I studied Samuelson’s text in 1968. And promptly ignored everything it taught. At Xmas I earned a mark of 35% which was going to be half the year’s final mark. The final exam was on the entire text. My overall final grade was around 66%. Not sure where I lost a couple of marks on the final.
But now I wish I had critiqued it more like I did with other subjects I studied. I had a professor of psychology the next year who said to the students (most of whom were graduating) in the last 20 minutes of my abnormal psychology class of my undergrad degree “When you go into your careers, be careful not to reify theories!”
I put up my hand and asked him to explain. He spent 20 minutes writing ideas on the blackboard -- dating myself -- under two headings. Deify and Riefy. He showed their common roots amounting to defining deify as making a god out of an object and reify as acting as if a theory was proven.
In the subsequent 48 years practicing as a social worker I frequently encountered reified theories. The first was that autism was caused by “refrigerator mothers” who did not show warmth and affection to their children. By then I took on bad ideas and opposed a doctor who had reified that theory and wanted a 4 year old child moved out of the foster home where he had lived since shortly after his birth. He was not moved.
There were many other such notions over the years and were often received orthodoxy. In political economics I gave a talk around 2000 called How I Learned Why Bad Beliefs Don’t Die At The Hockey Arena. Two other hockey dads had threatened me with physical harm when I mentioned that as businessmen, the money they borrowed was created out of thin air.
They had studied economics and believed in the Krugman intermediary approach of borrowers getting money from savers.
Like Steve, I despair that the human race will come to its senses in my lifetime.
Why not implement a 50% Discount/Rebate policy at retail sale? 1) it breaks up the monopoly paradigm that private banks enjoy, namely to create and distribute new money only as debt, with monetary gifting that benefits both individuals and enterprise. 2) it does so by duplicating the reciprocal accounting entries process they use to create most of our new money. 3) as everyone participates in retail sale it macro-economically implements beneficial price and asset deflation because we've never had y/o/y 50% inflation let alone minute to minute, while 4) doubling everyone's purchasing power and greatly increasing demand for every enterprise's goods and services and integrating what is usually opposed self interests thus making it a policy the bourgeosie could rally to in revolt against the real problem, namely private finance. 5) Throw in a few additional policies like UBI, "modern debt jubilee" and fiscal deficits all of which philosophically align with monetary gifting, and lastly regulate the tendency of non-retail business models to increase prices with a tax rate of 100% on any arbitrary price rises...and we might get someplace so far as changing economic realities.
"I don't care who writes a nation's laws—or crafts its advanced treaties—if I can write its economic textbooks."
If Samuelson said it, it's not very original- just a doggerel of the (jn)famous quote from Meyer Amschel Rothschild.
Cool story though. "Debunking Economics" is where I started on the road to lucidity, though been a political zealot since my early-teens. My take is that correct understanding of money opens the door to society choosing the political path it wants, and that's why the rich and powerful (even so called social democrats) are so heavily invested in keeping that door securely shut.
It's also outright ideology and preservation of a paradigm by Neoclassicals. If they admit this bit of reality--or any other bit of reality--into their framework, then the whole thing unravels.
And I'm very glad that Debunking Economics was helpful.
I studied Samuelson’s text in 1968. And promptly ignored everything it taught. At Xmas I earned a mark of 35% which was going to be half the year’s final mark. The final exam was on the entire text. My overall final grade was around 66%. Not sure where I lost a couple of marks on the final.
But now I wish I had critiqued it more like I did with other subjects I studied. I had a professor of psychology the next year who said to the students (most of whom were graduating) in the last 20 minutes of my abnormal psychology class of my undergrad degree “When you go into your careers, be careful not to reify theories!”
I put up my hand and asked him to explain. He spent 20 minutes writing ideas on the blackboard -- dating myself -- under two headings. Deify and Riefy. He showed their common roots amounting to defining deify as making a god out of an object and reify as acting as if a theory was proven.
In the subsequent 48 years practicing as a social worker I frequently encountered reified theories. The first was that autism was caused by “refrigerator mothers” who did not show warmth and affection to their children. By then I took on bad ideas and opposed a doctor who had reified that theory and wanted a 4 year old child moved out of the foster home where he had lived since shortly after his birth. He was not moved.
There were many other such notions over the years and were often received orthodoxy. In political economics I gave a talk around 2000 called How I Learned Why Bad Beliefs Don’t Die At The Hockey Arena. Two other hockey dads had threatened me with physical harm when I mentioned that as businessmen, the money they borrowed was created out of thin air.
They had studied economics and believed in the Krugman intermediary approach of borrowers getting money from savers.
Like Steve, I despair that the human race will come to its senses in my lifetime.
Thanks for cheering me up Herb! ;). But yes, the capacity humans have for deifying and reifying is about the only unlimited resource on the planet.
Why not implement a 50% Discount/Rebate policy at retail sale? 1) it breaks up the monopoly paradigm that private banks enjoy, namely to create and distribute new money only as debt, with monetary gifting that benefits both individuals and enterprise. 2) it does so by duplicating the reciprocal accounting entries process they use to create most of our new money. 3) as everyone participates in retail sale it macro-economically implements beneficial price and asset deflation because we've never had y/o/y 50% inflation let alone minute to minute, while 4) doubling everyone's purchasing power and greatly increasing demand for every enterprise's goods and services and integrating what is usually opposed self interests thus making it a policy the bourgeosie could rally to in revolt against the real problem, namely private finance. 5) Throw in a few additional policies like UBI, "modern debt jubilee" and fiscal deficits all of which philosophically align with monetary gifting, and lastly regulate the tendency of non-retail business models to increase prices with a tax rate of 100% on any arbitrary price rises...and we might get someplace so far as changing economic realities.
"I don't care who writes a nation's laws—or crafts its advanced treaties—if I can write its economic textbooks."
If Samuelson said it, it's not very original- just a doggerel of the (jn)famous quote from Meyer Amschel Rothschild.
Cool story though. "Debunking Economics" is where I started on the road to lucidity, though been a political zealot since my early-teens. My take is that correct understanding of money opens the door to society choosing the political path it wants, and that's why the rich and powerful (even so called social democrats) are so heavily invested in keeping that door securely shut.
It's also outright ideology and preservation of a paradigm by Neoclassicals. If they admit this bit of reality--or any other bit of reality--into their framework, then the whole thing unravels.
And I'm very glad that Debunking Economics was helpful.