogger.com/profile/04279366590950486985noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7608702.post-5175841996382708272008-06-09T03:07:00.000-05:002008-06-09T03:07:00.000-05:00"...the only grounds that would have validity for ..."...the only grounds that would have validity for a capitalist is the grounds he establishes for himself".<BR/><BR/>Well, there's a typo for you. "grounds" is plural, so either that or "is" is wrong.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.com