What am I if I wipe the slate of my mind totally clean of content__not it’s mechanics and what it’s really bio-neurally made of(don’t wish to make Descartes’ mistake), but to a state of purely zero information content…?(except of course, memory) Let’s take a hypothetical look at such a pure state possibility… I think it can easily stand in for the theorizing we often attempt, at removing historical information from our minds, to speculatively see the much more wild, native and ancient states of man and community__yet imo, this method of the ‘tabula rasa model/blank slate model’ offers the same means, while staying in the state changes of ones present life__which may just offer a far more direct method… It may even offer a clearer and truer state of speculation and possible hypothesis building, of mental actions and evolution__hopefully allowing a new slant on an old story…
If a pure fundamental state of mind exists, then what does initial or 1st state thought consist of, and where is its proto-source/s…? I think this is the question we must answer, to answer to history’s quest both in philosophy and psychology, the two most investigated areas of this equation. The late 19th century saw the greatest flury of activity by not only the newly forming field of professional psychologists, but the long standing logicians, as well. The battlefields were being drawn all across the European, as well as the American continents. Of course many will easily recognize this as the old battles of and between rational thought and empirical thought, more well known as the study of epistemology, and often extended to include some aspects of teleology, ontology and mereology, and for such facts, this expose will bear fruit from all four, as I intend to show an eclectic ‘a priori’ and ‘a posteriori’ logic, protecting its slightly weaker sibling__psychology, and this same psychology protecting its stronger sibling__logic, from becoming too full of itself…
Now, some may say that’s a bold statement__but, it’s already been articulated over a 50 year period, in the later 19th century, and the first part of the 20th century, by and within the formal and private writings, and professional letters of Charles Sanders Peirce__to many of the world’s most famous then living personages, of his era… I am simply stating that Peirce actually discovered the entire inference mechanics path of our total thought processes, back then__but, I’m not certain if he actually realized it or not, though it is clearly stated when anyone tasks themselves to take in all his and others’ ideas and papers, over the period of his life, especially when viewed from today’s much extended secondary investigations__with our much extended scientific capacities and abilities into classical, quantum and relative mechanics__not even counting today’s much extended logics and maths, but in all fairness, CM, QM and RM certainly depend on these new extensions of and within the modern logics and maths, of these complex physical systems…
Anyway, not to go any deeper than necessary, for our fundamental inference path mechanics__much of the modern logical and mathematical complexity can be ignored__as I intend to describe our inquiry trail much easier, with our simple natural logic, or the ‘logica utens’, as Peirce wrote about it. Yes, the ‘logica utens’ does contain our ‘a priori’ mathematical abilities, and this can be reduced to our simple ratio-logic, for its most fundamental path mechanics' necessities, to be put forward in this paper. Now, don’t all you psychology leaning readers run off at this stage, as no inference enters the brain/mind__without 1st passing directly through our psychological/empirical senses, by way of our physical senses of sight to intuition/perception/intuition, ‘a priori/a posteriori’ rational intellect, subjective/objective judgment, will and finally leaving at the gates of mental or physical action__either by being stored in memory for later retrieval, or said thought activating our muscles into new physical actions, of either play or work. My job will be to discern how and where these 1st perceptions and proto-thoughts are determined, to become psychological or logical judgments__and exactly how and from where all initial information enters the brain/mind states of such psychological and logical processes__but, my job is made much easier by having discovered all of these inference paths in Peirce’s already written massive correspondence and writings…
Of course, what the above paragraph is addressing are the hardest problems in philosophy__not yet solved, whether that be ‘total inference mechanics’_‘foundations of psychology, logic or both’_‘free will’_‘epistemology, teleology, psychology or all three, possibly plus ontology and mereology’_and ‘just how much is empiricism directly involved in rationality and why?’ These questions will only be settled by a new ‘meta-semiotic methodology’ of this science being directly applied to these difficult philosophical questions, debates and ever so serious arguments__no matter where and what media these dialogues, dialectics and conversations take place, and in. We just seem to love to argue over the seeming incommensurabilities of these, otherwise simple superveniences__But, where do the boundaries lie, and how can we understand these, seemingly so, complex aporias__anew…? Is it possible to develop an open eclective normativity of such views, expressed through a simpler ground of general common sense…?
If I had a nickel for every time I’ve re-read Peirce’s scientific methodological ideas, after reading others’ ideas, just to get my head screwed back on right__I’d be a millionaire by now. Just finished reading Joseph Esposito’s, Christopher Hookway’s, Irving Anellis’ and Mathias Girel’s excellent papers on these battles I speak of above, back in those days and up to today__and what a joy it’s been after reading hundreds of other really bad scholars in between, while leaning on a few good Peirceans just for life-preservers__such as Susan Haack, T.L. Short and Karl-Otto Apel__but, most were of the Frege' school which just about completely lacks a necessary modal logic and any reasonable and sensible distinctions between mathematics and logic__per say__which happens to be, imo, absolutely necessary for such philosophy to make any true and sound sense, so is there any unknown reason__that analytic philosophy__is off on such a silly linguistic witch-hunt…? They badly need re-introduction to simple language, images and analogies, etc__I do so humbly fear… And yes, I’m just giving smug personal opinions here, but Frege did give a great contribution to philosophy and logic, by distinguishing the necessity of separating psychological content from logical content, to do proper formal logic__Then__but, that is no longer feasible or necessary, in our over-conflated and confused semantic-web-world. We’ve long ago graduated from the fear of psychology destroying our logic__iff we’ve understood Peirce entirely, so I’ll try to keep my prejudices in check__but, really my problem is about one logic school of thought against another logic school of thought__Peirce vs. Frege__The older vs. the younger__and Peirce, by far imo, had the wiser supervisors of his education__plus the added advantage of being a real and true scientist__which gave him the advantage of a thoroughly real-world grounded logic…
Let me add in here, a few comments I wrote a few years back, that just may add a little clarity to what I’ve written above:
How Does A Brain See Itself, Without A Mind...?
Btw, excellent note you wrote to me... The title may seem strange, but seriously ask yourself; 'Do we need a mind, if we have a brain...?' If everything in the brain exists within the neural biological perception network, and I do mean everything, every essence agent tool we use, and every aspect of possible essence__Then what's mind but an extra, completely unnecessary word, to confuse us...? Can brain see mind...? No...! How does brain know mind exists...? It doesn't...! Is mind necessary for anything, beyond the capacities of our brains...? No__Not that I can find...! Is mind just pure imagination...? Is mind as a conceptual system necessary...? Is mind what we refer to as Intellect...? Is mind the conceptual system, absolutely separate from brain...? Imo, brain sees itself, without a mind, through perception...! Does perception see concepts...? Yes...! Does perception see feelings...? Yes...! Does perception see intellect...? Yes...! If all functions are performed by brain, perception and all their physical essence agents and tools, then what's mind do...? Nothing I can find, as it's not necessary__so far, to any of my investigations...! So maybe, iff we stop confusing and conflating brain and mind, brain with mind, mind with brain, etc., on and on__Just maybe, we could make some real sense of physical and mental intelligences...! Intelligence is nothing but the physical processes of the meat-ball sitting on our shoulders, processing meat, rocks and em-waves, etc...! Intelligence finds no minds or consciousnesses to process...! Intelligence finds only the physical world__externally and internally__all else is imaginal space exaggerations...! What is imaginal space...? Perception's ability to see beyond the finite, into oblivion(any physical mirror book system can do this)__Necessary for theory to see the possible ideal, and non-ideal, futures, for our very rational survival as a species...! What is rationality...? Perceptions fundamental a priori arithmetic ability to process lesser and greater magnitudes and multitudes, and their mathematical cousins__Best orders...!
Do we have mental intelligences...? Do we have physical intelligences...? Which is true...? Are they both true, or is just one true...? Is it necessary to have a mental fluidic continuum we can not physically define or see...? How could such a non-physical continuum field exist...? It couldn't...! It can't...! It doesn't...! There's only one real physical continuum, filled with real physical em-wave-matter, non-viscous, fluidic particles...! Oh, we can distinguish between the internal and external continuums, but they're really made of the exact same materials__em-rads, etc...! The only essence agent tool that makes them distinguishable is the brain's neural perception network...! So, what we mistake for the mental, is actually the brain's perception, mirroring the brain's physical visions, from one perception/essence agent tool to another, i.e., from external vision, to direct perception(internal vision), to memory storage, to judgments, to ascripted emotions, and back to perception, and finally to will and actions, etc...! The brain, perception and all her essence agents do it all__No mind required...! So what's the big deal about mind...? It's just an extra word we've tagged onto the brain's neural perceptual system__nothing more...!
The physical brain is processing nothing but physical systems__externally viewed, and internally viewed__by perception and brain...! What's the puzzle...? Relativity...? No...! That's just a minor, less than .5%, correction to standard classical physics...! The puzzle is arguing about mind and brain...! Throw out the useless words mind, and consciousness, and you can begin to understand the very simple brain of intuitions and logic...!
The missing link is not understanding word conflations and confusions...! Mind is simply perception...!
The Fallible Human Mind/Ego/Soul of Logic...
Again, you offer no definition of this, otherwise, mythical logic. You know, it seems everyone wants to assume their own perfection and completeness of understanding of ideas, when in fact all ideas and minds are truly incomplete___being itself___is incomplete___yet most speak from an ego as if it possessed complete omega knowledge and wisdom___I think this point quite important. Let's just say that possibly, the mind at omega point may be able to achieve such complete intelligence, how, and I stress how, would one develop the dialogue and language necessary to reach the world's diversity of minds? Is it even possible? I think the key would be in accepting, with humility, the absolute incompleteness of one's own being's knowledge, and the definitions of what is considered knowledge and or wisdom, to different groups. Now, we know from this site, that metaphysics and science are on opposing sides, quite often, not even counting the vast differences of spiritists, emotionalists and consciousnessists. Is there a solution to these mind/ego/soul differences...?
Now, I know there is a solution to these differences, but I don't know a way of getting the truths across to varying global points of views. All I can do is state my views, from the science side of philosophy and physics. Let me just point out that when anyone uses logic, it has different rules of use for all the opposing world points of view. It was Husserl who first recognized the different rules between scientific and psychological logics___he showed where they had opposite sets of rules. Others have shown also that music and comedy opperate on totally opposite logic functions than science, and of course, we well know the differences between spiritists and scientists, etc... Now, what exactly are these differences...? The scientist will say logic must function according to the established rules and laws of the historical use of philosophic and physical logic, as established by Aristotle on, i.e., A is A, A is B, and B is not not B, and the excluded middle, etc.. Since Aristotle, we have further increased the branches of logic to some 137 categories and 9 classes, functioning on varrying agreements and dis-agreements with the founding rules. On the other side of the fence are the psycholigists, metaphysicists, spiritists, emotionalists and consciousnessists, etc. who insist on a further undefined set of private language logics, as first described by Wittgenstien___and he also stated, it doesn't exist. Now, we really have quite a mix of mush to make sense of___where do we start...?
Let me again just state science's position. In order for logic to function toward facts and factually provable truths, only real object ideas can be inferred into the otherwise fallible human logic, due to the fact that if opinion is allowed to be inferred into logic, all that is possible for logic to return is opinion. This does not mean the scientist can not use theory to find fact. It only means that the final logic must only have real objects' ideas inferred into logic to return absolute facts, and nor is it possible for any subjective realities to be inferred into logic, with an outcome of absolute facts___subjective inferrences will always return nothing but unprovable opinions…(except of course, as pertains to our feelings of the heart, then even that's still highly debatable)
The human mind/ego/soul is too fallible, as most will use their ego, polluted by the infinity problem of soul capacity, to pollute the mind's final positions___this is just as often true of science, as of religion, etc. So, herein lies the problem, as I see it___The human mind/ego/soul itself___being___is too fallible to be trusted, without verifiable objective facts of observation, to back up logic, to create any absolute facts of any realities…
Now, for a moment, just look at the other side. Let's take the most violating of science and logic___religion. They most all believe in an infallible soul, yet the soul can be exaggerated to any powers of delusions, especially the more emotional it becomes. These exaggerations, when added to the mind, only enhance the mythical power of the ego, and do not add to any true logic. These are absolutely subjective states of opinions, when inferred into logic, and can only produce more opinions. This isn't to say that opinions can not become facts, as they often do, but not until purified by the realities of the absolutely objective world.(opinions themselves don't actually become facts__we simply exchange our opinions for facts) This isn't to say emotions aren't real and can't be studied, as they are scientifically cognitively studied all the time, but it's through a massive historical database of objective observational case studies, which I may add, are usually ignored by the opinionists, lacking these and other scientific logical objective facts…
True logic only works factually true with absolute objective objects' ideas inferred in, first___always___period... Any other type of logic, is polluted by, quite often, false opinion... This has been the trouble and reason that metaphysics has been truly unable to enhance the study of being beyond its feeble state of incompleteness___being is absolutely scientifically incomplete... We must get off our big egos and recognize this fact...
Now, what is it we are truly looking at, as pertains to our selves, seeing themselves, as the pure ‘tabula rasa’ state…?
Are we physical…? Yes… Are we mental…? Yes…? Is our mental, physical…? Iff viewed from the known perspective of em-waves being physical__yes… Do we have scientific experiments of thought being physical em-waves…? Yes, we certainly do, with all the new and powerful magnetic field experiments being performed in labs all around the world__where different areas of thought can be enhanced and retarded by simple proximity applications of such powerful magnetic fields. And further, new memory experiments are also showing PKM Zeta’s abilities to enhance and retard, or even erase long-term memories. So, we actually do have real world experiments relating brain states to neuro-biological body states, for the first era in history__which in my opinion, clearly repudiates the mind-body duality. If so, then the epistemological and scientific question becomes__'How do we know the brain starts out as a pure state ‘tabula rasa’__and is only filled in by information from the external world’s database, the internal memory, and the objective epistemology of the neuro-bio-epistemic brain-body connections…?’ And stronger still; ‘How do we know the epistmic agent, ‘tabula rasa’ acquires its own free-will choices…?’
The ‘Tabula Rasa’s’ Free-Will Mechanics__How…?
Simply put; “It’s mathematically impossible for the ‘tabula rasa’ not to exist as the proto-state of brain/mind, and self-acquire its own necessary free-will…” First, were the proto-state of brain/mind to exist as a fixed state of pre-existing programming and knowledge in an innate neuro-bio-state agency__How would such an agency state, change and update itself, from such a fixed innate state to a changing and changed state…? How would such fixed innate states explain our simple and complex changing personalities, talents and creativities, especially the actor’s choice, to assume any personality available upon self-command__to exist and function…? How would a pre-set will update its survival needs, on the fly__which we know it certainly does__to meet all of life’s many multitudes of changing challenges…? How would a fixed brain/mind pick one of millions of data-bits entering its inference engine, every month__without becoming over-whelmed into outright schizophrenia__had it no free-will to pick and choose…? These, and many thousands of similar questions can only be answered by a thoroughly dynamic system, capable of constant and eternal updating, of the data-bits entering its inference engine__and in no way could such a fixed proto-pre-set mechanics achieve such massive dynamics, as that of a constantly up-datable fundamental ‘tabula rasa’ having its absolutely necessary ‘free-will…’ If you think it could or can, then you are working with an entirely different information base than I am, and yet, I’ve truly studied them all__so, good luck explaining a ‘non-tabula rasa’ and a ‘non-free-will’__Without the help of great magic… Btw, all ‘non-tabula rasa’ thinking has simply turned the historical knowledge on its head, by 'stealing' this long history’s hard work, and simply offering its false ‘counterfactual’ information, while necessarily using the very data of history’s opposite discoveries, as it false informations__in other words, turning truth on its head, as a lie, and calling it__its own new truth__Blaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh…!!!
Here’s the five hurdles you’ll have to overcome:
1. Strong Determinism is a complete self-contradiction of its own self-necessity and self-consistencies__It uses the language mechanics of free-will choices, to attempt proofs against free-will, i.e., tis counterfactual, question begging, or the snake swallowing its own tail, or/and the conclusion is deriving far more from the statement mechanics’ premise/s than is present, to possibly deduct from it/them, i.e., tis a false deduction logic…
2. Strong Determinism is an infinite regress to a logical impossibility__It bases its arguments on cause and effect, yet when its cause and effect is chased to its true deductive foundations in absolute fundamental motion mechanics, there’s absolutely no fundamental prime mover mechanics known, to found such fallacious circular logic on, therefore__tis a pretentious logic, and impossible of absolutely true groundings…
3. Free-will is a perfect Q.M. engine__It’s indiscernible as to absolute foundation, except as to its general motion and simple choices, through highly possible frequency mechanics__Its foundation is indeterminism, randomness and/or uncertainty, etc., at base__We simply don’t yet know how it fully mechanically works, but are absolutely certain it works, as intuitive choice is a fact of human decision and judgment function, and also creativity__which can not be disproved, except by determinism's illogical feeble attempts by using this same free-will intuitive choice function, which certainly is no proof, but is its logical opposite, and such counterfactuals are dis-allowed in logic… A never equals not A…
4. Strong Determinism can never be intelligent, as it falsely attempts to eliminate the intelligence of its own necessary free-will choices, to be intelligent__and such attempts are highly offensive to all sound intelligence, without the determinist even recognizing the offensiveness of his statements, being identical to calling intelligent free-will’ers__highly stupid, especially when the sound logical proofs are on the free-will’ers side__Not the side of the determinists’ illusions and delusions of false scientific grandeur…
5. The Necessary Free-Will, to Be Subjectively and Objectively Intelligent, Exists__and oppositely__To advocate strong or absolute determinism, is to (unknowingly-implyingly) call everyone else who doesn’t agree__Stupid…! Strong determinism produces all its own logical self-contradictions__from its negative infinite regresses to nothing but pure ego, since its own logic kicks its own legs out from under it__Splat…!!!
Friday, July 15, 2011
Tuesday, July 5, 2011
HOW PEIRCEAN WAS THE “FREGEAN” REVOLUTION IN LOGIC?
(I strongly advise all logicians, analytic philosophers and linguists to please read this:)
Irving H. Anellis
Abstract. The historiography of logic conceives of a Fregean revolution in which modern mathematical logic (also called symbolic logic) has replaced Aristotelian logic. The preeminent expositors of this conception are Jean van Heijenoort (1912–1986) and Do-nald Angus Gillies. The innovations and characteristics that comprise mathematical logic and distinguish it from Aristotelian logic, according to this conception, created ex nihlo by Gottlob Frege (1848–1925) in his Begriffsschrift of 1879, and with Bertrand Rus-sell (1872–1970) as its chief This position likewise understands the algebraic logic of Augustus De Morgan (1806–1871), George Boole (1815–1864), Charles Sanders Peirce (1838–1914), and Ernst Schröder (1841–1902) as belonging to the Aristotelian tradi-tion. The “Booleans” are understood, from this vantage point, to merely have rewritten Aristotelian syllogistic in algebraic guise.
The most detailed listing and elaboration of Frege’s innovations, and the characteristics that distinguish mathematical logic from Aristotelian logic, were set forth by van Heijenoort. I consider each of the elements of van Heijenoort’s list and note the extent to which Peirce had also developed each of these aspects of logic. I also consider the extent to which Peirce and Frege were aware of, and may have influenced, one another’s logical writings.
Irving H. Anellis
Abstract. The historiography of logic conceives of a Fregean revolution in which modern mathematical logic (also called symbolic logic) has replaced Aristotelian logic. The preeminent expositors of this conception are Jean van Heijenoort (1912–1986) and Do-nald Angus Gillies. The innovations and characteristics that comprise mathematical logic and distinguish it from Aristotelian logic, according to this conception, created ex nihlo by Gottlob Frege (1848–1925) in his Begriffsschrift of 1879, and with Bertrand Rus-sell (1872–1970) as its chief This position likewise understands the algebraic logic of Augustus De Morgan (1806–1871), George Boole (1815–1864), Charles Sanders Peirce (1838–1914), and Ernst Schröder (1841–1902) as belonging to the Aristotelian tradi-tion. The “Booleans” are understood, from this vantage point, to merely have rewritten Aristotelian syllogistic in algebraic guise.
The most detailed listing and elaboration of Frege’s innovations, and the characteristics that distinguish mathematical logic from Aristotelian logic, were set forth by van Heijenoort. I consider each of the elements of van Heijenoort’s list and note the extent to which Peirce had also developed each of these aspects of logic. I also consider the extent to which Peirce and Frege were aware of, and may have influenced, one another’s logical writings.
Wednesday, May 25, 2011
A Journey__Finding Myself__My Total Self…
As a child, my eyes fell upon a world of beauty and conflict__the awesome beauty of nature and even man’s doings, yet at the same time, saw the immense conflicts between man and man, man and woman, woman and woman. I remember early on asking myself; “Why was the world of nature so exquisitely perfect, and yet the world of man so fraught with problems…?”__as I clearly saw these human problems within the very house I lived in, where four generations of family members tried to blend, and often failed to come to terms with one another. Even though I full well realized nature had to kill to live, as did man and woman, I saw far more civility and comity among the animals, than did I among the humans. Animals were much kinder to one another, at least of the same kind, and even of different kinds, when the farmer taught them to behave__as they stayed behaved and kind, once taught__that is, iff taught by a kind, knowing and caring enough farmer. I saw no animals forming armies to kill other animal armies of the same kind, or even innocent others unnecessarily so, or seeming to have the bitter personal battles over belongings, turf and space__as did our human crowd, and my close family, relatives and friends. This drastic difference of natural beauty and conflict puzzled me immensely, and would come to take up most of my life’s search for the reasons why…
Now, maybe I didn’t have the average family, as did many others__I did have a family of immense diversity__from the lowliest uneducated farmers and housewives, to the highest educated businessmen, gentlemen, engineers, mathematicians and politicians. The main farm I was raised on even had its own black-smith shop, complete with forge and foundry, to make all the tools, machinery and implements needed for our farm, and many others around the area. Gramps was the educated patriarch of the family, with more than a few college educated children, grand-children and great-grand-children college educated and not. Even some of the in-laws were highly educated, and of course some not at all, as there were also uneducated farmers and housewives amongst them. Now, as you may well imagine, this was quite an eclectic bunch of drastically different personality people, all trying to assimilate to some form of family function. Of course not all mentioned lived on this single farm, but were all often visiting members of gramps’ and great-gramps’ families__as gramps and great gramps were of unrelated families, yet of the same contemporary generation, since gramps married the maid of his family business enterprises, who was the young daughter of great-grand-dad__as gramps' wife had died giving birth to her 11th child. Grammy was the only person able to reach gramps, and bring him out of his depression, of losing his childhood sweetheart wife in childbirth, after a long hard year of deep mourning. Anyway, I mention this as it seems quite important for shaping gramps into the great humanitarian he became, after the death of his first wife__where he would go on to not only build major business enterprises, in several diverse fields, but also to take the time to become a very effective politician, and to educate most every family member, to, or at least near, his level of knowledge proficiency__as only he had the patience to do so__which also included my mother, father, sisters, brother and myself__along with the majority of the greater family members, also…
As my father was the wild-card_the black-sheep_of this massive extended family, he had to be the rebel, and quit school in the 8th grade__but couldn’t escape being educated by all the close influences around him, and actually took to self-educating himself, all through the years of his life, to keep up with his highly educated mathematically and medically inclined wife, and finally end as a full-fledged inventor and engineer__himself. In fact, of all the highly educated family members, only gramps and dad, would I grant the level of knowledge proficiency being achieved, above that of all the other college educated family members__even of the several other PhD’s in our family__so this always gave me a unique perspective about academics and common sense, in general. I always saw common sense and kindness trumping academics__as the number one necessary influence of an educated life__as I never met two wiser men than my grandfather and my father__one having a Ph.D. education, and his and his second wife’s son, my father, having an 8th grade education, and one day of high-school, whose mother was originally the 1st family’s maid, until she married gramps, 30 years her senior…
Now, many would say; “Well no wonder you witnessed so much family conflict…”__but that wouldn’t be true either, as I saw this same family conflict in every other family I ever got to know, well enough to know and see it. We weren’t special in the human conflict department of families, by any means. We were actually quite in the lesser end of the family conflict arena, as near as I could tell__but it was still far more than my young mind cared for, when I was such a tender aged child__as seeing my younger sister in tears, more times than I care to remember, was not a pretty picture to me__and this was over woman to woman conflict, or I should say, mother to daughter conflict__while I was treated like a King__Why…? This would take many years for my young mind to solve, as it would all the many other family, relatives, friends and acquaintance conflicts I witnessed, at these young ages, and as time would tell, all the rest of my life. “Why were humans so cruel to each other?__I just had to know…!”__While the wild animals, and even the insects, were so kind and even extremely co-operative, as I witnessed with ant and bee colonies__as compared to human collectives…
I don’t know, but maybe I had a starting advantage on others in understanding this deep personal conflict between like and diverse groups of human beings. Gramps, mother, father, friends and others always taught me as much as they knew, that is as I asked about anyway, and I had early on developed the innate curiosity to ask many questions of anyone I knew and met, who always seemed to answer my quests__and of course this had started with my two grandfathers, one educated and one not__but both willing to share all he knew with my young soul. And this same privilege extended to most all my other relatives and friends__then extended into school with certain other students, whose parents had taught them far beyond what that particular education system was offering__But, none of this help offered the deep interest and quest in personal humanity I shared with my deep investigating self. Every time I entered these deepest of areas quests with others, it always seemed to short out into some personal answer they had learned, and not discovered for themselves__as my feelings always rejected their answers as not being that deeper or deepest answer I was always seeking__and this didn’t seem to matter how educated or not, they were, and some of the closest to my ideas, actually came from many throughout my life, that were not educated, as their kindness had granted them a personal perspective into their own quite deep inner sanctums. Still, from the earliest ages to my ripe age of 66, I’ve yet to meet or read anyone with that all deepest of questions’ answers I’ve sought since childhood__at least to my satisfaction__and don’t kid yourself, as I’ve met and talked to many thousands throughout my life, and thoroughly read many thousands more__from the earliest Chinese, Egyptians, Assyrians, Greeks, Indians, etc., on and on__to the most present of logical, mathematical, scientific, philosophical and humanist of pre-modern and modern of thinkers possible for one mind to take in, in one lifetime__as it’s been a constant quest for me, all my life…
So, let me get to the meat of the matter; “How does thought, think about thinking…?” “Am I only ‘thought’ thinking about my own thinking…?” “Am I the thought-gap in my thinking, between other thoughts…?” “If I may be only the thought-gap, then am I nothing but space…?” “If I am nothing but space, am I nothing more than a field-continuum space…?” “If I am a continuum field-space, then am I a micro-field space, within the greater continuum field-space…?” “Am I nothing more than a field within a field, acting within and with the bio-agents of my body, interacting with its own bio-neuronal agency of some greater field-network of more inter-connected nerve synapses, called brain to mind interactions…?” “And, since Einstein stated ‘All is field, everywhere’, am I a non-deterministic quantum state evolved into a ball of free-will uniformity, shedding my randomness through self-control, in the path from my fundamental quantum states of randomness, to final uniformity as finished human product, from its initial rock sources…?” Am I, as Charles Sanders Peirce stated; “Two things here are all-important to assure oneself of and to remember. The first is that a person is not absolutely an individual. His thoughts are what he is "saying to himself", that is, is saying to that other self that is just coming into life in the flow of time. When one reasons, it is that critical self that one is trying to persuade; and all thought whatsoever is a sign, and is mostly of the nature of language. The second thing to remember is that the man's circle of society (however widely or narrowly this phrase may be understood), is a sort of loosely compacted person, in some respects of higher rank than the person of an individual organism." Now, can this highly complex paragraph by Peirce answer some of my above questions…? I am going to state that; “Iff you take the time to fully contemplate, exactly what Peirce is here stating, you can answer the question; ‘What is thought, thinking about thinking, with…?" If you may have read these three; Kant, Heisenberg or Heidegger__you may have come across similar statements about how our ‘intuition space’, or what I have referred to as the gap being the field-continuum, you may notice the almost exact similarities of these three thinkers with that of Peirce__where they also mention ideas about space__or intuitive space, as the same…
Now, the question becomes; “How can I make this plainer to you, so you may see it is the very answer to the fundamental problem of people treating people unjustly and unkindly__and only it is__as originally asked in the beginning of this story…?”__As per this question; “Why was the world of nature so exquisitely perfect, and yet the world of man so fraught with problems…?” This may be quite a task__a huge task__as it involves the entire history in ‘Inference Mechanics’, from the earliest of thinkers, to the most modern__trying to solve the epistemic gaps in our vast knowledge systems, which is actually no more than the gaps between our concepts, interacting with, within and between each and another… I do not intend to make it any more complex than it’s already been explained by Peirce’s complexity, and C. I. Lewis’ much more easily understood simplicity and clarity method, of stating the same as Peirce, with different language and ideation__yet I’ll try to fill in the missing pieces to make it even more plain, clear and simple__as it’s nothing more than the ‘missing mind mechanics’, that have made us all act bad__when its truths could have allowed us to act good, had we but known it’s truths’ mechanics of ‘modal feelings and emotions’, to our physical actions’ much more ordered and better 'Possibilities...'
Let’s look at Peirce’s above statement, and see if we can parse it into a much clearer and simpler understanding. Above I’ve used the term; ‘Inference Mechanics’, as that’s what ‘concept mechanics’ has been named since its inception in antiquity, by most every ancient culture who studied the mind deeply, no matter who or where__and is exactly what Peirce expressed in his above paragraph. I'd also like to here enter another of Peirce's clear statements; "The elements of every concept enter into logical thought at the gate of perception and make their exit at the gate of purposive action; and whatever cannot show its passports at both those two gates is to be arrested as unauthorized by reason.” Now, by adhering to the original terms, we avoid all the unnecessary confusions and conflations of ideas and ideations pertaining to this simple, yet highly over-complexified subject__in the history of the world. This is simply about perception, and abstracting that perception out of our subjective emotions and intellects, and into our objective emotions and intellects__to achieve rational understanding of our primitive feelings and visions of the real external and real internal worlds__one inanimate and one of animate and innate quality, when viewed with proper categories and concepts. As you’ve probably noticed, I’ve stated both subjective and objective emotions and intellect__as ‘conceptual inference mechanics’, and in order for it to be fully functioning and true, must process both the subjective and objective completely, to finally understand how humanity with humanity, really functions, and or can function, esthetically valid to our deepest wishes, of best ordered states, of highest ordered states of a new and true moral justice, for the highest numbers of Earth’s citizens__possible. That may seem like a tall order, bordering on the sycophantic utopias of ‘laughed at times and ideas’ of the past__but think again__this is new and revolutionary discovery of pure thought mechanics__best represented by Peirce’s discovery of the 3rd branch of logic__‘Abduction’__which allows this deepest of levels of personal and logical thinking...
Oh, I hear many of you screaming already__“That doesn’t work. It’s been tried and proven a failure, already…” No… I’m here to tell you it’s simply the anti-philosophers and thinkers who lack the understanding necessary to understand ‘Abduction’, whose understanding doesn’t understand ‘Modal Logic’__and because they do not understand our fundamental ‘Natural Modal Logic’__they also fail to understand strong ‘Modal Abduction…’ This simply makes these false sycophants and pretenders to knowledge, nothing but ‘anti-modal fools’ of what we’d really consider true, valid and fully quantified modal logical knowledge__in the real world. Sad to say, that these anti-modal sycophants have been ruling the academic roosts of the world’s institutions, over the last 60+ years__and this is the sole reason humanism has been divorced from science and academics__leaving the world with the criminalized secular nonsense destroying, what could otherwise be a new renaissance in humanistic expansionary seeding and growing__with ‘Modal Humanism’ and ‘Abduction’ leading the way into a new era of true human values being re-entered into our sad world’s state of present affairs. It’s long overdue we learn the truth of our ancient philosophies of true and profound, yet simple ‘Inference Mechanics’__and an ‘inference mechanics’ that includes our historically cherished evolutionary human moral-justice values__our real intellectual soul’s foundation in historical habitual objective emotional experience…
You may ask why I’ve mentioned objective emotional experience as our foundational base of values__think about it__Is there something preventing you of recognizing the greater capacity of your basic emotions and feelings of modally acting objectively as well as subjectively_or vice versa…? No, there certainly is not__As a matter of fact, you are only crippling yourself, if you are not using both sides of your full human capacity to process your experiences, and it’s simply the process of recognizing the fact that base feelings and emotions are capable of being processed through our ‘inference mechanics’ both subjectively and objectively. We process subjectively when we want our judgments to feel about our ideas, and we process objectively when we want our judgments to rationalize about our ideas, as many situations of our human experiences necessitate both states at different times__and sometimes both at once__for our lives to have true feeling and meaning, with full understanding of our own and others’ feelings, and also the necessities of ours, others’ and the world’s truly rational actions. I don’t know about you, but I intend to keep processing with both sides of my mind, as I’ve never had any trouble doing so__and only feel sorry for those who try and improperly discriminate science against humanism, as do all too many anti-modal sycophants in this far too crass and mean modern world__They should learn the powers of the new modal humanism springing forth, in our present modally logical pragmatic world, being enhanced and sped forth, by the semantic web and the internet’s many free-wills. I kind of doubt they can hold back the rising tide…
Let’s look at this effective ‘modal inference mechanics’ a bit deeper, especially as ‘abduction’ is explicated within its mechanics. The ‘knowledge gaps’ already mentioned have posed problems for philosophy and its epistemic studies for millennia__this is nothing new, but what is new is the fact within__that ‘modal inference mechanics’ can solve these ‘knowledge gaps’ and actually fill in all of Kant’s ‘thing in itself’ missing pieces. Yes, that’s exactly what I said__solve all the empty problems created by Kant’s ‘ding an sich’ unknowns, as there really are no unknowns__of true general importance to us, as human beings trying to survive this massive world of modern confusion and false conflation. You could say Plato and Aristotle started this ‘ding an sich’ myth with falsely thinking ‘rationality’ needed to be grounded in ‘God’, then others such as Kant and Hegel tried to avoid grounding in the effable ‘God’ by developing ‘ding an sich’ for Kant and ‘notion’ for Hegel__which is really still ‘God’ with a new name. Then of course there’s the idealistic ‘phenomenon’ for some, and the ‘epiphenomenal given’ for still others, or ‘epiphenomenal energy’ for still others__until finally Quantum Mechanics learned a true grounding could be achieved in the real world, and particle-wave physics, in the pure randomness and indeterminacy of its fundamental mechanics understandings, within ‘Statistical Mechanics’ solving for ‘Probability Mechanics’, or even indiscernibles(where measurements are above and or below/exceed our Planck scale capacities to measure), of the ‘absolute fundamental substance’__simply meaning there exists nothing more fundamental than the ‘absolute fundamental’, even if we can’t fully define or measure it__its generality is still the ‘absolute fundamental state of substance’ no matter what it turns out to be finally named__as modal necessity requires it to absolutely, fundamentally exist, as is already proven by R. Barcan’s modal logic necessity formulas and proofs of the `40’s. Anyway, this allows us to have an absolute grounding for science in its true ground of our real World and Universe, when these ‘absolute fundamental substance’ particle-waves combinatorially add up to our Universe’s well known and obviously existing general uniformity__we all see, when we simply look. I’d simply refer the reader to C. I. Lewis’ excellent book; ‘Mind And The World Order’ for further well explained and explicated ideas of the above, as relates back to C. S. Peirce, and to H. R. Fischer’s; ‘Abductive Reasoning as a Way of Worldmaking’ for his excellent explication of Peirce’s ‘Abduction…’
As to putting all this into simple common sense words all can easily understand__”I can think and feel any way I choose about the world__I’m a free-willed human being, but, if I want a better world, I best advise myself, I’d better pay close attention to how I use my personal to intellectual thoughts, ideas, judgments and ideations of my world__if I care to make a better world__as careless thinking can only further destroy our world.” I full well realize my subjective and objective feelings and intellectual mathematics, rationality and logic can all be easily and fully processed through my fundamental ‘inference mechanics’ and that my third branch of logic__‘Abduction’__is simply my ‘Method of Hypothesis’ for science, and my deep personal ‘Re-Thinking of Thoughts’ is the same, for my personal feelings’ world__where I can solve all those seeming oh-so-hard emotional problems, etc., and even many of the hard science problems, if I but open my eyes to all these simple ‘inference mechanics’ uses, and simply understand which modal direction I wish to process my information toward__The psychological emotional, or the logical intellectual__and fully learn not to conflate or confuse the two, as they are simply separate desires. ‘Inference Mechanics’ is nothing more than our ‘Base Knowledge Mechanics’__‘What I Can See, I Can Know’__"And, We Can See All Our Inferences Very Clearly, When We But Look, Even The First Inferences 'The World First Infers'__When We All First Opened Our Eyes And Minds, As Children…"
Finally, don’t let me forget to mention the all so important a/estheticians, or better known as the German humanists, as no logic and science functions properly without their necessary marriage with esthetics__no matter how much others think it does__It does not. From Baumgarten, who’s all importance to Kant’s ‘Third Critique of Judgment’ can’t afford to be left out, as Kant’s ideas would never have gained traction without Baumgarten’s esthetic influences__and the later esthetically influenced German humanists would maybe never have existed without Baumgarten’s original work and influence. Goethe, Schiller, Herbart and Steiner, etc., may have just been minor footnotes in history, if not for Baumgarten’s mastery of the esthetic nature of humanity, being spread wide by Kant’s system__so, when you may start to frown upon the mathematicians, scientists and logicians like Kant, Peirce, Lewis, Barcan and such others, don’t forget it was his massive influence that helped spread the popularity of German a/esthetic humanism, and its major influence on Peirce’s logic, which later influenced Lewis, Barcan and many other moderns__to possibly allow humanity’s return to ‘Humanity’s Humanness…’
And again from Peirce: “Two things here are all-important to assure oneself of and to remember. The first is that a person is not absolutely an individual. His thoughts are what he is "saying to himself", that is, is saying to that other self that is just coming into life in the flow of time. When one reasons, it is that critical self that one is trying to persuade; and all thought whatsoever is a sign, and is mostly of the nature of language. The second thing to remember is that the man's circle of society (however widely or narrowly this phrase may be understood), is a sort of loosely compacted person, in some respects of higher rank than the person of an individual organism." Imo, this is the most important message to thoroughly know and understand__in all its potential QM implications...
Also: Abduction Link...
(Click to enlarge... Peirce's inference mechanics paragraph, as explained by Lefebvre, in graphic form...)
Now, maybe I didn’t have the average family, as did many others__I did have a family of immense diversity__from the lowliest uneducated farmers and housewives, to the highest educated businessmen, gentlemen, engineers, mathematicians and politicians. The main farm I was raised on even had its own black-smith shop, complete with forge and foundry, to make all the tools, machinery and implements needed for our farm, and many others around the area. Gramps was the educated patriarch of the family, with more than a few college educated children, grand-children and great-grand-children college educated and not. Even some of the in-laws were highly educated, and of course some not at all, as there were also uneducated farmers and housewives amongst them. Now, as you may well imagine, this was quite an eclectic bunch of drastically different personality people, all trying to assimilate to some form of family function. Of course not all mentioned lived on this single farm, but were all often visiting members of gramps’ and great-gramps’ families__as gramps and great gramps were of unrelated families, yet of the same contemporary generation, since gramps married the maid of his family business enterprises, who was the young daughter of great-grand-dad__as gramps' wife had died giving birth to her 11th child. Grammy was the only person able to reach gramps, and bring him out of his depression, of losing his childhood sweetheart wife in childbirth, after a long hard year of deep mourning. Anyway, I mention this as it seems quite important for shaping gramps into the great humanitarian he became, after the death of his first wife__where he would go on to not only build major business enterprises, in several diverse fields, but also to take the time to become a very effective politician, and to educate most every family member, to, or at least near, his level of knowledge proficiency__as only he had the patience to do so__which also included my mother, father, sisters, brother and myself__along with the majority of the greater family members, also…
As my father was the wild-card_the black-sheep_of this massive extended family, he had to be the rebel, and quit school in the 8th grade__but couldn’t escape being educated by all the close influences around him, and actually took to self-educating himself, all through the years of his life, to keep up with his highly educated mathematically and medically inclined wife, and finally end as a full-fledged inventor and engineer__himself. In fact, of all the highly educated family members, only gramps and dad, would I grant the level of knowledge proficiency being achieved, above that of all the other college educated family members__even of the several other PhD’s in our family__so this always gave me a unique perspective about academics and common sense, in general. I always saw common sense and kindness trumping academics__as the number one necessary influence of an educated life__as I never met two wiser men than my grandfather and my father__one having a Ph.D. education, and his and his second wife’s son, my father, having an 8th grade education, and one day of high-school, whose mother was originally the 1st family’s maid, until she married gramps, 30 years her senior…
Now, many would say; “Well no wonder you witnessed so much family conflict…”__but that wouldn’t be true either, as I saw this same family conflict in every other family I ever got to know, well enough to know and see it. We weren’t special in the human conflict department of families, by any means. We were actually quite in the lesser end of the family conflict arena, as near as I could tell__but it was still far more than my young mind cared for, when I was such a tender aged child__as seeing my younger sister in tears, more times than I care to remember, was not a pretty picture to me__and this was over woman to woman conflict, or I should say, mother to daughter conflict__while I was treated like a King__Why…? This would take many years for my young mind to solve, as it would all the many other family, relatives, friends and acquaintance conflicts I witnessed, at these young ages, and as time would tell, all the rest of my life. “Why were humans so cruel to each other?__I just had to know…!”__While the wild animals, and even the insects, were so kind and even extremely co-operative, as I witnessed with ant and bee colonies__as compared to human collectives…
I don’t know, but maybe I had a starting advantage on others in understanding this deep personal conflict between like and diverse groups of human beings. Gramps, mother, father, friends and others always taught me as much as they knew, that is as I asked about anyway, and I had early on developed the innate curiosity to ask many questions of anyone I knew and met, who always seemed to answer my quests__and of course this had started with my two grandfathers, one educated and one not__but both willing to share all he knew with my young soul. And this same privilege extended to most all my other relatives and friends__then extended into school with certain other students, whose parents had taught them far beyond what that particular education system was offering__But, none of this help offered the deep interest and quest in personal humanity I shared with my deep investigating self. Every time I entered these deepest of areas quests with others, it always seemed to short out into some personal answer they had learned, and not discovered for themselves__as my feelings always rejected their answers as not being that deeper or deepest answer I was always seeking__and this didn’t seem to matter how educated or not, they were, and some of the closest to my ideas, actually came from many throughout my life, that were not educated, as their kindness had granted them a personal perspective into their own quite deep inner sanctums. Still, from the earliest ages to my ripe age of 66, I’ve yet to meet or read anyone with that all deepest of questions’ answers I’ve sought since childhood__at least to my satisfaction__and don’t kid yourself, as I’ve met and talked to many thousands throughout my life, and thoroughly read many thousands more__from the earliest Chinese, Egyptians, Assyrians, Greeks, Indians, etc., on and on__to the most present of logical, mathematical, scientific, philosophical and humanist of pre-modern and modern of thinkers possible for one mind to take in, in one lifetime__as it’s been a constant quest for me, all my life…
So, let me get to the meat of the matter; “How does thought, think about thinking…?” “Am I only ‘thought’ thinking about my own thinking…?” “Am I the thought-gap in my thinking, between other thoughts…?” “If I may be only the thought-gap, then am I nothing but space…?” “If I am nothing but space, am I nothing more than a field-continuum space…?” “If I am a continuum field-space, then am I a micro-field space, within the greater continuum field-space…?” “Am I nothing more than a field within a field, acting within and with the bio-agents of my body, interacting with its own bio-neuronal agency of some greater field-network of more inter-connected nerve synapses, called brain to mind interactions…?” “And, since Einstein stated ‘All is field, everywhere’, am I a non-deterministic quantum state evolved into a ball of free-will uniformity, shedding my randomness through self-control, in the path from my fundamental quantum states of randomness, to final uniformity as finished human product, from its initial rock sources…?” Am I, as Charles Sanders Peirce stated; “Two things here are all-important to assure oneself of and to remember. The first is that a person is not absolutely an individual. His thoughts are what he is "saying to himself", that is, is saying to that other self that is just coming into life in the flow of time. When one reasons, it is that critical self that one is trying to persuade; and all thought whatsoever is a sign, and is mostly of the nature of language. The second thing to remember is that the man's circle of society (however widely or narrowly this phrase may be understood), is a sort of loosely compacted person, in some respects of higher rank than the person of an individual organism." Now, can this highly complex paragraph by Peirce answer some of my above questions…? I am going to state that; “Iff you take the time to fully contemplate, exactly what Peirce is here stating, you can answer the question; ‘What is thought, thinking about thinking, with…?" If you may have read these three; Kant, Heisenberg or Heidegger__you may have come across similar statements about how our ‘intuition space’, or what I have referred to as the gap being the field-continuum, you may notice the almost exact similarities of these three thinkers with that of Peirce__where they also mention ideas about space__or intuitive space, as the same…
Now, the question becomes; “How can I make this plainer to you, so you may see it is the very answer to the fundamental problem of people treating people unjustly and unkindly__and only it is__as originally asked in the beginning of this story…?”__As per this question; “Why was the world of nature so exquisitely perfect, and yet the world of man so fraught with problems…?” This may be quite a task__a huge task__as it involves the entire history in ‘Inference Mechanics’, from the earliest of thinkers, to the most modern__trying to solve the epistemic gaps in our vast knowledge systems, which is actually no more than the gaps between our concepts, interacting with, within and between each and another… I do not intend to make it any more complex than it’s already been explained by Peirce’s complexity, and C. I. Lewis’ much more easily understood simplicity and clarity method, of stating the same as Peirce, with different language and ideation__yet I’ll try to fill in the missing pieces to make it even more plain, clear and simple__as it’s nothing more than the ‘missing mind mechanics’, that have made us all act bad__when its truths could have allowed us to act good, had we but known it’s truths’ mechanics of ‘modal feelings and emotions’, to our physical actions’ much more ordered and better 'Possibilities...'
Let’s look at Peirce’s above statement, and see if we can parse it into a much clearer and simpler understanding. Above I’ve used the term; ‘Inference Mechanics’, as that’s what ‘concept mechanics’ has been named since its inception in antiquity, by most every ancient culture who studied the mind deeply, no matter who or where__and is exactly what Peirce expressed in his above paragraph. I'd also like to here enter another of Peirce's clear statements; "The elements of every concept enter into logical thought at the gate of perception and make their exit at the gate of purposive action; and whatever cannot show its passports at both those two gates is to be arrested as unauthorized by reason.” Now, by adhering to the original terms, we avoid all the unnecessary confusions and conflations of ideas and ideations pertaining to this simple, yet highly over-complexified subject__in the history of the world. This is simply about perception, and abstracting that perception out of our subjective emotions and intellects, and into our objective emotions and intellects__to achieve rational understanding of our primitive feelings and visions of the real external and real internal worlds__one inanimate and one of animate and innate quality, when viewed with proper categories and concepts. As you’ve probably noticed, I’ve stated both subjective and objective emotions and intellect__as ‘conceptual inference mechanics’, and in order for it to be fully functioning and true, must process both the subjective and objective completely, to finally understand how humanity with humanity, really functions, and or can function, esthetically valid to our deepest wishes, of best ordered states, of highest ordered states of a new and true moral justice, for the highest numbers of Earth’s citizens__possible. That may seem like a tall order, bordering on the sycophantic utopias of ‘laughed at times and ideas’ of the past__but think again__this is new and revolutionary discovery of pure thought mechanics__best represented by Peirce’s discovery of the 3rd branch of logic__‘Abduction’__which allows this deepest of levels of personal and logical thinking...
Oh, I hear many of you screaming already__“That doesn’t work. It’s been tried and proven a failure, already…” No… I’m here to tell you it’s simply the anti-philosophers and thinkers who lack the understanding necessary to understand ‘Abduction’, whose understanding doesn’t understand ‘Modal Logic’__and because they do not understand our fundamental ‘Natural Modal Logic’__they also fail to understand strong ‘Modal Abduction…’ This simply makes these false sycophants and pretenders to knowledge, nothing but ‘anti-modal fools’ of what we’d really consider true, valid and fully quantified modal logical knowledge__in the real world. Sad to say, that these anti-modal sycophants have been ruling the academic roosts of the world’s institutions, over the last 60+ years__and this is the sole reason humanism has been divorced from science and academics__leaving the world with the criminalized secular nonsense destroying, what could otherwise be a new renaissance in humanistic expansionary seeding and growing__with ‘Modal Humanism’ and ‘Abduction’ leading the way into a new era of true human values being re-entered into our sad world’s state of present affairs. It’s long overdue we learn the truth of our ancient philosophies of true and profound, yet simple ‘Inference Mechanics’__and an ‘inference mechanics’ that includes our historically cherished evolutionary human moral-justice values__our real intellectual soul’s foundation in historical habitual objective emotional experience…
You may ask why I’ve mentioned objective emotional experience as our foundational base of values__think about it__Is there something preventing you of recognizing the greater capacity of your basic emotions and feelings of modally acting objectively as well as subjectively_or vice versa…? No, there certainly is not__As a matter of fact, you are only crippling yourself, if you are not using both sides of your full human capacity to process your experiences, and it’s simply the process of recognizing the fact that base feelings and emotions are capable of being processed through our ‘inference mechanics’ both subjectively and objectively. We process subjectively when we want our judgments to feel about our ideas, and we process objectively when we want our judgments to rationalize about our ideas, as many situations of our human experiences necessitate both states at different times__and sometimes both at once__for our lives to have true feeling and meaning, with full understanding of our own and others’ feelings, and also the necessities of ours, others’ and the world’s truly rational actions. I don’t know about you, but I intend to keep processing with both sides of my mind, as I’ve never had any trouble doing so__and only feel sorry for those who try and improperly discriminate science against humanism, as do all too many anti-modal sycophants in this far too crass and mean modern world__They should learn the powers of the new modal humanism springing forth, in our present modally logical pragmatic world, being enhanced and sped forth, by the semantic web and the internet’s many free-wills. I kind of doubt they can hold back the rising tide…
Let’s look at this effective ‘modal inference mechanics’ a bit deeper, especially as ‘abduction’ is explicated within its mechanics. The ‘knowledge gaps’ already mentioned have posed problems for philosophy and its epistemic studies for millennia__this is nothing new, but what is new is the fact within__that ‘modal inference mechanics’ can solve these ‘knowledge gaps’ and actually fill in all of Kant’s ‘thing in itself’ missing pieces. Yes, that’s exactly what I said__solve all the empty problems created by Kant’s ‘ding an sich’ unknowns, as there really are no unknowns__of true general importance to us, as human beings trying to survive this massive world of modern confusion and false conflation. You could say Plato and Aristotle started this ‘ding an sich’ myth with falsely thinking ‘rationality’ needed to be grounded in ‘God’, then others such as Kant and Hegel tried to avoid grounding in the effable ‘God’ by developing ‘ding an sich’ for Kant and ‘notion’ for Hegel__which is really still ‘God’ with a new name. Then of course there’s the idealistic ‘phenomenon’ for some, and the ‘epiphenomenal given’ for still others, or ‘epiphenomenal energy’ for still others__until finally Quantum Mechanics learned a true grounding could be achieved in the real world, and particle-wave physics, in the pure randomness and indeterminacy of its fundamental mechanics understandings, within ‘Statistical Mechanics’ solving for ‘Probability Mechanics’, or even indiscernibles(where measurements are above and or below/exceed our Planck scale capacities to measure), of the ‘absolute fundamental substance’__simply meaning there exists nothing more fundamental than the ‘absolute fundamental’, even if we can’t fully define or measure it__its generality is still the ‘absolute fundamental state of substance’ no matter what it turns out to be finally named__as modal necessity requires it to absolutely, fundamentally exist, as is already proven by R. Barcan’s modal logic necessity formulas and proofs of the `40’s. Anyway, this allows us to have an absolute grounding for science in its true ground of our real World and Universe, when these ‘absolute fundamental substance’ particle-waves combinatorially add up to our Universe’s well known and obviously existing general uniformity__we all see, when we simply look. I’d simply refer the reader to C. I. Lewis’ excellent book; ‘Mind And The World Order’ for further well explained and explicated ideas of the above, as relates back to C. S. Peirce, and to H. R. Fischer’s; ‘Abductive Reasoning as a Way of Worldmaking’ for his excellent explication of Peirce’s ‘Abduction…’
As to putting all this into simple common sense words all can easily understand__”I can think and feel any way I choose about the world__I’m a free-willed human being, but, if I want a better world, I best advise myself, I’d better pay close attention to how I use my personal to intellectual thoughts, ideas, judgments and ideations of my world__if I care to make a better world__as careless thinking can only further destroy our world.” I full well realize my subjective and objective feelings and intellectual mathematics, rationality and logic can all be easily and fully processed through my fundamental ‘inference mechanics’ and that my third branch of logic__‘Abduction’__is simply my ‘Method of Hypothesis’ for science, and my deep personal ‘Re-Thinking of Thoughts’ is the same, for my personal feelings’ world__where I can solve all those seeming oh-so-hard emotional problems, etc., and even many of the hard science problems, if I but open my eyes to all these simple ‘inference mechanics’ uses, and simply understand which modal direction I wish to process my information toward__The psychological emotional, or the logical intellectual__and fully learn not to conflate or confuse the two, as they are simply separate desires. ‘Inference Mechanics’ is nothing more than our ‘Base Knowledge Mechanics’__‘What I Can See, I Can Know’__"And, We Can See All Our Inferences Very Clearly, When We But Look, Even The First Inferences 'The World First Infers'__When We All First Opened Our Eyes And Minds, As Children…"
Finally, don’t let me forget to mention the all so important a/estheticians, or better known as the German humanists, as no logic and science functions properly without their necessary marriage with esthetics__no matter how much others think it does__It does not. From Baumgarten, who’s all importance to Kant’s ‘Third Critique of Judgment’ can’t afford to be left out, as Kant’s ideas would never have gained traction without Baumgarten’s esthetic influences__and the later esthetically influenced German humanists would maybe never have existed without Baumgarten’s original work and influence. Goethe, Schiller, Herbart and Steiner, etc., may have just been minor footnotes in history, if not for Baumgarten’s mastery of the esthetic nature of humanity, being spread wide by Kant’s system__so, when you may start to frown upon the mathematicians, scientists and logicians like Kant, Peirce, Lewis, Barcan and such others, don’t forget it was his massive influence that helped spread the popularity of German a/esthetic humanism, and its major influence on Peirce’s logic, which later influenced Lewis, Barcan and many other moderns__to possibly allow humanity’s return to ‘Humanity’s Humanness…’
And again from Peirce: “Two things here are all-important to assure oneself of and to remember. The first is that a person is not absolutely an individual. His thoughts are what he is "saying to himself", that is, is saying to that other self that is just coming into life in the flow of time. When one reasons, it is that critical self that one is trying to persuade; and all thought whatsoever is a sign, and is mostly of the nature of language. The second thing to remember is that the man's circle of society (however widely or narrowly this phrase may be understood), is a sort of loosely compacted person, in some respects of higher rank than the person of an individual organism." Imo, this is the most important message to thoroughly know and understand__in all its potential QM implications...
Also: Abduction Link...
(Click to enlarge... Peirce's inference mechanics paragraph, as explained by Lefebvre, in graphic form...)
Saturday, May 21, 2011
Bogeyman Economics...
by Katy Delay
I'm just a buffoon, and I love a little laughter. We all need a little comic relief from time to time, so I like to make light of the economic mess we're in. However, when surly individuals with Ph.D.s and/or lots of government power start making spooky declarations and rattling their chains, I get a little nervous. After all, they could hurt somebody.
Take Ben Bernanke, Timothy Geithner, and Alan Blinder, for example.
A few months ago, Dr. Bernanke looked Steve Croft straight in the eye and declared his absolute faith that the Federal Reserve can keep our economy stable and, at the same time withdraw the Fed's monetary support as soon as prices rise too much in the U.S.
I guess he thinks prices outside the country can rise as much as they want and it's not our problem. Yet credible researchers argue that U.S. monetary looseness is directly behind the current international rise in dollar-priced commodities. (See this Steve H. Hanke article for a breath of fresh common sense.) And rising food and raw material prices around the world cause misery, poverty, and death. (See this report by the World Bank.)
Then almost in the same sentence Bernanke went on to tell Steve about controlling "market expectations." Now, which is it, Sir? Does withdrawal of monetary support really stop incipient price inflation, or is price inflation merely the result of "market expectations"? Because in the latter case, you must believe that the Fed's words are more important that its actions.
But even Bernanke seems to admit that, sooner or later, the Fed will have to correct the situation; yet I don't see how the Fed can withdraw liquidity without causing a rise in interest rates and a second serious economic dip. So I suspect Bernanke and his colleagues are hoping against hope they can keep liquidity high, convince the markets that price inflation isn't going to happen, and then -- Voila, no price inflation, i.e. an economic miracle. Good luck to you, Doc. When it goes awry, either with price inflation or a second dip, don't say I didn't tell you so.
Then there's our Secretary of the Treasury, Mr. Timothy Geithner, warning us that the debt ceiling must be raised or America could default. Now, you and I know this is nonsense. (If you're not sure, read this common sense piece from Michael D. Tanner.) But no matter to the all-powerful Mr. Geithner. Recently his main purpose in life has been to scare debt-wary Republicans into believing they're driving the country into default. But, Mr. Geithner, what happens when Congress does raise the ceiling? Obviously, it condones the debt spending. But wait a minute, don't you get it, Sir? We don't want any more debt. How much of "No more!" don't you understand? You may not care if the U.S. retains its credibility, but we do.
Professor Alan Blinder, a Keynesian voodoo-economics professor at Princeton, declares that "if we crash into the debt ceiling ... it's not likely to be pretty. [WSJ commentary.] ... "At some point," says Blinder, "Mr. Geithner could wind up brooding over horrible questions like these: Do we stop issuing checks for Social Security benefits, or for soldiers' pay, or for interest payments to the Chinese government? Such agonizing choices are what make default imaginable."
Sounds like plain old scaremongering to me. This guy is the kind of academic soothsayer who furnishes politicians like Geithner with serious-sounding, credentialed ammunition. Shame on you, Professor. You're lucky you won't have to pay for the mess when U.S. debt explodes off the charts and we can't even pay the interest anymore.
Blinder goes on: "[S]uppose the federal government actually does reduce its expenditures by 40% overnight. That translates to roughly $1.5 trillion at annual rates, or about 10% of GDP. That's an enormous fiscal contraction for any economy to withstand, never mind one in a sluggish recovery with 9% unemployment. Even contemplating such a possibility is evidence of a dark, self-destructive impulse."
So Professor, which is the more self-destructive party: the academics like yourself, along with the politicians and their voters, who have gotten the U.S. into the worst pickle of its history, or those who would try to save us from people like you? No, you can't scare me -- well, wait; actually, you DO scare me. But not for the reasons you think.
American jurisprudence is missing one important element: Political Accountability. American citizens should be able to hold individuals in positions of power accountable for their recommendations and actions, other than just voting them out of office. If people want the power, they should get the liability.
There should be a law that anyone in a position of power who makes policy decisions that later turn out to be wrong should be held responsible and should give up everything they own or will ever earn, in order to pay back a fraction of what is owed to all those who have been harmed.
Drunk bus drivers who cause accidents are fired and penalized, even put in jail. Politicians inebriated by the headiness of power, and academics swollen with their sense of self-importance, can cause billions of losses to defenseless citizens with no fear of reprisal. What do they get when they screw up? A comfortable pension, full retirement benefits, and a book deal.
That's Bogeyman Economics for you.
I'm just a buffoon, and I love a little laughter. We all need a little comic relief from time to time, so I like to make light of the economic mess we're in. However, when surly individuals with Ph.D.s and/or lots of government power start making spooky declarations and rattling their chains, I get a little nervous. After all, they could hurt somebody.
Take Ben Bernanke, Timothy Geithner, and Alan Blinder, for example.
A few months ago, Dr. Bernanke looked Steve Croft straight in the eye and declared his absolute faith that the Federal Reserve can keep our economy stable and, at the same time withdraw the Fed's monetary support as soon as prices rise too much in the U.S.
I guess he thinks prices outside the country can rise as much as they want and it's not our problem. Yet credible researchers argue that U.S. monetary looseness is directly behind the current international rise in dollar-priced commodities. (See this Steve H. Hanke article for a breath of fresh common sense.) And rising food and raw material prices around the world cause misery, poverty, and death. (See this report by the World Bank.)
Then almost in the same sentence Bernanke went on to tell Steve about controlling "market expectations." Now, which is it, Sir? Does withdrawal of monetary support really stop incipient price inflation, or is price inflation merely the result of "market expectations"? Because in the latter case, you must believe that the Fed's words are more important that its actions.
But even Bernanke seems to admit that, sooner or later, the Fed will have to correct the situation; yet I don't see how the Fed can withdraw liquidity without causing a rise in interest rates and a second serious economic dip. So I suspect Bernanke and his colleagues are hoping against hope they can keep liquidity high, convince the markets that price inflation isn't going to happen, and then -- Voila, no price inflation, i.e. an economic miracle. Good luck to you, Doc. When it goes awry, either with price inflation or a second dip, don't say I didn't tell you so.
Then there's our Secretary of the Treasury, Mr. Timothy Geithner, warning us that the debt ceiling must be raised or America could default. Now, you and I know this is nonsense. (If you're not sure, read this common sense piece from Michael D. Tanner.) But no matter to the all-powerful Mr. Geithner. Recently his main purpose in life has been to scare debt-wary Republicans into believing they're driving the country into default. But, Mr. Geithner, what happens when Congress does raise the ceiling? Obviously, it condones the debt spending. But wait a minute, don't you get it, Sir? We don't want any more debt. How much of "No more!" don't you understand? You may not care if the U.S. retains its credibility, but we do.
Professor Alan Blinder, a Keynesian voodoo-economics professor at Princeton, declares that "if we crash into the debt ceiling ... it's not likely to be pretty. [WSJ commentary.] ... "At some point," says Blinder, "Mr. Geithner could wind up brooding over horrible questions like these: Do we stop issuing checks for Social Security benefits, or for soldiers' pay, or for interest payments to the Chinese government? Such agonizing choices are what make default imaginable."
Sounds like plain old scaremongering to me. This guy is the kind of academic soothsayer who furnishes politicians like Geithner with serious-sounding, credentialed ammunition. Shame on you, Professor. You're lucky you won't have to pay for the mess when U.S. debt explodes off the charts and we can't even pay the interest anymore.
Blinder goes on: "[S]uppose the federal government actually does reduce its expenditures by 40% overnight. That translates to roughly $1.5 trillion at annual rates, or about 10% of GDP. That's an enormous fiscal contraction for any economy to withstand, never mind one in a sluggish recovery with 9% unemployment. Even contemplating such a possibility is evidence of a dark, self-destructive impulse."
So Professor, which is the more self-destructive party: the academics like yourself, along with the politicians and their voters, who have gotten the U.S. into the worst pickle of its history, or those who would try to save us from people like you? No, you can't scare me -- well, wait; actually, you DO scare me. But not for the reasons you think.
American jurisprudence is missing one important element: Political Accountability. American citizens should be able to hold individuals in positions of power accountable for their recommendations and actions, other than just voting them out of office. If people want the power, they should get the liability.
There should be a law that anyone in a position of power who makes policy decisions that later turn out to be wrong should be held responsible and should give up everything they own or will ever earn, in order to pay back a fraction of what is owed to all those who have been harmed.
Drunk bus drivers who cause accidents are fired and penalized, even put in jail. Politicians inebriated by the headiness of power, and academics swollen with their sense of self-importance, can cause billions of losses to defenseless citizens with no fear of reprisal. What do they get when they screw up? A comfortable pension, full retirement benefits, and a book deal.
That's Bogeyman Economics for you.
Wednesday, April 13, 2011
The Paradoxers and Non-Paradoxers of Feelings, Thoughts and Logics…
The modern world of fraudulent emotions, thoughts and logics has come upon us all, so fast, most have not even yet noticed it. Everyone sees the national political debates going nowhere, on tv and most the same all around the world, and knows there’s something really wrong__but can’t quite put their finger on the real trouble. Let me tell you right up front__This is no more than the fraudulent ‘emotional and intellectual paradoxers’, that have always existed throughout different periods in history, and finally accumulate in large enough numbers to support political and social correctness laws__that really no more than over-respect the most evil emotions, thoughts, logics and wrong actions of societies__at these differing times of cultural evolutions__And, we are once again dead center in the middle of one of these same such periods. It’s no more complex than realizing certain of our most insecure personalities have learned how to emotionally and intellectually manipulate the best of social society to the worst of social society’s undesired actions. Over some centuries ago, people had a most legitimate name for these social functionaries__They were referred to as ‘good paradoxers’ and ‘bad paradoxers’ by such later notables as Augustus De Morgan__when he spoke of the centuries gone by, where the word ‘paradoxer’ had an entirely different meaning__until those who thought they knew better, who did not know better, changed the linguistic and social meaning of this older word and concept…
Here’s the best explanation of what paradoxers really were/are…
In the introduction to the Budget of Paradoxes De Morgan explains what he means by the word.
How can the sound paradoxer be distinguished from the false paradoxer? De Morgan supplies the following test:
The Budget consists of a review of a large collection of paradoxical books which De Morgan had accumulated in his own library, partly by purchase at bookstands, partly from books sent to him for review, partly from books sent to him by the authors. He gives the following classification: squarers of the circle, trisectors of the angle, duplicators of the cube, constructors of perpetual motion, subverters of gravitation, stagnators of the earth, builders of the universe. You will still find specimens of all these classes in the New World and in the new century. De Morgan gives his personal knowledge of paradoxers.
Now, back to my reason for entering De Morgan’s ideas about true and false paradoxers, as relates to my first paragraph… Not only do these people exist in the mathematical, logical and physical sciences, of which De Morgan was so familiar, but in the soft-sciences of sociology, political science, cultural studies and psychology, etc.__as well… I think at this point I should enter a para that shows where my thinking is mainly drawn from, and who drew the above, quoted from De Morgan:
Imo, only by looking at the very fundamentals of our feelings, thoughts and logics will we ever get to the bottom of modern societies’ troubles__and since all troubles start in our feelings about our world, of other thoughts and logics, all other thoughts and logics must be dealt with from this most fundamental foundationalism of such levels. Imo, nowhere can we jump from base feelings to informal and or formal logics, without first considering our most fundamental pre-suppositional feelings__and nowhere can we consider other thoughts and feelings, without also considering the full story our higher thoughts and logics have to tell our base feelings__When we do, we simply do nothing but cheat ourselves of true knowledge__and feed the procrustean and pugilistic paradoxers, and the very subtle cousins of the other paradoxer’s excess-empathy-pushers, etc. We have been making this humongous mistake of feelings’, thoughts’ and logics’ separations__for, oh I don’t know when or how long__forever, I guess…
Since I can see I’m going to make no sense here, as it’s really clearly outside my expertise, let me simply enter an e-mail to a friend, I recently wrote on the same subject:
Hi, and no I have never read anything of MacIntyre's, as this is far from what I'm more interested in, by way of logical and mathematical foundations of all ideas. I simply thought by reading the author's review, which seemed to offer some historical points, it may be valuable. You see to me, morality, ethics, emotions and values are as I described to you with that liberty graph(the golden mean), where people and societies act within a middle band-width of actions acceptable to the majority, as per the habits of social laws passed by chance experience collisions over the years, of these societies' evolutions__just as Peirce described it. To me, law is all societies' social codex of morality, yet all societies' have different chance experiences, which created each society's moral codex of laws. And yes, societies have always had people always wanting to exceed the band-width of accepted normalacy on both ends of the legal and social spectrum__serial killers on the upper end, and extreme empathy pushers and such, on the other end. Both are wrong, but only guided by our societies' moral law codes passed by habitual evolutions of such chance experience collisions, turned into the moral laws we do have__but none have the complete laws to guide human actions(nor can they) and keep the extremist manipulators and destroyers from taking advantage of the incommensurables that are impossible of creating law for__Just think how ridiculous it'd be to pass empathy laws of; "You must do and act as I say."__Yet that is what some of your students are trying to force on you__No...?
Imo, when the experiential self fails to cope__the social law codex must be invoked... It's that simple, as personal experiential emotions is a dead end in the ego, of errors and false beliefs(realize, knowledge also lives inside that same ego-space, in so many words, except is drawn from external facts, and internal ideation of). The social law codex is drawn from the intellect of historical experience of passing a far too strict a moral law code; religions etc., and a far too loose a moral law code; Attila The Hun and Genghis Khan marching over the top of every society, and bludgeoning all in their paths, etc. So, you see again, both Aristotle and Peirce were correct on the point of 'Habits'__as it's only our interpretation of evolutionary experiences, we have the actual moral law codexes we do. Though they ain't perfect__It's the best a chaotic-minded human species can achieve__until we can evolve our intellects to understanding the new and superior economic and social systems being talked about and offered by a few, all around the world__at present(but, it's anyone's guess when we'll awake, or at least as to the critical number of actioners/actuators). The times, they are a changing, and these new systems will be being talked about__when society finally realizes__'All existing systems have extremely false and fraudulent foundations, and fundamentals of much naive thought...’
I've been working on an article about all this, for about a week now, or after you spoke to me__as I realized it was also so in the center of my problems of reaching the audiences I'm attempting to__but, it's turning out to be more difficult to write than I first thought it may be, as I've really only got the first paragraph, then about 6 paras from Augustus De Morgan, about the paradoxers and non-paradoxers__or truth destroyers, and truth-makers... Here's the title__The Paradoxers of Feelings, Thoughts and Logics…
I'll send it to you when I'm done, but it may be a while, as I'm re-researching much of Peirce's ideas as relates to De Morgan's and many, many others. Imo, Peirce is the foundational logic and experiential mechanics of all modern societies__yet the world ain't yet figured this out. I can't find anyone highly intelligent of late__that doesn't directly or indirectly run back into Peirce's oh so modern thinking__as I've been tracing this foundationalism out through hundreds of other modern thinkers in all fields of study__all over the world. Imo, if they know anything, they've studied Peirce, or someone else who has__He's that important...
A wee bit o' advise__Try to sort the non-created ideas of feelings’ experiences, from the created ideas of intellectual experience... Created ideas are those ideas we improve upon__at least conceptually or model-wise, of our base experiential feelings. We improve upon our base experiences by understanding the necessary priorities of intellectually realized moral codex law, over our personally assumed egoic false beliefs about the same...(this is a long hard lesson to learn, and must be intricately traveled, over time) Remember, when we draw from our beliefs, we are drawing from our ego at the all too often dead-end of that personal experience’s aporia-tunnel, and quite often creating unintended errors... When we draw from our experiential intellects, we are drawing from everybody's trials and errors, into the best fit possible(if possible)__as per the West's moral codexes of laws, and this seems to be far better, and more mature than Sharia law__No...?(aporia above meaning 'incommensurabilities of the hazy indiscernibles')
Hope that helps, as when the emotions fail, one should find the proper experiential and intellectual 'habits' of the centuries... These are the general universal 'habits' of our greater humanity__Our natural morality, which is no more than a fair balance of acceptable opposites__among differing parties, or that oh so respectable moral liberty, to the best fit possible...
P.s.
I can explain all this much better to you, in person__as it really takes too many words without personal eye and body language presence... And I have realized much more about it, since we last spoke... Btw, it sounds to me like you probably forgot what I mentioned to you about the liberty graph's importance in understanding the 'mean(golden) limits of personal experience', that can only be sorted and handled by social law... It's the best-fit humanity's got... When the personal fails, the law must come to the rescue... Just a reminder...
Here’s the best explanation of what paradoxers really were/are…
In the introduction to the Budget of Paradoxes De Morgan explains what he means by the word.
"A great many individuals, ever since the rise of the mathematical method, have, each for himself, attacked its direct and indirect consequences. I shall call each of these persons a paradoxer, and his system a paradox. I use the word in the old sense: a paradox is something which is apart from general opinion, either in subject matter, method, or conclusion. Many of the things brought forward would now be called crotchets, which is the nearest word we have to old paradox. But there is this difference, that by calling a thing a crotchet we mean to speak lightly of it; which was not the necessary sense of paradox. Thus in the 16th century many spoke of the earth's motion as the paradox of Copernicus and held the ingenuity of that theory in very high esteem, and some I think who even inclined towards it. In the seventeenth century the deprivation of meaning took place, in England at least."
How can the sound paradoxer be distinguished from the false paradoxer? De Morgan supplies the following test:
"The manner in which a paradoxer will show himself, as to sense or nonsense, will not depend upon what he maintains, but upon whether he has or has not made a sufficient knowledge of what has been done by others, especially as to the mode of doing it, a preliminary to inventing knowledge for himself... New knowledge, when to any purpose, must come by contemplation of old knowledge, in every matter which concerns thought; mechanical contrivance sometimes, not very often, escapes this rule. All the men who are now called discoverers, in every matter ruled by thought, have been men versed in the minds of their predecessors and learned in what had been before them. There is not one exception."
"I remember that just before the American Association met at Indianapolis in 1860, the local newspapers heralded a great discovery which was to be laid before the assembled savants -- a young man living somewhere in the country had squared the circle. While the meeting was in progress I observed a young man going about with a roll of paper in his hand. He spoke to me and complained that the paper containing his discovery had not been received. I asked him whether his object in presenting the paper was not to get it read, printed and published so that everyone might inform himself of the result; to all of which he assented readily. But, said I, many men have worked at this question, and their results have been tested fully, and they are printed for the benefit of anyone who can read; have you informed yourself of their results? To this there was no assent, but the sickly smile of the false paradoxer"
The Budget consists of a review of a large collection of paradoxical books which De Morgan had accumulated in his own library, partly by purchase at bookstands, partly from books sent to him for review, partly from books sent to him by the authors. He gives the following classification: squarers of the circle, trisectors of the angle, duplicators of the cube, constructors of perpetual motion, subverters of gravitation, stagnators of the earth, builders of the universe. You will still find specimens of all these classes in the New World and in the new century. De Morgan gives his personal knowledge of paradoxers.
"I suspect that I know more of the English class than any man in Britain. I never kept any reckoning: but I know that one year with another? -- and less of late years than in earlier time? -- I have talked to more than five in each year, giving more than a hundred and fifty specimens. Of this I am sure, that it is my own fault if they have not been a thousand. Nobody knows how they swarm, except those to whom they naturally resort. They are in all ranks and occupations, of all ages and characters. They are very earnest people, and their purpose is bona fide, the dissemination of their paradoxes. A great many -- the mass, indeed -- are illiterate, and a great many waste their means, and are in or approaching penury. These discoverers despise one another."
Now, back to my reason for entering De Morgan’s ideas about true and false paradoxers, as relates to my first paragraph… Not only do these people exist in the mathematical, logical and physical sciences, of which De Morgan was so familiar, but in the soft-sciences of sociology, political science, cultural studies and psychology, etc.__as well… I think at this point I should enter a para that shows where my thinking is mainly drawn from, and who drew the above, quoted from De Morgan:
"In Logic, I am the exponent of a particular tendency, that of physical sciences. I make the pretension to being the most thorough going and fundamental representative of that element who has yet appeared. I believe that my system of logic (which is a philosophical method to which mathematical algebra only affords aid in a particular part of it) must stand, or else the whole spirit of the physical sciences must be revolutionized. If this is to happen, it cannot be brought about in any way so quickly as by the philosophical formularization of it and the carrying of it to its furthest logical consequences. If on the other hand it is to abide, its general statement will be of consequence for mankind. I have measured my powers against those of other men; I know what they are. It is my part to announce with modest confidence what I can do. My system has been sketched out but not so that its bearings can be appreciated. If the world thinks it worth developing, they have only to give me the means of doing it. But if not, I shall follow another path, with perfect contentment." C.S. Peirce
Imo, only by looking at the very fundamentals of our feelings, thoughts and logics will we ever get to the bottom of modern societies’ troubles__and since all troubles start in our feelings about our world, of other thoughts and logics, all other thoughts and logics must be dealt with from this most fundamental foundationalism of such levels. Imo, nowhere can we jump from base feelings to informal and or formal logics, without first considering our most fundamental pre-suppositional feelings__and nowhere can we consider other thoughts and feelings, without also considering the full story our higher thoughts and logics have to tell our base feelings__When we do, we simply do nothing but cheat ourselves of true knowledge__and feed the procrustean and pugilistic paradoxers, and the very subtle cousins of the other paradoxer’s excess-empathy-pushers, etc. We have been making this humongous mistake of feelings’, thoughts’ and logics’ separations__for, oh I don’t know when or how long__forever, I guess…
Since I can see I’m going to make no sense here, as it’s really clearly outside my expertise, let me simply enter an e-mail to a friend, I recently wrote on the same subject:
Hi, and no I have never read anything of MacIntyre's, as this is far from what I'm more interested in, by way of logical and mathematical foundations of all ideas. I simply thought by reading the author's review, which seemed to offer some historical points, it may be valuable. You see to me, morality, ethics, emotions and values are as I described to you with that liberty graph(the golden mean), where people and societies act within a middle band-width of actions acceptable to the majority, as per the habits of social laws passed by chance experience collisions over the years, of these societies' evolutions__just as Peirce described it. To me, law is all societies' social codex of morality, yet all societies' have different chance experiences, which created each society's moral codex of laws. And yes, societies have always had people always wanting to exceed the band-width of accepted normalacy on both ends of the legal and social spectrum__serial killers on the upper end, and extreme empathy pushers and such, on the other end. Both are wrong, but only guided by our societies' moral law codes passed by habitual evolutions of such chance experience collisions, turned into the moral laws we do have__but none have the complete laws to guide human actions(nor can they) and keep the extremist manipulators and destroyers from taking advantage of the incommensurables that are impossible of creating law for__Just think how ridiculous it'd be to pass empathy laws of; "You must do and act as I say."__Yet that is what some of your students are trying to force on you__No...?
Imo, when the experiential self fails to cope__the social law codex must be invoked... It's that simple, as personal experiential emotions is a dead end in the ego, of errors and false beliefs(realize, knowledge also lives inside that same ego-space, in so many words, except is drawn from external facts, and internal ideation of). The social law codex is drawn from the intellect of historical experience of passing a far too strict a moral law code; religions etc., and a far too loose a moral law code; Attila The Hun and Genghis Khan marching over the top of every society, and bludgeoning all in their paths, etc. So, you see again, both Aristotle and Peirce were correct on the point of 'Habits'__as it's only our interpretation of evolutionary experiences, we have the actual moral law codexes we do. Though they ain't perfect__It's the best a chaotic-minded human species can achieve__until we can evolve our intellects to understanding the new and superior economic and social systems being talked about and offered by a few, all around the world__at present(but, it's anyone's guess when we'll awake, or at least as to the critical number of actioners/actuators). The times, they are a changing, and these new systems will be being talked about__when society finally realizes__'All existing systems have extremely false and fraudulent foundations, and fundamentals of much naive thought...’
I've been working on an article about all this, for about a week now, or after you spoke to me__as I realized it was also so in the center of my problems of reaching the audiences I'm attempting to__but, it's turning out to be more difficult to write than I first thought it may be, as I've really only got the first paragraph, then about 6 paras from Augustus De Morgan, about the paradoxers and non-paradoxers__or truth destroyers, and truth-makers... Here's the title__The Paradoxers of Feelings, Thoughts and Logics…
I'll send it to you when I'm done, but it may be a while, as I'm re-researching much of Peirce's ideas as relates to De Morgan's and many, many others. Imo, Peirce is the foundational logic and experiential mechanics of all modern societies__yet the world ain't yet figured this out. I can't find anyone highly intelligent of late__that doesn't directly or indirectly run back into Peirce's oh so modern thinking__as I've been tracing this foundationalism out through hundreds of other modern thinkers in all fields of study__all over the world. Imo, if they know anything, they've studied Peirce, or someone else who has__He's that important...
A wee bit o' advise__Try to sort the non-created ideas of feelings’ experiences, from the created ideas of intellectual experience... Created ideas are those ideas we improve upon__at least conceptually or model-wise, of our base experiential feelings. We improve upon our base experiences by understanding the necessary priorities of intellectually realized moral codex law, over our personally assumed egoic false beliefs about the same...(this is a long hard lesson to learn, and must be intricately traveled, over time) Remember, when we draw from our beliefs, we are drawing from our ego at the all too often dead-end of that personal experience’s aporia-tunnel, and quite often creating unintended errors... When we draw from our experiential intellects, we are drawing from everybody's trials and errors, into the best fit possible(if possible)__as per the West's moral codexes of laws, and this seems to be far better, and more mature than Sharia law__No...?(aporia above meaning 'incommensurabilities of the hazy indiscernibles')
Hope that helps, as when the emotions fail, one should find the proper experiential and intellectual 'habits' of the centuries... These are the general universal 'habits' of our greater humanity__Our natural morality, which is no more than a fair balance of acceptable opposites__among differing parties, or that oh so respectable moral liberty, to the best fit possible...
There exists only personal experiential comfort...
There exists only intellectual experiential knowledge...
These two are drawn from two distinct sources__belief and facts...
The scientific method, is the only method of facts__the laws of...
P.s.
I can explain all this much better to you, in person__as it really takes too many words without personal eye and body language presence... And I have realized much more about it, since we last spoke... Btw, it sounds to me like you probably forgot what I mentioned to you about the liberty graph's importance in understanding the 'mean(golden) limits of personal experience', that can only be sorted and handled by social law... It's the best-fit humanity's got... When the personal fails, the law must come to the rescue... Just a reminder...
Saturday, March 12, 2011
What was Keynes' view of "too big to fail...?"
In short, tax, confiscate and legally reform all such excesses back to sane and functional systems, benefitting the greater society far more equitably__Just as FDR did in the `30's, by instituting many of Keynes' ideas, then...
Suggested modern updates by Davidson, as a modern extension of Keynes' ideas... (This is a much more complex system than represented here. It is not a single global currency system, as may be interpreted. All nations maintain local currency. It's only for international trade and financial transactions' management__the real problem area, which also includes self-liquidating national debts, and major local subsidiarity improvements, allowing future sustainability... This is the same system Plato first suggested some 2400 years ago__'All have eyes and ears, but practically none see and listen...")
“Elsewhere(Davidson) I have developed in detail a proposal for reforming the entire international payments system via an international clearing union that provides for capital controls and other necessary and sufficient conditions to permit the establishment of a golden age in the 21st century. The main proviso of my proposal are:
1. The unit of account and ultimate reserve asset for international liquidity is the International Money Clearing Unit (IMCU). All IMCU's are held only by central banks, not by the public.
2. Each nation's central bank is committed to guarantee one way convertibility from IMCU deposits at the clearing union to its domestic money. Each central bank will set its own rules regarding making available foreign monies (through IMCU clearing transactions) to its own bankers and private sector residents(21). Ultimately, all major private international transactions clear between central banks' accounts in the books of the international clearing institution.
3. The exchange rate between the domestic currency and the IMCU is set initially by each nation -- just as it would be if one instituted an international gold standard.
4. Contracts between private individuals will continue to be denominated into what ever domestic currency permitted by local laws and agreed upon by the contracting parties.
5. An overdraft system to make available short-term unused creditor balances at the Clearing House to finance the productive international transactions of others who need short-term credit. The terms will be determined by the pro bono clearing managers.
6. A trigger mechanism to encourage a creditor nation to spend what is deemed (in advance) by agreement of the international community to be "excessive" credit balances accumulated by running current account surpluses. These excessive credits can be spent in three ways: (1) on the products of any other member of the clearing union, (2) on new direct foreign investment projects, and/or (3) to provide unilateral transfers (foreign aid) to deficit members.
7. A system to stabilize the long-term purchasing power of the IMCU (in terms of each member nation's domestically produced market basket of goods) can be developed. This requires a system of fixed exchange rates between the local currency and the IMCU that changes only to reflect permanent increases in efficiency wages.(22) This assures each central bank that its holdings of IMCUs as the nation's foreign reserves will never lose purchasing power in terms of foreign produced goods, even if a foreign government permits wage-price inflation to occur within its borders.
8. If a country is at full employment and still has a tendency towards persistent international deficits on its current account, then this is prima facie evidence that it does not possess the productive capacity to maintain its current standard of living. If the deficit nation is a poor one, then surely there is a case for the richer nations who are in surplus to transfer some of their excess credit balances to support the poor nation.(23) If it is a relatively rich country, then the deficit nation must alter its standard of living by reducing the relative terms of trade with major trading partners. If the payment deficit persists despite a continuous positive balance of trade in goods and services, then there is evidence that the deficit nation might be carrying too heavy an international debt service obligation. The pro bono officials of the clearing union should bring the debtor and creditors into negotiations to reduce annual debt service payments by [1] lengthening the payments period, [2] reducing the interest charges, and/or [3] debt forgiveness.(24)”
Suggested modern updates by Davidson, as a modern extension of Keynes' ideas... (This is a much more complex system than represented here. It is not a single global currency system, as may be interpreted. All nations maintain local currency. It's only for international trade and financial transactions' management__the real problem area, which also includes self-liquidating national debts, and major local subsidiarity improvements, allowing future sustainability... This is the same system Plato first suggested some 2400 years ago__'All have eyes and ears, but practically none see and listen...")
“Elsewhere(Davidson) I have developed in detail a proposal for reforming the entire international payments system via an international clearing union that provides for capital controls and other necessary and sufficient conditions to permit the establishment of a golden age in the 21st century. The main proviso of my proposal are:
1. The unit of account and ultimate reserve asset for international liquidity is the International Money Clearing Unit (IMCU). All IMCU's are held only by central banks, not by the public.
2. Each nation's central bank is committed to guarantee one way convertibility from IMCU deposits at the clearing union to its domestic money. Each central bank will set its own rules regarding making available foreign monies (through IMCU clearing transactions) to its own bankers and private sector residents(21). Ultimately, all major private international transactions clear between central banks' accounts in the books of the international clearing institution.
3. The exchange rate between the domestic currency and the IMCU is set initially by each nation -- just as it would be if one instituted an international gold standard.
4. Contracts between private individuals will continue to be denominated into what ever domestic currency permitted by local laws and agreed upon by the contracting parties.
5. An overdraft system to make available short-term unused creditor balances at the Clearing House to finance the productive international transactions of others who need short-term credit. The terms will be determined by the pro bono clearing managers.
6. A trigger mechanism to encourage a creditor nation to spend what is deemed (in advance) by agreement of the international community to be "excessive" credit balances accumulated by running current account surpluses. These excessive credits can be spent in three ways: (1) on the products of any other member of the clearing union, (2) on new direct foreign investment projects, and/or (3) to provide unilateral transfers (foreign aid) to deficit members.
7. A system to stabilize the long-term purchasing power of the IMCU (in terms of each member nation's domestically produced market basket of goods) can be developed. This requires a system of fixed exchange rates between the local currency and the IMCU that changes only to reflect permanent increases in efficiency wages.(22) This assures each central bank that its holdings of IMCUs as the nation's foreign reserves will never lose purchasing power in terms of foreign produced goods, even if a foreign government permits wage-price inflation to occur within its borders.
8. If a country is at full employment and still has a tendency towards persistent international deficits on its current account, then this is prima facie evidence that it does not possess the productive capacity to maintain its current standard of living. If the deficit nation is a poor one, then surely there is a case for the richer nations who are in surplus to transfer some of their excess credit balances to support the poor nation.(23) If it is a relatively rich country, then the deficit nation must alter its standard of living by reducing the relative terms of trade with major trading partners. If the payment deficit persists despite a continuous positive balance of trade in goods and services, then there is evidence that the deficit nation might be carrying too heavy an international debt service obligation. The pro bono officials of the clearing union should bring the debtor and creditors into negotiations to reduce annual debt service payments by [1] lengthening the payments period, [2] reducing the interest charges, and/or [3] debt forgiveness.(24)”
Friday, February 4, 2011
Two Pictures Show an Important Difference Between China and America...
Two Pictures Show an Important Difference Between China and America
Fabius Maximus Feb 3, 2011 7:21PM Summary: Americans tend to see the mote in China’s eye but not the beam in ours. We project our dark traits onto China, no matter how absurd. Today we see two pictures that provide a rebuttal to one common myth about China and America.
The French Marshall Louis Lyautey (1854-1934) told his gardner to plant a row of trees on his estate. “My Lord, they will take a century to reach full growth” said his groundskeeper. “Then we start plant them today” replied Lyautey.
The news media and its pet pedants tell us much about China. Such as tales about China’s rampant malinvestment, unlike America — where home of entrepreneurs, where free markets rule. Google shows 37 thousand hits to the words Chinese and malinvestment. While there is probably much malinvestment in China, America has a far more serious malinvestment problem.
That’s important because over time even small differences in relative performance can produce large differences in national power.
Malinvestment in China
A new train station in Wuhan (Central China), completed December 2009 (source: Financial Times). One of the thousands of new ports, stations, and airports being built or expanded. Two generations from now these will be considered far-sighted acts of genius, building infrastructure before its needed — contributing to its current growth, built cheaply while China is poor.
Malinvestment in the USA
Meanwhile the US has 18.8 million vacant homes (18.6% 14.6% of total units), up from 13.6 million (11.7%) a decade ago (Census data). The office vacancy rate is 17.7% (per Grubb & Ellis).
But that’s a small aspect of the problem. Our critical public infrastructure is decaying (for details see “The 2009 Report Card for American Infrastructure” of the the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE). And our private sector engines of innovation have atrophied. Overall levels of investment are low. The great private sector R&D centers have died, such as Bell Labs and the Palo Alto Research Center.
So where is America investing? Much of our research is done by the government. NIH, NSF, DOE, and DARPA. And what are we building to compare with China’s state of the art transportation and communication systems?
An interior view of one of the many new buildings, each roughly the size of the Pentagon, going up to house expansion of America’s intelligence agencies (official picture). Several house only computers, built near power plants because of their fantastic electricity usage. This is the new HQ of the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, costing $1.8 billion. It will be the third largest building in Washington. An interesting contrast with the cuts in capex of America’s already decrepit public infrastructure.
Update: another example of “excess” investment in China — “China is planning to create the world’s biggest mega city by merging nine cities to create a metropolis twice the size of Wales with a population of 42 million.“
Almost a trillion dollars per year, America’s blood, our surplus economic product generated from one hundred million families — goes into our military and intelligence services. We spend more than the rest of the world combined, ten-fold times every possible combination of enemies. This money could rebuild our infrastructure, be invested in education and research to build a powerful America for the 21st century. Instead it gets consumed without thought or plan. Spilled carelessly.
Defense analyst Chuck Spinner describes our past and present (until we go broke) in “The Domestic Roots of Perpetual War” in Challenge: The Magazine of Economic Affairs, January/February 2011.
Posts about China LINK...
1.Power shifts from West to East: the end of the post-WWII regime in the news, 20 December 2007
2.China becomes a super-power (geopolitical analysis need not be war-mongering), 9 July 2008
3.Words to fear in the 21st century: Lǎo hǔ, lǎo hǔ, Lǎo hǔ, 14 July 2008
4.A different perspective on the US and China, seen by an American living in Russia, 23 March 2009
5.China – the mysterious other pole of the world economy, 22 July 2009
6.Another big step for China on its road to becoming a great power, 27 July 2009
7.Will China collapse?, 5 August 2009
8.A revolution is not a dinner party. Thoughts about the future of China, 19 August 2009
9.Update about China: a new center of the world, 13 December 2009
10.Fertilizer overuse destroying Chinese soil, 18 February 2010
11.Rare earths – a hidden but strategic battleground between the US and China, 5 May 2010
12.Today’s example of the inscrutable mystery of China’s economic statistics, 13 May 2010
13.How China builds its commercial empire, 12 July 2010
14.The West has power, but often little self-insight, 19 September 2010
15.A look at the future (it’s already here, but it’s not in the USA), 29 September 2010
16.Why China will again rise to the top, and their most important advantage over America, 11 November 2010
Fabius Maximus Feb 3, 2011 7:21PM Summary: Americans tend to see the mote in China’s eye but not the beam in ours. We project our dark traits onto China, no matter how absurd. Today we see two pictures that provide a rebuttal to one common myth about China and America.
The French Marshall Louis Lyautey (1854-1934) told his gardner to plant a row of trees on his estate. “My Lord, they will take a century to reach full growth” said his groundskeeper. “Then we start plant them today” replied Lyautey.
The news media and its pet pedants tell us much about China. Such as tales about China’s rampant malinvestment, unlike America — where home of entrepreneurs, where free markets rule. Google shows 37 thousand hits to the words Chinese and malinvestment. While there is probably much malinvestment in China, America has a far more serious malinvestment problem.
That’s important because over time even small differences in relative performance can produce large differences in national power.
Malinvestment in China
A new train station in Wuhan (Central China), completed December 2009 (source: Financial Times). One of the thousands of new ports, stations, and airports being built or expanded. Two generations from now these will be considered far-sighted acts of genius, building infrastructure before its needed — contributing to its current growth, built cheaply while China is poor.
Malinvestment in the USA
Meanwhile the US has 18.8 million vacant homes (18.6% 14.6% of total units), up from 13.6 million (11.7%) a decade ago (Census data). The office vacancy rate is 17.7% (per Grubb & Ellis).
But that’s a small aspect of the problem. Our critical public infrastructure is decaying (for details see “The 2009 Report Card for American Infrastructure” of the the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE). And our private sector engines of innovation have atrophied. Overall levels of investment are low. The great private sector R&D centers have died, such as Bell Labs and the Palo Alto Research Center.
So where is America investing? Much of our research is done by the government. NIH, NSF, DOE, and DARPA. And what are we building to compare with China’s state of the art transportation and communication systems?
An interior view of one of the many new buildings, each roughly the size of the Pentagon, going up to house expansion of America’s intelligence agencies (official picture). Several house only computers, built near power plants because of their fantastic electricity usage. This is the new HQ of the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, costing $1.8 billion. It will be the third largest building in Washington. An interesting contrast with the cuts in capex of America’s already decrepit public infrastructure.
Update: another example of “excess” investment in China — “China is planning to create the world’s biggest mega city by merging nine cities to create a metropolis twice the size of Wales with a population of 42 million.“
Almost a trillion dollars per year, America’s blood, our surplus economic product generated from one hundred million families — goes into our military and intelligence services. We spend more than the rest of the world combined, ten-fold times every possible combination of enemies. This money could rebuild our infrastructure, be invested in education and research to build a powerful America for the 21st century. Instead it gets consumed without thought or plan. Spilled carelessly.
Defense analyst Chuck Spinner describes our past and present (until we go broke) in “The Domestic Roots of Perpetual War” in Challenge: The Magazine of Economic Affairs, January/February 2011.
Posts about China LINK...
1.Power shifts from West to East: the end of the post-WWII regime in the news, 20 December 2007
2.China becomes a super-power (geopolitical analysis need not be war-mongering), 9 July 2008
3.Words to fear in the 21st century: Lǎo hǔ, lǎo hǔ, Lǎo hǔ, 14 July 2008
4.A different perspective on the US and China, seen by an American living in Russia, 23 March 2009
5.China – the mysterious other pole of the world economy, 22 July 2009
6.Another big step for China on its road to becoming a great power, 27 July 2009
7.Will China collapse?, 5 August 2009
8.A revolution is not a dinner party. Thoughts about the future of China, 19 August 2009
9.Update about China: a new center of the world, 13 December 2009
10.Fertilizer overuse destroying Chinese soil, 18 February 2010
11.Rare earths – a hidden but strategic battleground between the US and China, 5 May 2010
12.Today’s example of the inscrutable mystery of China’s economic statistics, 13 May 2010
13.How China builds its commercial empire, 12 July 2010
14.The West has power, but often little self-insight, 19 September 2010
15.A look at the future (it’s already here, but it’s not in the USA), 29 September 2010
16.Why China will again rise to the top, and their most important advantage over America, 11 November 2010
Friday, December 31, 2010
The Waves of 2011...
The Waves of 2011
by John Browne
One of the founding myths of the modern global financial system was that governments, especially of the developed democracies, could borrow endlessly without consequence. But, with sovereign debt crises erupting across the globe, it appears the umbrella of perceived safety has gotten smaller, exposing some benighted countries, like Greece and Ireland, to severely rough weather.
As a key condition for financial rescues of these ailing sovereigns, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the European Central Bank (ECB) both demanded severe cuts in government spending. Faced with a bondholder revolt that sent yields upward, both acquiesced and have embarked on austerity campaigns to repair their financial positions.
The big question is: has the umbrella stopped shrinking, or will other countries soon face similar decisions?
For now, major governments such as the United States and European Union have been able to continue to borrow and spend licentiously to fend off the threat of deflation and keep their economies stimulated (the U.S. is by far the greater offender). But three surprising and powerful changes threaten the viability of a long-promised "exit strategy."
First, international investors are beginning to become net sellers of sovereign debt. Even the mighty United States is finding that, despite the Fed's rounds of massive quantitative easing, in which the Fed has bought outright hundreds of billions of dollars of U.S. Treasuries, yields are still rising. In other words, the private and foreign selling pressure is stronger than the Fed's buying pressure.
Second, the credit agencies, stung by their failure to warn investors about the banking crisis, are now emboldened enough to threaten the triple-A ratings of member states within the EU, and even of the United States itself--now the largest debtor in the world. Although it remains to be seen how great an impact the rating agencies will have on the debt markets, the fact that such moves are being contemplated at least drives the debate in an unprecedented direction.
Third, there is considerable and growing political pressure on governments to cut spending. There is a growing awareness among Western voters that government largesse can't be maintained forever, and that it will likely cost the next generation if not the present. Many pet spending programs, including defense, healthcare, welfare and even public pensions, are getting ready for haircuts - if not scalpings. Massive government spending cuts, possibly accompanied by tax increases, will be sure to take a huge bite out of near-term GDP growth, and will perhaps put the world back into the second act of a recession. This will lead us to the next great crossroads in the global financial crisis. Put simply, will the governments of Europe and America allow a natural contraction?
If the central banks of the EU and the U.S. choose to unleash even more massive reflationary programs, then a period of crippling inflation could be the outcome. This will form the basis of monetary chaos and prolonged economic stagnation, the most damaging of all economic conditions. In these circumstances, the prices of needed raw materials and commodities, including precious metals and energy, would explode in dollar terms.
Meanwhile, Chinese inflation is beginning to drive the international agenda. In order to keep a lid on this growing problem, China will soon have no choice but to revalue its currency, the yuan, higher. This will curb inflation and make most commodities cheaper in domestic terms. It will also satisfy the increasingly angry political calls of other nations for China to revalue.
A yuan revaluation requires a devaluation of other key currencies, most dramatically the U.S. dollar, but also the pound sterling and euro. This will raise prices for food, energy, and other necessities even in the absence of action by our central banks. Such an outcome will place further economic pressures on the developed West.
In conclusion, 2011 likely will open with a deepening recession, increasing austerity, and falling asset prices. If this is met by a new round of inflation creation and yuan revaluation, then investors should weigh whether to redeploy assets in anticipation of potential rising commodity prices. I expect these developments not to happen gradually, but to come in great waves. Smart investors will tie their fate to an investment vessel with a solid hull, because in these seas, even a hint of rot could tear a ship asunder.
John Browne is an investment advisor, financial commentator and a former member of Britain’s Parliament who served on the Treasury Select Committee and as a close associate of then-Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
by John Browne
One of the founding myths of the modern global financial system was that governments, especially of the developed democracies, could borrow endlessly without consequence. But, with sovereign debt crises erupting across the globe, it appears the umbrella of perceived safety has gotten smaller, exposing some benighted countries, like Greece and Ireland, to severely rough weather.
As a key condition for financial rescues of these ailing sovereigns, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the European Central Bank (ECB) both demanded severe cuts in government spending. Faced with a bondholder revolt that sent yields upward, both acquiesced and have embarked on austerity campaigns to repair their financial positions.
The big question is: has the umbrella stopped shrinking, or will other countries soon face similar decisions?
For now, major governments such as the United States and European Union have been able to continue to borrow and spend licentiously to fend off the threat of deflation and keep their economies stimulated (the U.S. is by far the greater offender). But three surprising and powerful changes threaten the viability of a long-promised "exit strategy."
First, international investors are beginning to become net sellers of sovereign debt. Even the mighty United States is finding that, despite the Fed's rounds of massive quantitative easing, in which the Fed has bought outright hundreds of billions of dollars of U.S. Treasuries, yields are still rising. In other words, the private and foreign selling pressure is stronger than the Fed's buying pressure.
Second, the credit agencies, stung by their failure to warn investors about the banking crisis, are now emboldened enough to threaten the triple-A ratings of member states within the EU, and even of the United States itself--now the largest debtor in the world. Although it remains to be seen how great an impact the rating agencies will have on the debt markets, the fact that such moves are being contemplated at least drives the debate in an unprecedented direction.
Third, there is considerable and growing political pressure on governments to cut spending. There is a growing awareness among Western voters that government largesse can't be maintained forever, and that it will likely cost the next generation if not the present. Many pet spending programs, including defense, healthcare, welfare and even public pensions, are getting ready for haircuts - if not scalpings. Massive government spending cuts, possibly accompanied by tax increases, will be sure to take a huge bite out of near-term GDP growth, and will perhaps put the world back into the second act of a recession. This will lead us to the next great crossroads in the global financial crisis. Put simply, will the governments of Europe and America allow a natural contraction?
If the central banks of the EU and the U.S. choose to unleash even more massive reflationary programs, then a period of crippling inflation could be the outcome. This will form the basis of monetary chaos and prolonged economic stagnation, the most damaging of all economic conditions. In these circumstances, the prices of needed raw materials and commodities, including precious metals and energy, would explode in dollar terms.
Meanwhile, Chinese inflation is beginning to drive the international agenda. In order to keep a lid on this growing problem, China will soon have no choice but to revalue its currency, the yuan, higher. This will curb inflation and make most commodities cheaper in domestic terms. It will also satisfy the increasingly angry political calls of other nations for China to revalue.
A yuan revaluation requires a devaluation of other key currencies, most dramatically the U.S. dollar, but also the pound sterling and euro. This will raise prices for food, energy, and other necessities even in the absence of action by our central banks. Such an outcome will place further economic pressures on the developed West.
In conclusion, 2011 likely will open with a deepening recession, increasing austerity, and falling asset prices. If this is met by a new round of inflation creation and yuan revaluation, then investors should weigh whether to redeploy assets in anticipation of potential rising commodity prices. I expect these developments not to happen gradually, but to come in great waves. Smart investors will tie their fate to an investment vessel with a solid hull, because in these seas, even a hint of rot could tear a ship asunder.
John Browne is an investment advisor, financial commentator and a former member of Britain’s Parliament who served on the Treasury Select Committee and as a close associate of then-Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Saturday, November 27, 2010
Renaissance of the Gold Standard?
by Martin Hutchinson... LINK...
Global opposition to Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke's policy, World Bank President Robert Zoellick's "trial balloon" and statements by some of the new Republican Congressional caucus have caused a modest revival in consideration of the Gold Standard. In my view, the chances of its revival by official means in the next 10 years remain infinitesimal, but there is an increasing probability of private sector activity in that direction. Not only politically, the bombed-out Gold Standard stock may have reached bottom and be beginning a modest revival.
The Gold Standard did not disappear because it caused the Great Depression (it had only modest fingerprints on that disaster) nor because Maynard Keynes called gold a "barbarous relic." In reality, its demise had a much simpler cause: the rising rate of global population growth, which caused it to become damagingly deflationary.
The gold supply is limited. At the end of 2009, the total of all the gold ever mined was about 165,000 tons, worth $7 trillion at today's prices. Most of that total is still in existence, gold being essentially indestructible. However, new mine production in 2008 and 2009—both years enjoying near-record gold prices—was only around 2,500 tons, according to the World Gold Council. Thus even at the peak of the market, gold production is only 1.5% of existing supply. This hard limit on the world's gold supply exerts a considerable monetary effect on a Gold Standard world, limiting its money supply. Without an increase in monetary velocity, the world's gold supply can accommodate global growth of only about 1.5% per annum while maintaining prices constant. If global GDP growth is higher than that, the Gold Standard will be deflationary—prices will decline. If global growth is less than 1.5% per annum, prices may increase somewhat.
During the 18th century, for example, global population rose by 0.4% per annum, from 640 million in 1700 to 980 million in 1800, according to United Nations estimates. Accordingly, if world gold supplies had increased by 1.5% per annum during that century and monetary velocity had remained constant, a global Gold Standard would have accommodated about 1.1% per annum per capita economic growth. In practice global growth during that century averaged 0.56% per annum or 0.15% per capita, so gold supplies were ample to support it, even if mining was less active and successful than in some other periods. Indeed, in actuality the century saw mild inflation in Gold Standard countries.
During the 19th century, global economic growth accelerated, to 1.85% per annum, being 1.34% growth per capita (the result of the Industrial Revolution) and 0.51% per annum population growth. Thus the gold supply became much tighter, particularly towards the end of the century as economic and population growth accelerated. There was a shortage of specie and deflation during the "Hungry Forties" before the Californian gold discoveries of 1849 and another more prolonged period of deflation in 1873-96, before the discovery of new gold deposits in South Africa and the Yukon. During those years, the gold supply was increasing at a rate below its long-term average of 1%-1.5%, so global growth above that level caused the money supply to decline in terms of Gross World Product, and deflation to occur. By the early 1890s, there were multiple calls to abandon the Gold Standard, with proposals for bimetallism and William Jennings Bryan's "Cross of Gold" presidential campaign of 1896.
In practice, mild deflation is not a major economic problem, contrary to Ben Bernanke's theories. With an interest rate close to zero, even prolonged deflation of up to about 1% annually can be tolerated, as real interest rates remain containable. The 1880s, however, showed this to be close to the maximum tolerable level—U.S. prices declined by 22% from 1880 to 1896, an annual 1.5% deflation, and the strains showed.
In 1900-25, with world population growth of about 0.8% per annum, economic growth averaged 2.6% per annum, in spite of the depredations of World War I. Not surprisingly, the Gold Standard came under huge strain. Thus the failure of the 1925-31 British return to the Gold Standard was probably inevitable; by that time, global population and economic growth had reached a level at which the Gold Standard's deflationary effect had become intolerable.
For the quarter-century 1925-50, Keynes was right; with global population growth above 1%, even World War II could not hold economic growth below 2.7%. For the next 20 years, the heyday of the Bretton Woods Agreement monetary system, the equation was even worse. Population growth averaged 1.9%, while economic growth, recovering after World War II, averaged a startling 5.6% annually, with per capita economic growth of 3.7% annually. Even if the Bretton Woods system had been designed as a true Gold Standard, with private gold holding and trading permitted, it would never have stood a chance. In practice, since politically motivated governments controlled the Bretton Woods system, the breakdown came in the form of an explosion in the gold price rather than a tight deflation squeeze.
The good news for gold bugs is that the rate of global population increase peaked in 1963 and has now declined to about 1.1% annually. Judging by 1900-25's experience, that is still too high for a Gold Standard to be comfortable. However, the rate of population increase is continuing to decline; on current UN projections, it will by 2045 have fallen below 0.5% annually. At that level, as the 19th century showed, a Gold Standard is perfectly feasible and not excessively deflationary. Hence the young of today can perhaps hope to lead the world back to a Gold Standard in their later years.
The Gold Standard, however, remains anathema to the political class. This not surprising; as the U.S. is currently showing with its repeated bouts of quantitative easing, the seigniorage of money creation is highly profitable to governments strapped for cash owing to unaffordable social welfare programs. Even by 2045, absent a major economic crisis, it is unlikely that elite political opinion will have moved sufficiently to make Gold Standard re-introduction at an official level anything but a long and bitter struggle.
One advantage of commodity-based money over fiat currency, however, is that it does not require official sanction to come into existence. Whereas paper money requires a central bank and a national credit rating behind it to attain credibility (and even with this sometimes fails to do so, as in Zimbabwe, Weimar Germany or Latin America for much of the 20th century), gold-based money can come into existence through private activity.
There is some evidence that this is happening. Austria's Raiffesen Zentralbank now offers its clients gold-based accounts, and other banks are likely to follow. The SWIFT international payments system now allows payment in gold, an essential element in a currency's infrastructure in today's markets. Governments worldwide are competing to depreciate their currencies (or, like the hapless EU, watching their currencies come under fire as the weaker members of their union get into difficulties). At some point, a major exporter with a good competitive position—if you asked me to guess, from China or Germany—could start invoicing its customers in gold.
When that happens, a very important barrier will have been crossed. Once gold-denominated trade paper comes into existence, it will form the nucleus of a short-term money market, in the same way as the eurodollar market for assets and liabilities outside the United States arose in Europe after 1957 or so. Within a few years, gold bonds will be issued—once a company has gold-denominated receivables, it will have a natural hedge for such financing, which will remain cheap in interest terms even after conventional currency interest rates rise. It has happened before, in the formation of the eurodollar and eurobond markets in 1957-65. This time, once gold invoicing happens, the gold money and bond markets are likely to spring up quite quickly.
Banks, even outside Austria and Switzerland, will quickly get up the curve of offering gold-denominated accounts once their corporate customers demand them. They will find that a substantial demand exists at the retail level also. Here, modern technology will be very helpful. An ordinary citizen will be able to use a gold-denominated account for day-to-day transactions by means of a debit card, without the need to carry round expensive sovereigns or double eagles. A payment of $9.50 for a sandwich will be satisfied by the debit card, which will pay dollars (say) to the sandwich bar while debiting the account about 0.007 ounces of gold, using that day's gold price.
The card holder will pay perhaps 1% extra for everything, to cover the cost of the gold/dollar exchange transactions; but on the other hand, since his cash holdings are in gold, he will very likely gain much more than that percentage in dollar terms each month. His wealth will be expressed as so many ounces of gold (or kilos, if he is European), but he will never need to hold physical gold at all—or any other currency, though probably he will get a few dollars from the bank's cash machine each month for expenditures for which his debit card is not accepted.
In this way, both corporate and individual users will be able to move their transactions and holdings to gold, with the banks adapting to meet their needs. The banks will remain regulated by national authorities, and will have to manage their gold assets, liabilities and capital in such a way as to avoid breaching the authorities' leverage ratios, based on the gold price at the end of each reporting period.
If the world's monetary authorities come to their senses quickly enough, adopting Volckerite/Bundesbank monetary policies to restore confidence in their currencies, this private Gold Standard will remain a minor addition to the global financial landscape, perhaps dying away after a few years. If the authorities attempt to suppress the market, it will move underground or offshore, like the eurobond market in its early years—and their suppression attempts will in most countries be rebuked by an angry electorate. If they continue with sloppy monetary policies, then since the gold price will continue rising against all other currencies, gold will come to be seen as the most reliable available store of value and a perfectly acceptable unit of account.
At that point, the private gold standard could come to replace national currencies for most transactions. Governments will attempt to enforce usage of their currencies for tax payments, etc., but they will find themselves at a considerable disadvantage through doing so. They will also lose the vast majority of the seigniorage profit they have enjoyed since paper currencies became universal after World War II. Needless to say, this will cause a financial crisis, and a loss of confidence in the governments' own bonds. Their only remedy at that stage will be to move to gold themselves, cementing the dominance of a global monetary system entirely outside the control of governments and monetary authorities.
Central banks will find themselves unable to meddle with the new monetary system, since they do not control it—only the residual paper currencies will be subject to central bank monetary policy. A true Gold Standard on the basis of free banking will have been created more or less by accident. Banks will find that Basel III leverage requirements are much too generous in a Gold Standard system, so will have to deleverage themselves or face a liquidity crisis and apply for a bailout. Doubtless governments forced to bail out banks would insist that they reorient their business towards the shrinking economic area in which paper money is used—in which case such banks would quickly find themselves irrelevant to the new economic order. Their competitors, seeing the disastrous business- and bonus-destroying results of bailouts, would deleverage to a safe level.
For the world's governments, this would be a disaster. For everyone else, it would be a huge liberation. That is reason enough to encourage the beginnings of the private sector Gold Standard development now, rather than waiting until 2045 in the hope that governments will then establish an official Gold Standard.
As for deflation, don't worry too much about it. The day-to-day debit card-based Gold Standard will initially use very little metallic gold, so will not be particularly deflationary. The money supply will be established by trial and error, as banks that over-leverage and keep inadequate gold reserves discover the perils of fiat money banking without fiat money. In equilibrium, the money supply will be constrained by the physical gold supply, but by that time, we may be approaching 2045.
Global opposition to Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke's policy, World Bank President Robert Zoellick's "trial balloon" and statements by some of the new Republican Congressional caucus have caused a modest revival in consideration of the Gold Standard. In my view, the chances of its revival by official means in the next 10 years remain infinitesimal, but there is an increasing probability of private sector activity in that direction. Not only politically, the bombed-out Gold Standard stock may have reached bottom and be beginning a modest revival.
The Gold Standard did not disappear because it caused the Great Depression (it had only modest fingerprints on that disaster) nor because Maynard Keynes called gold a "barbarous relic." In reality, its demise had a much simpler cause: the rising rate of global population growth, which caused it to become damagingly deflationary.
The gold supply is limited. At the end of 2009, the total of all the gold ever mined was about 165,000 tons, worth $7 trillion at today's prices. Most of that total is still in existence, gold being essentially indestructible. However, new mine production in 2008 and 2009—both years enjoying near-record gold prices—was only around 2,500 tons, according to the World Gold Council. Thus even at the peak of the market, gold production is only 1.5% of existing supply. This hard limit on the world's gold supply exerts a considerable monetary effect on a Gold Standard world, limiting its money supply. Without an increase in monetary velocity, the world's gold supply can accommodate global growth of only about 1.5% per annum while maintaining prices constant. If global GDP growth is higher than that, the Gold Standard will be deflationary—prices will decline. If global growth is less than 1.5% per annum, prices may increase somewhat.
During the 18th century, for example, global population rose by 0.4% per annum, from 640 million in 1700 to 980 million in 1800, according to United Nations estimates. Accordingly, if world gold supplies had increased by 1.5% per annum during that century and monetary velocity had remained constant, a global Gold Standard would have accommodated about 1.1% per annum per capita economic growth. In practice global growth during that century averaged 0.56% per annum or 0.15% per capita, so gold supplies were ample to support it, even if mining was less active and successful than in some other periods. Indeed, in actuality the century saw mild inflation in Gold Standard countries.
During the 19th century, global economic growth accelerated, to 1.85% per annum, being 1.34% growth per capita (the result of the Industrial Revolution) and 0.51% per annum population growth. Thus the gold supply became much tighter, particularly towards the end of the century as economic and population growth accelerated. There was a shortage of specie and deflation during the "Hungry Forties" before the Californian gold discoveries of 1849 and another more prolonged period of deflation in 1873-96, before the discovery of new gold deposits in South Africa and the Yukon. During those years, the gold supply was increasing at a rate below its long-term average of 1%-1.5%, so global growth above that level caused the money supply to decline in terms of Gross World Product, and deflation to occur. By the early 1890s, there were multiple calls to abandon the Gold Standard, with proposals for bimetallism and William Jennings Bryan's "Cross of Gold" presidential campaign of 1896.
In practice, mild deflation is not a major economic problem, contrary to Ben Bernanke's theories. With an interest rate close to zero, even prolonged deflation of up to about 1% annually can be tolerated, as real interest rates remain containable. The 1880s, however, showed this to be close to the maximum tolerable level—U.S. prices declined by 22% from 1880 to 1896, an annual 1.5% deflation, and the strains showed.
In 1900-25, with world population growth of about 0.8% per annum, economic growth averaged 2.6% per annum, in spite of the depredations of World War I. Not surprisingly, the Gold Standard came under huge strain. Thus the failure of the 1925-31 British return to the Gold Standard was probably inevitable; by that time, global population and economic growth had reached a level at which the Gold Standard's deflationary effect had become intolerable.
For the quarter-century 1925-50, Keynes was right; with global population growth above 1%, even World War II could not hold economic growth below 2.7%. For the next 20 years, the heyday of the Bretton Woods Agreement monetary system, the equation was even worse. Population growth averaged 1.9%, while economic growth, recovering after World War II, averaged a startling 5.6% annually, with per capita economic growth of 3.7% annually. Even if the Bretton Woods system had been designed as a true Gold Standard, with private gold holding and trading permitted, it would never have stood a chance. In practice, since politically motivated governments controlled the Bretton Woods system, the breakdown came in the form of an explosion in the gold price rather than a tight deflation squeeze.
The good news for gold bugs is that the rate of global population increase peaked in 1963 and has now declined to about 1.1% annually. Judging by 1900-25's experience, that is still too high for a Gold Standard to be comfortable. However, the rate of population increase is continuing to decline; on current UN projections, it will by 2045 have fallen below 0.5% annually. At that level, as the 19th century showed, a Gold Standard is perfectly feasible and not excessively deflationary. Hence the young of today can perhaps hope to lead the world back to a Gold Standard in their later years.
The Gold Standard, however, remains anathema to the political class. This not surprising; as the U.S. is currently showing with its repeated bouts of quantitative easing, the seigniorage of money creation is highly profitable to governments strapped for cash owing to unaffordable social welfare programs. Even by 2045, absent a major economic crisis, it is unlikely that elite political opinion will have moved sufficiently to make Gold Standard re-introduction at an official level anything but a long and bitter struggle.
One advantage of commodity-based money over fiat currency, however, is that it does not require official sanction to come into existence. Whereas paper money requires a central bank and a national credit rating behind it to attain credibility (and even with this sometimes fails to do so, as in Zimbabwe, Weimar Germany or Latin America for much of the 20th century), gold-based money can come into existence through private activity.
There is some evidence that this is happening. Austria's Raiffesen Zentralbank now offers its clients gold-based accounts, and other banks are likely to follow. The SWIFT international payments system now allows payment in gold, an essential element in a currency's infrastructure in today's markets. Governments worldwide are competing to depreciate their currencies (or, like the hapless EU, watching their currencies come under fire as the weaker members of their union get into difficulties). At some point, a major exporter with a good competitive position—if you asked me to guess, from China or Germany—could start invoicing its customers in gold.
When that happens, a very important barrier will have been crossed. Once gold-denominated trade paper comes into existence, it will form the nucleus of a short-term money market, in the same way as the eurodollar market for assets and liabilities outside the United States arose in Europe after 1957 or so. Within a few years, gold bonds will be issued—once a company has gold-denominated receivables, it will have a natural hedge for such financing, which will remain cheap in interest terms even after conventional currency interest rates rise. It has happened before, in the formation of the eurodollar and eurobond markets in 1957-65. This time, once gold invoicing happens, the gold money and bond markets are likely to spring up quite quickly.
Banks, even outside Austria and Switzerland, will quickly get up the curve of offering gold-denominated accounts once their corporate customers demand them. They will find that a substantial demand exists at the retail level also. Here, modern technology will be very helpful. An ordinary citizen will be able to use a gold-denominated account for day-to-day transactions by means of a debit card, without the need to carry round expensive sovereigns or double eagles. A payment of $9.50 for a sandwich will be satisfied by the debit card, which will pay dollars (say) to the sandwich bar while debiting the account about 0.007 ounces of gold, using that day's gold price.
The card holder will pay perhaps 1% extra for everything, to cover the cost of the gold/dollar exchange transactions; but on the other hand, since his cash holdings are in gold, he will very likely gain much more than that percentage in dollar terms each month. His wealth will be expressed as so many ounces of gold (or kilos, if he is European), but he will never need to hold physical gold at all—or any other currency, though probably he will get a few dollars from the bank's cash machine each month for expenditures for which his debit card is not accepted.
In this way, both corporate and individual users will be able to move their transactions and holdings to gold, with the banks adapting to meet their needs. The banks will remain regulated by national authorities, and will have to manage their gold assets, liabilities and capital in such a way as to avoid breaching the authorities' leverage ratios, based on the gold price at the end of each reporting period.
If the world's monetary authorities come to their senses quickly enough, adopting Volckerite/Bundesbank monetary policies to restore confidence in their currencies, this private Gold Standard will remain a minor addition to the global financial landscape, perhaps dying away after a few years. If the authorities attempt to suppress the market, it will move underground or offshore, like the eurobond market in its early years—and their suppression attempts will in most countries be rebuked by an angry electorate. If they continue with sloppy monetary policies, then since the gold price will continue rising against all other currencies, gold will come to be seen as the most reliable available store of value and a perfectly acceptable unit of account.
At that point, the private gold standard could come to replace national currencies for most transactions. Governments will attempt to enforce usage of their currencies for tax payments, etc., but they will find themselves at a considerable disadvantage through doing so. They will also lose the vast majority of the seigniorage profit they have enjoyed since paper currencies became universal after World War II. Needless to say, this will cause a financial crisis, and a loss of confidence in the governments' own bonds. Their only remedy at that stage will be to move to gold themselves, cementing the dominance of a global monetary system entirely outside the control of governments and monetary authorities.
Central banks will find themselves unable to meddle with the new monetary system, since they do not control it—only the residual paper currencies will be subject to central bank monetary policy. A true Gold Standard on the basis of free banking will have been created more or less by accident. Banks will find that Basel III leverage requirements are much too generous in a Gold Standard system, so will have to deleverage themselves or face a liquidity crisis and apply for a bailout. Doubtless governments forced to bail out banks would insist that they reorient their business towards the shrinking economic area in which paper money is used—in which case such banks would quickly find themselves irrelevant to the new economic order. Their competitors, seeing the disastrous business- and bonus-destroying results of bailouts, would deleverage to a safe level.
For the world's governments, this would be a disaster. For everyone else, it would be a huge liberation. That is reason enough to encourage the beginnings of the private sector Gold Standard development now, rather than waiting until 2045 in the hope that governments will then establish an official Gold Standard.
As for deflation, don't worry too much about it. The day-to-day debit card-based Gold Standard will initially use very little metallic gold, so will not be particularly deflationary. The money supply will be established by trial and error, as banks that over-leverage and keep inadequate gold reserves discover the perils of fiat money banking without fiat money. In equilibrium, the money supply will be constrained by the physical gold supply, but by that time, we may be approaching 2045.
Sunday, November 7, 2010
What Can Be Done...
By Paul Davidson:
After the shellacking the Democrats and Obama took in this November election, it is clear that the old time religion of classical economics will be coming back into fashion. The result is likely to be further economic disaster.
I am not surprised by the failure of the Obama Administration to win over the American people to a progressive economic program. On pages 13 to 18 of my book THE KEYNES SOLUTION: THE PATH TO GLOBAL ECONOMIC PROSPERITY – ( written in January 2009) -- I compared what I expected of Obama vis-à-vis what Roosevelt did in the first few years of his administration.
I cited a letter written by Keynes and published in December 1933 in the New York Times where Keynes warned the president that there were two goals -- Recovery and overdue social Reforms. But Keynes warned if one goes for the social reforms before full economic recovery (full employment) was achieved, then any reforms "will upset the confidence of business... And it will confuse thought ". Instead Keynes recommended just concentrate on recovery. Once the president succeeds at achieving that goal, then reforms will come much more easily!
I suggested that if Obama followed the “jump start” advice of his economic advisors for a small “stimulus” program just to get the private economy turned around , then the nation would not get the full recovery we needed and all reform as well as full recovery will be jeopardized.
Given the politics of austerity, we face maybe a decade of economic disaster. Progressive heterodox economists must get out in front with a Keynes-style of economic thinking – for Keynes’s analytical framework is the only complete available one that is not just a variant of classical theory. Keynes theory of liquidity can deal with full employment recovery, international trade imbalances, policies to prevent inflation and deflation, and an understanding of the role of financial markets in a money using entrepreneurial economy. – what Soros calls a reflexivity economy.
It is necessary to immediately put forth a consistent plan for not only the domestic economy but also for the international payments system to end the huge trade imbalances that have occurred --Mr. Geithner's call for devaluing the dollar relative to the Chinese yuan will not do it.
Nor will relying on some Old or New Keynesian variants of classical economics such as Stiglitz's assymetric information or some other MIT or Harvard New Keynesianism --since all these models assume that the economic system is a classical system except for some ad hoc restraint on the flexiblity of prices or constraint on obtaining complete information about a future predetermined by today's market fundamental. In the long run all these mainstream "Keynesian" models will provide a full employment solution when fixities are removed and full information preceived. It is only these ad hoc constraints that prevent short run optimal results -- theerfore the implication of these mainstream models is get government out of the way and the market, in the long run, will prove to be optimal!
My book THE KEYNES SOLUTION provides a complete alternative program to the various classical models that is going to dominate Washington in the next few years – as Obama tries to compromise with the conservatives such as Paul Ryan and Tea Party people like Rand Paul.
The American people are being interpreted as saying no more deficits—but what they really want back is prosperity and jobs for all who are willing to work. And if we can show them why these goals require governemnt deficits to get to prosperity , they will accept that. We have to get into the public forum the kind of progressive program that is in the Roosevelt tradition and currently can be an economic foundation to provide a good economic future for years to come.
Until we can provide a single consistent program for economic prosperity, all the other goals of progressive thinkers will remain in the dustbin!! The conservatives and their classical theory will dominate, even though they are wrong – because, as they say in politics, “You can not beat Somebody with Nobody”.
The only body of economic thinking available to take on, and beat, classical thinking, is Keynes’s original analytical foundation – and not the Keynesianism of Samuelson, or the New Keynesianism of Stiglitz and other MIT and Harvard graduates.
And remember that the original Keynes analysis implied a nonergodic stochastic process (Keynes called “uncertainty”) is fully compatible with the reflexivity analysis put forth by George Soros. It is when people fear uncertainty that they demand liquidity rather than goods and services. And given all the cash bankers and businesses are sitting on, can anyone doubt the problem is one of too much uncertainty and private demands for liquidity -with the resulting lack of aggregate demand for goods and services?
Paul
Paul Davidson
Editor, Journal of Post Keynesian Economics
author: THE KEYNES SOLUTION: THE PATH TO GLOBAL ECONOMIC PROSPERITY
Bernard Schwartz Center for Economic Policy Analysis
21 Stratford Drive E. Unit D
Boynton Beach, Florida 33436
phone and fax number: (561)369-1951
email: pdavidson@utk.edu
http://econ.bus.utk.edu/davidson.html
Manuscripts for Journal of Post Keynesian Economics can be submitted electronically
to pdavidson@mesharpe.com
After the shellacking the Democrats and Obama took in this November election, it is clear that the old time religion of classical economics will be coming back into fashion. The result is likely to be further economic disaster.
I am not surprised by the failure of the Obama Administration to win over the American people to a progressive economic program. On pages 13 to 18 of my book THE KEYNES SOLUTION: THE PATH TO GLOBAL ECONOMIC PROSPERITY – ( written in January 2009) -- I compared what I expected of Obama vis-à-vis what Roosevelt did in the first few years of his administration.
I cited a letter written by Keynes and published in December 1933 in the New York Times where Keynes warned the president that there were two goals -- Recovery and overdue social Reforms. But Keynes warned if one goes for the social reforms before full economic recovery (full employment) was achieved, then any reforms "will upset the confidence of business... And it will confuse thought ". Instead Keynes recommended just concentrate on recovery. Once the president succeeds at achieving that goal, then reforms will come much more easily!
I suggested that if Obama followed the “jump start” advice of his economic advisors for a small “stimulus” program just to get the private economy turned around , then the nation would not get the full recovery we needed and all reform as well as full recovery will be jeopardized.
Given the politics of austerity, we face maybe a decade of economic disaster. Progressive heterodox economists must get out in front with a Keynes-style of economic thinking – for Keynes’s analytical framework is the only complete available one that is not just a variant of classical theory. Keynes theory of liquidity can deal with full employment recovery, international trade imbalances, policies to prevent inflation and deflation, and an understanding of the role of financial markets in a money using entrepreneurial economy. – what Soros calls a reflexivity economy.
It is necessary to immediately put forth a consistent plan for not only the domestic economy but also for the international payments system to end the huge trade imbalances that have occurred --Mr. Geithner's call for devaluing the dollar relative to the Chinese yuan will not do it.
Nor will relying on some Old or New Keynesian variants of classical economics such as Stiglitz's assymetric information or some other MIT or Harvard New Keynesianism --since all these models assume that the economic system is a classical system except for some ad hoc restraint on the flexiblity of prices or constraint on obtaining complete information about a future predetermined by today's market fundamental. In the long run all these mainstream "Keynesian" models will provide a full employment solution when fixities are removed and full information preceived. It is only these ad hoc constraints that prevent short run optimal results -- theerfore the implication of these mainstream models is get government out of the way and the market, in the long run, will prove to be optimal!
My book THE KEYNES SOLUTION provides a complete alternative program to the various classical models that is going to dominate Washington in the next few years – as Obama tries to compromise with the conservatives such as Paul Ryan and Tea Party people like Rand Paul.
The American people are being interpreted as saying no more deficits—but what they really want back is prosperity and jobs for all who are willing to work. And if we can show them why these goals require governemnt deficits to get to prosperity , they will accept that. We have to get into the public forum the kind of progressive program that is in the Roosevelt tradition and currently can be an economic foundation to provide a good economic future for years to come.
Until we can provide a single consistent program for economic prosperity, all the other goals of progressive thinkers will remain in the dustbin!! The conservatives and their classical theory will dominate, even though they are wrong – because, as they say in politics, “You can not beat Somebody with Nobody”.
The only body of economic thinking available to take on, and beat, classical thinking, is Keynes’s original analytical foundation – and not the Keynesianism of Samuelson, or the New Keynesianism of Stiglitz and other MIT and Harvard graduates.
And remember that the original Keynes analysis implied a nonergodic stochastic process (Keynes called “uncertainty”) is fully compatible with the reflexivity analysis put forth by George Soros. It is when people fear uncertainty that they demand liquidity rather than goods and services. And given all the cash bankers and businesses are sitting on, can anyone doubt the problem is one of too much uncertainty and private demands for liquidity -with the resulting lack of aggregate demand for goods and services?
Paul
Paul Davidson
Editor, Journal of Post Keynesian Economics
author: THE KEYNES SOLUTION: THE PATH TO GLOBAL ECONOMIC PROSPERITY
Bernard Schwartz Center for Economic Policy Analysis
21 Stratford Drive E. Unit D
Boynton Beach, Florida 33436
phone and fax number: (561)369-1951
email: pdavidson@utk.edu
http://econ.bus.utk.edu/davidson.html
Manuscripts for Journal of Post Keynesian Economics can be submitted electronically
to pdavidson@mesharpe.com
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